today I'm going to talk about how you can take great notes this method is

especially useful for students who are trying to write great essays or study for
exams but I think it could be used by anybody with a little bit of adaptation who
just wants to get the most out of what they read the principle behind this note-
taking method is pretty simple you are going to turn yourself into the teacher so
instead of taking or making notes as if you are studying for something you are
going to take or make

notes as if you were going to teach it to someone who knew less than you
when I would teach college students I would make these really thorough outlines in
order to structure my lectures after I had been doing this for a while I realized
that making these outlines was actually doing a very good job of teaching me the
material too and that's when I realized that you could do this even if you're not
going to teach a class the idea is that if you are able to teach a subject to
someone who knows absolutely nothing about it then that is

a sign that you truly understand it we're going to break this down into
three steps annotating exporting and outlining the first step is pretty simple
while I call this annotating you could all so just call it active reading I think
of active reading as requiring three components first you need to be intentionally
focused you are there for a reason the second is that you need to minimize
distractions and set up your environment correctly and then you need to properly
annotate the text what I mean here is that you need to be focused

you need to be in the right environment and you need to be marking up

your books in the right sort of way so I would suggest that you grab a pencil and
you could follow along with this example this is Aristotle's nicomachine ethics
which is my favorite work of philosophy when we're reading this text we are trying
to read it as if we are going to explain it to a beginner so we are looking for a
couple of things we want to look for jargon or vocabulary that might need to be
explained we also want

to look for the important passages or the key points that we want every
reader to know about and then finally we want to look for those parts of the text
that are unclear that we're going to need to break down and explain I like to
underline the vocabulary that needs to be defined I like to put a star next to the
important passages and a question mark next to those difficult parts I am not
underlining every sentence that is a common beginner mistake I so often see people
who when they're taking notes

actually end up just underlining almost every sentence in a book that is

useless it is not actually doing anything for you what I'm doing here is flagging
parts of the text for my future self I'm going to use these annotations later on
when I'm actually making my really high quality notes the study guide another thing
I like to do is add a little book tab or a sticky note or something when I'm
finished annotating a section not only does this let me know that I need to review
a certain page when I'm making

my notes but it also kind of acts as a bookmark that way you don't need a
separate bookmark and you don't need to dog hear your pages if I were doing this on
an iPad or a tablet my process would be basically the same The Only Exception is if
I'm using a Kindle or an e-reader I like my Kindle a lot I'm increasingly using it
to read almost every book that I read these days however I don't like any of the
note-taking features of the Kindle I even try to Kindle scribe and it didn't really
do it for me with

Kindles I'm just heavily relying on the highlighting part understanding

that I'm missing out on some of the annotation but if I'm still engaged in my
reading I'm highlighting appropriately and maybe even making some separate remarks
on a piece of paper or something you it can it can work it can work now the key to
active reading is to be in the right frame of mind you need to be able to really
focus and if you're struggling to focus or you would like to just clear your
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you'll get 25 off now that you have read your book or your article this isn't just
for books you need to do something with what you've read and this is where you're
going to make use of your annotations and you're going to put them somewhere else I
like to call this the

export phase your annotations and ideas will now come out of your book
and we'll go onto a page or a screen somewhere else you could use a pen and paper
for this you could also use a tool like obsidian or Rome I have dabbled with all
three though there is some evidence that writing by hand does improve information
retention so if you're doing this for the purpose of studying actually writing your
notes by hand could be very useful when you are exporting you are going to be
creating an outline of the section

that you just read you should always write a sentence or two summary of
the section that's just really helpful for reviewing and then your outline should
really reflect not the structure of the text but actually how you would go about
teaching this section to somebody else this is the beginning of your lesson plan or
your study guide so here I wrote a short summary of this section of the Nico McKean
ethics I also have a bullet point where I try to define the vocabulary that I had
underlined before

that means I won't have any important undefined terms left over I'll also
create a bullet point for some of the major points that Aristotle makes the idea is
that a beginner could read through my outline and have a pretty good understanding
of what's going on in this section of Aristotle's work and I could use my outline
to teach a class for beginners this is a first draft meaning you're going to want
to do this several times and refine it and revise things and this is where actually
digital tools like Rome or obsidian work

better than paper with paper you might have to start from scratch and
duplicate a lot of work in order to make revisions or you're going to need to use a
really good eraser or a lot of white out with say Rome all you have to do is add
more bullet points or strike through things or delete them and then type up
something new so while writing by hand it does improve information retention
creating a digital version of what I'm suggesting is actually very convenient and I
admit that I would probably use

roam or obsidian for this so now that you have exported your notes about
Section 1 you are just going to repeat this process for future sections of the book
go back to step one and do your active reading of another portion of the book and
then start exporting and outlining all over it and then that brings us to step
three which in a kind of grandiose terms I'm calling making the Omni outline what
you have done so far is make essentially a bunch of small outlines or study guides
but now we need to create a much bigger version about

the entire book essentially this is your lesson plan to teach the entire
book to a beginner you can do this in phases so let's look at the structure of
Aristotle's book to see what I mean the nicotine ethics is made up of 10 major
sections which we call books and those books have chapters I started this video by
reading chapter one of book one what I would want to do is first create these
little outlines of every chapter in book one and then I want to create a larger
outline of all of book one I'm going to

be taking content from my smaller outlines and and reusing it ideally

after I've done that for book one I would do it for book two and for book three and
so on so what we have actually is an outline of the entire nicomican ethics and
sometimes we can take a very high level View and look at it and give a quick
summary of each of the books and then sometimes we get really into the details
talking about every single chapter of every single book to make this a little
clearer let me show you how this would work in Rome so you can

have a page which is just the nick of McKean ethics because Rome is
essentially an outlining tool with some features built on top of it you can
essentially embed your book and chapter outlines into your Omni outline and then
you can expand or collapse different blocks depending on how detailed or granular
you need to be all of the information is really on one page but there's a there's a
nice way to be able to ignore the extra detail when you don't need it sometimes you
need to go into those details but sometimes you

just need that broad high level outline depending on who you're trying to
teach or depending on what you're trying to review obviously this is an intense
form of note-taking so I would encourage you to experiment a bit I've used it it's
a great effect I've actually used this to study for job interviews to write book
outlines for presentations or for papers that I'm writing this can be very powerful
but it does take a lot of work I also encourage you to just adapt it to suit your
needs if you need to make

modifications that suit you well do it I'm not going to come and like
criticize your particular note-taking method you can also adapt this not just for
books or for articles but also to learn a new skill like a programming language
things would be slightly different but the spirit of the method Remains the Same by
pretending that we are going to teach someone else we actually end up being pretty
good at teaching ourselves