Main idea

Faced with a quote, a sentence from a reading or a phrasing heard in a meeting, there is no list of boxes that would say whether it should join the small set of ideas you want to have in mind. What decides is an immediate effect: you read the sentence and you feel you recognize something. "That's it."

That effect is dated and situated. It depends on the path, the readings, the experiences and the open questions of the person reading, at that moment. A sentence that produces this recognition in one person can leave another perfectly indifferent, without either being right against the other.

This subjectivity is not a flaw in the criterion, it is what the criterion selects. A note base can aim at usefulness, which can be argued; a core of convictions aims at what structures a way of seeing, which cannot be argued and does not seek consensus.

Why it matters

It rules out delegating the selection. A checklist can be applied by a third party, a machine, a team; recognition can only be observed by the person who feels it.

And it protects against dilution: an objective criterion would let in everything that is sound and well thought out — that is, far too much.

Nuances and limits

Recognition in the moment is no guarantee: it can be produced by style more than by substance. It selects candidates, it validates nothing — the test comes afterwards, over time.

And rationalizing it too much destroys it: trying to justify after the fact why a given sentence resonated amounts to going back through the checklist you had just set aside.

Open questions

• Can the conditions for resonance be cultivated, or do you only observe it when it happens?