Use Time As A Filter
A core principle of The Notecard System is to use time as a filter. If you underline or highlight as you read, you find that with the passage of some time, most things that you underlined or highlighted don’t hold up as interesting or useful. “Using time as a filter” has held up as useful— with note-taking and beyond…
If We Forget It Tomorrow, It’s No Good
Paul McCartney talks about how The Beatles used time as a filter to create so many memorable songs. “There was no recording devices,” McCartney explains. So if they weren’t in the studio when they had an idea, “we had to remember it…There was no such thing as cassettes or anything to put the idea down on, so you just had to remember.” He said they began to realize this was actually a good thing. “We said, if we forget it tomorrow, it’s no good. How can we expect the public to remember it if we can’t, and we only wrote it yesterday? So we realized that we were writing songs that were memorable not because we wanted them to be memorable, but because we had to remember them.”
Quick No, Long Yes
Matthew McConaughey is known in Hollywood as a “Quick No, Long Yes.” “My No’s are quick,” he said on the Daily Stoic podcast. But before he says Yes to anything, he explained, he does the following. For 2 weeks, McConaughey lives in the “Yes I’m in” frame of mind. If during those 2 weeks, he finds himself dreading the idea of being away from for so long, playing this or that character, working with so-and-so, etc.—he begins to lean towards saying No. But then, for two weeks, he lives in the “No I’m out” frame of mind. “If I sleep well during those 2 weeks,” McConaughey said, “that’s a pretty good sign that I shouldn’t do it.” But, if during those 2 weeks, he’s woken up in the middle of the night by thoughts of, ahh, I gotta play that character. I’m going to regret it so bad if I don’t do this. I have to do it—”well, that’s a good reason to say, ‘I’m in,’” McConaughey said. “But I give myself about 2 weeks in each frame of mind—Yes I’m in, No I’m out—and then I measure what keeps me up at night.”
We’ll See
There’s an old story about a Chinese farmer. The farmer and his son own just one horse that helps operate the hoe needed to turn the soil over. One day, the horse takes off and runs for the hills. The son runs inside and says, “Dad, you’re not going to believe it—the horse ran away. This is horrible. We’re going to die out here.” The father says, “I don’t know if it’s horrible or not, son, we’ll see.” A few days later, the son is sitting on the porch when he sees the horse running toward him. Behind the horse, there are fifty wild stallions. The son runs to open the paddock and then closes it behind all the horses. He runs inside and says, “Dad, you’re not going to believe—the horse returned with fifty other stallions. This is a miracle. We can get into the horse trading business now. We’re going to be rich.” The father says, “I don’t know if it’s a miracle or not, son, we’ll see.” A few more days pass. While the son is trying to harness one of the new stallions, the horse panics, kicks, and shatters the son’s leg. “This is horrible,” the son says. “We’ll see,” the father replies. The next day, hundreds of soldiers on horseback showed up and the general gets off his horse and informs them that a war is on the horizon, and all young men must join the army. The father points at his son’s leg and tells the general that he’d be useless in battle. The general agrees and they ride off. The son can’t believe his luck. “I don’t know if you got lucky or not, son,” the father says. “We’ll see.”
A Second and 34 Years
Of course, not everything has to be filtered through time. A reward for mastery, for instance, is efficiency. In 1998, Citibank and The Travelers Insurance Company merged. They hired the legendary designer Paula Scher to create a new logo. In their first meeting, on a napkin, Scher drew what became the iconic Citi logo. As Scher got up to leave the room, someone from the Citi team asked, How can it be that it’s done in a second? “It’s done in a second and 34 years,” Scher replied. “It’s done in a second [and] every experience and everything that’s in my head.” As Scher has become a master of her craft, she’s repeatedly experienced this problem. “A lot of clients like to buy process,” she explains. “They think they’re not getting their money’s worth [if] you solve the problem too fast.” After that initial meeting, Scher said, “There were a million meetings…What if you do it this way, or that way? Show it to me on stationery. Show it to me on a card. What if we flip the colors? It’s got to be red on top and blue on the bottom. What do you do with the blue wave? Is it something you use in retail? What if you put that back on the credit card?—those were all the things that were being worked out for nearly two years before the thing launched.” Ultimately, after two years, feeling like they got their money’s worth—Citi went with Scher’s initial sketch. “The design of the logo is never really the hard part of the job, Scher said. “It’s persuading a million people to use it.”
Patience Is Like Clothes
“Patience,” Leonardo da Vinci said, “serves as protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold.” It serves as protection against having a box full of un-interesting and un-useful notecards. And against writing unmemorable songs. And against later regretting having said Yes. And against confusing good luck for bad luck. And against solving the problem too fast.