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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tiago Forte
Read between
September 19 - December 19, 2022
publish, speak, present, perform, produce, write, draw, interpret, critique, or translate.
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.
side effect of the way her mind works, spinning off new metaphors and turns of phrase at the most unexpected times:
Talent needs to be channeled and developed in order to become something more than a momentary spark.
Behind the scenes of their public persona, there is a process they follow for regularly turning new ideas into creative output.
Creativity depends on a creative process.
Knowledge capture is about mining the richness of the reading you’re already doing and the life you’re already living.
He was following his intuition and curiosity.
He posed questions and constantly scanned for solutions to long-standing problems in his reading, conversations, and everyday life.
to use the question as a North Star for my learning.
The best curators are picky about what they allow into their collections, and you should be too.
The more economical you can be with the material you capture in the first place, the less time and effort your future self will have to spend organizing, distilling, and expressing it.
Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?
keep a collection of inspiring quotes, photos, ideas, and stories.
If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it? Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think.
By playing with ideas—bending and stretching and remixing them—we become less attached to the way they were originally presented and can borrow certain aspects or elements to use in our own work.
should be to keep what resonates.
When you use up too much energy taking notes, you have little left over for the subsequent steps that add far more value:
making connections, imagining possibilities, formulating theories, and creating new ideas of your own.
The secret to making reading a habit is to make it effortless and enjoyable.
more important for your creative life—and your life in general—than learning to listen to the voice of intuition inside.
You can intentionally train yourself to hear that voice of intuition every day by taking note of what it tells you.
First, you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”
Writing things down is a way of “rehearsing” those ideas, like practicing a dance routine or shooting hoops, which makes them far more likely to stick.
One of the most cited psychology papers of the 1990s found that “translating emotional events into words leads to profound social, psychological, and neural changes.”
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.
What would capturing ideas look like if it was easy?
two notes per day—what are two ideas, insights, observations, perspectives, or lessons you’ve encountered today that you could write down right now?
You need to do it enough that it becomes second nature, while conserving your time and energy for the later steps when the value of the ideas you’ve found can be fully unleashed.
The only way to know whether you’re getting the good stuff is to try putting it to use in real life.
“Crystallizing our thoughts into tangible and digital objects is what allows us to share our thoughts with others.”
I recommend no more than 10 percent of the original source, at most.
Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. —Gustave Flaubert, French
The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I’ve started work.”
starting each project with a stated
important books from the era, and even material from other boxes, including
the Cathedral Effect.2 Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves in powerfully shapes our thinking.
it organizes information based on how actionable it is, not what kind of information it is.
One of the biggest temptations with organizing is to get too perfectionistic, treating the process of organizing as an end in itself. There is something inherently satisfying about order, and it’s easy to stop there instead of going on to develop and share our knowledge. We need to always be wary of accumulating so much information
times per day. A project will be the same project whether it’s found in your notes app, your computer file system, or your cloud storage drive, allowing you to move seamlessly between them
they have a beginning and an end;
have a specific, clear outcome that needs to happen in order for them to be checked off
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.
satisfaction ratings. You could also have photos of products you admire to use as design inspiration, manufacturing blueprints, or color palettes.
more importantly, because forcing yourself to make decisions every time you capture something adds a lot of friction to the process.
Knowledge is best applied through execution, which means whatever doesn’t help you make progress on your projects is probably detracting from them.
organizing them according to where they are going—
The true test of whether a piece of knowledge is valuable is not whether it is perfectly organized and neatly labeled, but whether it can have an impact on someone or something that matters to you.
We are organizing for actionability, and “what’s actionable” is always changing.
