Mini-Essays

How Mini-Essays Have Transformed My Learning

In this video, the YouTuber Odysseas shares how he uses mini-essays to learn. For him, they are 100-300 word essays, with a structured beginning, middle, and end, on a specific topic that he is learning. Any subject that he is reading he will take and break apart into smaller parts, atomizing the individual ideas into stand-alone units. He then attempts to link these ideas together to form new ideas.

To explain what this may look like I’ll give a visual. Let’s say you have two ideas and you write mini-essays about each of them. I’ll put them in a field, disconnected from each other.

Now comes the magic of why I love this system. Taking each of these ideas separately, you attempt to connect them. This is a intense, creative form of thinking where you look for clues in both of the ideas and attempt to connect them together into something new.

Then, after a bit of thinking, you may come up with some idea. You will then attempt to write down the idea as an essay (essay literally means attempt) and BOOM, you’ve got some original content.

I’ve been doing this for a little while now and, instead of locking it away in some not application, I’ve decided to use this blog as my thinking machine. This means I’ll be posting mundane essays which are summaries of whatever it is I’m reading. This is interesting enough. But the real strategy here is to connect different mini-essays together into new, original ideas.

I want this thinking to be public to show how this process is meant to go and how sloppy and uneven it can be. Thinking is hard but, in my experience, worth the effort every time.