Sönke Ahrens
A coach is not there to do the work, but to show us how to use our time and effort in the most effective way. What is self-evident…
A common way to embed an idea into the context of the slip-box is by writing out the reasons of its importance for your own lines …
A good structure enables flow, the state in which you get so completely immersed in your work that you lose track of time and can …
A pure topic-related order would have to be organised top down and requires a hierarchical order up front. A pure abstract order w…
A typical work day will contain many, if not all, of these steps: You read and take notes. You build connections within the slip-b…
Acts of self-control, responsible decision making, and active choice seem to interfere with other such acts that follow soon after…
Add links to other notes or links on other notes to your new note. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Notes…
Adding links to related notes. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Notes…
After a while, you will have developed ideas far enough to decide on a topic to write about. Your topic is now based on what you h…
After aligning our interests, we can go a step further and prime ourselves for seeking out dis-confirming facts. Collecting only o…
After collecting notes for a while in the way most people do, commenting in the margins of a text or collecting handwritten notes …
After doing extensive research on Luhmann’s workflow, the German sociologist Johannes F.K. Schmidt concluded his productivity coul…
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 a…
And this is the other insight of David Allen: Only if you can trust your system, only if you really know that everything will be t…
Another key point: Try working on different manuscripts at the same time. While the slip-box is already helpful to get one project…
Another seemingly banal tip relates to a distinguishing feature of extraordinary thinkers: Taking simple ideas seriously. Consider…
Any thought of a certain complexity requires writing. Coherent arguments require the language to be fixed, and only if something i…
As he treats every note as if it belongs to the “permanent” category, the notes will never build up a critical mass. The collectio…
As it is not possible to foresee the development of the slip-box, the fate of the notes is nothing to worry about. In contrast to …
As the slip-box is not a book with just one topic, we don’t need to have an overview of it. On the contrary, we are much better of…
Attention is not our only limited resource. Our short-term memory is also limited. We need strategies not to waste its capacity wi…
Because the slip-box is not intended to be an encyclopaedia, but a tool to think with, we don’t need to worry about completeness. …
Being able to abstract and re-specify ideas is, again, only one side of the equation. It is not good for anything if we don’t have…
Being able to finish a task in a timely manner and to pick up the work exactly where we left it has another enjoyable advantage th…
Being open for feedback doesn’t help very much if the only feedback you can get comes once every few months for work you have alre…
But doesn’t it make much more sense that the impressive body of work was produced not in spite of the fact he never made himself d…
By always using the same notebook for making quick notes, always extracting the main ideas from a text in the same way and always …
By focusing on what is interesting and keeping written track of your own intellectual development, topics, questions and arguments…
By linking two related notes regardless of where they are within the slip-box or within different contexts, surprising new lines o…
By taking into account these little insights into how our brains work, we can make sure that we will not get distracted by thought…
Change is possible when the solution appears to be simple. And that is the very good news at the end. The slip-box is as simple as…
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, stresses the importance of having a broad theore…
Chess players seem to think less than beginners. Rather, they see patterns and let themselves be guided by their experience from t…
Comparing notes also helps us to detect contradictions, paradoxes or oppositions – important facilitators for insight. When we rea…
Confirmation bias is a subtle but major force. As the psychologist Raymond Nickerson puts it: “If one were to attempt to identify …
Confirmation bias is tackled here in two steps: First, by turning the whole writing process on its head, and secondly, by changing…
Conversely, we can use the Zeigarnik effect to our advantage by deliberately keeping unanswered questions in our mind. We can rumi…
Do not brainstorm for a topic. Look into the slip-box instead to see where chains of notes have developed and ideas have been buil…
Embracing a growth mindset means to get pleasure out of changing for the better (which is mostly inwardly rewarding) instead of ge…
Even doctoral students sometimes just collect de-contextualised quotes from a text – probably the worst possible approach to resea…
Even hard work can be fun as long as it is aligned with our intrinsic goals and we feel in control. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Tak…
Even though planning is often at odds with the very idea of research and learning, it is the mantra of most study guides and self-…
Even though the slip-box, being organised bottom-up, does not face the trade-off problem between too many or too few topics, it to…
