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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tiago Forte
Started reading
November 21, 2022
We spend countless hours reading, listening to, and watching other people’s opinions about what we should do, how we should think, and how we should live, but make comparatively little effort applying that knowledge and making it our own. So much of the time we are “information hoarders,” stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our anxiety.
Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. —David Allen, author of Getting Things Done
Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.III
Commonplace books were a portal through which educated people interacted with the world.
Resurrecting the commonplace book allows us to stem the tide, shifting our relationship with information toward the timeless and the private.
Instead of consuming ever-greater amounts of content, we could take on a more patient, thoughtful approach that favors rereading, reformulating, and working through the implications of ideas over time.
For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.
we are surrounded by knowledge, yet starving for wisdom.
Herbert Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…”
The word “commonplace” can be traced back to Ancient Greece, where a speaker in law courts or political meetings would keep an assortment of arguments in a “common place” for easy reference.
The practice of keeping personal notes also arose in other countries, such as biji in China (roughly translated as “notebook”), which could contain anecdotes, quotations, random musings, literary criticism, short fictional stories, and anything else that a person thought worth recording. In Japan, zuihitsu (known as “pillow books”) were collections of notebooks used to document a person’s life.
In a 2004 study, Angelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki discovered that when monkeys and humans consistently use a tool to extend their reach, such as using a rake to reach an object, certain neural networks in the brain change their “map” of the body to include the new tool. This fascinating finding reinforces the idea that external tools can and often do become a natural extension of our minds.
The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul.
It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists. I am free because I remember. —Abhinavagupta, tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher and mystic
There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete. Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives.
Before we do anything with our ideas, we have to “off-load” them from our minds and put them into concrete form.
Only when we declutter our brain of complex ideas can we think clearly and start to work with those ideas effectively.
Too often when we take on a task—planning an event, designing a product, or leading an initiative—we draw only on the ideas we have access to right in that moment. I call this approach a “heavy lift”—demanding instantaneous results from our brains without the benefit of a support system.
We tend to favor the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones.
Notes are inherently messy, so there’s no need for perfect spelling or polished
Taking notes is a continuous process that never really ends, and you don’t always know where it might lead.
notes are ideal for free-form exploration before you have a goal in mind.
there are three stages of progress I often observe—and even encourage. Those stages are remembering, connecting, and creating.
The first way that people tend to use their Second Brain is as a memory aid.
The second way that people use their Second Brain is to connect ideas together.
the third and final way that people use their Second Brain is for creating new things.
Introducing The CODE Method: The Four Steps to Remembering What Matters To guide you in the process of creating your own Second Brain, I’ve developed a simple, intuitive four-part method called “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express.
The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside.
The best way to organize your notes is to organize for action, according to the active projects you are working on right now. Consider new information in terms of its utility, asking, “How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?”
Organizing for action gives you a sense of tremendous clarity, because you know that everything you’re keeping actually has a purpose.
There is a powerful way to facilitate and speed up this process of rapid association: distill your notes down to their essence.
Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?” That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention. Your notes will be useless if you can’t decipher them in the future, or if they’re so long that you don’t even try. Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand.
here to tell you that that is no way to live your life. Information becomes knowledge—personal, embodied, verified—only when we put it to use.
Everything not saved will be lost. —Nintendo “Quit Screen” message
You are what you consume, and that applies just as much to information as to nutrition.
A Second Brain gives us a way to filter the information stream and curate only the very best ideas we encounter in a private, trusted place.
Innovation and impact don’t happen by accident or chance. Creativity depends on a creative process.
the purpose of information was clear: to inform their writing, speaking, and conversation.
What kinds of information are worth preserving when we don’t know exactly how we’ll be putting it to use?
This is the main problem that needs to be solved. How do I decide what to save, how to save (format, medium, etc), where to save, and how to recall the context of the saved info?
How can we decide what to save when we have no idea what the future holds?
Knowledge isn’t always something “out there” that you have to go out and find. It’s everywhere, all around you: buried in the emails in your inbox, hidden within files in your documents folder, and waiting on cloud drives.
Knowledge capture is about mining the richness of the reading you’re already doing and the life you’re already living.
A knowledge asset is anything that can be used in the future to solve a problem, save time, illuminate a concept, or learn from past experience.
