TLDR:

- Warren Buffett uses a paper notebook to record his thoughts

- Small business owners can benefit from Buffett’s method of hand-writing his notes

- Hand writing notes makes your mind work harder to remember thoughts

- Hand writing simulates the act of repeating things many time to remember them

- Hand writing is a tactile process which helps stimulate more of one’s senses

- In contrast, watching videos is not a good way to stimulate memory

- Hand written notes can be converted to text & images with OCR

I’ve mentioned this before, but I will repeat it here. Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world was once asked if he uses an electronic device or a cell phone to keep his thoughts. He said that he uses a $20 flip phone and a paper notebook. Ever since I heard this, I have done the same thing and it’s been life-altering.

Warrant Buffett is an avid reader, and one of the things he does while he reads is he keeps copious notes. Over the years he has come up with a whole system for keeping his notes in order. It is a great system, but probably overkill for most small business owners who aren’t managing billion dollar portfolios. Buffett also reads hours each day, and let’s be honest, very few of us do that, too.

Let me use an analogy. If we were going to start investing like Warren Buffett, we wouldn’t have billions in cash to start with. So, to follow his example, we would buy a small fraction of the same companies he buys every day with our meager savings. This is the same idea: instead of an elaborate note-taking system, we can start with a small pocket notebook.

The psychology behind writing down your thoughts

I’m no psychologist, but I’m saying this because I know it has worked for me. I’ve also read that it works for students in college, people cramming for an exam, people preparing a large presentation, and yes, also business leaders like Warrant Buffett, Richard Branson and many others. If you want to remember things, writing them down is a great way to do so.

Consequently, it is also a great method for remembering things when you are the forgetful type, or you are becoming older and can’t always remember all the things you wanted to. Writing down notes about a conversation, a book, a great speech, or even a movie, gives you the peace of mind to know that you will have the information saved for later reference.

The fact is that writing down notes is a mnemonic system. The act of taking an idea, whether it is received in speech, song, or read from a page, and then writing it down with your own hands, makes use of all your senses. Because they are all involved in the transfer of information to paper. They are all being instructed by your brain which makes your entire body involved in the process.

This process involves your heart rate, your breathing, and even your digestive system gets a few neurons tossed in its direction. The fact is that your brain is working much harder to process the way that this impacts all the different parts of your body. The processes all link back to that idea or thought that you are writing down. In this way, you are imprinting the information into your brain with all these parts of your body in multiple ways.

You should also consider the impact of repetition. Remember back in elementary school when you would repeat something over and over again to remember it? I distinctly remember memorizing my multiplication tables that way. After some time, you probably discovered that a better way was to write things down over and over again – you didn’t know exactly why, but it just worked faster to remember things. I remember learning vocabulary words that way before my Friday quizzes.

Repetition is how we remember things, but a better and much more efficient way to memorize is to repeat the idea in different ways. For example, by associating what we need to memorize with different things. This is how the house-method works: you imagine a house and then put each thing you need to memorize into a separate room in the house, noting as many details as possible. Then to recall it, you just go to that room in the house.

While this is immensely powerful and used by geniuses and professionals all the time, it can take some time to master and… it’s a lot of work. However, our bodies already have a whole similar process already figured out: just write it down. As mentioned above, written-down ideas use all our senses, so they are automatically associated with different things in our body (instead of the rooms in the house).

These associations make remembering them much easier. Your body has already mastered the way to remember important ideas and thoughts in the most efficient way possible. All you need to do is write them down with your own hands.

So, there you have it: the solution to having genius memory, and you had it all along.

The importance of the tactile experience

Most young people today will balk at writing things down. They have complete faith in the idea that the internet will always be available and that the information will always be readily found. Yes, this is probably true – the internet won’t go away. However, each time that the information is required, it will need to be searched up again because it wasn’t retained.

I had a related discussion with my son recently about listening to records. He asked why I do this when I can just pull the entire album into my playlist. Sure, the convenience is there and when I work out, I do the same thing. However, that’s for what I call passive listening, a.k.a. background music. When I do that I can’t really remember what I listened to after I’m done, much less the lyrics in the songs.

This is because the entire process of listening involved a few clicks of my thumb at most – I can even do it by voice command if I’m lazy. However, when I put on a record, I need to use my eyes to pick out the record, I typically glance at the cover art, and I put some thought into selecting it. I then need to turn on the turntable, the amp, the preamp and adjust some dials. Then I need to put the record on the turntable, fidget with a few more levers and buttons. Only then does the music start playing.