Even though you could basically emulate the slip-box with any program that allows setting links and tagging (like Evernote or a Wi…
Every intellectual endeavour starts with a note. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Notes…
Every step is accompanied by questions like: How does this fact fit into my idea of …? How can this phenomenon be explained by tha…
Experts, on the other hand, have internalised the necessary knowledge so they don’t have to actively remember rules or think consc…
Filing each one behind one or more related notes (with a program, you can put one note “behind” multiple notes; – Sönke Ahrens in …
Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later. – Sönke Ah…
Fleeting notes are there for capturing ideas quickly while you are busy doing something else. When you are in a conversation, list…
Fleeting notes, which are only reminders of information, can be written in any kind of way and will end up in the trash within a d…
Focusing exclusively on the index would basically mean that we always know upfront what we are looking for – we would have to have…
Focusing on writing also doesn’t mean to stop giving presentations or finding other ways of making your thoughts public. Where els…
Getting something that is already written into another written piece is incomparably easier than assembling everything in your min…
Good Solutions are Simple – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Notes…
Good questions are in the sweet spot of being relevant and interesting, not too easy to answer but possible to tackle with materia…
Good students, on the other hand, constantly raise the bar for themselves as they focus on what they haven’t learned and mastered …
Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about something. If you make a plan, you impose a st…
He not only stressed that he never forced himself to do something he didn’t feel like, he even said: “I only do what is easy. I on…
He usually wrote his notes with an eye towards already existing notes in the slip-box. And while the notes on the literature were …
Here, gut feeling is not a mysterious force, but an incorporated history of experience. It is the sedimentation of deeply learned …
His slip-box became his dialogue partner, main idea generator and productivity engine. It helped him to structure and develop his …
Ideally, new notes are written with explicit reference to already existing notes. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Notes…
If I were a psychologist, this book would interest me for completely different reasons than if I were a politician or a debt advis…
If there is one thing the experts agree on, then it is this: You have to externalise your ideas, you have to write. Richard Feynma…
If we accompany every step of our work with the question, “What is interesting about this?” and everything we read with the questi…
If we look into our slip-box to see where clusters have built up, we not only see possible topics, but topics we have already work…
If we try to please the critical reader instantly, our workflow would come to a standstill. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart …
If you change your mind about the importance of writing, you will also change your mind about everything else. Even if you decide …
If you decide to write your notes by hand, just keep them in one place and sort them alphabetically in the usual way: “SurnameYear…
If you use the slip-box for a while, you will inevitably make a sobering discovery: The great new idea you are about to add to the…
Imagine if we went through life learning only what we planned to learn or being explicitly taught. I doubt we would have even lear…
In 30 years, he published 58 books and hundreds of articles, translations not included. Many became classics in their respective f…
In contrast to manuscript pages per day, a certain number of notes a day is a reasonable goal for academic writing. And that is be…
In order to develop a good question to write about or find the best angle for an assignment, one must already have put some though…
In the old system, the question is: Under which topic do I store this note? In the new system, the question is: In which context w…
In truth, it is highly unlikely that every text you read will contain exactly the information you looked for and nothing else. Oth…
Instead of having different storage for different ideas, everything goes into the same slip-box and is standardised into the same …
Instead of reviewing a text, you could just as well play a round of ping-pong. In fact, chances are it would help you more because…
Instead of spending your time worrying about finding the right topic, you will spend your time actually working on your already ex…
Instead of struggling with adverse dynamics, highly productive people deflect resistance, very much like judo champions. – Sönke A…
It is also easier to focus on finding the right words if we don’t have to think about the structure of the text at the same time, …
It is important to always keep in mind that making these links is not a chore, a kind of file-box maintenance. The search for mean…
It is important, though, to understand outlining not as the preparation of writing or even as planning, but as a separate task we …
It is not about redoing what you have done before, but about changing the way of working from now on. There is really no need to r…
