Use Notebooks for Active Living

Moving Beyond Passive Consumption to Active Living and Creation of Knowledge

Image by Colton Sturgeon from Unsplash

What We’re Not Taught

Were you ever taught how to take notes and keep a notebook? Most of you probably weren’t. Instead you probably learned by experimenting and watching what people around you in school were doing. There were no classes on note taking exploring different techniques, ways of indexing and exploring your notes after, or what the benefits of different systems are. The lack of lessons in how to take notes is connected to a broader problem of how we seem to be losing the ability to think deeply.

There’s an interesting question about the notebook and thinking deeply: are notebooks an extension of your brain into the physical world? In a sense you can off-load memory, and the connecting of different thoughts and knowledge to an object in the physical world. You can solve intellectual ideas partly inside your head, and partly on paper. Andy Clarke and David Chalmers explored this question philosophically in their 1998 paper, The Extended Mind by asking the question “where does the mind stop and the extended world begin?”.

Many of the greatest thinkers in history didn’t just sit still and meditate on big problems until they got an answer. They kept common-place books, zibaldones, journals, log books, and all kinds of different notebooks to extend their brain and think on paper. Leonardo da Vinci kept at least 50 notebooks spanning 28,000 pages where he thought on paper through writing and drawing as his means of trying to understand how the world works. His “brain” wasn’t just in his head, but in the notebooks too.

Almost all the great thinkers from the Renaissance onward did their thinking on paper in one form or another. Charles Darwin used notebooks to develop the theory of natural selection. “Trust nothing to the memory for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when one interesting object is succeeded by another still more interesting,” he said. He would record his rough field notes during the day, then in the evening would rewrite his discoveries into a more coherent and well thought out narrative. Often he would think on the page by asking himself questions and writing out his train of thought: “Why 2 [species] of ostrich in South America?”

By privately externalising his ideas he was able to question them, manipulate them and hone the arguments that would turn a raw hypothesis into a well-substantiated, coherently argued theory. Darwin more than once explained the method in print, recommending that researchers ‘ought to remember Bacon’s aphorism, that Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man’.

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

Isaac Newton did the same and used his notebooks to extend his mind and serve as a repository of the knowledge he collected and the ideas he came up with. Francis Bacon by his mid-forties had at least 28 notebooks for exploring scientific and philosophical ideas, keeping a collection of quotations and references, and tracking his household accounts.

Students were taught how to use these tools from the Renaissance until the 19th century when this kind of education started to fade along with the decline of grammar schools. The grammar school system focused on teaching the use of common-place books as the primary way of educating students. Shakespeare was an example of this kind of student. He used the common-place books he created while in grammar school for the rest of his life.

The curriculum that Brownsword left behind gives us a clear idea of what Shakespeare learned at school and how he learned it, and common-placing played a key role. The habit stood the young poet in good stead. Nearly every play adapts existing source material such as Holinshed’s Chronicles, Plutarch’s Lives and Boccaccio’s Decameron, using their plots, characters and imagery in fresh ways–’a style that mixes multiple sources and transforms them’, as Vine puts it.

…

The polymath Francis Bacon, put it, ‘there can hardly be anything more useful’ than a common-place to supply ‘matter to invention’.

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

There are different systems you ask? There’s a history to notebooks and how we’ve used them? Indexing? common-place books? Indeed there are even special names for different kinds of notebooks. Roland Allen recently published a whole exploration of these questions in The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, which I highly recommend. It's a wonderful book.

The way some of the greatest intellectuals and creatives in history thought was actually taught to them in school. Seems like this would have been a useful education for all of us to have. I don’t blame teachers for this. This isn’t secret knowledge someone hid from you and decided not to teach. It’s more like lost knowledge that almost no one including your teachers knew existed. I’m not saying the reason we don’t seem to have Leonardos, Newtons, and Shakespeares is because we don’t teach students how to think like this anymore, but it seems like maybe we should consider what we’re missing today that they had.

Personal Books

I like to think of notebooks, common-place books, zibaldones, diaries, journals, logbooks (if you don’t like the word “diary” then just call it your “captain’s log” or “The Chronicles of [your name]”. Much cooler), etc. as falling under the heading of “personal books”. They are typically handwritten, unstructured, messy, meant only for one reader, and unpublished, but they are still books and you are their author and they are meant as writings for you first and foremost.

