How to Take Note Part 3
If your life isn’t interesting, it won’t be worth noting.
The problem most people have is information overload. Even a leisurely scroll through social media deposits in your psyche a panoply of disconnected, sometimes noteworthy, but more often dismissible information. It isn’t that there is nothing of value there. It is that it is always value without context, meaning without purpose, information without discipline. It’s not meant to make you stop and write it down. It’s designed to keep you addicted to absorbing more of its fragmentary, subtly adrenalizing factoids.
So, since we are starting at the beginning and you are committed to being more that a cog in the machine of somebody else’s earth-shattering mega-corp, as training wheels for your smart noting experiment I need you to select something both permanent and interesting to take note of. This will be your practice ground. Before you risk all and import your entire outlook of to-do’s and don’t forgets to the Stack, let’s first get comfortable with the fundamentals of the process.
You can pick a book, a long-form podcast or even a movie. However, anything that you have to push “pause on” in order to take note of will probably frustrate you. So if you pick a movie, start with something you are familiar with and have seen a few times. If you pick a podcast, try to imagine that you are in a classroom and the speakers are live. There is no pause button, and if you missed it, you missed it.
Picking a good book is without question the easiest place to start. Feel free to start write now with I Will Teach You to Be Smart, although for the sake of enjoyment a great bet is picking up either (a) something you’ve already read a million times because its just the best book in the world, or (b) something you’ve always wanted to read because its probably the best book in the world but you just haven’t gotten around the it yet.
You don’t even have to read it all the way through. The goal is to give yourself freedom to begin experimenting with the magical cosmology of analog information. Someday, you will be a master, bobbing and weaving through a Stack grown so potent you might even consider buying a special tool box to house it in. But before you can black belt, you’ve got to get on the mat. You might be able to come out the gate swinging, but you also might just accidentally punch yourself in the face.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I dove into the deep end. Something in the Luhmann method as detailed by Sonke Ahrens tickled that part of me that believed in extreme possibilities and I heartily abandoned all my digital planners and calendars and trackers and ever notes so that I was swimming in an ever amalgamating Stack of 6x4s by the end of the first week.
It was fun. I had both the time and the profession to allow me to do it. It came with a fair share of mistakes but it was also incredibly rewarding. Don’t let me stop you if you’re my kind of crazy.
But for the rest of you, start with something to practice on. Later we’ll lay the groundwork for moving your workflow into and out of the Stack.
One note that belongs here as much as anywhere else is how much fun you can have applying smart notes to a fiction book. I still have tucked away fifteen 6x4s of a juvenile fiction book about two boys in a boarding school run by hateful authority figures that I wrote by T.E.A. noting another juvenile fiction book about two girls in Japan trying to escape their evil samurai uncle. For a variety of reasons I put the project down, but it was an excellent training ground for smart noting. Here were the rules:
I had to rewrite every sentence as a completely different sentence.
That was it. Whatever it said, I had to say something different that was also similar. The hardest part was not adding more to the story once the story got going. But I was in it for the discipline. This is the power of taking note. By absorbing information into your mind, then regurgitating it out onto the page as a translation, as something the same but different, something extraordinary happens. Quantum leaps begin, and then multiply. The information that was flat becomes squared, then cubed, the powered the the tenth.
But now I’m getting ahead of myself. You just want the gist. So let me give you the gist.
Write it down because you like it.
With all the effort given to education and production over the last century of western civilization, it is amazing how little we have devoted to teaching the average person how to take notes. They taught us to read (or they tried,) and they taught us to write (at least, they used to,) but they never taught us how to take notes. We were just supposed to graduate from workbooks with fill-in-the-blank busy work to high school seminars where we wrote down whatever the teacher put on the board as she taught toward the test, to college where the real trick was to outsmart the teacher by learning his game and spitting it back out it him.
Some of us did this by taking good notes on lined paper. Some began to use laptops to type away like busy monkeys. Others were just smart enough to listen, or do the reading, or what have you. But little attention was given to why any of this was useful.
To be sure, molecular biology paid off for some of you. But for the rest of us, education was never about learning the facts. It was about learning how to learn. Yet, instead of teaching us how to learn, they just threw us into an octagon of random credentialed people who were supposed to be smart and expected the best of us to swim and the worst of us to cooperate and graduate.
This is where that book or podcast you have chosen as your smart note training ground will level up your smarts more than those student loans you’re still paying off. If they’d taught you to take good note of things, you might not have taken out so many of those loans in the first place, (and maybe that’s the point.) But you don’t fix Monday by wasting Tuesday, so let’s tackle Tuesday head on.
You can’t write down everything you hear or read, and everything you hear or read isn’t worth writing down anyway. So the first step to getting smart by taking notes is to write down what you hear that you think sounds awesome. (If after five minutes of reading or writing nothing sounds awesome, then you picked a stupid training ground and need to try again.) Don’t worry too much about whether you use bullet points, arrows, dingles or doodles while you do it. I recommend using all of the above at some point. The goal at this stage is not perfection. The goal is not pretty. Pretty and perfection are the enemy. The goal right now is interesting.
The first thing that you find that makes sense, that jumps out and that is not supremely boring, is worth noting. Write it down in some format, and then leave it alone. Move on until you find more. The ideas don’t have to connect. They don’t have to be in order. You’re not writing a book. You are just taking note of what you’ve noticed that will be worth noticing again. This is only the first step to getting smart. This is only a First Note.
First Notes aren’t even first drafts. They’re random compilations of fascination. They’re ideas that may or may not be worth having forever, but they are worth having for the moment. They don’t have to endure. They’re valuable because they are valuable right now. The power of smart doesn’t come from grasping the wind in your hand. The wisdom is closing your eyes and letting the wind caress your face before it’s all gone.
Later, be the judge.
We’re moving fast here. This is the gist. I do hope you read the rest of the series because I’ve put years of discovery and life into it. I believe these insights will help make you not only smarter, but happier, more fulfilled and more at peace. But I also believe you can find all of that on your own just by applying these simple rules to your own life experiment.
On that, let me state for the record that I am not talking about what many people call “spirituality.” I am not talking about the peace that the world cannot give because it is only found in true religion. No. I’ve written other books about that, and I hope I earn enough of your trust with this book that you might consider reading them. But here I am just talking about the experience of day to day life. I am talking about lessening decision-fatigue and stonewalling information overload. I am talking about quitting notification addiction and stifling the distortion that comes from having too many inputs but not enough ponderings. I am talking about the peaceful and quiet life of the mind that man was made to enjoy. While it profits you nothing to gain the whole world and forfeit your soul, I am also aware of more than a few saved souls who are still trying to gain the whole world because they can’t take the time to notice what they’ve already got.
So, to review, now that you’ve got the right tools and an awesome set of inputs to practice with, start up your dialogue with the universe and fill up five to fifteen cards or pages with a borrowed stream of consciousness. Anything that you see, think or hear that is remotely inspiring, write it down. Draw some lines to segregate this or that. Turn the card sideways to start a new page. Flip it over to the back, or don’t. Just stop being so judgy about the first step on your journey. The road to stupid is paved with never starting. You don’t begin at the end. Step on the path to smart and write some of it down.
To be continued…