[David Perell] How to Take Notes like Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar once said that note taking is the closest thing that we have to time travel. Yeah. Yes. The Grammy and Pulitzer Prize winning rapper is a self proclaimed note taking god. And in this video, I'm gonna deconstruct Kendrick's note taking system and his overall creative process so that you can learn from one of our greatest contemporary writers. Kendrick's been on record saying, I have to make notes because a lot of my inspiration comes from meeting people, or going outside the country, or my old neighborhood. Taking notes is how Kendrick conserves his precious ideas, develops them over time, and eventually turns those ideas into art. How many brilliant ideas have escaped your mind after you failed to write them down? How much useful advice and how many memorable quotes have you lost to the entropy of memory? Note taking is the solution, and it's the best way to store our precious ideas so that we can level up our creative game and build systems to improve our craft, just like Kendrick Lamar.

See words on the page, they have this infinite shelf life. The ink preserves what our memory forgets. And these notes, the ones that you end up saving, they get more valuable as you find ways to cross pollinate your ideas. Taking notes allows you to compound your knowledge over time, which is exactly what Kendrick has been taking advantage of since childhood. Part of the reason that Kendrick is a phenomenal artist today is because he's been living in the world of ideas for a really long time. And he's been taking copious notes since the 7th grade. This was right around the time when he had this poetic awakening at Compton's Vanguard Learning Center. That's where he met an English teacher named Regis who brought poetry into the curriculum in an effort to deescalate the tension and the violence at Kendrick School.

He thought that if the kids wrote out their frustration, instead of internalizing it and holding it in, it could be a cathartic and healthy way of expressing their emotions, instead of resorting to violence. Kendrick and his peers at the time had to deal with a lot of pressure at school and in their communities. But through poetry, Kendrick found the words to talk about shared experiences and the shared human struggle. Learning from his English teacher and taking notes on his epiphanies was a breakthrough moment for the young Kendrick. Kendrick was a shy middle schooler. And he had a stutter that came up whenever he got really excited. It was so frustrating that he ended up turning to the written word. He felt like it was his only option.

The more he became obsessed with writing, the more he scribbled rap lyrics on note book paper instead of finishing assignments for his other classes. So now let's fast forward to Kendrick's wildly And in 2016, he became the rapper with the most Grammy nominations in a single night. And craziest of all, Kendrick became the 1st rapper to win a Pulitzer Prize Award for his album Damn. The first time the prize has ever been given to an artist outside of the either the classical or the jazz community. But how does Kendrick do it? How does he actually write so well? You might think that he just sits down and grinds it out pen to paper 247. But Kendrick has described his creative process as a perpetual one where ideas develop over time. It's as if he slow cooks his ideas instead of turning the creative burner all the way up and seeing how fast he can turn raw material into something that's ready for consumption. He doesn't just sit down in one sitting and write all his songs in one place.

He says, I write stuff all the time. It can be pulled from anywhere. They can generate some rhymes as soon as I walk out the store. Rather than sitting down to Pomodoro timers for deep work sessions or something, Kendrick is always working. And in his words, he's vibing out and soaking up energy. Like Alchemy, his note taking process helps him convert these young notes into award winning triple platinum singles. But unfortunately, our education system doesn't have the same respect for note taking. It's absolutely bonkers to me that students in school aren't taught to take deliberate notes in a way that accumulates throughout their life, in the way that Kendrick has already figured out for himself.

It's totally normal in school to enroll in a class like US history or something, take copious notes all semester, use them to nail your end of the semester essay, and then crumple them all up and throw those notes away right after you hand that essay into the teacher. Like, do you still have your notes from college? And if so, when was the last time you actually looked at them or used them for something? It's not really just that great writers have better ideas, it's that they actually know how to recognize and capture their best ideas when they have them. They know it's more efficient to store ideas on trusted computer silicon or paper instead of the undependable matter of your mind. Knowledge and wisdom is always coming your way, left and right. If you look for it, you'll see it every day. But you have to actually capture the gems that come into your mind if you're going to consistently do creative work. You have to build a library of ideas that you can leverage for the rest of your life. And that's uniquely possible now because all of us carry a smartphone in our pocket, which makes it easy to capture ideas into a database of instantly searchable notes.

As Kendrick learned at a young age, note taking is like building an extended mind so that you can instantly find the best ideas you've ever had and become a more productive creator. By the way, if you want more videos that break down the many things that writers can learn from great artists, make sure to subscribe by clicking here. As a creator myself, I've studied tons of artists and found ways to both unblock myself and build an online audience. And I share all that on this channel. So let me explain a little bit more about what an ideal note taking process looks like. And even though I'm not an award winning rapper, yet I've been building a library of notes for years. I've learned that process of note taking precedes any actual creative process. And there's so much more to writing than what you actually end up putting on the page.

