Keypoints

Environmental Influence on our habits and behaviours

Habit change and by extension behaviour change can be facilitated by changing our environments. Another way is using self-discipline or self-control but we have a limited supply of both. Therefore it is the easiest to change our environments. It also reduces decision fatigue.

Importance of Routines

Routines help enter the [[Evergreen Notes/The Hyperfocus || flow state]] easier and negate the [[Evergreen Notes/Decision Fatigue || Ego Depletion]]

What are Quick notes or fleeting notes?

The brain can gain new-insights at any moment. It doesn't wait for the right place and time and usually when the insight does strike you are underequipped to process it there and then. Therefore, in-order to ensure the safe-keeping of that idea, use Quick Capture

What are Literature notes?

Literature notes are essentially [[Evergreen Notes/Quick Capture]] notes but they are made when you are doing serious reading. They are more precise and their meaning should be understandable even after a day or two of them being made.

What are Permanent or Evergreen notes?

In these notes, you gather both the [[Evergreen Notes/Quick Capture]] notes and the [[Evergreen Notes/Literature Notes]] and extract the ideas out of them, to distil all the relevant information out of those ideas and make several [[Evergreen Notes/Permanent Notes || Evergreen Notes]] in your own words.

How to use the Zettelkasten method

The Zettelkasten method essentially involves five steps four of which are dedicated to consuming and note-taking and the last one is dedicated to writing your own pieces of text and developing arguments, questions and topics.

1. The first step is about [[Evergreen Notes/Quick Capture]]
2. The second step is about making [[Evergreen Notes/Literature Notes]]
3. The third step is about making [[Evergreen Notes/Permanent Notes || Evergreen Notes]]
4. The forth step is to add all of the [[Evergreen Notes/Permanent Notes || Evergreen Notes]] to the [[Evergreen Notes/The Slip Box]]
5. The fifth step is about using all the information at your service inside your [[Evergreen Notes/The Slip Box]] to form arguments, topics and questions bottom-up(from material to a topic) rather than top-down(from topic to material)

Highlights

New highlights added October 19th, 2020 at 5:15 PM

Everybody writes. Especially in academia. (Location 112)

writing doesn’t necessarily mean papers, articles or books, but everyday, basic writing. We write when we need to remember something, be it an idea, a quote or the outcome of a study. We write when we want to organise our thoughts and when we want to exchange ideas with others. (Location 114)

Every intellectual endeavour starts with a note. (Location 117)

Writing is not what follows research, learning or studying, it is the medium of all this work. (Location 134)

Every task that is interesting, meaningful and well-defined will be done, because there is no conflict between long- and short-term interests. Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time. Not having willpower, but not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success. (Location 179)

New highlights added October 19th, 2020 at 5:20 PM

What does make a significant difference along the whole intelligence spectrum is something else: how much self-discipline or self-control one uses to approach the tasks at hand (Location 166)

Note: That matter of who will succeed given that you have the minimum IQ and stuff. As long as you are minimally qualified, this applies.

self-control and self-discipline have much more to do with our environment than with ourselves (Location 176)

New highlights added October 19th, 2020 at 6:01 PM

A good structure allows you to do that, to move seamlessly from one task to another – without threatening the whole arrangement or losing sight of the bigger picture. A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you from the burden of remembering and keeping track of everything. (Location 189)

Note: A good stucture allows to say: “I never force myself to do anything I don’t feel like. Whenever I am stuck, I do something else.”

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 just keep on going as the work becomes effortless (Location 195)

Having a clear structure to work in is completely different from making plans about something. If you make a plan, you impose a structure on yourself; it makes you inflexible. To keep going according to plan, you have to push yourself and employ willpower. This is not only demotivating, but also unsuitable for an open-ended process like research, thinking or studying in general, where we have to adjust our next steps with every new insight, understanding or achievement – which we ideally have on a regular basis and not just as an exception. (Location 201)

The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward. We do not want to make ourselves dependent on a plan that is threatened by the unexpected, like a new idea, discovery – or insight. (Location 208)

Planners are also unlikely to continue with their studies after they finish their examinations. They are rather glad it is over. Experts, on the other hand, would not even consider voluntarily giving up what has already proved to be rewarding and fun: learning in a way that generates real insight, is accumulative and sparks new ideas. (Location 212)

poor students often feel more successful (until they are tested), because they don’t experience much self-doubt. In psychology, this is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect (Location 228)

