203 - Zettelkasten Sales Pitch
The point of reading a nonfiction book is to understand the knowledge of a topic the author is trying to communicate to you. Unfortunately in life, you do not come across all the relevant information on a topic at first glance. One important reason for this is because you just aren’t aware of all the best books on a subject matter, so you don’t read them all at once. Another significant reason is that all the important books on a subject matter don’t come out on the same day. You may read a great book about storytelling, then not read another book about storytelling until 3 years later. By then you’ll likely to have forgotten a lot of the important content in the first book. So you need some sort of long term memory of the ideas you come across in the book, especially when you can’t memorize everything you read.
The zettelkasten is a method/system devised to act as your long term memory. It means taking and structuring your notes in a particular way that you can iterate today on an idea you haven’t seen in 3 years. This allows you to build and connect ideas over a long period of time. As you take more notes and interconnect them, you continually build up a more complex picture of a subject matter and reality.
Building a complex picture of reality is important because it helps you see connections that others have missed. Not only can you bring value to the world by communicating these connections, but creating these connections is the very definition of understanding, which in turn helps you in making better decisions in the world.
While this may seem super obvious, most people go through life without deliberately connecting and intertwining what they read in an external system. People unintentionally connect what they read because of how the mind works, but only do so in an internal system. The problem with that is we can only deal with so much information in the mind and have a limited retrieval ability, leading to a lot of forgetting and wasted information processing. This is helpful because it allows us to forget what is unimportant and create easy to use/streamlined models, but in the process we lose the connections that allow for a deeper understanding.
Zettelkasten Requirements
At the heart of a zettelkasten is the idea that you can further develop knowledge by connecting ideas you come across (through reading, thinking, and discussion) to existing information (notes you’ve already taken). For a zettelkasten to work, you just need the ability to create new notes and add connections to existing ones. This means that you could technically create a zettelkasten within a single word document.