*Read in February 2025* ## Why I Wanted To Read It I wanted to read this book for two reasons: For one, knowledge tends to slip away and needs to be actively maintained, a lot like building sand castles on the beach and starting all over again each and every tide. I want to get better at keeping my knowledge active so that I can keep adding to it. The second reason is many organizations have documentation issues, by which I mean they don't document anything, at least not in an actionable way. I notice people who overrely on their memory — because the item at hand feels like something they should remember — constantly forgetting what they decided last week, last month or last year, or why. So I was hoping to find practical ways of documenting work projects on a collaborative level, too. As a primer, note that the book revolves around the writing process of Niklas Luhmann. I have not read him yet, but it seems to me the only reason anyone brings him up those days is related to note-taking rather than his work. The author compares at length what he was doing with current research and studies, outlining why it makes sense and deriving many key insights on why and how to apply it to the production of scientific papers. My point is that this book can appear overfitted to the methodology of one author and to one use case, which certainly explains the methodic style in which it is written. Yet I feel those are more of a pretext to expose how one might want to develop how they think and produce ideas, as the insights it contains are, in my view, universal, and can be combined in any shape or form that suits your specific needs and weaknesses. ## The Blank Page Problem The one thing that most impacts our writing is, unsurprisingly, having something to write about. Yet it is often the case that a subject and a position are chosen pretty much at random, out of the need or will to write, and that the following process becomes a game of proving how the topic is relevant and why the position is right. Operating like this puts us in a position from which it's rather hard to produce anything but noise, as it creates space for intellectual traps and biases. And so the author nudges us toward reframing the writing process from "How can I prove what I think is right" towards "I've captured ideas over a period of time, made some interesting connections and wonder what they mean". The rest of the book is dedicated to creating a position from which it becomes both easy to connect ideas by rediscovering them over and over, thus uncovering topics to write about, and hard to fall into our many biases, by distancing ourselves from ideas and opinions. ## The Need for External scaffolding To create such a position, we need external structure. For one, it's not possible to hold many things in our mind at the same time. Besides, our memory needs to be constantly stimulated, as it works much like a muscle. This structure must make it easy to not only retrieve information, but also be loose enough so that it is possible to discover and develop connections between ideas and concepts, reinforcing memory further. As per Hebb's postulate, "neurons that fire together, wire together." It follows this external scaffolding must then implement features satisfying those requirements while being seamless enough to reduce friction. This is where the author describes at length the so-called *zettelkasten method*. Zettelkasten is German for "wooden box" by which Niklas Luhmann used to refer to the box containing his notes. With external scaffolding, writing doesn't start when you decide to put pen to paper anymore, but when you're collecting and linking ideas from books, papers, podcasts, documentaries, movies... Capturing those ideas and organizing them in such a way that you'll rediscover them every now and then will help you to better understand, remember and connect them. ## Petri Dishing Ideas Collecting ideas, however, is not enough. Good ideas are grown over time, from the activity of connecting them together, comparing them, filling the blanks between them, amending them, thus refining them for some time. In my experience, we tend to be dismissive of how much effort has to be put into an idea or solution, and even more so into framing it simply. You try coming at the problem from all sides, end up trashing most of what you thought valid because you've discovered weaknesses in your logic, only to start the process all over again. Maturing an idea ensures quality thinking, because it will be tested against many others, will grow linked to other concepts and will be changed or dismissed as needed. Making notes and organizing them, one way or another, makes this process seamless, as it naturally occurs while you learn, without the need for huge bursts of work. It then becomes easier to evolve topics and ideas, rather than making predictions about how your research is going to unfold before turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy by selecting information based on what you decided is true ahead of time. Having a system for taking notes replaces a top-down approach to writing with a bottom-up one, which makes it more likely to evolve qualitative, original and occasionally great ideas. ## Context Is All You Need > "The first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form … You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head." > *— Charlie Munger* One realization on my end was how much I had been piling up short scattered notes for the last few years, making little to no time to process or organize them. Looking back, they made little to no sense after a while being deprived from context. I was accumulating cognitive load instead of relieving it, trying — and failing — to keep this context