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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tiago Forte
Read between
May 1 - June 18, 2023
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.
PKM—or personal knowledge management.
When you transform your relationship to information, you will begin to see the technology in your life not just as a storage medium but as a tool for thinking. Like a bicycle for the mind,II once we learn how to use it properly, technology can enhance our cognitive abilities and accelerate us toward our goals far faster than we could ever achieve on our own.
It’s time to elevate the status of notes from test prep and humble scribblings into something far more interesting and dynamic. 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.
Your brain is no longer the bottleneck on your potential, which means you have all the bandwidth you need to pursue any endeavor and make it successful.
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.
Digital notes aren’t physical, but they are visual.
“Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections.”3
What are the chances that the most creative, most innovative approaches will instantly be top of mind? What are the odds that the best way to move forward is one of the first ways we come up with? This tendency is known as recency bias.4 We tend to favor the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones.
American journalist, author, and filmmaker Sebastian Junger once wrote on the subject of “writer’s block”: “It’s not that I’m blocked. It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words, [but rather] that I don’t have the ammunition.”7
nascent
All four of the above qualities are shared by paper notes, but when we make them digital, we can supercharge these timeless benefits with the incredible capabilities of technology—searching, sharing, backups, editing, linking, syncing between devices, and many others. Digital notes combine the casual artistry of a daily sketchbook with the scientific power of modern software.
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?”
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.
personal knowledge management exists to support taking action—anything else is a distraction.
A common challenge for people who are curious and love to learn is that we can fall into the habit of continuously force-feeding ourselves more and more information, but never actually take the next step and apply it.
shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating.V
We need an external medium in which to see our ideas from another vantage point, and writing things down is the most effective and convenient one ever invented.
Feynman revealed his strategy in an interview4: You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”
realizing that in any piece of content, the value is not evenly distributed. There are always certain parts that are especially interesting, helpful, or valuable to you.
If you try to save every piece of material you come across, you run the risk of inundating your future self with tons of irrelevant information. At that point, your Second Brain will be no better than scrolling through social media.
Use a curator's perspective
Any time you need a break, a new perspective, or a dash of motivation, you can look through it and see what sparks your imagination. For example, I keep a folder full of customer testimonials I’ve received over the years. Any time I think what I’m doing doesn’t matter or isn’t good enough, all I have to do is open up that folder and my perspective is completely shifted.
definition for “information”: that which surprises you.7 If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it?
you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”10 researchers have found that when people actively generate a series of words, such as by speaking or writing, more parts of their brain are activated when compared to simply reading the same words. Writing things down is a way of “rehearsing” those ideas, like practicing a dance routine or shooting hoops,
The moment you first encounter an idea is the worst time to decide what it means. You need to set it aside and gain some objectivity.
Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. —Gustave Flaubert, French novelist
This is a dope ass quote! Love this.
We buy nice furniture, deliberate for weeks over the color of our walls, and fiddle with the placement of plants and books. We know that the details of lighting, temperature, and the layout of a space dramatically affect how we feel and think. There’s a name for this phenomenon: the Cathedral Effect.2 Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves in powerfully shapes our thinking.
Knowing which projects you’re currently committed to is crucial to being able to prioritize your week, plan your progress, and say no to things that aren’t important.
Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, I recommend organizing them according to where they are going—specifically, the outcomes
She saw that my standard approach to my work was brute force: to stay late at the office, fill every single minute with productivity, and power through mountains of work as if my life depended on it. That wasn’t a path to success; it was a path to burnout. Not only did I exhaust my mental and physical reserves time and again; my frontal assaults weren’t even very effective. I didn’t know how to set my intentions, craft a strategy, and look for sources of leverage that would allow me to accomplish things with minimal effort. My mentor advised me to “move quickly and touch lightly” instead. To
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short documentary titled Francis Coppola’s Notebook3 released in 2001, Coppola explained his process. He started with an initial read of the entire novel, noting down anything that stuck out to him: “I think it’s important to put your impressions down on the first reading because those are the initial instincts about what you thought was good or what you didn’t understand or what you thought was bad.”
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The more determined we are to focus and get something done, the more aggressively life tends to throw emergencies and delays in our face.
Hard facts
Distillation is at the very heart of all effective communication.
technique is simple: you highlight the main points of a note, and then highlight the main points of those highlights, and so on, distilling the essence of a note in several “layers.” Each of these layers uses a different kind of formatting so you can easily tell them apart.
progressive summarization
“layer one”—the chunks of text initially captured in my notes.
All I have to do is bold the main points within the note. This could include keywords that provide hints of what this text is about, phrases that capture what the original author was trying to say, or sentences that especially resonated with me even if I can’t explain why.
second layer of distillation
Look only at the bolded passages you identified in layer two and highlight only the most interesting and surprising of those points. This will often amount to just one or two sentences that encapsulate the message of the original source.
third layer of distillation
For only the very few sources that are truly unique and valuable, I’ll add an “executive summary” at the top of the note with a few bullet points summarizing the article in my own words.
fourth phase of distillation
* only on rare occassions
“Baumol’s Cost Disease,”
Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible. As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly.
The ability to intentionally and strategically allocate our attention is a competitive advantage in a distracted world.
Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging. —Silvano Arieti, psychiatrist and author of Creativity: The Magic Synthesis
the process of creating anything, it follows the same simple pattern, alternating back and forth between divergence and convergence.
A creative endeavor begins with an act of divergence. You open the space of possibilities and consider as many options as possible.
this is the time to wander!
at some point you must start discarding possibilities and converging toward a solution.
Convergence forces us to eliminate options, make trade-offs, and decide what is truly essential.
The more imaginative and curious you are, the more diverse your interests, and the higher your standards and commitment to perfection, the more difficult you will likely find it to switch from divergence mode into convergence mode.
