How To Remember Everything You Read (My Notecard System)

0:00 Look, it's good that you read. It's good that you read a lot. But if you can't remember what you're reading, if all this is just going in a black hole somewhere, you have a massive problem. Right? Cuz a lot of what we read now, a lot of what we are learning now, it is valuable. And we may need it, just not at this moment. So the question becomes, how do you collect, organize, preserve all the things that you're reading and learning? Because the cost of forgetting a story or a lesson means really high. It could be money. It could be time. Could be relationship, right? Like you're reading about something now that could be of great benefit to you in the future. Could be the solution to your problem. Could save you. But if you don't remember it, if you haven't recorded it, if you can't easily access it, may as well never have read it in

0:46 the first place. Right? What reading is is a way to learn from the experiences of others. We have to record and capture and preserve that information. I've read thousands and thousands of books over the course of my life. And before that, I was a research assistant under the great Robert Greene, who taught me a lot of what we're going to talk about in today's episode. And then my own learning and experience writing the books that I've done and having this job for many years, I'm going to give you my four-part system that can help you remember and use everything that you're reading and learning. So first, let's talk about how to read. Obviously, you do know how to read. But if you're not reading with a pen, you might as well not be reading, in my opinion. To me, reading is something you do [music] actively. You're reading,

1:32 you're taking notes, you're highlighting things, you're marking things. I don't care what kind of pen you use, what kind of highlighter you use, whatever it is. The point [music] is you should be reading and selecting and noting things that stand out to you. For some reason, I like to use Sharpies. So like you can see here, this is a page I'm marking with a Sharpie. I'm folding one page. I'm marking to continue to the next one. I'm marking things I want to use in my books. If you have a thought, if you have a disagreement, if you really like something, that's what the pen is for. This is called marginalia. It's something that the greatest writers [music] and thinkers have always done. I learned this in David McCullough's book on >> [music] >> John Adams. You can see these are all the pages I folded, and then I'll I'll show you some of the notes that I took in mine. But, in one book that he read

2:19 on the French Revolution, his marginalia totaled something like 12,000 [music] words. And McCullough points out that he read thinkers like Adam Smith. He agreed with them in some cases, disagreed with them [music] in other cases. He made connections, he made notations, and that's what he's doing as an active reader. The point is, reading should be [music] active and it should be engaging. You shouldn't agree with everything, you shouldn't accept everything unthinkingly, you shouldn't even like everything. I often tweak or criticize sentences that I don't like, metaphors or similes that I think are lame, stylistic choices that I like, dislike. [music] Right, they call reading the classics the great conversation. I think that's a great way to think about it. This is, in fact, a conversation. It's a dialogue between

3:05 you and the writer. You know, some people are are reluctant to do this cuz they want to preserve their books. They want to protect their books. No, books are meant to be read and used. [music] Not only did I write in this one, I was scribbling with Sharpie on the cover. There's food stains you can see here. I put hundreds of miles on this book. I took it on airplanes, I took it on car trip. I sat and ate my lunch over it. The point is, I am engaging with the thing that David McCullough spent years of his life producing. [music] I am not treating it like it's this delicate, fragile little thing. No, I'm integrating it into my [music] life. I'm engaging with it. I'm subjecting it to the test, right? So, part of what we're doing when we're reading is setting ourselves up for future success. Now, can you also do this on an ebook? Yes,

3:50 but I actually think it's the act of reading it physically, engaging with it that is so valuable, which leads me to my next point. Speed reading is You're not trying to burn through these books as fast [music] as possible. Marcus Aurelius talks about this in Meditations that he learns from his philosophy teacher. This is a passage here I underlined [music] in book one of Meditations. Marcus Aurelius thanking what he learned from his philosophy teacher, Junius [music] Rusticus. I'll read it for you here. I've underlined it and highlighted it multiple times over 20-plus years. He says, "From Rusticus he learned to read attentively and not be satisfied with [music] just getting the gist of it." It'd be better to read fewer books and really understand them, really process them, really take extract from them

4:37 everything that they contain, than read [music] tons and tons of books and get nothing from them. So, the next thing I do after I read a book like this, after I've marked all these pages, is I just let it sit for a little bit. They sit on a pile next to my desk, and whenever I have spare time, I sit down, I do my extracts, I do my note [music] cards. Now it's the process of taking this information which is contained between these two covers, and extracting it. This is really important. This is the best and most powerful part. The reason you're waiting is that some of the stuff that jumps out at you when you read it the first time, when you go back through it the second time, it's not going to jump out at you. Also, this period of kind of setting it and forgetting it is really important cuz it's the second pass [music] that's now allowing you to engage with the material

5:24 one additional time. But it's really important that we take the stuff that's in the books and we put it on the page, right? This is a great book, which by the way, I took tons of notes on. This is Roland Allen's The Notebook. The subtitle here is great, A History of Thinking on Paper. So, I've read the book on paper, and now I want to turn it into note cards. I use 4x6 note cards cuz this is the method that I learned as a research assistant to the great Robert Greene. I remember I just started working for him and he takes me into his office and he starts pulling out these boxes. They look like long shoe boxes and he says, "You want to see how I wrote the 48 Laws of Power?" Which is by the way this like mind-bending compilation of all these different facts and stories and anecdotes [music] and quotes from all different cultures and

