---

Dear Friends,

Someone asked me recently why I don’t use AI to take notes. Evidently, I seemed old-fashioned, scratching away in my blue, college-ruled notebook, purchased on sale at CVS for $3.49. 

In the moment, I simply shrugged and said, “Old habits.” But there’s more to it than that. 

I’m convinced that taking notes by hand helps me think better. 

When I write by hand, I increase my focus, notice more connections, ask more good questions, and remember more clearly. 

I think better. 

“But using a notetaker offloads the tedious work,” someone will say.  

Indeed. Sadly, that “tedious work” is part of the cognitive effort I need to do if I want to build the neural pathways that enable complex thinking and creativity.

Here’s a simple truth: The things you write down, using your own words, will live longer in your memory than the things you don’t. 

They will therefore have more power to shape what you think and who you become than the things that merely pass through your senses. They will be invested with the sort of synaptic connectivity that undergirds semantic insight. 

The things you write down, using your own words, begin to become the meaning you create for yourself, if for no other reason than because you wrote them down. And creating meaning is not a task any of us can afford to outsource. 

To outsource this task is like allowing a muscle to atrophy or never to develop fully, except that the muscle is our minds. And the capacity we’re choosing not to build is the capacity to find and shape meaning in life, to understand the world for ourselves, to become the sort of selves who create meaning. 

The capacity we’re choosing not to build is the capacity to be a creator instead of a passive observer—a person who takes notes and proactively makes meaning rather than just having the potential to return to whatever another entity recorded. 

This risk, writ large, is this: By not writing anything down in your own words, you are limiting the self you might otherwise become. You are leaving your memory to chance and your imagination to algorithmic machines designed to manage and monetize your attention. 

You are giving up the power to decide what lives on and continues to matter—to you and, potentially, through you, to others. 

Am I making too much of note-taking here? 

Maybe. But if you want my advice, here it is:

• If something is important to you, write it down. 
• If you want to help determine which things are important to other people, write them down. 
• If you don’t want an alien agent to structure your thinking for you, keep writing things down yourself.

Write it down. And then keep rewriting it as long as you must. This is one of the steps on the path to better thinking, personal growth, and a more meaningful existence.

Best,
Steve