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The Cup of Coffee Theory of AI

This piece originally ran on Every.

As the author Ryan Holiday’s research assistant, I’m worried about AI replacing me. 

By most of the common psychological tests of intelligence, AI is smarter than me. AI can brainstorm more ideas than I can. AI can read a book, find information, fact check, and create content faster than I can.

So I’ve considered going back to working in coffee shops.

After I graduated from college, I chased winter. I lived and skied all over Colorado for the Northern Hemisphere’s winter months, and for the southern hemisphere’s, Australia and New Zealand.

To fund this year-round skiing, wherever I went, I worked part-time as a barista. When I think about my time working in coffee shops around the world, I find reasons to be optimistic about my job security.

Coffee shops around the world all have the same powerful machines. They’ve science’d most parts of the process—how the beans are grown, the mineral composition of the water, the milks and the drinkware. So, unlike not that long ago, you can get a great latte, cappuccino, or flat white basically anywhere. 

Yet many people still love their drip coffee with half and half. Many love their cheap store-bought beans brewed by their countertop coffee pot. And many don’t care—they just want their shot of caffeine.

Coffee preferences are personal and abundant. The world is big enough for espresso machines and French presses. And which machine the barista uses depends on who they’re serving. 

Art preferences are similar. So when I hear talk about how AI is going to replace artists, I think to myself, the world is big enough for both. Or when I see tweets about how AI wrote this “great” article or produced this “great” image, I ask myself, “great”—according to whom?

Countless authors, painters, and inventors who were considered ordinary in their own time are revered in ours. And anyone who has made and released creative work has experienced something analogous to making a delicious espresso for an audience that prefers a French press.

This is the perennial challenge of the artist: finding the middle of the Venn diagram where one circle is the artist’s tastes and the other is the audience’s tastes. 

For the past two years, we’ve tried to hire another research assistant. We’ve trialed dozens of smart, creative, ambitious, book-loving, speedy fact-checking individuals. We always give them a version of the same assignment: read this book (usually a biography) and pull out two good anecdotes and two good quotes. What they come back with is not in the middle of that Venn diagram. 

In a word, we’ve struggled for two years to find someone with taste—with an eye for what stands the chance of being interesting, entertaining, or useful to an audience. 

We’re not alone. I’ve talked to authors, podcasters, documentarians, late-night TV writers, YouTubers and TikTokers, and they all share this problem. Most of these creators are actively or passively looking for people—whether researchers, writers, animators, video editors, producers, or production managers—with what Jerry Seinfeld identified as the ultimate skill of the artist: “taste and discernment.”  

“It’s one thing to create,” Seinfeld said. “The other is you have to choose. ‘What are we going to do, and what are we not going to do?’ This is a gigantic aspect of [artistic] survival. It’s kind of unseen—what’s picked and what is discarded—but mastering that is how you stay alive.”

Tools like ChatGPT are great at creating. AI can generate options in high quantities at high speed. It is great at providing more choices. But it is not great at discerning and choosing what to do and what not to do. For example, I prompted ChatGPT:

The results are the worst we’ve seen. First, none of the quotes are relevant to the article I said I wanted to write. Second, none of the quote sources are correct. And third, none of the quotes are actual Marcus Aurelius quotes, let alone from the Gregory Hays translation (Ryan’s favorite, and the one from which we source for the Daily Stoic).   

The tools will no doubt get better at pulling relevant quotes. But I’m less confident they’ll ever solve the perennial mysteries of taste and discernment. Many great artists have put out what they thought was their best work, only to see it flop. And vice versa—what they thought was average ended up going viral. Every time you release a work of art into the world, you can’t forecast its reception with any certainty. The best you can do is have a vague sense that others might like it. You (or the AI bot, or a hybrid of the two) are always guessing.

But if anyone is in a better position to make better guesses, I do think it’s humans. 

When a work of art—whether a book or an album, a movie, a TV show, or a YouTube video—is well received, we say that it connected. The work connected with an audience—with humans. 

To connect with humans, it helps to be among humans. Leonardo da Vinci kept a notebook hanging from his belt loop and, one of his contemporaries would recall, “went to places where he knew that people assembled and observed their faces, their manners, dresses, and gestures.” The filmmaker David Mamet used to ride the bus around Chicago, take notes of the things people said, and then go home and write dialogue. J.K. Rowling had the initial idea for Harry Potter on a Manchester-London train, wrote a lot of the series in cafes, and named some characters after childhood friends and based others on favorite teachers. 

Artists who get so famous that they can’t go out in public talk about how not being able to do so makes it hard to create art that connects. To come up with material for Seinfeld, for instance, Seinfeld and co-creator Larry David liked to hang out in public settings where they could observe and eavesdrop on strangers. As the show became a cultural phenomenon, Seinfeld and David couldn’t go out in public like they used to. Strangers didn’t act like strangers around them. This slow detachment from humanity made it harder to make a show that connected with humanity. 

When you don’t experience reality like most people do, it’s hard to make things that connect with most people. 

AI, completely detached from reality, will have a hard time making things that connect with people. It’s something of a hybrid between the Harvard grad student in the movie Good Will Hunting, who can regurgitate page 98 of Daniel Vickers’s Work in Essex County but can’t come up with any thoughts of his own, and Will Hunting, who can give you the skinny on Michelangelo—life’s work, political aspirations, his relationship with the pope, sexual orientation—but can’t tell you what it’s like to stand in the Sistine Chapel and look up at that beautiful ceiling.

AI is smart. Ask it about books, and it can spit out a top-100 list. But it can’t tell you what it’s like to read a passage that puts perfectly something you’ve felt but couldn’t articulate. Ask it about music, and it can write you lyrics in the style of whoever you’d like. But it’s never listened to a great song, never heard one right when it needed to be heard. Ask it about taking a walk, and it can give you science-backed reasons to go for one. But it’s never been on a walk, never been totally excited by a thought or an idea that seemed to come from out of nowhere. Ask it about coffee, and it can give you an infographic that details tens or hundreds of brewing methods. But it’s never had that first sip of that first cup of the day. Ask it about connecting with an audience, and it can give you hundreds of best practices. But it can’t guarantee any of them are going to work. 

It can’t be certain that your work (or its own) will connect with the human experience. It can’t be certain that the work will land in the middle of that Venn diagram. It can’t be certain that its taste and discernment are “great.”

This remains the perennial problem of making great art. 

If AI solves it, well, I can teach you how to work an espresso machine.

The Notecard System: Capture, Organize, and Use Everything You Read, Watch, and Listen To

Below, I am going to explain my adapted version of the notecard system. The structure, like the system, is not sequential, so click the links and jump around if you wish. And there are a lot of pictures and examples throughout, so don’t let the scroll bar deceive you—it’s not that long.

