How to Leverage Cumulative Thinking (To Capture the Intermittent Flow and Seasons of Our Ideas)
Box Cutter Co. Free Issue No. 56
If you’ve ever been fishing — with a rod and lure — you can appreciate the alignment of timing that must occur for your hook and pursued fish to meet in that magical moment of capture.
Often, it may not feel all that different than the meeting between our countless ideas, thoughts, and insights — and creative pursuits.
Two themes I’ve done some writing (and publishing) on this week:
Action Bias
Personal Geographies
Why?
Both are excellent reminders and influences on the power and importance of Thinking — especially ‘thinking about thinking’ (metacognition, the academics call it).
Welcome to new Box Cutter subscribers — and welcome back to those reading regularly (and even intermittently). This week, capturing the ideas and power of Cumulative Thinking.
But, first personal geographies…
The Power of Personal Geographies
For many years through my 20s and 30s, I worked outside.
In many ways, it mirrored much of my childhood. I spent hours upon hours up some river fishing, building forts, thrashing about in ferns and moss, or charging around some beach.
I grew up on isolated islands off the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada — just south of the Alaskan panhandle. For most of my childhood, we lived in a rural area, near what’s called the Tl’all River.
Our house was also less than a mile from the ocean — just a short walk away.
As a young kid, I probably spent more hours beside or in the river than I did sleeping in my bed. From a young age, my older brother and I were allowed to head out to the river fishing — as long as we had a lifejacket on.
As kids, we got to know the seasons of fish migrations very well. The early run cutthroat trout arriving in the spring months — with the potential of catching the occasional large steelhead. (An absolute thrill to experience)
Then the Dolly Varden, with their bright pink spots. Then the humpies (pink salmon). Then our favorite — coho salmon in the early fall.
These fish would sometimes reach up to over 20 pounds. Catching them in a relatively small river can be exhilarating.
The image above is my older brother with a good haul of Coho, we’d just finished cleaning — burying the guts in our gardens. (He’s clearly a confused hockey fan…for anyone who recognizes the logos on his shirt and hat). I’m in the background along with our younger sister doing backyard dance moves.
Over the years, my wife and I have visited the islands (every summer until C-19 hit). And we head to the river that ran through my childhood.
This represents the process of passing my accumulation of memories and experiences on to our kids. They then accumulate their own sets of experiences, memories, and personal geographies.
This image above is our 3 kids and my wife hanging out and fishing on the banks of the Yakoun River — about 2 years ago. A river I spent a lot of my teenage years on. When I was 12 we moved up-island about 40 km to a small village.
This spot on the river was about 10 km from where we lived and I could ride there on my bike on gravel logging roads. Our local swimming hole was just downstream from this spot.
This same day, we stopped and visited an old sawmill site on the edge of the inlet we lived on. And, the old dock I spent a lot of time fishing from and jumping off of as a teen. (This was literally across the street from our small house)
I told our kids the story of one of our teenage colleagues who got a new street bike (motorbike - crotch rocket they call them).
One day, he was showing off doing a brake stand on the end of the dock. He lost his grip on the brake, and the motorbike took off leaving him on the deck. The bike hit the small barrier on the end of the dock 👇 with speed — and flipped into the ocean below.
(whoops!)
And, the story of a childhood friend who was fishing off the same dock, at about the spot where the arrow is pointing in the image below. He caught a pink salmon, from one of the large schools that would regularly swim by in the summer.
He had put down his fishing rod beside him, leaning it on the railing, and was starting to pull the fish up from the water below — hand over hand, as he leaned out over the red railing.
The three-prong hook came loose from the fish. The fish fell back to the water, and the hook shot straight back at his face. (Like this one below).
And lodged in one of his eyes.
By some miracle, it went just between his eyeball and eyelid.
A trip to the health clinic and very careful removal — he escaped with some bruising and sensitivity but no long-term damage (and one hell of a story to tell).
These are just but a few examples of the power of personal geographies in life — and in writing and other creative pursuits.
The photos above were from one of our last visits to the islands. It was also a heavy time. Days previous, our youngest and I had been present to say goodbye to my mom as she moved to the next part of her celestial journey.
The rest of our family (my wife and 2 older kids) arrived a few days later. Over the next few days, we spent time with family and travelled to some of our favourite places — and as family deaths can do, it was also a time of some reflection and reminiscing.