Routines require simple, repeatable tasks that can become automatic and fit together seamlessly (cf. Mata, Todd, and Lippke, 2010). Only when all the related work becomes part of an overarching and interlocked process, where all bottlenecks are removed, can significant change take place (Location 268)

New highlights added October 27th, 2020 at 1:24 PM

Studies on highly successful people have proven again and again that success is not the result of strong willpower and the ability to overcome resistance, but rather the result of smart working environments that avoid resistance in the first place (Location 381)

It is about having the right tools and knowing how to use them – and very few understand that you need both. (Location 386)

Note: "It" being success

Intuitively, most people do not expect much from simple ideas. They rather assume that impressive results must have equally impressively complicated means. (Location 403)

New highlights added October 27th, 2020 at 2:48 PM

Writing is, without dispute, the best facilitator for thinking, reading, learning, understanding and generating ideas we have. Notes build up while you think, read, understand and generate ideas, because you have to have a pen in your hand if you want to think, read, understand and generate ideas properly anyway. If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words. Thinking takes place as much on paper as in your own head. “Notes on paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporary physics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make it possible,” (Location 494)

New highlights added October 27th, 2020 at 2:54 PM

Always have something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind. Don’t worry too much about how you write it down or what you write it on. These are fleeting notes, mere reminders of what is in your head. They should not cause any distraction. Put them into one place, which you define as your inbox, and process them later. (Location 511)

New highlights added October 27th, 2020 at 2:56 PM

Whenever you read something, make notes about the content. Write down what you don’t want to forget or think you might use in your own thinking or writing. Keep it very short, be extremely selective, and use your own words. Be extra selective with quotes – don’t copy them to skip the step of really understanding what they mean. Keep these notes together with the bibliographic details in one place – your reference system. (Location 516)

New highlights added October 27th, 2020 at 3:15 PM

1. Make fleeting notes. Always have something at hand to write with to capture every idea that pops into your mind. Don’t worry too much about how you write it down or what you write it on. These are fleeting notes, mere reminders of what is in your head. They should not cause any distraction. Put them into one place, which you define as your inbox, and process them later. I usually have a simple notebook with me, but I am happy with napkins or receipts if nothing else is at hand. Sometimes I leave a voice record on my phone. If your thoughts are already sorted and you have the time, you can skip this step and write your idea directly down as a proper, permanent note for your slip-box. 2. Make literature notes. Whenever you read something, make notes about the content. Write down what you don’t want to forget or think you might use in your own thinking or writing. Keep it very short, be extremely selective, and use your own words. Be extra selective with quotes – don’t copy them to skip the step of really understanding what they mean. Keep these notes together with the bibliographic details in one place – your reference system. 3. Make permanent notes. Now turn to your slip-box. Go through the notes you made in step one or two (ideally once a day and before you forget what you meant) and think about how they relate to what is relevant for your own research, thinking or interests. This can soon be done by looking into the slip-box – it only contains what interests you anyway. The idea is not to collect, but to develop ideas, arguments and discussions. Does the new information contradict, correct, support or add to what you already have (in the slip-box or on your mind)? Can you combine ideas to generate something new? What questions are triggered by them?    Write exactly one note for each idea and write as if you were writing for someone else: Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references and try to be as precise, clear and brief as possible. Throw away the fleeting notes from step one and put the literature notes from step two into your reference system. You can forget about them now. All that matters is going into the slip-box. 4. Now add your new permanent notes to the slip-box by: a)    Filing each one behind one or more related notes (with a program, you can put one note “behind” multiple notes; if you use pen and paper like Luhmann, you have to decide where it fits best and add manual links to the other notes). 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 last one. b)    Adding links to related notes. c)    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 that you use as an entry point to a discussion or topic and is itself linked to the index. 5. Develop your topics, questions and research projects bottom up from within the system. See what is there, what is… (Location 510)

In truth, it is highly unlikely that every text you read will contain exactly the information you looked for and nothing else. Otherwise, you must have already known what was in there and wouldn’t have had reason to read it in the first place.[7] (Location 566)

As the only way to find out if something is worth reading is by reading it (even just bits of it), it makes sense to use the time spent in the best possible way. We constantly encounter interesting ideas along the way and only a fraction of them are useful for the particular paper we started reading it for. Why let them go to waste? Make a note and add it to your slip-box. It improves it. Every idea adds to what can become a critical mass that turns a mere collection of ideas into an idea-generator. A typical work day will contain many, if not all, of these steps: You read and take notes. You build connections within the slip-box, which in itself will spark new ideas. You write them down and add them to the discussion. You write on your paper, notice a hole in the argument and have another look in the file system for the missing link. You follow up on a footnote, go back to research and might add a fitting quote to one of your papers in the making. How focused you want to read depends on your priorities. You don’t have to read anything you don’t consider an absolute necessity for finishing your most urgent paper, but you will still encounter a lot of other ideas and information along the way. Spending the little extra time to add them to your system will make all the difference, because the accidental encounters make up the majority of what we learn. Imagine if we went through life learning only what we planned to learn or being explicitly taught. I doubt we would have even learned to speak. Each added bit of information, filtered only by our interest, is a contribution to our future understanding, thinking and writing. And the best ideas are usually the ones we haven’t anticipated anyway. (Location 568)

New highlights added October 30th, 2020 at 12:56 PM

The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering. (Location 797)

Permanent notes, on the other hand, are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from. (Location 848)

The extraordinary successful fitness motivation coach Michelle Segar uses this dynamic to turn even the most stubborn couch potatoes into exercise aficionados (Segar, 2015). She brings those who really don’t like exercise but know they have to do it into a sustainable workout routine by focusing on one thing: Creating satisfying, repeatable experiences with sports. It doesn’t matter what her clients are doing – running, walking, team sports, gym workouts or bicycling to work. The only thing that matters is that they discover something that gives them a good experience that they would like to have again. Once her clients find something, they are encouraged enough to try something else as well. They enter the virtuous circle where willpower isn’t needed anymore because they feel like doing it anyway. If they tried to trick themselves into exercise by rewarding themselves afterwards with a relaxed evening on the sofa watching TV, it wouldn’t have taken them long until they went straight for the sofa, skipping the workout altogether, because this is how we tick. (Location 999)

In an experiment, beginner and expert paramedics and their teachers were shown scenes of CPR performed by either experienced paramedics or those who had just finished their training (Flyvbjerg 2001).[19] As you might expect, the experienced paramedics were able to spot their kind correctly in almost all cases (~90%), while the beginners were more or less just guessing (~50%). So far, so good. But when the teachers watched the videos, they systematically mistook the beginners for experts and the experts for beginners. They were wrong in most of the cases (and only right in about a third of all the cases). Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, researchers on expertise, have a simple explanation: Teachers tend to mistake the ability to follow (their) rules with the ability to make the right choices in real situations. Unlike the expert paramedics, they did not look at the unique circumstances and check if the paramedics in the videos did the best thing possible in each individual situation. Instead, they focused on the question of whether the people in the videos acted according to the rules they taught. Because trainees lack the experience to judge a situation correctly and confidently, they need to stick to the rules they were taught, much to the delight of their teachers. According to the Dreyfuses, the correct application of teachable rules enables you to become a competent “performer” (which corresponds to a “3” on their five-grade expert scale), but it won’t make you a “master” (level 4) and certainly won’t turn you into an “expert” (level 5). Experts, on the other hand, have internalised the necessary knowledge so they don’t have to actively remember rules or think consciously about their choices. They have acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition to know what to do in which kind of situation. Their decisions in complex situations are explicitly not made by long rational-analytical considerations, but rather come from the gut (cf. Gigerenzer, 2008a, 2008b). (Location 1224)

Zeigarnik successfully reproduced what is now known as the Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory – until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted by thoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance. But 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 thinking about them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of. That’s right: The brain doesn't distinguish between an actual finished task and one that is postponed by taking a note. By writing something down, we literally get it out of our heads. This is why David Allen’s “Getting things done” system works: The secret to have a “mind like water” is to get all the little stuff out of our short-term memory. And as we can’t take care of everything once and for all right now, the only way to do that is to have a reliable external system in place where we can keep all our nagging thoughts about the many things that need to be done and trust that they will not be lost. And the same is true for the work with the slip-box. To be able to focus on the task at hand, we have to make sure other, unfinished tasks are not lingering in our head and wasting precious mental resources. (Location 1297)

