✍🏾 summary

why take notes?

We tend to remember what we think about a lot and what we view from different viewpoints. We want to take notes to retain information so we can pursue our passions.

how to take notes

Trust yourself to only write down what you need to be creative, then create new ideas from what you've learned.

Write notes by concept to find information quickly.
Link related concepts together to erase the limits on your thinking.

You can do this with your old notes too. This will make them grow over time with your new ones instead of limiting physics concepts to your physics notebook.

how not to take notes

In class, don't write down:

anything that falls under USE,
what you can remember without reminders,
appointments/to-dos, and
small facts you don't have to memorize (like the height of the Empire State Building).

Example: Write down not the examples given in class, but every part of the example that you couldn't predict. Be comfortable with forgetting the rest.

📃 context

🔎 how i discovered it

Pretty sure this one just got recommended to me via YouTube's algorithm. I watch a lot of stuff on taking notes. You might have noticed.

👀 who should watch it?

Anyone looking to remember what they hear in a class or read in a book, without needing specific tools or spending anything.

✨how it changed me

⚡ insights

I take notes to write so I can learn so I can write some more.
Creativity ≠ novelty.

🤩 seeing differently

All the content about notetaking can be filled with unexplained jargon ("PKM," "second brain," "digital garden," "commonplace book," etc), which can scare off people who just want to learn how to take notes. This video was able to talk about the same concepts without--for lack of a better term, "scaring the hoes."

💬 favorite quotes

When you’re first taught how to take notes, you’re told something along the lines of "write down the important stuff." But if you’re like a younger me, then you just interpret basically everything the teacher was saying as being important. Why else would they be telling it to you?

it took me years to learn this. children, if you internalize one thing from this note, let it be this.

When we take notes, it’s not the actual notes that we care about. Nobody takes notes just to have them. What we’re really after is the information.

ngl i also care about the notes 😅 as you can tell from this note and its structure. but i know that's not broadly true lol

In life, the goal is not to learn as much as possible; the goal is to do as much as possible.

...i might be a knowledge hoarder.

Creativity is just making something new, but oftentimes that happens by making a connection between concepts that nobody's ever thought of before.

lightbulb moment

There are no such things as disciplines in the world; there is no biology, chemistry, physics, economics, or history. It’s all just the universe; it’s just a bunch of concepts and ideas floating around and highly linked together within and across the traditional "disciplines."

that's why this garden is a Zettelkasten :)

the idea of inertia can help explain things in economics and social behavior, and so much more.

📋 references

Source: youtube link

Status: #published

Tags: notetaking, creativity