How to Take Smart Notes Quotes

“It is not so important who you are, but what you do”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“a superior IQ will neither help you to distinguish yourself nor protect you from failure”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“How focused you want to read depends on your priorities.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, researchers on expertise, have a simple explanation: Teachers tend to mistake the ability to follow (their) rules with the ability to make the right choices in real situations. Unlike the expert paramedics, they did not look at the unique circumstances and check if the paramedics in the videos did the best thing possible”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“It is not so important who you are, but what you do. Doing the work required and doing it in a smart way leads, somehow unsurprisingly, to success.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“One of the most famous figures to illustrate this skill is the mathematician Abraham Wald (Mangel and Samaniego 1984). During World War II, he was asked to help the Royal Air Force find the areas on their planes that were most often hit by bullets so they could cover them with more armour. But instead of counting the bullet holes on the returned planes, he recommended armouring the spots where none of the planes had taken any hits. The RAF forgot to take into account what was not there to see: All the planes that didn’t make it back. The RAF fell for a common error in thinking called survivorship bias (Taleb 2005). The other planes didn’t make it back because they were hit where they should have had extra protection, like the fuel tank. The returning planes could only show what was less relevant.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“When even highly intelligent students fail in their studies, it’s most often because they cease to see the meaning in what they were supposed to learn (cf. Balduf 2009), are unable to make a connection to their personal goals (Glynn et al. 2009) or lack the ability to control their own studies autonomously and on their own terms (Reeve and Jan, 2006; Reeve, 2009).”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Confirmation bias is a subtle but major force. As the psychologist Raymond Nickerson puts it: “If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration” (Nickerson 1998, 175).”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“When we extract ideas from the specific context of a text, we deal with ideas that serve a specific purpose in a particular context, support a specific argument, are part of a theory that isn’t ours or written in a language we wouldn’t use. This is why we have to translate them into our own language to prepare them to be embedded into new contexts of our own thinking, the different context(s) within the slip-box. Translating means to give the truest possible account of the original work, using different words – it does not mean the freedom to make something fit. As well, the mere copying of quotes almost always changes their meaning by stripping them out of context, even though the words aren’t changed. This is a common beginner mistake, which can only lead to a patchwork of ideas, but never a coherent thought.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a good draft; to get a good draft written, you only have to turn a series of notes into a continuous text. And as a series of notes is just the rearrangement of notes you already have in your slip-box, all you really have to do is have a pen in your hand when you read. If”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Writing a paper involves much more than just typing on the keyboard. It also means reading, understanding, reflecting, getting ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting and rewriting. All these are not just different tasks, but tasks requiring a different kind of attention.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“We extract information from different linear sources and mix it all up and shake it until new patterns emerge.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The note sequences are the clusters where order emerges from complexity.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“the slip-box is the medium we think in, not something we think about.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Writing notes and sorting them into the slip-box is nothing other than an attempt to understand the wider meaning of something.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“If you focus your time and energy on understanding, you cannot help but learn.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The problem is that the meaning of something is not always obvious and needs to be explored. That is why we need to elaborate on it. But elaboration is nothing more than connecting information to other information in a meaningful way.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The challenge of writing as well as learning is therefore not so much to learn, but to understand, as we will already have learned what we understand.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“One piece of information can become the cue for another and strings or networks of cues can be built.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“By explicitly writing down how something connects or leads to something else, we force ourselves to clarify and distinguish ideas from each other.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The brain works with rules of thumb and makes things look as if they fit, even if they don’t. It remembers events that never happened, connects unrelated episodes to convincing narratives and completes incomplete images.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium of all this work. And maybe that is the reason why we rarely think about this writing, the everyday writing, the note-taking and draft-making. Like breathing, it is vital to what we do, but because we do it constantly, it escapes our attention.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Studying does not prepare students for independent research. It is independent research.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“The second is what psychologists call the mere-exposure effect: doing something many times makes us believe we have become good at it – completely independent of our actual performance”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“We don’t just play with ideas in our heads, but do something with them in a very concrete way: We think about what they mean for other lines of thoughts, then we write this explicitly on paper and connect them literally with the other notes.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“That is why Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger describes as worldly-wise someone who has a broad set of these tools and knows how to apply them.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“Now we are faced with a clear choice: We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“If we don’t try to verify our understanding during our studies, we will happily enjoy the feeling of getting smarter and more knowledgeable while in reality staying as dumb as we were. This warm feeling disappears quickly when we try to explain what we read in our own words in writing.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“That often means to reflect as much on what is not mentioned as what is mentioned.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

“By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads. This is why David Allen’s “Getting things done” system works: The secret to have a “mind like water” is to get all the little stuff out of our short-term memory.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes