Distill

Lao Tzu (Chinese Philosopher)

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.

• Distillation is the very heart of effective communication.
• Use progressive summarization to convert a large block of text to its basic idea.

Progressive Summarization

• Takes advantage of highlighting.
• The main idea is recursive highlighting.
• This is not done on note creation, but rather on successive note consumptions.
• There are four layers -
  1. Captured Notes - Original Notes.
  2. Bolded Passages - The Most important part of the original notes.
  3. Highlighted Passages - Highlight important parts of the bolded passages.
  4. Executive Summary - Only needed when the note is visited frequently.

Tip

Make all notes in bullet points when actively reading/consuming. Make sure each of these points is a maximum of one line long.

Picasso’s Bull - 11 lithographs Picasso created while deconstructing a Bull.