Commonplace Book/Cards

You should be extending your stay with writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind.

Seneca, Letter II

I became familiar with Ryan Holiday after a former work colleague introduced me to his daily email, The Daily Stoic in early 2021. I read some of the emails, watched some of his YouTube videos and before long I had picked up Ego is the Enemy, Stillness is the Key and, The Obstacle is the Way. While I was mucking around on YouTube one morning, I came across a video Holiday had put out about his note-card system for documenting, organising and retaining the hundreds of books he has read in his professional writing career.

This system is based on the concept of a ‘commonplace book’: a central location where you write down what you have learned or what you have read in such a way that you can return to it to look things up. Holiday would refer to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, as one of the best-known examples of a commonplace book ever.

In An Introduction to Buddhism, His Holiness the Dalai Lama recounts the three levels of understanding in Buddhism:

• Learning and Studying: When you read a book, engage in a conversation or lecture, when you watch the video or listen to the podcast,
• Understanding through deep reflection and contemplation: When you move away from the source materiel and think deeply on what you have consumed.
• Understanding acquired through meditative experience: When you have made the lessons part of your everyday life and part of your own nature.

Where Holiday’s system of commonplace cards really shines is that it is based on these same three principles of learning. You read the book, then after a month or so you come back and re-read the book — taking notes on a notecard as you progress through the book. Finally, you have these cards at your fingertips for when you want to write or to draw down on the pool of wisdom you’ve been collecting for yourself.

By collating these cards and by storing them in a simple, easy to access container, you are accessing the most insightful and most meaningful parts of all the books you’ve read. You’re taking all the parts which resonated with you and collating them into something far greater than the sum of its parts.

“When things stand out and attract attention in a work”, says Seneca in Letter XXXIII to his good friend Lucilius, “you can be sure there is an uneven quality to it. A tree by itself never calls for admiration when the whole forest rises to the same height.”

This process allows for the truly magnificent ‘trees in the forest’ to stand out and then be among other, equally as brilliant trees plucked from other forests. The majesty of each piece is not washed out by the others; what you are doing is ensuring the quality of all elements are so high that to pluck a card at random would bring you insight and meaning far greater than the random page of a random book.

As a tool for writing, having a full deck of commonplace cards has made inspiration for meaningful articles simple to find.