Mike and Matty — Learn To Think On Paper. Here’s How.
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The brain is for having ideas, not holding them. Here’s how top thinkers use paper to remember.
The top 1% make complex ideas clear, not just by being smarter, but by leveraging the brain’s natural tool: paper. Through years of training medical doctors and coaching learners, we’ve found that the ability to think on paper directly impacts whether ideas achieve lasting memory retention. We’re sharing six principles to cultivate clearer writing and enhance your brain power, especially through note taking by hand.
0:00 Intro 0:23 Principle 1 1:46 Principle 2 3:45 Principle 3 5:34 Principle 4 8:45 Principle 5 11:19 Principle 6
🙏 Thanks for watching!
- Mike and Matty
Key Insights
The top 1% make complex ideas clearer. And it’s not because they’re smarter, but because they use the one tool that the brain was actually designed for, paper. And over the last 10 years, as we train to become medical doctors and coached hundreds of learners, what we found is that being able to think on paper is what determines whether your ideas are remembered or forgotten. These are the six principles [music] to think more clearly on paper. So number one, consuming information does not mean you comprehend that information. In science, there’s a term called the illusion of familiarity. >> It’s like when you hear something that, oh, I’ve heard about that before. So you feel like you know it, but actually you just recognize it. >> Without somewhere to put those ideas down, you can’t rely on yourself actually knowing it cuz your brain will trick itself into thinking it knows something until you actually try to reproduce it for yourself. There’s a famous quote from David Allen that summarizes this perfectly. The brain is for having ideas, not for holding them. The next question is, why can’t I just type them, right? Why can’t I just use Apple Notes voice memos to to capture those ideas? But the way that you capture those ideas, it actually might hurt you more than not doing it at all. So, there’s this idea called intentional forgetting. Like, remember when we used to be in school, I would just write down everything that the professor would say because I don’t want to forget it, right? But I also don’t want to learn it right now. So, I’ll just write it down and be like, uh, I’ll learn this tomorrow, >> right? but I just I want to make sure that I’m doing something. So, the goal of writing things down is not to offload it, but to allow your brain to process it. And a good example of ways that the brain doesn’t learn is through mediums like textbooks, like PowerPoint, slides, even like audio recordings, right? Because all of these things are very linear way of delivering ideas. Number two, paper allows you to think nonlinear. A lot of people think that your brain is like filing cabinets in different like books. you open chapters and stuff, >> your brain is actually more like a web. Like when you think of something brown, you think of like poop, wood, cardboard, box, dirt. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a lot of like things come to your mind. Like it sparks all these ideas like all your neurons are like a web of interconnected ideas together. If you don’t have the ability to actually draw things out and make that kind of connection, you can’t really see like what is the relationship of this idea to all of these things. But the reason why information is shared through the course of human history in a linear form is because that’s the most efficient way to deliver that information, right? In text, paragraph, chapters. But that’s the trap, right? Like if you look at information as only linear like this as how like a textbook would present it, then you miss seeing like, hey, maybe chapter 1 also connects with chapter 3, chapter 2 also connects with chapter 4. The difference that we’re talking about here is like if you’re telling a story, then it does make sense to use time >> to go in a sequence, right? Like when you watch a movie like a thriller or like a a movie that has like a heist or something, you don’t want to know what Thor is all about until you get there. But in terms of like learning and understanding concepts, we really want to be like big picture. You want to be like above the clouds and see everything. Now that we see the big picture, how do we simplify this? And this is why I think visually seeing things is so much easier than let’s say like a big voice note. There’s no clear relationships in that voice note. You basically just have to reread or relisten to the whole voice note to know what you learned from it. Versus this, you could like, okay, I can just like skip to this because I already know what
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