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Hello. We talked about this issue before about superpowers, and what I think is the greatest superpower that you can cultivate sort of on your own by yourself is taking notes. Taking notes is a big topic. Shout out to Tom, a bloke on the internet who said, hey, you should do a video on this. I was like, yeah, OK. So here it is. Hopefully it’s good. I actually did this video before and technical problems. I honestly don’t think it was user error. Video got blown away. So we’ll try again. It’ll probably be better. Let’s hope. So I said this before, taking notes is a superpower. Why? When you can organize your thoughts on paper, that enables you to organize your thoughts as you’re having them. So the ability to organize your thoughts is something that accepts out, as John Breveke would say, right from wherever it’s at. You can organize them in your head. You can organize them on paper. It goes both ways, right, that you reciprocally reinforce one another. You can cultivate note taking. Tom’s question, which is a fair question, is, well, how do I do that? Like, oh, OK. Didn’t really occur to me. Pretty easy actually, right? You just start. You’re not going to be good at it at first. That’s OK. The way you get better is the superpower part. It’s easy to take notes. I take notes all the time. I read 20% of my notes at best. Some of that is because I don’t have to. I have a good memory. But some of that is because I’m lazy and I never get back to my notes and I don’t organize them. If you go back and organize your notes, you will get better at note taking. If you take notes, you leave them for a day, you come back to them, you don’t understand them, you’re going to get better. You’re going to get better. You can try organizing them with outlines or try different tricks, back references, footnotes, there’s all kinds of different styles. You should pick a style that works for you. How do you know it works for you? Try them all. There’s whole books, multiple books on note taking and different ways to take notes. You can just experiment for yourself. I just experimented for myself, found what worked for me. I have three or four different note taking styles. I’m a big fan of sticky notes and index cards. I love me index cards. They’re great. I will put lists on index cards. I will put notes on index cards. I’ll put all kinds of things on index cards. Sticky notes, I got one in front of me, whole outline for how to do an AI thing. I do these things. We have a 300 page notes file that Manuel and I took together over three and a half, four years, whatever it’s been. We since come back and organized that, started out as daily notes, literally just, here’s the day or the month and the day. Didn’t even put the year in. Didn’t really realize we were going to be doing it for three years. We just jot down sentences, half sentences of whatever it was we were thinking at the time. Then we do this thing called roll up once a month, a couple of times a month, whatever. We go back and read through the days and try to categorize them in a class. What category would we put these in? It’s a very useful exercise to do with somebody else. It’s the other thing, you take notes with other people. Great thing to do. You can compare notes. If you’re comparing notes, if you compare physical notes, very good. If you’re a writer, you probably realize the value of taking notes and having notes. But it’s something you can do yourself. You just have to be patient with yourself and realize when you first start, you’re probably not going to be good at it. That’s okay. The perfect is the enemy of the better. Don’t try to be perfect yet. You’ll learn how. Easy peasy. Learning is a process of making lots of mistakes and going, that was dumb, and then trying to correct them. And again, the secret is you got to go back and read your notes. Read them a day later, read them two days later, read them a week later, read them a month later, do all of that with the same set of notes. Very useful. You’ll get better over time. And again, what that does is when you can articulate your thoughts better on paper, especially as you’re having them, and that’s not the only way to take notes, but it’s one way to take notes. You can also speak them better when you need to recall them. You can also recall them better. We know this. If you Mind Palace stuff, if you look at Mind Palace, there’s a great book called Moonwalking with Einstein that I read. Wonderful book. I don’t know how I read that book. Very strange for me to pick up a book like that. But I did. It was wonderful. The more you interact with information or data, the easier it is to remember. The more different ways you interact with it, the easier it is to remember. So if you speak it, that’s good. If you hear it, that’s good. If you speak it, that’s better. If you write it down, that’s even better. If you do all three, much better. And then there’s other tricks to Mind Palace that you can read about. The Mind Palace is a type of organizing information in your head. But again, you can do that by taking notes. So there’s a few ways to take notes. You can take notes after the fact, see how many things you can remember about the text you just read. Probably start out small and work your way up. I a lot of times take spontaneous notes. Sometimes I’m in my car and I’m on the Discord server and I make somebody else take my notes. Whatever works, works. You just have to find what works for you. Right? But you can. And when you can, it’s a superpower. And it’s super power again, you can do by yourself on your own with pretty much no help from anyone else. Although if you have somebody else to help keep you motivated to take notes, remind you, hey, don’t forget to take notes. You can do that by yourself. You can do that by yourself. You can do that by yourself. Help keep you motivated to take notes, remind you, hey, don’t forget to take notes. Or to read your notes with you or to have them prod you, whatever. It’s not just accountability. Accountability helps, but can always add to accountability. So you should keep that in mind. This power or superpower, soon to be superpower of yours, I hope, is accessible to you. It takes a little bit of discipline like most things, right? You have to train your time, energy, and attention. Note taking trains all three of those things. And when those things are trained, they again, they’re zapped out, right? They work in other areas of your life as well. When you can organize your thoughts while you’re reading or even while you’re thinking about something, like I take notes while I’m thinking things through. I don’t just take notes on other people’s texts or while reading