Muchenxuan Tong's List: Note Taking

• Organization is really the key virtue here. In order to have a well-organized set of notes, you must think about the material, asking yourself, "What are the most important parts of the material?" and "How do the different parts relate to each other?" If you do this, you should quickly find out what bits of the material do not make sense to you, and you can then use the text to remedy that lack of understanding, or, failing that, ask your instructor for help in understanding the material.

   

  This copying over should be performed at least 2-3 times per week, and typically with the textbook at hand to clear up any confusion you have about the material. If you leave it all for the weekend, then you risk having forgotten material covered in lecture (but for which you may not have taken good notes), have missed out on the opportunity to ask about your misunderstandings at lecture, and you have given yourself a mountain of work.

   

  One other advantage I found was this: knowing that you will be copying the notes over within about 48 hours, you are free to be as messy and disorganized as you wish, allowing much faster note-taking in class. This increases your ability to keep up with the instructor's lecture pace. See the example pages for what I'm taking about.

• To reduce the time required to study, you must try to do as much thinking and processing of the information as possible while still in the classroom. You’re there anyways, you might as well make the most of it! Don’t record what the professor says, record the importance of what he says. The only thing that should go into your notebook is processed information. When it comes time to study, your task becomes one of review, not thinking, and this saves significant time.
• Instead, probe the connections between the information. Ask how an idea fits a theory mentioned earlier. Test your understanding of why a certain scholar thought a certain way, or what factor might explain a certain event. The less sure you are of your answer the more important it is for you ask. These connections are fuel for deep understanding.

• This ideas shows up often on Study Hacks: identify your trouble spots as the semester progresses, do not wait until the weekend before the exam to try to fill in these gaps. This note-taking method forces this continual clarification.

• -A few weeks after finishing the book, return to it and transfer those notes/thoughts on to the appropriate note cards. Why wait? Waiting helps you separate the wheat from the chaff. I promise that many of the pages you marked will not seem to important or noteworthy when you return to them. This is a good thing–it’s a form of editing.
• -In the top right hand corner of each card, put a theme or category that this card belongs to. If a card can fit in multiple categories, just make a duplicate card. Robert uses color coded cards for an extra layer of organization.
• -As you compile cards and study different things, it’s not uncommon to organically begin coming across unexpected themes. This is how new categories are born.

• -If you are working on a book project where there are a limited amount of themes or you know exactly what they are, it makes sense to introduce a shorthand. For instance, with my last book Growth Hacker Marketing, I had 6 themes that roughly corresponded with the chapters and structure of the book:

   
   
  • 1) Intro 
  • 2) Growth Hacking 
  • 3) Product Market Fit 
  • 4) Growth Hacks 
  • 5) Virality 
  • 6) Optimization and Retention 
  • (Misc)
• -Don’t stress about filling up whole cards. I have hundreds that just have a ONE or TWO words on them. These might be cool new words that I’ve never heard before, words I think have a lot of meaning in them, reminders about topics I want to mention.
• -Helpful tip: If you end up using the back of the card (I do it fairly often), put an arrow on the front side. Sometimes when you’re flipping through them, you miss the fact that there is text on the back.
• -Get in the habit. If you have an idea, put it on a damn card. If you don’t, you’ll regret it. I can’t tell you how many times I saved my ass writing down a title idea or a thought, I otherwise would have forgotten. It’s a good thing when your own cards surprise you.
• -When I go back through the cards, I’ll often remember other things from more recent reading or thinking and add to them. This is why, if you went through all mine, you’d see different colors of ink on the same card.
• I read a book and I take, as I’m reading it, I underline it and put notes on the side and then I go back and put them on notecards. And I can gauge a good book will generate 20 to 31 notecards. A bad book will generate two or three notecards and I will find themes in this book and I will take a book that’s maybe not organized very well and I will do the organizing. On page 30 you talk about this and you talk about it on page 180, you should have put those two together but I’m going to put those two together. And I find the themes in there and I break the book down into the gist of it, the heart of it.
• You don’t want to know everything about it, but with this there now, if I’ve done all that work and I sit down to write, I have at my fingertips, all of this. If I want to do Leonardo da Vinci, I have 50 notecards that break him down from every possible angle. I can now, with that, write in a much fuller, deeper, dimensional way because I’ve taken all this information and I’ve organized it.

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• 真正的专家，都有自己的一整套知识体系。这套体系就如同他们心中的一棵不断生枝长叶的树，又如同一张随时变大变复杂的网。每当有新的知识进来，他们都知道该把这个知识放到体系的什么位置上去。有人管这套体系叫做 mental model, 有人管它叫 matrix。有了这套体系，你才可能对相关事务作出出神入化的“眨眼判断”，而不是靠什么“灵感”或者“女人的直觉”。

   

  普通人把鱼按形状分类，而一个有知识体系的渔民则把鱼按巡游习惯和商业价值分类。真正懂音乐的人听同一首贝多芬要听很多种不同版本，有知识体系的油漆工可以识别十六种不同的白色。新手消防队员只看到火，而有知识体系的老消防队员看到的是一个有起因有发展有结局的故事。有知识体系的科学家，一眼就能看出什么方向重要，什么不重要。
• 我读到好书，也会做点读书笔记。如果你没做过，你不会有我的感受：写读书笔记太累了。正如钱钟书说的那样，到写读书笔记的时候，才发现很多读第一遍没有读出来的意思。在写笔记的时候要把一本书融会贯通，要记下自己的感想，甚至要跟作者对话。读各种闲书是我的业余爱好，只能使用零散的时间。在读闲书时间里我有三件事可以选择：读一本新书，写篇博客，或者写读书笔记。其中我最不愿意做的事情就是写读书笔记。实在是最高强度的脑力劳动。相比之下，反倒是科研笔记更容易写。
• 建立知识体系的第二要点，是要把新的知识跟自己已有的知识联系起来。一般人善于发现新事物的不同点，而真正的高手则善于发现共同点。所谓消化吸收的本质，正在于此。有些读书太多的人之所以死板，就是因为他机械地读，而没有建立一个体系。
• 刚开始念研究生的时候，我把看过的物理论文按内容加标签，而现在我一律按照作者名字加标签。你跟我提一篇物理论文，我不记得这篇文章的标题是什么，但我记得它的作者是谁，哪年发表的。所有的物理学家都是如此。当你对一个领域足够了解，你就会构建一个知识体系，在这个体系里，谁做的什么工作一目了然。

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