The Common-place Book

Probably the easiest way to conceive of a common-place book is that it’s a personal encyclopedia of the knowledge, thoughts, and insights of the writer. The “common-place” refers to the headings of that encyclopedia. If you were learning about Democracy for example you might have a “common-place” in your encyclopedia titled “Democracy” where you would write out your knowledge and collected ideas. Beyond that though there is no clear definition of a common-place book. Its format, usage, and method of creation differed from person to person. Sometimes the writer gave it a strict structure and it really would be like an encyclopedia, while other times it might be something of a mishmash of collected knowledge under common-places mixed with a diary, doodles, little poetry snippets, fun facts, quotations, or just a sort of journaling word vomit in general.

The Zibaldone

The zibaldone, which is Italian meaning something like “a heap of things” or a “salad of things”, was similar to the common-place book in that it was a place to record what you collected, but where a common-place book would be structured with information written under “common-places”, the zibaldone would contain a mishmash of things the writer wanted to keep, often without any formal structure. Zibaldones would often be filled with quotations, recipes, drawings, aphorisms, observations, bits of knowledge the author would want to refer to often (I keep a few recipes and my measurements for when I’m buying clothes for example), or almost anything you could think of that you could put on paper in a notebook for coming back to later.

One rather fun aspect of the zibaldone in Renaissance Italy is people would carry them around whenever they went out, and would often show each other entries they had for their friends, family, or people they met to copy into their own zibaldones. “Oh, you’d love this recipe I have. Here, you can copy it from my zibaldone into yours.” It was a fun pre-digital form of social media.

Speaking of pre-digital social media, there is also the album amicorum, meaning a “friendship book”, which was popular in parts of Europe, particularly protestant countries in the 1700s. Yes, it’s basically pre internet Facebook. People would have their friends and people they meet write entries and sign them as a way of showing connection and friendship and could include poems, drawings, letters of affection, favorite quotes, or perhaps a little journal entry of how you two met.

Sadly, the album amicorum seems to have died in the 19th century and only survived for a time as the autograph book but even that went away as the selfie with a celebrity took over. It’s the same for these other kinds of notebooks too of course. The common-place book and the zibaldone disappeared too. Although they are now seeing something of a revival as some corners of the internet become interested in them again (yours truly included).

I bought a leather notebook based off the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade grail diary. It’s a blank and brand new leather notebook designed to be what the grail diary would have been like when Dr. Jones had bought it new from the store. I’m starting to use it as a combination zibaldone and album amicorum. I figured a notebook with a connection to the holy grail would be a perfect metaphor for those things that grant eternal life—the connections we make with other people in life. An album amicorum indeed.

Besides the diary or journal where we delve into our feelings, why did we stop writing these other kinds of personal books? I imagine there are a few reasons. One is simply that with modern entertainment there is more to do after work in the evenings than sit down and write stuff in your common-place book. We probably aren’t reading as much with modern entertainment either and so we probably just don’t even have as much material to record in one even if we wanted to. Another reason is likely that books and paper became cheap enough that we didn’t have to write out our own encyclopedias anymore. Why write out the knowledge we collect when we could just buy a set of encyclopedias. Then as the internet took over we had even less of a reason to care about handwriting out our knowledge and collections.

But this gets to the crux of the problem: we substituted active thinking for passive. We recognized the efficiency of relying on encyclopedias, Wikipedia, and other published books and websites of knowledge and forgot the benefits of recording our thoughts and the information we collected. The act of recording, of thinking on paper, demands active thinking. We substituted active living with passive consumption.

Active Living vs Passive Living

Personal notebooks are a great tool to force us into doing something that we seem to increasingly struggle with in the modern era: living actively. When I say active living I mean something broader than just exercising or playing sports. It includes that, but I’m also referring to being active in the sense of active learning, creating art instead of consuming art, or thinking about what you learn and connecting each little new node of knowledge with the wider network you already have.

Active living is reading an article and then writing your own summary, notes, and thoughts on what you read rather than asking ChatGPT to read it through and write the summary for you. Though, I don’t want to knock LLMs too much as talking to them is inherently more active than doom scrolling social media. To really learn, innovate, think deeply, and create requires being active. It requires doing something difficult and taxing. If you aren’t finding it hard then you aren’t stretching your ability, and hence, growing.