  1. Who Needs The Notecard System? — my answer to, who should implement the notecard system? Who shouldn’t?
  2. Note-taking Principles — the 5 core principles underlying my note-taking process.
  3. The Notecard System — how I capture stories, ideas, and research I come across when I read books and articles, listen to podcasts, and watch documentaries and YouTube videos.
  4. Frequently Asked Questions — answers to the questions I frequently get asked.
  5. Other People Who You Use The Notecard System — resources to read about and learn from other people who use the notecard system.
  6. Conclusion — a closing argument for The Notecard System and what you get out of it.

I. Who Needs The Notecard System?

“The greatest genius will never be worth much if he pretends to draw exclusively from his own resources.” — Goethe

In Game 1 of the 2018 Eastern Conference NBA finals, the Cleveland Cavaliers lost to the Boston Celtics 108-83. After the game, Cavaliers’ star Lebron James was asked about a stretch where the Celtics scored seven straight points. What happened there? the reported asked

What happened? James repeated back to the reporter. He pauses, seems like he might dismiss the banal question, then perfectly recalls, “The first possession, we ran them down all the way to 2 [seconds] on the shot clock. [The Celtics’] Marcus Morris missed a jump shot. He followed it up, they got a dunk. We came back down, we ran a set for Jordan Clarkson. He came off and missed it. They rebounded it. We came back on the defensive end, and we got a stop. They took it out on the sideline. Jason Tatum took the ball out, threw it to Marcus Smart in the short corner, he made a three. We come down, miss another shot. And then Tatum came down and went ninety-four feet, did a Eurostep and made a right-hand layup. [We called a] timeout.” The other reporters in the room laugh. “There you go,” James says.

“People always say of great athletes that they have a sixth sense,” Malcolm Gladwell says in Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon.

“But it’s not a sixth sense. It’s memory.” Gladwell then analogizes James’ exacting memory to Simon’s. In the way James has precise recall of basketball game situations, Simon has it of sounds and songs. “Simon’s memory is prodigious,” Gladwell says. “There were thousands of songs in his head. And thousands more bits of songs—components—which appeared to have been broken down and stacked like cordwood in his imagination.”

The archive of situations James has in his memory function as reference points to decipher new but analogous game situations, to enable intelligent decisions, to facilitate anticipation.

For Simon, those reference points facilitate his creative output. He cultivates an archive of sounds he likes that become the building blocks for his own songs. As Gladwell says, for Simon, “songwriting is the rearrangement and reconstruction of those pleasurable sounds.”

Simon’s musicianship is a function of the library of musical components in his head. Everything he creates is largely an amalgamation of bits from his musical memories. Simon recognizes this to be his gift: “I seem to have a very exact memory of things that I’ve heard—liked and disliked—but very exact,” he says.

If you are like Lebron James or Paul Simon, if you were born with a gift for recall, you might not need a note-taking system.

But if you are like the rest of us, you should have a notetaking system. You should capture the things you might want to later recall. You should cultivate an external memory bank, a library of components you can rearrange and reconstruct to your liking and needing.

Whether you write screenplays or emails, design sneakers or powerpoints, arrange music or spreadsheets—you create things. You use your brain to bring things into existence. To bring things into existence, your brain rearranges and reconstructs the material available to it.

And improving the quality and quantity of material available to your brain when you sit down to create something—that is why we implement The Notecard System.

II. Note-taking Principles

A lot of people ask Ryan how he produces so much output.

My dad has a custom apparel business, and I worked in the factory growing up. While he produces some 60,000 items of decorated apparel each year, no one asks him how he does it. How he does it isa warehouse of garments and fabrics and spools of thread and rolls of cad-cut film and thermo film that get pulled and pieced together by skilled embroidery and press operators and then cleaned and trimmed and ironed and inspected and folded and boxed then shipped.

Ryan’s production is a function of a similar process.

He has a warehouse of notecards with ideas and stories and quotes and facts and bits of research, which get pulled and pieced together then proofread and revised and trimmed and inspected and packaged and then shipped. If you develop a process and commit to that process, Ryan says, books come out the other side. They aren’t feats of genius or works of magic or flashes of inspiration. They’re products of process. They’re products of The Notecard System.

Which brings me to the first principle of my notecard system:

Do Not Copy and Paste

Mitch Hedberg joked that he kept his pen and paper on the other side of the room. Then when he had an idea for a joke—if he couldn’t convince himself to get up and go get the pen and paper, the joke must not be good enough.

If you can’t talk yourself into using your energy to write or type something out, it’s probably not worth capturing.

The novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler said he avoided reading books written by someone who didn’t “take the pains” to write out the words. (It used to be common for writers to dictate into a recorder then have an assistant transcribe those words.)

“You have to have that mechanical resistance,” Chandler wrote in a 1949 letter to actor/writer Alex Barris. “When you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.”

When you don’t have that mechanical resistance, when you give yourself the freedom to copy and paste, you’re not discerning. You capture anything and everything that strikes you at first glance. It’d be like if you stored everything you underline in a book you read. Anyone who has gone back through what they underlined in a book they read knows you don’t want to capture everything you underline.

When I get an email from someone who has taken thousands of notes but can’t seem to put them to use, I ask if they are copy-and-pasters. They almost always are. So their Evernote or Roam or Notion database is unwieldy. There may be some quality insights in there, but they’re lost among all the crap they copy and pasted.

Be discerning. Take the pains to write things out.

Use Time As A Filter

When I finish a book, I put it back on the shelf for a week or two. After a week or two, when I have a block of time, I grab the book and a stack of 4×6 notecards.

The reason to wait a week or two? Time is a great filter. Even with a really good book—one where I fold over every other page—I might only make 5-10 notecards. With the passage of some time, you find most things that you underline don’t hold up.

The interesting information, you realize, actually isn’t that interesting. The great anecdote, you realize, actually isn’t worth the cognitive energy required to write it out in your own words. So, I move from one folded page to the next, asking myself, is this worth the energy? When the answer is yes, I try to make a notecard as if I might want to later transfer it directly into a piece of writing.

(Quick aside: I hear from people who somehow have their Kindle app and their note-taking app synced up so that everything they underline goes straight into their note-taking app. I think this is a terrible thing to do.)

Take Notes For A Stranger

One of the big lies notetakers tell themselves is, “I will remember why I liked this quote/story/fact/etc.”

The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who was famous for his “slip box” or “zettelkästen” method, called his box of notecards his conversation partner. He made each note card as if someone else were going to read it. Because, he would point out, by the time he came to a card a couple days/weeks/months later, he would be someone else. You may have had the experience where you flip through a book you read and marked up some time ago, and you have no idea what you were liking about something you underlined or what you meant by this or that comment in the margin.

So I make every note card with the assumption that I will later have forgotten just about everything about the book/article/paper/interview from which the note card comes from.

If I am capturing an interesting idea, for instance, I surround it with context—the way it might appear in a paragraph in an article. (much more on this and many examples below).

