
The first few chapters of [_The Study in Scarlet_](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/244), the first book in *The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes*, is when Dr. Watson and Mr. Holmes meet each other for the first time. Much of Holmes’ character and his philosophy on life and knowledge is revealed through these interactions.

When Watson finally discovered Holmes’ profession, he didn't know exactly what made Sherlock a better detective than anyone else.

Holmes’ answer:

> I’m generally able, through my knowledge of the history of crime, to set [mysteries] straight. There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of 1,000 at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the 1,001.

Sherlock also said: “I have a lot of special knowledge which I apply to the problem, and which facilitates matters wonderfully.”

But Sherlock didn’t just go around cramming his head full of facts; he only remembered what would be useful for his “application.” When Watson first learned this, he was astonished:

(*Sherlock Holmes* is written from the perspective of Watson.)

> His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
> 
> “You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
> 
> “To forget it!”
> 
> “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

(Holmes’s “attic” quote is one of my favorites in any fiction book—nay, of _any_ book.)

To help himself understand what Sherlock knows and doesn't know, Watson writes this telling assessment of the “limits” to Holmes’ knowledge:

> SHERLOCK HOLMES—his limits.
> 
> 1. Knowledge of Literature.—Nil.
> 2. Philosophy.—Nil.
> 3. Astronomy.—Nil.
> 4. Politics.—Feeble.
> 5. Botany.—Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.
> 6. Geology.—Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.
> 7. Chemistry.—Profound.
> 8. Anatomy.—Accurate, but unsystematic.
> 9. Sensational Literature.—Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.
> 10. Plays the violin well.
> 11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.
> 12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

Sherlock puts it another way:

> It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated.

### How to learn like Sherlock Holmes and become great in your field

1. Figure out what subjects matter to your life’s “application.”
2. Learn everything you can about those subjects. Learn also everything you can about the subjects once or twice removed from those subjects.
3. Learn the history of your field better than anyone else so you can determine patterns that no one else sees.

---

### Bonus knowledge about Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

What’s fascinating is that Holmes was based on one of [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s medical professors](https://www.life.com/arts-entertainment/sherlock-holmes-the-influence-of-the-worlds-most-famous-detective/):

> In 1876, Doyle enrolled as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh, where he met the man who would change his life. On his first day in Dr. Joseph Bell’s class, Doyle watched the professor hold up a vial filled with amber liquid. This, gentlemen, contains a most potent drug,” Bell said. “It is extremely bitter to the taste. Now, I wish to see how many of you have developed the powers of observation that God granted you.” Opening the vial, Bell stirred the liquid with his finger. “As I don’t ask anything of my students which I wouldn’t do alone with myself, I will taste it before passing it around.” He licked his finger and grimaced at the seemingly unpleasant taste. Then he passed the vial around. Would Doyle meet the challenge? When it was his turn, he tasted the liquid. But neither Doyle nor his classmates proved to have what Bell was looking for. “Gentlemen,” the professor said, “I am deeply grieved to find that not one of you has developed his power of perception, the faculty of observation which I speak so much of, for if you had truly observed me, you would have seen that, while I placed my index finger in the awful brew, it was my middle finger—aye—which somehow found its way into my mouth.


How to learn like Sherlock Holmes


I started reading John Stuart Mill's *Autobiography* this week, and it's terrific. Mill had a unique childhood filled with self-education and, you guessed it–reading! He writes:

> He [his father] not only drew my attention to the insight they afforded into Athenian institutions, and the principles of legislation and government which they often illustrated, but pointed out the skill and art of the orator—how everything important to his purpose was said at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his audience into the state most fitted to receive it; how he made steal into their minds, gradually and by insinuation, thoughts which, if expressed in a more direct manner, would have roused their opposition. **Most of these reflections were beyond my capacity of full comprehension at the time; but they left seed behind, which germinated in due season** (Emphasis mine).

That's a profound idea. Just because you read something beyond your "capacity of full comprehension" doesn't mean you aren't learning or getting something out of it. Seeds are being deposited, which, in due time, will sprout.

Those seeds won't germinate, though, if they aren't watered, rooted in good soil, and given the proper amount of sunlight. I may be over-extending the analogy here (I don't think I am), but without Mill's continued learning, the seeds he and his father planted at a young age would’ve never germinated. What he learned later in life allowed him to put greater context into what he read when he was younger. Without reading challenging works at a young age, his education may not have been as fruitful and advanced as it was when he was older. Without continuing to read challenging works when he got older, he may have never understood what he read when he was younger. It’s a feedback loop. As you read more, you begin to understand how little you know. As you continue to read more, those blindspots get back-filled, and knowledge begins to compound. You may be studying something for ten years, but nothing clicks until you finally read something that brings it all together in the eleventh. That’s the magic (and the difficulty) with compounding–all the big results are always at the end.

