The Emergence of "Idea Emergence"
How sketches and links help ideas surface—and stick.
Abstract
How a few sketches in Excalidraw (summer 2020) sparked a practice for seeing connections in real time. Learn how linking ideas turns notetaking into notemaking, and how this shapes the LYT book.
- Think with your notes, not just store them.
- Linking ideas creates meaning and reveals insights.
- Focus on relationships over rigid structure.
Speaker Bio
Nick Milo
Creator of Linking Your Thinking. For 17+ years, Nick has used linked notes across film, fitness, and more to make sense of complexity—and now teaches flexible frameworks to think with your notes. He leads the Linking Your Thinking Workshop and teaches Writing Original Works and Note Making Mastery to help people turn information into insight and creative output. Nick recently signed a major book deal with Simon & Schuster; the forthcoming book distills these tested mindsets and methods—shaped with the LYT community—to help readers reclaim agency over information, with publication targeted for 2027.
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Session Summary
Nick details the five-year evolution of his core conceptual frameworks for working with ideas: Idea Emergence and the ARC Framework. The talk emphasizes the challenge of not just thinking, but showing the thinking process through practical, visual models, ultimately aiming to help users transition from passive note-taking to active note-making.
The Evolution of Idea Emergence
Nick introduced the concept of Idea Emergence in 2020, inspired by the utility of linked notes in systems like Obsidian. The model illustrates how ideas grow in richness and complexity over time, moving from nothing to something.
The model is based on five levels of intellectual growth:
- Level 1 (Capture): Moving ideas from the "primordial idea soup" into external notes, going from nothingness to somethingness.
- Level 2 (Linking): Connecting individual notes, creating a natural living system, though this "forest of notes" can become overwhelming without structure.
- Level 3 (Map of Content/MOC): Pulling related notes into a single Map of Content (MOC), creating a dedicated colliding phase. This new thinking space fosters synthesis from clustered ideas, turning tension into insight.
- Level 4 (MOC Networks): Connecting MOCs to other MOCs. This higher-order network makes creating new output—like essays, articles, or books—almost effortless because the intellectual work (80% of the project) is already complete in the form of reusable intellectual assets.
- Level 5 (Home Note): A North Star or dashboard that acts as a central launchpad and historical guide, allowing the user to travel backward and forward in time through their knowledge system.
Nick highlights the struggle of refining the initial, complex visual model, stressing the need to "kill your darlings" to achieve simplicity and universality. The five levels represent a shift toward middle-out thinking, focusing on the crucial MOC level as the core creation space, rather than relying solely on rigid top-down or chaotic bottom-up organization.
The ARC Framework and Unification
Seeking a more practical application, Nick developed the ARC Framework to diagnose where people get stuck in the creative process. The framework focuses on the three phases of sense-making:
- A - Add: Consuming, collecting, capturing, and highlighting (where people spend over 50% of their time).
- R - Relate: Contextualizing, interacting, clarifying, and colliding ideas.
- C - Communicate: Transforming, generating, and publishing output.
A core insight is that most people spend too much time on note-taking (Add) and not enough on note-making (Relate/Communicate), resulting in the Relate phase being "squished."
The unified model successfully maps the vertical Idea Emergence levels onto the horizontal ARC flow, showing how Level 1 is part of Add, Level 3 is the core of Relate, and Levels 4 and 5 support the generation of Communicate outputs. This unified framework acts as a diagnostic tool, defining sticking points like the gap between spark (Add) and remark (Relate), and the necessary transition between the Architect (structured planning) and Gardener (chaotic creation) mindsets.
Key Insights and Practical Takeaways
- The Power of Collision: The practical exercise for the colliding phase is to group ideas tightly, creating tension, and then look at the negative space—the gaps between clusters. Ask, “What’s missing?” This question forces the creation of a new, bridging idea that did not exist before.
- Making Links Meaningful: A link is meaningful if the user makes it themselves. Nick strongly advises against letting AI create links, as the value lies in the self-curated nature of the connections, which provides "dopamine shots" of insight and acts as a continual pruning of the "Zen garden" of ideas.
- Breaking the Add/Relate Bottleneck: For users stuck in the Add phase with a large backlog, the solution is to skip ahead to the Communicate phase by setting a firm, tangible goal, deadline, or deliverable (e.g., an article, a book outline). This external pressure automatically prioritizes the few ideas from the backlog that are truly necessary, effectively pulling the user into the Relate phase.
- The Outcome: The goal is to build a Meaningful Cognitive Universe (MCU) by creating a rich intellectual environment and cultivating reusable intellectual assets, which then allows for dynamic, meaningful insights right alongside intentional, structured goals.
- Tools for Visualization: Nick uses a combination of pen and paper, Excalidraw (for quick sketching), Figma (for polished graphics), and Keynote (which he calls the most underrated sense-making tool) to create the dynamic animations that tell the story of the idea's evolution.