![]() Then I cut them out and tape them to a notecard. For longer quotes, I will type them out and print them. Most of the quotes are longer than that, but space is constrained here in this post so I won’t rewrite the longer ones for you. So those are the kinds of quotes I grab for one particular topic. “Find them! Fix them! Fight them! Finish them!” – Gen. “All men work more zealously against their enemies than they cooperate with their friends.” – Caesar qtd in Schiff’s Cleopatra pg 19 “Pursuit should be to the last breath of man and beast.” – (Prussian Maxim qtd in Knights Cross) “Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.” – Schopenhauer pg 77 Retort: “You may not be afraid to have your hand cut off, but your body will suffer.” – John D. “It is better to see once than hear a hundred times.” – Gorbachev Here are some quotes from my Strategy cards: If it’s a really long story or example, I will just jot down a few notes on the key points and then put something like: “For a story about _ see: pg 14 in. If I am quoting someone quoting someone else, I’ll usually write “qtd in.” To make this extra clear, I always put a circle around the first quotation mark. It’s very important that you mark quotes properly so you never risk forgetting to attribute. They’re either famous quotes or quotes from the writer that I think are smart. Most of the time, what I write down are quotes (I used to put them on a blog instead but it was too unwieldy). Either sentences in my own writing, words I like, questions I have, or examples I think might fit somewhere and want to learn more about. So those are the kinds of notes I write to myself. Also, where he ran toward the explosion at City Point. Grant–incident at Mathew Brady’s studio where glass fell on him and he didn’t move. We always decide whether we continue or not.” (Will) “Our actions our constrained, our will is not. “Gaman–the Japanese word for endurance” (Persistence) “We know objectively that we learn from failure, yet we spend all our time trying to avoid it. “Don’t be the slave of circumstance.” (intro) For instance, as I was preparing for my next book, The Obstacle is The Way, I filled out thousands of these cards for ideas and concepts that I wanted included in the book. If I have a thought, I write it down on a 4×6 notecard and identify it with a theme–or if I am working on a specific project, where it would fit in the project. ![]() By the end of it, I promise the system will make sense. It’s difficult to describe this in any linear way so I am just going to do this in kind a brain dump way. But it’s still be hugely helpful to me and I think I’m in a unique position to explain this method to people. What he taught me was neat, clean and orderly. ![]() If anything, I use a perverted version of a system taught to me by the genius Robert Greene, when I was his research assistant. Now to be clear, this is not “my” notecard system. It’s responsible for helping me publish three books in three years, (along with other books I’ve had the privilege of contributing to), write countless articles published in newspapers and websites, send out my reading recommendations every month, and make all sorts of other work and personal successes possible. All I can say is that since learning it about 7 years ago, it has totally transformed my process and drastically increased my creative output. After the response to this recent LifeHacker piece, I thought I would explain the system I use to take notes, research books and keep track of anecdotes, stories and info I come across in my work.
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