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Is Your Note-Taking Helping You to Become a Thought Leader?
Dear Reader,
Reading a book and not applying the ideas is like spending all day in the kitchen preparing a five-course meal and not eating it. As an avid reader, it’s important to use the knowledge you gain to develop thought leadership. What do you want to be known for? Read more books, so you’ll develop expertise in that area.
I’m writing the book, Leadership Reading: Spilling the Tea on How Top Leaders Read. It should be published at the end of April 2022. I spent a lot of time thinking about what to include to make it useful to a leader. And I started to think about the next generation of note-taking, and how it could help you to become a thought leader.
Most professionals, when they take notes, they take linear or hierarchical notes. There’s nothing wrong with that per se. However, it makes it difficult to connect your notes across multiple books. If you aspire to become a thought leader, which is a goal for many professionals, it’s critical to engage in network note-taking. This gives you the flexibility to connect concepts and ideas across the books you read.
In the next section of this newsletter, I’ll probe more deeply into the topic.
Ask Avil
Is Your Note-Taking Helping You to Become a Thought Leader?
In this 118th issue of the newsletter, I’m looking at note-taking and thought leadership.
What is thought leadership, and what are the benefits of having it?
Thought leadership is a term used to describe the practice of influencing and directing the thinking of others, typically through the use of ideas. Thought leadership can have many benefits for an organization, including increased innovation, improved customer relationships, and greater market share. Thought leadership can be generated in a variety of ways, by developing new ideas, influencing others to adopt those ideas, or presenting existing ideas in a new or innovative way. Thought leadership skills are important for any leader who wants to be successful in today’s competitive marketplace.
One of the best ways to develop thought leadership is by taking notes when you read books to learn. Thoughts are the building blocks of thought leadership. Effective note-taking can help you capture your ideas and insights, so that you can build on them in future work. When taking notes, have a system in place. There are many strategies that work well for different people. Some people prefer to take handwritten notes, while others may prefer electronic files. There are also various ways to organize the information that is being taken down.
Some people prefer to group similar notes together, while others might prefer to write everything down at once and then go through it later. Find a system that works for you and stick with it. If you want to connect your notes from the books you read, you need to understand linear and network note-taking.
Linear note-taking involves writing down information in a straight line next to one another on a notepad or paper. This method can be helpful if you want to take down a lot of detailed information quickly. Network note-taking, on the other hand, allows you to connect different notes together into a network so that you can more easily see the relationships between them.
One of the most common methods for taking notes is through a linear system, and that’s what you were taught in school. In a linear system, each new idea or piece of information is added on top of the one before it. This can be helpful when you want to remember a lot of information at once, but it can also be difficult to keep track of everything.
Taking linear notes allows you to focus on the task at hand and not get distracted by extraneous information. This method also allows you to easily reference past notes, which can be helpful when recalling specific details or ideas. Additionally, linear note-taking can help you stay organized and make better use of your time. On the other hand, it can be difficult to follow multiple ideas simultaneously.
Network note-taking has become increasingly popular in recent years. It can be useful for capturing any type of information, including ideas for articles or papers, brainstorming sessions, meeting notes, or anything else that can be written down. Network note-taking is also a great way to keep track of your thoughts and ideas as they evolve over time, which is important as you build your thought leadership.
There are a number of different applications and tools that you can use to create and manage network notes. As you have more book notes, the volume of information can become unbearable, so it’s critical to use technology. To become a thought leader, I recommend that you explore apps such as Roam Research and Obsidian. When you use these network note-taking apps, you connect your book notes, so you’re able to come up with unique ideas you’d never have discovered without using technology. Imagine the articles you could write and the presentations you could give.
If you want to improve your reading skills, and read more books in less time, consider investing in the 7-Day Makeover Challenge.
7 Day Reading Makeover Challenge
Until Next Week,
Avil Beckford, Founder, The Invisible Mentor!