How To Take Smart Notes

Key Takeaways

Ahrens’s case for the slip-box (Zettelkasten) as a thinking system, read in 2020 and annotated chapter-by-chapter in Roam. The highlights below are organized by theme rather than by page, because the full-text read produced clusters of notes around recurring ideas. Seven threads run through them:

1. Writing is thinking, not a record of it. The strongest claim in the book — echoed in the Richard Feynman anecdote (“It’s not a record, not really. It’s working… this is the paper”) — is that real thinking requires externalization. You don’t write up what you’ve thought; you think by writing. “If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words.”

2. Elaboration is the mechanism. The best-researched learning method is elaboration: rephrasing an idea in your own words and connecting it to what you already know. Familiarity is not understanding, and the only way to tell them apart is to try to write the thing down. This is the throughline Kyle tagged as one of the most important quotes in the book.

3. A note’s value is its context, and connection is where insight lives. Luhmann’s insight that “one idea, one note was only as valuable as its context.” The slip-box’s usefulness grows exponentially with size because it surfaces unsought connections — the Idea Sex / “ideas having sex” frame from Conor White-Sullivan, and Steve Jobs’s “creativity is just connecting things.”

4. Simplicity and easiness of the way. Big transformations usually start from a simple idea taken seriously (the shipping container). Kyle pairs this directly with the scripture thread — Alma 37:6 (“by small and simple things are great things brought to pass”) and Alma 37:46 (“do not let us be slothful because of the easiness of the way”) — reading Ahrens’s productivity argument through a religious-intellectual lens.

5. Let the work carry you (willpower is finite). Willpower is a Finite Resource; the smart move is to structure the workflow so you do what moves the project forward without forcing it — Luhmann’s “I always work on different manuscripts at the same time,” redirecting resistance rather than pushing against it. Connects to The Flow and Deep Work.

6. Learning in Public and Information Ingestion. Studying done properly is research, and “an idea kept private is as good as one you never had.” Doing everything (reading, listening, tweeting) with the purpose of feeding public thinking changes how you do all of it — Kyle’s own recurring thesis, cross-referenced to Tim Berners-Lee and Ward Cunningham’s “post the wrong answer.”

7. Expertise, memory, and the Latticework. Experts run on intuition — sedimented experience, not rules (“real experts don’t make plans”). Memory is about retrieval strength, not storage: attach information to a framework so the right cues trigger it. Closes on Charlie Munger’s latticework of mental models, which Kyle threads to Elder Klebingat’s “mind palace.”

A recurring meta-note: several highlights carry Kyle’s #Find the Quote flag — open loops to source an Andy Matuschak line on the lack of deliberate practice in knowledge work, and a missionary-journal line (“He is wise who knows what has been written and where to find it”).

Connections

People: Niklas Luhmann — the slip-box’s originator, whose “one idea, one note was only as valuable as its context” insight anchors the Idea Sex thread. Charlie Munger — his “latticework of theory” passage is quoted in the Memorization section. Charles Darwin — the model of disciplined Self-Criticism, writing down disconfirming arguments “without fail and at once.” Richard Feynman — “it’s not a record… this is the paper,” the book’s strongest case that writing is thinking. Steve Jobs — “creativity is just connecting things,” tied to the slip-box’s connection-generating value. Steven Johnson — the “slow hunch” and experimental spaces where ideas mingle. Andy Matuschak — the lack of deliberate practice in knowledge work. Conor White-Sullivan — the “ideas having sex” / compound-interest-on-thoughts frame. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — flow as effortless focused attention. Tim Berners-Lee and Ward Cunningham — knowledge kept private vs. publishing the wrong answer, feeding the Learning in Public thread.

Concepts: Elaboration — the best-researched learning method and the book’s core mechanism. Idea Sex — connection as where insight lives. Zettelkasten — the slip-box system itself. Deep Work and The Flow — structuring the workflow so focus and momentum carry the work. Willpower is a Finite Resource — the ego-depletion premise behind “let the work carry you.” Expertise — intuition as sedimented experience; “real experts don’t make plans.” Latticework — Munger’s mental-models framework for retrieval-strength memory. Spaced Repetition — retrieval over re-reading. Simplify and Intensify — taking simple ideas seriously (the Shipping Container). Confirmation Bias and Self-Criticism — seeking disconfirming evidence. Information Ingestion and Learning in Public — doing everything as if writing for public thinking.

Books: Poor Charlie’s Almanack — source of the Munger latticework-of-mental-models passage quoted in the Memorization section.

Highlights

Captured from Kyle’s full chapter-by-chapter read-through in Roam (2020), organized by theme. Book passages are listed verbatim; Kyle’s own notes appear as Kyle: callouts beneath the passage they respond to.

Knowledge Workers Thinking About Knowledge

Under the Radar

• Writing plays such a central role in learning, studying and research that it is surprising how little we think about it.
• Here is another reason that note-taking flies mostly under the radar: We don’t experience any immediate negative feedback if we do it badly. But without an immediate experience of failure, there is also not much demand for help.
• “I spend a lot of time thinking about why knowledge workers don’t spend very much time thinking about knowledge work.” Andy Matuschak

Deliberate Practice in Knowledge Work

• Poor students do not have any of these problems. As long as they stick within the boundaries of their discipline and read only as much as they are told to (or less), no serious external system is required and writing can be done by sticking with the usual formulas of “how to write a scientific paper.” In fact, poor students often feel more successful (until they are tested), because they don’t experience much self-doubt. In psychology, this is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect (Kruger and Dunning, 1999). Poor students lack insight into their own limitations–as they would have to know about the vast amount of knowledge out there to be able to see how little they know in comparison. That means that those who are not very good at something tend to be overly confident, while those who have made an effort tend to underestimate their abilities. Poor students also have no trouble finding a question to write about: they neither lack opinions nor the confidence that they have already thought them through. They also won’t have trouble finding confirming evidence in the literature as they usually lack both interest and skill to detect and think through dis-confirming facts and arguments.

  Kyle: Reminds me of Andy Matuschak talking about there being very little deliberate “practice” in knowledge work; you don’t realize how bad you are at it because you’re rarely called upon to do it or reflect on it. #Find the Quote

• While it is obvious that familiarity is not understanding, we have no chance of knowing whether we understand something or just believe we understand something until we test ourselves in some form. If we don’t try to verify our understanding during our studies, we will happily enjoy the feeling of getting smarter and more knowledgeable while in reality staying as dumb as we were. This warm feeling disappears quickly when we try to explain what we read in our own words in Writing. Suddenly, we see the problem. The attempt to rephrase an argument in our own words confronts us without mercy with all the gaps in our understanding. It certainly feels less good, but this struggle is the only chance we have to improve our understanding, to learn and move forward (cf. below). This, again, is deliberate practice. Now we are faced with a clear choice: We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter. And while writing down an idea feels like a detour, extra time spent, not writing it down is the real waste of time, as it renders most of what we read as ineffectual.
• Learning itself requires deliberate practice, and I mean actual learning that helps us to increase our understanding of the world, not just the learning that makes us pass a test. And deliberate practice is demanding; it requires effort. Trying to skip this step would be like going to the gym and trying to work out with the least effort possible. That just doesn’t make sense, just like it wouldn’t make sense to hire a coach to do the heavy lifting. A coach is not there to do the work, but to show us how to use our time and effort in the most effective way. What is self-evident in sports we are only starting to realise is true for learning as well. “The one who does the work does the learning,” writes Doyle (2008, 63). It is hard to believe, but in education that is still a revolutionary idea. #Learn Like An Athlete

Augmenting Knowledge Workers

• Thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas is the main work of everyone who studies, does research or writes. If you write to improve all of these activities, you have a strong tailwind going for you. If you take your notes in a smart way, it will propel you forward.

