The best CSS themes for Roam Research
Learn how to personalise the look of Roam Research with a custom CSS theme. Check out our selection of the best themes shared by Roam users to get started.
Year: 2020
Semantic traps: why vague words are risky
In politics and linguistics, semantic traps are words so vague that we cannot give them specific meaning, or words that are systematically misleading. Semantic traps are often used to stir a debate in a certain direction, or to influence people’s judgement. A famous example is when Republican strategist Frank Luntz wrote a memo to George … Read More
How to build diagrams in Roam Research
As a big fan of thinking in maps, I’m always curious about tools to lay out and connect ideas visually. Many people are not aware as this is a bit of a hidden functionality, but you can actually create diagrams in Roam. 1. Create the canvas. Type {{diagram}} and press enter. You can also type … Read More
The power of flexible consistency
When I launched the newsletter last summer, I didn’t expect to hit 20,000 subscribers about a year later. Beside the financial freedom, what started as a little project has brought me countless opportunities to connect with smart people and create new friendships. Many readers are also writers, creators, designers, and entrepreneurs—whether full-time or on the … Read More
Negativity bias: how negative experiences cloud our judgement
Have you ever found yourself ruminating over a mistake you made a while ago? Replaying in your head a conversation that didn’t go so well? That’s the negativity bias at play: not only do we register negative stimuli more readily, but we also tend to dwell on these events for longer. In general, negative events … Read More
Networked thinking: a quiet cognitive revolution
Humanity has lived through several cognitive revolutions already. The development of various writing systems around the world; the invention of the printing press; the formulation of the heliocentric hypothesis by Copernicus; Darwin’s theory of evolution; Einstein’s theory of relativity—all of these discoveries have fundamentally reshaped the way we think. While nowadays the spotlight is on … Read More
Adjacent skills: how to widen your career perspective
Gone are the days of linear career trajectories. Most people will live several work lives, and careers have become increasingly mobile. While deep expertise in a given domain can lead to a successful career, it is also a more rigid approach which may limit the number of lateral opportunities. In contrast, adjacent skills can open … Read More
How to think better
As Einstein wrote in 1936: “All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.” Why is it that a skill as important as thinking is not a key focus in traditional schools? Why don’t we have classes on decision-making, cognitive biases, and mental models? Can we learn how to think better? It’s … Read More
The science of deliberate practice
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, “practice makes perfect” is “said to encourage someone to continue to do something many times, so that they will learn to do it very well.” But does practice really make perfect? We tend to see practice as tireless repetition of the same task, where the goal is to progressively become … Read More
How to set up your own digital garden
A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. Contrary to a blog, where articles and essays have a publication date and start decaying as soon as they are published, a digital garden is evergreen: digital … Read More