6:09 great works of art and he showed me how he did the 48 Laws of Power. It's the shoe box. It's organized in all these different He's like, "It's all about the note cards. The note cards are the building blocks." So, I went out and got note cards and that's the system I've been doing for 20 plus years now. And there's actually a great quote in this book from Pliny the Elder, a great Roman thinker and he said, "Never read without taking extracts." And Pliny used to say there was no book so bad that you couldn't take one or [music] two things from it, which is totally true. There's been books I've read about totally random subjects that I ended up getting one line or one idea from that shaped one of my books or took me down a rabbit hole I ended up looking something up. So, that's the process. It goes from the reading to the extract phase and then to

6:55 the note cards. Let me tell you why. A collection of anecdotes and maxims is the greatest treasure for a man of the world as long as he knows how to weave the former into apposite points in the course of conversation and to recall the latter on fitting occasions. Who is that? It's from Goethe, the German philosopher and novelist and I took that on a note card and I put it here. And so, once you've extracted [music] the information, you're writing it down, the next step is of course organizing it and you have to organize it into what's called [music] a commonplace book. So, remember earlier I was telling you that story about John Adams? How did I know that was on page 619 [music] of the McCullough biography? Cuz I I it

7:40 right here on a note card which I took when I was writing my wisdom book. I knew I wanted to do a chapter on commonplace books, which is what we're talking about here, and I said 12,000 words of comments on one book, page 619, McCullah, John Adams. So, this is a building block for a chapter that I would write later. And I have been collecting these note cards, >> [music] >> I have tens of thousands of them for over 20 years. Whenever I find something interesting, I find [music] something I think I might use, when I find something that I want to research, I write it down on a note [music] card, and then I organize it in my commonplace book. If you don't know what a commonplace book is, well, you should, and I write about it in Wisdom Takes Work, cuz it's, as I said, it's a really important theme.

8:26 This is the Create a Second Brain chapter. For hundreds of years, lovers of books and ideas have kept what is called a commonplace book, where they collected observations, quotes, ideas, diary entries, and anecdotes [music] that they wanted to preserve. As far back as the Greeks and Romans, ars excerpendi, the art of excerpting, was a skill to be taught. And I talk about all the different people that have done this, that have kept some version of a commonplace book. Anne Frank kept one. Montaigne kept a commonplace book, that's what formed his famous essays. Emerson kept so many commonplace books, did so much extracting that he had to create a book just that's like a running table of context or index about where all the stuff could be found. Now, there's a bunch of different names and words for this commonplace system.

9:13 There's a German word for it, zettelkasten, which is interesting. A lot of people use index cards like I do, that's my favorite thing. Look, you can do it as a notebook, but a lot of people use index cards. [music] And you want to know how I wrote that chapter on commonplace books in Wisdom Takes Work? A stack of note cards that I collected about people keeping [music] commonplace books. Here's a note about Montaigne, his copy of Lucretius >> [music] >> is currently exists at Cambridge University and you can look at all the notes that he kept. I actually read a great book a couple of years ago called Patton's mind which talks of all about how Patton extracted knowledge from the books that he read and you can look at the pages of books that Patton read and when he finished he put a little R in

9:59 the corner. More about John Adams, Darwin said trust nothing to memory. Joan Didion has done note cards at this table. She would organize her screenplays with note cards, but she also kept notebooks and note cards to remember stuff. And she says famously in this quote that I have here about how the reason we keep notebooks, the reason we write these things down is not just that it has a professional application. She finds little things she ends up using in her essays and books, but that it helps her keep in touch with who she used to be. That is the delightful part of extracting and keeping a commonplace book. Several years ago when I was putting out Conspiracy I got invited to do a an event at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and I immediately said yes. Why did I say yes? And what was the condition my acceptance

10:46 was predicated on? It's I wanted to see Ronald Reagan's note [music] cards. Because I'd read a book actually written by someone I know a little bit, Douglas Brinkley. Ronald Reagan kept these photo binders way back beginning in his acting [music] days and then his spokesperson days, then his government days about [music] anecdotes, stories, facts that he really liked. [music] And I said I'll give this talk if you let me go through some of his note cards. They did. I went in the library [music] and they just had all these note cards laid out for me to look at. And it was incredible. Now again, he put them often on these 3 by 5 cards or sometimes scraps of paper. Like I said, I prefer 4 by 6 note cards, that seems like the right size to me. So this is ultimately the president of the United States. Why was he such a good public speaker? Where

11:32 did this sort of homespun wisdom [music] came from? It wasn't off the top of his head. It wasn't extemporaneous. It was from his note cards. And look, a really important part of this system is how painstaking it is and how much time it takes, as I was saying. So, it's the process of reading and taking the notes, but then it's writing out the long quotes by hand or typing it up and printing it out. So, now I've read it, then I've opened the book up and I'm looking at it again, and now I'm feeling those words flow through my fingers this way or that way. And so, now I've engaged with the material a handful of times. And this is much better memory than, you know, highlighting it and sending it to your Evernote or to a Google Doc somewhere. I want you to

