Taking permanent notes is also a form of thinking within the medium of writing and dialogue with the existing notes within the zettelkasten any thoughts of a certain complexity require writing a coherent argument requires the language to be fixed and that only happens when written down.
only in writing format can an argument be looked at with a certain distance to be able to think about it.
as Kahmneman says “Our minds are machines that are designed for jumping to conclusions is not the kind of machine you want to rely on when it comes to facts and rationality”
that makes it important to embed and expose those ideas into different contexts in your zettelkasten by writing out the reason for their importance for your lines of thoughts
writing alongside the lines of thinking, we should take two more permanent notes about the idea that we are consuming
- one states the relevancy of that idea to our own thinking and ideas
- and another one explains the idea in more detail
while writing these notes it becomes obvious that the answer to “why” which should trigger more follow-up questions. and then by skimming through the slip box you might discover that these ideas and questions might have answers or relevancy in your existing zettelkasten notes
how to add new permanent notes
that should allow you to build a network of generalised ideas, facts and mental models
writing notes sorting them and making connections between them is nothing other than an attempt to understand the wider meaning of something as the zettelkasten forces us to ask lots of questions to get a better understanding of our notes and ideas questions like what does that mean? how does it connect to? what is it difference from another thing? this will force us to elaborate to understand, to connect and there fore to learn seriously