How Ryan Holiday Uses Notecards to Write Best-Sellers

Hi and welcome to The Daily Dot, the daily edition of the Connect the Dots podcast. My name is Matt Raglan, and in each episode I share a short lesson about how to be more focused and productive. I draw these lessons from personal experience, work with clients, modern psychology, and real-world application. Thank you for listening, and if you enjoy The Daily Dot, please share it with a friend. Now here's today's lesson. I want to share a story from an article that I read about Ryan Holiday's note card system. For all that we've been talking about note-taking in the last several days on The Daily Dot, this really stood out to me because it was something that inspired me to start my own note-taking journey and even to use analog physical note cards. Holiday is one of my favorite writers, not just because I really enjoy the books that he writes about Stoicism, the book that he wrote about the Hulk Hogan, Peter Thiel case called Conspiracy. Is one of my favorite books of all time. It's just so interesting and well-written. Recently, I found an article that he wrote on his website called The Notecard System: The Key for Remembering, Organizing, and Using Everything That You Read. Holliday is not only a prolific writer, but a prolific reader. If you get any of his reading list emails, you'll see that he reads a substantial stack of books every single month. And one of the things that's always been challenging to me is while I'm reading a lot, how do I really capture capture, remember, and organize everything that I'm reading so that I can use it for the inspiration for the building blocks of future creative work. This is exactly what we've been talking about with our note-taking system, with Quick Notes, Smart Notes, the Zettelkasten, everything that we've discussed. Holliday puts it into practice in one of the realest and most consistent ways I've ever seen. I'll link to the article in the description. It's 100% worth reading, and I'll probably share my notes on these notes pretty soon. But the thing that really stood out to me is the way that Holiday does this, most people would think is incredibly time-consuming and inefficient. He learned this system from the writer Robert Greene, who wrote books like The 48 Laws of Power and The 33 Strategies of War. To put this really simply, and this is a really simple explanation of it, whenever Holiday has a thought, he sees a quote that he likes or an idea that he thinks he might want to expand on later or even include in a book. That he's writing or an article that he's writing, he captures it on a note card as quickly as he can. As soon as he writes down that note, whatever it might be, he makes a connection to the book that he might be writing that he thinks it's a good fit for. He usually writes down the category, like Stoicism, for example. Another thing that I found super interesting was if he thinks that the quote or the idea or the passage or whatever it is he's putting on the note card would fit into two different projects or two different categories, he will create a duplicate note card of the idea. If you remember in one of the past episodes, I said that the inability to duplicate the note card was a drawback. And while you can't do it in the same way that you can in an app like Roam or Notion, what Holliday does is very literally duplicate the note card so it can have a place in both categorical stacks. As Holiday writes his books, he continues to go through the note card stack that he has for that particular book. And so these note cards become the outlines for chapters in the book that he might be writing, whether that is Obstacle Is the Way or Ego Is the Enemy, Stillness Is the Key, or The Lives of Stoics. Obviously, there is a lot of additional writing that goes into creating the books that Holliday writes. But I've always found it fascinating that someone as prolific as Holliday uses something as simple as a stack of note cards to write such great books. Like we discussed in the note-taking life cycle, what Holliday does is effectively distribute his creativity among many moments of his day, his week, his month, his life, so that when it comes to pulling all of those notes and ideas together, He really is just reassembling and repurposing them for the expression of the book that he's writing. I find this inspiring because it starts as simple as making a note on a simple note card, but done over and over again, these become the building blocks of bestselling books, of YouTube videos, of speeches, of all these different sorts of creative expression that can change the world. And you may think that's fine for Robert Greene and Ryan Holiday, or even it's fine for Yours truly, Matt Ragland, but there's nothing special about any of us that makes the way that we take notes better than any way that you take notes. And there's no way that any of us started with our note-taking that makes it any different for how you can start your note-taking. No matter what type of habit you are creating, and in this case, we're talking about note-taking, most people go through a few waves of habit formation. It doesn't all happen. Right the first time and you hit on some great inspiration. It normally starts by saying like, uh, this is kind of, this is kind of tough. And then you start to get the ball rolling downhill. You've created some momentum. You're like, oh cool, this is great. And then it starts kind of going uphill again. You lose momentum. This undulating up and down line of yay, oh no, yay, oh no, yay, oh no, until you generate enough momentum, expertise, experience that even if you do hit a bit of an uphill battle, then you start to realize like, okay, I've done this before. Look at this stack of note cards. That I have, look at this output that I've created over days, weeks, months, and years that show that the work that I'm putting into it, that even this tiny sliver of a note card can lead to something really big. Thanks for listening to The Daily Dot. I really appreciate it. The best way to help the show grow is by sharing with a friend, but the other way is to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I'd love to hear from you on Twitter or Instagram. You can find me @MattRagland. I'll be back tomorrow with a new episode. So thanks again, and I will talk to you tomorrow.