Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,75

this listening experience than if you do it dispassionately. Trying to understand where the speaker is coming from and why brings additional substance to what they might be saying and allows you to feel it from their perspective.

A is for Anticipate: Engage in the experience with a sense of anticipation. Remember that learning is state-dependent and that what you can learn from this speaker will become a long-term memory if you attach emotion to it. Your enthusiasm for what you’re hearing will greatly increase your potential of truly hearing it.

R is for Review: If you have the opportunity to directly engage with the speaker, do so. Ask clarifying questions or maybe even for a point to be repeated. If you’re in the position to take notes, do so. And afterward, reflect on what the speaker said. Paraphrase it in your mind and imagine yourself teaching it to someone else. Doing so will solidify it in your mind.

Habit 7: Take Note of Taking Notes

Studying under the best conditions will likely improve your retention considerably. And, both in preparation for your studies and in concert with your studies, upgrading your note-taking ability is invaluable.

The ultimate advantage of taking notes is that they customize the information you need to retain to your vocabulary and your mode of thinking. At their best, notes allow you to organize and process information in a way that makes it most likely that you can use this information afterward.

But many people take notes ineffectively. Common pitfalls include concentrating so heavily on writing notes that you’re not actually listening to the information, trying to write down every single thing you hear, and writing notes in such a way that they won’t be helpful to you a day later. It’s easy to avoid all of these pitfalls once you are aware of them, so let’s put a plan together for upgrading your note-taking ability.

First off, be sure that you understand the purpose for taking these notes. For example, the goal of taking notes in a midsemester lecture might be very different from the notes you take in the review class before a big final. Similarly, what you’re trying to accomplish with the notes you take in a weekly meeting with your team is likely to be different from the notes you take in the week leading up to a major client presentation.

By being clear on your intention with your notes, you are able to distinguish between information that is relevant to you and information that is not. I have a friend who is a writer and insists on transcribing every interview he does even though it would be more time-efficient to have a transcription service do it for him. The reason, he says, is that by doing it himself he only transcribes the parts of the interview that he knows he’s going to be able to use, therefore eliminating the possibility that these quotes will get lost among all the other conversation that might not be relevant to the book he’s writing. What he’s left with is nearly pure content. Likewise, if you take notes with a goal in mind, every note you take will have relevance.

Once you’re clear on your goals, take an active approach to note-taking. Listen with the intention of getting exactly what you need, and write your notes in ways that will benefit your recall later. If you’re going to use abbreviations and shortcuts, use ones that are familiar to you. The last thing you want is for your own notes to be indecipherable to you later.

Equally important is making sure that you use your own words wherever possible. As noted earlier, one of the key pitfalls to effective note-taking is trying to record everything. There are two obvious downsides to this. One is that it is impossible to write as quickly as most people speak. On average, people handwrite 10 to 12 words a minute, and the average speaker speaks at around 100 words a minute. Even if you were typing your notes (which I don’t recommend; more on this shortly), you’d probably only be able to get down about half of what the speaker was saying.

But there’s an even more fundamental downside: If you’re copying what someone is saying verbatim, you’re probably not processing any of it. That means that, at the most essential moment of learning, you’re utilizing most of your brain to the task of taking dictation. When you use your own words in your notes, you begin to process the information,