Hi, it’s Brilliant.
People sometimes ask how I remember so much — quotes, etymologies, who taught and influenced whom, which books and cities and cultures shaped others. Random tidbits, you name it. To be clear, I couldn’t hold a candle to Jeopardy! legend Ken Jennings.
It’s not that I have some bear-trap memory for everything. My penchant is for recalling what others have said — especially about life, and how to live it well. And the honest answer isn’t a technique. It’s this: I remember what I love, what I’ve needed, and what I intend to give away.
Start with love. When I learn, I usually bring my whole self to it. The Japanese have a word for this — isshōkenmei, “with all one’s might.” The word descends from an old samurai phrase meaning to defend one’s single plot of land with one’s life. Wholeheartedness with survival stakes.
Learning science has a name for the state in which we learn best: arousal. When I learn, I’m often aroused. Make of that what you will.
For me, learning is mostly play. I think of it like being a kid on a beach collecting sea glass — beautiful shells, odd treasures, whatever the ocean washed up that day. It’s also a puzzle. Someone once asked me my life goals, and I was surprised to hear myself say, “I want to be omniscient.” But I knew it was true. I want to know everything. (Never to be a know-it-all — just to keep finding out.) It’s the phrase Richard Feynman lived by, the one that titles a collection of his talks: the pleasure of finding things out.
And here’s the thing about recall: it’s effortless when the learning didn’t take effort in the first place. We don’t strain to remember what delighted us.
But play is only part of my answer. For much of my life, I experienced the universe as a vast, dark, cold, indifferent place — a vacuum devoid of meaning. And I desperately wanted meaning. The things I learned became beacons. Guideposts. Sometimes the path itself. The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal. If you can say it or think it, it’s not true. I returned to these again and again, and navigated by them. Some days I just needed a reason to live one more day. It didn’t have to be a good one. It just had to be something.
Here’s what I discovered: it’s easy to remember things that are essential to your survival.
And finally — whenever I learn something, I’m already thinking about who I can share it with. That intention changes everything. It’s why I built systems to save what I find, and every time I revisit a quote or a fact to pass it along, it settles deeper into memory. Generosity, it turns out, is a mnemonic device.
When Isaac Asimov — who wrote or edited more than 500 books — was reportedly asked what he’d do if told he had only six months to live, he answered: “Type faster.”
That’s what love, need, and generosity look like when they’ve fused into one motion. We don’t remember what we memorize. We remember what we treasure, what has saved us, and what we can’t wait to give away.
From the Commonplace Book
“Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.” — Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel
Further Down the Rabbit Hole
Recently I stumbled onto splode.co — a live leaderboard of what the internet is paying attention to right now. It pulls trending data from Google, YouTube, Spotify, Reddit, and more into a single page, refreshed every few minutes.
It’s like peering through keyholes throughout the universe. A meta-feed: instead of whatever the algorithms are serving me, I see what others are seeing and caring about. The beach at high tide, if the ocean were all of us. I never leave without picking something up.
If any of this landed, hit reply and tell me — I read every one. And if you think it might be worth someone else’s time, send it their way.
Wishing you every good thing,
Brilliant