How to Take Smart Notes
1. Willpower & Environment
One of the most counterintuitive insights from modern psychology is that willpower is a limited, depleting resource — and it’s not something we can reliably strengthen over the long term. The real lever isn’t willpower itself, but the environment around us.
“Willpower is, as far as we know today, a limited resource that depletes quickly and is also not that much up for improvement over the long term.”
“Self-control and self-discipline have much more to do with our environment than with ourselves — and the environment can be changed.”
“Not having willpower, but not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success.”
“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 control we have to steer our work towards what we consider interesting and relevant, the less willpower we have to put into getting things done.”
Plans, paradoxically, can work against us. They impose rigidity that requires constant willpower to maintain:
“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.”
2. Note-Taking & The Slip-Box System
The highlights draw heavily from the Zettelkasten (slip-box) method — a note-taking system designed to build knowledge organically over time rather than through rigid planning.
Types of Notes
“Fleeting notes are only useful if you review them within a day or so and turn them into proper notes you can use later.”
“No underlined sentence will ever present itself when you need it in the development of an argument. These kinds of notes are just reminders of a thought, which you haven’t had the time to elaborate on yet. 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.”
The Step-by-Step Writing & Note Process
- Make fleeting notes.
- Make literature notes.
- Make permanent notes.
- Add permanent notes to the slip-box. Develop topics, questions, and research projects bottom-up from within the system. See what is there, what is missing, and what questions arise.
- After a while, you’ll have developed ideas far enough to decide on a topic to write about.
- Turn your notes into a rough draft.
- Detect holes in your argument — fill them or change your argument.
- Edit and proofread your manuscript.
The Value of This Process
“It will change the way you read as well: You will become more focused on the most relevant aspects, knowing that you cannot write down everything. You will read in a more engaged way, because you cannot rephrase anything in your own words if you don’t understand what it is about.”
“The idea is not to copy, but to have a meaningful dialogue with the texts we read.”
“Handwriting makes pure copying impossible, but instead facilitates the translation of what is said (or written) into one’s own words.”
3. Writing & Thinking
Writing isn’t just a way to record thinking — it is thinking.
“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.”
“All we have to do is to write them down in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care of.”
Our brains stay occupied with unfinished tasks — writing things down is how we release that mental load:
“Our brains tend to stay occupied with a task until it is accomplished (or written down).”
And when drafting, don’t be precious about your words:
“‘Kill your darlings.’ This becomes much easier when you move the questionable passages into another document and tell yourself you might use them later.”
The writing phase is ultimately about narrowing, not expanding:
“It is now about narrowing the perspective, making a decision on one topic only and cutting out everything that does not directly contribute to the development of the text and support the main argument.”
4. Understanding vs. Familiarity
One of the most important — and humbling — distinctions in learning is the gap between recognizing something and truly understanding it.
“We unfortunately tend to confuse familiarity with skill.”
“The moment we become familiar with something, we start believing we also understand it.”
“If we don’t try to verify our understanding during our studies, we will happily enjoy the feeling of getting smarter and more knowledgeable while in reality staying as dumb as we were. This warm feeling disappears quickly when we try to explain what we read in our own words in writing.”
Writing in our own language is the test of real understanding:
“Part of a theory that isn’t ours or written in a language we wouldn’t use — 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.”
5. Cognitive Biases & Perception
Our brains are optimized for efficiency — not accuracy. That means we constantly filter, reinterpret, and distort reality to fit our existing mental models.
“Our brains just love routines. Before new information prompts our brains to think differently about something, they make the new information fit into the known or let it disappear completely from our perception. Usually, we don’t even notice when our brains modify our surroundings to make it fit its expectations.”
“Our perception does not follow the order of seeing first and interpreting second. It does both at the same time: We always perceive something as something — our interpretation is instantaneous.”
“To be able to see what we see instead of what we expect to see is indeed a skill in itself, not like a character trait of being ‘open-minded.’ Those who think of themselves as being open-minded are often even more prone to stick to their first understanding, as they believe to be without natural prejudices and therefore don’t see the need to counterbalance them.”
Confirmation Bias
“While we should seek out disconfirming 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.”
“We just seem to happen to be surrounded by people who all think alike. Not on purpose, of course. We just spend our time with people we like. And why do we like them? Correct: Because they think like us.”
The Abraham Wald Story: Seeing What’s Not There
Perhaps the most striking illustration of biased perception comes from WWII:
“Abraham Wald was asked to help the Royal Air Force find the areas on their planes most often hit by bullets so they could cover them with more armour. But instead of counting the bullet holes on the returned planes, he recommended armouring the spots where none of the planes had taken any hits. The RAF forgot to take into account what was not there to see: All the planes that didn’t make it back.”
Kant put the challenge of intellectual independence memorably:
“Nonage [immaturity] is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. Dare to know! ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.” — Kant (1784)
6. Creativity, Questions & Problem Solving
Creativity isn’t a mysterious gift — it’s a learnable mode of thinking that requires moving between open and focused states of mind.
“The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.”
“Problems rarely get solved directly, anyway. Most often, the crucial step forward is to redefine the problem in such a way that an already existing solution can be employed.”
Good research questions sit in a productive middle ground:
“Good questions are in the sweet spot of being relevant and interesting, not too easy to answer but possible to tackle with material that is available or at least within our reach.”
7. Motivation & Deliberate Practice
Sustainable motivation isn’t about discipline alone — it comes from making the work itself rewarding.
“Only if the work itself becomes rewarding can the dynamic of motivation and reward become self-sustainable and propel the whole process forward.”
And the path to genuine improvement is deliberate, intentional effort:
“Deliberate practice is the only serious way of becoming better at what we are doing.”
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