Hi guys and welcome back to Brain-Friendly Thinking.
A little while ago I used the example of a video lecture to show my note taking process in action.
Ray Hylton Jr asked whether I could not do the same and also show you
how I take and process notes while reading. So, this is what I gonna do in this video.
The book which I chose as an example is called Mastery by George Leonard.
It’s about how to become very good at a set of skills. So far what I talked about on this
channel most is the connection between knowledge and creativity. But there is also a different type
of creativity which has to do with skill and being to adapt those skills to new situations.
This is also a very important point which I would like to talk more about in the future.
So, this book serves as an entry point for me into this very fascinating topic. It’s from
1991, so it’s already quite old, but I heard a lot of good things.
I think it will be very interesting and I think also a lot of you will like it.
So, I gonna leave a link to the book down in the description, if you want to read it for yourself.
Before reading the book in detail, I first gonna skim it. Why and how I do this, for
that I already made a complete video which you can watch somewhere over there, if you’re interested.
But, basically, the first thing I have to do is, I need to go through the table of contents and see
whether there’re any words that are standing out to me. Let’s see… Ok, we have a… Well,
we start with the title. Title: Mastery. Er… The key to success and long-term fulfilment.
Yeah, hmm… Key, success… I don’t really know… Mastery… Na… So, the second thing is headings.
Let’s go through the headings. We have: master’s again, but we have master’s journey.
Journey could be important. So, let’s write this one down.
Introduction is just a generic title. It doesn’t tell me anything. Again: What is mastery?
Should I really write down mastery? He’s gonna use it a lot. I think actually, he probably
gonna define it at some point. So, yes. Let’s write down mastery. Erm… So, meet the dabbler,
the obsessive, the hacker. These seem to be very important concepts, so let’s write them down.
It seems to be these are probably different type of people and different type of learners.
Obs… How do you write… Obsessive. And hacker. Cool. America’s wa… war against mastery.
Na… That’s not really doesn’t tell me a lot. Loving the plateau. Yes, plateau seems to be
important, if you even need to love it. The five master keys.
Instruction, practice, surrender, intentionality and edge.
Ok, let’s first write down the keys themselves. Instruction.
OK then. After just reading the title and the headings, I got 15 words here. And some of them,
such as plateau, practice, intentionality, they’re very likely key words of the text.
Next thing, I gonna read the introduction. And so, I go through the text for the first time.
I first read the introduction in detail. Then I read every first sentence of every chapter
and sub-chapter. Then I have a look at the images. There aren’t very many in this book.
And finally, I take a look at the summary, at the very last chapter.
And so, slowly, my ABC-active grows from 15 words to 30 words at the end of this step.
Now I read the book cover to cover as you would usually do. Now I read in detail and every word.
But because I primed my mind before starting to read, it is now much easier for me
to judge the importance of the concepts that I’m encountering.
And I can place them in their proper context and know how they will be used later on.
Even though, as I’m reading the text in detail there are still many more concepts or many more
arguments. And so, I fill my ABC-active slowly by slowly from 30 to 72 words. At the same time,
sometimes what I’m reading gives me an idea of something else. And then I take my notebook
and I write this down as a note for myself, rather than putting it into the ABC-active.
After I finish reading the text, I go through my ABC- active. The one exercise I always do
first is, I go through my words and I categorise them according to how essential they are to the
topic of the text. I always do this, because this is a comparatively simple exercise,
but you already need to t think about the words quite a lot.
And so, you’re sort of mulling over the text in your head much more than you would otherwise.
Next, I wanted to explore some of the key concepts of the text in more detail.
Among those concepts which I categorised as being most essential to the text, I selected four.
For no specific reason, it just felt right.
And I selected these four and I wanted to think about them more deeply. In order to do this,
I created a CaWa for each of them. And this time, the CaWa does not take the words
from from my ABC-active and I don’t try to fit it to the CaWa, but anything that comes to my
mind is fair game to write down. A lot of what I write down will, of course, reflect what was
written in the text, because it’s still fresh in my mind, but there will also be other associations
which point me to a further directions or which give me more perspective.
Then I take all my words which I collected using my CaWas
and I place them in an ABC-list of their own. I go through the ABC-list and I see whether I can
put the words into groups. Which of the words belong together?
Not necessarily which CaWa did they come from, but maybe some of the words belong to learning
or others belong to challenges and so on. This is simply to think about the concepts in more detail.
Up to this point I had planned everything that I wanted to do before I started shooting the video.
But as I was going through the categorisation, I suddenly had an idea. It appeared to me
that for me personally, right now, the most important words were quick fix and journey. And I
saw, looking at the words, that there are certain words which characterise what a quick fix is and
what a journey is. Like a very condensed version. So, what I’m doing now is, I’m writing them down.
I have quick fix vs journey. And below each of them I write a couple of words that describe
them best, in such a way that a word on the left side is contrasted with a word on the right side.
Quick fix means comfort zone, journey means challenge.
Quick fix means immobility, journey means action. And so on and so forth.
Then, as I had finished that exercise and as I was waiting for some water to boil,
I could not help but continue to think about the topic. And the more I thought about it,
the clearer it became to me that really the word which characterises quick fix most of all those
which I’ve written down is immobility. And the word that really characterises journey the most
is action. Spontaneously, as I was thinking about it, I developed some metaphors in my mind.
A quick fix looks mobile, but is really immobile, like sand being pushed around by the wind.
Whereas the journey looks stationary, but is really action. Just like a tree.
And so, in the end, what I did is, I quickly did a CaGa of each of the metaphors I had come up with.
And this really captures the essence for me
right now of the text. And where I want to like to continue to think about in the future.
I highly enjoyed reading this book. It’s quite short and it’s written quite easily,
but it’s got a lot packed in there. What it provided to me specifically, right now,
are words to describe observations I had also arrived at. Especially quick-fix society
and journey. So, you’re sure to encounter concepts from this book in my future videos.
And this is how you can take notes and explore the topic of a book
using brain-friendly techniques. I hope it has given you some idea of what you can try
yourself. If you’re interested in how you can manage your knowledge with a long-term approach,
you might be interested in the zettelkasten technique. And you can click the video right here.
If instead you’re interested in other thinking techniques you can use, you can click the link
here. Otherwise, if you found the video useful, please don’t forget to give the like button a
high-five. Consider subscribing, if you haven’t already. And until next time: keep thinking.