Note taking - Methods - Nodes or Mini Essays or Blank Sheets

Nodes or Mini Essays or Blank Sheets

1. They help us to dramatically improve our reading comprehension.
2. They are the Ultimate Learning Tool.
3. They help multiply our understanding of things tenfold.
4. They will take our learning process to the next level.
5. These nodes are the simplest form of teaching. They’re easy. They’re accessible. And anyone can do it almost anywhere.
6. If you make many essays a habit I promise you you will become a better reader but also a skilled writer.
7. These methods transform passive reading into active learning. They force us to engage deeply with the material, visualize our learning, and reinforce what we already know, allowing us to internalize content more effectively. This approach enhances comprehension, retention, and critical thinking, enabling us to develop unique insights and connect ideas across disciplines. It’s not just about reading better; it’s about becoming a more effective learner and thinker.
8. Start your next book with a node or a mini essay or a blank sheet and watch your understanding deepen, misconceptions fade, and new ideas flourish.
9. The path to a more impactful reading begins with an empty page.

Single concepts or ideas

1. Keep them restricted to a single concept or idea.
2. Every single mini essay should be about one thing and one thing alone.
3. This is important because, as soon as you try and integrate many different elements, concepts, it starts getting complicated.
4. You start to lose the clarity of the message and it just becomes a jumble.
5. It is tempting to pull other ideas in sometimes. But it will make the process so much easier if you stick to a single concept.

Structure of these nodes

1. They’re not the long boring ones from school where your teachers made you write 2,000 words on something you didn’t care about.
2. These mini essays are actually fun to write.
3. They are short pieces of writing that surround a single idea or topic.
4. We don’t have to get frustrated over choosing what to write about because it’s already done for us. See “choosing how to create nodes”. TODO
5. It’s not just some scribbled down note. This has a start, an end and a middle. It has structure to it.

How to write them?

1. The first step involves the learning itself, which is straightforward. You pick up a book, you watch something, you listen to a podcast, anything, so long as you’re actively learning. Writing notes forces our minds to think.
2. The second thing is to actually teach what we learn to others. We don’t have to go out and give a lecture on it to someone. But we are teaching an imaginary audience. We are producing something as if we are going to tell someone else about it.
   1. Note taking - Methods - Write it as if you are going to teach it to someone else

Benefits

Priming Your Brain

The blank sheet acts as a canvas for your mind. By starting with what you know, you’re preparing your brain to absorb new information more effectively. It’s like warming up before exercise – you’re getting your mental muscles ready for action.

Building Knowledge Visually

As you read and add to your sheet, you’re not just passively consuming information. You’re actively constructing a visual representation of your growing knowledge. This process makes learning tangible and rewarding.

Correcting Misconceptions

One of the most valuable aspects of this method is identifying and correcting what you thought you knew. It’s not just about adding information, but refining your understanding and removing what no longer serves you.

Layering and Understanding

By reviewing your sheet before each session, you’re reinforcing previous learning and creating a mental scaffold for which you can hang new information. This helps you connect ideas and see relationships you might otherwise miss. It also allows you to synthesize vocabulary across multiple authors, a key to reading books at a deeper level.

Vacuuming The Details

By forcing you to compress a chapter or paragraph into a few words, you are able to recall the broader idea and context. This allows you to vacuum up a repository of details, which are necessary for associative pattern matching.

Starting from Scratch

Don’t worry if you begin with little knowledge. Use the book’s structure as your initial scaffolding. As you progress, you’ll replace this borrowed framework with your own understanding.

Quickly Review

If you put your blank sheets into a binder, you have a simple and quick way to review your learnings, aiding comprehension and ease of recall.

Leverage the power of novelty

1. A great benefit to these nodes or mini essays is novelty.
   1. When you scroll through YouTube shorts or Instagram reels, why are they so addictive? What is it about them that keeps you glued to the screen? Every few seconds, you can expect to see something new and that keeps you entertained. Whereas, if you were to watch a 2 hour lecture on YouTube, because nothing’s really changing throughout that two hours, you really have to have a stronger attention span to stay focused.
2. By writing these nodes, you’re harnessing the power of novelty to keep you writing for long periods of time.
3. You know what that means. It means you write more. It means you get better. It means you improve at a faster rate than ever before.
4. We are human beings. We have different interests. If someone tells you that you need to stick to your specialized field and you need to talk about one given specific topic all the time, you wouldn’t do that. We would hate to do that. We hate to bottle ourselves in into to one topic.
5. These nodes or mini essays are completely against the idea too.
6. Because, using these type of nodes, in the space of 1 hour, we can write about five different topics - all of which are wildly interesting to us. Because each mini essay takes about 10 or 20 minutes to write, all in the space of an hour, we could be writing about five different, diverse topics like a concept in programming, content creation, or some literature we read. We can switch between all these vastly different topics so quickly.
7. It keeps learning, reading and writing fun, accessible and refreshing.
8. That allows us to just do it for ages.

The Blank Sheet Method

(This is not all that different from Nodes or Mini Essays or Blank Sheets in this page. It is a similar concept)

The blank sheet method primes your brain for what you’re about to read and shows you what you’re learning.

1. Before reading, write what you know about the subject on a blank sheet.
2. After each reading session, add new information in a different color.
3. Review the sheet before your next reading session.
4. Store completed sheets in a binder for periodic review. (Hint: Re-write them for clarity).