The Power of a Notebook
You should build one to unlock the potential of your knowledge and ideas.
Introduction
For centuries, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, investors and artists have used notebooks to record their knowledge, make connections between data points, and create new insights. Do you have one?
Recently, I picked up the book, Building a Second Brain written by Tiago Forte. Forte is a thought leader in note taking innovation and developed the concept of the second brain. The second brain is considered an extension of your mind; a physical or digital location where you store your most important thoughts, ideas, and insights. It is a place where you can catalogue fragmented data points that you cannot connect or analyze in the immediate moment, but want to think about later.
In fact, right now I am referencing my second brain, a database of notes kept in an app called Obsidian, to draft this post. It is exciting to see my second brain at work. After spending several months developing topics and insights upon which to build BUILDR, I am finally seeing new insights come together as I apply them to actual posts and hopefully mentorship sessions I am now sharing with you.
This video below tells you about the functionality within Obsidian. It is a cool way to link your thoughts and develop insights from notes and topics that seem relatively unrelated at face value.
However, your notebook does not have to be digital or in a fancy application. A simple word document or physical notebook will do. Interestingly, intellectuals, scientists, artists and investors have been using notebooks for centuries to store their knowledge and develop their ideas.
History of Notebooks
As Forte puts it, "For centuries, artists and intellectuals from Leonardo da Vinci to Virginia Woolf, from John Locke to Octavia Butler, have recorded the ideas they found most interesting in a book they carried around with them, known as a “commonplace book.”1
Below is a rendition of a page from Leonardo da Vinci’s “commonplace book” or notebook depicting an invention he was considering at the time.
Just as interesting, Forte notes that according to the Case for Books, written by historian and former director of the Harvard University Library, Robert Darnton,
“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.”
Application
In reality, this is much more similar to how we engage information today. We are overwhelmed by an influx of information of clutter everyday. Whether it is notifications from Whatsapp, Instagram, Twitter or your favorite news media sources. "According to the New York Times, the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes. A separate study cited by the Times estimates that we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986." 2
The current way that most of us consume information aligns more closely with the way early modern Englishmen consumed information. This also inclines us to develop rigorous note taking habits of our own. You never known what new thought or idea will come to mind as you review notes written months ago. Note taking forces you to catalogue, revisit, and re-think ideas at a later date when your mindset, attitude or context may be different. These changes can trigger a new thought or conclusion from that same note. This feels exciting to me as I try to propel myself through an entrepreneurial life.
Interestingly, this style of information consumption and analysis has led to amazing scientific discoveries. According to Forte, the two scientists that discovered the double helix structure of DNA, emphasized building models and structuring the different molecules as physical models until they discovered the famous double helix structure.
As Forte writes, “[Watson and Crick] made cardboard cutouts to approximate the shapes of the molecules they knew were part of DNA’s makeup and, like a puzzle, experimented with different ways of putting them together. They would shift around their models on their desktops, trying to find a shape that fit everything they knew about how the molecules were arranged. The double helix structure seemed to fit all known constraints, allowing the complementary base pairs to fit together perfectly while respecting the ratios between elements that had been measured previously.”
How are you experimenting the different ways your knowledge fits together? Is this a practice that could advance your thinking and ideas?
The key to Watson and Crick’s modeling is that the act of structuring their information in a new way gave them insights they could not see when looking at the same data at face value. By taking notes and re-arranging them as the early modern Englishmen and Watson and Crick did, you may be able to glean new insights from the information you capture that you could not recognize before. The notebook creates a space for you to do that, creating a backdrop for your unique and original ideas.
Since I began my own notebook a few months ago, I have developed what I call lightbulb moments. These are times when two or more notes or thoughts come together to form a new insight. It is exciting to see this happen, but it takes discipline to nurture and grow the knowledge in your notebook. Once you are able to build a system, your knowledge and critical thinking skills will grow immensely.
Here are some suggestions for nurturing and developing your notebook. First, if possible, it is best to make your notebook digital. When your notebook is digital, it can be searchable and you can quickly search ideas and share them with your friends and colleagues at a moment’t notice. You can appear really expert on niche topics when you can quickly search for a fact, data point, or quote.
Second, when you make your notebook digital, you can move ideas and content around without having to cross things out or use erasers. This prevents clutter and prevents you from losing information or ideas.
There are a number of great free applications that you can use. I am linking a video below (from Tiago Forte), which can help you pick the best application for yourself. Don’t forget, a physical notebook can work just as well. If a physical notebook is what you need to use in order to get started right away, don’t hesitate, just get going building your notes.
If you would like to discuss notebooks, your note taking style, how to set up a digital notebook and structure your notes, among other topics further with me, please consider scheduling a free kickoff mentorship session by clicking the button above.
I look forward to working more closely with you on applying the principles and ideas presented in this blog. Please also consider sharing this post with friends and subscribing to this blog in order to help build the BUILDR community, a network of young men on the African continent seeking to build something greater than themselves.
In the meantime, some questions to consider when taking new notes and building your new notebook:
What do I do with all the information coming through my feeds and how do I make sense of this?
How does this information apply to my current work, life, goals, and personal vision?
-Andrew
Just Built It.
Life. Startup. Impact.
Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain, June 14, 2022.
Ibid.