Topic Learning Workflow
Overview
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When you’re reading a book, highlight important paragraphs and put them into a card. Then, place this book card on a whiteboard and break it down into multiple smaller concept cards. Use arrows and sections to connect and group these concept cards, establishing a vivid knowledge structure of the book.
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When you’re researching a new topic in the future, create a new whiteboard and import concept cards from different books and sources related to this topic. Synthesize them so that you can apply what you’ve learned in the past to what you’re working on in the future.
The purpose of visualizing notes is to gain a deep understanding of what you’ve learned. If all of your notes are very long and you don’t break down the knowledge into smaller parts, the understanding you can gain from visualization will be very limited. Real deep understanding doesn’t come from the “relationship between two books” but from the “relationship between all the concepts in these two books.”
You can only gain a deep understanding of the topics you care about through visual note-taking when you atomize your notes. Atomic note-taking does not mean you cannot have long notes. It means that each concept card should only contain one concept and be supported by its content. To ensure clarity, you should always describe the concept in one sentence and use that sentence as the title of the concept card.