The note card should be able to communicate a complete thought or idea or story or lesson that an ignorant audience (me) can understand, learn from, or be surprised by.

“One of the most basic presuppositions of communication,” Luhmann writes, “is that the partners can mutually surprise each other.” Which is one of the joys of the notecard system—when you surprise yourself, when you rediscover, when you find the perfect card while you were looking for something else.

Let The Notes Determine The Themes

One of the big breakthroughs for me with this system was to let the notes/categories determine the categories/themes/sections, not the other way around.

So originally I thought, I need a bunch of categories and themes first then I’ll keep my eyes and ears out for things that fit into those topics and themes. What I found was that if something caught my attention but I didn’t have a topic/theme to slide it into, I didn’t write it down.

Now my thinking is, it caught your attention for a reason – capture it and figure out where it belongs later.

So I’ve got a section in the front of my box of notecards that is the “Waiting Room.” What happens is, over time, I’ll draw a connection between three or four cards and then move those to their own section with a card up front with a kind of index (more on this below).

Regularly Review The Collection

In Getting Things Done, David Allen talks about how when you write something down, you are essentially telling your mind, ‘mind, you don’t have to remember or remind me about this.’ This is very helpful in the context of task management: if you are trying to focus on Task A but Task B is lingering in the cognitive background, if you write down when/where/how you will complete Task B, Task B tends to disappear from the cognitive background (in other words, your mind stops trying to remind you of Task B because it trusts it doesn’t have to).

In the context of knowledge management, this is less helpful. In the context of the notecard system, you write something on a notecard because you want to remember it. But when you write something on a notecard, I have found, you are essentially saying, ‘mind, you don’t have to remember this.’

If the “Take Notes For A Stranger” principal above is a branch on a tree that represents an assumption that I don’t have as good a memory as I think I do, this principal is a stick that stems off of that branch.

At least once a week, I sift through all my notecards before I write my Sunday newsletter. And every time, I find cards I have no recollection of making. So I’ve come to agree with the following.

Randall Stutman, an executive advisor and prolific note-taker, says, “collecting insights is just the preamble to what really matters: reviewing, with some level of consistency, those insights. You have to routinely make those insights available to yourself.”

“Wisdom is only wisdom if you can act on it,” Randall says. “In the review process, you’re making those insights available for your mind to act on.”

Physical or digital, I think whatever system gets you to look forward to consistently reviewing what you’ve collected (read: forgotten) is the best system.

III. The Notecard System

“For every good idea that comes out of you, you need ten good ideas coming into you. And that’s up to you to ensure that you continuously fill yourself up with fresh knowledge and information and impressions so that one thing can come out.” — René Redzepi

Like any system, the notecard system needs inputs.

Whether you use physical notecards or an app like Evernote, Obsidian, or Notion—your collection of notes is a function of the content you consume.

A rough estimate, but 75% of my notecards come from books, 13% from podcasts, 10% from articles, and 2% from videos (YouTube, documentaries, movies, etc.).

My consumption strategies vary slightly across mediums, but they all stem from what I learned from one of my reading heroes, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson liked to identify four classes of readers: the hourglass, the sponge, the jelly-bag, and the Golconda. The hourglass takes nothing in. The sponge holds on to nothing but a little dirt and sediment. The jelly-bag doesn’t recognize good stuff, but holds on to worthless stuff. And the Golconda (a rich mine) keeps only the pure gems. “Emerson was the Golconda reader par excellence,” one biographer writes in a little book on the role of reading in Emerson’s creative process, “or what miners call a ‘high-grader’—a person who goes through a mine and pockets only the richest lumps of ore.”

Of his huge book collection, it was said that Emerson had a bigger appetite than intake. He glanced at thousands of books, only reading carefully when his attention was fully captured. He believed it was the book’s job to fully capture his attention. So he had no problem moving on from a book after the first page, the first chapter, the first half—whenever he caught his attention fading.

He was on a relentless hunt for that feeling when a book really has you hooked in its teeth. You know it if you know it. “Learn to divine books,” Emerson once advised a friend, “to feel those that you want without wasting much time. Remember you must know only the excellent of all that has been presented. But often a chapter is enough. The glance reveals what the gaze obscures…You only read to start your own team.”

You only consume what others created to do your own creating. “There is then creative reading as well as creative writing,” Emerson said. “The discerning will read…only the authentic utterances of the oracle—all the rest he rejects.”

With that said…

  • What I choose to read:
    • wide funnel, tight filter—start a lot of books/articles and quit most of them. If I catch myself trying to convince myself to stay with a book/article, I stop reading it. There’s a certain feeling when a book captures your full attention…I’m searching for that.
    • chain smoking—light the start of the next book with the end of the previous book: if I really like a book, my next book is one that was either mentioned in the book or in the book’s bibliography.
    • trust but verify—start every book/article referenced or recommended by someone with good taste. But again, if it doesn’t capture and hold my attention, I’m quick to move on.
  • What I choose to listen to:
    • all of the above, and:
    • people not podcasts—I don’t have any go-to podcasts. I get interested in someone—a writer, a musician, a comedian, a chef, an entrepreneur, etc.—then I search what podcasts they’ve been on.
  • What I choose to watch:
    • all the above, but less frequently.

The way I bookmark things I might ultimately transfer onto a notecard also varies slightly across mediums.

I will show you those various methods, starting with books…

Books

I mostly read physical books. I have an iPad with the kindle app, which I use only in the following way. If someone recommends a book or if I see a book referenced in another book or if I’m listening to a podcast and a book gets mentioned or etc., I will download the kindle sample. I will read that sample (usually the first 10% or so of the book) on the iPad and if i get hooked, I order a physical copy.

I like to read with a pen. (This is my favorite pen because it writes like a sharpie but doesn’t bleed through the page of a book or a notecard).

When I come across interesting information, I underline then write a corresponding question in the margin. So what I underlined is an answer to the question.

For example:

From The Splendid and the Vile

This, I find, is helpful when you go back through the book. The question in the margin sparks a recollection of the corresponding information. And typically, it does so faster than it’d take to reread that information.

When I come across an anecdote I like, I write a corresponding phrase in all caps in the margin. So I ask myself, “if this were to appear in a future article or newsletter or etc, what might the title or header be?”

For example, I recently read about how Lin-Manuel Miranda tells the same story dozens of times to the same person because he forgets who he already told. Once, when he finished telling his collaborator Tommy Kail a story, Kail said, “That happened to me. I told you that.” They both laughed then Kail added, “That’s why you’re cut out for theater, because you’ll tell it like it’s the first time.” So in the margin I wrote, LIKE IT’S THE FIRST TIME:

From Sicker in the Head

I’ll draw those squares around names, book titles, a good phrase, anything I might want to catch my eye when I am going back through the book.

When I come across something that reminds me of some other story or idea or etc., I write “<=> INSERT RELATED THING” in the margin.

