Using a Personal Library To Create a Magnum Opus

The Personal Library obviously serves as a fantastic store and search archive of data collected that's relevant and interesting to its creator(s).

However, it's less clear that a personal library could be used to help assist in life's daily tasks; and much less in life's largest task, the magnum opus of the most ambitious among us.

Speed Limit

The brain moves really fast, and a personal library might just get in the way. In addition, there are often things that aren't shared with the personal library that exist within the architecture of the brain itself, including muscle memory on how to do things, habits, and small neuroses and non verbal things like attractions/repulsions from stimuli that currently can't be conveyed into data that would go into a personal library.

In order to create a magnum opus, the brain needs to have an obsessively intense amount of focus on one particular problem and stare at it for hours or days or weeks or even years, often in lieu of solving other more immediate tasks.

What Dimensions Can We Improve Against?

Here are the dimensions that I think matter when it comes to creating a masterpiece or a better masterpiece using a personal library:

• (I) Being able to create that masterpiece faster. Instead of creating it over the course of three decades, you can create it in one and a half, for example. This gives you those 15 years back to improve upon the idea post-publish.
• (II) Another dimension is to be able to uncover new elements from better sourcing. Good writing is both additive and subtractive. It subtracts away everything that isn't necessary, but it isn't afraid to go to the ends of the earth to find what is.
• (III) Finally, another dimension that could be very useful for improving a magnum opus would be to have the creator stay in flow state longer, which basically allows them to work on their magnum opus for longer periods of time without exhaustion. Going off of the current scientific consensus that humans can roughly do about four hours of deep work a day, that means that we all have a very real limit that we approach and being able to stay in our peak creative state for all of that limit allows us to create better work and better opportunity for our masterpieces.

I have my own biased list of masterpieces, but some masterpieces from this list include "Hunter x Hunter" by Yoshiro Togashi, the invention of calculus by Isaac Newton, "Pieta" by Michelangelo, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" by Claude Shannon and "Take Me Back to Eden" by Sleep Token. Obviously, many of these breakthroughs were done in the field of art or theoretical paper writing because one person or a small group of people doesn't have the resources to make societal wide engineering cultural changes. However, many of these theories did go on decades later to reshape entire industries.

Where A Personal Library Comes In

Dimension I: Not very obvious, but I think by maintaining a good captain's log style journal back-and-forth feedback of the masterpiece that you're creating and storing those resources into a personal library means you can access them faster. Chronological series data, as well as the boring boilerplate type work can be managed by a personal library. There are a number of constant tasks like this that can go from O(n) to potentially O(1).

Dimension II: Thanks to personal libraries now having vector databases, being able to establish relationships between entries is pretty trivial. And being able to access far-reaching, interesting, juxtaposing ideas and then access their neighbors to find interesting similarities and relationships allows the magnum opus creator to create brand new ideas from scratch.

Dimension III: Here's what the Personal Library would be doing: It would suggest helpful pieces of information that save you the energy that it takes to go and search for them.

(NB: I've experienced something similar using machine learning models to help me code - it's easier to stay in the flow state because I have to break out of the context less often, and can stay focused more readily on the problem I'm trying to solve instead of a sub-problem that popped up and immediately requires my attention.)

Of course, all three of these can then be used to influence each other, and ideas in a personal library can be synthesized into new catalysts for future projects.

There is a positive feedback loop of the helpful data being restored into the system that again resurfaces it in the future to be restored later.