The reason to wait a week or two? Or Im researching something for work and stumble on an irrelevant but potentially interesting article. This is a good thingits a form of editing. Then I cut them out and tape them to a notecard. Stoicism (served as the premise for his most noteworthy book, Strategy (examples of strategic genius or wisdom). I have an iPad with the kindle app, which I use only in the following way. -I think its important that the notes are not just about work. Im going to implement this in my own life. (In the article you mention that when you have a thought, you write it down on your 4 x 6 cards, and yet you also mention re-visiting books a few weeks after theyve been read). Before, I used the smallerVaultz 46 Index Card File boxes. If I have a spare half hour, I always prefer cracking open a new book than going back over an old one the first feels like play, the latter feels like work. Robert uses color coded cards for an extra layer of organization. There are several ways to build and keep a commonplace book ,and the way Robert does it is especially useful when its time to rearrange and connect ideas. If its the right-hand page, I fold the top corner. I bet its a pain in the ass to carry these around with you if you get sick of working from home. Ryan, With positive effects already verified, the elaborative interrogation consists in asking the student why such topic makes sense or why it is unexpected. Nabokov used this analogy for his notecard systemwith each notecard, he was slowly assembling the structure of a book until he had what resembled, in his minds eye, the blocked grid of a crossword puzzle. Ebook notation just isnt there yet, and you cant mark up the library books, LOL. Time is a great filter/editor. Whatever I want! If a notecard could fit in multiple sections, I do this: So thats basically what Im doing when I read: Im looking for interesting information, Im on the hunt for stories, and Im trying to make connections. Shoe Dog: https://amzn.to/32zo2bu2. Its from Patton: Blood, Guts, and Prayer by Michael Keene. So they stop making index cards tomorrow. Successful startups, Andreessen said, more commonly happen as follows. A lot of people ask Ryan how he produces so much output. The novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler said he avoided reading books written by someone who didnt take the pains to write out the words. These note cardswhich were mostly filled with quoteshave actually been turnedinto a book edited by the historian Douglas Brinkley. What I do is take that [research] material and boil down the moments that I think are cinematic, the moments that are necessary for this story, and I start to put them onto note cards. I believe this to be not because I dont remember to but actually because they arent something physical for me to see. Jason Tatum took the ball out, threw it to Marcus Smart in the short corner, he made a three. What he does is he captures everything interesting he comes across. Another important point: you need to do something with those notes, which Robert Greene turns into a commonplace book (Roberts ex-apprentice, Ryan Holiday, wrote about them here). wide funnel, tight filterstart a lot of books/articles and quit most of them. What do you do when a box gets full? For example, I listened to a podcast where Marc Andreessen advised against starting what he called synthetic startups, which he said is when you start with just wanting to be an entrepreneur and try to work backwards to an idea. Remember you must know only the excellent of all that has been presented. My house recently got robbedand I was so fucking terrified that someone took it, you have no idea. Its not the same process.. With the eye of expertise, you see that something should work a different way. If I catch myself trying to convince myself to stay with a book/article, I stop reading it. Find a low hanging fruit blog that a larger blog often hyperlinks/validates to, then go up the ladder to a mid-sized blog then work your way up to the nationals. In the context of the notecard system, you write something on a notecard because you want to remember it. Simons memory is prodigious, Gladwell says. Some asked me bluntly: What the hell is a digital note? That being said, please, get an evernote account or something similar and transfer these cards and categories to it. *The Narrative Fallacy(Something Id like to write a book about one day), *Strategy (Examples of strategic genius or wisdom), *Post Ideas (Many cards here have been turned into articles youve read), *Animals (Weird stories about animals. I cant tell you how many times I saved my ass writing down a title idea or a thought, I otherwise would have forgotten. Extremely interesting system! Within each note, I have sections: How I came across the book. When you put stuff from a smart persons brain into your brain, right then and there, you are changed. So every so often, I scroll through this note and see what ideas or stories or etc. I promise that many of the pages you marked will not seem to important or noteworthy when you return to them. As I said with my reading process, Im a believer in letting time be a kind of editor. See: Simpsons bio (Nerve). Hes a systems and principles kind of thinker, so even though I use physical notecards, his work has influenced the evolution of my processes. Read up on Commonplace Books Its a modern form of Commonplace booking. So, each book that I do, which would be the equivalent of each business that perhaps an entrepreneur enters into, is a new challenge. He had the Reagan library in his