Speaker 1: If you want to make notes that last a lifetime, notes that help you think, and even create content, then this video is for you. Because most people just take notes. They passively copy or highlight whatever they find interesting and call it a day. But when you make smart notes, you're creating something. It's no longer someone else's thoughts, it's your own. And as you make more and more smart notes, your system becomes exponentially more useful. To the point that it becomes an idea generation machine. This is what makes smart notes smart. And I'm gonna go over my entire workflow, which is based on the Zettelkasten system. But the methodology behind Zettelkasten, which was created in the 1950s, is a bit old-fashioned. After all, it's not like people back then had access to the same tools that we have today. So while the idea is the same, the execution has been shaped by the capabilities of modern tools. One of such tools is Obsidian, which I've been using for nearly three years. But if you use something else, that's fine, as long as you can link to different notes. Also, bear in mind that this is just the way I do it. It's not the only way, and it might not even be the best way. Because the best way is whatever works for you. And lastly, I'm gonna mention a lot of fancy terminology that may sound intimidating at first. But once you understand it, you'll see that it's actually very simple. Alright, so first up, we have fleeting notes. These are notes to quickly capture what's on your mind, and they're meant to be deleted. I'm not gonna spend any time on this, as I don't use proper fleeting notes. I think of them more as to-dos. And I've made a separate video on how I capture my ideas and thoughts, which you can find right here. In this video, I'm only focusing on reference, literature, and permanent notes, and each of them has its own individual chapter. And let's start with reference notes. These are meant to capture someone else's thoughts. So if you read a book, an academic paper, an article, whatever it may be, and you highlight stuff, those highlights are your reference notes. These notes should only have direct quotes of someone else's work, and not your own. The whole point of having reference notes is to help us in writing literature notes, which we'll get to in the next chapter. There's a lot of different ways to get reference notes into Obsidian. I personally use Readwise, so in my vault, there's a Readwise folder, which contains all of my reference notes from all the stuff I've captured. Readwise is great, but it isn't free. And if you want double the free trial to see if you really use it, you can use my link in the description. And if you want a free alternative, I recommend looking into Zotero, or you can always do it yourself. And most people stop here. They don't go any further. They see stuff they like, they capture it in their app of choice, and that's it. They see this next step as a waste of time, but really, the true waste of time is stopping here. Because you've consumed a bunch of stuff, and you're not doing anything with it. You're just archiving it, and before you know it, you'll have hundreds of highlights that you'll never see again. If you want to actually build knowledge and stuff that lasts, we need to continue to the next step, which are literature notes. A literature note is a note you make in your own words about a reference note. It's your own interpretation of the author's thoughts. It's what you personally got out of it. There's no right or wrong way to write these, as long as it's in your own words. Let's take this book here as an example. I read it on my Kindle, I took my highlights, and through Readwise, those highlights were exported to Obsidian. And I can find it here in my vault, under the Readwise folder. That's my reference note. I then created a new note, which is this one right here, where I summarized the book, and I wrote down what I got out of it. That's the literature note. Over here on the top, you can see I have a literature tag, and I also have a medium here, because I also take literature notes on academic papers, articles, and so on. Now, you might be thinking, why not just keep one note, as opposed to keeping a reference and a literature note? And sure, you can do that, but I prefer to keep two different files, because while all the highlights I take make it to Obsidian, I try to put only the most relevant ones in the literature note. The fact that I keep two different files gives me permission to not be so selective with what to highlight. It lets me read more freely and really focus on the text itself, instead of spending time thinking like, should this really be highlighted, or maybe I should have highlighted that. And Obsidian makes it really easy to simply link the exact location of a highlight. So in here, you see that I'm linking to not only this note, but this exact highlight. So if I go on it, it's going to take me right there. And when I'm writing the literature note, I normally open up the reference note on one side, and the literature note I want to write on the other. The simple act of summarizing a book and writing down what you got out of it may seem pointless and even a waste of time, but in my opinion, not doing it is what is a true waste of time. Taking notes, highlighting, etc. takes no thinking at all. It's the act of summarizing and writing what you got out of it that really makes you think about what you read. And simply having the predefined headers of summary and my takeaways forces me to think because I can't just leave them empty. And then down here, I have a list of all the chapters in the book. And as you can see, the majority were left empty. But that doesn't mean that they were a waste of time or that I got nothing out of it. In fact, I even took highlights on those chapters, but I'm extremely selective on what goes in the literature note. This goes back to what I said earlier about the benefits of separating a reference and a literature note. And in the case of this book, these were my thoughts on what I thought truly mattered. And if I want to look at what the author said, I can just click on any of these references, and it's going to take me to the author's exact quote. And