So, keep reading things above your “grade level.” It might not all make sense today, but it will if you keep reading and learning. When that happens, people will wonder how you got so smart. When they ask that, you know your compounding has started paying off. (But don’t let this fool you into thinking you’ve arrived. There’s still a lot you probably don’t know!)


Reading plants seeds

Most books and essays are filled with anecdotes that help the author communicate the main thesis.

In podcasts, the host and the guest often explore a wide-range of topics, talking shallowly about this idea or that idea.

Those anecdotes and passing remarks in books or podcasts are what I call “intellectual scraps.” They are ideas presented by someone else, but because of the nature of the book or conversation, they don’t go too in-depth about them.

Sometimes it’s a person’s name from history that you’ve never heard before, or a seminal essay or book that you haven’t read. Other times it’s an event from history you’re not familiar with.

These intellectual scraps are gold mines for finding new ideas to write and think about.

A good way to spot intellectual scraps is to pay attention to whenever you think, "Man, I wish they talked or wrote more about that idea.”

When this happens – whether it’s a figure from history, a reference to something you haven’t heard before, an event you’re not familiar with, or something else entirely – make a mental note of it. When you have some downtime, do a quick Google search to familiarize yourself with the reference.

Doing this allows you to learn about the peripheral ideas in books or podcasts that others don’t pick up on. This is a competitive advantage. If you read the same book as everyone else, but have trained yourself to learn something different from it, you’ll have more unique insights as the ideas start to compound on one another.

Collecting intellectual scraps is how you shape ideas of your own.

Gather intellectual scraps to shape ideas of your own

The following passage comes from *What Do You Care What Other People Think?* by Richard Feynman. It's a collection of stories from his life and curious adventures.

> We had the *Encyclopedia Britannica* at home. When I was a small boy he used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the *Britannica.* We would be reading, say, about dinosaurs. It would be talking about the *Tyrannosaurus Rex*, and it would say something like, "This dinosaur is twenty-five feet high and its head is six feet across."
> 
> My father would stop reading and say, "Now, let's see what that meant. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be tall enough to put his head through our window up here" (We were on the second floor.) "But his head would be too wide to fit into the window." Everything he read to me he would translate as best he could into some reality.
> 
> I learned from my father to translate: everything I read to try and figure out what it really means, what it's really saying.

The most important step to learning is to understand what it truly means. Make learning a reality! If you're reading about the scientific revolution, make a timeline with all the dates of discoveries or lives of influential scientists to see which lives overlapped. You could even try mapping where each discovery took place. Any tangible action that makes learning abstract concepts into something tangible will bode better for your knowledge (and subsequently everyone else!)

Make learning a reality

I.
"Names don't constitute knowledge", the great professor and physicist Richard Feynman declared in an [interview in 1973](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsgBtOVzHKI).

I know that A2 + B2  is equal to C2, that equation is called the Pythagorean Theorem, and it was named after Pythagorus. But I couldn't tell you why it works or how it works. I may be able to cobble together enough words to make a somewhat decent description, but I'll look like a fool trying to explain it to someone who has never heard of Geometry before. **I have the knowledge of it, not the understanding.**

That's not the only thing I'm lacking knowledge about. I've read 200+ books in the last few years and could probably summarize off the top of my head about 15 of them. The rest I may be able to recognize the title and paint a broad picture of the author's ideas, but that's about it. **I've read the books, but I don't understand the books.**

II.
This type of person, someone who has a lot of knowledge but no understanding, is what the blog [More to That]( https://moretothat.com/knowledge-is-not-understanding/) has penned as a "Dumb-Smart Person." A Dumb-Smart Person (DSP) is someone who has acquired loads of textbook knowledge, but doesn't know how to handle a situation that isn't pre-defined by something they've learned. They *know* the information, but don't *understand* it. What little information they do know, they're unable to adequately recognize when it's not in the context they've learned it in.

This is what I call context-dependent knowledge and it's a lot more common than you think.

Take for example Kyle here.

![Street Life - Standing](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/1rkFpWaMMGlLpo4LCcS997/e147a15845d8845f82f70cbd2a636583/Street_Life_-_Standing.png)

Kyle is a studious college senior who loves to read biographies of businesses and entrepreneurs. He's getting a degree in business, but it's not scratching the itch as much as he would like. He needs real examples, not case studies.

He had just finished reading Benjamin Franklin's biography and was struck by a well-known story about Ben Franklin asking a foe to borrow one of his books. The foe accepted and upon returning the book, the foe engaged in a friendly conversation with Benjamin. The foe was now a friend. Kyle thought this was incredible. Dealing with conflict has always been awkward, but this was a simple strategy that he could add to his toolkit to deploy when the time comes. Kyle noted the story in his "second brain" and moved on to the next read.

