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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tiago Forte
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May 30, 2023 - April 6, 2024
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?”
Surprisingly, when you focus on taking action, the vast amount of information out there gets radically streamlined and simplified. There are relatively few things that are actionable and relevant at any given time, which ...
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Distill: Find the Essence
Every note is the seed of an idea, reminding you of what you already know and already think about a topic.
There is a powerful way to facilitate and speed up this process of rapid association: distill your notes down to their essence.
Every idea has an “essence”: the heart and soul of what it is tr...
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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.
Express: Show Your Work
What is the point of knowledge if it doesn’t help anyone or produce anything?
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.
It’s so easy to endlessly delay and postpone the experiences that would so enrich our lives. We think we’re not ready. We fear we’re not prepared. We cannot stand the thought that there is one little piece of information we’re missing that, if we had it, would make all the difference.
I’m 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. You gain confidence in what you know only when you know that it works. Until you do, it’s just a theory.
This is why I recommend you shift as much of your time and effort as possible fro...
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Information is always in flux, and it is always a work in progress.
This is not so for Truth. Truth is fixed, and is not personal to individuals. "Facts" may be wrong, as we currently understand them, but Truth is not contingent on understanding or belief.
Since nothing is ever truly final, there is no need to wait to get started. You can publish a simple website now, and slowly add additional pages over time. You can send out a draft of a piece of writing now and make revisions later when you have more time. The sooner you begin, the sooner you start on the path of improvement.
The consumerist attitude toward information—that more is better, that we never have enough, and that what we already have isn’t good enough—is at the heart of many people’s dissatisfaction with how they spend their time online. Instead of trying to find “the best” content, I recommend instead switching your focus to making things, which is far more satisfying.
Everything not saved will be lost. —Nintendo “Quit Screen” message
Information isn’t a luxury—it is the very basis of our survival. Just as with the food we put into our bodies, it is our responsibility and right to choose our information diet. It’s up to us to decide what information is good for us, what we want more of and less of, and ultimately, what we do with it. 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. Think of it as planting your own “knowledge garden” where you are free to cultivate your ideas and develop your own thinking away from the deafening noise of other people’s opinions.
“I kind of have to capitalize on the excitement of me getting that idea and see it all the way through or else I’ll leave it behind and assume it wasn’t good enough.”
It’s not a matter of having enough raw talent. Talent needs to be channeled and developed in order to become something more than a momentary spark.
we have to radically expand our definition of “knowledge.”
In the digital world we live in, knowledge most often shows up as “content”—snippets of text, screenshots, bookmarked articles, podcasts, or other kinds of media. This includes the content you gather from outside sources but also the content you create as you compose emails, draw up project plans, brainstorm ideas, and journal your own thoughts. These aren’t just random artifacts with no value—they are “knowledge assets” that crystallize what you know in concrete form.I
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.
Knowledge assets can come from either the external world or your inner thoughts. External knowledge could include: Highlights: Insightful passages from books or articles you read. Quotes: Memorable passages from podcasts or audiobooks you listen to. Bookmarks and favorites: Links to interesting content you find on the web or favorited social media posts. Voice memos: Clips recorded on your mobile device as “notes to self.” Meeting notes: Notes you take about what was discussed during meetings or phone calls. Images: Photos or other images that you find inspiring or interesting. Takeaways:
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As you start collecting this material from the outer world, it often sparks new ideas and realizations in your inner world. You can capture those thoughts too! They could include: Stories: Your favorite anecdotes, whether they happened to you or someone else. Insights: The small (and big) realizations you have. Memories: Experiences from your life that you don’t want to forget. Reflections: Personal thoughts and lessons written in a journal or diary. Musings: Random “shower ideas” that pop into your head.
The meaning of a thought, insight, or memory often isn’t immediately clear. We need to write them down, revisit them, and view them from a different perspective in order to digest what they mean to us. It is exceedingly difficult to do that within the confines of our heads. 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.
there are four kinds of content that aren’t well suited to notes apps:
Is this sensitive information you’d like to keep secure?
Is this a special format or file type better handled by a dedicated app?
Is this a very large file?
Will it need to be collaboratively edited?
With the abundance of content all around us, it can be hard to know exactly what is worth preserving. I use an insightful exercise to help people make this decision easier. I call it “Twelve Favorite Problems,” inspired by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman.
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!”
In other words, Feynman’s approach was to maintain a list of a dozen open questions.
When a fellow physicist and mentor asked what the use of such an insight was, Feynman responded: “It doesn’t have any importance… I don’t care whether a thing has importance. Isn’t it fun?” He was following his intuition and curiosity. But it did end up having importance, with his research into the equations underlying rotation informing the work that ultimately led to him receiving the Nobel Prize.
Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?”
“How can I make it a habit to exercise every day?”
“How can I have closer relationships with the people I love?”
“How can I spend more of my time doing hi...
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What does it look like to move from mindless consumption to mindful creation?
How can I work through the fear I have of taking on more responsibility?
How do I start reading all the books I already have instead of buying more?
How can I speed up and relax at the same time?
What can I do to make eating healthy easier?
How can I make decisions with more confidence?
The key to this exercise is to make them open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have a single answer. To find questions that invoke a state of wonder and curiosity about the amazing world we live in.
Incomplete sentence
The power of your favorite problems is that they tend to stay fairly consistent over time. The exact framing of each question may change, but even as we move between projects, jobs, relationships, and careers, our favorite problems tend to follow us across the years.
How can creativity emerge out of chaos?—still
The goal isn’t to definitively answer the question once and for all, but to use the question as a North Star for my learning.
