Book Byte #34 "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens
One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers
📣 Curious Quotes from the Author:
“Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible.”
“We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains.”
“Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium of all this work.”
“Learning, thinking, and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking. This is done by questioning one’s own thinking routines in light of new experiences and facts.”
“The real enemy of independent thinking is not an external authority, but our own inertia. The ability to generate new ideas has more to do with breaking with old habits of thinking than with coming up with as many ideas as possible.”
“The most important advantage of writing is that it helps us confront ourselves when we do not understand something as well as we would like to believe.”
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” (Steve Jobs)”
“Good students also look beyond the obvious. They peek over the fences of their own disciplines – and once you have done that, you cannot go back and do what everyone else is doing, even if you now must deal with heterogeneous ideas that come without a manual on how they might fit together”
“An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all.”
“School is different. Pupils are usually not encouraged to follow their own learning paths, question and discuss everything the teacher is teaching and move on to another topic if something does not promise to generate interesting insight. The teacher is there for the pupils to learn. But, as Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin and brother to the great explorer Alexander von Humboldt, put it, the professor is not there for the student and the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth. And truth is always a public matter.”
📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea:
The Slip-box Method is an innovative approach to externalize your thoughts and create a repository of ideas, arguments, and facts. When used appropriately, it will behave like a conversation partner, making it easier for you to produce academic papers, think more clearly, and increase both your long-term learning and understanding.
Make smart notes part of your reading regimen.
When you're reading, keep a pen and paper nearby. Make notes on any fascinating ideas or sections. Make this simple initial step a habit; it will motivate you to begin taking permanent notes and, as you fill your slip-box, to connect them with your other notes. Once you've developed your new note-taking regimen, it will become second nature.
🛠️Fixing the Tech Industry
Note taking isn’t a big thing amongst tech people. We tend to internalize a lot of information by skimming articles or books, but we don’t know how to take good notes on a regular basis. This book will help fix that. The system was perfected over his entire career, and modern notetaking apps take a lot of his system and built it into their note taking apps.
🤝 Collaborate with others with this Social Media Prompt:
What’s your favorite note-taking app? What feature do you like the most out of it?