alive in the back of my head. I was consuming too much content in regard of how much time I had left to process it. At some point in the last few months I even made a post-it note I sticked on my laptop with the words "context-free information has no value", which became my razor for avoiding engaging with content I deemed not related enough to what I was doing and learning. I can't help but draw a parallel here with the recent developments in the AI field, the starting point of which was a Google paper, [[Attention Is All You Need.pdf|Attention Is All You Need]]. The key idea that unlocked recent advances is that earlier systems, such as recurrent neural networks, struggled to efficiently capture long-range context. Transformers addressed this by using self-attention, improving next-word prediction and other language tasks by orders of magnitude. Context matters. This translates into Luhmann's note-taking by linking ideas together: - Taking short, atomic notes (one idea per note) - Storing related notes close to each other - Creating indexes for topics and a couple of entry points for each - An numbering system for sorting and branching ## Making It Your Own > "There is an unmistakeable difference between a bag of rabbit parts and a rabbit." > *— Ryan Nance* From this point forward I diverge from the book to expose my take on the subject. Please read my opinions as such. Using external scaffolding undoubtedly builds an advantage. I've seen it at work during my time in law school. I had notes all over the place, flash cards, computer notes, audio recordings alongside insane amounts of focus and Guronsan[^1]. The downside of this lack of structure, while helpful in the moment, is that fifteen years later it's all gone, and I would have to do the same work all over again to get acquainted with the same subjects. Being all over the place never last long. I've also seen it at work while [[How to Learn Russian And Other Things|learning Russian]], which I now speak at a native level. I took the habit of writing down full sentences I was surprised to understand as they seemed above my level. By building my knowledge of the language like so, I noticed a couple of things. I would often remember where it was in my notebook rather than what it was at first. Only after needing it enough would I remember it, possibly because this was the path of least resistance. Learning words that way, my Russian became much more native-like than that of my comrades. I didn't learn lists or words (or anything else for that matter; never have, never will), but rather sentences with all the words in the "right" context. A give-away of foreigners, no matter their mastery of a language, is often that they use words that have the right meaning but the wrong context. Languages are a lot like music, there are many ways of saying the same thing, but only a few are in use and sound normal to people. Where I grow somewhat sceptic of the universality of the Luhmann recipe (of which he had no claim) is the many examples one can find of great thinkers that do not use such a ~~German~~ rigorous system. There's a (very) Russian saying, *"What's good for a Russian, kills a German"*. I'm generally suspicious of one-size-fits-all solutions. While it can serve as inspiration, not everything is meant to be copied, as we all have specific strengths and weaknesses. Take for instance [Benjamin Franklin's papers](https://franklinpapers.org/), a collection of notes with no particular order to it. [Bill Gates likes to annotate books](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTFy8RnUkoU), [David Rockefeller had a custom rolodex](https://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2017/12/07/david-rockefellers-rolodex-offers-a-master-class-in-making-friends-and-influencing-people/), Charlie Munger didn't seem to use much of a note-taking system either, which didn't seem to prevent him from producing a good many decisions, ideas, essays and speeches. Edgar Allan Poe was mostly collecting newspaper stories, Beethoven wrote down music in notebooks but never looked at them again, and, last, but not least, Socrates famously wrote nothing down[^2]. The more you engage with what you learn, the better will be your understanding. That much is certain. Making it easy for you to come back to it often, reassessing it and linking it with other ideas will allow you to build deeper knowledge and understanding. One way to engage with knowledge is of course engaging with the creation of your own system for organizing and recording it. It should help your strengths and compensate your weaknesses. One weakness of mine, for instance, is I have a hard time prioritizing processing what I learn. To do so, I started taking the time to write my notes with a fountain pen first. This slows me down and helps me not only think, but also filter what I feel is too menial or secondary to be written down. ## Talking Works, Too Does your thinking have to be all in writing? Depending on your strengths, orally debating ideas can be an excellent way of improving them. I for one often find myself discussing the same idea I've come across over the course of some weeks, with various people. This helps me refine my understanding by testing it against different context and people; sometimes it gets disproved entirely. This is something I aim to leverage more often as I find it has always helped me a great deal. The sheer fact of explaining my comprehension to classmates in university might have been the single reason why I was able to learn so much, so fast. There's this excellent article, [[Managing Oneself Peter Drucker.pdf|Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker]], that I keep coming back to and recommending. It's a great help to assess