In 2022, the firm that I worked for at the time invited the organizational psychologist Adam Grant to join us on a Zoom for an interactive Q&A session.
Adam had just released his book Think Again prior to this meeting, and we all received a hardcover copy of it in the days that followed.
One of Adam's earlier books, Give and Take, had a profound impact on my thinking and my life, and I have been a fan of his work ever since.
So, of course I completely nerded out when Adam graciously answered not one, but two (!) of my questions about concepts from Give and Take despite the fact that he was there to talk about new stuff.
After this call and I received my copy of Grant's new book, all I wanted to do was tear into reading Think Again.
There was one tiny and small problem - I was so burned out and beaten down at the time that I couldn't focus long enough to read a single page, let alone a couple hundred of them.
Think Again, Think Again, Think Again...If You Can
You're on top. You're on the ball. You think you've seen it all?THINK AGAIN
Minor Threat “Think Again” (1983)
In mid 2022, I had grown incredibly frustrated by my inability to focus on something as simple as reading a book, and I had reached peak burnout working for a complete stooge of a corporate manager.
Then the real cherry on top came when I experienced a devastating personal loss...at that point it wasn't even about focus anymore. Hell, it wasn't even about functioning. It was about surviving.
I had to burn personal vacation time to create the space, but I spent an entire week sitting on my rooftop doing nothing but focusing on reading Adam Grant's Think Again (and reconnecting with my cats).
Now when I look back through the chaos of the past 2.5+ years of my life, and I see how much I've learned and grown in such a rapid period of time (and in my late 40's, no less), I can't help but be blown away.
Not only do I credit Think Again with helping me make sense of the world I found myself in at the time, it changed my entire approach to learning and how I made sense of literally everything.
I decided to unlearn everything I had ever learned since childhood, and to start over from a foundation of principles and known truths.
I wanted to begin from a core and work outward, staying connected to observable, causal, and scientifically provable knowledge.
After a multi-year journey of learning, unlearning, relearning, and figuring out how to rapidly capture, analyze, and synthesize new information as it came into my world, I arrived at what I am calling my "Knowledge Ontology."
I present to you The Ontology of Mike Topalovich - the culmination of years of personal introspection, inquiry, and confronting hard truths.
Say What?
I'll go deeper into the "Why" and get into the "How" behind this at some point, but for now please let me walk you through the "What" of the first iteration of my knowledge ontology.
Despite the concept of Ontology being something that has only recently begun to enter the Tech Nerd Zeitgeist™ because of its applicability to reducing Generative AI hallucinations, it looks like there are already pedantic gatekeepers and "influencers" emerging, so let me be clear about something upfront:
I know what I'm presenting in its current form isn't going to pass muster as a true "Ontology" as the cool kids are trying to define it, and I really couldn't give a s**t less.
What I'm releasing today took well over a thousand hours to create, I know there are hundreds more hours to put into this, and at the moment it is a thought experiment and learning opportunity for me that I am building publicly in the hopes someone may find value in it.
So let's please not get hung up on technicalities as I try and articulate my thinking and my processes behind the tangible output of that thinking.
I know it's not "done." Hopefully it never will be.
The Thinking Behind the Thinking
The Ontology of Mike Topalovich represents the connecting and surfacing of knowledge that I have accumulated throughout my life, structured in a way that makes it not only easy for me to store and retrieve information, but to connect my knowledge in new ways that create the conditions for new thoughts and ideas to emerge.
This structure itself emerged after grinding out dozens and dozens of iterations - tear-downs, rebuilds, and versions that just needed to be killed with fire.
Like with any complex system design, I had to make a significant number of tradeoffs along the way to finding the optimal balance between form, function, and feel.
I'll go into this in more detail at some point, but one of the big challenges I faced was the tension between getting this "out the door" and getting it "right."
Essentially, I had to find the right balance between structure and immediate usability. Interestingly enough, structure won for the first version.
At about 200 topics, I dove in and tried applying my ontology as I envisioned it working. I found that it needed wayyyyy more thought and structuring, because I would inevitably run into topics I wanted to link to and they just weren't there in many cases.
I needed more surface area, but that came with a high complexity cost.
After enough "back to the drawing board" moments, and after a serious amount of exploration, reflection, and experimentation, I found that it wasn't 200 topics I needed...it was closer to 2,000 atomic pieces of structured, networked information just to make this usable.
So the first complete iteration of The Ontology of Mike Topalovich is comprised of a complete Information Architecture similar in feel to a taxonomy but designed to reassemble information from the most granular components as leaf nodes, traversing back to higher order concepts and structures.
The resulting structure was designed to be observable and easily visualized as a knowledge graph or similar construct.
And now that I've arrived at this structure, even though I don't have each of the underlying pages built out yet, what I've found is that by simply having this structure completed and available for traversing, my brain is re-wiring itself to adopt a similar internal structure.
This technical architecture aligns with my cognitive architecture, allowing me to use the Ontology almost like an "index" for jumping between internal thinking and external tools in my personal knowledge architecture and systems.
Taking into account the known limitations of human memory and optimizing for the number of objects that humans can typically hold in short term memory (7 plus or minus 2), I broke the 2,098 current topics into 7 "pillars" of thinking:
- Architect Thinking - Designing and structuring digital and conceptual systems.
- Business Thinking - Understanding the mechanics of how business works.
- Human Thinking - How do we think? What does it mean to be human?
- Market Thinking - Understanding economic, market, and social systems.
- Strategic Thinking - Making decisions that align actions and behaviors with long-term goals.
- Systems Thinking - Understanding the dynamic and interconnected nature of systems.
- Technology Thinking - Reflections on modern technologies and the impact they have on our lives.
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