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Whether Einstein, Darwin or Mozart; most great thinkers were both genius and highly productive.
Darwin published 118 publications, some of them thick books.
Einstein 248 publication.
Mozart 600 compositions.
But this is not a sign of their super-human capabilities.
Both the ingenious ideas and the productivity have a common reason.
They think often and deeply about their topic.
Nowhere has this process been better documented than for German sociologist Niklas Luhmann
and his famous zettelkasten.
What I’d like to introduce to you today is the thinking technique, the thinking tools
used by Niklas Luhmann.
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist.
He’s very well known within Germany and within continental Europe, but not so much
in the English speaking world.
And he has an enormous track record of publications.
50 books, approximately 400 papers, plus another approximately 200 papers which he never bothered
to publish.
So he was extremely productive and also he was very, very creative in that he took the
theory of systems which had been introduced into psychology before and he combined them
with other sources.
And then transformed it into something that, according to himself, could explain all the
phenomena in sociology.
So his aim was a grand theory of everything.
Very ambitious.
And the great thing about Luhmann is that, even though he was very creative, there was
not this one defining moment where he had the ingenious spark about his idea.
It was more his theory developed as he moved along.
The special thing about Luhmann’s method was, he would take all of his notes on special
slips of papers.
Slips of papers are called zettels in German and he would store all these zettels in a
specific box: an index card box.
Which is called a kasten.
So his method is known, also in English, as the zettelkasten method.
Now the special thing about Luhmann’s zettelkasten method as opposed to any ordinary index card
system was, the main structure came from the fact that he linked the zettels to one another.
He essentially used an analogue system of what we now know as hyperlinks and, in a way,
his zettelkasten worked as the first wiki.
So far this is what a lot of other videos can tell you about Luhmann’s zettelkasten.
However, that’s not all there is to it.
In reality this zettelkasten itself is just… it is important, but it is only important
if it is embedded within other activities.
And it were those other activities together with the special structure of the zettelkasten,
that really enabled Luhmann to develop his thoughts, to develop his ideas.
The idea was transformed continuously.
Luhmann’s special way of thinking consisted of four distinct phases.
Note taking, transferring the notes and two phases of working with the zettelkasten.
The first phase consisted of reading.
Luhmann read enormous quantities of books.
There is a bibliography in his zettelkasten and it contains some in the order of 16,000
to 18,000 references.
To books, papers, essay and other things.
He really read very, very widely.
While he was reading he was taking notes, like most of us.
However, the notes he was taking while reading, they were very sparse and they were very they
were very condensed.
So after a week or so he would not have been able to understand what he was thinking as
he were taking the notes.
They were more an aide memoire to him.
The second step was, at the evening of each day, he would sit down with his notes from
the day and he would go over them and see what topic did they belong to?
Then he would take out some zettels he had already created that belonged to the same
topic.
Going through the zettels and through his notes, he would then take the note and transform
it into a new zettel.
And he would write the zettel in such a way that it fitted the other zettels he already
had on this topic.
Now third phase, he would regularly go through his zettelkasten and look at his zettels to
certain topics that interested him.
As he was going through the zettels maybe new ideas popped into his mind, new questions,
some further line of research.
And as they popped into his head, he recorded them on new zettels which he also inserted
into the zettelkasten at the appropriate location.
At the same time he looked at what topics belonged together and created so called hub
notes.
Hub notes were zettels about a certain topic with subtopics.
And for each subtopic he would write down the ID of three to four zettels that were
a good introduction to that subtopic.
So using the hub notes you could very quickly traverse the zettelkasten from one topic to
another topic and you could either drill deep or you could go very wide.
A special type of hub note, if you like, was his index.
He kept a very top level index about all of the important words that he might be interested
in looking up.
And again instead of listing all the zettels he had for this specific word, he would only
write down three to a maximum of four words.
They were intended as an entrance to the topic.
And then he would read through the zettels and see where the links were to take him.
Phase four.
Usually, as Luhmann was reading or talking to colleagues, some questions would pop into
his mind.
He would write down the questions and the he would go to the zettelkasten.
He’d take the questions and he’d transform them into a keyword.
What keyword did the question touch?
He’d then go to his index and look at this keyword and select one of the three to four
ideas which he had written down previously as an entry point to this topic.
He would go to that part of the zettelkasten, he would take out the zettels and he would
read the zettels.
He would follow the links on the hub notes or maybe on the zettels if there were any.
And so he would amass a number of zettels.
From quite distinct sources and also from quite distinct line of thoughts.
Using those zettels he would then go to answer this questions.
And from the answers of those questions and from the other ideas which he wrote down,
he'd then go and compile the papers and the books he had written.
And this is how, over many years, of going through the zettelkasten numerous times, either
just to organise his zettels or to pursue certain questions, he would slowly add to
the topics He would transform them.
He would get new ideas.
And so his thoughts from the beginning slowly started to build, pour out into several papers,
into a lot of papers, but also were transformed into something new, something that had not
been there before.
And it is precisely that that enabled him to be so creative and so productive at the
same time.
So what can we learn from that if we want to be productive and creative?
First of all we need a lot of input.
Be it through reading, talking to others, doing some form of experimentation or observation.
But this input then needs to be continuously worked on and transformed.
We’re not just taking notes, no we’re transforming the notes and then give it to
our note taking system.
Once it is in our note taking system, we need to go through the note taking system on a
regular basis.
We need to engage with it.
Because, if we do this, first of all it’s much less likely that we forget important
thoughts.
We follow them up.
And we develop new thoughts, new ideas which we can also follow up.
And from that it is then comparatively easy to create new solutions.
Be it in the form of papers, as in Lumann’s case, be it in the form of new products or
new services.
And so this method…
You don’t necessarily need to use the zerttelkasten.
You can use a normal notebook, you can use a wiki, whatever you like.
But this overall method is a very good way to achieve highly creative, even ingenious,
outputs even if you think you’re not a genius.
Because you don’t need to be.
You have many small ideas, like most people.
But you keep track of them.
You expand on them.
And you build them into an overall structure.
And for those people who haven’t seen all the little steps you’ve taken in-between,
but who only see the beginning and the end.
It will feel as if you’re a very ingenious person.
And you can tell them: “No.
I’m actually just the same as you.”
If you don’t know yet how to take quick notes, I made a video where I share the personal
technique which I used.
And you can watch it right here.
Otherwise I hope you found this video useful.
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And until next time:
keep thinking!