Cultivating Curiosity: Create a Commonplace Book

1. Episode One: Introduction: Hustle culture age, the most important thing is chasing an achievement, running after a goal. But what's really key to important and valuable work is intrinsic motivation. I when you do something simply for the sake of doing it. It is this, which is the most effective way for us to do good work. In this class, we will follow a research interest simply for the sake. Following a research interest. As such, this class seeks to offer a different way of thinking about work and approaching work, which is focused more on curiosity than on outputs, which kind of turns work into play, which is the thing that we should always be seeking to do. Because when work becomes play, it becomes so much more enjoyable, it becomes easier to motivate ourselves, and we're more likely to actually follow through with our goals and enjoy the process of doing it, which is always so integral. Through thinking about work in this different, more curiosity driven way, hopefully you'll be able to shift how you think about work into something which is kind of more related to play. Get started with the class, though, I want to give you some background about me. I just finished my masters in early modern English literature at the University of Oxford, and I love learning and reading more than anything else. It's my favorite thing to do. And this love, this fascination, this interest predominantly comes from cultivated curiosity, a state of curiosity which I have sought to grow and increase and nurture. I also create educational literature and study based content on YouTube and have done for nine years now, which is kind of unbelievable. And on these platforms, I seek to offer advice and motivation to get people more excited about learning. And in this class, we're doing a deep dive into that. Through the humble, actually, is it even humble? Not so humble, common place book. I started common placing last year, and I will never look back after starting. It's completely changed the way that I think. But just to start, I'm sure that you're familiar with Simon Snex's Golden Circle. This is the why, what, how model. This made a real impression on me the first time that I came across it and as really informed and shaped the way that I now think about work and the way that I intentionally approach work projects. This model puts the y at the center, the reason why you're doing it, intrinsic motivation at the center of any task. And intrinsic motivation will always be more powerful than extrinsic motivation. But the first question always is How do you find that hy? It's all very well wanting to leave with the y, but where do those ideas? Where does that motivation actually come from? And that is what we are going to be looking at in this class. The 17th century philosophers, Renee Descarte and John Locke, believed that ideas were the collective product of objects, ideas, thoughts, things that you'd read, Idas with the amalgamation. The manifestation of all of this in the brain. Under this philosophical model then, you can't have good ideas and new ideas without first having fertile ground in your brain from which these ideas can actually spawn. In this class, we will look at creating ideas. And how do we do this? Curiosity. It is curiosity which spawns creativity, and like creativity, curiosity is something that we can foster and we can grow. Use the words cultivate and grow very intentionally. I almost used hone and practice. Those words are on the tip of my tongue, but it's not honing and practicing. It's not like a traditional skill because curiosity and what we're trying to think about in this class is more about thinking and approaching things just for the sake of doing them, just for the intrinsic joy and interest in that moment. It's more about approaching it and just seeing what happens as opposed to you with a skill where you've got something very final, like a final output goal in mind. In this class, we are going to work towards encouraging curiosity, encouraging creativity then as an offshoot of that. It seeks to be an antidote to this goal oriented Hussle culture model that I mentioned at the beginning, and this can be extraordinarily important for both our personal and professional goals in life. And so how are we going to do that? With the humble or maybe not so humble, practice of commonplacing. Commonplacing became very popular in the early modern period, which is the 16th and 17th century, actually the period that my master's degree focused on, and it's a way of cataloguing information, collecting information. So during this class, you will create a mini commonplace book, learn about the process, the history of common placing, but also how you can use this practice to become more curious and creative. You will walk away with a new way of thinking. 2. Episode Two: A Method in Commonplacing: Second episode, we are going to delve into the practice of commonplacing and how you can set up your own commonplace book. But of course, we want to start with the history of commonplacing. Common placing became particularly prevalent and popular in the early modern period, which is the 16th and 17th century. It was so popular that Professor Adam Smith goes as far as to say that Early Modern England was a commonplace book culture. By this, he means that people going further than just keeping commonplace books. He stresses that instead, it is the way that people approach the act of reading. In a commonplace book culture, the reader is much more active, the reader and writer in a symbiosis, as the reader interprets and takes out certain parts of the book. My says that by deploying these collected quotations in spoken or written discourse, compilers will be led to an eloquence of expression and through this eloquence to a good moral life. Now, this early modern commonplacing was very similar to the Flolagia of the medieval period, which is the collection of literary flowers, very, very beautiful pieces of literature that would all be compiled together. Common placing is a way of organizing information and retainer. Adam Smith says that it makes reading an active interventionalist practice. Now, over