  Kyle: As time goes on and Automation becomes more widespread the only real differentiator you can have as an individual is your ability to create; creating content, ideas, designs, systems, structures. And that creative ability will require a differentiating system for thinking. #Creativity

Willpower is a Finite Resource

• It is not so important who you are, but what you do. Doing the work required and doing it in a smart way leads, somehow unsurprisingly, to success. At first glance, this is both good and bad news. The good news is that we wouldn’t be able to do much about our IQ anyway, while it seems to be within our control to have more self-discipline with a little bit of willpower. The bad news is that we do not have this kind of control over ourselves. Self-discipline or Self-control is not that easy to achieve with willpower alone. Willpower is, as far as we know today,[2] a limited resource that depletes quickly and is also not that much up for improvement over the long term (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, and Tice, 1998; Muraven, Tice, and Baumeister, 1998; Schmeichel, Vohs, and Baumeister, 2003; Moller, 2006). And who would want to flog oneself to work, anyway?
• For the longest time, willpower was seen more as a character trait than a resource. This has changed. Today, willpower is compared to muscles: a limited resource that depletes quickly and needs time to recover. Improvement through training is possible to a certain degree, but takes time and effort. The phenomenon is usually discussed under the term “ego depletion”: “We use the term ego depletion to refer to a temporary reduction in the self’s capacity or willingness to engage in volitional action (including controlling the environment, controlling the self, making choices, and initiating action) caused by prior exercise of volition.” (Baumeister et al., 1998, 1253)
• The smartest way to deal with this kind of limitation is to cheat. Instead of forcing ourselves to do something we don’t feel like doing, we need to find a way to make us feel like doing what moves our project further along. Doing the work that need to be done without having to apply too much willpower requires a technique, a ruse.
• In the way we organise our research and writing, we too can significantly reduce the amount of decisions we have to make. While content-related decisions have to be made (on what is more and what is less important in an article, on the connections between notes, the structure of a text, etc.), most organisational decisions can be made up front, once and for all, by deciding on one system. By always using the same notebook for making quick notes, always extracting the main ideas from a text in the same way and always turning them into the same kind of permanent notes, which are always dealt with in the same manner, the number of decisions during a work session can be greatly reduced. That leaves us with much more mental energy that we can direct towards more useful tasks, like trying to solve the problems in question.

Creating the opportunity for Deep Work

• As students, researchers and nonfiction writers, we have so much more freedom than others to choose what we want to spend our time on. Still, we often struggle the most with procrastination and motivation. It is certainly not the lack of interesting topics, but rather the employment of problematic work routines that seems to take charge of us instead of allowing us to steer the process in the right direction. A good, structured workflow puts us back in charge and increases our freedom to do the right thing at the right time.

  Kyle: Creating an environment that allows you to work effectively on the things that you want to spend time thinking deeply about

• According to a widely cited study, the constant interruption of emails and text messages cuts our productivity by about 40% and makes us at least 10 IQ points dumber. Even though this study was never published, makes no claims about intelligence and is statistically irrelevant, it does seem to confirm what most of us believe anyway and that is that we might have an attention deficit problem. It might not show it by content, but the mere fact that it was possible to have a misunderstanding spreading so fast under titles like “E-mails ‘hurt IQ more than pot’ ” (CNN) is telling. There are real studies about that as well. We know for example that watching television reduces the attention span of children (Swing et al. 2010). We also know that the average length of TV soundbites has steadily declined over the last several decades (Fehrmann, 2011). During the U.S. presidential election in 1968, the average soundbite—that is, any footage of a candidate speaking uninterrupted—was still a little more than 40 seconds, but that had fallen to less than 10 seconds at the end of the 80s (Hallin 1994) and 7.8 seconds in 2000 (Lichter, 2001). The last election has certainly not reversed the trend. Whether that means that the media adjust to our decreasing attention span or is causing the trend is not easy to say.[ 17] But however it might be, it is obvious that we are surrounded by more sources of distraction and less opportunities to train our attention spans. #Focus #Deep Work
• If more than one thing tries to catch your attention, the temptation is great to look at more than one thing at the same time–to multitask. Many people claim to be quite good at multitasking. For some, it is one of the most important skills to cope with today’s informational overload. It is a common belief that the younger generations are better at it, that it even comes naturally to them as they grew up among the attention-seeking new media. And studies show that those who claim to multitask a lot also claim to be very good at it. Those interviewed in these studies do not see their productivity impaired by it. On the contrary, they think it’s improved. But they usually don’t test themselves in comparison with a control group.
• This puts us in the position of the fairy-tale hero who is introduced into a cave of incredible treasures and permitted to choose from the heap whatever gem he wants—but only one. What a delightful situation! I can think of anything I want to—absolutely anything! With this provision, that when I choose to focus my attention on one object, all other objects drop into the background. I am only permitted to think of one thing at a time, that is one rule of the game. Hugh Nibley
• In some areas, like texting and driving, the downsides of multitasking are painfully obvious. But what is most interesting about these studies is not the fact that the productivity and the quality of the work decreases with multitasking, but that it also impairs the ability to deal with more than one thing at a time!
• This result is surprising, because we usually expect to become better at something the more often we do it. But on a closer look, it makes sense. Multitasking is not what we think it is. It is not focusing attention on more than one thing at a time. Nobody can do that. When we think we multitask, what we really do is shift our attention quickly between two (or more) things. And every shift is a drain on our ability to shift and delays the moment we manage to get focused again. Trying to multitask fatigues us and decreases our ability to deal with more than one task.
• “That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed, but that our power to do has increased.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The good news is that we can train ourselves to stay focused on one thing for longer if we avoid multitasking, remove possible distractions and separate different kinds of tasks as much as possible so they will not interfere with each other. This too is not just a question of having the right mindset, but, equally important, of how we organise our workflow. A lack of structure makes it much more challenging to stay focused for extended periods of time. The slip-box provides not only a clear structure to work in, but also forces us to shift our attention consciously as we can complete tasks in reasonable time before moving on to the next one. Together with the fact that every task is accompanied by writing, which in itself requires undistracted attention, the slip-box can become a haven for our restless minds.

  Kyle: As much about (1) types of tasks, (2) environment, and (3) project management / timing

More about you than the tool

• There is no need to build a complex system and there is no need to reorganise everything you already have. You can start working and developing ideas immediately by taking smart notes.
• The second idea is equally important. Even the best tool will not improve your productivity considerably if you don’t change your daily routines the tool is embedded in, just as the fastest car won’t help you much if you don’t have proper roads to drive it on.
• The slip-box does not put the learner in the centre. Quite the contrary: It allows the learner to let his or her own thinking become decentralised within a network of other ideas. Learning, thinking and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking. This is done by questioning one’s own thinking routines in the light of new experiences and facts. #Open Source Knowledge

The Flow

• What we can take from Allen as an important insight is that the secret to a successful organization lies in the holistic perspective. Everything needs to be taken care of, otherwise the neglected bits will nag us until the unimportant tasks become urgent. Even the best tools won’t make much of a difference if they are used in isolation. Only if they are embedded in a well-conceived working process can the tools play out their strengths. There is no point in having great tools if they don’t fit together. #Systems Thinking
• You may remember from school the difference between an exergonic and an endergonic reaction. In the first case, you constantly need to add energy to keep the process going. In the second case, the reaction, once triggered, continues by itself and even releases energy. The dynamics of work are not so different. Sometimes we feel like our work is draining our energy and we can only move forward if we put more and more energy into it. But sometimes it is the opposite. Once we get into the workflow, it is as if the work itself gains momentum, pulling us along and sometimes even energizing us. This is the kind of dynamic we are looking for. #What gives you energy?
• A good workflow can easily turn into a virtuous circle, where the positive experience motivates us to take on the next task with ease, which helps us to get better at what we are doing, which in return makes it more likely for us to enjoy the work, and so on. But if we feel constantly stuck in our work, we will become demotivated and much more likely to procrastinate, leaving us with fewer positive or even bad experiences like missed deadlines. We might end up in a vicious circle of failure (cf. Fishbach, Eyal and Finkelstein, 2010). #What gives you energy?
• Usually, when we think about attention, we only think about focused attention–something that requires willpower to sustain. This is not too surprising, because this is what most psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists used to have in mind when they talked about attention (Bruya 2010, 5). Today, research differentiates between multiple forms of attention. Ever since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s described “flow,” the state in which being highly focused becomes effortless (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975),[ 18] other forms of attention, which are much less dependent on will and effort, attracted researchers’ interest.

