🦸AIP 50 5 Reasons Notetaking Is A Digital Superpower You Can't Ignore
Notetaking is becoming a digital superpower.
We are experiencing a paradox of abundance.
The quality of good information is increasing as the quantity of bad information is increasing. Critical thinking is more important than ever.
And notetaking is one of the best skills for critical thinking.
What's the benefit of critical thinking?
Critical thinking allows you to sift through the heap of informational bollywog (It's a word, I just made it up) for the best advice on health, wealth, and relationships. Thus, notetaking helps you find gold information in the three cardinal areas of life. It's not only a skill for school.
Still not convinced?
In this article, I'm going to explain the five main reasons notetaking is a digital superpower:
- 🧠 Notetaking Helps You Learn Faster
- 💭 Notetaking Helps You Think More Effectively
- ✍️ Notetaking Helps You Create More
- 📆 Notetaking Helps You Create Your Ideal Life
- 🏛️ Notetaking Helps You Build A Knowledgebase That Compounds
Now, let's dive in...
🧠1. Notetaking Helps You Learn Faster
Learning fast is a matter of two things:
- Understanding a learning
- Applying that understanding
Notetaking helps you with the first step and primes you for the next.
Writing things down in your own words helps you understand it. Once you understand a singular concept, notetaking lets you see how it fits into the larger whole. In notetaking lingo, we call this bottom-up and top-down notetaking. Think of bottom-up notetaking like seeing a tree in a forest. Taking notes in your own words helps you analyze a singular tree. But then you want to see the tree in the broader forest, top-down notetaking.
Mixing bottom-up and top-down notetaking allows you to see the trees in the forest and the forest in the trees.
_Photo by Geranimo on Unsplash_
Once you understand something, you can apply it to a project you are working on.
I can't emphasize how powerful this combination is. Understanding + application is the ultimate speed learning hack.
💭2. Notetaking Helps You Think More Effectively
The amount of information in the digital age is overwhelming.
We need a way to filter and process it all. Notetaking helps with both of these things. When you take notes, you naturally filter and select the most important information. Notetaking forces you to slow down, leading to deeper thinking and analysis. Notetaking also helps you think critically by externalizing your thoughts and feelings.
Once your feelings and thoughts are on a page, they can be molded, shaped, and interacted with.
Compare that to someone who doesn't take notes.
They are in a sea of information without a compass or map. The waves toss them around, unable to find direction or purpose amidst the overwhelming currents. They have no ground to anchor their thoughts.
_Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash_
✍️3. Notetaking Helps You Create More
Often when I sit down to write, I'm already 80% done.
How is this possible? By leveraging my notes to create new knowledge. My past work becomes the building blocks of future projects.
But I can only do this because I take notes in the first place.
This entire article was already 80% done when I sat down to write it.
As I'm typing this in a coffee shop, I have gone through my past blog posts and pasted in relevant writing. Then, all I have to do is connect the writing together.
What might have taken me 5 hours of research and writing becomes one hour of work.
📆4. Notetaking Helps You Create Your Ideal Life
I'm in my fifth semester at Cornell and living my ideal college life.
I'm having fun making passive income through creating content part-time, seeing friends for dinner parties, hosting board game and movie nights, exercising regularly, eating healthily, sleeping well, and not spending hours every day studying and overly stressed by classes.
How did I do this?
Lifestyle Design.
Lifestyle design is the art of creating and adapting your life to resonate with you. This involves finding your values, interests, and role models. How do you find your values, interests, and role models?
I bet you can't guess it... Notetaking.
Notetaking (you might prefer to call it journaling, in this case) is a way of externalizing your feelings and thoughts while living. Regular reflection allows you to spot consistencies in the activities that bring you joy and those that bring you down. Then, you can change your schedule with this in mind.
In effect, notetaking helps you create and adapt a life that resonates most with you.
🏛️5. Notetaking Helps You Build A Knowledgebase That Compounds
Notetaking is time travel...
It allows your past, present, and future selves to have conversation with each other. For example, when I first started taking notes in Obsidian, I was interested in Stoicism and Buddhism. At first, these interests were separate. As I consumed more information on each, concepts from both philosophies began to connect in my notetaking system. Over 3 years, I developed my Buddhism and Stoicism notes.
