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by Roberto Zoia

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Zettelkasten, a method for note-taking

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Having a repository for the things you learn is more relevant than ever. Facts can be easily checked using the internet. However, the process of connecting ideas, and formulating relevant questions, comes from deep reading and reflection.

Last weekend I discovered a method for note-taking called Zettelkasten. This method was devised by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who used it as an aid in his research throughout his life1. For context, during his life Luhmann published more than 70 books and 400 scholarly articles on various subjects. Luhmann referred to his Zettelkästen as his zweites Gehirn, his second brain2.

Most of the things I’ve learned about Zettelkästen comes from the excellent zettelkasten.de website by Christian Tietze and Sascha Fast. At first, I thought about buying Sascha Fast’s book Die Zettelkasgtenmethode to learn the method. But alas, there’s no ebook version available. Having it shipped to Peru, aside of time issues, almost doubles the price of the book. So I resorted to reading enough of the articles on the website to gain a working knowledge of Zettelkasten.

A Repository for Knowledge

The basic idea behind Zettelkasten is to build a repository of the knowledge you gain through the years. The idea is similar to what Paul Jun, of Creative Mastery, writes about keeping a Commonplace Book, or Ryan Holiday’s notecard system. Zettelkasten adds the powerful idea of linking notes to create a web of interlinked knowledge.

I’ve been taking notes of what I read for years, first on index cards, then Filemaker, then Evernote and, more recently, using Bear. After a couple of days of appying some of the concepts of Zettelkasten, I’m really impressed in how my understanding of what I read has improved, and more important, the consistency of the system.

Instead of explaining the technique by itself, I’ll describe how I’ve incorporated it into my reading workflow.

I read most of my books on the Kindle, either using the physical device or the MacOs app on my laptop. While reading, I highlight paragraphs as I see fit, and add notes using the corresponding feature on the Kindle.

Later, on the Kindle app on my laptop, I process the highlighted paragraphs and notes. I copy each highlighted paragraph to Bear, using a separate note for each concept. (Zettelkasten refers to this as atomicity.) Each note is given a unique identifier and an appropriate title3.

Each note is also given tags for classification. Good tagging helps with accuracy when searching. The method’s recommendation is to use tags for objects, and not for subjects4. In the same note, I write down the ideas I had in mind when highlighting the paragraph, or any connection that comes to mind during this process.

Context notes are used as a map to a series of notes. A context note that outlines a more complex concept or broader subject, using links to other notes in the process. For example, while I’m reading a book, I build an outline of the things I find relevant, based on my highlights and notes of the book. Each of the outline’s items links to a separate note explaining the idea in more detail, and usually contains the highlighted text of the book.

While this process takes more time, it helps with understanding what you read at a different level, and making connection with other concepts and ideas. I’m interested in reading more books, but not if it goes against comprehension.

  1. I’m not writing to endorse Luhman’s sociology theories, because I don’t know anything about them. This article is about his note-taking method. ↩
  2. cfr Ein Zettelkasten war Lumens zweites Gehirn. ↩
  3. I’m using the recommended format in the Zettelkasten.de site of date-time to create a unique identifier. For example, 20181113131025 for a note created on 2018-11-13 at 13:10:25. (I actually use TextExpander to create the ID automatically.) The note title becomes then “20181113131025 Cultural assimilation in empires” instead of “Cultural assimilation in empires”. This ensures that each note is uniquely identified. ↩
  4. Check this article by Sacha Tietze for some insights on how to use tags effectively: The Difference Between Good Tags and Bad Tags. ↩

Featured image photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.

Origin Story

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I can’t remember exactly when I learned to program, but I’m almost sure that at the end of 1981, at the age of 12, I was already programming in BASIC.

Before 1981, my experience with computers was limited to borrowing some time in an Apple computer at my father’s office, learning to program the basics of the TI-59 calculator (again, thanks to an engineer in my father’s office who was relly into computers), and devouring every computer magazine I could get my hands on1.

In February 1981, life changed. I went with my familty to Florida for vacations. Some weeks before I had totally failed at convincing my parents to buy me an Apple II+ with occasion of our forthcomming holidays. But I got lucky. During the trip, we met by chance with a very close friend of my father. He had just bought Commodore VIC-20 for his kids. This friend told my father his view on the role computers would play in our future, and the importance of exposing their children to technology. He even gave us the address of the shop in Miami where he had bought his computer, the name of the salesman, along with the exact list of things we had to buy2.