For example, I recently read this idea of matching your selling techniques to people’s buying habits. That reminded me of something I once heard Nick Thompson talk about. He was asked what he learned from playing the guitar on NYC subway platforms. He said he learned that you gotta figure out who your ideal demographic is and then you gotta go to the subway platform they are most likely going to be at. You gotta meet your people where they are:

From Inbound Marketing

And then, as I mentioned with the “Let The Notes Determine The Themes” principle above, when I draw a connection between three or four cards, those become a section with a card up front with a kind of index.

For example, here’s a collection of cards from a section around simplicity/reducing things down to the atomic unit:

(And here, you can see how some of those cards become a newsletter issue).

If a notecard could fit in multiple sections, I do this:

So that’s basically what I’m doing when I read: I’m looking for interesting information, I’m on the hunt for stories, and I’m trying to make connections. Oh, and whenever I underline or write in the margins, I fold over the page. If it’s the left-hand page, I fold the bottom corner. If it’s the right-hand page, I fold the top corner. That way, if I want to fold both sides of the same page, I can.

When I finish a book, I put it back on the shelf for a week or two. After a week or two, when I have a block of time, I grab the book and a stack of 4×6 notecards. The reason to wait a week or two? Time is a great filter/editor. Even with a really good book—one where I fold over every other page—I might only make 5-10 notecards.

As I talk about above with the “Do Not Copy and Paste” core principle, with the passage of some time, most things you underline don’t hold up. (Quick aside: I hear from people who somehow have their Kindle app and their note-taking app synced up so that everything they underline goes straight into their note-taking app. I think this is a terrible thing to do.) The interesting information, you realize, actually isn’t that interesting. The great anecdote, you realize, actually isn’t worth the cognitive energy required to write it out in your own words. So, I move from one folded page to the next, asking myself, is this worth the energy? When the answer is yes, I try to make a notecard as if I might want to later transfer it directly into a piece of writing.

For example, in the book The Secret Wisdom of Nature, I liked the idea that trees that have to struggle for sunlight grow stronger and live longer than trees that are free from that struggle:

From The Secret Wisdom of Nature

A month or two after reading this, I made a notecard…

(I put a title of some kind at the top of every card. This is helpful when I finger-tip through the cards—in a glance, I can tell if it’s what I’m looking for).

A few weeks after making the notecard, I wrote about how the actor Jeff Daniels decides what jobs to take on. Basically, he only takes a job if it will be challenging. His explanation reminded me of the idea that trees that have to struggle get stronger:

From It’s Good That It’s A Struggle

On the back of the notecard, I put the book title and page number(s).

Next up…

Podcasts

There must be better ways to do this, but this is what works for me.

I typically listen to podcasts when I am on the move: running, walking, driving, etc. So when I’m listening to a podcast, as soon as I hear something I might want to later transfer onto a notecard, I copy the link into a note in Notion titled “Podcasts” then put the name of the person getting interviewed.

Then, like I do in the margin of books, next to a time stamp, I put either a question or a phrase that corresponds to what the person said.

For example, I recently listened to a podcast where David Sacks talked about how, when he’s stuck on problem, he assembles smart people he trusts, and tries to get a variety of advice/opinions out on the table. He analogized it to taking the Rubik’s cube out his head, putting it on the table, letting others have it for a while, then putting the cube back in his own head. So I made this note:

If I am reminded of some other idea, I write “<=> INSERT RELATED THING” below the question.

For example, I listened to a podcast where Marc Andreessen advised against starting what he called “synthetic startups,” which he said is when you start with just wanting to be an entrepreneur and try to work backwards to an idea. It can work, he said, but in his experience, it’s rare that a synthetic startup works. Successful startups, Andreessen said, more commonly happen as follows. You have been immersed in an industry for five to ten years. You work tediously and tirelessly to develop to earn the ability to know the industry inside-out. With the eye of expertise, you see that something should work a different way. “If it’s an organic idea that comes out of something you’ve been deeply immersed in,” Andreessen said, “then you might be onto something.”

This reminded me of Robert Greene’s definition of creativity, which is that creativity is a function of putting in lots of tedious work. “If you put a lot of hours into thinking and researching and reading,” Robert says, “hour after hour—a very tedious process—creativity will come to you.” 

So I made this note:

As I said with my reading process, I’m a believer in letting time be a kind of editor. So every so often, I scroll through this note and see what ideas or stories or etc. still excite me. When something jumps out, the notecard process here is the same: I write a title/header at the top of the notecard then try to make the contents of the notecard as if I might want to later transfer it directly into a piece of writing.

For example, on a few different podcasts, I heard Kobe Bryant talk about how he was terrible at basketball when he first started playing then taking an iterative approach to getting better and better. 

A few weeks later, I made a notecard:

Which later made it into a piece about a race to the South Pole and ice ages:

From Progress is a Magnitude of Consistency

On the back of the notecard, I put the title of the podcast and a timestamp.

Next up…

Articles

The only thing new to report here are some tools.

I typically come across an article I might want to read when I don’t have time to read it right then and there. I’m checking email and some newsletter links to some article. Or I’m scrolling twitter and someone shares something. Or I’m researching something for work and stumble on an irrelevant but potentially interesting article.

In these cases and others, I copy and paste the link into the read-later app Instapaper. It syncs across phone, iPad, and computer, but I typically read articles on my iPad before bed.

My article reading process is an adapted version of my book reading process.

When I come across interesting information, I highlight then comment a corresponding question:

From You Have To Be A Studio

When I come across an anecdote I like, I highlight then comment a corresponding phrase in all caps:

From 10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: What I Learned

When I come across something that reminds me of some other story or idea or etc., I comment “<=> INSERT RELATED THING” like this:

Again, time is the best filter. I never immediately read an article then make a notecard. Like with the podcast process, every so often, when I’ve got a block of time, I open Instapaper and look at what I’ve read and the notes I took. When something still excites me, the notecard process here is the same: I write a title/header at the top of the notecard then try to make the contents of the notecard as if I might want to later transfer it directly into a piece of writing.

For example, a few weeks after I came across this short article by biographer Andrew Roberts about Napoleon’s “extraordinary capacity for compartmentalizing his mind,” I made a notecard:

Which later made it into a piece about Attention Residue:

From Attention Residue

On the back of the notecard, I put the title of the article and the author.

Next up…

Videos

Because stuff from videos, as I said above, only makes up ~2% of what I ultimately transfer onto notecards, I will just say the following.

This process is identical to the podcast process.

I have a note in Notion titled “Vids,” where I either add a link (if it’s a YouTube video) or a title (if it’s a movie or documentary) then a timestamp before a question, phrase, or connect.

So those are the processes and tools I use for various mediums.

Now, the questions I’m frequently asked about my notecard system…

IV. Frequently Asked Questions

Do you use the same box as Ryan?

