The Notecard System Great Authors Use | #26

The Notecard System Great Authors Use

No. 26 — read time 9 minutes

Welcome to The Soloist, a weekly newsletter where I share timeless ideas and insights about life, business, and art.

Today at a glance

• The Notecard System

• Tweet: Christopher Nolan & Hans Zimmer create iconic soundtracks

• Article: Understanding How Scale Works Online

• Podcast: Anne-Leure Le Cunff On Gaining Creativity

I’ve always been fascinated by the systems and processes of the greats. There’s something alluring about knowing what the daily routines of our heroes looks like.

Perhaps it’s because we know that we all share the same 24 hours. If they did it, so could anyone, right? But what is it that they do?

These kinds of questions are the reasons I go down rabbit holes of the gym routines of Kobe Bryant to the writing habits of Ernest Hemingway.

Of course this can turn into a dangerous cocktail of cargo cult mentality and survivorship bias where we think replicating the daily actions of the known “successful” types will replicate results. I’m honest with myself about the folly of such thinking. Instead, we’re probably better off with a list of daily non-actions — what actions should we avoid that all the losers shared.

Still, the brain looks to pattern match and when I stumbled upon the Notecard System of Billy Oppenheimer, it was like a portal to another dimension opened up.

Billy for those of you who don’t know is Ryan Holiday’s research assistant. Ryan Holiday is the author of a dozen books on Stoicism, philosophy, and marketing. Ryan taught Billy the Notecard System he used to build his library of knowledge that then translates into books.

And Ryan Holiday learned this system from his mentor, Robert Greene.

As I went further down this rabbit hole, I realized that the canonical answer to this system was sitting in my room, on my book shelf. An unassuming book with the title How To Take Smart Notes. I must have purchased it during grad school and then never opened it. With a title like that, can you blame me?

But as we’ll see, this unopened book on my shelf was a symbol of the larger lesson I’m going to teach you today. The idea of an anti-library for your personal knowledge management, as Taleb describes in his book Black Swan:

The Origin of the Notecard System

How To Take Smart Notes tells the story of a German bureaucrat named Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann worked in some government agency, clocking in every day at his 9-5. But Luhmann wanted more.

Luhmann was a voracious reader on nights and weekends but realized most of his reading was for naught. He didn’t remember anything he read. Then he devised a system that would not only transform his life, but the lives of countless writers, authors, researchers, and academics. He would go on to publish 58 books in a span of 30 years and offered a professorship in Sociology at the University of Berlin despite having no formal background in academia.

His system consisted of hand-writing notes on 4×6 index cards and linking the ideas using a rudimentary numbering system to connect ideas in a plain old slip-box.

In German, the slip-box is called zettelkasten.

Depending on the internet rabbit holes you’ve gone down yourself, you may be familiar with this idea. Tools like Roam, Obsidian, and Logseq have popularized it in order to sell you software.

But the system doesn’t need any software subscription to work.

All you need is a pen and some note-cards.

How The Notecard System Works

The basic premise is that to write a great piece of work, you only need to connect good notecards you’ve already written. And the way you do that is by reading with a pen in hand to underline and remember interesting things you read.

As you start to consume content with the eye of a curator, you jot notes down in the margins of books, always asking yourself “what is interesting or different about this”.

The Oppenheimer/Holiday/Greene method is to let a finished (and marked up) book sit on the shelf for 1-2 weeks to allow some time to pass before going back to write notes.

Our goal is to sharpen our lens for curation. Which nuggets truly stand the test of time.

The reason the researching, reading, and note-taking feels laborious is because it’s meant to crystallize our thinking before depositing a notecard into the vault.

Well-written notes with ideas that can be connected is less like saving money in a piggy bank and more like receiving compound interest on investments. The whole system increases in value as notes are saved.

A simple way to think about what to add (or not add) to the notecards from your previous scribbles is to ask yourself why the aspects your wrote down caught your interest to begin with.

Your goal is elaboration, which is another way of saying connecting meaningful ideas.

Here’s an example of how I connected a story Conan O’Brien shared about his decision to go into comedy with Sylvester Stallone’s story of writing the script for Rocky as a young 20-something in a 64 sq. ft. apartment in NYC:

As you start to write notes, you can organize them in one of two ways: Ideas or Numbers.

The way Luhmann did it, the zettelkasten method, is to put a number in the corner of the notecard. As notes are added you keep adding numbers sequentially so 1, 2, 3, etc.