  Kyle: What is the psychology behind The Flow?

• It is not surprising that motivation is shown to be one of the most important indicators for successful students–next to the feeling of being in control of one’s own learning course. When even highly intelligent students fail in their studies, it’s most often because they cease to see the meaning in what they were supposed to learn (cf. Balduf 2009), are unable to make a connection to their personal goals (Glynn et al. 2009) or lack the ability to control their own studies autonomously and on their own terms (Reeve and Jan, 2006; Reeve, 2009).

  Kyle: Creating a sense of flow comes from (1) sense of control and (2) sense of meaning

Idea Sex

• He soon developed new categories of these notes. He realised 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.
• I think that you need to be able to get compound interest on your thoughts. Good ideas come from when ideas have sex: the intersection of different things that you’ve been reading or different things you’ve been seeing. So you can have better ideas faster if you are actually reviewing the old things and you are building up. You’re not throwing away work. #Idea Sex Conor White-Sullivan
• What all these category-confusing approaches have in common is that the benefit of note-taking decreases with the number of notes you keep. More notes will make it more difficult to retrieve the right ones and bring related ones together in a playful way. But it should be just the opposite: The more you learn and collect, the more beneficial your notes should become, the more ideas can mingle and give birth to new ones–and the easier it should be to write an intelligent text with less effort. #Compounding
• The slip-box is not a collection of notes. Working with it is less about retrieving specific notes and more about being pointed to relevant facts and generating insight by letting ideas mingle. Its usability grows with its size, not just linearly but exponentially. When we turn to the slip-box, its inner connectedness will not just provide us with isolated facts, but with lines of developed thoughts. Moreover, because of its inner complexity, a search throught the slip-box will confront us with related notes we did not look for. This is a very significant difference that becomes more and more relevant over time. The more content it contains, the more connections it can provide, and the easier it becomes to add new entries in a smart way and receive useful suggestions.
• Every step is accompanied by questions like: How does this fact fit into my idea of …? How can this phenomenon be explained by that theory? Are these two ideas contradictory or do they complement each other? Isn’t this argument similar to that one? Haven’t I heard this before? And above all: What does x mean for y? These questions not only increase our understanding, but facilitate learning as well. Once we make a meaningful connection to an idea or fact, it is difficult not to remember it when we think about what it is connected with.
• What does help for true, useful learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible, which is what we do when we connect our notes in the slip-box with other notes. Making these connections deliberately means building up a self-supporting network of interconnected ideas and facts that work reciprocally as cues for each other.
• Stein et al. illustrate how commonsensical this is on the example of a biology novice who learns the difference between veins and arteries: “[he] may find it difficult at first to understand and remember that arteries have thick walls, are elastic, and do not have valves, whereas veins are less elastic, have thinner walls, and have valves” (ibid.). But by elaborating a little bit on this difference and asking the right questions, like “why?” the students can connect this knowledge with prior knowledge, like their understanding of pressure and the function of the heart. Just by making the connection to the common knowledge that the heart presses the blood into the arteries, they immediately know that these walls need to sustain more pressure, which means they need to be thicker than veins, in which the blood flows back to the heart with less pressure. And, of course, this makes valves necessary to keep the blood from flowing back. Once understood, the attributes and differences are almost impossible to disentangle from the knowledge of veins and arteries.
• Writing notes and sorting them into the slip-box is nothing other than an attempt to understand the wider meaning of something. The slip-box forces us to ask numerous elaborating questions: What does it mean? How does it connect to … ? What is the difference between … ? What is it similar to? That the slip-box is not sorted by topics is the precondition for actively building connections between notes. Connections can be made between heterogeneous notes–as long as the connection makes sense. This is the best antidote to the impeding way most information is given to us in our learning institutions. Most often, it comes in modular form, sorted by topic, separated by disciplines and generally isolated from other information. The slip-box is forcing us to do the exact opposite: To elaborate, to understand, to connect and therefore to learn seriously.
• “Every note is just an element in the network of references and back references in the system, from which it gains its quality.” (Niklas Luhmann 1992)
• After adding a note to the slip-box, we need to make sure it can be found again. This is what the index is for. Luhmann wrote an index with a typewriter on index cards. In the Zettelkasten, keywords can easily be added to a note like tags and will then show up in the index. They should be chosen carefully and sparsely. Luhmann would add the number of one or two (rarely more) notes next to a keyword in the index (Schmidt 2013, 171). The reason he was so economical with notes per keyword and why we too should be very selective lies in the way the slip-box is used. Because it should not be used as an archive, where we just take out what we put in, but as a system to think with, the references between the notes are much more important than the references from the index to a single note. Focusing exclusively on the index would basically mean that we always know upfront what we are looking for–we would have to have a fully developed plan in our heads. But liberating our brains from the task of organizing the notes is the main reason we use the slip-box in the first place.
• These links can help us to find surprising connections and similarities between seemingly unrelated topics. Patterns might not become visible right away, but they might emerge after multiple note-to-note links between two topics have been established. It is no coincidence that one of the main features of Luhmann’s theory of social systems is its discovery of structural patterns that could be found in very different parts of society. For example, he was able to show how vastly different things like money, power, love, truth and justice can be seen as social inventions that solve structurally similar problems (they all can be seen as media that make the acceptance of certain communication offers more likely, cf. Luhmann 1997, chapter 9–12). Observations like these could never be done nor explained by someone who is working with a system that keeps things neatly separated by preconceived themes and topics.
• Sometimes, the confrontation with old notes helps to detect differences we wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. What seems to be the same idea sometimes turns out to be slightly, but crucially, different. We then can explicitly discuss this difference on another note. This is especially helpful when two authors use the same concept in slightly different ways. The clarification of differences in the use of words and concepts is a major part of every serious academic work anyway–but it is so much easier if you have a nit-picking partner like the slip-box. If we had written just excerpts or notes that we had kept in separate places, these differences would only become obvious if we had all the relevant notes on our minds at the same time. It is much easier to detect these small but crucial differences when we literally have our notes in front of our eyes, comparing them during our attempts to connect them. The brain is very good at making associations and spotting patterns and similarities between seemingly different things and also very good in spotting differences between seemingly similar things, but it needs to have them presented objectively and externally. It is much easier to see differences and similarities than to detect them by mere thinking.
• Helmut D. Sachs puts it like this: “By Learning, retaining, and building on the retained basics, we are creating a rich web of associated information. The more we know, the more information (hooks) we have to connect new information to, the easier we can form long-term memories. […] Learning becomes fun. We have entered a virtuous circle of learning, and it seems as if our long-term memory capacity and speed are actually growing. On the other hand, if we fail to retain what we have learned, for example, by not using effective strategies, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn information that builds on earlier learning. More and more knowledge gaps become apparent. Since we can’t really connect new information to gaps, learning becomes an uphill battle that exhausts us and takes the fun out of learning. It seems as if we have reached the capacity limit of our brain and memory. Welcome to a vicious circle. Certainly, you would much rather be in a virtuous learning circle, so to remember what you have learned, you need to build effective long-term memory structures.” (Sachs 2013, 26)
• We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval). The slip-box not only provides us with the opportunity to learn in this proven way, it forces us to do exactly what is recommended just by using it. We have to elaborate on what we read just to be able to write it down and translate it into different contexts. We retrieve information from the slip-box whenever we try to connect new notes with old notes. Just by doing this, we mix up contexts, shuffle notes and retrieve the information in irregular intervals. And along the way, we further elaborate on the information, which we always retrieve deliberately.
• “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” (Steve Jobs)
• Steven Johnson, who wrote an insightful book about how people in science and in general come up with genuine new ideas, calls it the “slow hunch.” As a precondition to make use of this intuition, he emphasises the importance of experimental spaces where ideas can freely mingle (Johnson 2011). A laboratory with open-minded colleagues can be such a space, much as intellectuals and artists freely discussed ideas in the cafés of old Paris. I would add the slip-box as such a space in which ideas can mingle freely, so they can give birth to new ones. #Clark’s Coffeehouse

