What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from How to Take Smart Notes
Marisol ran a twelve-person logistics startup and prided herself on staying informed. Every customer call, every podcast on supply chains, every article on a competitor's funding round got a highlight or a bullet in her notes app. When she needed to decide whether to pivot toward mid-market clients, she opened eleven months of notes and scrolled. Hundreds of fragments stared back: quotes, half-remembered numbers, phrases like "interesting, revisit." None of it connected to anything else, because she had filed everything by date, not by the idea it supported. She could not find the three conversations that actually mattered. She pitched the pivot from memory alone, got two follow-up questions she couldn't answer, and watched the meeting end in "let's revisit next quarter" - a full sales cycle lost to notes that never became thinking.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Capture the idea, not just the meeting
When something clicks in a customer call or a competitor's launch, stop and write the insight in a sentence of your own, explaining why it matters to your business, rather than pasting the quote. A raw quote tells you what someone said; your own sentence tells you what you understood.
Marisol's habit was pasting customer quotes verbatim into a spreadsheet column labeled "feedback," so months later she had forty quotes and no way to tell which ones pointed at the same underlying problem.
After every customer or investor conversation, write one sentence in your own words answering what you just learned that changes how you'd run the business, before logging anything else from the call.
Connect new insights to what you already believe
A note about a customer complaint becomes more useful once you link it to the note where you first doubted your pricing model, or a rival founder's warning about the same segment. The value isn't the single observation - it's seeing that unrelated conversations describe the same risk.
Marisol kept a "customer insights" folder and a separate "competitor watch" folder, so when both were quietly describing the same shrinking market, nothing in either folder pointed her toward the other.
Once a week, pick one new note and force yourself to find and name one older note it relates to, even if the connection feels like a stretch.
Let your categories emerge instead of forcing them
Resist building an elaborate folder structure - "sales," "product," "hiring" - before you have enough notes to know what recurs in your business. A structure imposed too early buries the note belonging in a category you haven't invented yet.
Marisol tagged every note under one of five departments on day one; the note describing a hybrid sales-and-support problem had nowhere natural to live, so it sat unread in "sales" until the problem became a crisis.
Let a new category earn its name only after five or six notes have naturally clustered around the same idea - never invent the folder before the notes exist.
Let the collection surface pivots you didn't plan
The real payoff of linked notes shows up later, when a note from four months ago - written for an unrelated reason - turns out to be exactly the evidence a decision needs. A founder who revisits and connects notes regularly starts noticing patterns across customers, competitors, and failed experiments that no single meeting would have revealed, which is often where a genuine pivot or product idea originates.
Writing every insight in your own words takes time between back-to-back calls, while linking older notes takes time you're tempted to skip once the backlog grows. Protect the writing step ruthlessly, even as one rushed sentence, and treat linking as a weekly ritual instead - a shallow note written now beats a perfect one written never, but an unlinked note is nearly as useless as no note at all.
Name one thing, honestly
Which decision in your business right now would look different if you could actually find and connect everything you've already learned about it?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Let a new category earn its name only after five or six notes have naturally clustered around the same idea - never invent the folder before the notes exist.