9.6      Reduce the Number of Decisions Next to the attention that can only be directed at one thing at a time and the short-term memory that can only hold up to seven things at once, the third limited resource is motivation or willpower. Here, too, the environmental design of our workflow makes all the difference. It shouldn’t come as a surprise anymore that a close cooperation with the slip-box turns out to be far superior to any sophisticated planning. (Location 1326)

New highlights added November 2nd, 2020 at 9:21 AM

“We use the term ego depletion to refer to a temporary reduction in the self’s capacity or willingness to engage in volitional action (including controlling the environment, controlling the self, making choices, and initiating action) caused by prior exercise of volition.” (Location 1334)

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 that helps to restore our attention: We can have breaks without fear of losing the thread. Breaks are much more than just opportunities to recover. They are crucial for learning. They allow the brain to process information, move it into long-term memory and prepare it for new information (Doyle and Zakrajsek 2013, 69).[23] If we don’t give ourselves a break in between work sessions, be it out of eagerness or fear of forgetting what we were doing, it can have a detrimental effect on our efforts. To have a walk (Ratey, 2008) or even a nap[24] supports learning and thinking.[25] (Location 1361)

New highlights added November 3rd, 2020 at 9:21 AM

This is why we have to translate them into our own language to prepare them to be embedded into new contexts of our own thinking, the different context(s) within the slip-box. Translating means to give the truest possible account of the original work, using different words – it does not mean the freedom to make something fit. As well, the mere copying of quotes almost always changes their meaning by stripping them out of context, even though the words aren’t changed. (Location 1397)

Handwriting is slower and can’t be corrected as quickly as electronic notes. Because students can’t write fast enough to keep up with everything that is said in a lecture, they are forced to focus on the gist of what is being said, not the details. But to be able to note down the gist of a lecture, you have to understand it in the first place. So if you are writing by hand, you are forced to think about what you hear (or read) – otherwise you wouldn’t be able to grasp the underlying principle, the idea, the structure of an argument. Handwriting makes pure copying impossible, but instead facilitates the translation of what is said (or written) into one’s own words. (Location 1441)

10.2   Keep an Open Mind While selectivity is the key to smart note-taking, it is equally important to be selective in a smart way. Unfortunately, our brains are not very smart in selecting information by default. While we should seek out dis-confirming arguments and facts that challenge our way of thinking, we are naturally drawn to everything that makes us feel good, which is everything that confirms what we already believe we know. The very moment we decide on a hypothesis, our brains automatically go into search mode, scanning our surroundings for supporting data, which is neither a good way to learn nor research. Worse, we are usually not even aware of this confirmation bias (or myside bias[28]) that surreptitiously meddles with our life. (Location 1454)

Developing arguments and ideas bottom-up instead of top-down is the first and most important step to opening ourselves up for insight. (Location 1490)

Instead of having the hypothesis in mind all the time, we want to:   ·    Confirm that we have separated tasks and focus on understanding the text we read, ·    Make sure we have given a true account of its content ·    Find the relevance of it and make connections. (Location 1493)

The only thing that matters is that it connects or is open to connections. Everything can contribute to the development of thoughts within the slip-box: an addition as well as a contradiction, the questioning of a seemingly obvious idea as well as the differentiation of an argument. What we are looking for are facts and information that can add something and therefore enrich the slip-box. One of the most important habitual changes when starting to work with the slip-box is moving the attention from the individual project with our preconceived ideas towards the open connections within the slip-box. (Location 1503)

Yes, we have to be selective, but not in terms of pros and cons, but in terms of relevant or irrelevant. (Location 1509)

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 one-sided notes and seemingly fitting quotes. In fact, it is almost impossible to write anything interesting and worth publishing (and therefore motivating) if it is based on nothing else than an idea we were able to come up with up front before elaborating on the problem. (Location 1515)

“Nonage [immaturity] is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.” (Kant 1784) (Location 1540)

One has to read extremely selectively and extract widespread and connected references. One has to be able to follow recurrences. But how to learn it if guidance is impossible? […] Probably the best method is to take notes – not excerpts, but condensed reformulated accounts of a text. Rewriting what was already written almost automatically trains one to shift the attention towards frames, patterns and categories in the observations, or the conditions/assumptions, which enable certain, but not other descriptions. (Location 1548)

10.4   Learn to Read (Location 1567)

Note: Active recall essentially. Rereading wastes time.

