How To Take Smart Notes (3 methods no one's talking about)

The Illusion of Competence. So you read an actionable, insightful book. You learn visually by highlighting the key  points and underline the key words.

And then an hour later or maybe it's 5 minutes later, if  you're like me, you try to tell your loved ones, your friends or family about all these amazing  things that you've learned. But there's that awkward pause. .

. Why can't I explain what  I just learned? What was that idea again?

This happens to the best of us. It's  called the illusion of competence. The gist of it is all that underlining, all  that highlighting, all that note taking is giving us the illusion that we're learning  something new while our brain is just relaxing like a potato.

So how to fix it? One way is to  take smart notes. Actually, no air quotes.

These notes are actually smart. This is how Leonardo da  Vinci took notes. You know, the polymath genius who invented tanks, made scientific discoveries in  astronomy, civil engineering, zoology, geometry, and had time to paint on the side, like the Last  Supper and the Mona Lisa.

Niklas Luhmann also used smart notes and published more than 70 books  and almost 400 articles on the economy, lore, politics, art, religion, media and even love.  So if you want to become a powerful thinker, or you just want to remember the things that you've  learned, smart Notes is going to help you do that. There are 3 things that make smart notes smart. 

The first one is smart notes are active, meaning that they're not passive highlights, underlines  and notes that just follow the author's flow. 1/ active smart notes Instead, it's about actively  restructuring other people's thoughts into your own structure. Now, you might ask, Well, what is  my structure?

Well, if you don't already have one, here's a great one to get started: It's  called Q/E/C. Q/E/C. It stands for Question, Evidence and Conclusion.

This is what I used in  law school Even if you are not studying for law, this still works because Professor Cal Newport  from Georgetown University, who's written lots of books on a deep work on time blocking  on digital productivity, he uses this method, and actually he was the one that named this the  Q/E/C Note-Taking method. You look for only 3 things when you're reading: the questions, the  evidence and the conclusion. This way it doesn't matter what you're reading, which order the author  puts his ideas in.

You can always find these three things and link them together. Professor Newport  even has a system for identifying them while you read. For any conclusions, ideas, you put a  dot next to it.

For the evidence and examples, you put a dash across it. And when you review  your notes, you think about which question are these ideas trying to answer and which evidence  links to these ideas. Let me give you a quick example with the book Atomic Habits.

James Clear,  like his name, he's a very clear writer. So, many of his headings are actually already questions.  Then you go down the page and you look for new ideas and put a dot next to them.

He gives great  examples and anecdotes, so you put a dash across them. Once you've finished reading a section,  then you can put all these notes together. Start with question, give the evidence and write  the conclusion down.

This is how it can look like. Now, most people stop here, right? I've  got the question.

I've got the evidence I've got the conclusion. What more do I need?  A-ha.

This is where you are going to outsmart others. Because the next thing about smart  notes is that they are atomic. The size of your notes and the ideas on them matter.

When other  people are organizing their notes in one giant document, 2/ atomic smart notes whether digitally  or in notebook, you do something different. You make your notes atomic. This is a classic example  of how tools actually shape and limit how you can think.

Think about it. If you use a giant word  doc, how do you think? You think vertically, right?

You think chronologically, you think A,  then B, then C. If you take away A and C, all of a sudden you can't really remember what was B. But  if you use atomic ideas not in one giant document, but each idea stands alone by itself, then you  can think in 3D, right?

You can think up and down, left to right. You can think diagonally. You  can think about this pile and that pile.

All of a sudden your ideas come alive. This is what  Charlie Munger was talking about when he said "The first rule is that you can't really know anything  if you just remember isolate the facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together  on a latticework of theory, don't have them in a usable form.

" So once you've got your Q/E/C's,  you want each Q, each E, each C - each question, each evidence, each conclusion to be its own  atomic note, because in the next step we are going to rearrange them. Especially if you're using  the Zettelkasten method, making your ideas atomic is going to make all the difference. Because  the third thing that makes smart notes smart is that they are connected, which means one, we've  already connected ideas with the Q/E/C method.

But there's a two, 3/ connected smart notes which is  outside of these new things that you've learned, you also want to connect new ideas to existing  ideas, things that you already know. This is how we will combat the illusion of competence. The  way to get out of the illusion is to make sure you're latching your new ideas onto existing ones. 

And how do you do that? You can try the compass of the Zettelkasten thinking. I learned this  one from my friend Fei.

You take one idea in the middle and you think in four different directions.  Compass of Zettelkasten Thinking North is: Where does this idea come from? West is: What's  similar to this idea?

East is: What competes with this idea? And South is: Where can this  idea link to next? Let me give you an example from Atomic Habits again.

"You do not rise to the  level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. " Let's use that as the main idea.

Okay,  so let's go north. Where does this idea come from? Well, James Clear says it comes from goal oriented  thinking that most of us do.

But the problem is that winners and losers have the same goals,  right? So what's different? It's the systems they set that help them achieve those goals.

Okay,  then let's go West. What's similar to this idea of don't focus on goals, focus on the system? Well,  systems thinking is exactly about this idea.

I've talked about it in detail here. But the  gist is that you want to troubleshoot a system to make sure that you're reaching your  eventual goal. So just like how we manage large organizations, we can apply similar  principles in our habit formations.

Okay, then let's go east. What competes with this idea  of focus on systems, not goals? What's opposite?

What's missing? Well, we can say that goal setting  is important. Right.

It gives us a direction to go towards and then have the system that get you  there. But if your goals are wrong and you are on the wrong trajectory, then it doesn't matter how  good your system is, you're not going to get to where you want to go. Goal setting has to happen  first, but then you need the systems.

All right, then, let's go south. Where does the idea of goals  and systems lead to? Well, as James Clear said himself, is not just about forming good habits. 

It's also about breaking bad habits. Forming atomic habits has helped people with addiction,  with weight loss goals. Coming back to systems thinking and larger organizations.

Maybe we can  apply the same principles and help organizations break bad habits like problems in diversity, like  protecting the environment. Wow. Just by thinking in four different directions, we're coming up with  ways to solve climate change and diversity issues.

Connecting ideas is essential. And if you want  to take your smart note-taking to the next level, then make sure you check out my Zettelkasten  guide and I'll see you in the next one. Bye!