How to Take Smart Notes Quotes

“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 light of new experiences and facts.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The most important advantage of writing is that it helps us confront ourselves when we do not understand something as well as we would like to believe.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The real enemy of independent thinking is not an external authority, but our own inertia. The ability to generate new ideas has more to do with breaking with old habits of thinking than with coming up with as many ideas as possible.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“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)”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Good students also look beyond the obvious. They peek over the fences of their own disciplines – and once you have done that, you cannot go back and do what everyone else is doing, even if you now must deal with heterogeneous ideas that come without a manual on how they might fit together”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“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”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“writing is not only for proclaiming opinions, but the main tool to achieve insight worth sharing.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“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.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Those who think of themselves as being open-minded are often even more prone to stick to their first understanding as they believe themselves to be without natural prejudices and therefore don’t see the need to counter-balance them. If we think we can ‘hold back’ on interpretation, we are fooling ourselves.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“just one idea per note and force ourselves to be as precise and brief as possible. The restriction to one idea per note is also the precondition to recombine them freely later.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“To have an undistracted brain to think with and a reliable collection of notes to think in is pretty much all we need.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time. Not having willpower, but not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success. This is where the organisation of writing and note-taking comes into play.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Writing plays such a central role in learning, studying and research that it is surprising how little we think about it. If writing is discussed, the focus lies almost always on the few exceptional moments where we write a lengthy piece, a book, an article or, as students, the essays and theses we have to hand in.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“less choice is better.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Problems rarely get solved directly, anyway. Most often, the crucial step forward is to redefine the problem in such a way that an already existing solution can be employed.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Ironically, it is therefore often the highly gifted and talented students, who receive a lot of praise, who are more in danger of developing a fixed mindset and getting stuck. Having been praised for what they are (talented and gifted) rather than for what they do, they tend to focus on keeping this impression intact, rather than exposing themselves to new challenges and the possibility of learning from failure.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Just collecting unprocessed fleeting notes inevitably leads to chaos. Even small amounts of unclear and unrelated notes lingering around your desk will soon induce the wish of starting from scratch.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Good questions are in the sweet spot of being relevant and interesting, not too easy to answer but possible to tackle with material that is available or at least within our reach.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“I highly recommend treating a digital note as if the space were limited.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“distinguishing feature of extraordinary thinkers: Taking simple ideas seriously”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“A good structure enables flow, the state in which you get so completely immersed in your work that you lose track of time and can just keep on going as the work becomes effortless (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975).”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking

“It is not surprising that my friend has a bookshelf filled with notebooks full of wonderful ideas, but not a single publication to show.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“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?”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“If I want something, it’s more time. The only thing that really is a nuisance is the lack of time.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“On one hand, those with wandering, defocused, childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be analysis and application that’s important. The answer to this conundrum is that creative people need both … The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about something. If you make a plan, you impose a structure on yourself; it makes you inflexible”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“there is no measurable correlation between a high IQ and academic success – at least not north of 120.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“no matter how internal processes are implemented, (you) need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes