Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration of Powerful Structuring Ideas

I’ve just published a new section in Principle 7, “Apply Knowledge” of Cognitive Productivity with macOS. It is called “Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration of Powerful Structuring Ideas”. This provides some clues about the functionality of “New App”.

I wrote:

We at CogSci Apps are developing several apps to help users apply specific principles of my Cognitive Productivity books. We think they will permanently alter the way in which progressive experts work with knowledge. Here are some powerful structuring ideas, gleaned from the tech business literature, that I have applied at CogSci Apps for our soon To be Announced app.

This section contains two subsections that productivity app enthusiasts might find interesting:

1. John Gruber’s Advice on Marketing New Apps

In this section, I describe how I was influenced by the advice John Gruber gave on August 23, 2016, after he and his business partners abandoned their iOS product: Vesper, adieux.

2. Riding the Technology Adoption Life Cycle

In this section, I describe how Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado influenced “New App’s” product road map.

Fondness for Ideas

More precisely, the thesis of this section is that in order to overcome the brain’s resistance to using new ideas, it helps to fall in love with them. Just as in personal relationships, truly loving ideas does not necessarily come easily. There are strategies one can use, for instance, to maintain one’s love and admiration for one’s partner or close friends. (One of John Gottman’s Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is “Nurture your fondness and admiration”). Loving ideas helps one recognize when they are applicable, and then to at least considering using them.