“Enter the Note-taker”, Bruce Lee

I loved this piece about Bruce Lee over on the ever-excellent Brain Pickings website. Did you know that Bruce Lee carried a notebook everywhere? Obviously, he’s exactly like me… just way more athletic and accomplished… and probably better at note-taking… but we both CARRY notebooks everywhere.

When you repeatedly see that successful people are the ones who curate what they think and how they think about it, you start to see why putting pen to paper can be so important. Check out this bit from the post:

When [the studio] tried to cut all the philosophy out of Enter the Dragon because they wanted a vacantly entertaining action movie, Lee refused to go on set for two weeks, insisting that the kung-fu and the philosophy were inextricably entwined, each the vehicle for the other. Hollywood eventually had to relent and it was precisely the philosophical dimension that rendered the movie — just before the release of which Lee met his untimely death — a cultural icon and a beacon of racial empowerment associated with the Black Power movement, later acquired by the Library of Congress as a “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” artifact.
Bruce Lee’s Never-Before-Seen Writings on Willpower, Emotion, Reason, Memory, Imagination, and Confidence

Lee was comfortable enough with his own values to take a stand for it. A martial artist trying to break into Hollywood who had the presence of mind to say “I want success but on my terms.” This sort of strength comes from a deep understanding of values and motives, something which is frequently uncovered through exploratory writing.

Another element of the post that I found fascinating, is how Bruce seemed to filter his ideas over time, strengthening those that provided the most value, and turning many of them into daily meditations and personal commitments. He captured tons of small details but clearly also took the time to revisit and refine things that he saw as important. This is key element of note-taking systems.

Beyond capture is curation and ultimately creation. Bruce Lee embodied this process in many areas of his life. I strongly recommend clicking on over to the actual post to see exclusive photos the notebooks and letters from the Bruce Lee archive.

Daily creation

“It is amateurs who have one big bright beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot.”
“What Mad Pursuit,” by Francis Crick

“Quick and dirty” is far better than “never and perfect.” Once you have something down, your mind begins a dialog with what you’ve started and it will hunt until it reaches some resolution.

Create every damn day. You’ll feel better.

Productivity Hack: Spark to Liner Connection

As part of the Building a Second Brain course from Tiago Forte, he recommended a web highlighting app called Liner. I’m really enjoying this tool. As I read web articles, I can highlight and annotate it and all that markup for the page gets saved into Liner. I can then export them into Evernote with a single click at my convenience.

What I’ve been playing with today is the “Create Link” feature of Spark—a great Mac email client. I receive a bunch of fantastic email newsletters each week and I struggle to get through them all. Now, when I see something interesting I’d like to hold on to—a quote or concept— I just click “Create Link,” pop over to my browser and insert the URL (it’s automatically added to your clipboard when you create it), and then use the Liner browser plugins to highlight or annotate the passages that are interesting to me. Voila! A nice little hack for getting bits of your email when you need it.