time, many thinkers have kept commonplace books, well beyond the 17th century. So for example, Oscar Wilds kept a commonplacebook. Specifically, when he was at Oxford, I read these Excellent. I would recommend. And Ian Foster, who's famous for writing Maurice and Howard's nd, similarly kept a commonplace book. As you will see over these classes, there is a reason why so many people keep them. I guarantee that when you start, you will be hooked and you will not look back. Indeed, recently, we have seen a resurgence in the popularity of the commonplace book, video styled trending online, and also very famously in a series of unfortunate events by Leoni Snicket. Klaus keeps and carries a commonplace book. That's the first place I personally heard about it. There are many different styles of common placing. Adam Smith reminds us that commonplace books rarely conform to such neat templates. Often, they are messy. They are eclectic because it's people compiling information that's not necessarily going to be a very neat and orderly act. I guess I stress that because in this particular class, we are going to be setting up commonplace books, getting all of our materials sorted, and I just want to stress that it doesn't have to look perfect. Often also when something looks perfect, we are much less likely to use it. Now there are many different types of common placing, but the one that we're going to focus on now is the Lockyer method. So John Locke, the famous moral philosopher, published a guide to common placing in 16 76, which was highly influential, and this is the model that I personally follow, so that's the one that I'm going to introduce you to. Also the easiest one to follow, I think. So John Locke developed this method after having used it himself for 25 years. Now with the Locker method, it's not done in any order. Just write headings as and when they come up. If you read something related to melancholy, you will create the heading of melancholy as you read the quote as you find the quote. It's an ongoing system of cataloguing and you only add titles when you need them. This is opposed to other methods where you might write out, lots of different headings, lots of different themes ahead of time and then wait to populate the pages. The important thing then is the index and having a very easy to follow index because otherwise, you're not going to be able to find anything, and the whole point is that you have this kind of mini encyclopedia in your pocket. Now common place books come in all shapes and sizes. But the one that I'm going to recommend for this particular class is something akin to this. This is a Mogi passport notebook. Anything of this size kind of very, very thin would be ideal for what we are going to be covering in this particular class and as an introduction to common placing. As you can see, I always love to add a little gold foil title. So you might want to do that, but obviously not necessary. The very first thing to do is go through and number the pages if they're not already numbered. This is just going to be helpful for finding things and setting up an index, and Fo index, you're going to want to put the themes in one column and then the page numbers in the other column. And then in that first page column, you can just add in every page where that theme comes up in your common place book. If For example, happiness might come up on page two, but also page 29. If your notebook isn't lined, so for example, this is just plain paper, then you might just want to get a ruler as well and create a ruled page because it will be much easier to keep track of your index going forward. Then the third thing we are going to do is actually choose our topic. You can keep a very broad common Facebook, and I would recommend you keeping a very broad common Facebook, but we are looking at how common pacing can help apad thinking and with working on a project, with researching something specific. For that reason, we want to choose a topic as to what we are going to be researching. This will be the theme of the book, so it's very important whatever you choose. And everything you read will in some way be related back to this theme, but not necessarily in the ways that you would expect. As we will see in the next session, where we will be looking at irresponsible reading. But in the meantime, before proceeding with the class, make sure that you've set up your common placebook, and that you've chosen a theme of what you want to research in this class. 3. Episode Three: Reading Without Purpose: Put your common place book set up, and now we need to populate it. To do this, you want to read without purpose. Read languidly, read variably, read widely, and don't read with a specific goal in mind. It's not going to result in some sudden epistemic breakthrough, but reading widely is really really important because if we returned to that philosophical model from Descarte and Locke mentioned in the intro, when we have more knowledge and information, we've got more ground to draw on. Common placing is all about connecting ideas, connecting things that don't usually go together. So of course, irresponsible reading is really, really important. When Nitch was writing his book good and evil, he apparently read around 1,100 books that year, which is unbelievable. When Net writes on reading, he says, it teaches how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar. And the key part there is the final phrase. Mental doors ajar. This isn't about reading with purpose. It's just about reading and keeping an open mind, keeping those mental doors ajar. Daniel Whistler is a philosopher. He's talking on the process of doing philosophy. He says, Excitement, seduction and rapture often emerge entwined with those aha moments, IE epistemic breakthroughs, which philosophers covet. But he argues, these moments are not the only important ones. The process of, as he says, frustration, alienation, and the urge to quit when you don't instantly get it are also really, really important for the process of doing philosophy. Key thing to take away from that is you don't always have to have a massive success, and ha moment when you're reading. It can be sufficient just to read