III.
Awhile later, he was put in a situation where the book tactic would be of great use. During one of his classes, students were assigned a group project. He happened to be paired with Lex, another brilliant but not-so-kind and arrogant student. Kyle knew this was his opportunity to apply the learning from Ben Franklin's life.

"Okay," Kyle thought, "If I ask him to borrow a book, he's going to have to lend it to me, right? Then I'll read it and when I give it back to him, I'll tell him my favorite points and ask what his were. Genius."

Operation Ben Franklin was a go.

"Hey Lex, I know you like reading Angela Duckworth's work. Could I borrow *Grit*? I've heard great things and would love to read it."

"You can just get it from the library..." Lex claps back.

"Oh, right. Sorry thanks." Kyle mumbles out, embarrassed. *Well that didn't work*, he thinks to himself. *What went wrong?*

What went wrong?! You used a strategy that worked in 1750 where books were scarce and hard to get. You didn't understand the deeper knowledge of that strategy. You were stuck in context-dependent learning and failed to apply the *knowledge* from that situation into a modern-day environment. You got cocky with your "second brain" only to realize you may not be as smart as you think.

Kyle is a dumb-smart person who fell prey to context-dependent knowledge–only being able to apply the learning of something if it's in the exact same context in which you've learned it.

This has happened to me countless times on my journey to learn programming. Watching a tutorial and following along step-by-step gives me some knowledge of how certain programming languages work, but if I don't understand *how* it works or *why* it works the way that it does, I won't know what methods to use in what situations when I'm trying to build things on my own out in the wild. I have to work really hard at applying methods and concepts outside of the specific use case the tutorial taught me. 

If I learn how to use the useEffect() hook from React one way, I'll fail to recognize how to use it when it's called for in a different context. Programming knowledge is *very* context-dependent. I've found that practicing on your own is the only way to overcome that obstacle and get out of tutorial hell.

IV.
We can picture a Dumb-Smart person's journey through knowledge and understanding as two mountains. The Mountain of Knowledge on one side and the The Peak of Understanding on the other.
![1-01](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/4gSCFCZFewIm6hqNh2Zlfy/27fb6f8cee3e52d746559072b0d91eb3/1-01.png)

Splitting the gap between the two is the Trough of Failures–an essential part of moving from The Mountain of Knowledge to the Peak of Understanding.
![2-01](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/2B5fH7Jbv8x3BaRZdR7S8V/9a10a385c753c290739e052d15c64702/2-01.png)
A dumb-smart person fails to recognize the gap between the two, assuming it's one big mountain that they've successfully conquered.

"Finally," they think. "I made it."

Man oh man do we have news for you.

V.

To get to the Peak of Understanding, one must do two things:

First, recognize there's a gap there at all. An arrogant, ego-filled academic will never reach the Peak of Knowledge if they think they are already there.

Second, they must trek through the Trough of Failures. They do this by taking their knowledge, applying it in certain situations, and seeing where it fits and where it doesn't. This is often accompanied by endless amounts of failures because that's how we learn.

With each application of knowledge, we get closer and closer to reaching the Peak of Understanding, until, finally, we've made it and can communicate the concept or idea in a simple way.

It sounds simple. And honestly it really is. The biggest obstacle I've seen (and faced myself) is having the desire to make the jump from one side to the other in the first place. Ever since we started learning in school, we were awarded with memorizing knowledge:

- What's the powerhouse of the cell?
- Who led the Revolutionary War?
- What year did Christopher Columbus set sail to the New World?

We were never taught, nor had the use case for, a deeper understanding of any concepts. As long as we could memorize some key vocabulary terms, things turned out quite alright.

And this doesn't change as life goes on. Signaling your knowledge is the second-most important thing to signal in human society, not too far behind wealth. If you can sprout off a few facts about World War 2 and entertain a dinner table with crazy Greek mythologies, people will assume you're intelligent (Unless you're annoying while doing that. And it's very easy to be annoying in that situation.

People who have knowledge may get remembered, but those who seek to understand will never truly die.

The Mountain of Knowledge (And Why Dumb Smart People Never Escape It)

From [Joel Chan](https://oasislab.pubpub.org/user/joel-chan), this process for synthesizing notes is the best I've seen. It's a bit academic in nature, but with a careful read can be easily understood and you could have a new process for note-taking. I know I do.

### The process goes like this

1. Begin with a set of question notes and papers
	- Every paper or source is read with these questions in mind.
2. Create observation notes
	- Observation notes have the potential to inform one or more questions that you started with.
	- Each observation note is grounded in at least one quote or context from a source and then directly linked to a question note.
3. Develop synthesis
	- What does the literature have to say about the questions of interest?
	2. Synthesis notes also get explicitly linked to relevant question note.
4. Compose and combine synthesis notes and questions of interest into arguments and theories. 
	- If done well, this process will reveal even more questions. That's okay. Go back to the question phase.

