Looping back/re-connecting

Many of us hoard information to consume later, then never get to it. In a Jarvis Cocker interview with Paul McCartney, he was describing his creative process and stated that he has thousands of ideas that he's collected. But in the early days of The Beatles, they put their ideas to work immediately. That's the best way to do something with an idea, rather than simply saving it for later. Ideally, what you want is to be able to absorb information and connect it with something else, so that you remember it and act on it.

On Connecting:

• Even if you've organized a pile, it's still a pile. It has to be encoded, as memories are encoded.

• Knowledge is the result of effective "triggering".

• Creativity is perhaps most effective in the moment, defined as within 12-18 hours. But revisiting ideas from 12 years ago is almost like a new idea—because it was once.