Think inside the box

from

How to Take Smart Notes Develop Ideas

links

Note-taking Learning

previous

Use the slip-box as a creativity machine

next

Facilitate creativity through restrictions

To be able to play with ideas, we first have to liberate them from their original context by means of abstraction and re-specification.

If the story of Romeo and Juliet touches us, it is certainly not because we are all members of one of two feuding families in Verona. We abstract from time and place, from the particular circumstances until we can meet the protagonists of this story on a general level where our own emotional life can resonant with what we see on stage.

Usually, we don't even notice when our brains modify our surroundings to make it fit its expectations. We need therefore a bit of a ruse to break the power of thinking routines.

Make sure that you really see what you think you see and describe it as plainly and factually as possible.

It is very good to know what has already proven to not work if we try to come up with new ideas that do work.

Sometimes, it is more important to rediscover the problems for which we already have a solution than to think solely about the problems that are present to us.

What kind of answer can you expect from asking a question in this particular way? What is missing?

Taking simple ideas seriously. Consider, for example, the idea of buying stocks low and selling them high. I am sure everyone can grasp that idea. But grasping an idea is not the same as understanding it. If you go and buy stocks on that "insight," all you can do is to hope that a stock goes up after you buy it, which makes this knowledge about as useful as the tip on the next colour to choose on a roulette table.

The next level of understanding is reached when you realise what you buy if you buy a stock: a part of a company. The only thing Warren Buffett thinks about it is the relationship between price and value - he doesn't even look at the price from yesterday. He understands that simple is not the same as easy, and that the worst thing you can do is to make a simple task unnecessarily complicated. A stock is a share in a company. The price is set by the market, which means by supply and demand, which touches on the rationality of market participants as well as the question of valuation, which means you have to understand something about the business you are considering investing in, including competition, competitive advantages, technological developments, etc.

Making things more complicated than they are can be a way to avoid the underlying complexity of simple ideas. This is what happened during the financial crisis of 2008: Economists developed hugely complicated products, but did not take into account the simple fact that price and value are not necessarily the same. There is a reason why Buffett is not only a great investor, but also a great teacher: He not only has a vast knowledge about everything related to business, he can also explain it all in simple terms.

By using the slip-box on a daily basis, we train these important intellectual skills deliberately: We check if what we understood from a text is really in the text by having our understanding in written form in front of our eyes. We learn to focus on the gist of an idea by restricting ourselves in terms of space. We can make it a habit to always think about what is missing when we write down our own ideas. And we can practice asking good questions when we sort our notes into the slip-box and connect them with other notes.

Only by abstraction and re-specification can we apply ideas in the singular and always differrent situations in reality.

关注过、感兴趣的事物，要尽可能添加到笔记中，添加到笔记中是一个试错的过程，也是让内容可视化的过程，而笔记就是将来的自己思考的土壤。

已有的笔记是过去思考的结晶，而头脑风暴却只能提取当下大脑最易提取的内容。大脑优先考虑容易获得的内容，通常是最近遇到的、情绪化的、生动具体的。反过来，让自己感兴趣的事物能被经常看到、生动具体化，它们也就容易从大脑中提取出来了。