We write for many reasons as Tiffany Shlain observes in her book 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week. Shlain writes, “Journaling is how I practice presence, cultivate gratitude, create my sense of self, work to stay grounded, and determine what I want to do and what I want to work on. It’s also my way to sort out what’s happened in my life and the world at large.” Writing things down has been done for as long as we’ve been able to write.
Author of thirteen books and media theorist Steven Johnson has noted, “Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, ‘commonplacing,’ as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations.” We write things down because they seem important to us, and we are likely to want to access them again in the future. We do so because even though we don’t know now exactly how, we think one day this may be useful to us.
Italians have a word, Zibaldone, which refers to a personal notebook that contains important thoughts and ideas for someone. A literary legend, Giacomo Leopardi, was a prolific poet, writer, and philosopher in Italy that lived early in the 19th Century. His Zibaldone was suggested to consist of more than 4,500 pages. Apparently, Leopardi was encouraged to create this collection of notes by a priest that told him, “Every literary man should have a written chaos such as this: notebook containing sottiseries, adrersa, excerpta, pugillares, commentaria… the store-house out of which fine literature of every kind may come, as the sun, moon, and stars issued out of chaos.” Mark Twain in Life on The Mississippi wrote of direction received which helped him see the importance of writing things down, “’My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book; and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away.’ This was a revelation to me; for my memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges.”
Whether a notebook, a commonplace book, a memorandum-book, or a Zibaldone, it’s worthwhile having something to write things down to help you remember things. A Chinese Proverb offers, “The palest ink is more reliable than the most powerful memory.” Or translated differently asserts, “Good memory is not comparable to a worn-out pen tip.” How many times have you had an insight, not record it immediately, only to have it slip away to be forgotten shortly after? The game designer, Nintendo, got it right when they placed the message on their game screens, “Everything not saved will be lost.” Lost indeed if not saved. Write things down to save them.
Food and business magnate, Yves Farges, offered, “To be right, write … notes are only useful if you remember where you put them.” Once we get good at writing down useful insights, we need to remember where we wrote them to be able to access them again in the future. Tiago Forte, author, and advocate of the idea of a Second Brain, offers the acronym CODE. Forte puts forth CODE as a structure to Collect, Organize, Distill, and Express ideas. CODE is what we’re seeking to do by writing things down or preserving them in some way. First, we’re collecting. We’re collecting to remember, to learn, to at some point access again. Knowing this, we want to organize what we collect in some way so that it will be easier to retrieve when we seek it out in the future. To organize is to make what’s been collected readily accessible. To distill is to curate something collected into something manageable and meaningful. We need to shape something in order to be better able to share it. Finally, expressing what was collected and reshaped is the end product and purpose of our initial preservation efforts.
Beyond remembering, we write to learn. To learn about ourselves, others, and subjects. Author and speaker Brendon Burchard offers, “You should start taking notes on little interactions you have as well as the big breakthroughs. Look for lessons in every moment and every relationship and record them in a journal. I remember learning the value of this from my journalism teacher in high school. Decades later, I would see it in practice with my friends Tony Robbins and Jack Canfield, two of the most diligent and productive note takers I have ever met in my life.” Achievers of all stripes recognize that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth recording. Danish author Sonke Ahrens wrote in Take Smart Notes, “Every intellectual endeavor starts with a note.” Thomas Edison suggested that “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% taking really good notes.”
Georg Lichtenberg was a German polymath that lived in the later half of the 18th Century. He wrote, “Tradesman have their ‘waste book’ in which they enter from day to day everything they buy and sell, everything all mixed up without any order to it, from there it is transferred to the day-book, where everything appears in more systematic fashion. This deserves to be imitated by scholars. First a book where I write down everything as I see it or as my thoughts put it before me, later this can be transcribed into another, where the materials are more distinguished and ordered.” Writing things down can be iterative. First, scramble to scribble. As Dante observed, “He listens well who takes notes.” Invite errors of commission. Worry less about writing down things that are useful and more about capturing as much as possible.
Use your notes to then review and refine the material shaping the sentences into something more precise. Author Derek Sivers supports the service of reviewing and revising notes as leading to additional insights when he observed, “Almost all the thoughts I have on any subject are the result of writing in my diary and journals, then questioning myself and working through alternate ways of thinking about it, and finally returning to the subject days or months later with a clear head and updated thoughts, seeing how they’ve changed or not over time.”
The German guru of systems thinking, Niklas Luhmann, offered “One cannot think without writing.” It is through writing that we make sense of a subject. Computer scientist, Leslie Lamport, believes similarly to Luhmann suggesting, “Writing is nature’s way of telling us how lousy our thinking is.” Yet another scientist, Neil Levy, suggests “Notes … do not make contemporary physics easier, they make it possible.” Just like our math teachers exhorted us to show our work to demonstrate our understanding of the math, our writing reflects our understanding on a topic. As author James Clear has suggested, “The simplest way to clarify your thinking is to write a full page about whatever you are dealing with and then delete everything except the 1-2 sentences that explain it best.” Reviewing, reflecting, and refining our original notes helps us make sense of what we know or don’t know. This, in turn, becomes the basis of further investigation. Clear also offered, “Don’t wait to start writing until you have something to say. Start writing so you can find out what you have the say.” We find the hole in our understanding and can then seek to fill them with updated information.
As we get better at taking notes, we can hope to create a virtuous cycle where our note taking helps our ability to remember and learn further inspiring our efforts to take more notes. As we reiterate our writing our notes may become the basis of unique contributions we become capable of offering. Our notes become springboards to creative ideas and insights. As the author Melanie Benjamin noted, “When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn’t planned.” Enjoy your note-taking adventures.
