Note: This was written as an email newsletter update (Subscribe Here)

I am an avid note taker!

You might say that I’m obsessed with taking “copious” notes.

As I was preparing to write this email newsletter update, I came across the following two quotes related to the value of note taking.

“You have to make your own condensed notes. You learn from MAKING them. A lot of thinking goes into deciding what to include and exclude. You develop your own system of abbreviations and memory methods for the information.” ― Peter Rogers

“I‘ve forgotten who it was that said creation is memory. My own experiences and the various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing. For this reason, since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy when I read a book. I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down in bed.” ― Akira Kurosawa

I love that last line… “Don’t read books while lying down in bed.” This advice may not be for everyone, but I totally get it. If I’m going to read a book, it must contain “transformational insights.” If it does include such insights, I want my own personal and professional life to actually be powerfully transformed by them.

Further than that, if these insights do, in fact, transform my own life, I then want to teach those insights to my friends, family and clients.

There is a story that I have not told in a very long time.

When I was in college, I used to go class with mini-cassette tape recorder, a legal pad of paper and a laptop computer. This may not sound odd today. However, this was in 1992.

NOBODY brought laptops to class at this time. In fact, my fellow classmates snickered at me when they saw me pull out this five pound computer and tape recorder from my backpack.

When the lectures would start, I’d click record on the tape recorder, open up a Word document and I would begin typing notes as fast as I possible to capture as much of the lecture as I could.

When the professor would draw something on the blackboard, I’d draw that same item onto my pad of paper.

After class was over, I’d go back to my dorm, I’d rewind the cassette and replay the entire lecture a second time. This time, I’d pause and play as many times as it took for me to transcribe every, single, word that was spoken in that lecture.

Once my manual transcription was complete, I would then go to the “Paint” app to digitally draw the images that I had created on my note pad. These digital images were then saved and embedded into my Word document.

When finals week came around at the end of each semester, those same students, who had snickered at me when I pulled out my laptop, tape recorder and note pad in class, began to approach me. They would say… “Hey Cliff, what are the chances that I could get a print-out copy of all those notes that you have taken?”

I would then proceed to collect $200 from nearly every single student in the class. I’d deliver them a printed out copy of my incredibly detailed notes, bound inside an Oxford Heavyweight Pressboard Report Cover with a label on the front cover that said, “Cliff’s Notes on (insert name of class)”

I made a few thousand dollars every semester!