Book excerpt: This is a book for people to dip into, as they would walk in and out of the room of a dinner party and embrace their interests. Before Information Architecture, before the rules on how to organize information, before you learn grammar, before you work hard at expanding your vocabulary and go through the exercises of parallel meanings of things as using a Thesaurus and as one writes papers in class, before any learning one must understand. Understanding Understanding precedes the whole process of learning, of giving yourself permission to understand the formations of facts, data, stories, pictures, words, conversations that allow you to understand. This book could be called A Celebration of Conversation or Musings with my Mentors. It is about the fantasy of being the dumbest person in the room and being able to identify all the myriad connections of how others think, talk, explain and visualize. The following is a collection of many of the most interesting idiosyncratic paths of understanding that lead to creation.