and not understanding it is also important. Hopefully, you will have already chosen a topic in the previous lesson. Now you're going to want to find two or three subtopics within the topic that you've chosen. These two to three, you're going to seek out intentionally. You might even go to a page like Wikipedia or is encycpeda Britannica, something where you can get a sense of some pre research. No actual research. Wikipedia is not actual research, but it's good for pre research. It's good as a starting point. You just want to find some basic, some introductory information to populate the pages. Using this pre research, you can come up with the main subtopics within the topic that you're looking at, and you're going to want to make your headings. Once you've done that, you're going to put your commonplace book in your Because commonplacing does not depend on you going out and looking for answers. It's not like you write on your to do list. Find things for my common placebook today. You keep your common placebook on you, and then when you are in a common situation and you hear something which is relevant, you pull out your commonplace book and you add to it. Commplacing does not want you looking for answers, but coming across them. So keep this newbook with you everywhere, and when you read something, watch something, discuss something, hear something, write it down under the relevant topic heading. Don't even have to know how it relates, but if you have that niggling feeling that it does, it's a sign that it should go in here. The key thing here is consuming widely, consuming irresponsibly, and thus pairing things that don't usually pair. The goal is to synthesize knowledge. EO Wilson says, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers. People able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it and make important choices wisely. Pato similarly emphasizes the importance of synoptic thinking men. George Dodson writes of Plato's Republic, their knowledge being necessarily a mass of unconnected and unrelated fragments could not be embraced in a unitary view. But when the synthetic powers ripen, the time arrives to attempt an organization of the mental content to put together the things that have been and are being learned and comprehensiveness becomes an ideal of the mind. We've also seen an increase in so called critical realism, which is a movement in the philosophy of sociology, and it stresses the importance of meta theory and scholarship. By reading widely by having this varied information. Then by connecting it, that is how you come up with novel and interesting ideas. Synoptic thinking is a really important skill to develop for creative thinking. Edward De Bono's book on lateral thinking encourages us to think unconventionally, not to think in the same way as everyone else, but to connect things that aren't usually connected. Tony Buzan argues that Leonardo Da vinci was so successful. Skills and talented in the arts and science because he had all of these varied interests and he was able to bring them together in ways that other people weren't doing. Einstein says, Imagination is more important than knowledge. So to practice this, to practice this unconventional synoptic thinking. Now that you've kind of got a topic chosen for your common place book, I'd love you to go to the discussion board and comment your topic and then look at the other topics that other students are looking at, and then suggest links between your topic and someone else's topic. You don't have to give a very well explained link between the two. It's more about practicing this as a skill as a way of thinking. There's no pressure for it to be a perfectly formulated link. It's more just about learning and kind of practicing this as a way of thinking. 4. Episode Four: Synthesis: By now, you should have a book of common placing. But the next question is, what do you do with it? The first and most important thing to note is not necessarily anything. Common placing is progenic, and the more you do it, the more you will strengthen your synoptic thinking. It doesn't necessarily need an end goal because things and ideas will spawn from it without you even realizing. Francis Bacon, who was the founder of the Royal Society in the 17th century said, and I really love this. I want to share it. Reading make it a full man, conference, a ready man, and writing an exact man. You'll be able to use this as your own encyclopedia of themes and interests and ideas that you can come back to. However, we for the sake of this class, are going to create something tangible. We're going to practice using a common place book as a research tool for research in a way that can actually end up having an end result. For this reason, if you're keeping a commonplace book, it could be useful for writing a university essay, doing an extended project. Any kind of creative project actually, maybe for work or personal life, or just something that you're interested in broadly. If we are wanting to use our commonplace book as a research tool and as a source of ideas and a prompt for going further for creating something, the first thing we are going to do is read through our commonplace book. Hopefully during week or two weeks that you've been keeping this common facebook. You have found a lot of stuff and you might not necessarily remember all of that off top of your head. That's the point you wouldn't remember off the top of your head, which is why you've written it down here. Then after reading through it once, go back, read it again, but this time, jot down the things that you find interesting. Just on a separate piece of paper, little things that occur to you while you're reading through it. These things don't have to be well articulated thoughts and things that make lots of conceptual sense, things that occur to you because things will occur to you. I guarantee things will occur to you. Next, you're going to go through each of the headings that you've got and practice the thinking skill. Practice that synoptic thinking, synthesize the information that you've got. Hopefully as broad as you've got an advertisement next to Plato next to something you've heard in a conversation with a