### Example images
![Screen Shot 2022-04-19 at 8.00.34 PM](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/2nV6nLutnSSWXP96mdir7M/cd971a904ffe8df6ea464e5953468815/Screen_Shot_2022-04-19_at_8.00.34_PM.png)

![Screen Shot 2022-04-19 at 8.00.53 PM](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/5QAMRJ9q04QPwe2eBbRyYK/11ee69b4e4ee736d3b169f8e2c447c0f/Screen_Shot_2022-04-19_at_8.00.53_PM.png)

I reccomend you read the entire article. [Do so here](https://oasislab.pubpub.org/pub/54t0y9mk/release/3).

The best system I've read for synthesizing knowledge

Note taking is the best form of studying I've ever come across. It forces you to [think critically about the ideas](https://twitter.com/mollyfmielke/status/1496212938788642824?s=20&t=Ta8qrVFPaf9aa2nRVDBnXg) you're consuming and what's going on in the world. Most of the time, [we don't give ourselves enough slack](https://fs.blog/slack/) in life to sit with our thoughts. But note taking forces you to do that.

I've tried about every note taking app on the market by now and none of them are everything I want them to be. Notion is great and is what I would recommend to someone looking to take more notes and get organized in life. I've tried Roam, mem.io, Evernote, and many, many more. But the constant switching of systems defeats the main purposes of note taking, rediscovering ideas you wrote about before. If you start from scratch every six months, you won't have many insights to rediscover.

Our of all the apps I've tried, Obsidian is the one I like the most. The customization is nice and the ability to publish via Obsidian Publish is what drew me to it.

## Working with the garage door up

The biggest inspiration for me to publish my notes is from Andy Matuschak. He has his notes public and a lot of people know "Andy's Notes." I was exploring them one day and was awe-struck by the ideas he was writing about. Andy writes about this concept called ["Working with the garage door up"](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Work_with_the_garage_door_up) and is one of the reasons he publishes his notes.

When I was younger, every weekend I'd do projects in the garage with my dad. Since we kept the garage door open, we never knew who was going to walk by. Sometimes, it was the Soto's. Next door neighbor's of ours who always supported my school fundraisers.

Other times it was friends asking if I could come out to play. On rare occasions, it was someone who could help us with the project we're working on! This is what happens when you work with the garage door up. You run into people and make connections you wouldn't have otherwise.

## Increasing online serendipity

[David Perell](https://perell.com/), a writer and creator of [Write of Passage](https://writeofpassage.school/), encourages his students to [maximize their serendipity by writing online](https://perell.com/essay/serendipity/). He writes:

> Maintain a [website](http://perell.com/join) so people can find your bio, share your work, and describe you in a favorable light. Once your website is live, publish content to encourage people to visit your website, advertise your skills and hype you up.

But creating polished content on a regular basis is difficult, especially if you're balancing a job, a family, and other hobbies. So, a great way to increase serendipitous interactions is to publish things that are not polished.

Andy, in his note about [working with the garage door up](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Work_with_the_garage_door_up), writes this:

> This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it's [Screenshot Saturday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/screenshotsaturday?lang=en); it's giving a lecture about the problems you're pondering in the shower; it's thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn't work at all. It's so much of Twitch. I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette.

Taking notes encourages you to think about how you're trimming the artichoke. Publishing those notes shows others how you're thinking about trimming the artichoke. Someone who also thinks a lot about trimming artichoke's can now connect with you to refine their own process. It's a win-win!

## Why I went with Obsidian

There are no right ways to publish your notes online. You could write things in a Google Doc and share that in your Twitter bio if you want to. That's he best way to capture notes though, which is why I chose Obsidian.

The process of taking new notes is the most important thing to focus on. I had to make sure I enjoyed the process of taking notes in whatever system I used. I like how Obsidian is a desktop app and not online. This for ease of use and not a privacy thing. I found if I was using a Chrome tab, it would get closed out or I'd lose it.

I also like the free flowing structure of Obsidian and how anything can go anywhere, though I do see how this could be confusing and disorganized. If you want more structure, [Tiago Forte's PARA](https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/) method is recommend, or you can use the [Map of Content](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GqQKCT0PZ4) idea.

What sealed the deal for me was the [Obsidian Publish](https://obsidian.md/publish) feature. With only a few clicks, I could make my notes public at a custom domain and allow users to search and interact with my notes in similar functionality to how Andy's Notes work. If there are pages I don't want to publish, I can add some YAML to the top of the page which tells Obsidian, "Hey, don't make this public. K, thanks!"

I'm happy with how my notes are coming along both online and offline. I also enjoy how I can share links with people online to ideas I'm thinking about, but haven't thought about it enough to write a full essay. You can check out [my public notes here](https://notes.daltonmabery.com/About+these+notes).
