Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

📖 How to Take Smart Notes

10 min read

Why did I want to read it?

A book to think better? Shut up and take my moneeeeeey!

What did I get out of it?

Best quote of the book (p. 89-90). Writing is thinking:

Richard Feynman once had a visitor in his office, a historian who wanted to interview him. When he spotted Feynman’s notebooks, he said how delighted he was to see such “wonderful records of Feynman’s thinking.” “No, no!” Feynman protested. “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.” “Well,” the historian said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper.”

Introduction

…those who take smart notes will never have the problem of a blank screen again (p. 2)

The quality of a paper and the ease with which it is written depends more than anything of what you have done in writing before you even made a decision on the topic (p. 3)

Everything you need to know

Having read more does not automatically mean having more ideas. Especially in the beginning, it means having fewer ideas to work with, because you know that others have already thought of most of them (p. 7)

it is not just about collecting thoughts, but about making connections and sparking new ideas (p. 9)

He not only stressed that he never forced himself to do something he didn’t feel like. ‘If I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else’ (p. 15)

Studies on highly successful people have proven (…) that success is not the result of strong willpower (…), but rather the result of smart working environments that avoid resistance in the first place. (p. 17)

Two slip-boxes: a bibliographical one, and a main one (p. 18)

The last element in his file system was an index, from which he would refer to one or two notes that would serve as a kind of entry point into a line of thought (p. 20)

Everything you need to do

Make literature notes (…) use your own words (…)Be extra selective with quotes. (p. 24)

Don’t cling to an idea if another, more promising one gains momentum. The more you become interested in something, the more you will read and think about it. (p. 25)

But you will still encounter a lot of other ideas and information along the way. Spending the little extra time to add them to your system will make all the difference (p. 27).

The four underlying principles

  1. Writing is the only thing that matters. Writing provides focus to the learning process. In order to write well about something, it means reading, understanding…

  2. Simplicity is paramount.

The slip-box is designed to present you ideas you have already forgotten (p. 41).

  1. Nobody ever starts from scratch.

There is one reliable sign if you managed to structure your workflow according to the fact that writing is not a linear process, but a circular one: the problem of finding a topic is replaced by the problem of having too many topics to write about (p. 50).

  1. Let the work carry you forward.

The more content it [the slip-box] contains, the more connections it can provide, and the easier it becomes to add new entries in a smart way and receive useful suggestions (p.55).

As we are the authors of all notes, we learn in lockstep with the slip-box. This is another big difference from using an encyclopaedia like Wikipedia (p.56)

The six steps of successful writing

Separate and interlocking tasks

Give each task the right kind of attention.

“Specifically, the problem-solving behavior of eminent scientists can alternate between extraordinary levels of focus on specific concepts and playful exploration of ideas. This suggests that successful problem solving may be a function of flexible strategy application in relation to task demands” (Vartanian 2009). (p. 63)

Become an expert instead of a planner. Reminds me of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 📖 Antifragile regarding the intuitive knowledge.

Teachers tend to mistake the ability to follow (their) rules with the ability to make the right choices in real situations. [Expert] decisions in complex situations are not made by long rational-analytical considerations, but rather come from the gut (p. 66).

“Real experts don´t make plans” (Flyvbjerg 2001). (p. 67)

Get closure. Avoid the Zeigarnik effect: open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory until they are done (p. 70).

Converserly, we can use the Zeigarnik effect to our advantage by deliberately keeping unaswered questions in our mind (p. 71)

Read for understanding

Keep an open mind

Developing arguments and ideas bottom-up instead of top-down is the first and most important step to opening ourselves up for insight (…). We postpone the decision on what to write about specifically and focus on building a critical mass within the slip-box (p. 81).

Get the gist

It is proven that readers regard an author and an audiences a speaker as more intelligent the more clear and to the point their expressions are (Oppenheimer 2006). (p. 84)

Learn to read.

“If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself” (John Searle) (p. 85)

This is a bit in contradiction with 📖 Antifragile intuitive knowledge.

The most important advantage of writing is that it help us to confront ourselves when we do not understand something as well as we would like to believe (p. 85).

