Networking Stagnation: Fatigue or Growing Pains? III

The second question I want to discuss is how to allow for digestion and consolidation between spurts of discovery.

I started my current spurt of discovery in May 2002 when I joined KnowledgeBoard. Half a year later I started my weblog in English, boosting the discovery process, and just a month ago I started a weblog in Dutch and German, looking to boost it once again.

With all the enthousiasm that comes with entering new uncharted territories at first everything is interesting. All special interest groups on KnowledgeBoard are worth contributing to, all interesting blogposts, and boy there are many out there, are worth commenting on or reflecting on in your own blog. You reach addiction levels when you start being afraid to miss something interesting.

But that eagerness takes its toll. There is no real time to filter all that passes before your eyes, as you're already sprinting to the next interesting post as soon as you've linked to the last one. And finally there is the time when all that discovering and exploring, and playing with ideas for fascinating projects, becomes too much.

Then it's time to sit back and reflect. What use is all this to me? What is applicable now, and what is promising for later? How are my opinions and beliefs influenced and changed? These are the type of questions that help digest what you discovered. It means, selecting and setting priorities based on current problems to solve, or current needs to fulfill. It means learning that it is not neglecting your duties, it's honoring them, when you pass up on all the interesting conversations out there for a while, so that you may make more sense of the ones you have participated in. It means picking a few discussions and instead of widening them to encompass the world, narrowing them down as to be able to dig deeper.

A close friend of mine uses a picture of a pyramid for this. In times of rapid personal growth you build a tower on your current base of opinions, skills and beliefs. As that tower reaches increasing heights, you have to stop building upwards for a while and broaden the base some more, to keep the tower stable. After broadening the base you can continue reaching for the skies again. So you're always building on top of a pyramid, with an ever broadening base.

The excitement of discovery is probably not so easy replaced by the more mundane task of broadening the base of your knowledge pyramid. So the question is how to make broadening the base more attractive, lessening the contrast with the rush of discovery.

If that question goes unanswered we probably end up with doing away with the results of a discovery phase. "It was great, but in the end nothing came out of it" and go looking for discovery in another realm with the vain hope that things will be different there. It's a pattern one can find in early adoptors a lot I think, where hopping to the 'new thing' without really structurally adopting or assimilating the 'last new thing' is common.

The disappointment in the quotes in my first post in this little trilogy speaks I think of that contrast between the 'trip' of discovery, and having to deal with the rest of the world predominantly unimpressed by the stunning things you found along the way. It's maybe the grown up version of being a little kid and finding all these beautiful glittering stones in the riverbed. "Look dad, look at these beautiful glittering stones." "Ah that's only fools gold, my son, nothing to get excited about."

But the point was and is that you are excited. When I speak to non-bloggers in fact I want them to understand my excitement more than I want them to understand blogging per se. But as with scores of dads, they seem to miss the importance of being excited.

The answer to that might be to try and mix discovery and consolidation. I can name a few things that became increasingly clear to me in the last 14 months of discovery, and have changed and augmented my belief system: