14 June 2020
How To Take Smart Notes
How To Take Smart Notes
One Simple Technique To Boost Writing, Learning And Thinking – For Students, Academics And Nonfiction Book Writers
Sönke Ahrens

Highlights

Yes, a certain intellectual capacity helps to get into academia, and if you struggle severely with an IQ test, it is likely that you will struggle to solve academic problems, too. But once you are in, a superior IQ will neither help you to distinguish yourself nor protect you from failure. What does make a significant difference along the whole intelligence spectrum is something else: how much self-discipline or self-control one uses to approach the tasks at hand.
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Poor students lack insight into their own limitations – as they would have to know about the vast amount of knowledge out there to be able to see how little they know in comparison. That means that those who are not very good at something tend to be overly confident, while those who have made an effort tend to underestimate their abilities.
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[M]ost distractions do not come so much from our environment, but our own minds.
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Even the best tools won’t make much of a difference if they are used in isolation. Only if they are embedded in a well-conceived working process can the tools play out their strengths. There is no point in having great tools if they don’t fit together.
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Studies on highly successful people have proven again and again that success is not the result of strong willpower and the ability to overcome resistance, but rather the result of smart working environments that avoid resistance in the first place.
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Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They rather assume that impressive results must have equally impressively complicated means.
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If we write, it is more likely that we understand what we read, remember what we learn and that our thoughts make sense.
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The more you become interested in something, the more you will read and think about it.
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As the only way to find out if something is worth reading is by reading it (even just bits of it), it makes sense to use the time spent in the best possible way. We constantly encounter interesting ideas along the way and only a fraction of them are useful for the particular paper we started reading it for. Why let them go to waste? Make a note and add it to your slip-box. It improves it. Every idea adds to what can become a critical mass that turns a mere collection of ideas into an idea-generator.
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Most people follow different lines of thought at the same time. They might focus for a while on one idea, but then leave it alone for another while until they see how to proceed further. It is helpful then to be able to pick up on another idea now and go back to the earlier thought later. It is much more realistic to keep this flexibility and you don’t have to worry about starting all over.
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An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all. Making something public always means to write it down so it can be read. There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas.
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Having a clear, tangible purpose when you attend a lecture, discussion or seminar will make you more engaged and sharpen your focus. You will not waste your time with the attempt to figure out what you “should” learn.
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You might not know where you will end up (and you don’t need to), but you can’t force insight into a preconceived direction anyway.
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Only if the work itself becomes rewarding can the dynamic of motivation and reward become self-sustainable and propel the whole process forward.
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Embracing a growth mindset means to get pleasure out of changing for the better (which is mostly inwardly rewarding) instead of getting pleasure in being praised (which is outwardly rewarding). The orientation towards the latter makes one stick to safe, proven areas. The orientation towards the first draws the attention to the areas most in need of improvement. To seek as many opportunities to learn as possible is the most reliable long-term growth strategy.
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The ability to express understanding in one’s own words is a fundamental competency for everyone who writes – and only by doing it with the chance of realizing our lack of understanding can we become better at it.
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Reading in itself can require very different kinds of attention, depending on the text. Some texts need to be read slowly and carefully, while others are only worth skimming. It would be ridiculous to adhere to a general formula and read every text in the same way, even though that is what many study guides or speed-reading courses try to convince us of. It is not a sign of professionalism to master one technique and stick to it no matter what, but to be flexible and adjust one’s reading to whatever speed or approach a text requires.
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“On one hand, those with wandering, defocused, childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be analysis and application that’s important. The answer to this conundrum is that creative people need both … The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.” (Dean, 2013, 152)
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The moment we stop making plans is the moment we start to learn.
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[G]ut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience. It is the sedimentation of deeply learned practice through numerous feedback loops on success or failure.
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Without a clear purpose for the notes, taking them will feel more like a chore than an important step within a bigger project.
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The linear process promoted by most study guides, which insanely starts with the decision on the hypothesis or the topic to write about, is a sure-fire way to let confirmation bias run rampant. First, you basically fix your present understanding, as the outcome instead of using it as the starting point, priming yourself for one-sided perception. Then you artificially create a conflict of interest between getting things done (finding support for your preconceived argument) and generating insight, turning any departure from your preconceived plan into a mutiny against the success of your own project. This is a good rule of thumb: If insight becomes a threat to your academic or writing success, you are doing it wrong.
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It is so much easier to develop an interesting text from a lively discussion with a lot of pros and cons than from a collection of one-sided notes and seemingly fitting quotes.
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The most important advantage of writing is that it helps us to confront ourselves when we do not understand something as well as we would like to believe.
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We have to choose between feeling smarter or becoming smarter. And while writing down an idea feels like a detour, extra time spent, not writing it down is the real waste of time, as it renders most of what we read as ineffectual.
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Not learning from what we read because we don’t take the time to elaborate on it is the real waste of time.
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Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given. What good readers can do is spot the limitations of a particular approach and see what is not mentioned in the text.
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Without understanding information within its context, it is also impossible to go beyond it, to reframe it and to think about what it could mean for another question.
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Any thought of a certain complexity requires writing. Coherent arguments require the language to be fixed, and only if something is written down is it fixed enough to be discussed independently from the author. The brain alone is too eager to make us feel good – even if it is by politely ignoring inconsistencies in our thinking. Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance – literally. We need this distance to think about an argument – otherwise the argument itself would occupy the very mental resources we need for scrutinizing it.
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The slip-box forces us to ask numerous elaborating questions: What does it mean? How does it connect to … ? What is the difference between … ? What is it similar to? That the slip-box is not sorted by topics is the precondition for actively building connections between notes.
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Keywords should always be assigned with an eye towards the topics you are working on or interested in, never by looking at the note in isolation.
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The brain is very good at making associations and spotting patterns and similarities between seemingly different things and also very good in spotting differences between seemingly similar things, but it needs to have them presented objectively and externally. It is much easier to see differences and similarities than to detect them by mere thinking.
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Munger writes: “Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience, both vicarious and direct, on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.”
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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.
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If we practice learning not as a pure accumulation of knowledge, but as an attempt to build up a latticework of theories and mental models to which information can stick, we enter a virtuous circle where learning facilitates learning.
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We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval).
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Even sudden breakthroughs are usually preceded by a long, intense process of preparation.
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[I]ntuition is not the opposition to rationality and knowledge, it is rather the incorporated, practical side of our intellectual endeavours, the sedimented experience on which we build our conscious, explicit knowledge.
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[N]ot having to make decisions can be quite liberating.
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The biggest threat to creativity and scientific progress is therefore the opposite: a lack of structure and restrictions. Without structure, we cannot differentiate, compare or experiment with ideas. Without restrictions, we would never be forced to make the decision on what is worth pursuing and what is not.
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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).
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It is much easier to get started if the next step is as feasible as “writing a note,” “collect what is interesting in this paper” or “turning this series of notes into a paragraph” than if we decide to spend the next days with a vague and ill-defined task like “keep working on that overdue paper.”
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Change is possible when the solution appears to be simple.