The moment we become familiar with something, we start believing we also understand it. On top of that, we also tend to like it more (Bornstein 1989). (p.86)

Learn by reading

Another reference to 📖 Range idea that some efficient learning strategies don’t feel right (such as trying to answer a question even if we don´t know the answer)

…stress floods our brains with hormones that suppress learning processes (Baram et al. 2008) (p. 89)

Working with the slip-box, therefore, doesn’t mean storing information in there instead of in your head, i.e., not learning. On the contrary, it facilitates real, long-term learning. It just means not cramming isolated facts into your brain - something you probably wouldn’t want to do anyway (p. 90)

There is a clear division of labour between the brain and the slip-box: The slip-box takes care of details and references and is a long-term memory resource that keeps information objectively unaltered. That allows the brain to focus on the gist, the deeper understanding and the bigger picture, and frees it up to be creative (p. 90)

Take smart notes

Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind (p. 91).

… recommends: Writing brief accounts on the main ideas of a text instead of collecting quotes (p. 91)

Think outside the brain

We reinvent and rewrite our memory every time we try to retrieve information (…) it is not possible to think systematically without writing (p. 95)

Learn by not trying

two different measurements when it comes to memory: storage strength and retrieval strength (…) it does make sense to shift the attention from storage strength to retrieval strength. (p. 101)

If we test ourselves repeatedly in the same context and environment in which we have learned something, it would make us overconfident in terms of learning success (p. 102).

Contexts will act as cues for that info:

What does help for true, useful learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible (p. 103).

The fact that too much order can impede learning has become more and more known (Carey 2014).(…) elaborating on the differences and similarities of notes instead of sorting them by topic not only facilitates learning, but facilitates the ability to categorise and create sensible classifications (p. 106)

Develop ideas

…we are much better off accepting as early as possible that an overview of the slip-box is as impossible as having an overview of our own thinking while we are thinking. As an extension of our own memory, the slip-box is the medium we think in, not something we think about (p. 108)

The section “12.1 Develop topics” is an amazing section devoted entirely to tagging. The gist of it is that you should NOT think in terms of (broad) categories such as “Engineering”. Instead, you should tag excerpts based on the questions you have on your mind, potential arguments you will want to build using this info. Also, those words won’t likely appear on the excerpts.

The idea that is all about connectedness also extends to mental models: the usefulness comes from having a broad latticework of mental models.

Again, people ✍️ Refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants:

A truly wise person is not someone who knows everything, but someone who is able to make sense of things by drawing from an extended resource of interpretation schemes. This stands in harsh contrast to the common but not-so-wise belief that we need to learn from experience. It is much better to learn from the experiences of others - especially when this experience is reflected on and turned into versatile mental models that can be used in different situations (p. 119).

Learning effectively implies:

  • Elaboration: work with info, connecting it to other.
  • Spacing: retrieve it at different times.
  • Variation: in different contexts.
  • Contextual interference: with the help of chance.
  • Retrieval: with deliberate effort.

Use the slip-box as a creativity machine.

We might even become experts at creativity, intuitively knowing when an idea is worth pursuing. (p. 121)

Even groundbreaking paradigm shifts are most often the consequence of many small moves in the right direction instead of one big idea. This is why the search for small differences is key.(p. 122)

Think inside the box.

The better an engineer is at abstracting from a specific problem, the better and more pragmatic his solutions will be - even for the very problem he abstracted from (p. 124)

Those who think of themselves as being open-minded are often even more prone to stick to their first understanding as they believe to be without natural prejudices and therefore don’t see the need to counterbalance them (p. 126)

Yep, again ✍️ Refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants:

Rarely does a product developer show any interest in learning from the experience of others. Often, companies don’t even keep track of their own failed attempts.

[Using the slip-box] we learn to focus on the gist of an idea, by restricting the amount of space we use to write about it (p. 129)

Share your insight

Shitty ✍️ Refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants: This section is a summary (probably of the whole book) of how brainstorming and starting ideas from scratch is not a good approach (because you only remember what is recent), and it is much more effective to develop stuff bottom-up, keeping several lines open, changing directions depending on our interests (that go on developing as we progress).

Structuring a writing project, focusing on the ability to change the direction of work, reminds me a lot about software projects and Extreme Programming concept of design:

Try working on different manuscripts at the same time (p. 140)

Make it a habit

(Pues eso).

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