Maybe the heaviness of the scenario, for our kids saying goodbye to their ‘granny’ and being with grieving family, will become part of their cumulative memories and thinking.
Maybe embedding some of those memories deeper into their personal geographies.
These are also examples of pondering and drawing upon ‘Cumulative Thinking’.
Cumulative Impacts (and Thinking)
Through a good chunk of my adult life, I carried the accumulation of experiences of being outside and in natural ecosystems — into professional work and living.
For over a decade, almost every spring and summer, I worked as a treeplanter and planting supervisor in the interior of British Columbia. It was good money and opened up the winter months for travelling skiing, and various other projects.
In my mid-20s and up until my 30s, I worked as a fisheries technician during the winter months. Eventually, I left the treeplanting behind and started doing fisheries work all year.
It was mainly stream and fish habitat mapping as well as fish habitat restoration projects. I worked up and down the BC coast. I spent most days beside or in a creek or river (not all that different than childhood).
I loved it.
In that line of work, there were many discussions about “Cumulative Effects” or “Cumulative Impacts”. In this sense, these terms referred to natural systems and generally had negative connotations.
Cumulative effects in environmental terms refer to the collective impact of various activities and natural processes over time. For example, rivers that experience a lot of logging in their drainage areas, plus road building and overall increased human activity — will suffer from the cumulative effects.
However, it doesn’t have to always be bad or negative. In some cases, cumulative effects can also be leveraged to reclaim and rehabilitate natural areas. Things like soil enrichment, planting trees and native plants, water purification and others.
Not too long ago, as I pondered some ideas and articles I started to think about the idea of mish-mashing cumulative effects and Cumulative Thinking. This became more so the case, as I worked on an article this past week on Personal Geographies (with more to come).
The Forgetting Curve and Cumulative Thinking
We might like to think that we have excellent, clear, non-polluted minds and memories…. be we don’t.
There is a concept called the “Forgetting Curve”, which I drew out and have used in some social media posts.
Whether we like it or not, we will generally forget (not retain) most things (almost 60%) within an hour.
After about 6 days, we retain very little.
Writing is an ingenious technology developed by humans about 6,000 years ago — that vastly increased our ability to retain information over time. And, it may, or may not, be a surprise that much of the original ‘writing’ was about money — or at least ‘currency’. (like debts and promissory notes).
Writing massively increased our ability to retain information, knowledge, and thinking over vast periods. Just think, for example, of what a library represents for the accumulation of knowledge — or, put another way Cumulative Thinking.
Schooling and Cumulative Thinking
Now, enter schooling (or education).
The education system is largely built on accumulating and memorizing the knowledge and thinking of others.
Teachers, textbooks and exams represent the cumulative impacts and cumulative thinking — dictated largely by institutions and systems. This is not necessarily all bad. However, it means that most of us become good at trying to remember ‘facts and figures’ — at least until the exam.
Time spent in post-secondary (or higher education) is largely about referencing everyone else’s knowledge and thinking. The hours upon hours spent by learners (and instructors) ensuring ‘proper citations’ and ‘reference lists’ and formats (APA, MLA, bla bla bla).
Added to this, being told repeatedly there is no “I” permitted in scholarly work or essays. Must be objective, they say.
And, to be objective, we engage in ‘critical thinking’ — which in higher ed simply means regurgitating other people’s arguments, facts and figures to disprove that other person’s facts and figures over there. (rinse and repeat as necessary…)
Yes, there is some benefit to these approaches — but what is lost?
Often… the ability to appreciate one’s own thinking - and the many, many, many different ways of thinking, of generating thinking, and of capturing one’s own thinking.
Cumulative Thinking
Cumulative thinking is the collection of experiences, ideas, knowledge, and skills.
Just as environmental cumulative effects can be minor individually but significant collectively — with cumulative thinking, small and seemingly insignificant thoughts or experiences (in the moment) can collectively lead to substantial insights or creative breakthroughs.
An analogy could be made with investing in stocks and businesses. Warren Buffet, for example, has accumulated billions of dollars based on a strategy of wise investing and then holding for the long term (buy-and-hold).
We can translate that into Thinking (and in turn creating and writing).
Document-and-hold.
This means catching your ideas, experiences, thoughts, flashes of insight, and more.
It also means capturing your sketches, maps, brainstorming, doodling, and various other mind-meanderings.
Think for example, like a river… and its memories.