In music, listeners hear Kendrick's lyrics.

You see fireworks in carpet, tires skirt the bullet far. I know how you work, I know just who you are See, use it, use it, use it

But know nothing of the note taking system that made those lyrics possible in the first place. Now, I wanna get practical here. What does this actually mean for your writing? I say stop trying to just be creative when you're at your computer. Abandon the idea that your life is split in these two halves, the time for creativity and the time to actually live life. Because once you start taking notes, you'll realize that most of your creative ideas will come when you're just living your ordinary life. And the universe is just gonna give you these new ideas have to save ideas immediately while they're still fresh. You don't even need to wait for inspiration to strike before you get started. You can adopt daily habits and put yourself in a state of mind by thinking about what kind of problems, what kind of themes do you wanna actually explore.

Keep them in the back of your mind. Let them simmer and see what your brain comes up with. In fact, that's something that Kendrick did when he was thinking through his album DAM. He took a list of themes and open questions that he wanted his subconscious mind to marinate on. And DAM ended up becoming a process of deep introspection and contemplation on themes like God and eternal damnation. The album revolves around a man who's worried about his spirit burning for an eternity. And Kendrick would sit down in the studio listening to the beats that his team produced, sometimes for months at a time, just to approach it with an angle that could accurately convey how we felt. You don't just take notes to remember things like shopping lists or something.

No, a good note taking system helps you remember things that you don't even remember learning about in the first place. So here's an example. One time, I was in New York. I was in the West Village at one of my favorite burger joints called Corner Bistro. And I had a conversation with a friend that was really illustrative because it illuminated how so many young people think about their careers these days. On the way home, when I got on the subway, I popped open my phone, and I just wrote about the entire experience. I wrote about what my friend was experiencing at work. I wrote about how his eyes moved as he was telling me the story.

I wrote about how the burger tasted as I was listening to him. And then I remember writing about how the ketchup splattered onto his fries right before he began his story. I wanted to write out all the details right after the experience so that they were fresh when I wrote them down. And that way I wouldn't need to go back and remember them later. And then like a year later as I started working on my essay about Peter Thiel, I ended up using those notes. I ended up referring to the cheeseburgers, the splattering ketchup on those crispy french fries, all that stuff. And without those notes, I wouldn't have remembered or been able to write about that experience in such vivid detail. Because taking notes on that conversation right after it happened preserved that memory for me.

And you can do the same thing too. Because by taking notes, you could write about experiences that occurred decades ago. And if you do a good job, you can write about them with the same fidelity of something that happened yesterday. I feel the benefits of note taking every single day. See, I have an atrocious memory. And rather than being disappointed by that bad memory, I'm propelled by the compounding advantages of a notes collection that I've been building ever since I took a life changing online course called Building a Second Brain. And one of the best things that I learned in Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain course is that note taking will actually change your creative process. So you don't have to work in these things called heavy lifts anymore.

You know, where you go through these grueling slogs of painful work, where you have to block out an entire day and start your creative process from scratch. And then you gotta finish it all in one sitting because you have everything loaded up in your head? Well instead, you can work in slow burns. Instead of canceling all your plans and going through the entire creative process in one sitting, you can gather notes over time and just during the course of your normal life in a way that doesn't end up costing you any extra attention. With all those notes in one place, you can start recycling ideas. And that output of one project can become the seed of another one. Because you can use the same ideas across multiple projects, maybe even multiple articles. It's just like how kids reuse Lego blocks for multiple buildings thinking, once you have a note taking thinking, once you have a note taking system, can be recycled and reused in future projects. By putting in a little bit of extra effort now to preserve your thinking through notes, you won't have to do that thinking again in the future.

Is note taking something that you do already? If so, let me know in the comments below, and tell me what your note taking process and your writing process is like. So now what happens if you want to start taking notes, but you're not really sure what you should start taking notes of? Well let me help. I think that there are 4 kinds of information that you should save. You should save anything that is inspiring, useful, easily lost, or personal. Inspiring information is anything that's gonna get you excited when you see it. And it's the kind of thing that maybe you wanna write about in the future, something that will inspire other people too. Useful information is anything that you think could be something for a future article, maybe a building block for a future project, or an idea that you'll wanna share with other people. Easily lost information is something that you don't think that you're gonna be

able to find in the future.

And these things tend to be things like tweets or maybe a Reddit post that might get deleted, a text that might be hard to find. And then personal information is any unique or hard won knowledge that you'll wanna revisit over the years. And to make your notes really valuable for yourself, I recommend that you only save a small fraction of what you actually consume. Only like the top 5% or something. And now, when it comes to putting these notes into action and creating excellent writing, you can utilize a tactic that I explain in this video right here. Note taking transcends the limits of memory and throws you into a galaxy of perpetual insight. And guess what? If you took notes while watching this video, well done. You're 95% ahead of other people.