Now, it's one of the most important notes in my system showcasing personal life philosophy.
This is the power of notetaking.
It lets your past, present, and future selves create something beautiful. Think of your individual notes like Lego bricks. And the process of notetaking as the building of things with those Lego bricks. Through 15 minutes of notetaking a day, you can compound your knowledge to unimaginable heights.
_Photo by Xavi Cabrera on Unsplash_
TL;DR
Five main reasons notetaking is a digital superpower:
- 🧠 Notetaking Helps You Learn Faster
- 💭 Notetaking Helps You Think More Effectively
- ✍️ Notetaking Helps You Create More
- 📆 Notetaking Helps You Create Your Ideal Life
- 🏛️ Notetaking Helps You Build A Knowledgebase That Compounds
If you have made it this far in the article, you care about building this digital superpower.
Your next questions might be:
- What tool should I take notes with?
- What resources should I consume to learn more?
- How should I take effective notes?
All of the resources with answers to these questions are answered in my FREE Beginner Obsidian Resource List.
This is the resource list I wish I had 3 years ago when starting my notetaking journey. Save yourself countless hours of time and energy looking for the best Obsidian learning resources. It includes:
- The best creators to follow in the Obsidian Community
- Links to immerse yourself in the Obsidian Community
- A curated list of my most popular Obsidian content teaching you:
• How to level up your notetaking in Obsidian
• How to fall back in love with learning
• How to create a unique personal knowledgebase that compounds over your life
- Secret BONUS:
Get the Beginner Obsidian Resource List for FREE by clicking on this link.
Here's what I would like to share this week.
📸News From The Channel!
📺Latest On De YouTube - What I Would Do If I Was A Freshman Cornell Student Again: I was an absolute mess as a Freshman Cornell student. In this video, I will teach you everything I would do differently if I were a Freshman Cornell student again.
🎙️Latest On De Podcast - E26 King In Motion: How To Become More Creative Using The Zettelkasten Notetaking System: King a content creator on with over five years of experience on YT who embarked on a transformative journey to revolutionize his content creation process. Balancing the demands of a full-time job, a growing family of two boys and a wife, and a desire to fulfill his creative potential, King sought out effective strategies to streamline his content production. After experimenting with various methods, he stumbled upon the Zettelkasten system, delving deep into Niklas Luhmann's original paper and distilling its complex principles into practical strategies. After 300+ hours of applying Luhman's principles, he has built the Obsidian Zettelkasten Starter Guide to help creators go beyond regurgitating content.
In this podcast, you will learn the following:
- What a Zettelkasten is
- How you can become more prolific and creative using it
- Biggest Zettelkasten beginner mistakes
✍️Latest On De Blog - Getting Straight A's Might Keep You Poor And Depressed: A physical college degree is no longer enough to succeed in the digital age. The skills required to make money and find meaning aren't the same as in the 1950s and 60s. In this article, I explain the 5 reasons why aiming for straight A's might keep you poor and depressed.
How To Manage Your Time And Energy For Your Notetaking Habit: If we want to make our notetaking skills benefit us FOREVER, we need to create habits and rituals that STICK. So in this article we are going to be exploring my best time and energy management tips applied to notetaking. By the end of this article, you will know how to create a notetaking habit that requires only 15-30 minutes of daily upkeep.
💡My Best Insights:
📖Book - Why We Are Restless On The Modern Quest For Contentment: A friend gifted this book to me because they could see I was becoming quite restless in my transition from the summer to college. The book explains we are restless because, in Modern American Society, there are too many choices. And we aren't taught how to make meaningful choices. Instead, we distract ourselves with as much as we can to avoid making these critical choices. If you want to learn how to overcome that restlessness, check out the book for yourself.
📺YouTube Video - 65 Core Principles Of Living The Good Life: This is a fantastic deep dive into how to live a good life in general. I recommend everyone check this video out. This is the type of video I will return to every couple of years. And get different things from every time.
✨Quote Of The Week - "Effective diversion must include both the hunt and the kill, for neither satisfies alone. Put the soul at rest, and it longs for activity. Put the soul in motion, and it longs for rest. In neither does it find contentment." - Why We Are Restless On The Modern Quest For Contentment