Abstraction of an Idea

• “[C]reative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see“ (Andreasen 2014).
• To be able to play with ideas, we first have to liberate them from their original context by means of abstraction and re-specification. We did this when we took literature notes and translated them into the different contexts within the slip-box. Abstraction does not have a good reputation at the moment. It is the tangible, the concrete that is cheered for. Abstraction should indeed not be the final goal of thinking, but it is a necessary in-between step to make heterogeneous ideas compatible. If Darwin had never abstracted from his concrete observations of sparrows, he would never have found an abstract, a general principle of evolution across different species, and he would never have been able to see how evolution works in other species as well. Abstraction is also not for theoretical-academic processes of insight only. We need to abstract from concrete situations every day. Only by abstraction and re-specification can we apply ideas in the singular and always different situations in reality (Loewenstein, 2010).
• Studies on Creativity with engineers show that the ability to find not only creative, but functional and working solutions for technical problems is equal to the ability to make abstractions. The better an engineer is at abstracting from a specific problem, the better and more pragmatic his solutions will be–even for the very problem he abstracted from (Gassmann and Zeschky, 2008, 103). Abstraction is also the key to analyse and compare concepts, to make analogies and to combine ideas; this is especially true when it comes to interdisciplinary work (Goldstone and Wilensky 2008).

Easiness of the Way

• Until recently, almost no one really seemed to believe it. We are still so used to the idea that a great outcome requires great effort that we tend not to believe that a simple change in our work routines could not only make us more productive, but the work also more fun. But doesn’t it make much more sense that the impressive body of work was produced not in spite of the fact he never made himself do anything he didn’t feel like, but because of it? Even hard work can be fun as long as it is aligned with our intrinsic goals and we feel in control. The problems arise when we set up our work in such an inflexible way that we can’t adjust it when things change and become arrested in a process that seems to develop a life of its own.
• Alma 37:46 O my son, do not let us be slothful because of the easiness of the way; for so was it with our fathers; for so was it prepared for them, that if they would look they might live; even so it is with us. The way is prepared, and if we will look we may live forever.
• 1 Nephi 17: 41 And he did straiten them in the wilderness with his rod; for they hardened their hearts, even as ye have; and the Lord straitened them because of their iniquity. He sent fiery flying serpents among them; and after they were bitten he prepared a way that they might be healed; and the labor which they had to perform was to look; and because of the simpleness of the way, or the easiness of it, there were many who perished.
• 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). Boxes, for example, are simple. Malcom McLean, the owner of a trucking company and a former trucker himself, regularly got stuck in traffic on the crowded coastal highways. When he came up with an idea to circumvent the congested roads, it was a simple one. He had no clue that it would tip the world in a new direction. He did not foresee that his simple idea would reshape the political landscape, let some nations rise to the top and other fall behind, make century-old professions redundant, give birth to new industries, and would barely leave a single person on earth unaffected by it. I am speaking, of course, of the shipping container, which is basically just a box. When McLean converted the tanker Ideal X to be able to carry 58 containers and set it to sail on 26 April 1956, it was just because it made more sense to ship parts of a lorry than the whole lorry itself, which in itself made more sense than to have them stand in traffic for days. He certainly did not aim to turn world trade upside down and pave the way for Asia to become the next big economic power. He just didn’t want to get stuck in traffic anymore.
• Alma 37: 6 Now ye may suppose that this is foolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise.

Simplify and Intensify

• If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.” (John Searle)
• Another seemingly banal tip relates to a distinguishing feature of extraordinary thinkers: Taking simple ideas seriously. Consider, for example, the idea of buying stocks low and selling them high. I am sure everyone can grasp that idea. But grasping an idea is not the same as understanding it. If you go and buy stocks on that “insight,” all you can do is to hope that a stock goes up after you buy it, which makes this knowledge about as useful as the tip on the next colour to choose on a roulette table.
• Sometimes the breakthrough in a scientific process is the discovery of a simple principle behind a seemingly very complicated process. Burger and Starbird remind us of the long history of human attempts to fly: We tried to emulate birds by flapping wing-like apparatuses with feathers and all, but in the end, it was about not getting distracted by details and discovering that the subtle bending of the wing is the only thing that counts.
• Simple ideas can be tied together into consistent theories and build up enormous complexity. This just doesn’t work with complicated ideas. By using the slip-box on a daily basis, we train these important intellectual skills deliberately: We check if what we understood from a text is really in the text by having our understanding in written form in front of our eyes. We learn to focus on the gist of an idea by restricting ourselves in terms of space. We can make it a habit to always think about what is missing when we write down our own ideas. And we can practice asking good questions when we sort our notes into the slip-box and connect them with other notes.
• The formal standardization of the slip-box might seem to be at odds with our search for creativity. But here, too, it is more likely the opposite is true. Thinking and creativity can flourish under restricted conditions and there are plenty of studies to back that claim (cf. Stokes 2001; Rheinberger 1997). The scientific revolution started with the standardization and controlling of experiments, which made them comparable and repeatable (cf. Shapin, 1996). Or think of poetry: It imposes restrictions in terms of rhythm, syllables or rhymes. Haikus give the poet very little room for formal variations, but that doesn’t mean they are equally limited in terms of poetic expressiveness. On the contrary: It is the strict formalism that allows them to transcend time and culture.
• The biggest threat to creativity and scientific progress is therefore the opposite: a lack of structure and restrictions. Without structure, we cannot differentiate, compare or experiment with ideas. Without restrictions, we would never be forced to make the decision on what is worth pursuing and what is not. Indifference is the worst environment for insight. And the slip-box is, above all, a tool for enforcing distinctions, decisions and making differences visible. One thing is for sure: the common idea that we should liberate ourselves from any restrictions and “open ourselves up” to be more creative is very misleading indeed (Dean 2013, 201).

The Writing Process

Turning your Zettelkasten into a “dialogue partner”

• He soon developed new categories of these notes. He realised 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. #Zettelkasten
• Because the slip-box is not intended to be an encyclopaedia, but a tool to think with, we don’t need to worry about completeness. We don’t need to write anything down just to bridge a gap in a note sequence. We only write if it helps us with our own thinking. The gaps we do need to concern ourselves with are the gaps in the arguments in the final manuscript–but these gaps will only become obvious in the next step, when we take the relevant notes for an argument out of the network of the slip-box and sort them into the linear order for the rough draft.

And then following a set of processes with the help of that system

• At this point, it should become clear that you don’t need to wait for a genie to appear, as each step is clearly not only within your abilities, but also straightforward and well defined: Assemble notes and bring them into order, turn these notes into a draft, review it and you are done.

