> You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. > > — James Clear, *Atomic Habits* (2018) Most of what I get done depends less on motivation than on the habits that sustain me through ordinary days. These are the ones that have helped me most. They aren’t a system to copy. They’re principles, methods and tools that have proved useful to me. ## Principles ### Learning 1. **Knowledge is not an object to be obtained but an ongoing dialogue into which we are initiated.** Since Descartes, Western thought has often pictured knowledge as a building: find a foundation of certainty, then build everything else on top of it. On that view, knowledge becomes “unbiased, value-free fact” (Zimmermann 2015: 23), and learning means acquiring it. But knowledge grows through conversation. We join a dialogue already underway, learn its terms, and in time add our own voice. 2. **Language is the means through which we make sense of the world.** We only truly understand something when we can put it into our own words. This is why writing and—by extension—note-taking are essential tools for learning. 3. **Understanding is historically, socially, and culturally situated.** We always understand from somewhere: there is no “view from nowhere,” to borrow Thomas Nagel’s phrase for the ideal of perfect objectivity (Nagel 1986). The aim isn’t to escape our perspective but to become aware of it, and to let other perspectives question it. 4. **Good writing is cultivated through daily practice.** The most effective means for sharpening our writing is taking notes. Yet, as Sönke Ahrens argues, it is the most neglected part of writing, because we do it every day and “we don’t experience any immediate negative feedback if we do it badly” (Ahrens 2022: 2). The [[Zettelkasten]] method is one answer. ## Methods - **[[Getting Things Done|Getting Things Done]]**: David Allen’s method for capturing and organizing everything that has your attention. - **[[Second Brain|Second Brain]]**: Tiago Forte’s method for keeping what you learn in one place, ready to use. - **[[spaced repetition]]**: reviewing what you’ve learned just before you would forget it, at growing intervals, so it lasts. - **[[Zettelkasten]]**: Niklas Luhmann’s method of linked notes, written in your own words. ## Apps - **[[Anki|Anki]]**: flashcards that schedule your reviews for you. - **[[Obsidian|Obsidian]]**: notes as plain files, linked to each other. - **[[Todoist|Todoist]]**: one place for every task and commitment. - **[[Zotero]]**: a library for your sources and citations. ## References Ahrens, Sönke. 2022. *How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking*. 2nd ed. Hamburg: Sönke Ahrens. Nagel, Thomas. 1986. *The View from Nowhere*. New York: Oxford University Press. Zimmermann, Jens. 2015. *Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction*. Oxford: Oxford University Press.