It is not just about feeling in control, it is about setting up the work in a way that we really are in control. And the more cont…
It is not surprising, therefore, that the best-researched and most successful learning method is elaboration. It is very similar t…
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…
It is the one decision in the beginning, to make writing the mean and the end of the whole intellectual endeavour, that changed th…
It will change the way you read as well: You will become more focused on the most relevant aspects, knowing that you cannot write …
Just amassing notes in one place would not lead to anything other than a mass of notes. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Note…
Just by working with the slip-box, we retrieve old ideas and facts on an irregular basis and connect them with other bits of infor…
Keywords should always be assigned with an eye towards the topics you are working on or interested in, never by looking at the not…
Letting the inner critic interfere with the author isn’t helpful, either. Here we have to focus our attention on our thoughts. If …
Like every change in behaviour, a change in working habits means going through a phase where you are drawn back to your old ways. …
Lonka recommends what Luhmann recommends: Writing brief accounts on the main ideas of a text instead of collecting quotes. And she…
Look to which note the new one directly relates or, if it does not relate directly to any other note yet, just file it behind the …
Luhmann almost never read a text twice (Hagen 1997) and was still regarded as an impressive conversation partner who seemed to hav…
Luhmann collected up to 25 links to other notes on these kind of entry notes. They don’t have to be written in one go as links can…
Luhmann states as clearly as possible: it is not possible to think systematically without writing – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take …
Luhmann, working with pen and paper, would put a note behind an existing one and number it accordingly. If the existing note bore …
Luhmann’s answer to the question of how one person could be so productive was that he never forced himself to do anything and only…
Luhmann’s slip-box contains about 90,000 notes, which sounds like an incredibly large number. But it only means that he wrote six …
Make fleeting notes. Always have something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind. Don’t worry too m…
Make literature notes. Whenever you read something, make notes about the content. Write down what you don’t want to forget or thin…
Make sure it can be found from the index; add an entry in the index if necessary or refer to it from a note that is connected to t…
Making sure you will be able to find this note later by either linking to it from your index or by making a link to it on a note t…
Mistaking learning with cramming is still very much ingrained in our educational culture. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart No…
More often than not, a new note would directly follow up on another note and would become part of a longer chain of notes. – Sönke…
More people in a brainstorming group usually come up with less good ideas and restrict themselves inadvertently to a narrower rang…
Most ideas will not stand the test of time, while others might become the seed for a major project. Unfortunately, they are not ea…
Most notes will be found through other notes. The organisation of the notes is in the network of references in the slip-box, so al…
Most people still think about thinking as a purely internal process, and believe that the only function of the pen is to put finis…
Most people try to reduce complexity by separating what they have into smaller stacks, piles or separate folders. They sort their …
Multitasking is not what we think it is. It is not focusing attention on more than one thing at a time. Nobody can do that. When w…
Munger writes: “Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’…
Not having to think about the organisation is really good news for brains like ours – the few mental resources we have available, …
Nothing in this box would ever get thrown away. Some notes might disappear into the background and never catch his attention again…
Nothing motivates us more than the experience of becoming better at what we do. And the only chance to improve in something is get…
Often, companies don’t even keep track of their own failed attempts, providing McMath with whole series in which one kind of mista…
On top of that, the strict chronological order does not offer any help to find, combine or rearrange ideas in a productive sense. …
One of the most difficult tasks is to rigorously delete what has no function within an argument – “kill your darlings.”[42] This b…
One thing is for sure: the common idea that we should liberate ourselves from any restrictions and “open ourselves up” to be more …
Only if we know that everything is taken care of, from the important to the trivial, can we let go and focus on what is right in f…
Only in the written form can an argument be looked at with a certain distance – literally. We need this distance to think about an…
Or the third option is the simple fact that something is still in our in-box waiting to be turned into a permanent note – a quick …
Organizing the work so we can steer our projects in the most promising direction not only allows us to stay focused for longer, bu…
Oshin Vartanian compared and analysed the daily workflows of Nobel Prize winners and other eminent scientists and concluded that i…
