Book Synopsis: How to take smart notes?|5 key takeaways

Creativity is not creating something out of the thin air. It is about taking in ideas, absorbing them and connecting them in unique ways, and creating new things.

But how to keep things in the brain? We all know our minds are a dumb ass. We are gonna forget the information stored in our brain anyway. For that, we need an external system where we can put out thoughts and insights we are exposed to. If you are a writer then it is very important for you.

Get the book (affiliate link) : How to take smart notes?

All the writing and creativity books around there are telling and teaching you that to write or create you have to come with an idea. Then research and finally write. But this masterpiece challenges it. It tells that it’s not the writing that is done actively. But it is done passively by looking in a stored treasure of thoughts and ideas.

The one where more ideas accumulate in excess becomes your writing. By taking smart notes and keeping an archive of all the information you have been exposed to, you are exposing yourself to the serendipity to hit by which you can create something unique.

It is the art of building a second brain as termed by Tiago Forte. I have written a whole article about doing it by explaining the method described in this book these days using different apps. Want to get a pdf of it: How to take smart notes?

1. Everything you need to know:

“We need a structure that breaks down ‘writing a paper’ or ‘writing an essay’ into small and clearly separated tasks, so we can do one thing at a time. This enables flow.

Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about something.”

How do you plan for insight, which by definition, cannot be anticipated? It’s a huge misunderstanding that the only alternative to planning is aimless messing around. The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward”.

• Complexity is an issue — even if you’re just keeping track of what you read, organizing your notes, and developing your thoughts, over time things will become increasingly complex, especially because it’s not just about collecting thoughts, but about making connections and sparking new ideas.
• Making your notes simple and siloed into separate, smaller stacks makes everything look less complex, but it reduces the likelihood of building and finding surprising connections between the notes themselves.

“He realized that one idea, one note was only as valuable as its context, which was not necessarily the context it was taken from. So he started to think about how one idea could relate and contribute to different contexts. Just amassing notes in one place would not lead to anything other than a mass of notes.

But he collected his notes in his slip-box in such a way that the collection became much more than the sum of its parts. His slip-box became his dialogue partner, main idea generator, and productivity engine. It helped him to structure and develop his thoughts. And it was fun to work with — because it worked.”

2. Everything you need to do:

“Each step is straightforward and well-defined: (1) assemble notes and bring them into order, (2) turn these notes into a draft, (3) review it and you’re done. “

“Notes build up while you think, read, understand and generate ideas, because you have to have a pen in your hand if you want to think, read, understand and generate ideas properly anyway.”

“ “Notes on paper, or on a computer screen […] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible,” neuroscientist Neil Levy concludes in the introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Neuro-ethics, summarizing decades of research.”

“ You have to externalize your ideas, you have to write. Richard Feynman stresses it as much as Benjamin Franklin. If we write, it is more likely that we understand what we read, remember what we learn and that our thoughts make sense. And if we have to write anyway, why not use our writing to build up the resources for our future publications?”

1. Make fleeting notes. Always have a Quick Capture inbox where you can just chuck stuff and worry about processing it later.

2. Make literature notes. Whenever you read something (and by extension, watch and listen to something), make notes about the content. Write down: (a) what you don’t want to forget, (b) what you might use later, © use your own words. Keep it short, be extremely selective. Be even more selective about quotes.

3. Make permanent notes. Go through your inbox once a day ideally, think about how these notes relate to your own stuff (research, thinking, interests). Don’t just collect ideas. Develop ideas, arguments, discussions. Does the new information contradict, correct, support, or add to what you already have (in your slip-box or your mind)? Can you combine ideas to generate something new? What questions are triggered by them?

Write exactly one note for each idea, and write as if you’re writing for someone else. Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references, try to be as precise, clear, brief as possible. Throw away fleeting notes from step 1, but the literature notes from step 2 into your reference system. You can forget about them now. All that matters is going into the slip box.”

3. Everything you need to have:

“There is this story where NASA tried to figure out how to make a ballpoint pen that works in space. If you have ever tried to use a ballpoint pen over your head, you have probably realized it is gravity that keeps the ink flowing.

After a series of prototypes, several test runs and tons of money invested, NASA developed a fully functional gravity-independent pen, which pushes the ink onto the paper by means of compressed nitrogen. According to this story, the Russians faced the same problem. So they used pencils (De Bono, 1998, 141). The slip-box follows the Russian model: Focus on the essentials, don’t complicate things unnecessarily.”

Keep things simple. The workflow is important, not the app.

4. Writing matters:

Traditional (student) thinking = writing is a form of examination. You demonstrate what you’ve learned etc through writing. First, you get a task to write. Then you have to find a topic/angle, find the research, read the material, understand the material, process it, come to a conclusion.

“ This, according to this thinking, prepares you for doing independent research. Alas, it does not. If you become successful in your research, it was not because you learned to approach writing in this way, but despite it.”

This book is based on another assumption: Studying does not prepare students for independent research. It is independent research. Nobody starts from scratch and everybody is already able to think for themselves. Studying, done properly, is research, because it is about gaining insight that cannot be anticipated and will be shared within the scientific community under public scrutiny.

There is no such thing as private knowledge in academia. An idea kept private is as good as the one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all. Making something public always means writing it down so it can be read. There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas.“

“Even if you decide never to write a single line of a manuscript, you will improve your reading, thinking, and other intellectual skills just by doing everything as if nothing counts other than writing.”

5. Nobody starts from scratch:

“The white sheet of paper — or today: the blank screen — is a fundamental misunderstanding”

It is one of the important aspects of academic or nonfiction writing. The promotion of brainstorming as a starting point is all the more surprising as it is not the origin of most ideas: The things you are supposed to find in your head by brainstorming usually don’t have their origins in there.

Rather, they come from the outside: through reading, having discussions, and listening to others, through all the things that could have been accompanied and often even would have been improved by writing. The advice to think about what to write about before you write comes both too early and too late.

Too late, as you already have passed up the chance to build up written resources when you face the white sheet of paper or the blank screen, but also too early, if you try to postpone every serious content-related work until you have made a decision on the topic.