#181 - The One Thing You Need To Know About Zettelkasten

The researcher Niklas Luhman (1927-1998) is credited with inventing the so-called “zettelkasten” (German for slipbox). His Zettelkasten contained around 90,000 index cards with ideas on them.

Niklas Luhman was an extremely prolific writer, and he credited it for enabling his prolific writing (source: Wikipedia).

It is essential to take note if you are in a field where generating ideas is important.

When people explain his Zettelkasten method, they start with how he encoded it. Each index card has a unique number based on an indexing hierarchy, and while it’s interesting, it isn’t the key idea behind Zettelkasten.

Each index card needs to be assigned a unique identifier and then filed away so that it can be found again with that unique identifier. The unique identifier can be any system you come up with, but it is perhaps useful to have some sort of hierarchy so you can easily find ideas based on the topic.

In his original approach, ideas had numbers like 1, 2, 3, 4, et cetera at the root. If he wanted to branch away, he’d add a letter, like 1a, 1b, or 1c. If he wanted to branch away from, say, 1b, he’d use a number again, like 1b1, 1b2, 1b3, etc.

But you can use words, too: drawing, drawing-tools, drawing-exercises. Et cetera.

The coding method itself is not the key feature of the method.

Here is the key idea you should know: you go about your day and have ideas during the day. You write them down on your phone, in notebooks, or on paper. Then, at the end of the day, you go through the ideas, one by one, and take your time to try to connect as many ideas as possible to this new idea.

This is the key idea. Connect as many ideas as possible to this new idea.

You don’t try to capture as many ideas as possible; instead, you try to create as many new links between ideas as possible.

And that’s it.

Combining ideas leads to original and interesting new points of view.

Marshall Vandruff does that a lot in his course. He combines apparently different things to come up with a novel new way of looking at things, and it tends to result in a mind-blowing insight.

Marshall’s courses are valuable not only because they present fascinating and original new insights but also because, if you observe carefully, you can see hints of the methods he uses to research topics—methods you can use to dive into new topics autonomously yourself.

In his Bridgman course, Marshall contemplates the fact that George Bridgman taught in the same building as Kimon Nicolaides. These teachers had radically different teaching styles, and Marshall tried to imagine what it must have been like for students to be taught by both teachers during the same period. To understand how Bridgman lessons were received by the students, it was interesting to think about how they must have experienced the lessons from both teachers.

In his Composition course, Marshall had his students draw their studio for him. He looked at one of the drawings of the studio of a student. The studio had a drawing table and a machine for a physical workout. Marshall said, “Oh, body and mind! Yin and Yang!” He had again combined ideas. Composition is about design, but his point was that you can design everything in your life: your workspace and your day schedule, et cetera. He combined it with the ideas of Yin and Yang, highlighting the need for balance between the two extremes.

Combining ideas can give surprising, highly enlightening new insights. And that is what you need to take away from the Zettelkasten methods: don’t try to come up with as many ideas as possible, but rather with as many combinations between ideas as possible.