Self-education:

Five ways to learn with a notebook

Notebooks are the map to wisdom.

Their emptiness is their strength; we have no choice but to fill it with our discoveries, and as you write, you echo a part of God and the universe—creation.

It’s a privilege no other creature on earth shares (except for beavers).

By writing, you learn what it means to be conscious, not just as an individual, but as a soul, a community, and as a bearer of knowledge in the chain we call history.

High and mighty out of the way, these are five ways I use notebooks, beyond just “for writing :D”

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Idea capture

Anything creative will thrust you into the idea economy.

You need things to draw, designs to shape, and songs to compose, and unless your ideas stick out from the muddy sea of mediocrity, nobody will give your effort a second look.

It’s harsh, but also why we value excellence in art.

Even if your craft is your own, purely for your personal pleasure, you still need ideas. A photographer explores the city for glimmers of light, interesting people, and scenes that make you stop. Musicians resist smashing their instrument twice a week as they grapple with a new technique. Writers sit at a blank screens until heaven blesses them with an idea, or a cloud of depression starts to appear in its place.

It’s the universal struggle of creation.

The problem is ideas are hard to come by. They’re invisible, fleeting, and impossible to predict—some days, they catch you naked in the shower, give you a good shock, then vanish as fast as they arrived. Others tease you in your dreams, but like the guilty morning after a hookup, they leave you alone in bed with a blurry memory, just enough to keep you hanging. Even when you’re awake, sober, and alert, there’s no promise a eureka moment will stick with you—arrive home an hour later, and it’s either forgotten, or swept under the tsunami of life’s obligations.

If you want control over your ideas, you need a way to capture them.

When you carry a notebook around, you free yourself from the burden of having to remember. Instead of juggling new ideas between your busy neurons, you imprison them in ink, and save them for when they have your full attention. Good ideas will never escape you again.

Your phone works just as well . . . but a notebook in public makes you look cooler, so you be the judge.

I also recommend the Audionotes app, which saves you the effort of writing altogether. If you’re too busy to write, or don’t feel like dragging around a notebook, you can talk to Audionotes about your idea, and it will automatically save it as a transcription, all neatly synced to your account. It’s super handy, so check it out if you get lots of good ideas when you’re out and about.

I always use it to save video ideas while I’m out on a walk, and I like that it has a bot which automatically converts my waffling into a readable summary.

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First drafts

Do you remember when that library in Alexandria burned down?

Feels like yesterday. I still get the shivers. It’s scary how our written work is vulnerable to the elements; a bad spill can wipe out many weeks of effort, and no matter how well we store them, the scratches, bumps, and tears never heal. The all-consuming mould has already taken a few of my older books.

Roaring fires are less of a threat . . . but you never know.

The world has also moved on. Why store your work in shelves upon shelves when you can keep terabytes of data on a pocket-sized block of glass and metal? And even if that is dropped in the bath, big deal—you can (almost) literally pull your work from thin air, wherever you are, and bring it back from death. It just makes sense.

But there’s a problem.

We can’t just abandon the pen and paper. Or rather, it won’t let us.

Neither the threat of becoming obsolete, nor the army of note-taking apps, can overcome the inexplicable aura that a notebook has—the texture of the paper, the leather embossing, the fluidity of the ink. It has style. It has sauce. It is the difference between hot flesh and cold robotics, where one may be more functional, but it will always be less human.

For that reason, I like to compromise and write my first drafts on paper. It’s slower, but that’s the happiest sacrifice I’ll ever make. It’s a chance to dial down the pace, embrace the aesthetic side of the craft, and imbue life with a sense of ritual.

Perhaps that’s the end of it. You create these tomes of personal wisdom, line them up on your shelf, and one day, when you are dead and rotten, you let them be rediscovered by your great-grandkids after a good rummage in the attic. That’s special in itself.

If you write for the world, the notebook first draft will improve your final draft. As I type up my handwriting into Obsidian, I use it as a chance to edit—to rearrange paragraphs, kill off pointless words, and remove any waffle. At first, it feels like wasted energy. Repeat it a few times, and you realize it’s the slowness that begets quality.