You’re not conversing with a blank slate. You’re talking to a partner informed by experiences.

• “The white sheet of paper–or today: the blank screen–is a fundamental misunderstanding” (Nassehi 2015, 185)

Acknowledge the segmentation of different activities and prepare for them accordingly

• On closer look, it becomes obvious how different the tasks are that are usually summarised under “Writing” and how different the kinds of attention are that they require.
• Proofreading, for example, is obviously part of the writing process, but requires a very different state of mind than the attempt to find the right words. When we proofread a manuscript, we take on the role of a critic who takes a step back to see the text with the eyes of a dispassionate reader. We scan the text for typos, try to smooth out patches and check structure. We deliberately put distance between ourselves and the text to see what is really on the paper, not just in our heads. We try to block out the knowledge of what we meant to say to be able to see what we wrote.
• The first step is to break down the amorphous task of “Writing” into smaller pieces of different tasks that can be finished in one go. The second step is to make sure we always write down the outcome of our thinking, including possible connections to further inquiries. As the outcome of each task is written down and possible connections become visible, it is easy to pick up the work any time where we left it without having to keep it in mind all the time. [22] Possible subsequent tasks are open questions or connections to other notes, which we could elaborate on further or not. It also comes up in explicit reminders like “review this chapter and check for redundancies,” which belong into the project folder. Or the third option is the simple fact that something is still in our in-box waiting to be turned into a permanent note–a quick and not-yet–crossed-out note in our notebook, or literature notes not yet archived in our reference system.
• To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a good draft; to get a good draft written, you only have to turn a series of notes into a continuous text. And as a series of notes is just the rearrangement of notes you already have in your slip-box, all you really have to do is have a pen in your hand when you read.

Treat the paper as where the actual work is done

• “No, no!” Richard Feynman protested. “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.” “Well,” the historian said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper.”[ 33]
• Philosophers, neuroscientists, educators and psychologists like to disagree in many different aspects on how the brain works. But they no longer disagree when it comes to the need for external scaffolding. Almost all agree nowadays that real thinking requires some kind of externalization, especially in the form of Writing. “Notes on paper, or on a computer screen […] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible” is one of the key takeaways in a contemporary handbook of neuroscientists (Levy 2011, 290) Concluding the discussions in this book, Levy writes: “In any case, no matter how internal processes are implemented, insofar as thinkers are genuinely concerned with what enables human beings to perform the spectacular intellectual feats exhibited in science and other areas of systematic enquiry, as well as in the arts, they need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.” (Ibid.) In our system, the scaffolding is done explicitly by connecting the thoughts within the external memory of the slip-box. Niklas Luhmann writes: “Somehow one has to mark differences, keep track of distinctions, either explicitly or implicitly in concepts,” because only if the connections are somehow fixed externally can they function as models or theories to give meaning and continuity for further thinking (Luhmann, 1992, 53).

’I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.’ - Flannery O’Connor

• The challenge of writing as well as learning is therefore not so much to learn, but to understand, as we will already have learned what we understand. The problem is that the meaning of something is not always obvious and needs to be explored. That is why we need to elaborate on it. But elaboration is nothing more than connecting information to other information in a meaningful way. The first step of elaboration is to think enough about a piece of information so we are able to write about it. The second step is to think about what it means for other contexts as well.

Are you an archivist or a writer?

• The way people choose their keywords shows clearly if they think like an archivist or a writer. Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it? The archivist asks: Which keyword is the most fitting? A writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it? It is a crucial difference.

When you look for new topics to write about focus on the largest nodes you’ve already built

• Whenever someone struggles with finding a good topic to write about, someone else will recommend brainstorming. It still has a modern sound to it, even though it was described in 1919 by Alex Osborn and introduced to a broader audience in 1958 in the book “Brainstorming: The Dynamic New Way to Create Successful Ideas” from Charles Hutchison Clark. For many people, it is still the best method to generate new ideas. I suggest to see it rather as an expression of an outdated fixation on the brain, which is mirrored in the fixation of our educational system to learn things by heart–which means to think without external tools. Testing students for memorised knowledge does not give much indication about their understanding, and the fact that someone came up with a lot of ideas during a brainstorming session does not give much indication about their quality.
• While we want to find topics that are important, interesting and can be dealt with using the material we have available, the brain prioritises ideas that are easily available in the moment. This, obviously, does not equal relevant. The brain more easily remembers information that it encountered recently, which has emotions attached to it and is lively, concrete or specific. Ideally, it rhymes as well (cf. Schacter, 2001; Schacter, Chiao and Mitchell, 2003). Everything that is rather abstract, vague, emotionally neutral or does not even sound good is far down on its list of priorities–not exactly the best criteria for an intellectual endeavour.

The biggest obstacle with a Zettelkasten is having so much at hand to be able to pick where to focus

• The problem in this stage is almost exactly the opposite of the “blank screen.” Instead of not knowing how to fill the pages, we have so much at hand that we have to curb our impulse to mention everything at the same time.
• The process of Reading and Writing inevitably produces a lot of unintended by-products. Not all ideas can fit into the same article, and only a fraction of the information we encounter is useful for one particular project.

Be working on multiple projects at once

• Remember: Luhmann’s answer to the question of how one person could be so productive was that he never forced himself to do anything and only did what came easily to him. “When I am stuck for one moment, I leave it and do something else.” When he was asked what else he did when he was stuck, his answer was: “Well, writing other books. I always work on different manuscripts at the same time. With this method, to work on different things simultaneously, I never encounter any mental blockages.” (Luhmann, Baecker, and Stanitzek 1987, 125–55) It is like martial arts: If you encounter resistance or an opposing force, you should not push against it, but redirect it towards another productive goal. The slip-box will always provide you with multiple possibilities.

The Secrets of Writing and Note-taking

• Granted, writing these notes is the main work. It will take enormous amounts of effort, time, patience and willpower, and you will probably break under the weight of this task. Just kidding. It is the easiest part of all. Writing these notes is also not the main work. Thinking is. Reading is. Understanding and coming up with ideas is. And this is how it is supposed to be. The notes are just the tangible outcome of it. All you have to do is to have a pen in your hand while you are doing what you are doing anyway (or a keyboard under your fingers). Writing notes accompanies the main work and, done right, it helps with it. Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have. 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. If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words. Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head. “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 Neuroethics, summarizing decades of research. Neuroscientists, psychologists and other experts on thinking have very different ideas about how our brains work, but, as Levy writes: “no matter how internal processes are implemented, (you) need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.” (2011, 270) If there is one thing the experts agree on, then it is this: You have to externalise 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?

Elaborate

• It is not surprising, therefore, that the best-researched and most successful learning method is elaboration. It is very similar to what we do when we take smart notes and combine them with others, which is the opposite of mere re-viewing (Stein et al. 1984) Elaboration means nothing other than really thinking about the meaning of what we read, how it could inform different questions and topics and how it could be combined with other knowledge. In fact, “Writing for Learning” is the name of an “elaboration method” (Gunel, Hand, and Prain 2007). But there is a caveat. Even though elaboration works verifiably well for deep understanding, it might not be the best choice if you just want to learn isolated encyclopaedic facts (Rivard 1994). But as long as you are not striving for a career as a quiz show candidate, why would you want that, anyway? The slip-box takes care of storing facts and information. Thinking and understanding is what it can’t take off your shoulders, which is why it makes sense to focus on this part of the work. That it facilitates learning as well is a nice side effect. Niklas Luhmann almost never read a text twice (Hagen 1997) and was still regarded as an impressive conversation partner who seemed to have all information ready to hand. [30] #Zettelkasten

  Kyle: One of the most important quotes. Elaborate in your own words if you truly want to understand.