friend. All of these things are next to each other all related to the same theme. The thing that you're going to practice now is putting all of these things together, how do they link? Because they are all disparate and they are all different. But all of these things are still connected because you have connected them, you are the connecting force, which has brought all of these things together, and why have you done that under that one heading? In synthesizing this, the first thing that I would recommend doing is free Jureling. I'm a big free joler. I think free joling is fantastic. Get a piece of paper and just sit there and write, just write a single page. Doesn't take very long. I'll probably take you five to 10 minutes. It doesn't have to be coherent, it doesn't have to make any sense. You're just thinking on paper. You're thinking with your pen. These things connected. Now, the trick is to not take your pen off the paper. You can't pause. You just have to keep on writing, it doesn't matter if it's complete waffle, that's beside the point. Hopefully, what you'll find is things coming out. Little like nuggets of wisdom coming out. You'll get a sense of why you have connected these things together. If you're not a big fan of writing, if that's really not your favorite thing, then the other thing you can do is just speak it loud. Sit there by yourself and just speak it loud. You might even put on a like voice recording on your phone and You can listen back to it in case you say something very astute that otherwise just gets lost in the epa. This next thing which you're going to do is going to get you to really hone that synoptic thinking skill and really start drawing connections between the different media and materials, information quotes that you've been reading and compiling all in your commonplace book. You're going to go through each page, each heading, and you're going to synthesize it into just a 50 word, short paragraph about What has come up? When you read all of these things together, when you look under your heading of happiness, and you see all of these things laid out, all of these things connected, what occurs to you? What are the similarities between this material? What happens when you put Plato's conception of happiness next to a quote that you saw in a film the other day, How do these things relate? The key thing here is synthesizing the information and starting to understand. It's growing familiar with the information, connecting to it. You're starting to ask questions and starting to see what takes shape, which is actually what we are going to be turning to. Now in the next class, where we are going to be thinking about filling in these gaps. Just to further familiarize yourself with the information. You might also want to make use of Cat GBT. The prompt that I would personally use, which I'd recommend using is, please respond as if you are a personal tutor who is wanting me to think more critically about this paragraph. Then put in your 50 word paragraph, the thing that you've just written, synthesizing the information. And ask Shad DT to ask me questions, which get me to think more about the material. Then when you have those questions, again, just follow the same pattern of either free journaling or speaking out loud. But it's just getting yourself familiar with the material. That is the crucial takeaway from this class. It's allowing yourself that space to think, which honestly, we rarely give ourselves nowadays. We're constantly looking for something to do like a way to implement information. But we're focusing here on the actual process of thinking, the joy of thinking, the joy of exploration, discovery, and drawing these new connections and just seeing what takes shape. 5. Episode Five: Filling the Gaps: All right. Now it's time to start filling in the gaps. We are going to flip the notebook the other way and we're going to start from the other side. Because we're focusing on a specific topic, we want to keep it all together in one notebook, and that's why I always do it like one side, it's my common placing, and the other side is for general thoughts. In this lesson, we are going to think about filling in those gaps and asking the right questions. Asking questions and good questions at is such a valuable skill, one of the most important skills. Voltaire says, judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers. Albert Einstein says, the important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. Thomas Berger says, the art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge. That is exactly what we're going to do. We are going to ask questions, so many questions, and no question is too silly. At the back of your commonplace book, write down 50 questions. I know that is a ridiculous number of questions, it sounds like a lot and it is a lot, but that's the point because once you get started, you'll find that it's harder to stop. Plus there's a pressure that comes with having to come up with five quality questions. But if you write those 50 questions, 10% of them, five of them are likely to be good questions. Now, writing out these questions is good for two reasons. Number one, it is honing your curiosity. Getting you to just ask questions, be curious, see where your interest lies, see what things you find interesting, just naturally when you're writing the questions. But number two, by writing lots of questions, you're more likely to come up with good questions. The more questions that we're asking, the more familiar we get with the material. In Hans George Gadamer's work on Hermanutis, he stresses the importance of asking questions as a way of understanding. The more questions that we ask, the more familiar we get with the material. More likely we are to understand it? That is just so crucial for research of any kind. Depending on what you're researching as well, you might want to try the five y method. Now, this was introduced by Taichi Ono, who was a Japanese industrial engineer. He recommends asking y questions until you get to the root. When you have a problem, you just ask why, why, why, y again and again and again until eventually you get to the root. If you say, why am I so tired all of