own little file system.. Could you provide some more detail on the process of your method? Just curious do you find it easier to read an entire book through, mark the important pages and then return to put the info on the note cards or do you prefer to do it while reading, or a bit of both? (Quick aside: I hear from people who somehow have their Kindle app and their note-taking app synced up so that everything they underline goes straight into their note-taking app. I am an academic (professor) and loathe that I might find the process so satisfying. His explanation reminded me of the idea that trees that have to struggle get stronger: On the back of the notecard, I put the book title and page number(s). Thats why doing it physically is so important. Theres nothing more fit than leaving you with this inspiring Nietzsches quote, extracted from the last page of Roberts latest book Mastery. When I have a problem, I flip through them. Anyone who has gone back through what they underlined in a book they read knows you dont want to capture everything you underline. For every good idea that comes out of you, you need ten good ideas coming into you. My article reading process is an adapted version of my book reading process. Luhmann wrote a short essay about his slip-box as a communication partner here. With the passage of some time, you find most things that you underline dont hold up. And I WISH Id put more time in over the last few years to create a better note-taking system like the one you describe here my Evernote is bulging with book quotes but I almost never review them and I have my doubts that its really paid me back for the time Ive invested into it. I made them and arranged them with my own hands. Its up there, together with raising a kid. The structure, like the system, is not sequential, so click the links and jump around if you wish. When the book hes reading is good, it can generate 20~30 cards. But it took me a long time to acquire enough cards to need that. Theres an energy attached to poetry and great prose, Murphy said. These were not only responsible for many of his speeches as president, but before office Reagan delivered hundreds of talks as part of his role at General Electric. If anything, I use a perverted version of a system taught to me by the geniusRobert Greene,when I was his research assistant. Hey Ryan, thanks for this post. I use the Notepad in my various electronic devices but often run into the challenge of actually looking back on them. The lovely thing about this method is that you can adapt it to suit your writing and research style . This, I find, is helpful when you go back through the book. The first tip comes from author Ryan Holiday, who in turn learned and adapted this system from his mentor Robert Greene. If you dont currently create or have plans to create blog posts or books or songs or sneakers or etc., I thought I might argue, a note-taking process is a waste of time. . Do you review the cards? He first wrote about his system here and later, in this video, he explained his methods for reading, organizing what he reads, and using that information in his life and work. If anyone has examples, send away! This way, you create your own library that you can use to make decisions or getting inspiration. When asked about why he doesnt use a digital system, Robert said: Writing things out by hand has a logic to it. To bring things into existence, your brain rearranges and reconstructs the material available to it. You have to routinely make those insights available to yourself., Wisdom is only wisdom if you can act on it, Randall says. All I can say is that since learning it about 7 years ago, it has totally transformed my process and drastically increased my creative output. After a week or two, when I have a block of time, I grab the book and a stack of 46 notecards. Identify them with a theme, category, or project at the top so that you can find them more easily later on. For inquiries: frenchtoastbiz@gmail.comGet the books I've read using the links below:1. Trust yourself, trust the freaking process, just start doing it and make it right for you and your needs. Im a reasonably intelligent person but Im sorry but I was lost after the first two sentences. I am actually thinking of usingTaskRabbitto have someone create a digital backup. A notecard system is a system for storing and organizing knowledge. Far more than anything Ive assembledwhatever you think of the guy. But so what? If anything ever happened to them (flood, fire, robbery, etc.) But often a chapter is enough. He adopted the system from his mentor and fellow writer Robert Greene, who no-doubt adopted . I wonder why not MS One note or Mindmap softwares are used. Mine is more of a mess. This is why, if you went through all mine, youd see different colors of ink on the same card. Robert is not just the author of multiple bestsellers. It would be so easy for him, with established worldwide fame and prestige, to step in his previous successes to write more-of-the-same books and convert all the attention in cheap money. Its elaborate. By working through it you gain proficiency and competence. So originally I thought, I need a bunch of categories and themes first then Ill keep my eyes and ears out for things that fit into those topics and themes. They almost always are. After defining the chapter themes, he aggregates the cards more or less around those themes. Emerson was the Golconda reader par excellence, one biographer writes in a little book on the role of reading in Emersons creative process, or what miners call a high-gradera person who goes through a mine and pockets only the richest lumps of ore.. In Obsidian, run the Advanced URI plugin command 'Copy Command URI', then paste it into the Data field on MacroDroid. the powerful books of the strategist Robert Greene. ), One of the big lies notetakers tell themselves is, I will remember why I liked this quote/story/fact/etc.. Writing is something extremely hard to do and with a non-linear complexity: it increases faster than the size of the project. Last thought. Being able to write a facebook post is sensibly different from writing a school essay; which is not the same as composing a blog post. You work tediously and tirelessly to develop to earn the ability to know the industry inside-out. Thankfully they didnt. Joking aside, what I tend to do is just take the section I am working on with me. Theyre either famous quotes or quotes from the writer that I think are smart. And I find the themes in there and I break the book down into the gist of it, the heart of it. Robert Greene's work on Mastery is a masterpiece in itself a complete look into what it . Reading this updated version has inspired me to upgrade my organization! You can write individual knowledge units on notecards and keep them. After you finish reading a book, do the following: Wait a few days or weeks. It also made the shoebox look pretty cool. Go To Link My schedule is flexible, but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers. Vladimir Nabokov. One of the things I like about Ryan Holiday's notecard system, the one he learned from his mentor, Robert Greene, is its emphasis, not just on taking notes, but on going back and revisiting your notes: after you take notes in a book, you let the book sit for a week, and then you go back through the book and transfer your notes to notecards . So Ive got a section in the front of my box of notecards that is the Waiting Room. What happens is, over time, Ill draw a connection between three or four cards and then move those to their own section with a card up front with a kind of index (more on this below). So what I underlined is an answer to the question. I can move cards from one category to another. Thats something Ive realized through the following bizarre and interesting experience. . She kept them from the beginning of her career. All these activities are explicable if one pictures to oneself people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them. When you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.. Thanks much for sharing. Emerson liked to identify four classes of readers: the hourglass, the sponge, the jelly-bag, and the Golconda. Regards I highly recommend at least looking at it. This method was popularized by best-selling nonfiction authors Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene. Each card is linked back to a main thread or theme of information via a number, a tag, or a title (or a mix of all three). There were thousands of songs in his head. Almost daily, I engage with the boxes in one way or another. The more I heard about the system, the more I became obsessed with it. I like to read with a pen. But it's still be hugely helpful to me and I think I'm in a unique position to explain this method to people. If thats what you want to use then go for it. A space dedicated to the exploration of knowledge, sense-making, learning, writing, taking Ryan Holiday & Robert Greene's Notecard System -- now with Cards from the Minimal Theme! When Im taking notes, when Im scrawling with my fountain pen on a cardIm thinking more deeply than when typing on a computerThe handwriting process links closer and faster to the way my brain worksThen, having a box of two thousand cards that I can sift through with my fingers and that I can move around with incredible speedI cant do that on a computer. It facilitates every other step of the researching and writing process. This is just what I needed! If its an organic idea that comes out of something youve been deeply immersed in, Andreessen said, then you might be onto something., This reminded me of Robert Greenes definition of creativity, which is that creativity is a function of putting in lots of tedious work. I also send myself articles that I like and its nice to be able to write my thoughts or key words to go with it. If I am working on chapter 2I take those cards. Discussing the production of his next book (tentatively called The Laws of Human Nature), which is still 12-24 months in the future, Robert told that he reads 300-400 whole books to research for each work. If I need to, Ill search the various places online I might have used the contents of a notecard. So he could almost anticipate what the enemy was going to do next.. They took it out on the sideline. This way, not only will you be less prone to develop biased views (getting away from the Truth), but your creativity will be unbounded by pre-fixed ideas. Recently I started tweeting quotes that I had taken note of. Even the Masters, with worldwide fame and books that echoes through the eternity, began a little movement in the right direction. So, for instance, with the War book, blue cards would be about politics, yellow strictly war, green the arts and entertainment, pink cards on strategy, etc. What he taught me was neat, clean and orderly. For example, on a few different podcasts, I heard Kobe Bryant talk about how he was terrible at basketball when he first started playing then taking an iterative approach to getting better and better. I love writing but the digital method of note taking just hasnt worked for me. Part of my problem though (and I know this isnt an excuse, Im just saying) is that I LOVE reading books but dont enjoy making notes for its own sake. When something still excites me, the notecard process here is the same: I write a title/header at the top of the notecard then try to make the contents of the notecard as if I might want to later transfer it directly into a piece of writing. See point three in the link below if interested: https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/10/charles-darwins-reflections-mind/. When I come across interesting information, I underline then write a corresponding question in the margin. There you go, James says. Ive tried using underlining in the e-text, but I just cant remember which book has the good stuff in it. Its a good thing when your own cards surprise you. It might not work for you. Why? (intro), Gamanthe Japanese word for endurance (Persistence), Our actions our constrained, our will is not. After the response tothis recent LifeHacker piece, I thought I would explainthe systemI use to take notes, research books and keep track of anecdotes, stories and info I come across in my work. Schmidt wrote a great paper, Niklas Luhmanns Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine. Either sentences in my own writing, words I like, questions I have, or examples I think might fit somewhere and want to learn more about. After reading a book, I usually pull few quotes out for IG and Twitter, but Im not left with much for my blogs (or future books). Mine is more of a mess. From the beginning I found myself deeply challenged and stuck freaked out by the blank page. He would take copious notes on 4-by-6 index cards for every book that he ever read. The Kindles so convenient but after 150 books I just cant help but feel like somethings missing. Im just explaining it because people asked. I like this. I hope it inspires your own method. Even though life is not about going over a checklist, this saying conveys the importance we give, as a society, to the act of writing a book. Take the pains to write things out. Check out WritingRoutines.com. Thus our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius: for only if we think of him as being very remote from us, as a miraculum, does he not aggrieve us But, aside from these suggestions of our vanity, the activity of the genius seems in no way fundamentally different from the activity of the inventor of machines, the scholar of astronomy or history, the master of tactics. In it, you can see the notecards Nabokov made that he eventually would have pieced together into a cohesive novel. When I finish a book, I put it back on the shelf for a week or two. the entire book BEFORE writing onto note cards or do you transcribe ideas onto the note cards simultaneously? Guess whats the best way to master that kind of knowledge? Of course, I do not think of all this on my own; it mostly happens in my fileIn essence, the filing system explains my productivityFiling takes more of my time than writing the booksWithout those cards, just by contemplating, these ideas would have never occurred to me. I review the cards way more than I originally thought was necessary. In this video, the Oscar-winning filmmaker Dustin Lance Black (Milk, When We Rise) explains and shows how he researches, makes note cards, organizes those note cards, then lays out those note cards to write his screenplays. in Philosophy. I also often use clutter as a reason to take notes or pen down ideas on my computer however, I often feel a loss there too what with the lack of intimacy when things go digital. -Im sure there are other awesome people who use a similar system. Categorize each card. The pluses are that the cards are now your own. Absolutely. His company, Brass Check, has advised companies such as Google, TASER, and Complex, as well as Grammy Award winning musicians and some of the biggest authors in the world. And when you bring it into your mind, into your living sensibility, by some weird osmosis, it lifts your style or the attempts of your mind. When you read great writing, when you write down a great line or paragraph, Murphy continues, somehow or another, it contaminates you in a rich way. Thanks so much for sharing this! What Ryan is doing is pretty much straight out of the tradition of classical rhetoric. A lot. If I am taking notes for a specific project, like a book, I give it its own box. Thanks for clarifying, keep up the inspiring work and enjoy your weekend! You go to the printer and tell him I want a red line on top and then blue lines the rest of the way down on thin enough paper so they curl up on me. As the master zen Shunryu Suzuki said: In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, but in the experts there are few. It doesnt have to be all of them either. Its not an exaggeration: Nearly every dollar Ive made in my adult life was earned first on the back or front (or both) of an index card. It can work, he said, but in his experience, its rare that a synthetic startup works. When the answer is yes, I try to make a notecard as if I might want to later transfer it directly into a piece of writing. To help navigate through such complex waters, we could sure use an experienced guide, with a replicable method of proven results. I take my notes live while reading, or at least at the end of every reading session. If I want to do Leonardo da Vinci, I have 50 notecards that break him down from every possible angle. Thank you for sharing this system with us, I really appreciate you attention to detail and your no-nonsense step by step explanation of the method.