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Kindle Notes & Highlights
We can provide ourselves with a (temporarily valid) overview over a topic or subtopic just by making another note. If we then link from the index to such a note, we have a good entry point.
Keywords should always be assigned with an eye towards the topics you are working on or interested in, never by looking at the note in isolation. This is also why this process cannot be automated or delegated to a machine or program – it requires thinking.
The first type of links are those on notes that are giving you the overview of a topic. These are notes directly referred to from the index and usually used as an entry point into a topic
On a note like this, you can collect links to other relevant notes to this topic or question, preferably with a short indication of what to find on these notes (one or two words or a short sentence is sufficient). This kind of note helps to structure thoughts and can be seen as an in-between step towards the development of a manuscript.
The most common form of reference is plain note-to-note links. They have no function other than indicating a relevant connection between two individual notes. By linking two related notes regardless of where they are within the slip-box or within different contexts, surprising new lines of thought can be established.
It is important to always keep in mind that making these links is not a chore, a kind of file-box maintenance. The search for meaningful connections is a crucial part of the thinking process
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.
Assemble a Toolbox for Thinking
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, stresses the importance of having a broad theoretical toolbox – not to be a good academic, but to have a good, pragmatic grip on reality.
He advocates looking out for the most powerful concepts in every discipline and to try to understand them so thoroughly that they become part of our thinking.
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.
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).
Use the Slip-Box as a Creativity Machine
“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)
Many exciting stories from scientific history make us believe that great insight comes in a flash.
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.
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,
innovation is not the result of a sudden moment of realization, anyway, but incremental steps toward improvement. Even groundbreaking paradigm shifts are most often the consequence of many small moves in the right direction instead of one big idea. This is why the search for small differences is key. It is such an important skill to see differences between seemingly similar concepts, or connections between seemingly different ideas.
The neurobiologist James Zull points out that comparing is our natural form of perception, where our cognitive interpretation is in lockstep with our actual eye movements. Therefore, comparing should be understood quite literally.
To be able to play with ideas, we first have to liberate them from their original context by means of abstraction and re-specification.
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.
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).
Creativity cannot be taught like a rule or approached like a plan. But we can make sure that our working environment allows us to be creative with ideas.
There is a reason why Buffett is not only a great investor, but also a great teacher: He not only has a vast knowledge about everything related to business, he can also explain it all in simple terms.
12.7 Facilitate Creativity through Restrictions
even though the digital program lifts the physical restrictions on the length of a note, I highly recommend treating a digital note as if the space were limited.
By restricting ourselves to one format, we also restrict ourselves to 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.
Share Your Insight
The process is self-reinforcing. A visibly developed cluster attracts more ideas and provides more possible connections, which in return influence our choices on what to read and think further.
It is the one decision in the beginning, to make writing the mean and the end of the whole intellectual endeavour, that changed the role of topic-finding completely.
Jeremy Dean, who has written extensively on routines and rituals and suggests seeing old ways of thinking as thinking routines, puts it well when he writes that we cannot break with a certain way of thinking if we are not even aware that it is a certain way of thinking (Dean, 2013).
Getting Things Done by Following Your Interests
If we accompany every step of our work with the question, “What is interesting about this?” and everything we read with the question, “What is so relevant about this that it is worth noting down?”
The process of reading and writing inevitably produces a lot of unintended by-products.
we can only learn from our experiences if feedback follows shortly afterwards – and maybe more than once in a while.
The goal here is to get into the habit of fetching pen and paper whenever we read something, to write down the most important and interesting aspects.
the long-term, cross-topic organization of notes, which is guided only by one’s own understanding and interest, is very much at odds with the modular, compartmentalised and top-down approach in which the curricula of universities and colleges are organised.
The more pressure we feel, the more we tend to stick to our old routines – even when these routines caused the problems and the stress in the first place. This is known as the tunnel effect (Mullainathan and Shafir 2013).