When a new note is introduced that is related to a note you already have (either in agreement with or contradictory to), you insert it between two numbers and start breaking off into a sub-system. So a note related to note 1 would have 1a written on the corner and inserted between note 1 and 2.

You can keep doing this so 1a1, then 1a1a, etc.

Luhmann recommended some sort of loose index card up front so you have a way to jump around to major themes or ideas but the whole premise is that instead of thinking like an archivist, you’re encouraged to stumble upon ideas. To create a latticework of models as Charlie Munger calls them.

The Oppenheimer/Holiday/Greene method relies on creating your own clusters around themes or ideas:

Why The Notecard System Works: The Zeigarnik Effect

Bluma Zeigarnik was a Soviet psychologist who noticed something interesting about human memory while having lunch with colleagues at a restaurant. The waiters took everyone’s order and matched the dishes to the diner without ever writing down who ordered what. But after paying the check and leaving the restaurant, Zeigarnik returned realizing she had left her jacket behind.

The waiters, who seemed to have incredible memorization skills, didn’t remember her at all. They explained that they memorize orders and guests but the moment a table clears, they forgot all about them and moved on to the next group.

Zeigarnik was able to reproduce this phenomena in her research which became known as the Zeigarnik Effect — open tasks occupy our brain until they are finished. This is why we seem to obsess over our unfinished todos even if they aren’t that important.

What we also know is that the way to hack this phenomena in the brain is to write down our todos. This act flushes them out of our short-term memory freeing up that space to be occupied by the next thing.

The inverse is also true. By leaving a finished and marked up book on the shelf for 1-2 weeks before writing down notes, we allow our brains to continue to grapple with what we read. A sort of unfinished task that the brain ruminates on while we go about our day. This is why we get some of our best thoughts in the shower.

Once we enter our thoughts, our elaboration, into the notecard and into the slip-box, it moves from short-term memory to long-term memory. In a sense we forget them. But forgetting is the path to long-term learning. Psychologists call this active inhibition — the mind erects a barrier between long-term memory and the conscious mind. Without it we’d be flooded with facts and memories all day.

It sounds paradoxical but you need to unlearn everything school taught you. Rote memorization may help you with standardized tests but it is the opposite of how great research is done. Great research is opportunistic, not strategic. It allows the mind to connect diverse ideas to find commonalities.

That is the goal of taking and storing smart notes.

There’s much more to say on this topic but this newsletter is getting a bit long so I’ll end with this:

The quality of your writing will depend on your ability to connect ideas. And to connect ideas you need good ideas. To have good ideas you need to consume widely and then train yourself to be a tight filter, a curator. Once you curate it goes into your external memory, your second brain, allowing to stumble upon what you’ve learned and find the connections and commonalities.

At first it won’t seem like much, but as I mentioned in the beginning, this is all about compound interest.

It grows gradually, then all at once.

You can read more about Billy Oppenheimer’s notecard system here, Ryan Holiday’s system here, and Robert Greene’s system here.

Tweet: How Hans Zimmer and Christopher Nolan created iconic soundtracks together

I’m fascinated by the creative process. There are days when I sit to write and nothing comes out. And then there are the days when I want to rush out of the shower, hair still full of shampoo, to get to my computer and write down the brilliance that just struck at the most inopportune moment.

So when my favorite writers like Trung Phan dissect the creative process of some of my favorite movies’ soundtracks, I pay attention:

Article: Understanding How Scale Works Online

My friend Ben Carlson wrote an excellent essay on understanding the scale of the internet and how proximity to whales can impact our reach, careers, and reach of our work.

He also recently released a brilliant course on how to attract the attention of the most influential people on Twitter. It’s one of the best courses I’ve come across.

Podcast: Anne-Leure Le Cunff On Gaining Creativity

Anne-Leure Le Cunff writes over at Ness Labs. This is an older podcast episode I stumbled upon where she chats with Paul Millerd on creativity.

Creativity opened up for her when she started focusing on things that sparked her curiosity and passion vs things that she felt would help her be more productive or successful

Here’s the snippet:

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on retaining what you read and storing it for retrieval. I’m putting the finishing touches on my new site which will give me the space to write more long-form content.

If you’re interested in reading my long-form essays, reply back with “interested”. It’ll help me gauge how many of you prefer the quick bites vs. the deeper stuff.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Till next week,

-Tom

P.S. Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. If you save a lot of bookmarks on Twitter (like me), try dewey. —
   the easiest way to organize Twitter bookmarks (I'm one of the makers).

2. If you're looking for coaching on audience growth book a slot here.

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