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Diagrams

Shit doesn’t make sense sometimes.

We can don our tweed jackets, light a cigarette, and try our hardest to be intellectuals . . . but no matter our confidence, some books stump us. No amount of rationalising in the margins can save us, and rereading the same page over and over feels more like a broken time-loop rather than progress.

The reading isn’t reading.

What can we do? Keep going. That’s the fun of great and challenging literature.

The less annoying answer? We find ways to understand, and diagrams are one of them.

You can visualise tricky ideas through a simple doodle, and like a general in his war room, you create an overview of the field and study how it all connects: causes, consequences, and contrasts, unfolding in a constellation that may otherwise be suffocated if you kept them as a sentence, so rigid and immovable.

It’s fun too, and that’s reason enough.

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Book reviews

I hate when I don’t remember what a book is about.

When your mind draws a blank, it feels like all your past effort evaporates into nothingness, like Sisyphus watching his boulder roll down for the three billionth time (maybe not that bad).

What’s the point? What was it all for?

We don’t read just to remember things. It’s more about reflection, depth, and exploration, the kind that morphs your character over a lifetime, and that has no bearing to how many little facts and themes you can implant into your brain.

You’re not Wikipedia, so don’t punish yourself for falling short of it.

Even then, we can’t pretend it feels good. It’s still painful to forget.

Book reviews are how I dull that frustration. It’s my way to guarantee that the months and years won’t erode the most important ideas from the book, or at least, a basic recollection of it, something enough to talk about if it ever comes up, and enough to feel like it truly touched your life.

In my notebooks, I have a key system where each number represents an important aspect of the book: the main themes, the writing style, or simply what I liked the most, for example.

As I read, I mark any instances of each with a page number, and maybe a short note (although usually the annotations in the book are enough). At the end, I gather every note from every number and arrange them in a linear way, as you’d expect in a more formal book review.

That’s just me—it’s a lot of effort, but it’s justified because I want to share them here one day. You can adapt it to whatever suits you best, whether it’s a few bullet points, a template of questions to answer, or an entire Goodreads review where you tear the book apart in a cathartic rage.

There’s no right way, only your way.

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Going beyond the margins

There are some publishers I want to kiss.

They are the ones who give us wide open margins of nothing—empty space which celebrates active reading, because we’re given the room to think, to fill those gaps with our thoughts and opinions.

It’s rare though. Like a massive investment firm buying out all the real estate, most books spread their lines riiiight up to the edge of the book, leaving us with only a narrow alley to get any annotations in.

That’s where notebooks come in.

When a book clicks, when it feels like a long trance of good ideas, there’s a lot to get excited about, but not much room to manifest it as words. Rather than crush yourself in the margins, I like to get my notebook out and write my notes there instead, such that my thoughts can become free-range and occupy as much space as they want.

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Your turn

If you're feeling generous and want to un-gatekeep how you use a notebook in your daily life, I'd love to hear it!

This is always the most interesting part of any video or newsletter because you come up with some great stuff. Who knows, I might even compile it all and make it a part 2.

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.

Yours,

Odysseas

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P.S

The above link for Audionotes is an affiliate link, meaning if you sign up, I'll get a small commission at no extra cost to you.

And this is a good time to talk about promotions in general.

I only promote products or services I either use myself, or truly believe they are good.

The former is self-explanatory, but the latter means it's a high-quality offer, but not necessarily suited to how I work, or if it's redundant to something I already use. For example, I will never use 99% of note-taking apps, but most of them are still great, and I'd be happy to recommend them. In this case, I'll always test it myself before any promotion.

I hate when Youtubers abandon their values or exploit trust just to make a quick buck, so I add this part for transparency, and for you to hold me accountable. If I ever act up, send me a well-deserved hate email and hope it slaps me into my senses.

On a positive note, Audionotes is great, and one of the rare gems which will make it into these newsletters.

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P.P.S

The next video is a continuation of the 'anti-hustle' mindset, and relates to realistic time management. That will be out this weekend—I hope you enjoy.

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P.P.P.S

I'm still working through replies, so don't worry if I have left you on read. It can take months sometimes because I don't like to half-ass replies, so thanks for all the patience.

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