your strengths, weaknesses and whether you're more on the writing or speaking end of the spectrum. ## Keep It Simple, Stupid >“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” *— Albert Einstein* Building a long lasting latticework of ideas allows you to benefit from the compound effect of knowledge, doing the work of processing it for your future self, allowing him to reengage with it every now and then, all the while cross-pollinating old notions with new ones without standing in the way of actually doing the work. Keep things simple. Any unnecessary overhead or friction will makes it less likely you'll be able to make a sustainable habit of it. So think long and hard before making things more complicated than they could be for your future self. Many intelligent people think they can rely on willpower to stay accountable when they feel motivated to do something great. This is a disastrous notion. What makes all the difference in the world is creating conditions in which we can still do the work even if we're not motivated. Setting ourselves up for success has more to do with our environment, the position we create for ourselves, than resorting to willpower. This is a resource that depletes fast, and that barely can be change over time. You can't change your willpower, but you can change your environment so you don't need it. I think the hard part for me is to abandon the ideas of staying on top of it and knowing where this is going. I will always lag behind what I want to learn somehow and I don't know what I'll find. Once you embrace the mindset, though, it is freeing. Today I'm still relying on hybrid mediums, having notebooks, bookmarks, post-its and obviously this repository of notions. The difference is they all act as a filter and have a final destination if they make it through: My repository of ideas, my notes. More than making me reconsider how I take notes, this book reshaped my approach of thinking and learning. A crucial piece of unnecessary friction is the urge to turn your "system" into a Swiss watch mechanism. This would be more accurately described as organizational FOMO. One idea I've held onto since I read [[Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman]] is I'm never going to get on top of this structure. It will stay imperfect, incomplete and forever changing — and that's okay. The structure itself isn't the goal. It's meant to support your intellectual journey, not become the journey itself. Don't make a big deal of it. ## External Feedback The book's thesis is that producing qualitative writing is made possible by efficient note-taking, with the production of scientific papers in mind. What puzzles me is the promotion of working mostly in isolation and being your own feedback loop. The danger is to stay trapped in [[The Streetlight Effect|your own local maxima]]. Some valuable tools are presented to counterbalance natural biases, but it seems to me it's hard to replace — let alone beat — external feedback. While Benjamin Franklin had his papers, one thing that surely influenced his life and writing is the founding of the Junto club, a mutual improvement and debate club that required of his members to produce one essay a quarter to be discussed during sessions. Having a learning partner is also a way to engage with what you learn; surely this was involved in the Warren Buffet & Charlie Munger partnership as well. Open source software is the paramount example of what feedback loops can achieve. Today, 70-90% of any code base is made up of open source components.[^3] Your dishwasher, hairdryer, computer or car wouldn't function without it. As a guesstimate, just ordering a pizza must involve somewhere around ~30.00.000 lines of open source code (phones' operating systems, infrastructure code, mobile apps, backends, companies' websites, developper environment and tooling, compilers and interpreters, your interphone... you name it). Open source isn't exclusively about software, though. We tend to extend well-deserved admiration towards *individual* geniuses, but often fail to see the network effects at play, to analyze the environment, connexions and conditions that carried their success forward. Below is a famous photograph at the 1927 Solvay Council Conference. It features most of the biggest geniuses of the time, who all knew each other and exchanged ideas on a regular basis. ![[solvay-conference-1927.jpg]] Stephen Hawking† used to organize annual retreats with fellow researchers to discuss and advance current theories[^4]. Sir Isaac Newton used to exchange letters with most of the scientific community of his time.[^5] The point is, running your ideas by others — and others' ideas by you — on a regular basis is not an option if your aim is to produce impactful ideas. [^1]: A prescription drug that cuts off signals from the vagus nerve so you can sleep two hours a day for a couple of weeks and still pass those finals while working full-time; terrible idea, I ended up passing out in the middle of my room one day as I stood from my desk. [^2]: On that point, a teacher once told me there was some debate around Socrates existing at all, as some academics had advanced the idea Plato might have made him up; so maybe *some* writing doesn't hurt. [^3]: As reported by Intel in [The Careful Consumption of Open Source Software](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/guide/the-careful-consumption-of-open-source-software.html) [^4]: Hawking's last retreat sparked the work that solved the information paradox, proving the quantum hair of a black hole could theoretically preserve all the information about what disappeared in it. [^5]: A delay in the correspondance between Newton and Leibniz started the dispute regarding the paternity of Calculus.