Why You Should Create and Build a Book of Wisdom Throughout Your Life

Jan 25, 2022

Why you should create and build a Book of Wisdom throughout your life:

We tend to think we remember more than we do, but to a first approximation, we’ve forgotten everything we’ve learned. By the time you've read a book or listened to a podcast, you retain a fraction of its fidelity, and the rest decays at an alarming rate.

Think about your favorite podcast episode and try to remember three things you learned from it. Then read this distillation, which is only ten percent of what Balaji said. This one exercise will change the way you think about your memory forever.

Justin Mikolay 💻 @jmikolay

A distillation of what @balajis said in conversation with @tferriss on The Tim Ferriss Show:

Unless you capture them, important ideas fade away in your memory exponentially. But systematically harvesting value from the best sources you can find has the opposite effect. When you create a Book of Wisdom, your ideas build on each other for the rest of your life.

Read actively every day and select important things. Capture the thought, thinker, and source, then restate the thought in your own words. This imperfect system has worked for centuries.

Dickie Bush 🚢 @dickiebush

The single most productive thing I’ve done in my entire life was giving up trying to create the perfect note-taking system.

You don’t need fancy tools. Software and the internet help you manage ideas, but building a Book of Wisdom is, in essence, a manual process. Personal knowledge development cannot be automated.

Fortunately, you already have the most powerful learning technology ever developed: symbolic language. Writing creates memories that never fade, giving you the ability to speak to anyone in time and space. Including yourself, now and in the future.

That doesn’t mean you should save everything (Evernote got that wrong). Learning isn’t an act of accumulation, it’s an act of negation, dependent not on your ability to remember everything, but on your ability to remember some things and forget others.

But there’s a reason the Greeks named the mother of all Muses the goddess of memory. Today, the Muses are memorialized, and their name has been given to storehouses of knowledge. We call them “museums,” and you can create your own.

The more serious you get about creating, the more systematic you'll get about taking great notes and selecting great sources. When you follow your curiosity and pay close enough attention, you can’t help but create.