The Story phase
On a summer holiday morning, about 23 years ago, I remember waking up to the sound of rain hammering on the roof.
What better thing to do than disappear into a book?!
So, I snuck out of the house to go to this small, two-room library nearby. It was a high school library, which I had access to, and because it was the holidays, I had the entire library to myself that day.
I remember picking up a book and settling down on the floor, with my back pressed against the wall. About a couple of hours later, I stood up after finishing the book, with goosebumps all over me.
The book was The Call of the Wild.
And there was this one paragraph I remember by heart to this day, which, in hindsight, has probably shaped more of my life than I realized at the time.
“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.”
Since then, in one form or another, I’ve made a point to collect highlights and notes from most of the books I read, later expanding them into movies, documentaries, essays, interviews, and anything else that caught my attention. Not all of them were useful, of course. But enough of them were.
But these notes and highlights that resonated with me may not have been as interesting for someone else.
It’s all subjective.
Because the collage of meaning that we make out of these notes is deeply personal. It may not make much sense to someone else, taken piece by piece.
In other words, the collection, over time, becomes us.
For example, Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish critic and philosopher, spent years collecting notes on the covered shopping arcades of nineteenth-century Paris. The project was called The Arcades Project. It was not a conventional book as much as a vast collage of notes, quotations, fragments, observations, and commentaries about modern life.
As his collection grew, Benjamin organized these fragments into folders called “convolutes.”
The categories were wide-ranging: fashion, boredom, dreams, advertisements, mirrors, and many other strange, ordinary details of nineteenth-century Paris.
The project was never finished.
But today, The Arcades Project is one of the most influential personal accounts of that era, even though Walter Benjamin never meant it to be a historical archive, or any archive for that matter.
And that’s the whole point.
A collection is not just a pile of things. Over time, it becomes a vivid portrait of the person who made it.
As Montaigne, the French essayist, once wrote, “I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
We think we are collecting other people’s thoughts. But over time, we also start collecting evidence of who we really are.
The Structure phase
To put it in a slightly old-fashioned way, the collection unveils the collector.
When you highlight something or make a note when you’re reading, you are not only saving an idea. You are leaving behind a record of your own consciousness.
Page by page, book by book, these pieces start forming a collage of your own personality, seen through the thoughts of other people.
Before getting more into that, though, it’s worth asking the obvious question: why does this matter in the first place?
Because without knowing ourselves—what we want, what our strengths are, what we value, and what kind of life actually fits us—we don’t really have a reference point to life.
We don’t have a stable home base.
So when the messiness of the real world presses in on us, we get confused. We get stressed. We start borrowing other people’s definitions of success because we just don’t know what should be ours.
And I believe reading books, especially reading them carefully like this, is one of the simplest ways to get to know yourself.
Now, let’s move on to the next big question: how is knowing yourself going to help you make better choices?
First of all, you get a strange buy-one-get-one-free type of offer when you really get to know yourself. You also begin to know what you really want in life.
Second, it helps you prioritize.
You know exactly what to say no to, and you know exactly what to say yes to.
For example, you may admire a certain kind of career because it looks ‘shiny’; to be able to just have things, and also, to be seen having things. But then, when you look back at your notes, you realize that the ideas that interest you are not really about status at all. They might be about independence, deep work, or financial freedom.
And that realigns you towards the type of life that you will call ‘fulfilling’.
The interface
So, where do you start?
Well, like I said, the whole point of this piece is that we are all different from each other. So the way we come to understand ourselves will be different, too.
There is no right or wrong way to do this.
Some of us are not big fans of reading books, but like to learn from a more visual medium, like documentaries, movies, or even YouTube videos.
These are all great options.
But as a good rule of thumb, it’s best to have some kind of system. A simple one. Some place to collect, organize, and return to your ideas and thoughts.
A small notebook would be a great start.
If you are like me, who likes to digitize notes and highlights, any note-taking software—like Notion or Obsidian—is a great option. Obsidian is my tool of choice, but the tool itself is not the point.
The point is to start noticing what you notice.
Because sometimes, one sentence in a book is just that. A sentence.
But when you look back after 23 years, you might realize that it was, indeed, more than just a sentence.