You don’t need a single dollar to get the biggest return on investment of your life. If you told me this 4 years ago, I would have probably laughed in your face.
It wasn’t until I learned that my most valuable asset is not money. It’s the knowledge that’s already inside my head.
Most successful entrepreneurs will tell you that if they suddenly went broke and had to start over from zero, they would still be able to get rich again. That is because they know this simple secret, that knowledge has a bigger ROI than any financial investment.
The late Peter Drucker once wrote in 1992, “every few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred”. For Drucker, “the shift to a knowledge society” would be the dominant force to usher in the new economy.
More than three decades ago, Drucker believed that knowledge would become the most valuable economic resource, surpassing the value of land, labor, and even financial resources. Shortly before his passing in 2005, Drucker emphasized the vital importance of enhancing the productivity of “knowledge workers”, a term he coined in 1959, arguing that it was an essential responsibility for management in the 21st century.
The busiest and most successful people in the world have the same 24 hours as you do. If they can spend at least one hour per day on knowledge development, so can you.
Now what if I told you that you can 4x the amount of learning you do in an hour with a simple system that makes learning fun and effective for the ADHD brain?
It’s called “zettelkasten”, which is German for notebox. A zettelkasten is for storing your knowledge so your mind is more clear for thinking and idea generation. It greatly enhances creativity, writing and thinking skills as you write your way through your thought process and generate valuable knowledge assets by linking them to related concepts.
Think of a zettelkasten as a second mind and thinking partner.
Writing is thinking. To be a dynamic thinker, you must cultivate, synthesize and express knowledge across a wide range of topics in a creative way. This is where Zettelkasten presents itself as a highly effective and efficient way to amplify knowledge work output.
The way it works is very simple, despite the often confusing and complicated way in which many productivity YouTubers present it.
- Capture knowledge from various sources (books, podcasts, videos, articles, etc) into a source note, outlining key points, ideas and concepts.
- Clarify ideas that spark your interest into to form of main notes by reformulating or reflecting upon the knowledge you captured.
- Connect or file your main notes with related notes in your notebox to expand your knowledge base and increase serendipity.
- Create outputs of your knowledge by publishing content or creating digital products.
A zettelkasten’s purpose isn’t to be a note collection system, its purpose is to be an output creation system.
Be a creator, not a collector.
This is how you can supercharge investing your time and energy into generating valuable intellectual assets that compound in the knowledge economy. Every deposit of knowledge into your notebox is a free investment into your future self.
But the key is to create.
Stay curious, my friend.
-Tony