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Stoic Wisdom: Seneca on Writing Better Notes
Taking notes to remember is like drinking to forget. It might feel good in the moment, but you really aren’t doing shit.
Santi
July 30, 2024
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To say that writing saved my life would be an insult to the craft.
Writing got me through some of my darkest times — the battles you fight alone and tell no one about, the spiritual and emotional wars that require you to go deeper than you ever have just to rediscover who the fuck you are.
Writing has taught me vulnerability, which is a prerequisite for living an authentic and fulfilling life. It has also helped me build an incredible community — yes, that includes you — and has provided me with countless creative and professional opportunities.
I would not be here if it weren’t for putting pen to paper, literally and metaphorically.
So, when I say everyone needs some type of writing habit and should constantly strive to improve their writing, I mean it.
“But I don’t want to write,” You might argue.
Here are three reasons why you might want to reconsider:
Writing is the most scalable tool for persuasion 💰
Writing is thinking on paper — clear writing is clear thinking 🧠
Writing is more than a tool for communicating ideas. It's also a powerful tool for generating them ❤️
Today, we’ll focus on the last point — the creative powers of writing and, more specifically, what most people refer to as note-taking.
Oh, and I hate the word “note-taking.” It just doesn’t fully capture the potential of the note.
But more on that later …
TODAY’S MENU
💡 Stoic Wisdom: Seneca on Writing Better Notes
🧠 The Answer to Your Procrastination
⛰️ 101 Additional Life Advices
🤗 Your Self-Doubt is Untapped Creative Potential
— Santi
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Seneca’s Metaphors for Better Notes
Note-taking sucks.
It prioritizes consumption and deprioritizes creativity. After all, the primary purpose of note-taking is information storage.
But this hoarder approach to writing notes blinds you to the true power of the note — idea development.
Taking notes to remember is like drinking to forget. It might feel good in the moment, but you really aren’t doing shit.
Think about all the sentences you’ve highlighted, quotes you’ve saved, and notes you’ve written down. How much do you actually remember?
Not much, huh?
Note-taking gives you the illusion of productivity. But in reality, you’re producing very little and missing out on the opportunity to maximize your creative potential.
To do that, focus on note-making instead.
From Note-Taking to Note-Making
With note-making, you don’t simply capture your notes and dump them in a library or idea graveyard.
Instead, you work on and with your notes, review them, and connect them to other ideas. Here, you’re not simply taking notes. You are crafting them.
By making notes, you stay active and engaged during the learning and creative process and create notes that will serve as rich soil for new ideas to flourish.
Note-making is more than a productivity system or learning tool. It is the first step of the creative process and an important pillar of any effective thinking system.
Side Note: A few folks have reached out, asking me to share more about my systems, process, projects, and general liifestyle. They say, “Learning about the greatest minds is cool, but I want a more intimate look at what you’re working on and how you’re doing it.” If this interests you, please let me know by answering the poll below or replying to this email.
The History of Note-Making
One of Da Vinci’s Pocket Notebooks
Many great minds in history understood the power of the note.
Da Vinci’s journals are an intimate look at the artist’s private world and proof that note-making is essential to effective creative processes. Frida Kahlo kept diaries with sketches and personal reflections. Thomas Edison filled notebooks with detailed accounts of his experiments and ideas.
But nobody understood the power of the note better than the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger.
Seneca’s Metaphors for Note-Making
Seneca was a philosopher, statesman, and writer of ancient Rome who, in addition to penning some of the most important works of ancient Stoicism, recorded some of the most powerful and popular metaphors for note-making.
The Bee
The Spider and the Bee have been beefing since antiquity.
In one of his fables, the Greek storyteller Aesop describes an argument between a Spider and a Bee over who is the better artist.
The Spider, completely independent, spins a sick web from within. On the other hand, the Bee depends on every herb and flour to produce her sweet, sweet art.
The fable doesn’t explicitly say who the better artist is, but the Spider is not in a winning position. The Spider proves to be a less sympathetic character: it kills with its craft while the bee nourishes.
Seneca beautifully captured how the work of honeybees resembles capturing ideas in your notebook (or notes app). He suggests you vary your reading, extract useful ideas from various sources, and combine them to make something new, nutritious, and delicious.
We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, – in other words, our natural gifts, – we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.
The Stomach
No different than the honeybee, the stomach synthesizes diverse materials to nourish the body. With this metaphor, Seneca highlights the importance of “digesting” our reading so that we can make it our own.
So it is with the food which nourishes our higher nature, – we should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged, or it will be no part of us. We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power. Let us loyally welcome such foods and make them our own, so that something that is one may be formed out of many elements…
Our food is of little value if it is not digested. Similarly, gathering information without chewing and mulling it over leads to mere memorization. The goal of our notes is to serve as creative nourishment so new ideas may appear.
The Choir
Continuing with his theme of combinational creativity — taking old ideas or bits of information and combining them to make something new — Seneca introduces the metaphor of a choir.
Do you not see how many voices there are in a chorus? Yet out of the many only one voice results. In that chorus one voice takes the tenor another the bass, another the baritone. There are women, too, as well as men, and the flute is mingled with them. In that chorus the voices of the individual singers are hidden; what we hear is the voices of all together.
With the choir, we learn that each individual component matters, but not as much as the overall whole. Individual notes are cool, but have you ever combined your notes to form new ideas?
Personal Notes on Note-Making
The comment section of the post above introduced me to GIGO — garbage in, garbage out. I like Good Input = Good Output better.
To be a better note-maker, you must become a better reader.
The quality of the texts you consume and the quality of your attention and focus you dedicate to the texts you read will influence the quality of your writing.
I’m not saying that you need to stop reading for fun. I’m saying that to train your mind to think and, therefore, write on a higher level, you need to engage with sophisticated ideas.
In addition to a high-quality content diet, you also need a system that makes note-making easy and fun and encourages creativity. If you want to learn more about my system, reply to this email.
Also, what ideas are you chewing on nowadays? Are you also a note-making freak? I’d love to hear from you!