Your research interest should be genuine. It’s a mistake to choose something you think is “safe” to fail at. It may seem rational to experiment with something where failure has no serious consequences (e.g., having to start over). But this only leads to a lack of motivation to build the intensity and seriousness needed for thorough work. If the content of your Zettelkasten isn’t important to you and only serves to learn the Zettelkasten method, you’ll quickly become superficial and sloppy with the content. The Zettelkasten method requires serious engagement with the content – it cannot be learned with dummy content.

My experiment illustrated how the vast majority of any medical encounter is figuring out the correct patient narrative. If someone comes into my ER saying their wrist hurts, but not due to any recent accident, it could be a psychosomatic reaction after the patient’s grandson fell down, or it could be due to a sexually transmitted disease, or something else entirely. The art of medicine is extracting all the necessary information required to create the right narrative.