🫧 Using PKM to Pop the Bubble of Belief

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is all about making sense of information.

Unfortunately, there’s an awful lot of it. And not all of it is helpful.

Even the things we feel are useful can actually be detrimental over time if we don’t understand how our brain naturally channels us down selected paths designed to verify what we already believe to be true.

Author Dave Gray calls this the bubble of belief. And it’s naturally established in our brain trying to make sense of an abundance of information by selecting the stuff that feels good.

Our capacity for perceiving information is about 11 million bits per second. But our conscious attention is limited to 40 bits per second! Which means there’s a whole lot going on around us that we’re not aware of because there’s only so much we can pay attention to.

Our conscious attention is like a needle on a record player. It’s what defines our experiences, and it’s the thing upon which we build our theories, judgments, and beliefs.

But it’s only a drop in the bucket of what’s actually knowable.

Unfortunately, it’s human nature to seek out others who look, act, and sound just like us. So we tend to surround ourselves with people who believe the same things we do, which makes it feel “obvious” to us. What it’s really doing is creating a “bubble of belief” from self-sealing logic that has been hand-picked by our brains to confirm the bias we’ve established.

Here’s a sketch I made from visuals in the book that illustrates the point:

The Bubble of Belief

Unfortunately, the bubble of belief keeps us from truly understanding things. We’re so convinced we know the truth that we don’t listen to alternate points of view.

Beware the Internet Philosophers

One of my favorite takeaways from the book is that the Internet is a grocery store for facts. You can go to your favorite section and pick out exactly what you want without considering anything else in the store.

But facts don’t equal truth.

Facts are often selected to prove a point. They reinforce our confirmation bias and close our minds to other options.

“We construct our beliefs, mostly unconsciously, and thereafter they hold us captive. They can help us focus and make us more effective, but sadly, they also can limit us: they blind us to possibility and subject us to fog, fear, and doubt.” – Dave Gray, Liminal Thinking

If you’ve ever talked to someone who was convinced that they knew the truth because they read an article about something online to support their wild theory, you know exactly how dangerous this can be.

But the pursuit of truth and understanding opens doors. It requires us to consider the possibility that we may be wrong, which creates a desire to go beyond our clique and see what else is out there.

The desire for truth is at the core of the growth mindset. It’s not afraid of being wrong because it knows eventually it will be right. But a fixed mindset will attack any threat to protect the delicate bubble of belief because being wrong would be fatal to the identity it is trying desperately to preserve.

Popping the Bubble of Belief

One of the best things we can do to pop the bubble of belief is to embrace the things that make us uncomfortable.

I try my best to converse with people who don’t view the world the same way I do. Their belief systems aren’t a threat to mine — in fact, understanding their perspectives often helps me better understand my own!

But I go into it with an open mind. I’m not trying to convince them my way is right. I’m simply trying to understand a little bit better the experiences they’ve had that are different than my own.

As Stephen Covey said, seek first to understand, then to be understood.

That’s one of the reasons I enjoy the Bookworm podcast so much. My co-host & I take turns picking books, so frequently they pick a book that I wouldn’t have chosen myself. But since I have to show up and talk about it, it’s my job to understand it the best I can. I don’t always agree with the authors, but some of my favorite books have been ones that I had a strong aversion to at the beginning.

Over time, I’ve learned that the feeling of resistance I sometimes feel can be an indication that there’s something valuable to be learned here. That’s actually a clue that there is something useful here to be added to the Maps of Content I create in Obsidian as I try to codify my thoughts around things I don’t fully understand.

If you really want to make sense of things (what PKM is all about in my opinion), you need to lean into the things that make you uncomfortable. Don’t hide from the hard stuff. Collect the things that force you to decide what you really believe.

Something Cool: Share Notes via Public URLs with Share Note

I recently came across the Share Note plugin that allows you to share an individual note from your Obsidian library via a public web link. All you have to do is install the plugin and then choose the Share Current Note command, and this plugin takes care of the rest.

My notes from Part-Time YouTuber Academy shared to the web via the Share Note plugin.

After you share the note, you get an encrypted link that you can share anywhere (you can turn off encryption if you want to enable the preview in messaging apps). All of the images, code blocks, and callouts are present in the shared note because all the CSS is bundled in when you choose to share the note. You can even upload notes that match your current Obsidian theme if you choose to use something besides the default.

Book Notes: Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray

This entire newsletter was inspired by ideas from Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray. This is easily one of my most recommended books. If you could use a little help understanding, shaping, or reframing beliefs, you’ll definitely want to pick this one up.

My notes from Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray.

And if you want to download my personal notes in PDF form, click here.

— Mike

P.S. I’ve mentioned a few weeks in a row that I’m moving things over to mikeschmitz.com soon. This is likely the last email newsletter that will come from an address other than mike@mikeschmitz.com. If you enjoy the newsletter and want to make sure you keep getting it, you might want to add that address to your approved senders list 😉