12:17 sweat for it. I want it to take time. I want it to be difficult. The inefficiency is the efficiency. Let me show you what a commonplace book looks like. This is one of mine. We've been talking about Wisdom Takes Work, so I'll show you my commonplace book for my book about wisdom. Oh my god, it's so heavy. All right, so this is actually a box. It's called a cropper hopper or something. I just bought a bunch of them online that is meant to also to organize photos, not unlike Ronald Reagan [music] did. And this is thousands of note cards. This is the note card I did when I was writing the virtue series, courage, temperance, justice. [music] I was in my little circle which one I was working on. But this is all the research and extracts I took while I was writing Wisdom Takes

13:03 Work. There's a chapter in the book on wonder, that part of wisdom is about finding things [music] that inspire you, that light you up, that that make you ever curious. I'm talking about this book that I loved about Richard Feynman by Leonard Mlodinow. And there's a story I So, Feynman's exam for Leonard [music] page 325. He said, "Look, if you're going to insist that I've taught you something, I guess I should give you a final exam." Really? One question. Okay, sure. Go look at an electron microscope photograph of an [music] atom, he told him. Don't just glance at it. It's very important that you examine it closely. Right? And then here's here's me riffing on it. I said, "What does it matter if an atom makes your heart flutter?" Because, as Aristotle said, another bit of reading I did, "Philosophy begins in wonder." No one can accomplish greatness

13:49 in any field if they're not driven by love and fascination and genuine reverence. So, the point is we're collecting this stuff so we can use it. In my case, as a writer, but maybe in your case in a speech that you're giving, in a business plan that you're writing, or a an art project that you're doing, or maybe just something you're collecting for a subject you're trying to wrap your head around. And then here we have another quote from Feynman talking about Descartes. This is page 118. We have a quote. "Do you know who first explained the true origin of the rainbow?" I asked. "It was Descartes," he said, and in a moment he looked me in the eye. "And what do you think was the salient feature of the rainbow that inspired Descartes's mathematical analysis?" he asked. "Well, the rainbow is actually" starts to explain it. [music] And then Feynman cuts him off and he says, "You're overlooking a key feature of the phenomenon." "Okay, I

14:34 give up. What would you say inspired his theory?" "I would say his inspiration was that he thought rainbows were beautiful." So, I just love little stories like that. I think the Greek term for them was akraia. They're little sort [music] of anecdotes, moral lessons, moral stories that you tell and it helps you encapture and understand the essence of someone, but also the essence of world or some truth about the human experience. And look, all of this would be impossible for being to keep in my brain. I could keep some of it, but not all of it. And so, it's the process of writing and rewriting and organizing and putting them in these little file folders that allows me to engage with the material over and over and over again. I remember I asked Robert Greene, I was like, "Can I just do this all digitally?" And he was like, "No, the whole point is that it's physical, not

15:20 just the painful part of doing it." Like when I read a big book like this, sometimes the reason I take a couple weeks before I pick it up or months, this would be multiple days work, right? Transferring these extracts might take two or three days of work. But it's not just that that is important, like sweating for what you really learn it. But having it here, having it laid out, allows me to organize it, put it in themes, but move them around. I go, "Actually, no, this doesn't go here, this goes here. This belongs in two categories." And now I've got to write it again, and I'm engaging with the material again. So, it's creating the recall, the familiarity, but also in my brain, I have a sense of where they all go, what belongs with each other. And then I can see as I'm writing a book or as I'm researching and accumulating a book, where these themes have started to

16:06 come together. So, I have commonplace books for each of the books that I write. I have commonplace books about philosophy. I have a commonplace book of just life advice, just things that I try to apply as a person and as a parent. So, you can do this however you want for whatever you're doing it for. It's changing and evolving over time. Eventually, I'll run out of these boxes, or maybe I'll come up with a more permanent solution. The point is, it's designed to be tweaked, but the core basic principles, the nuts and bolts of it, that is perennial and timeless. I want you to put your own spin on it. But most of all, what I want you to do is do it, right? I got some advantage out of it when I started on my first book, but it was my second and my third. It's all the accumulation of these cards over

16:52 many, many, many, many years that I've derived the most value of. And so, the best time to have started a commonplace book, to have started the system for you would have been a long time ago, but the second best time is like right now, cuz your future self, you 5 years from now when you're working on a project, you 20 years, 30 years from now when you're really struggling with something, and you know you read something or you thought you heard this somewhere, you're going to want to draw on wisdom. It's going to be right here in whatever form you've collected and organized it in. That's what it's all about. And these principles are are timeless, right? Read intentionally, read with a pen, take notes, extract them from the book, put them physically manifest them on the note cards, organize them, and then,

17:38 this is the most important part, how do you apply them to your actual life, to the work that you do? So, yeah, it would be better to have done this a long time ago, but now is pretty good, too, provided that you keep doing it as you go and as you grow.