Our fascination with these stories clouds the fact that all good ideas need time. Even sudden breakthroughs are usually preceded b…
Outlining or changing the outline is also a very different task that requires a very different focus on something else: not on one…
Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context the…
Permanent notes, which will never be thrown away and contain the necessary information in themselves in a permanently understandab…
Physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman once said that he could only determine whether he understood something if he coul…
Project notes, which are only relevant to one particular project. They are kept within a project-specific folder and can be discar…
Proofreading, for example, is obviously part of the writing process, but requires a very different state of mind than the attempt …
Psychologists used to associate scientific work exclusively with focused attention, while other, more floating kinds of attention …
Reading with a pen in the hand, for example, forces, us to think about what we read and check upon our understanding. It is the si…
Real experts, Flyvbjerg writes unambiguously, don’t make plans – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Notes…
Sometimes the only thing that is done is underlining sentences and making some comments in the margins of a book, which is almost …
Sometimes, the confrontation with old notes helps to detect differences we wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. What seems to be the s…
Studies on highly successful people have proven again and again that success is not the result of strong willpower and the ability…
Sure, planning will get you through your exams if you stick to them and push through. But it will not make you an expert in the ar…
Take more notes, develop ideas further and see where things will take you. Just follow your interest and always take the path that…
Taking permanent notes of our own thoughts is a form of self-testing as well: do they still make sense in writing? Are we even abl…
The ability to change the direction of our work opportunistically is a form of control that is completely different from the attem…
The beauty of this approach is that we co-evolve with our slip-boxes: we build the same connections in our heads while we delibera…
The beginning of the research project that led to the discovery of DNA’s structure was the application for a grant. The grant was …
The best way to deal with complexity is to keep things as simple as possible and to follow a few basic principles. The simplicity …
The best way to maintain the feeling of being in control is to stay in control. And to stay in control, it's better to keep your o…
The biggest advantage compared to a top-down storage system organised by topics is that the slip-box becomes more and more valuabl…
The biggest threat to creativity and scientific progress is therefore the opposite: a lack of structure and restrictions. Without …
The brain works with rules of thumb and makes things look as if they fit, even if they don’t. It remembers events that never happe…
The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forwar…
The consideration of how to structure a topic, therefore, belongs on notes as well – and not on a meta-hierarchical level. – Sönke…
The constant comparing of notes also serves as an ongoing examination of old notes in a new light. I am surprised how often the ad…
The fact that too much order can impede learning has become more and more known (Carey 2014). Conversely, we know that the deliber…
The first step is to break down the amorphous task of “writing” into smaller pieces of different tasks that can be finished in one…
The first system is designed to find things you deliberately search for, putting all the responsibility on your brain. The slip-bo…
The first type of links are those on notes that are giving you the overview of a topic. These are notes directly referred to from …
The goal here is to get into the habit of fetching pen and paper whenever we read something, to write down the most important and …
The good news is that we can train ourselves to stay focused on one thing for longer if we avoid multitasking, remove possible dis…
The idea is not to collect, but to develop ideas, arguments and discussions. Does the new information contradict, correct, support…
The last element in his file system was an index, from which he would refer to one or two notes that would serve as a kind of entr…
The last type of note, the ones that are related to only one specific project, are kept together with other project-related notes …
The lesson to draw is to be generally sceptical about planning, especially if it is merely focused on the outcome, not on the actu…
The linear process promoted by most study guides, which insanely starts with the decision on the hypothesis or the topic to write …
The material will cluster around the questions they returned to most often, so they don’t risk too far of a departure from their i…
The most common form of reference is plain note-to-note links. They have no function other than indicating a relevant connection b…
The only permanently stored notes are the literature notes in the reference system and the main notes in the slip-box. The former …
The outcome is unambiguous: While those who multitasked felt more productive, their productivity actually decreased – a lot (Wang …