my own notes. There’s also taking notes on your notes. Another tactic, right? Sometimes I’m just thinking about something and I’m like, I’m going to take some notes. This is a really good idea. I’m going to write that down. In fact, I was talking on the Discord earlier today and Tom helped me out with a bunch of good thoughts. I was like, I’m going to write this down. I’m going to do a video on this. This is great, too. So when you get the hang of that, when you hone it, you don’t have to hone it a lot. You don’t have to be good at it. If you’re better at it than you are now, superpower, instant superpower. Because it’s not just that it improves your memory. It certainly does that. It’s not just an improved your ability to think. It also gives you a taste of how poor your thought is and how much it needs to be improved. That’s good to know. It’s good to know how much of a muppet you are so that you can be a better muppet. It’s great. So take notes. Do it poorly. Do it poorly until it gets better. Frustrate yourself with it. Just a little bit of discipline. Get a buddy to help you, to remind you to write notes. I hadn’t really done a super huge amount of note taking until Manuel one day basically said, you need to share your notes. And I was like, what? And he’s like, yeah, you say you’re taking notes. I want to see them. And then I was like, oh, crap. Well, now I got to take notes all the time. And we did. We took almost daily notes for something like three and a half years. It’s wonderful. And taking with somebody else is good too because you could say like, did you mean to say that? I’d read it and go like, oh, no, I didn’t mean to say that. What was I thinking when I wrote that? Very helpful. So any interaction you have, again, you can do it on your own, but then you’ve got to remember, oh, I’ve got to review the notes. If I don’t review the notes, it’s not that it’s not useful. It’s still useful. Unreviewed notes are still good. But if you review them, you can more easily organize your thoughts and get your thoughts more organized than you ever imagined possible. And when your thoughts are organized, that helps your mind be organized when information is coming in in real time. So it’s not just better memory. It’s not just organized thoughts. It also affects your real-time thinking and your ability to think things through and your appreciation of humility. The art of taking notes and realizing how messy your thoughts really are in the moment is humbling. And it’s humiliating in a good way. And it’s really healthy. Because then you sort of have a little appreciation for other people because most other people have scattered thoughts. They’re not good note takers. They’ve never taken notes or they haven’t taken notes since college, and that was 10 years ago or whatever. Or they didn’t take good notes and they knew it, right? But they never got better. And, you know, look, it’s like anything else. If you don’t practice it, you know, you lose that skill over time. So take notes. Take your superpower. Put on that cape. Fly around the intellectual universe as somebody who’s got organized, easy to articulate thoughts, right? When you can articulate well, as Jordan Peterson talks about, you’ve got a lot more status in the world. And taking notes helps you to articulate things. It really does. And it also puts you in a position, because you’ve organized notes, to be able to articulate things in multiple ways, which helps you communicate with different people, which is an amazing thing. Being able to communicate with lots of different people is great. It’s really great. So yeah, that’s your superpower. It gives you so many features. And look, you just got to dive in and start. You can use outlines. You can use references. You can use back references. You can reference pages and texts, right? Oh, page 23, paragraph four, right? Line three. I’ve done that. I have notes like that. I have other notes that are just lists, right? Lists of thoughts. I have other notes that are whole paragraphs, right? And then paragraphs on different things. I have a whole notes file that I use just for these videos. And some videos, I’ve said this before, are, I have one here, having, being, and telling the difference. That’s the whole theme for the video. At some point, I’ll figure out whether or not I want to add to that, probably, or not. When I do my live streams, I’ve mentioned this before, sometimes I have a lot of notes, usually about a page. Sometimes I don’t have a lot of notes. I’ve done a couple off the cuff. I knew what topic I wanted to talk about. I thought about it all week, or at least for two or three days. And then I just dive right in. It all depends. But the fact that I’ve taken notes before and done good notes probably helps me to take fewer notes and be able to talk more off the cuff. This video, yeah, how to take notes, dash superpower, exclamation point, routine, right? Didn’t mention that yet. Start a routine. Just start. Get it going, right? Review the notes. Get better, right? Notes kind of start out arbitrary. That’s okay. The pattern of note taking emerges over time, and the organization can happen as a result. And that’s how you develop note taking power. You just get started, right? You review those notes. You make it a routine. Do you get better? It doesn’t matter how you start. Pick any kind of note taking style you want or invent your own. It makes no difference. And it’s totally okay that you start out arbitrary and that you suck at it. Like every good thing you learn. You didn’t know how to ride a bike the first time you get on it. It’s okay. And that pattern will support all these other thought patterns over time. And you’ll get better and better and better. Right? And that’s how it is. And again, you can use a buddy either as accountability or somebody to encourage you further to take notes, read notes, review notes with, or somebody to take notes with like I had with Manuel. I mean, I’ve taken notes my whole life, but it really helped to have a Manuel. Whatever combination of that you can manage. You could do it all by yourself. It’s harder to do by yourself. Discipline is hard. David Goggins talks about it like it’s some magical force that you can just conjure up. I tend to disagree. Some people can. Some people are very good at that. Most people are not very good at that. So look, get your superpower. It’s right there. It’s at your fingertips. Grab it. Get a better memory. Get more organized thoughts. Get more articulate. Get a way to explain the same things to more people than you can now. It’ll be great. It’ll be fantastic. Go out and take notes. And the thing that I try to take note of is my gratitude for your time and attention.