No. Ryan uses this one. I use this one. Both hold 4×6 notecards (I just use these basic notecards. Ryan gets 4×6 notecards custom made for whatever project he is working on—for example). I went with a smaller box because it appears to fill up faster and that is satisfying. Also, it—along with my laptop, iPad, some pens, and a few books—fits in this Carhartt bag I take wherever I go.

How has your system evolved over time?

As I said in the “Let The Notes Determine The Themes” section, the biggest change for me has been from thinking about how a card fits into a theme to indiscriminately capturing things that interest me enough that I will take the pains to write it down.

How do you make sure you don’t lose track of cards?

I don’t make sure I don’t lose track of cards. As I said above and as some of the people below talk about, one of the joys of the system is when you surprise yourself, when you rediscover, when you find the perfect card while you were looking for something else.

What time of day do you typically make notecards?

Usually in the afternoon after I’ve completed work-related writing/tasks.

Do you do all your writing longhand?

No. Aside from notecards, I do all my writing in custom template I made in Notion. It facilitates every other step of the researching and writing process.

How much time do you spend reading per day?

It depends. When possible, I like to read first thing in the morning for an hour or so. Then throughout the day, I try to take any opportunity to read even just a page or two. If I’m frying an egg, for instance, I’ll read while the pan is heating up, while the egg is cooking, and while I’m eating breakfast.

Do you keep track of what cards you’ve used and haven’t used?

No. If I need to, I’ll search the various places online I might have used the contents of a notecard.

Do you make notecards for Ryan?

No. My job as his research assistant is to find material he might want to transfer into his notecard system.

How many notecards do you have?

I’m not sure. I have a box and ~1/4 full of cards. Each box holds ~1500 4×6 notecards.

What are you doing today that you wish you would have done from the start?

I review the cards way more than I originally thought was necessary. Almost daily, I engage with the boxes in one way or another.

How do you decide which cards you sift through before writing your Sunday newsletter?

The newsletter has evolved. In the beginning, I picked six random notecards and essentially transcribed them into the email service provider. So originally, I would go through all my notecards until I selected six. Recently, I’ve taken a more thematic approach to the newsletter. So I start with a vague sense of a theme—e.g. the ability to be in uncertainties and doubts without getting too stressed/anxious. Then, I have a pretty good sense of where I might find notecards that fit with that theme. So starting with a theme narrows my notecard search a bit, but because I’ve also found theme-relevant cards where I didn’t expect, I sometimes can’t help but expand my search beyond what is sometimes necessary.

V. Other People Who Use The Notecard System

“You’re better off starting imperfectly than being paralyzed by the hope or the delusion of perfection.” — Ryan Holiday

Ryan Holiday

Each one of Ryan’s books is comprised of thousands of notecards. What he does is he captures everything interesting he comes across. If there’s a good story in a book or a good line in a movie or a good lyric in a song, he writes it down on 4×6 index card and puts it in a box. When he goes through that box, he finds themes and makes connections that later become the idea for a book or a chapter or an article or a daily email or a talk or a video or a product or etc.

He first wrote about his system here and later, in this video, he explained his methods for reading, organizing what he reads, and using that information in his life and work.

I also recommend his article on the creative powers of the index card.

“It’s not an exaggeration: Nearly every dollar I’ve made in my adult life was earned first on the back or front (or both) of an index card. Everything I do, I do on index cards.” — Ryan Holiday

Ryan Holiday’s notecards
Ryan Holiday’s notecards

Robert Greene

Ryan adopted and adapted the notecard system from Robert Greene.

Robert talks about his system and shows one of his boxes of notecards here. And in his interview on the Knowledge Project podcast, starting around 12:50, Robert details how he reads, researches, marks up books, transfers material onto notecards, files those cards, and uses those cards to write his books.

When asked about why he doesn’t use a digital system, Robert said:

“Writing things out by hand has a logic to it. When I’m taking notes, when I’m scrawling with my fountain pen on a card—I’m thinking more deeply than when typing on a computer…The handwriting process links closer and faster to the way my brain works…Then, having a box of two thousand cards that I can sift through with my fingers and that I can move around with incredible speed—I can’t do that on a computer. It’s not the same process.”

Robert Greene’s notecards

Niklas Luhmann

The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann published some 50 books and 550 articles in various publications. When asked about his high quality and high volume output, Luhmann would credit his “slip-box” (or zettelkasten in German).

“Of course, I do not think of all this on my own; it mostly happens in my file…In essence, the filing system explains my productivity…Filing takes more of my time than writing the books…Without those cards, just by contemplating, these ideas would have never occurred to me. Of course, my mind is needed to note down the ideas, but they cannot be attributed to it alone.” — Niklas Luhmann

Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten
Niklas Luhman’s notecards

Luhmann wrote a short essay about his slip-box as a communication partner here. And a Johannes F.K. Schmidt wrote a great paper, Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine.

The research analyst and developer Dr. Sönke Ahrens wrote a short book loosely based on Luhmann’s methods titled How To Take Smart Notes.

Tiago Forte

Tiago is the authority on digital note-taking, or—to borrow from the title of his popular online course and recent bestselling book—on Building A Second Brain (course, book).

Tiago’s methodology is app-agnostic. He’s a systems and principles kind of thinker, so even though I use physical notecards, his work has influenced the evolution of my processes.

Tiago also has a great piece on Luhmann’s slip-box system as written about in How To Take Smarts, which you can read here.

“What are the chances that the most creative, most innovative approaches will instantly be top of mind? … Now imagine if you were able to unshackle from the limits of the present moment, and draw on weeks, months, or even years of accumulated imagination.”

Tiago Forte’s Second Brain

Dustin Lance Black

In this video, the Oscar-winning filmmaker Dustin Lance Black (Milk, When We Rise) explains and shows how he researches, makes note cards, organizes those note cards, then lays out those note cards to write his screenplays.

“What I do is take that [research] material and boil down the moments that I think are cinematic, the moments that are necessary for this story, and I start to put them onto note cards. Each note card should be as pure and singular an idea as possible, because I want to be able to move all the pieces around and to create a film. And a film is not what happened. A film is an impression of what happened.” — Dustin Lance Black

Dustin Lance Black’s notecards
Dustin Lance Black’s notecard system

Vladimir Nabokov

After his death, Vladimir Nabokov’s final novel, The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments, was published. In it, you can see the notecards Nabokov made that he eventually would have pieced together into a cohesive novel.

Nabokov used this analogy for his notecard system—with each notecard, he was slowly assembling the structure of a book until he had what resembled, in his mind’s eye, the blocked grid of a crossword puzzle. Then, he went back and filled in the white space.

“The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done. My schedule is flexible, but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.” — Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov notecard
Vladimir Nabokov’s notecard system

Erin Lee Carr

In this interview, Erin Lee Carr talks about how she turned to the notecard system when she was stuck during the process of writing All That You Leave Behind.