The problems arise when we set up our work in such an inflexible way that we can’t adjust it when things change and become arreste…
The right question is: What can we do differently in the weeks, months or even years before we face the blank page that will get u…
The risk of losing interest in what we do is high when we decide upfront on a long-term project without much clue about what to ex…
The same goes for writing permanent notes, which have another feedback loop built-in: Expressing our own thoughts in writing makes…
The slip-box imposes quite a few restrictions on its user. Instead of having the choice between all kinds of fancy notebooks, pape…
The slip-box is in some way what the chemical industry calls “verbund.” This is a setup in which the inevitable by-product of one …
The slip-box is not a collection of notes. Working with it is less about retrieving specific notes and more about being pointed to…
The slip-box not only confronts us with dis-confirming information, but also helps with what is known as the feature-positive effe…
The slip-box takes care of storing facts and information. Thinking and understanding is what it can’t take off your shoulders, whi…
The teacher is there for the pupils to learn. But, as Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin and broth…
The technique of writing a certain amount every day was perfected by Anthony Trollope, one of the most popular and productive auth…
The third typical mistake is, of course, to treat all notes as fleeting ones. You can easily spot this approach by the mess that c…
The way people choose their keywords shows clearly if they think like an archivist or a writer. Do they wonder where to store a no…
There are few serious knowledge workers left who haven’t heard of “GTD” and that is for a good reason: It works. The principle of …
There is no need to build a complex system and there is no need to reorganise everything you already have. You can start working a…
There is one reliable sign if you managed to structure your workflow according to the fact that writing is not a linear process, b…
There is quite extensive empirical and logical research on this phenomenon (for an overview: cf. Sull and Eisenhardt, 2015). – Sön…
These are the steps, presented as if you will write only one paper/article at a time. In reality, you never work on just one idea,…
These studies help to solve a puzzle that has bothered psychologists who study creative people as well. “On one hand, those with w…
Thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas is the main work of everyone who studies, does research or writes.…
This kind of self-imposed restriction is counterintuitive in a culture where more choice is usually regarded as a good thing and m…
This shows that elaborating on the differences and similarities of notes instead of sorting them by topic not only facilitates lea…
This very much resembles, of course, the way we use hyperlinks on the internet. But, as I will explain later, they are quite diffe…
Those who rely on their brains will first ask themselves, then their supervisor: I read so much, but what should I write about? On…
To be able to become an expert, we need the freedom to make our own decisions and all the necessary mistakes that help us learn. L…
To be able to play with ideas, we first have to liberate them from their original context by means of abstraction and re-specifica…
To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a good draft; to get a good draft written, you only have to turn a series of…
To seek as many opportunities to learn as possible is the most reliable long-term growth strategy. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take…
Truth does not belong to anyone; it is the outcome of the scientific exchange of written ideas. This is why the presentation and t…
Unfortunately, David Allen’s technique cannot simply be transferred to the task of insightful writing. The first reason is that GT…
We are still so used to the idea that a great outcome requires great effort that we tend not to believe that a simple change in ou…
We can provide ourselves with a (temporarily valid) overview over a topic or subtopic just by making another note. If we then link…
We don’t just play with ideas in our heads, but do something with them in a very concrete way: We think about what they mean for o…
We have to read with a pen in hand, develop ideas on paper and build up an ever-growing pool of externalised thoughts. We will not…
We know for example that watching television reduces the attention span of children (Swing et al. 2010). – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How t…
We know today that self-control and self-discipline have much more to do with our environment than with ourselves (cf. Thaler, 201…
We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), bu…
We need a reliable and simple external structure to think in that compensates for the limitations of our brains. – Sönke Ahrens in…
We tend to think that big transformations have to start with an equally big idea. But more often than not, it is the simplicity of…
What all these category-confusing approaches have in common is that the benefit of note-taking decreases with the number of notes …
What does make a significant difference along the whole intelligence spectrum is something else: how much self-discipline or self-…
What they all have in common, though, is that they start with a blank screen or sheet of paper.[1] But by doing this, they ignore …
