Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you

When you use up too much energy taking notes, you have little left over for the subsequent steps that add far more value: making connections, imagining possibilities, formulating theories, and creating new ideas of your own. Not to mention, if you make reading and learning into unpleasant experiences, over time you’re going to find yourself doing l

The ability to spot patterns, to question the frames used and detect the distinctions made by others, is the precondition to thinking critically and looking behind the assertions of a text or a talk. Being able to re-frame questions, assertions and information is even more important than having an extensive knowledge, because without this ability,

If you want to be more effective when sharing yourself and your work, you need to become a better storyteller. You need to know what a good story is and how to tell one.

In order to be successful, a narrative has to be central to the communication. These are words—written, spoken, or a combination of the two—that tell the story in an order that makes sense and convinces the audience why it’s important or interesting and attention to it should be paid.

What all these category-confusing approaches have in common is that the benefit of note-taking decreases with the number of notes you keep. More notes will make it more difficult to retrieve the right ones and bring related ones together in a playful way. But it should be just the opposite: The more you learn and collect, the more beneficial your n