“From the beginning I found myself deeply challenged and stuck — freaked out by the blank page. So I started to use my skills as a filmmaker. I note-carded it. I had the notes above my computer, and I got to do a little “X” when I finished the draft of a chapter; it was this really satisfying moment.” — Erin Lee Carr

Erin Lee Carr’s notecards

Ronald Reagan

From the Reagan Foundation: “In the 1950s, Ronald Reagan began collecting motivational, entertaining and compelling quotes, writing them on notecards, from which he drew inspiration for his speeches.”

After Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, he and the speechwriter Ken Khachigan sat down to draft Reagan’s first inaugural address. Reagan took out his notecards. Khachigan said, “he had all this stuff he had stored up all these years — all these stories, all these anecdotes. He had the Reagan library in his own little file system.”

Ronald Reagan notecard
Ronald Reagan notecard

George Carlin

The comedian George Carlin said his system started when:

I had a boss in radio when I was 18 years old, and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time, and then file it away and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it…

“A lot of this,” Carlin said, “is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that’s our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.”

https://i0.wp.com/austinkleon.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/files-600x800.jpeg?resize=600%2C800&ssl=1
George Carlin’s notecard system
George Carlin’s notecard

VI. Conclusion

“Many times the reading of a book has made the fortune of the reader,—has decided his way of life.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There’s an argument I initially thought I might make here that would have gone something like this: if you don’t produce things with your notes, you’re wasting your time by taking notes. If you don’t currently create or have plans to create blog posts or books or songs or sneakers or etc., I thought I might argue, a note-taking process is a waste of time.

But then I thought more about it. I spent more time with my notecards. I paid closer attention when I was taking the pains to write things down. And now, I will make a different argument.

When you put stuff from a smart person’s brain into your brain, right then and there, you are changed. Your thoughts are downstream from your inputs. That’s something I’ve realized through the following bizarre and interesting experience. I’ll be talking or journaling and catch myself reciting (what feels like) word for word from a notecard I’d made. It’s bizarre because, as I said many times above, for the most part, I can’t remember the notecards I’ve made. It’s interesting because, wow, I’ll think, this experience couldn’t exist in this way if I hadn’t made that notecard.

When he was coming up as a writer, the author and journalist Rex Murphy would write out longhand favorite poems and passages. He was asked, what’s that done for you? “There’s an energy attached to poetry and great prose,” Murphy said. “And when you bring it into your mind, into your living sensibility, by some weird osmosis, it lifts your style or the attempts of your mind.” When you read great writing, when you write down a great line or paragraph, Murphy continues, “somehow or another, it contaminates you in a rich way. You get something from it—from this osmotic imitation—that will only take place if you lodge it in your consciousness.”

David Brooks talks about what he calls the “theory of maximum taste.” It’s similar to what Murphy is saying. “Exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness,” Brooks writes. “If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you [don’t].”

The famous line from Emerson is, “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

And same—I cannot remember the notecards I’ve made, but I like knowing they are both somewhere in my consciousness and somewhere in my box.

Want to see The Notecard System in action?

Every week, I pick six notecards from my collection to help me write my Sunday newsletter.

You can check out the archives here, and if you want to start receiving SIX at 6 in your email inbox every Sunday, drop you email in the thing below. Or email me and I’ll make sure you get added to the list.

Thank you to Katie McKenzie, Alejandro Sobrino, Jeff Shannon, Joseph Lindley, Harry Lawrence, Kevin Rapp, Max Feld, and Stanley Goldberg for reading drafts of this.

Skill vs. Talent

Skill is the ability to do something. Talent is the rate at which you can acquire the ability to do something.¹

If you have a talent for the guitar, that means you will learn to play the guitar faster than someone who doesn’t have a talent for the guitar. If you don’t have a talent for the guitar, that means it will take longer to learn to play the guitar than it would if you did have some talent.

For most things* in life, talent doesn’t really matter. The rate at which you can acquire the ability to do something doesn’t really matter. What really matters is the length of time you can do something.

This reality was crystallized in my head when I taught skiing. I saw both sides of the talent-doesn’t-really-mater coin. There’s the kid with tons of talent but lives in Florida and only skis the few days of the winter break trip to Colorado. Then there’s the kid with little talent but lives down the street in Vail. It doesn’t really matter who has the talent, the kid who gets forty to fifty days on the mountain each winter is a better skier.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about how this is the point most people overlooked in the “10,000-Hour Rule” chapter in Outliers. The point was not that you just have to put thousands of hours into something to get good at it. It was that you have to be able to put in thousands of hours. The point is made, subtly: “The interesting thing about ten thousand hours, of course, is that ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time.”²

To get really good at something, you need to be able to do it a lot. To be able to do something a lot, what do you need?

Kim Ung-Yong had a lot of talent. By the age of 3, he could solve calculus problems. By 5, he could speak Korean, Japanese, French, German, and English. At the age of 7, he went on TV in Japan and shocked viewers with his ability to solve complicated math equations. He then got his elementary, middle, and high school degrees in two years. Around this time, Kim was measured as having an IQ of 210—at the time, the highest IQ ever. And at 15, he earned a Ph.D. in physics before accepting an invitation to do research at NASA. But after a few years, he quit his job at NASA, returned to South Korea, became a part-time teacher, and was branded a “failed genius.”

Kim Ung-Yong’s television appearance at the age of 7

“Some think,” Kim would say to the idea that he wasted his talents, “people with a high IQ can be omnipotent, but that’s not true. Look at me…Society should not judge anyone with unilateral standards—everyone has different learning levels, hopes, talents, and dreams and we should respect that.”³

To be able to do something a lot, you need interest. The kid needs to live near the mountain and to want to go skiing. Tony Hawk needed a skateboard and to want to skate. Kim Ung-Yong needed a talent for math and to want to do math.

Imagine you had the choice between having tons of talent for something but losing interest in it quickly, and, having less talent for something but never losing interest in it. When you see those options laid out like that, it’s obvious. Without interest, talent doesn’t really matter. And with interest, talent doesn’t really matter.

The comedian Steve Martin had no talent for the banjo. To begin to try to learn, he got a book called How To Play The 5-string Banjo by Pete Seeger. One of the first lessons was how to make a C-chord. Martin put his fingers down on the strings and strummed a C-chord. “I couldn’t tell the difference,” he said. To him, strumming a C-chord sounded just like strumming with no fingers down on any of the strings. “I was not naturally talented,” he writes.⁴

But he really wanted to be able to play the banjo. “So I just stayed with it,” Martin said, “and I kept saying to myself, ‘Well, if I just stay with it, one day, I will have played for forty years…Anybody who sticks with [the banjo] for forty years will be able to play it.”⁵

Martin stuck with the banjo and in 2001, he and his banjo won a Grammy for “Best Country Instrumental Music Performance.”

Jerry Seinfeld was once asked, what would you teach in a class on how to become a great writer or comedian or actor or [insert anything]?