That means we may need to accept and learn from earlier ages, where friction was greater, the need to do difficult things. Cheap printing in the 19th century gave way to reducing the need to do the hard work of thinking through, summarizing, and connecting our nodes of knowledge gained from what we read into commonplace books, and now the internet has taken this even further. Of course they experienced friction because that was just the nature of life, but we might have to start thinking about how to give ourselves friction in the same way we now go to the gym to stay fit.

We need friction to learn and live actively. Without friction we increasingly become passive consumers. The problems are already solved for us—just passively take in the solution. No need to truly understand or develop the capacity to grow without friction.

But probably worst of all is this reduction of friction and need to be active has also reduced our need, and therefore ability, to concentrate. It isn’t just the distraction machines in our pockets that makes it hard to concentrate. It’s also the reduced need for it because our desire for passive consumption is increasingly catered to. Active living requires being able to concentrate on a task for long periods of time. Whether that’s a problem to be solved, or just having the ability to concentrate and live in the moment instead of looking down at our phones every three seconds.

I wrote before about a quote from Napoleon who pointed out that genius is the ability to concentrate on problems for long periods of time without tiring. Imagine someone who went to a renaissance grammar school, where they were forced by the technological capabilities of the era to concentrate and learn by deep thinking and recording. How much better would their ability to concentrate be compared to someone today?

To move beyond passive living and innovate, generate new knowledge, and create, requires people who are well exercised in this kind of active living and thinking. Past analog technology forced people to live actively and so they benefited from it. They had to think carefully about what they learned to write it out in a commonplace book, and their commonplace books didn’t send them notifications about a new post some guy who is wrong on the internet just made.

On the spectrum of active vs passive living we also have to talk about the difference between handwriting vs. typing on a computer. Typing on a computer is faster, has the benefits of instant spell-checking, makes it accessible in the cloud from any device, and makes what you write instantly searchable. It has colossal benefits. There is a but however: handwriting makes what you write more memorable and ingrained in your mind, and the slower speed seems to encourage deeper thinking about what you write.

That work suggested that people taking notes by computer were typing without thinking, says van der Meer, a professor of neuropsychology at NTNU. “It’s very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying,” she says. “It kind of goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information.” But when taking notes by hand, it’s often impossible to write everything down; students have to actively pay attention to the incoming information and process it—prioritize it, consolidate it and try to relate it to things they’ve learned before. This conscious action of building onto existing knowledge can make it easier to stay engaged and grasp new concepts.

Charlotte Hu, Why Writing by Hand is Better for Memory and Learning

On the scale of active vs passive living, handwriting your notes is more active. Again, that friction provides benefits and brings you closer to those earlier eras.

Bringing Active Thinking Back

If you’re wishing you knew all this about note taking, and how intellectuals of the past used them to think through the big questions and wish you had been taught this then here are some sources to get you started.

Andrew Kern

at

Elvis and The Philosopher

has written a terrific guide on a method for note taking that will result in a form of common-place book. I wish I had learned this years ago in school.

Parker Settecase

has wonderful content both here on Substack and on YouTube including an interview with Roland Allen on The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper.

Don’t be afraid to write in the margin of books you’re reading too. Renaissance thinkers wrote and drew in their book margins all the time. I’ve adopted a system of using an index card as my bookmark where every time I want to highlight a section of text or take a margin note I record its page number on the card with a little summary of the margin or note, then I store the index card. Any time I want to check my notes and highlights of a book I just read over the card instead of frantically flipping through the pages. I use this same index card system for ebooks too. I adopted this from the zettelkasten method, which gets far deeper.

Of course we aren’t an analog culture anymore. Time and technology marches on and we can’t just go back to the education system and analog technology of the past. But there is a sort of balance we can maintain.

We might worry about what AI tools will do to us, but I can see at least one massive benefit here. Digital notes are in the cloud, accessible anywhere with an internet connection and we can search through them instantaneously. Handwriting our notes makes them more memorable for us, and the process of handwriting forces us to engage with what we’re consuming in a more active way. With AI tools we can get the benefit of both worlds: handwrite your notes, then quickly transcribe the image of them into digital text (just make sure your handwriting is neat enough for an AI to read).

To grow and develop we have to do the hard, high friction work of active living, learning, thinking, and creating. There’s no way around it. It’s hard because it has to be hard or we won’t grow. That doesn’t mean it can’t be fun or satisfying in its own way, but that requires a shift in our attitude towards doing hard things–a shift in embracing active living over passive consumption.

My growing notebook collection