10.5   Learn by Reading (Location 1609)

Note: Eaborate extensively. Write in your own words. Shorten text for notes. Or make it onto a essay. But it should only be its own quanta

Learning requires effort, because we have to think to understand and we need to actively retrieve old knowledge to convince our brains to connect it with new ideas as cues. To understand how groundbreaking this idea is, it helps to remember how much effort teachers still put into the attempt to make learning easier for their students by prearranging information, sorting it into modules, categories and themes. By doing that, they achieve the opposite of what they intend to do. They make it harder for the student to learn because they set everything up for reviewing, taking away the opportunity to build meaningful connections and to make sense of something by translating it into one’s own language. It is like fast food: It is neither nutritious nor very enjoyable, it is just convenient. (Location 1618)

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 exercise helps to transfer information into long-term memory (cf. Ratey 2008). Plus, exercise reduces stress, which is good, because stress floods our brains with hormones that suppress learning processes (Baram et al. 2008). (Location 1643)

There is a clear division of labour between the brain and the slip-box: The slip-box takes care of details and references and is a long-term memory resource that keeps information objectively unaltered. That allows the brain to focus on the gist, the deeper understanding and the bigger picture, and frees it up to be creative. Both the brain and the slip-box can focus on what they are best at. (Location 1663)

New highlights added November 4th, 2020 at 8:24 AM

Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given. What good readers can do is spot the limitations of a particular approach and see what is not mentioned in the text. (Location 1673)

The brain, as Kahneman writes, is “a machine for jumping to conclusions” (Location 1748)

Concluding the discussions in this book, Levy writes: “In any case, no matter how internal processes are implemented, insofar as thinkers are genuinely concerned with what enables human beings to perform the spectacular intellectual feats exhibited in science and other areas of systematic enquiry, as well as in the arts, they need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.” (Location 1766)

If you focus your time and energy on understanding, you cannot help but learn. But if you focus your time and energy on learning without trying to understand, you will not only not understand, but also probably not learn. And the effects are cumulative. There is a reason why the best scientists are also often very good teachers. For someone like Richard Feynman, everything was about understanding, regardless of whether he was doing research or teaching. His famous Feynman diagrams are primarily tools to make understanding easier and his lectures are famous because they help students to really understand physics. It is not surprising, therefore, that he was passionate about challenging traditional education methods. He couldn’t stand textbooks full of pseudo-explanations (Feynman 1985) and teachers who tried to make learning easier for students by using artificial “real-life” examples instead of using their actual prior understanding as a connection point (Feynman 1963). (Location 1930)

overview of it. On the contrary, we are much better off accepting as early as possible that an overview of the slip-box is as impossible as having an overview of our own thinking while we are thinking. As an extension of our own memory, the slip-box is the medium we think in, not something we think about. (Location 1993)

The way people choose their keywords shows clearly if they think like an archivist or a writer. Do they wonder where to store a note or how to retrieve it? The archivist asks: Which keyword is the most fitting? A writer asks: In which circumstances will I want to stumble upon this note, even if I forget about it? It is a crucial difference. (Location 2022)

Good keywords are usually not already mentioned as words in the note. Assume I have the note “A sudden increase of ad-hoc theories is for Kuhn a sign that a normal-science phase might be in crisis (Kuhn 1967, 96).” A fitting keyword might be “paradigm change,” but that phrase is not in the note and therefore would not be suggested by the program. Assigning keywords is much more than just a bureaucratic act. (Location 2050)

The slip-box not only confronts us with dis-confirming information, but also helps with what is known as the feature-positive effect (Allison and Messick 1988; Newman, Wolff, and Hearst 1980; Sainsbury 1971). This is the phenomenon in which we tend to overstate the importance of information that is (mentally) easily available to us and tilts our thinking towards the most recently acquired facts, not necessarily the most relevant ones. Without external help, we would not only take exclusively into account what we know, but what is on top of our heads.[35]You are less prone to make this error in judgement if you know about it (Rasin 2014). You are welcome.) The slip-box constantly reminds us of information we have long forgotten and wouldn’t remember otherwise – so much so, we wouldn’t even look for it. (Location 2140)

You are less prone to make this error in judgement if you know about it (Rasin 2014). You are welcome.