I realize now why my strategy to convince my parent’s to buy a computer had failed: the VIC-20 was around $100, while the Apple II+ was around $1,000. In retrospect, I suppose that it made more sense to my parents buy the VIC-20, and spend some money in a cassette player to store programns, and some ROM cartriges with a couples of games, and some other programs.

I was totally happy with the VIC-20. When we returned from the trip, my parents got me and old black and white 12″ TV to use as a monitor. I’m sure that monitor used transistor bulbs, because you had to wait around a minute for something to show on the screen after you turned it on.

The VIC-20 came with a nice booklet that thought how to program in BASIC. When you turned on the VIC, other computers of the time, you were dumped directly into the BASIC interpreter: a welcome screen and a blinking cursor. I had some game cartriges, and the VIC manuals, so BASIC was the right thing to learn. I devoured the booklet. I ran all the examples, and tried some of my own.

Some time later my parents signed me up for a BASIC computer class. The classes gave me some structure to my understanding of the language, and the possibility of receiving feedback about the simple programs I wrote. We were only three or four kids in the class, the rest were grown-ups. (I remember that the final project was a program that displayed a bunch of data as a bar-chart graphic.)

My parents where pretty supportive to my computer obsessions. For example, they helped me subscribe to a handful of computer magazines: Byte Magazine, Compute!, and Creative Computing. I waited eagerly for each issue to arrive. I read them throughly from cover to cover, even if I didn’t understand everything. I shelved every issue carefully in my bookshelf, beside my books, as someone stores a precious treasure. I spent hours typing the code from those magazine pages into my computer and saving it to cassette tapes. Sometimes I enrolled my two younger sisters to help me type, with the promise of playing, once they were finished, the great game they were helping to type in.

Byte Magazine, January 1984

Compute!, August 1984

The VIC-20 was my introduction to the 6502 Assembly Language. Manufactured by Rockwell, the 6502 was the CPU used by most of the personal computers of the time. Thanks to its low cost, this CPU was one of the key players in the home computer revolution of the 1980s.

In front of the VIC-20, with the help of a simple program I copied from one of the magazines, I played with some rudementary assembly code. But it was not until some time later, when the VIC was replaced by an Atari 800XL, that I really started to programming in Assembler. I learned about things like memory maps, pointers, indirection, storage registers, screen address space… Again, I could not have done this if it were not with the help of some excellent books like Mapping the Atari by Ian Chadwick, and in this case, the awesome MAC/65 Macro Assembler by Optimized Systems Software,

I got so deep into computers that my parents decided to move my computer gear out of my room, and put it somewhere more public, so I didn’t stay awake all night punching at the keyboard3. This were pre-internet days, and I had no modem access, so if I was in front of the computer I was either playing games or learning something…

I also had an insatiable appetite for books. Aside from tech-related books, I read science-fiction and fantasy. My father read a lot. There were always books at home. To this day, I can ask him at anytime what book is he currently reading, because I’m sure he’s always reading something. I remember that a couple of times every month, my father would take me to a local library, where he would purchase a couple of books for himself and, with his help, I would pick a couple of books for me. My father finished his books during the week. Most of the time so would I. I read most of Jules Verne, Emilio Salgary, and others during that time. In 1984, where all computer magazines where writing about Orwell’s novel 1984, I bought the novel and binge-read it.

My parents enforced a lights-off rule so I wouldn’t stay awake reading at night and blury-eyed during the day. Luckily, I had a flashlight. I would go under my bed sheet’s with the lantern and manage an extra two-hours of uninterrupted reading.

In 1985 the Atari 800XL was replaced again, this time by an Apple IIc. I felt in love with the machine and with Apple the company. I read everything I could about Apple, about Jobs and specially Wozniak. I read with awe the story about how Woz designed the Apple Disk II controller –the hardware and code that controls how the diskette reader worked and connected to the computer– to use only 9 chips instead of the disk supplier’s original 40. He designed the circuit not only to be efficient, more advanced than anything available at the time, with more data capacity than it’s competitors, but he also took care that the circuits were beautifully laid out on the board.