Then I typically go sit on my favorite chair (always a pleasant experience), and I often have the record sleeve in my hand so that I can follow along with the artist. I listen to the first side and after some twenty minutes, I need to get up and flip it over to hear the other side. Well, you get the idea, listening to a record is an experience that involves more of your senses, more of you mind, and more of your entire body. It is then imprinted in our minds very differently.

It is the tactile experience of listening to records that imprints it on our minds in a much more impactful way. So while it may not be as convenient as telling Siri/Alexa to play my favorite Coleman Hawkins album, which method do you think will have a greater meaning for me? Which one will I remember better? Which one will I still remember in ten years? That is the power of the tactile experience.

What about video?

When I talk to young people, they assure me that they can learn all they need from watching a video: it is always available and they can watch it over and over again. They can even pause it, slow it down and follow along as the perform a task. I don’t disagree that following along while performing the task at the same time is a great way to learn because we use more of our senses. And yet, it is still a bare minimum.

Video can be very useful and convenient for performing simple tasks like fixing a faucet or leaning to remove a background on an image. However, it is best for things that don’t need to be retained. This method is less useful when the information is abstract or complex and it doesn’t involve a physical activity. Then the only activity left is to watch the video over and over again, which is akin to the simple repetition we did in elementary school.

A much better solution would be to write down notes throughout the video, or immediately afterwards. By taking notes, I am referring to doing this with pen and paper. Letting the computer transcribe the text and then copying that into a note-taking app, while convenient, correspondingly reduces the imprinting process significantly. And let’s be honest, how many people really take notes while watching a YouTube video?

Well, I do. But that’s because I always have a trusty notepad handy. I’ve been doing this so long, it’s almost second nature to me. When I don’t have something to write on after a video, I almost feel like I am not done. Of course, not all video is intended for learning – some of it is just for entertainment and as background noise after a busy day (think TikTok cat videos).

But if that’s how you spend most of your time, then you need to ask yourself if that’s the best use of that time. Might this perhaps slow down your path to becoming the next Warren Buffett?

Conclusion

The fact is that taking written notes is one of the best ways to remember things that matter. I have thoughts about writing topics all day long. I can do this by pulling my phone out of my pocket, unlocking it, finding the right app, then finding the right page, then to start finger-typing my thoughts, by which time I sometimes forget what I wanted to write, or the details I wanted to include. Instead, I just pull out my notepad and start writing – it requires far less effort and mind-confusing steps. Sometimes I doodle too, and while I can do that on my phone too, it’s even more cumbersome.

One of the things I had struggled with in the past was that my notes were not in a computer format. They weren’t searchable and they had no particular order to them. This was rather inconvenient because I do all my professional writing with a computer. My process was then to re-read my notes (often making more notes), and then transferring them to my writing manually. Tedious, yes, but with the added benefit that it further reinforced my retention and even elaborated on those same ideas.

Back in college, I actually wrote many of my papers on a punch-typewriter before Word Perfect 4.2 and the IBM XT saved my poor fingers from permanent nerve damage. Being able to move paragraphs around, saving my work and generating bibliographies/notes were a game-changer for me. Ever since, I have always championed technology as a writing aid, and I’ll be the last person to finger-scold anyone for using tech creatively.

That said, my written notes could be seen as a boomer thing from a bygone millennium. I realize that, but then there’s the cognitive aspect that also can’t be argued against. So, I stuck with hand-written notes, but they were always separate from my writing (ever since 1988). Fortunately, that is no longer the case anymore either, thanks to technology, once again.

I now scan them in when I need to. Not all of them are scanned, but many are. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has improved significantly in recent years. Now with the advent of AI, I can scan in whole pages of cursive writing, super-tiny text in the margins, illustrations, and whatever else I was scratching down, and it scans it all in.

While I’m still experimenting with different software applications (I’ll write about this in a future article), I am amazed at what scanning software can do. It can even create meta-data for things it considers images and can’t convert to text. It really is amazing and I’m only scratching the surface of it.

The bottom line is that there isn’t any reason anymore to not write down your thoughts on paper. You’ll be glad you did. After all, it sure helped Warrant Buffett …and who doesn’t want to model him?