if I want to reread that exact part of the book, I can just see what chapter it was and reread just that chapter. So depending on the medium, this will either be chapters, pages, or even timestamps. I don't like to impose strict rules on myself, but I do try to keep the literature note as short as possible, because that's what's hard. It's the same thought process as when I plan out my YouTube videos. Doing a 30-minute video is easy. What's hard is turning that 30-minute video into 10 or 15 minutes without losing anything of value. And the same applies here. I want to say the most that I can in the least amount of words. And more often than not, as I make my literature notes on a book, it usually leads me to think of one or more ideas. And I don't have to act on them right away. I can just link them. That's all it takes. In fact, I often don't act on an idea until I find that I have multiple notes pointing to it, which means that I'm almost never starting from scratch. And this usually marks the starting point for a permanent note, which we'll get to in the next chapter. And even if you do nothing else and stop here, you're doing way more than the vast majority of people, because you're learning by doing, which is exactly what the sponsor of today's video, Brilliant.org, is all about. Brilliant is the best way to learn math, data science, and computer science interactively. Whether you're advanced or you're just starting out, Brilliant tailors its content to fit your needs and lets you work through it at your own pace. Brilliant just released a new course called How Technology Works, where you can learn more about the algorithms that run today's world and how computer memory and GPSes work, all in a very intuitive and interactive way. Brilliant is constantly adding new lessons every month, so there's always something new to learn. To try everything Brilliant has to offer free for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org from Sergio, and the first 200 people that sign up get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. And a big thank you to Brilliant for sponsoring this video. Alright, so now comes the permanent notes. These notes are fully ours. They're not reference notes, as that's someone else's thoughts, and they're not literature notes, as that's our interpretation of someone else's thoughts. Permanent notes are concepts and ideas independent of their original context. Let's take a look at an example and go back to the literature note for this book right here. If I scroll down here, there was a part where the author talked about the multitasking myth, which basically says that multitasking doesn't work, and when we think we're multitasking, we're actually switching between two tasks really quickly, and every time we switch, there's a switch cost. And this is something I agree with, and I have my own thoughts about it. So it prompted me to make a permanent note on it. At the time, I created the link, but I didn't write the permanent note, I just linked it. As I read and consumed more content, I made literature notes on Atomic Habits by James Clear and Flow by Mihaly. Those three literature notes both ended up linking to multitasking. So later, once I saw that there were multiple links to that empty note, I started writing it, and I already had so much to write about because I had already thought and written about it before. This is why it's commonly said that in a good zettelkasten system, you never start from scratch. As your vault grows, you'll see clusters forming in your graph view, and some of these clusters will likely be around notes you haven't even written yet. But when you have multiple notes all pointing to one single link, it becomes virtually impossible to not take action and write a permanent note about it, because half of it is already written for you. You just need to put the pieces together. Alright, so how do you write a permanent note? And again, there's no right or wrong way to do it, but I do follow some guidelines. The first is that they should be atomic, which means one note, one idea. Secondly, they should be as short and concise as possible. I make it so that I don't have to scroll down to see the full note, because generally speaking, if I need to scroll to see the full note, I'm either not being clear enough or I'm covering more than one idea. And lastly, it should be easy to understand by anyone. Even if it pulls information from two or three different literature notes, someone with just basic knowledge of the topic at hand should be able to understand it. As Sonke said in the book, permanent notes are directed towards an audience ignorant of the thoughts behind the text and unaware of the original context, only equipped with a general knowledge of the field. Lastly, I do my best to have at least one link in each permanent note. This, of course, isn't possible when you're just starting, but it's something to keep in mind as your vault grows, because that's what adds real value to our system. It's what turns it into a content creation machine. Alright, so is there more to this? Is this the end goal? And for me, at this point in time, yeah, it ends here. But for a lot of people, it doesn't, because there's one final step in the process, and that is to write published work. That's when you take the content from multiple permanent notes to write published work, whether that's an academic paper, a book, etc. The same permanent note can and likely will help in creating several different published pieces. But for now, my journey ends here. So the last question that is probably on your mind right now is why bother with any of this if you don't want to have published work? And there's so many benefits to doing this. Your notes and thoughts will compound over time, giving you insights and connections you wouldn't find otherwise. You'll become a better thinker, which turns you into a better speaker, because you're able to better articulate your thoughts. And no matter what you do, or plan to do, being a good writer will probably help it. The one thing I left out in this video was how I capture my ideas and thoughts so that I can later process them in Obsidian. And you can find that in this video right here. So I'll see you there.