Book Notes: How To Take Smart Notes (Sonke Ahrens) — Part II
This book helped me develop my own “slip-box” and use it for the intelligent organization of ideas and notes in my daily life.
📙 About The Book
Title: How To Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique To Boost Writing, Learning And Thinking
Author: Sonke Ahrens
🚀 Book Highlights
You might want to check out the book highlights and key ideas here.
🗒 Summary + Notes
[Note: This book has its chapters divided into three parts — Introduction, The Four Underlying Principles, and The Six Steps To Successful Writing. To keep the article length reasonable, the notes have been divided into three parts. This is the second part.]
PART II:
THE FOUR UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES
5. Writing Is The Only Thing That Matters
An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all. Making something public always means to write it down so it can be read. There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas.
Writing is of utmost importance to keep a record of your ideas and arguments. It will have a positive impact on the way you read as well. You will be more focused on the more relevant aspects because you will not be able to rephrase something until you fully understand it. You will end up elaborating on it more if you understand it well and as a result, you are more likely to remember it. You also need to think beyond what you read to turn it into something new. By using writing as a tool you will end up doing it deliberately.
6. Simplicity Is Paramount
We tend to think that big transformations have to start with an equally big idea. But more often than not, it is the simplicity of an idea that makes it so powerful (and often overlooked in the beginning).
People often tend to take too many notes in many different places. e.g. they underline, add comments in margins, write into notebooks, write an excerpt, etc. This causes you to spend your mental faculties remembering what was written where and when.
A text must then be conceptualised independently from these notes, which explains why so many resort to brainstorming to arrange the resources afterwards according to this preconceived idea.
In the old system, the question is: Under which topic do I store this note? In the new system, the question is: In which context will I want to stumble upon it again?
Sorting your notes by topic doesn’t help much because that makes it hard to find the notes as you tend to either add more and more notes to one topic or you end up adding more topics and subtopics which only creates a greater mess.
Unlike the older methods, the slip-box method is designed to present you with already forgotten ideas allowing your brain to think instead of remember.
Some typical mistakes that are made often:
- 1. Adhering to the advice to keep a scientific journal without giving much thought to what’s going into the journal and in what context.
- Collecting notes related to only specific projects and discarding everything else that is unrelated, causing it to get lost. If you try to open new folders for every single project, you will end up with a large overwhelming amount of unfinished projects. In the absence of a permanent reservoir of ideas, you will not be able to develop any major ideas over a longer period.
- Treating all notes as fleeting notes
Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later.
Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from.
A good indication that a note has been left unprocessed too long is when you no longer understand what you meant or it appears banal.
Project-related notes can be comments in the manuscript, collections of project-related literature, outlines, snippets of drafts, reminders, to-do lists, or the draft itself.
7. Nobody Ever Starts From Scratch
When you decide to work on an assignment, you think about a topic, read about it, and decide to read or not read something else. All this is rooted in prior understanding and is not unexpected.
Every intellectual endeavour starts from an already existing preconception, which then can be transformed during further inquires and can serve as a starting point for following endeavours.
People who believe they are starting from scratch do not do it. The reason they feel so is because they have not written down their thoughts and ideas previously which is why they feel that they are starting with something completely new. In reality, they end up retracing their ideas.
8. Let The Work Carry You Forward
There are two kinds of scenarios — one where your work drives you and the other opposite to this. You usually look for the former. Positive experiences drive you to take up more tasks, get better at work and enjoy it. But, in the opposite case, you get demotivated and stuck thereby falling prey to procrastination and unwanted consequences like missed deadlines.
It is important that you seek and be receptive to feedback. The most reliable predictor of long-term success is having a “growth mindset” while a hindrance to this success is having a “fixed mindset”.
Embracing a growth mindset means to get pleasure out of changing for the better (which is mostly inwardly rewarding) instead of getting pleasure in being praised (which is outwardly rewarding).
To seek as many opportunities to learn as possible is the most reliable long-term growth strategy.
To promote a growth mindset for yourself, you need to have a learning system in place that practically enables feedback loops.
The ability to express understanding in one’s own words is a fundamental competency for everyone who writes — and only by doing it with the chance of realizing our lack of understanding can we become better at it.
Do check out the notes for Part — I: Introduction here and the notes for Part — III: The Six Steps To Successful Writing here.
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