the time? Because I'm not getting enough sleep, why am I not getting enough sleep? Because I'm checking my phone before bed. Why am I checking my phone before bed, because I haven't been letting myself go on my phone during the day. Why am I not letting myself go on my phone during the day? Because I feel like it's a waste of time. Why do I feel like it's a waste of time because I'm not consuming content, which I feel is valuable? What's the solution I need to be consuming content, which I feel is valuable? That's just one that I've come up with the top of my head, but I hope that demonstrates how that works. When you're researching something, that is similarly a method that you can use to really hone down your focus to something you're interested in and see the gaps. So if for example, you were looking at Jane Lum's phigenia, you say, why did Jane Lumley choose to translate ephogenia? That's your first y. Then the answer to that might be, oh, because she had the Latin of phigenia in her family library. Next why question. Well, why was that one of the only Euripides plays that she had in her family library? You can go through like that and get more and more specific, which can help you find a research focus. After you've got all of these questions laid out, after you've got your 50 questions and maybe a few which has circled and highlighted, which are particularly interesting to you. You're sly going to want to start answering these questions by doing research. As you research is the way we're going to start to go deeper and think more critically and fully about something. Just a few top research skills that I would recommend. Now, research takes many forms and your sources should be variable in the same way that the information that you've compiled from your commonplace book has been variable. Going to be following these tangents and following these things that you've been looking at and commonplacing over time. When you're answering a question, I would recommend using Wikipedia. I feel like that's controversial to say, but it shouldn't be as long as you're using Wikipedia correctly, which lots of people don't. Wikipedia is great for pre research. Before you actually get into real research, Wikipedia is a really great place to go. You can familiarize yourself with the key concepts, familiarize yourself with the key debates, and material. And most importantly, follow the footnotes and the references which you find at the bottom of the Wikipedia page. Because these will take you to some of the most influential, some of the most important sources and arguments that can start your research journey. I would recommend that. Encyclopedias like Britana Cronin and the Stanford encyclopedia philosophy are similarly great places to start when you're just starting out with the topic. You can find academic articles on JStOre like 23 per month, even if you're not a student or enrolled in academic institution, which is really worth bearing in mind. And I would recommend you using those 23 articles. The other key thing to be looking at is primary resources, which is basically anything which is original, a book, a manuscript letter, something which you would write about. Really look at these as much as possible, mostly because they're interesting, they're fascinating, but get your first impressions on this before going to secondary material. The whole goal here is answering some of those questions which you've written up and basically using your commonplace book as a prompt book. 6. Episode Six: Thinking Critically: In this penultimate class, we are going to get critical. Now you've got questions. You've got answers, you've done research, you've found quotes, you've found sources. You have been observing and also synthesizing a bit as you've been going along. By this point, your commonplace book is fully populated as you've been doing research and adding to your headings and should be pretty familiar with this topic because you've been asking so many good questions. But this is where we turn inwards to what really sparks your interest, and ideally, this should be something very specific. Having done your research, having used your common facebook as a prompt book. You want to go through your research, go through what you found, and write down the insufficiencies. What problems have you encountered? What things do you think have not been covered by current research? What problems still stand in whatever area you've been researching? What things maybe don't you agree with? This doesn't have to be well formulated, but just think about what things have not been considered adequately. Again, the key goal is just training your thinking, so keep long and very messy list. Then in response to these insufficiencies, in response to these problems, go through your headings and try and link them. Look between your subheadings, the things that you've been considering and try and link them together. Just choose two randomly to start with. Ask yourself, how do these two things link? Try this for a couple of different themes. Free writing again, free journaling, or just speaking out loud, can really help to tease out similarities, the overlap between these subheadings. Key thing, again, here is just as we sat there thinking. Using your common Facebook as a prompt book, which is really kind of like the running theme that we've seen in this class is something which has ongoing use and is more there to help spark your thinking, train your thinking, improve your thinking as opposed to actually creating something immediately tangible. Ideally, what you will find as you practice putting one and two together, putting two things together, which shouldn't really go together usually. You will start to see how those insufficiencies that you identified could be resolved by incorporating something which we don't usually think to incorporate. And you might not find anything. You might not find something very specific which you can pull out and use, but you might, and it's that mit, which is important. As I say, there shouldn't be an expectation, never be an expectation that you are going to find the answer there. But it's training your brain to try and see those things, try and see