I hated reading in school. My mind would drift as my eyes moved across the words. I was a slow reader, and doing something you hate slowly only makes it more torturous.
Fast forward twenty-four years and I've read hundreds of books. So what changed? Audiobooks. In 2014 I tried one and I was hooked.
But there was a problem I didn't notice for a long time. I was consuming a huge amount of great ideas, and I couldn't use any of them.
You've been here too
You finish a brilliant book. Every page made sense. You were nodding along, maybe even telling a friend, "You have to read this."
Three weeks later someone asks what it was about, and you draw a blank.
This isn't a memory problem. It's a recognition versus recall problem. If you saw the passage again, it would all come flooding back. You know it. You just can't pull it out when you need it.
And here's the sneaky part. Because the book made sense in the moment, you assume you'll remember it. That feeling of understanding never gives you the urgency to capture anything. It's only months later, when you try to use what you read, that you realise it's gone.
I call this passive consumption. You read, you enjoy, you move on. And the knowledge evaporates.
Active consumption
The opposite is active consumption. You create something as you learn. A note. A question. A thought in your own words.
When you write something in your own words, you're forced to work out whether you actually understand it. That effort is what moves information from "I recognise this" to "I can recall this". If you can't put it in your own words, you don't understand it yet, and that's worth knowing.
Better still, your notes give you somewhere to look things up. As David Allen put it:
"Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them."
You don't need to remember everything. You need a place that remembers it for you, so your head is free to think.
Try this tonight
You don't need a system for this. Next time you finish a chapter, an article or a video, do this before you move on:
- Close the book.
- Write three bullet points of what you remember, in your own words.
- Write one question you still have.
That's it. It takes about five minutes.
You'll notice two things. First, it's harder than you expect. You'll stumble over ideas you thought you understood. Second, you'll remember far more of it a week later than you would have otherwise.
Notes that just sit there
Here's the catch, and I'll be honest because I've been guilty of it myself. Capturing notes isn't enough on its own. Most of us end up with a notes app full of highlights and half-sentences gathering digital dust. It becomes an archive, not a thinking tool.
A great knowledge system is built for recall. It's designed so that when you need an idea six months from now, you can find it, understand it, and connect it to everything else you know.
That's the problem I went looking to solve in 2020. Eventually I found a method that answered it, and it changed how I read, write and make videos.
Want the whole system?
This post covers the first step: why capturing in your own words matters. In my book, Atomic Note-Taking: The Ultimate Zettelkasten Guide, I walk you through the complete workflow—from the first highlight to ideas you've never had before—with real examples at every stage.
