Everyone reads. Articles, books, tweets and newsletters.
Everyone watches and listens. YouTube, documentaries and podcasts.
Fewer in number are those who know how to consume content effectively, inspiring content of their own.
I’ve been writing since the start of the year, and managing my personal knowledge since a year prior to this, reading books like Building a Second Brain and How to Take Smart Notes. This has equipped me with detailed knowledge and experience in consuming content and turning it into work of my own.
This is what I’m going to teach you in this piece.
I’m going to go over how to record interesting parts of the content you consume, and how to turn them into notes that can inspire content of your own.
This entire process is simply a synthesis of experiences and knowledge and if you can learn how to synthesise effectively, you can build a large audience that hangs on to the words you say.
Let’s get started…
What information should you capture and how do you capture it?
There’s a very simple rule that you can use to answer this.
Look at the information you’re consuming, and ask yourself:
“Is this something that I can put in place to change my life? Is this something that I’m going to use in the future?”
If the information is relevant because you’ve answered yes to one or both of the above questions, capture it. You can either highlight the point or record it some other way. Most of the formats that I consume information in have highlighting functions, so I use this.
How do you turn this information into output?
Remember we captured only actionable steps when consuming?
The next step is to put this advice into the action you’ve assumed you’re going to use it for.
The fact is, you could create content related simply to the information you’ve read, but your work is going to have more depth if you’ve actually put it to some use in building, learning or experiencing something.
Anyone can regurgitate facts, fewer can relate the information to progress and experiences they’ve undergone.
Make mistakes, become better, and integrate the knowledge in such a way that it becomes part of your life.
Then create something that tells the story of these experiences, effectively passing on the knowledge to the consumer…
How do you create this piece?
This can be done in any way you like, so long as you share your work with the world.
I’ll go over my process here:
I use the tool Readwise, which connects to all the places where I consume content — Twitter, Kindle, Readwise Reader and Snipd. This means, when I make a highlight of something, it’s sent to Readwise.
I do the creating in Obsidian.
Readwise is connected to a folder in my Obsidian vault via the Readwise Official plugin. In Obsidian, I can reference these highlights, reminding myself of the actionable steps.
Once I’ve put the information into action, I can create permanent notes that I store in a Zettelkasten-style linked folder of notes in my vault.
These permanent notes detail the facts, the actionable steps that I’ve taken, as well as my outcomes, results and experiences, making it unique.
When it comes to writing, all I have to do is look into this Zettelkasten to find inspiration for an informative and entertaining piece of writing.
This can be done without Readwise, and with different note-taking software to record your results and experiences, it just means that you’ll be recording action steps directly from the source, rather than having them imported as highlights.
This makes the whole process slightly less streamlined but in a way, this is more effective because you’re going to focus on synthesising less but more important content.
I try to keep things as simple as possible because living the actionable advice and trying to improve my life is the main thing that’s going to make the writing more interesting. That’s what I try and focus on. If I live an interesting life, the content is easy.
Thanks for reading!