“I would teach them to learn to accept your mediocrity,” Seinfeld said. “You know, no one’s really that great. You know who’s great? The people that just put a tremendous amount of hours into it. It’s a game of tonnage, you know? How many hours are you going to work? Per week, per month, per year—you might even want to chart that.”⁶

That’s what matters. That’s why a sixth-round draft pick can become the greatest NFL player of all time. That’s why a high school kid can be touted as a 5-tool ballplayer then become an MLB-bust. That’s why a filmmaker like Alfred Hitchcock, a writer like Mark Twain, and a painter like Cézanne can really start to hit their stride in their forties, fifties, and sixties.⁷ That’s why there’s Wikipedia pages full of child prodigies you’ve never heard of. Because for most things in life, the prize doesn’t go to the person who shows up with talent, it goes to the person who stays at it the longest. The person who just puts in a tremendous amount of hours. It’s a game of tonnage, you know?

*For some things, of course things like genetics matter. There’s no amount of time, for instance, that would lead to me acquiring the size and speed necessary to be an NFL running back.

Sources:

[1] I got these definitions of skill and talent from HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah. Shah talks about the importance of distinguishing between skill and talent in just about every interview I’ve listened to. On My First Million, Shah credits his success to the talent/skill mindset shift. And here, he was asked what his biggest strength is—“my biggest strength is the ability to separate skills from talent…I don’t let the lack of talent hold me back from learning whatever I need to learn.”

[2] Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

[3] Life in the high IQ lane

[4] Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

[5] Steve Martin on Charlie Rose

[6] Jerry Seinfeld — A Comedy Legend’s Systems, Routines, and Methods for Success

[7] Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity? by Malcolm Gladwell

Progress is a Magnitude of Consistency

Before 1911, no human had successfully reached the South Pole, 90° 45’.

The Antarctic continent was discovered in 1820. And for the next eight decades, the great polar pioneers were trying for the pole. The first explicit attempt was in 1827. Ten years later, Royal Naval officer James Clark Ross set out on two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. Six weeks in, Ross reached the Antarctic ice shelf—“The Great Icy Barrier,” as Ross described it in his journal. At 78° 10’, Ross recorded that “we might with equal chance of success try to sail through the Cliffs of Dover, as penetrate such a mass,” and turned back. ¹

Two years after Ross, Sir John Franklin took command of the Erebus and the Terror. Franklin and a crew of 128 aimed to reach further south. None of them lived to tell their tale. 

This was the state of Polar exploration as two “rivals for the pole” found it in 1911. In November of that year, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott set out in a race to be first to reach the South Pole. 

In The Last Place on Earth, Roland Huntford details their diametrically opposed approaches. Scott’s working pattern reflected “his own dour, self-punishing temperament,” Huntford writes. His plan was to push his crew to “keep up a steady grind hour after hour.” Scott set no particular number of miles or hours of travel per day. Just as many and for as long as possible. Unless a crew member got sick or injured. With his insisting on a level of “inhuman exertion,” Scott’s guys were hampered along the way by frostbite, dehydration, malnutrition, scurvy, snowblindness, hypothermia, intermittent paralysis, leg and ankle sprains, a dislocated shoulder, and worse of all, low morale. “We’re not a very happy party,” one of Scott’s crew members recorded. 

Amundsen, on the other hand, leaves the impression that his lifelong goal was to be the second human to the South Pole. He and his crew “were spending up to sixteen hours a day in their sleeping bags,” Huntford writes. Even on perfect weather days when the going was good and easy, “he would not allow the daily fifteen miles to be exceeded, and insisted on plenty of rest.” From his study of the expeditions that came before his, Amundsen came to believe in consistent moderate effort. “The heroic struggle that made such good reading,” he believed, “was in reality a warning.” 

While Scott’s crew was “struggling nine or ten hours a day,” Amundsen’s “had settled down to rhythm and unexciting regularity.” And so, with our rivals for the pole trekking along, here seems to be the perfect spot to leave them temporarily to talk about ice ages. 

I was surprised to learn that it was only in the early 19th century that humans began to conceive of the possibility that Earth was once covered by a sheet of ice. It began when French and European geologists and naturalists asked the question of massive granite boulders sitting three thousand feet up mountainsides in Switzerland: how could these possibly have gotten here? After the theory that floods carried the boulders was falsified by one geologist’s observation that all of Earth’s water couldn’t make such enormous objects float, the possibility of glaciation began percolating. ²

The term ice age was coined in 1837. And for the next six decades, the question slowly evolved from if the planet was ever frozen to how the planet became frozen. 

In the early 1900s, the expanding research became an unexpected interest of Serbian academic Milutin Milankovitch. Studying the cyclical changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit and angle of orientation to the Sun, Milankovitch wondered if the see-sawing between elliptical and circular orbits and/or the degree between Earth and Sun might explain the process of ice ages. 

It took some twenty years of drawing angles and computing solar radiation intensities and durations, but Milankovitch was right: ice age’s comings and goings depend on planetary wobble. I know what you’re now assuming: Earth tilts a degree or two away from the Sun, Earth gets less solar radiation, winters get extremely cold, ice sheets form then spread, few thousands and thousands of years later, ice age. Milankovitch assumed the same. 

Here, however, he was wrong. The ice age process is more subtle. 

In the 1920s, Russian-German meteorologist Wladimir Köppen discovered it is not extremely cold weather that causes ice ages. Rather, it is consistently cool weather. The process hinges on consistency across seasons. If it stays cool enough that this winter’s snow sticks around until next winter, sunlight rebounds off the snowy or icy reflective surface, perpetuating the cooling effect and increasing the odds that next-next winter’s snow accumulates, perpetuating…perpetuating, perpetuating, perpetuating. 

“The process is self-enlarging, unstoppable,” as John McPhee writes, “and once the ice is really growing it moves.” ³ Little by little, day by day, year by year, a little snow progresses into a planetary ice sheet. “It is not,” glaciologist Gwen Shultz explains, “the amount of snow that causes ice sheets but the fact that snow, however little, lasts.” ⁴ If a record snowfall winter is followed by a typical warm summer, all that snow will melt into ice age irrelevancy. 

Similarly, the amount of ground you cover in the short run, as Scott will prove, is irrelevant if you, in the long run, can’t last. Because progress is rarely a magnitude of intensity. Almost always, as Amundsen will prove, it’s a magnitude of consistency.

And on December 12, 1911, Amundsen and his team made it within forty-five miles of the South Pole—the closest any human had ever made it. “Going and surface as good as ever,” Amundsen journaled. “Weather splendid—calm with sunshine.” They could have made it to the Pole that day. They knew there was still the prospect of being beaten by Scott, but Amundsen reminded his crew: fifteen miles a day, no more, no less. On December 15, they woke up at dawn, had breakfast, packed up camp, then set out on their final fifteen. After about eight hours of seeing nothing but the endless white snowy horizon, Amundsen ordered, “Halt!” It was 3 PM. Amundsen looked at his compass: 90° 45’. “We are here as the first men,” one of the crew members recorded in his journal, “no English flag waves.” 