New highlights added November 5th, 2020 at 7:32 PM

A truly wise person is not someone who knows everything, but someone who is able to make sense of things by drawing from an extended resource of interpretation schemes. This stands in harsh contrast to the common but not-so-wise belief that we need to learn from experience. It is much better to learn from the experiences of others – especially when this experience is reflected on and turned into versatile “mental models” that can be used in different situations. (Location 2174)

If we practice learning not as a pure accumulation of knowledge, but as an attempt to build up a latticework of theories and mental models to which information can stick, we enter a virtuous circle where learning facilitates learning. (Location 2184)

On the other hand, if we fail to retain what we have learned, for example, by not using effective strategies, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn information that builds on earlier learning. More and more knowledge gaps become apparent. Since we can’t really connect new information to gaps, learning becomes an uphill battle that exhausts us and takes the fun out of learning. It seems as if we have reached the capacity limit of our brain and memory. Welcome to a vicious circle. (Location 2190)

We even compare when we focus on one thing: “Paying attention does not mean unrelenting attention on one focal point. Our brains evolved to notice details by shifting focus from one area to another, by repeatedly scanning the surroundings. [...] The brain is more likely to notice details when it scans than when it focuses.” (Zull 2002, 142f) This is one of the reasons why thinking works so much better when we have the very things we think about in front of our eyes. It is in our nature. (Location 2245)

Studies on creativity with engineers show that the ability to find not only creative, but functional and working solutions for technical problems is equal to the ability to make abstractions. (Location 2268)

Make sure that you really see what you think you see and describe it as plainly and factually as possible. (Location 2294)

While the constant comparison of notes can help us to detect differences, no technique can help us see what is missing. But we can make it a habit to always ask what is not in the picture, but could be relevant. This, too, does not come naturally to us. (Location 2309)

But many people treat a stock exactly like this. They don’t really think about what they get for the price they pay: they just assume they made a good deal when the price is lower than the day before. But the only thing Warren Buffett thinks about it is the relationship between price and value – he doesn’t even look at the price from yesterday. He understands that simple is not the same as easy, and that the worst thing you can do is to make a simple task unnecessarily complicated. A stock is a share in a company. The price is set by the market, which means by supply and demand, which touches on the rationality of market participants as well as the question of valuation, which means you have to understand something about the business you are considering investing in, including competition, competitive advantages, technological developments, etc. Making things more complicated than they are can be a way to avoid the underlying complexity of simple ideas. This is what happened during the financial crisis of 2008: Economists developed hugely complicated products, but did not take into account the simple fact that price and value are not necessarily the same. There is a reason why Buffett is not only a great investor, but also a great teacher: He not only has a vast knowledge about everything related to business, he can also explain it all in simple terms. (Location 2345)

Standardised is also the way we treat literature and our own thoughts: Instead of using different kinds of notes or techniques for different kinds of texts or ideas, the approach here is always the same, simple one. Literature is condensed on a note saying, “On page x, it says y,” and later stored with the reference in one place. Ideas and thoughts are captured on the slip-box notes and connected to other notes always in the same way in the same place. These standardizations make it possible that the technical side of note-taking can become automatic. Not having to think about the organisation is really good news for brains like ours – the few mental resources we have available, we need for thinking about the actual relevant questions: those concerning the contents. (Location 2375)

The biggest threat to creativity and scientific progress is therefore the opposite: a lack of structure and restrictions. Without structure, we cannot differentiate, compare or experiment with ideas. Without restrictions, we would never be forced to make the decision on what is worth pursuing and what is not. Indifference is the worst environment for insight. And the slip-box is, above all, a tool for enforcing distinctions, decisions and making differences visible. One thing is for sure: the common idea that we should liberate ourselves from any restrictions and “open ourselves up” to be more creative is very misleading indeed (Dean 2013, 201). (Location 2403)

“Remember the lesson: ‘An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it is easily available to you.’” (Charles T. Munger) (Location 2430)

New highlights added November 6th, 2020 at 9:23 AM

We don’t need to worry about the question of what to write about because we have answered the question already – many times on a daily basis. Every time we read something, we make a decision on what is worth writing down and what is not. Every time we make a permanent note, we also made a decision about the aspects of a text we regarded as relevant for our longer-term thinking and relevant for the development of our ideas. We constantly make explicit how ideas and information connect with each other and turn them into literal connections between our notes. By doing this, we develop visible clusters of ideas that are now ready to be turned into manuscripts. (Location 2456)