The power of notes

🧠 Our brains are lazy ⛱

It takes an enormous amount of energy for them to do anything, and they spend most of it on making sure we’re breathing and not falling over.

Mental shortcuts

👂 One side effect is that we take shortcuts when listening to, interpreting, and storing the information that continually bombards us. We simply don’t have the capacity to hear, process, and remember every word that is shared. Instead, we use an efficiency boosting approach by relating this input to our existing experiences and understandings.

🥴 But this also distorts the information, so what we remember might not be what was said.

👿 And this naturally leads to disagreements.

A solution

📓 Enter a powerful weapon: the notebook.

When used correctly, the notebook works in two ways:

📒 It focusses our attention on the information. Our brains are forced to devote more energy to active listening.

📔 It creates an immutable store of the information, so we can recall it without distortion later.

If you’re interested in finding out more, please read my blog post on The Narrative Fallacy.