Thirty-four days later, the exhausted, sick, hungry, and injured Britains were greeted by a waving Norwegian flag. The trip home was worse. All five members of the team, Scott included, got frostbite then froze to death. 

Amundsen and his guys made the trip home to Norway without any issues at a pace of fifteen miles a day, no more, no less. “Bursting with health,” Huntford wrote, “by the way they moved, it would be hard to tell that they were just finishing off a journey of 1,400 miles in the harshest climate in the world for two months on end.” 

Kobe Bryant didn’t score a single point in his first basketball season. “I was terrible,” he said. “Awful.” When asked how he then went on to become one of the greatest basketball players of all time, he said, consistency. “I wasn’t the most athletic,” Kobe said. “So I had to look longterm…I had to say, ‘Ok, this year I’m going to get better at this. Next year, that. And patiently, I got better and better. It was piece by piece. It was the consistency of the work. The consistency of the work,” he stresses. “Monday, get better. Tuesday, get better. Wednesday, get better. You do that over a period of time—three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years—you get to where you want to go.” ⁵ 

Whether it’s getting to the South Pole or freezing the planet over, getting in shape or writing a book, building a company, learning a new language, or perfecting your jump shot—progress is a magnitude of consistency. It’s not how hard you go today, tomorrow, and next week. It’s—when we check in on you in three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years—are you still going?

“It’s simple,” Kobe said. “It’s simple math.” ⁶ No more, no less.

Sources:

[1] The Last Place on Earth by Roland Huntford

[2] A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

[3] In Suspect Terrain by John McPhee

[4] Ice Age Lost by Gwen Shultz 

[5] Kobe Bryant: ON How to be Strategic & Obsessive to Find Your Purpose

[6] Kobe Bryant: Mamba Mentality and The Mind of a Champion

Thank you to Greg Shildkrout and Katie McKenzie for reading drafts of this.

Do It For The Sake of It

Novak Djokovic almost quit playing tennis in 2010.

A lot of kids dream of being a professional athlete. Djokovic’s earliest memory is being a “seven-year-old boy in Serbia constructing a Wimbledon tennis trophy in my room from improvised materials.” ¹ Unlike most of us with the dream, Djokovic had the talent. One professional tennis player saw him play when he was six years old and said, “This is the greatest talent I have seen since Monica Seles,” then the number 1 player in the world. ²

He turned pro in 2003. By 2008, he was the number three ranked player in the world, a grand slam winner, and in the conversation to win Wimbledon. But after a quarterfinals loss in the 2010 French Open, “I hit a wall,” Djokovic said. He’d been hearing for more than a decade that he had the talent to be number 1. One way to look at that is the way Djokovic looked at it: for more than a decade, he wasn’t enough, wasn’t good enough, wasn’t achieving enough. “I was mentally at one very messed up place.” ³

He first told his parents he was done. Then he went to tell his coach Maria Vajda. When he saw Vajda, he broke down in tears. Vajda encouraged him to let it out and Djokovic did for about as long as it will take me to tell you about someone who was number 1 in their profession.

Rodney Mullen started skateboarding in a little detached garage on his family’s farm in Florida. It wasn’t much, but it was cement—the only cement for miles. It was 1974, a few years before the Ollie was invented. He turned pro in 1980 and over the next ten years, Rodney was the number 1 skateboarder in the sport. He won every freestyle contest he entered but one, and along the way, he invented most of the tricks used today—the flatground ollie, the kickflip, the heelflip and some thirty others. ⁴ In 1989, he started World Industries, the first ever skateboarder-owned company. He sold it in 2003 for $46 million. That year, he was voted the all-time greatest action sports athlete. The following year, he founded Almost Skateboards, which is today one of the most successful companies in skateboarding. Rodney’s in his fifties now and still skateboards every day. He was once asked to what he owes his success, how he got to the top of his profession and has been able to stay there for over four decades:

I’m easily amused…It’s such a gift to be able to look at something and to love it for the sake of it…I have that. I’ve nurtured it in my life. Talent is around. I see people with talent but the one thing they don’t have is that just love of doing it for the sake of it. ⁵

And by now, Djokovic was calming down. “Let’s look back,” Vajda said, “Why did you start playing this sport? Put aside rankings and what you want to achieve, do you really like holding a racket in your hand?” 

Djokovic didn’t say anything for one-mississippi, two-mississippi, “I do. I love holding a racket in my hand. Whether it’s a grand slam final on center court or just a normal public court, I like playing for the sake of playing.” Vajda nodded, “Well that’s your source. That’s what you need to tap into.” 

Still, picking up some burnout symptoms, Vajda told Djokovic to take a few weeks off. Djokovic agreed he would. But he woke up the next day with vitality. He went to the courts, not to train, but to play. “And I never looked back ever since that moment.”

The following season, Djokovic enjoyed one of the greatest seasons in sports history. It was so good that “The 2011 Novak Djokovic tennis season” has its own Wikipedia page. He won 43 straight matches. He won three Grand Slams: the Australian Open, the US Open, and his first Wimbledon. And he finished the year as the number one player in the world. 

“I started to play freely,” he says of that season. “I became the kid that I was when I started playing.” ⁶

It’s strange but true: when you aren’t thinking so much about reaching the pinnacle, you reach it.  

47 years after publishing Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl wrote about this paradox. In 1945, he wrote the book in nine days with a conviction that it would be published anonymously. Unlike the dozens of other books he published, the first printing of Man’s Search For Meaning didn’t have his name on the cover. “And so it is both strange and remarkable to me,” Frankl wrote, that it became the book he’s known for. For the rest of his life, Frankl would share what that taught him: “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication…In the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.” ⁷

Or suppose it doesn’t. Suppose “success” never follows you. Suppose Rodney Mullen skated for forty years just for the sake of skating and suppose he never won a trophy. Suppose Novak Djokovic played tennis for twenty years just for the sake of playing tennis and suppose he never won Wimbledon. Could we call them “unsuccessful”? I couldn’t.

“So the trick,” Rodney Mullen says, “is to always peel back and ask, why am I doing this in the first place?  I’m still that kid skating in the garage on the farm, you know? And I cling to that.”

Sources:

[1] Novak Djokovic Champion’s Post-Match Interview | Wimbledon 2021

[2] Serve to Win by Novak Djokavic 

[3] Novak Djokovic | Tennisnet

[4] The Mutt: How to Skateboard and Not Kill Yourself by Rodney Mullen

[5] Rodney Mullen | How to Use Pain to Become The Best in the World

[6] Novak Djokovic on Becoming #1 in the World and Overcoming the Odds

[7] Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Thank you to Greg Shildkrout and Katie McKenzie for reading drafts of this.

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Billy Oppenheimer is a writer and research assistant based in Austin, TX.

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