A Barbell Strategy means ‘nothing in the middle’. Additionally, Taleb’s Barbell strategy has the overwhelming majority on one end in ‘low-risk, safe bets’, and a small percentage on the other end in moonshot bets.
So what if our knowledge management is the same?
90% of our material is simply references, things to remember. It should be captured easily, and indexed semantically.
The other 10% is the high-risk bets, ie the ideas we really spend our time manually fleshing out. These are the things we develop, share, bank on, and are proud of.
There should be no ‘in-the-middle’ work. Tagging, categorizing, etc all feel like antiquated methods in the face of semantic search and language modeling.
Search, linking, organizing, filing—all good for your most important notes, but then again, the most important stuff will show up again on its own (something else the best notes apps could do, resurfacing older notes like Apple Pictures does with your photo “memories”). You’ll come across those best ideas again and again; your notes end up merely being a record of when you first encountered the idea. 📰 Notes Apps Are Where Ideas Go to Die. And That’s Good.