When you created your vision plans, you identified skills you need to make them happen. The systematic acquisition of skills is critical. And skill acquisition is function of accumulating and applying knowledge.
The process of applying knowledge depends heavily on the domain. But to a large degree the accumulation of knowledge can be managed with a consistent system.
This is probably the area where I’m guilty of wasting time with tools. I used to use notebooks. Then I used Bear. Then I migrated to Roam. Now I’m in the process of migrating to Notion and Reflect This is probably okay because I’ve developed the habits. If you’re just getting started, find a tool that works for you and just start using it.
My notes (in whatever form) are probably my most prized possession in my life.
The essential skills and process:
You read stuff. Books. Articles. Tweet threads.
As you read, get in the habit of taking notes and highlighting passages. And when you’re done with the book, or article, or whatever, transfer those notes into your knowledge management system.
There are several approaches for this. Ryan Holiday recommends using 3x5 index cards, which allows him to move them around and play with them physically. There are a bunch of tools like Reflect that make it easy to create “bidirectional links” between content, facilitating connections you wouldn’t otherwise have found. (Roam and Obsidian are others).
I store articles and tweet threads from the web in Readwise Reader, and read stuff in batches. I highlight interesting bits, which get automatically sent to Readwise and Reflect.
I periodically take my notes and consolidate them into “unified theory of X” documents, which I keep both in Reflect and Notion.
I use Notion because I can publish it on the web - I like the idea of having my notes accessible and sharable with others.
Again, don’t get bogged down with the tool. Build the habit.
We forget about 50 percent of new information within an hour of hearing it. That goes up to 70 percent within twenty-four hours, and 90 percent after a week
The proper application of spaced repetition allows me to get the knowledge into my long-term memory. Again, this can take many forms depending on the modality you use for collect.
Readwise is my favorite tool for this. It automatically imports my highlights from Kindle books, allows me to save tweets and tweet threads easily, and I can type my notes from paper books (take photos of the pages I’ve highlighted and use OCR to capture the highlighted passages.)
It then sends me an email each day with 5 of my highlights each day. You can “tune” the highlights to show certain books or resources more frequently, and you can tell it to stop showing you any particular note that is no longer useful.
Ultimately the point is to put this knowledge to work. Having a knowledge management system makes creating content so much easier. Reflect’s bidirectional linking, or a tag-based system (notion DB with tags, tagging your Readwise notes, etc.) makes finding common ideas super simple. Once you get to a critical mass (1000 or so notes or highlights) you find that ideas come faster than you can tackle them.