Thanks to two excellent books, Beneath Apple DOS and Beneath Apple ProDOS, I learned about Apple’s operating systems. The book explained in detail the workings of the disk controller code, which indirectly helped me learn how unlock protected software. I learned how to copy the controller code4, modify the copy to read a program from disk without running it, so I could patch its code and remove the protection code, and write the unprotected copy to a new disk. That year, I also began subscribing to Doctor Dobb’s Journal… of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia (DDJ). The issues from those years where probably the best articles I’ve read ever about computer programming5.

The story goes on and on. At one point, I opened the Apple IIc to replace it’s CPU with a piggyback board with extra memory. I don’t remember exactly when I built my first PC by buying the hardware in sepparate pieces, but it was probably in the first years of university. I self-learned many different languages and framewors: C, then Pascal, then C++, then PHP, HTML, Java, Javascript, Python… For several years I run my own mail server in a headless computer in a closet. I’ve had affairs with Lisp and Clojure. I wrote a static blogging engine from scratch. I’ve fiddled with embedded devices, from PLCs to Arduinos and Raspberri PIs. You get it.

This is my origin story. Part wizard, part sorcerer, my magical powers come from the intertwinning of computers, books, and an insatiable appetite for self-learning6. (And needless to say, great parents.)

✼✼✼✼✼✼

I started writing this post after reading Time’s article titled Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal. Borrowing from my own experience learning BASIC when I was a kid, my initial idea was to write about how kids can learn a lot more than we give them credit, if we encourage them and help them develop a growth mindset, using Carol Dweck‘s meaning of the word.

As word kept flowing, the article became more about my passion for computers, books, and furious learning. 1,500+ words later, I realized that I had written my origin story.

An Origin Story “refers to how characters gained their superpowers and/or the circumstances under which they became superheroes or supervillains7“. Seth Godin explains and expands on this concept in the July 11, 2018 of his podcast Akimbo:

What’s your origin story? What was the incident that got you started on this path? And what was the choice you made after the incident occured. (…) To often we don’t realize that the origin story doesn’t have to match our destiny. We can change it, we can make a choice. With great power comes great responsibility.

We all have an origin story we tell us about ourselves. If we haven’t made it explicit, then it’s the story we uncounsciously repeat in our minds. What we need to realize that the story is not finished. We are the authors, we can change the narrative.

So, where did you get your special superpowers?

  1. OK, I should also consider countless hours staring fascinated at the screen and printer of my father’s company IBM System/32, which they used for processing the payroll. I still remember some commands: SEU ROBERTO, P to open the file editor. ↩
  2. The list included, surprisingly, a Forth implementation for the VIC. As I learned later, Forth is a computer language created for programming embedded and real time applications. I never did anything in Forth at the time, probably because I had no book to learn from. ↩
  3. I can reveal now that my parent’s strategy didn’t work. I would wait until they felt asleep watching TV and then I would turn the computer on and spend an extra two hours in front of the screen. ↩
  4. If memory doesn’t fail me, it resided at hex address $C600 in memory. ↩
  5. Sadly, some years later, the quality of the magazine faltered as they tried to become mainstream. Finally the magazine discontinued its printed edition and became an online section of InformationWeek. ↩
  6. If I had to name a fourth thread, it would be photography. But that’s for another story. ↩
  7. cfr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_story ↩

Later

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A quote about leaving things for later:

Later is where excuses live. Later is where good intentions go to die. Later is a broken back and a bent spirit. Later says “all-nighters are temporary until we’ve got this figured out.” Unlikely. Make the change now.

— It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson.

A second quote:

‘To-morrow’: sometimes it is prudence; very often it is the adverb of the defeated.

— The Way, n. 251, by St. Josemaría Escrivá.

Psychology as Superpower

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A quote from Brandon Sanderson’s novel Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds:

Psychology-as-superpower is a recurring theme in my works. I’ve always believed that the personality traits that make us each distinctive (the way we process information, the way we motivate ourselves, the way we shelter our psyche from the bad while learning to cherish the good) can be either our greatest strengths or our most dramatic limitations. How you see yourself, along with how you use what you have, often more important than talents, skills, or even supernatural abilities.”