those connections so that you will see them, and you can use them to fill in those gaps and resolve those insufficiencies. Discussion board, I'd love for you to write down some of the problems, some of the insufficiencies that you found, and see if other students, people who have been looking at different things are able to use their information, their ideas, their research, to offer something tangible for you. This is about dialogue. This is about conversation, crossover, seeing how things connect even when they don't initially seem like they will. 7. Episode Seven: Application: The final lesson is not encouraging you to follow a certain path or follow this information to a certain very particular tangible end, but rather to think about application. Think about it in a creative way. How could this research be applied if you wanted to apply it? It's important here to think creatively. Think without bounds. We're thinking about application. We're thinking about how this could be pragmatic, how we could apply this information to the real world to an actual project. So, my mapping is one of the best things that we can do. Like, just get a piece of paper and scroll off, all of these ideas, all of these possibilities of what this information could be used for. Even better, you might have a conversation with somebody because as we've stressed the whole way through this class, dialogue and bouncing off each other is one of the best ways to think creatively and kind of thinking new in different ways. It's like a very active and, like, embodied way of commonplacing. You're not thinking realistically, you're thinking creatively. It doesn't have to be linked to your particular skill set, to your background, to what things you actually plausibly can do. It's just thinking about why and how information can be used. It's about seeing and understanding the implications of your research. And I think that's a really good idea whenever you learn about anything. It's what we see in so called hackathons, where people will be locked in a room with a group of people for a couple of hours, and they are given a problem, and they've got to find a solution to it during that time. It's about concentrating your brain power. Fact, I say, don't be realistic, but even further than that, intentionally be unrealistic. Like, keep two lists, I would encourage you to be ridiculous with your suggestions, so outloudish, so out there, so unbelievable, because perfectionism doesn't help with creativity. Unfortunately, Branni Brown says, perfectionism is a 20 ton shield that we lug around, thinking it will protect us, when, in fact, it's the thing that's really preventing us from taking flight. You're focusing on the process of coming up with an idea, which is similar to what we see with Van Go, and his creative process. He says, and I absolutely love this. If you hear a voice within you that says, you cannot paint, Then by all means, paint, and that voice will be silenced. Perfectionism will inhibit you from thinking creatively. And actually, by writing all of these ridiculous ideas, you get over that perfectionism and that realism of this has to be something I can do because it's not about coming out with an actual tangible project. It's about thinking about how information has implications and how you can apply research to the real world. You might want to apply your research in a very pragmatic way and make a creative project, which uses your research to a tangible end. So just to give you a few examples, if you were researching the genre of tragedy, you might adapt one of your favorite novels into a tragedy play. That look like? Secondly, if you were looking into education models, maybe you would come up with your own education model. What would an ideal school look like in your head or what would be an amazing alternative to GCS exams? If you've been researching sanitation? What would your own new sanitation system look like? Actually, as inspiration, it can be useful to have a list of creative projects, social projects. Schemes which you've really admired, which you think are particularly impactful and write those down, just as kind of inspiration because you could draw on that when you're coming up with your own ideas. Keeping lists like this or even just one ongoing list of possible projects, possible ways of applying your research and things that you've been learning about is exciting. It's inspiring, but it's also useful because you can use these then as a launch pad. Even if it's not always something plausible, it's something you might return to later down the line and follow through. And more than anything, again, it's helping you to think in a different way. 8. Episode Eight: Outro & Goodbye: All right. So somehow we are at the end of the class. I just want to say thank you so much if you watched all of these classes, or even if you just watched a few of them, because in a way that actually feels quite like commonplacing, if you were to watch some classes from a different person and then watch one of mine. That feels really relevant to the way that we're thinking. Just as a final task as a final ask, I would love if you could share a page of your commonplace book that you've been keeping that you've been cultivating on the discussion board for other people to see and to engage with, or ultimately you might want to share your summarizing paragraph from Lesson five. That would also be so interesting to read. I mean, the discussion board is such a wonderful space to connect with other students, to just use that dialogue and that linking that we've been talking about. I mean, of course, there's no pressure too, but I really hope that you will do that. More than anything, this class was a call to think more creatively. To practice that skill of leading with curiosity as opposed to with a final goal in mind, nothing tangible, nothing physical might come of the commonplace book that you have kept. But you will have started to cultivate this skill of curiosity, this different way of thinking, and maybe also become more conscious of that process of thinking, and ultimately perhaps not taking thinking for granted. Thank you again so much and I hope you have a wonderful day.