• Working with the slip-box, therefore, doesn’t mean storing information in there instead of in your head, i.e. not learning. On the contrary, it facilitates real, long-term learning. It just means not cramming isolated facts into your brain–something you probably wouldn’t want to do anyway. The objection that it takes too much time to take notes and sort them into the slip-box is therefore short-sighted. Writing, taking notes and thinking about how ideas connect is exactly the kind of elaboration that is needed to learn. Not learning from what we read because we don’t take the time to elaborate on it is the real waste of time.
• But the first question I asked myself when it came to writing the first permanent note for the slip-box was: What does this all mean for my own research and the questions I think about in my slip-box? This is just another way of asking: Why did the aspects I wrote down catch my interest?
• Just by writing down these questions and making possible connections explicit in writing are the concepts and theories being investigated. Their limitations become as visible as their particular angle on a problem. By explicitly writing down how something connects or leads to something else, we force ourselves to clarify and distinguish ideas from each other.
• We have seen in the first step that elaboration through taking smart literature notes increases the likelihood that we will remember what we read in the long term. But this was only the first step. Transferring these ideas into the network of our own thoughts, our latticework of theories, concepts and mental models in the slip-box brings our thinking to the next level. Now we elaborate these ideas within different contexts and connect them with other ideas in a durable fashion. The literature notes are going to be archived, which means the ideas would be lost in the reference system if we didn’t do something with them. That is why we transfer them into our external memory, the slip-box, with which we have an ongoing dialogue and where they can become part of our active set of ideas. #Zettelkasten

”Never let any good idea go to waste”

• These are the steps, presented as if you will write only one paper/ article at a time. In reality, you never work on just one idea, but many ideas in different stages at the same time. And that is where the system plays out its real strengths. We cannot help but think about more than one question at a time and the chances are that you will think and write in the future as well. It might not be for academia or a publication, but certainly for your own intellectual growth. Gather what you encounter along your way and don’t let any good idea go to waste. You might read a certain book in hope it could be useful for one of the papers you write. Maybe you are wrong, but it still might contain some interesting thoughts worth keeping and useful for something else you haven’t thought about yet.
• “While walking in a rapid stream we cannot tread twice in the same water. Neither can we spend twice the same time. When we pass out of that door, the work of this meeting will be closed to us forever. We shall never spend the time of this evening again. Then should we not keep a record of our work, teachings, and counsel that we give? We should.” Wilford Woodruff #Journals

Learning in Public

• 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 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.
• “All the time we are very conscious of the huge challenges that human society has right now — curing cancer, understanding the brain for Alzheimer’s, understanding the economy to make it a little bit more stable, understanding how the world works. The people who are going to solve those — the scientists — they have half-formed ideas in their head, they try to communicate those over the web. But a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment is on databases, often sitting in their computers, and actually, currently not shared.” Tim Berners-Lee
• School is different. Pupils are usually not encouraged to follow their own learning paths, question and discuss everything the teacher is teaching and move on to another topic if something does not promise to generate interesting insight. The teacher is there for the pupils to learn. But, as Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin and brother to the great explorer Alexander von Humboldt, put it, the professor is not there for the student and the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth. And truth is always a public matter. Everything within the university aims at some kind of publication. A written piece does not necessarily need to be accepted in an international journal to become public. In fact, the vast majority of what is written and discussed is not published in this narrow sense. The review process itself is a form of presenting an idea publicly to the peers and so is everything a student hands over to a professor or lecturer. Even the handout for a presentation discussed with fellow students is a written piece made public. It is public because in the discussion, it does not matter anymore what the author meant, only what is there in writing. The moment the author can be removed from the scene, the written piece is a public claim on truth. The criteria for a convincing argument are always the same, regardless of who the author is or the status of the publisher: They have to be coherent and based on facts. Truth does not belong to anyone; it is the outcome of the scientific exchange of written ideas. This is why the presentation and the production of knowledge cannot be separated, but are rather two sides of the same coin (Peters and Schäfer 2006, 9). If writing is the medium of research and studying nothing else than research, then there is no reason not to work as if nothing else counts than writing.
• To be able to become an expert, we need the freedom to make our own decisions and all the necessary mistakes that help us learn. Like bicycling, it can only be learned by doing it. Most study guides and academic writing teachers are trying very hard to spare you from that experience by telling you what, when and how to write instead. But they are keeping you from learning the very thing academia and writing is all about: gaining insight and making it public.

  Kyle: Someone recently asked me, “what is the benefit of Learning in Public?” My answer was the fact that by asserting something you invited the world to respond with what is right or wrong about your idea. You invite dialogue.

• “The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” Ward Cunningham

Information Ingestion

Kyle: When you do everything deliberately (reading, listening, tweeting, etc.) with the purpose of “this will end up as part of my public thinking,” it changes the way you do all of those things. Kyle: Interesting parallels to Instagram Life and how we live our lives differently because we know so much of it will end up posted on social media (e.g. spending money on experiences vs. ‘things’) #Influencers

• Working as if nothing else counts than Writing does not mean spending more time writing at the expense of everything else. Only if we compartmentalise our work into different, isolated tasks will it seem like focusing on writing reduces the time we spend on other tasks. But it does not mean to read less, for this is the main source of the writing material. It doesn’t mean to attend fewer lectures or seminars, because they provide you with the ideas to write about and questions worth answering. Attending lectures is also one of the best ways to get an idea about the current state of research, not to mention the ability to ask and discuss questions. Focusing on writing also doesn’t mean to stop giving presentations or finding other ways of making your thoughts public. Where else could you get feedback for your ideas? #Information Ingestion
• Focusing on writing as if nothing else counts does not necessarily mean you should do everything else less well, but it certainly makes you do everything else differently. Having a clear, tangible purpose when you attend a lecture, discussion or seminar will make you more engaged and sharpen your focus. You will not waste your time with the attempt to figure out what you “should” learn. Rather, you will try to learn as efficiently as possible so you can quickly get to the point where actual open questions arise, as these are the only questions worth writing about. You quickly learn to distinguish good-sounding arguments from actual good ones, as you will have to think them through whenever you try to write them down and connect them with your previous knowledge. It will change the way you read as well: You will become more focused on the most relevant aspects, knowing that you cannot write down everything. You will read in a more engaged way, because you cannot rephrase anything in your own words if you don’t understand what it is about. By doing this, you will elaborate on the meaning, which will make it much more likely that you will remember it. You also have to think beyond the things you read, because you need to turn it into something new. And by doing everything with the clear purpose of writing about it, you will do what you do deliberately. Deliberate practice is the only serious way of becoming better at what we are doing (cf. Anders Ericsson, 2008). If you change your mind about the importance of writing, you will also change your mind about everything else. 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.

  Kyle: Reminds me of Andy Matuschak talking about there being very little deliberate “practice” in knowledge work; you don’t realize how bad you are at it because you’re rarely called upon to do it or reflect on it. #Find the Quote

• Proofreading, formulating and outlining are also different from the task of combining and developing thoughts. Working with the slip-box means playing with ideas and looking out for interesting connections and comparisons. It means building clusters, combining them with other clusters and preparing the order of notes for a project. Here, we need to puzzle with notes and find the best fit. It is much more associative, playful and creative than the other tasks and requires a very different kind of attention as well.

  Kyle: When you save things, don’t do so only with fully flushed out ideas. Think of it as building micro feeds (e.g. clusters) around the ideas that fascinate you at all. Regardless of how actionable they are.