What we can take from Allen as an important insight is that the secret to a successful organization lies in the holistic perspecti…
What we regard as being relevant for a topic and how we structure it will change over time. This change might lead to another note…
When it comes to writing, everything, from research to proofreading, is closely connected. All the little steps must be linked in …
When you close the folder for your current project in the evening and nothing is left on your desk other than pen and paper, you k…
Whenever he added a note, he checked his slip-box for other relevant notes to make possible connections between them. – Sönke Ahre…
Whenever he read something, he would write the bibliographic information on one side of a card and make brief notes about the cont…
While we want to remember some things as long as possible, we don’t want to clog our brains with irrelevant information. And the w…
Working as if nothing else counts than writing does not mean spending more time writing at the expense of everything else. Only if…
Working with the slip-box, therefore, doesn’t mean storing information in there instead of in your head, i.e. not learning. On the…
Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources,…
Writing is not a linear process. We constantly have to jump back and forth between different tasks. It wouldn’t make any sense to …
Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have. Not…
Writing plays such a central role in learning, studying and research that it is surprising how little we think about it. – Sönke A…
You can use this pool of notes not only to make writing easier and more fun for yourself, but also to learn for the long run and g…
You may remember from school the difference between an exergonic and an endergonic reaction. In the first case, you constantly nee…
Zooming out to the bigger picture does not really help, either, because then we have next steps like “writing a page.” That does n…
a system is needed to keep track of the ever-increasing pool of information, which allows one to combine different ideas in an int…
and the main one in which he collected and generated his ideas, mainly in response to what he read. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Tak…
any improvement in the way we organise the everyday writing, how we take notes of what we encounter and what we do with them, will…
as Levy writes: “no matter how internal processes are implemented, (you) need to understand the extent to which the mind is relian…
good, productive writing is based on good note-taking. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Notes…
most importantly, without a permanent reservoir of ideas, you will not be able to develop any major ideas over a longer period of …
most of all, you can write every day in a way that brings your projects forward. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Notes…
real thinking requires some kind of externalization, especially in the form of writing. – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Note…
thanks to Zeigarnik’s follow-up research, we also know that we don’t actually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop …
the long-term, cross-topic organization of notes, which is guided only by one’s own understanding and interest, is very much at od…
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 …
they will not help you in the later stages of the writing process, as no underlined sentence will ever present itself when you nee…
we have to thank Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik for her insight and observational skills. The story goes that she went for lu…
we need a note-taking system that is as comprehensive as GTD, but one that is suitable for the open-ended process of writing, lear…
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 mos…
‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.” (Kant 1784) – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ Ho…
“By learning, retaining, and building on the retained basics, we are creating a rich web of associated information. The more we kn…
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they…
“I always have a slip of paper at hand, on which I note down the ideas of certain pages. On the backside I write down the bibliogr…
“I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else.” – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take…
“I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand and enter in a little book short hints of what you feel that is common or that…
“If learning is your goal, cramming is an irrational act” (Doyle and Zakrajsek 2013). – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Notes…
“If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.” (John Searle) – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Notes…
“In any case, no matter how internal processes are implemented, insofar as thinkers are genuinely concerned with what enables huma…
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we shoul…
“Notes on paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, t…
“Writing itself makes you realise where there are holes in things. I’m never sure what I think until I see what I write. And so I …
“latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), – Sönke Ahrens in ⚟ How to Take Smart Notes…
“writing has to be difficult,” “the struggle is part of the deal” are just a few of the mantras that keep too many from inquiring …