How to Use a Commonplace Book to Turn Old Highlights Into New Ideas

Every intellectual endeavor starts with a note. — Sönke Ahrens

I copied those seven words out of How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens the first time I read the book. Not because I had a plan for them. I copied them the way you copy a line into a commonplace book — because something in them felt worth keeping, even if I couldn’t yet say why.

And then they sat there. For about a year.

That’s not a confession. That’s the practice. A commonplace book isn’t a to-do list; nothing in it is late. The lines you keep are more like guests in a spare room — they stay as long as they need to, and every so often you knock on the door and see if they’re ready to talk.

A year later, I knocked. I read the line again, and this time something in me said: there’s more here. Sit with this.

This is the story of what happened when I did. Not a system, not a workflow — just what it looks like to dwell with seven words until they open.

The first words that caught my attention were intellectual endeavor.

As I turned them over, they reminded me of another line I’d kept, one I had written to myself: Do this every day: find and create meaning.

This is the quiet magic of keeping both a journal of your own thoughts and a commonplace book of others’ — and letting them talk to each other. Ahrens’s line came from one book; my line came from the other. So I introduced the two and let them speak. Out came this:

Every attempt to find and create meaning starts with a note.

And isn’t that what we’re all after? Meaning.

The moment we perceive the meaning of something, a door unlocks. That revelation can be shared. That insight can be spoken. A conversation can begin. Writing something down is how you accept the invitation to join the great conversation — the long, unhurried one humanity has been having in its letters and margins and journals for thousands of years.

The commonplace book is your seat at that table. And it starts with a note.

Then the phrase starts with began to glow a little.

When you read the words “starts with,” you know that what follows has to carry weight. It connects the how to the what. Saving money starts with budgeting. Losing weight starts with logging your food.

So I lingered on the word start itself. To start is to come into being. To establish. To lay foundations. To lay a cornerstone. To sow seed.

I took those images and set them back into the sentence, one at a time, the way you’d try a stone in different spots of a garden wall:

A note is where the seeds of meaning are sown. A note is where insight is established. A note is the cornerstone of finding and creating meaning.

That last word stopped me. Cornerstone.

A cornerstone is the first stone set in a building. Every other stone is laid in reference to it. It doesn’t do anything flashy — it just holds the true line that everything else answers to.

That’s what a kept word is. Not a productivity asset. Not raw material for output. A reference point. A line you set down once, that quietly governs how everything after it gets built.

Every attempt to find and create meaning starts with a note.

Seven words. One line, copied by hand into the book. A year of sitting quietly in the spare room. And then, when I finally knocked — a cornerstone.

So here’s what I’d offer you, if you keep a journal or a commonplace book or even just a pile of underlined pages: the practice isn’t finished when you write the line down. That’s when it begins.

Go back. Reread what you kept six months ago, a year ago. Knock on the door. Ask a line what it’s been thinking about since you last spoke. Let it meet the other words you’ve kept and see what they say to each other.

Some lines will just nod politely. But every once in a while, one will open its eyes and look back at you.

It all starts with a note.

P.S. — This practice of going back and knocking is the whole reason I built Ember. It's a quiet place to build your commonplace book and journal in one place — the lines you've kept from others, the thoughts you've written yourself — and to sit with one when it's ready to talk. No dashboards, no backlog, nothing marked overdue. Just you, a kept word, and the door. If this piece resonated, Ember is where I do this every day.