• If you use the slip-box for a while, you will inevitably make a sobering discovery: The great new idea you are about to add to the slip-box turns out to be already in there. Even worse, chances are this idea wasn’t even yours, but someone else’s. Having the same thought twice or mistaking another person’s idea with our own is far from unusual. Unfortunately, most people never notice this humbling fact because they have no system that confronts them with already thought thoughts. If we forget about an idea and have it again, our brains get as excited as if we are having it the first time. Therefore, working with the slip-box is disillusioning, but at the same time it increases the chance that we actually move forward in our thinking towards uncharted territory, instead of just feeling like we are moving forward.
• A truly wise person is not someone who knows everything, but someone who is able to make sense of things by drawing from an extended resource of interpretation schemes. This stands in harsh contrast to the common but not-so-wise belief that we need to learn from experience. It is much better to learn from the experiences of others–especially when this experience is reflected on and turned into versatile “mental models” that can be used in different situations.

  Kyle: Get the quote from missionary topical journals about “He is wise who knows what has been written and where to find it.” #Find the Quote

Expertise

• “(An) exclusive use of analytical rationality tends to impede further improvement in human performance because of analytical rationality’s slow reasoning and its emphasis on rules, principles, and universal solutions. Second, bodily involvement, speed, and an intimate knowledge of concrete cases in the form of good examples is a prerequisite for true expertise.” (Flyvbjerg 2001, 15)
• Experts, on the other hand, have internalised the necessary knowledge so they don’t have to actively remember rules or think consciously about their choices. They have acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition to know what to do in which kind of situation. Their decisions in complex situations are explicitly not made by long rational-analytical considerations, but rather come from the gut (cf. Gigerenzer, 2008a, 2008b).
• Here, gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience. It is the sedimentation of deeply learned practice through numerous feedback loops on success or failure.[ 20] Even a rational and analytical endeavour like science does not function without expertise, intuition and experience–which is one of the most interesting outcomes of the empirical research on natural scientists in their laboratories (Rheinberger 1997). Chess players seem to think less than beginners. Rather, they see patterns and let themselves be guided by their experience from the past rather than attempt to calculate turns far into the future.
• But like in professional chess, the intuition of professional academic and nonfiction writing can also only be gained by systematic exposure to feedback loops and experience, which means that success in academic writing depends to a great degree on the organization of its practical side. The workflow around the slip-box is not a prescription that tells you what to do at what stage of writing. On the contrary: It gives you a structure of clearly separable tasks, which can be completed within reasonable time and provides you with instant feedback through interconnected writing tasks. It allows you to become better by giving you the opportunity for deliberate practice. The more experience you gain, the more you will be able to rely on your intuition to tell you what to do next. Instead of taking you “from intuition to professional writing strategies”, as the title of a typical study guide promises, it is here all about becoming a professional by acquiring the skills and experience to judge situations correctly and intuitively so you can chuck misleading study guides for good. Real experts, Flyvbjerg writes unambiguously, don’t make plans (Flyvbjerg 2001, 19).
• But the reason why Watson and Crick or Kekulé had these insights and not a random person on the street is that they already had spent a very long time thinking hard about the problems, tinkered with other possible solutions and tried countless other ways of looking at the problem. Our fascination with these stories clouds the fact that all good ideas need time. Even sudden breakthroughs are usually preceded by a long, intense process of preparation.
• Being experienced with a problem and intimately familiar with the tools and devices we work with, ideally to the point of virtuosity, is the precondition for discovering their inherent possibilities, writes Ludwik Fleck, a historian of science (Fleck 2012, 126). This is true even for purely theoretical work. Here, too, we need experience until we can “feel our way” around the problems and questions we deal with, even if these things are words, concepts and notes in a file system. What we learn in practice is always much more thorough and complex than what we could put into words. That is why even purely theoretical work cannot be reduced to explicit knowledge, which is consciously available. This is especially true for the use of a slip-box. It is the intuition that comes from the intimate knowledge of a practice that can lead us to new insights. We might not be able to explicitly state why it is more promising to follow one idea instead of another, but being experienced, we somehow know–which is enough. Experimental scientists regularly describe their decision-making process as being based on intuition (Rheinberger 1997), and there is no reason why it should be different in the social sciences. Maybe it is just harder to accept in the social sciences as we try so hard to be more like natural scientists, who seem to do without something as vague as intuition. But intuition is not the opposition to rationality and knowledge, it is rather the incorporated, practical side of our intellectual endeavours, the sedimented experience on which we build our conscious, explicit knowledge (cf. Ahrens 2014).
• Another piece of advice is not a feature of the slip-box and might sound banal, but it is crucial: Make sure that you really see what you think you see and describe it as plainly and factually as possible. Double-check if necessary. That this isn’t as obvious as it sounds will become clearer by the fact that the ability to truly see what is in front of one’s eyes is often listed as a trait of experts. And that is easily explained by the fact that our perception does not follow the order of seeing first and interpreting second. It does both at the same time: We always perceive something as something–our interpretation is instantaneous. This is why we have so much trouble not falling for an optical illusion: If we look at a three-dimensional drawing, we cannot see it just as an arrangement of lines and shapes–unless we are highly trained to do so. We don’t even notice objectively missing parts in our perception, like the blind spot in the middle of everything we see. We need a trick to see what we don’t see. As we always immediately see a whole picture of something, everything else, including the reinterpretation of it or the detection of missing bits, is a step that follows.

Developing the ability to visualize the things you need to do helps in developing your expertise

• The lesson to draw is to be generally sceptical about planning, especially if it is merely focused on the outcome, not on the actual work and the steps required to achieve a goal. While it doesn’t help to imagine oneself the great author of a successful and timely finished paper, it does make a difference if we have a realistic idea about what needs to be done to get there in our minds. We know from sports that it doesn’t help when athletes imagine themselves as winners of a race, but it makes a big difference if they imagine all the training that is necessary to be able to win. Having a more realistic idea in mind not only helps them to perform better, it also boosts their motivation (Singer et al. 2001). We know today that this is not only true for athletes, but for any work that needs effort and endurance (Pham and Taylor 1999). Writing definitely belongs in this category.

Memorization

• Attention is not our only limited resource. Our short-term memory is also limited. We need strategies not to waste its capacity with thoughts we can better delegate to an external system. While the estimations of our long-term memory capacity are wildly diverse and rather speculative, psychologists used to tend to agree on a very specific number when it came to short-term memory: We can hold a maximum of seven things in our head at the same time, plus/ minus two (Miller 1956).
• But what about memory artists? It might seem like we can increase the number of things we can remember by employing memo techniques–and not just a bit, but significantly. But what we actually do when we use memo techniques is to bundle items together in a meaningful way and remember the bundles–up to about seven (Levin and Levin, 1990). Or, if recent research is right and the participants in earlier tests have always already bundled things together, then the maximum capacity of our working memory is not seven plus/ minus two, but more like a maximum of four (Cowan 2001).
• This is why it is so much easier to remember things we understand than things we don’t. It is not that we have to choose to focus either on learning or understanding. It is always about understanding–and if it is only for the sake of learning. Things we understand are connected, either through rules, theories, narratives, pure logic, mental models or explanations. And deliberately building these kinds of meaningful connections is what the slip-box is all about.
• Forgetting, then, would not be the loss of a memory, but the erection of a mental barrier between the conscious mind and our long-term memory. Psychologists call this mechanism active inhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007). It is easy to understand what it is good for: Without a very thorough filter, our brains would constantly be flooded by memories, making it impossible to focus on anything in our surroundings. That is what Shereshevsky struggled with in his life: There were moment where he tried to buy an ice cream, but some random word of the vendor triggered such an enormous amount of associations and memories that he would have to leave the shop, so overwhelming was this experience.

  Kyle: “Not being able to see the forest for the trees.” Kyle: The ability to engage in Information Ingestion and then selectively forget things is the process of getting “the gist” of an idea.

