If you are a creator, this is the most powerful kind of note you can take
Not all notes are born equal.
Some are much more useful than others. Some you will come back to over and over again. Some will become treasures of ideas. Some will develop into full-blown products.
For the majority of my note-taking journey, I believed the most important notes were the ones taken from sources.
Books, articles, and everything I was reading or watching that was educational.
I was wrong.
Notes from sources are important yes
Being able to reference a book you read quickly, looking up a specific anecdote you saved from a story, or a way to mix up colours for a specific finish — yeah, sure, all important.
It’s going to help you create faster, better, with more precision.
Also, those notes will surely spark ideas.
But there is a type of note that’s much more important. Much more precious than all of those.
Your own feelings and impressions
Not so much journaling as making a note of that one tool you are testing, taking some screenshots and talking about what you wish was different, what you liked, what you don’t agree with and why…
Or when you are watching a new film or a TV show or reading a book.
Because ultimately — that’s what makes you a good creator : the personal touch.
That’s why GPT and co shouldn’t scare you. Because they don’t do that. They don’t have opinions and taste and experiences and everything that makes us humans.
This is why Chat GPT feels the way it does:
Writers too!
Funny how we are ready to call musicians and painters and sculptors, artists. But not so much writers.
We seem to collectively agree that those people work with feelings, emotions and some sort of magic we, writers, can’t quite materialize.
Except maybe poets and novelists.
So it is no surprise to have musicians talk about their notes on emotions :
But emotions play a big role too when you are writing. Yes, even on Medium.
Because that is what hooks people — not so much the information you give, but the wrapping it comes with : your opinion, style, stories…
Do you have a space for those in your note-taking system?
It could be a specific tag in your note-taking system. Or a folder. Or whatever you are using.
It could be in your journal. That’s what I have been doing so far. But I’m going to test something else.
I am going to try and use Readwise for my own impressions now. I’ll create “books” and add impressions as I go.
That way, my notes will resurface, and they will be uploaded automatically into Notion and Obsidian.
My only issue is that I won’t be able to add pictures. But well… that will force me to actually write down stuff instead of adding a picture.