How to Make Yourself Into a Learning Machine

The one thing I do try to follow is to go on streaks of reading a lot of books on a particular topic around the same time. Doing this is useful because it means I don’t have to just trust one author’s perspective on a particular topic, and it helps me connect a lot of facts together, so I can understand things better.

When I come across something in a book that seems useful to understand and remember, I will highlight it on my Kindle and add a note to it with the text: “.flash”.

When I highlight something from a book that contains an idea, concept, metaphor, or generally something more abstract, I’ll put it into my Zettelkasten instead of my flashcard system. These highlights aren’t to be remembered—they are to be connected.

If I think a highlight is important, I’ll create a new note in my Zettelkasten and start connecting it with others. For example, this is a note about the controversy zippers created when they first came into use:

This one’s a winner. So I’ll create an entry in my Zettelkasten for it

If I’m writing a presentation, thinking about a problem, or doing any kind of creative work, my Zettelkasten is a gold mine. All of my daily writing also happens inside of it, including reviewing books (which also end up on my personal website).

I think memory is underrated.

For example, memorizing all of the U.S. presidents is something that people might think is for show. But to me it’s actually really helpful to know who was president at a certain time because it allows you to connect the president with that time period. 

For example, take Reagan. If you know when he was president, you can say, This was around the Cold War, and it was toward the end of it, and his platform supported trickle-down economics, which was a very important idea in that time period.

Memorizing these things means that if you’re talking about the U.S. in the eighties, you’ll remember that he was president, and all of those concepts come up. 

So that’s what I find helpful—knowing all of these facts becomes a kind of memory connector.

I have three main areas I throw tasks into: 

Growth (a list of personal projects) Life (chores) Work