The map below is by geologist Robert Fisk in the 1940s. It represents the movement of the Mississippi River's main river channel — across geologic time.
The main channel is the same colour as the background and runs across the centre of the image from left to right.
Each ancient channel mapped and coloured in — on its own — wouldn’t reveal much or seem all that interesting.
However, cumulatively, all together reveals a fascinating pattern and fuel for much deeper thinking — as well as a deeper appreciation for thinking in geologic time and scale.
The Seasons of Thinking (and Documenting Them)
Not much different than seasons for fish, or varying river flows — thinking has its seasons and even its times of day and even hour-to-hour flow.
Depending on what you’ve eaten, how you slept, the tilt of the earth, and air pressure (e.g., high or low), what you’re reading or scrolling, and who you’re hanging out with (to name a few) — thinking will vary in scope, scale, and effectiveness across a day, a week, a month, and so on.
This is why — if you are in any sort of endeavour requiring creativity, or thinking, or synthesis — it’s critical to capture those thoughts, ideas, notions, sketches, maps and otherwise (when they come).
I am as guilty as the next person — to say in my head — “but this is such a great idea, I won’t lose it!”
But we often do.
Or… an idea that may have seemed “run-of-the-mill” or mundane — upon reflection we realize was brilliant. Or pretty darn good.
Or… that by noting it down, and then re-reading it, it was exactly the puzzle piece we required now — even though we might have thought it and jotted it down last week, last month, 2 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago.
Cheryl Strayed, for example, author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail had an almost 20-year gap from the time she did the hike (mid 1990s) to the time she released her memoir book. Her best-selling book went on to become a popular movie.
If you’re someone in the Creator space — maybe looking (or already) participating in the $250 Billion Creator Economy — or maybe someone who’s always wanted to write (and maybe publish)… then something like a Learning Journal can be an incredibly valuable tool, process, and legacy.
Learning Journals to Capture Your Cumulative Thinking
My first experience keeping journals started in my late teens. When I was 18, I started treeplanting. I bought a day planner and kept track of my daily stats. It was piece work (e.g. paid by the tree planted) — so it was important to keep track of how much I made each day.
After my first year of treeplanting, I went to Australia for almost a year. I kept notes in a day planner. Quick notes about where I was, my experiences and who I was meeting.
That practice hooked me. I’ve kept journals since. That was over 30 years ago. In my early 20s, I made the shift to calling them Learning Journals. This dropped any stigma about ‘dear diary’ or otherwise.
The important thing — I find, and recommend — there is no right or wrong way to keep a Learning Journal. Find what works for you.
Yet, the most important thing, try to keep some sort of notebook on the go. When possible, try to catch:
Daily Insights: Each day, write down at least one new idea, insight, or learning. This could be something you read, observed, or thought about. Reflect on why it stood out to you. Write this down — even bullet points.
Connections and Patterns: Try to review your entries (semi-regularly) and look for patterns or connections between your thoughts. This can help you see the bigger picture and how daily learnings contribute to your overall understanding.
Challenges and Solutions: Note down challenges you face, ponder and map out potential solutions. Revisit these entries later to evaluate which solutions worked and why. (You may find that a past idea wasn’t quite right for that situation but perfect for a new one).
Creative Ideas: Use your journal to jot down your creative ideas, no matter how big or small. Over time, these will become seeds for larger projects or solutions to existing problems.
My main ‘cumulative thinking’ resource is hard-copy (pen and paper). However, I also use the Notes app, little videos, photos, and various other Learning Journals.
Even these Free Issues of Box Cutter Co. are a form of Learning Journals.
The Learning Journal Initiative
We (my wife and I) recently started a new writing project on Medium. It’s connected to our educational startup Humanity Academy.
It’s called The Learning Journal Initiative. I started it on Dec. 23.
In 3 weeks we’ve already grown to over 400 Followers and made close to $50.
Below are some of the headlines of articles, and each is a ‘friend link’ so that anyone can read it (you don’t have to be a Medium member to read these).
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading.
Would love to hear your questions — drop a like, a comment, or re-post on channels you navigate. Thank you to those who do this regularly.
Watch for the next Free Issue of The Solopreneur Series coming this week.
Thanks, David. I *just* started journaling recently, and your tips couldn’t come at a better timing for this! Also love the idea of personal geographies, there’s just something so inspiring and life-reassuring about it :)
Beautiful post, David.
The way you connect ideas and take your reader on a journey is phenomenal.