The Deadly Reality of the Lazy Manager

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In his book Mastery, Robert Greene writes about social intelligence and its importance when working with other people. In human behavior, says Greene, we can detect patterns that transcend culture and time. There are positive traits, but also negative ones. He calls these negative qualities The Seven Deadly Realities: Envy, Conformism, Rigidity, Self-obsessiveness, Laziness, Flightiness, and Passive Aggression. “Most of us have these negative qualities (…) in mild doses. But in a group setting, there will be inevitably people who have one or more of these qualities to a high degree that they can become very destructve” (p. 141)


Describing laziness, Greene writes:

We all have the tendency to want to take the quickest, easiest path to our goals, but we generally manage to control our impatience; we understand the superior value of getting what we want through hard work. For some people, however, this inveterate lazy streak is far too powerful. Discouraged by the thought that it might take months or years to get somewhere, they are constantly on the lookout for shortcuts. Their laziness will assume many insidious forms. For example, if you are not careful and talk too much, they will steal your best ideas and make them their own, saving themselves all of the mental effort that went into conceiving them. They will swoop in during the middle of your project and put their name on it, gaining partial credit for your work. They will engage you in a “collaboration” in which you do the bulk of the hard work but they share equally in the rewards. (…) If you are doing work for a superior, be prepared for them to take full credit and leave your name out. (p. 144)

Let’s consider laziness not from the apprentice point of view –the point of view that Green uses– but from the point of view of the leader in an organization who manages a team. If we were describing a lazy manager, Greene’s description would closely match what Adam Grant refers to as a taker1.

Some people may justify this behavior by telling themselves —and others— that “the world is a competitive, dog-eat-dog place”, a zero-sum game. For some people to win, others have to lose. But the research done by Grant tells a different story: most of the time, the best performers are not of those who behave as takers, but quite the opposite. These givers, as Grant calls them, are people who use a different cost-benefit analysis: people who help whenever the benefits to others exceed the personal costs2.

This is what I find most magnetic about successful givers: they get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them. Whereas success is zero-sum in a group of takers, in groups of givers, it may be true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. As Simon Sinek writes, “Givers advance the world. Takers advance themselves and hold the world back.” 3

This makes sense. Consider that for achieving outstanding results, you need to “enlist” other people to your cause: you need your team’s commitment, but also support from people higher in the hierarchy. If you need your team to go the extra mile consistently, they need drivers that go beyond what external motivators like compensation, fear of loosing their job, or even status, can provide.

The saying goes that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”4 Nobody likes working in a place where, to thrive, you need to follow Greene’s advice: “Keep your ideas to yourself. Conceal enough of the details so that it is not possible to steal them. Secure your credit in advance. When someone ask for help, pass it off as a ‘collaborative’ effort.5“

How to grow a culture of givers, not of laziness? Example is one of the most powerful forces. Be a giver yourself. Don’t look for shortcuts, look for efficiencies instead. Don’t take credit for other’s work, but recognize and promote their good work in front of their peers and other managers.

Most important, don’t reward or recognize people who focus work as a zero-sum game, who act like takers. Don’t be naive, don’t feed them. Don’t hire them, because they’ll dump you as soon as they can’t benefit from you or the company. Learn to judge people not by first impressions, but by the consistent traits of their behaviour instead.

The best companies don’t care just about results, but also about how those results are achieved. They are not excellent only because of their strategies, but because of the people who design and put those strategies to action.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

  1. cfr Grant, Adam. Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, p. 4.
    “Takers have a distinctive signature: they like to get more than they give. They tilt reciprocity in their own favor, putting their own interests ahead of others’ needs. Takers believe that the world is a competitive, dog-eat-dog place. They feel that to succeed, they need to be better than others. To prove their competence, they self-promote and make sure they get plenty of credit for their efforts. Garden-variety takers aren’t cruel or cutthroat; they’re just cautious and self-protective. ‘If I don’t look out for myself first,’ takers think, ‘no one will’.” ↩
  2. cfr. Grant, Adam., op. cit., p. 5. ↩
  3. cfr. Grant, Adam., op. cit., p. 258. ↩
  4. Quote allegedly attributed to the late Peter Drucker. ↩
  5. Greene, Robert. Mastery, p. 144. ↩

You have to build diversity into your company from day one

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Fred Wilson, commenting on how diversity happens:

A few years at our annual CEO summit, Scott Heiferman, founder and CEO of Meetup, told a room full of startup CEOs that you have to build diversity into your company from day one because if you don’t, it becomes so much harder later on. He explained that nobody wants to join a company where nobody looks like them. That really hit home and woke quite a few people up.

All companies and people suffer from back burnering things. You focus on what you must get done and everything else takes a back seat.

That doesn’t work when it comes to hiring and diversity. You have to prioritize it and make it intentional.