• We are very dependent on a subconscious mechanism that reliably inhibits almost every memory every moment except the very, very few that are truly helpful in a situation. Unfortunately, we cannot just consciously pluck from our memory what we need like from a folder in an archive. That would require the memory we can choose from to be already in our conscious mind, which would render the mechanism of remembering redundant. Remembering is the very mechanism to bring a memory back into our conscious mind. Therefore, Shereshevsky might not have had an ability most of us do not possess, but lacked an ability we all possess: The ability to forget systematically–to inhibit most irrelevant information from being remembered.

  Kyle: Thinking about Elder Klebingat’s system; its about maintaining a Latticework of as much relevant information as possible while filtering out the irrelevant detail

• It is difficult, if not impossible, to verify this claim, but it does make sense to shift the attention from storage strength to retrieval strength. Learning would be not so much about saving information, like on a hard disk, but about building connections and bridges between pieces of information to circumvent the inhibition mechanism in the right moment. It is about making sure that the right “cues” trigger the right memory, about how we can think strategically to remember the most useful information when we need it.

  Kyle: Similar to Elder Klebingat’s “mind palace,” you’re attaching the relevant information to a framework to make it easier to “trigger”

• The trick, of course, is not to learn like Ebbinghaus thought we would learn: by banging the information into our heads. Memory artists instead attach meaning to information and connect it to already known networks of connections in a meaningful way. One piece of information can become the cue for another and strings or networks of cues can be built. Those kinds of memory techniques are great in case you need to learn information that bears no meaning in itself or has no logical or meaningful connection to other things you already know. But why would you want to learn something like that–except when you happen to be a memory artist? #Latticework
• Just by working with the slip-box, we retrieve old ideas and facts on an irregular basis and connect them with other bits of information–very much how experts recommend we learn (Bjork 2011, 8; Kornell and Bjork 2008). This is also the idea behind flashcards. But even though flashcards are much more effective than cramming or reviewing information within the context of a textbook, they also have a downside: The information on flashcards is neither elaborated on nor embedded in some form of context. Each flashcard stays isolated instead of being connected with the network of theoretical frames, our experiences or our latticework of mental models. This not only makes it much more difficult to learn, but also difficult to understand the implications and the meaning of information (cf. Birnbaum et al., 2013). A scientific term or concept only becomes meaningful within the context of a theory–otherwise it would just be a word. #Spaced Repetition
• Charlie Munger writes: “Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a Latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience, both vicarious and direct, on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.” (Munger 1994).

Self-Criticism & Confirmation Bias

• While selectivity is the key to smart Note-taking, it is equally important to be selective in a smart way. Unfortunately, our brains are not very smart in selecting information by default. While we should seek out dis-confirming arguments and facts that challenge our way of thinking, we are naturally drawn to everything that makes us feel good, which is everything that confirms what we already believe we know.
• In so behaving, the University of Chicago is imitating Charles Darwin, who spent much of his long life thinking in reverse as he tried to disprove his own hardest-won and best-loved ideas. And so long as there are parts of academia that keep alive its best values by thinking in reverse like Darwin, we can confidently expect that silly educational practices will eventually be replaced by better ones, exactly as Carl Jacobi might have predicted. #Self-Criticism
• Even the best scientists and thinkers are not free from it. What sets them apart is the mere fact that they are aware of the problem and do something about it. The classic role model would be Charles Darwin. He forced himself to write down (and therefore elaborate on) the arguments that were the most critical of his theories. “I had […] during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views, which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.” (Darwin 1958, 123)
• The linear process promoted by most study guides, which insanely starts with the decision on the hypothesis or the topic to write about, is a sure-fire way to let Confirmation Bias run rampant. First, you basically fix your present understanding, as the outcome instead of using it as the starting point, priming yourself for one-sided perception. Then you artificially create a conflict of interest between getting things done (finding support for your preconceived argument) and generating insight, turning any departure from your preconceived plan into a mutiny against the success of your own project. This is a good rule of thumb: If insight becomes a threat to your academic or writing success, you are doing it wrong.
• Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the advantages of Writing. In oral presentations, we easily get away with unfounded claims. We can distract from argumentative gaps with confident gestures or drop a casual “you know what I mean” irrespective of whether we know what we meant. In writing, these manoeuvres are a little too obvious. It is easy to check a statement like: “But that is what I said!” The most important advantage of writing is that it helps us to confront ourselves when we do not understand something as well as we would like to believe. #Public Speaking
• When we take permanent notes, it is much more a form of thinking within the medium of writing and in dialogue with the already existing notes within the slip-box than a protocol of preconceived ideas. Any thought of a certain complexity requires writing. Coherent arguments require the language to be fixed, and only if something is written down is it fixed enough to be discussed independently from the author. The brain alone is too eager to make us feel good–even if it is by politely ignoring inconsistencies in our thinking. Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance–literally. We need this distance to think about an argument–otherwise the argument itself would occupy the very mental resources we need for scrutinizing it.
• Comparing notes also helps us to detect contradictions, paradoxes or oppositions–important facilitators for insight. When we realise that we used to accept two contradicting ideas as equally true, we know that we have a problem–and problems are good because we now have something to solve. A paradox can be a sign that we haven’t thought thoroughly enough about a problem or, conversely, that we exhausted the possibilities of a certain paradigm. Finally, oppositions help to shape ideas by providing contrast. Albert Rothenberg suggests that the construction of oppositions is the most reliable way of generating new ideas (Rothenberg 1971; 1996; 2015).
• The slip-box not only confronts us with dis-confirming information, but also helps with what is known as the feature-positive effect (Allison and Messick 1988; Newman, Wolff, and Hearst 1980; Sainsbury 1971). This is the phenomenon in which we tend to overstate the importance of information that is (mentally) easily available to us and tilts our thinking towards the most recently acquired facts, not necessarily the most relevant ones. Without external help, we would not only take exclusively into account what we know, but what is on top of our heads.[ 35] The slip-box constantly reminds us of information we have long forgotten and wouldn’t remember otherwise–so much so, we wouldn’t even look for it.

Truth

• The slip-box forces us to be selective in reading and note-taking, but the only criterion is the question of whether something adds to a discussion in the slip-box. The only thing that matters is that it connects or is open to connections. Everything can contribute to the development of thoughts within the slip-box: an addition as well as a contradiction, the questioning of a seemingly obvious idea as well as the differentiation of an argument. What we are looking for are facts and information that can add something and therefore enrich the slip-box. One of the most important habitual changes when starting to work with the slip-box is moving the attention from the individual project with our preconceived ideas towards the open connections within the slip-box.
• “We believe in all truth, no matter to what subject it may refer. No sect or religious denomination [or, I may say, no searcher of truth] in the world possesses a single principle of truth that we do not accept or that we will reject. We are willing to receive all truth, from whatever source it may come; for truth will stand, truth will endure.” Joseph F. Smith
• Comparing notes also helps us to detect contradictions, paradoxes or oppositions–important facilitators for insight. When we realise that we used to accept two contradicting ideas as equally true, we know that we have a problem–and problems are good because we now have something to solve. A paradox can be a sign that we haven’t thought thoroughly enough about a problem or, conversely, that we exhausted the possibilities of a certain paradigm. Finally, oppositions help to shape ideas by providing contrast. Albert Rothenberg suggests that the construction of oppositions is the most reliable way of generating new ideas (Rothenberg 1971; 1996; 2015).
• “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

Full Book

🔒 The full text of this book is kept private.

Kyle keeps a complete personal copy of How To Take Smart Notes in his private knowledge base for reference and study. Out of respect for the author’s copyright, the full text isn’t published here — only the highlights, notes, and connections above.