Book Summary | How to Take Smart Notes (2017)

Book is a window to wisdom. Some books give us insights. Others show how life works and motivate us to make the best of our short lifetime. And yet there are some books which teach us how to think and challenge our limitation of imagination. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking by Sönke Ahrens (2017) falls into the last category.
It reveals a systematic way of building knowledge systems with a simple process from small pieces. It has three easy steps:

• Take Fleet Note: write down facts and highlighted ideas that resonate with you when reading.
• Create Literature Notes after the reading: paraphrase the text in your own words, make decisions, and develop your own ideas.
• Make Permanent Notes: Explain your understanding to others in your own words and add links to the related notes.

The steps follow our natural learning processing: we discover something new when we read. We understand it first and then connect it to our own knowledge and eventually apply them to our life to validate. Ultimately, we want the new ability to become part of our own. We develop our unique opines on the topic, make it better, and share with others.
Making notes like taking a breath, it’s vital to what we do and making it systematic and become part of us. As a result, we will never have the black page syndrome when you don’t know anything to write about a subject or imposter syndrome when you have the feeling that you are not really up to the job later. To make it happen, it takes a little more self-discipline and perseverance.

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