It certainly took an interesting intellect to develop a system like the Zettelkasten, though I’m not sure to what extent Luhmann credited the invention with his prolific success vs. having it attributed later as advertising hype. I would of course love to ape his success as a thinker, although I think another factor in that might be that my interests are spread further out, while his seemed to cluster around the social science he liked to write in.
And I’m not sure brainstorming is the right concept. I might brainstorm the solution to a specific problem I’m having, whereas with a Zettelkasten I’d build something shaped like a solution and then look for problems to use it on. There’s an element of play to it, too, in making the ideas dance with each other. It’s like seeing what kind of keys you could make with what’s available vs. trying to get back in when you’ve locked yourself out of the house.
That said most of what I did in this post was brainstorm, so I think a lot of building those keys comes down to brainstorming anyway and that the system just gives you a bunch of starting points for doing that.
I cut down the number of nodes because I felt like the project would be too tedious at scale, and having a handful of very fruitful nodes would make it harder to show if the rest of them weren’t doing anything.
I’m not sure I would say the method’s lost its novelty for me, since it’s more of an afterthought to note-taking usually, but I’ve found it unrewarding to look at this web of concepts swimming together and not get any eurekas out of it. It’s possible that cutting the chaff out might produce a tighter web that makes more meaningful connections, but this seems like a very daunting housekeeping project if I can really do it at all.
Drawing connections between Zettelkasten-style atomic ideas is better to me than full-throated complicated ones, and that’s where I’d apply the virtue of narrowness—if you try to smash whole fields together you get new fields less often than smashing ideas together generates new ideas.