Word count:9640
hey leo here for actualised org and in this episode I'm gonna be talking about how to keep the ultimate journal your commonplace book stick with me throughout this whole episode because towards the end I'm gonna show you a live demo of my ultimate journal my commonplace book and I'm gonna show you all the categories that I set up and how I use it to really supercharge my creativity but before we can get there we need to talk about what is a commonplace book and why it's so important this is one of those things that's so practical that it will completely change your life as it snowballs over the years over the years over the years and I want to show you the effect that it had in my own life so what is a commonplace book a commonplace book is a repository of all your knowledge every idea that you run across that strikes you as important or significant or inspiring you write it down and you organize it and you put it all together into a sort of personal Wikipedia this is like a scrapbook that contains notes clippings lists of goals to-do lists random ideas that you have for projects and business ideas and any kind of hobbies that you have any lessons that you learn from books or from listening to videos listening to me or any insights that you personally have in your psychedelic trips or whatever sources you're getting your insights from your writing all those down you have lists of quotes drawings you can have Diaries in there where you write down your intimate thoughts exercises that you do personal development exercises consciousness work sort of exercises or whatever you could have schematics picture tables lists of resources links to stuff that you find on the internet like articles that are very important that you've read you can have screenshots and screen clippings of important stuff that you've seen and it can just go on and on and on you can have videos in there you can even have audio in there all of this put together into a scrapbook scrapbook sort of thing now this word commonplace book it's a bit of a weird word why do I use this book why don't I just call it a journal most people would call it a journal well when you say journal usually what that implies to me and to most people is just like one page and it just Scrolls down and down and down you're just writing stuff down sequentially that's not what this thing is this thing is much much more robust than your typical journal so the alternative to that is personal Wikipedia that's how I like to think of it that's how robust it can be with links pointing to different places like that so this word commonplace book I didn't make it up myself this is actually a term that exists and commonplace books became a popular tool for intellectuals thinkers and philosophers in the era of early modern Europe so as Europe came out of the Middle Ages we had the Renaissance then we quickly had the Scientific Revolution then around the French Revolution there was the Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau and you can think about people like Rene Descartes Leonardo da Vinci Michelangelo Galileo Copernicus so all these people who had a very significant long-lasting effect on European intellectual tradition and of course Western your Western intellectual tradition that has now not just in Europe but it's really affected the entire world and of course it's here in the United States so these thinkers started to organize all their thoughts into commonplace books and so what this would be I mean back then there was no computers no digital stuff so it was just this gigantic book literally a scrapbook where they would paste all the kind of stuff that they ran across that was important to them pieces of paper clippings and was it's very messy giant sort of ultimate notebook you might think for a thinker and what was so significant about that is that when you take all these ideas that you randomly just run across throughout your everyday life and you compile them together into one source and then you can just look through it and it's all organized and you can look through it very quickly you can kind of scan it get a picture of you and you can refer back to it constantly then that has a very powerful effect on your mind and it organizes this information in an interesting way where your mind can pick out new creative insights from all of that so that's what you need to have why do you need to have it because it organizes all of your learning and most importantly because it supercharges your creativity it's hard for me to articulate how significant my own commonplace book has been over the last five years that I've been keeping it I've got hundreds of tabs hundreds of categories in there literally thousands of pages of information and it's all really densely packed it's not like I'm just randomly writing down my thoughts like in a diary I do have some Diaries in there that I keep but mostly the information is like really dense lists of ideas and insights and stuff for my business and stuff for my personal life stuff for my own growth and just ideas that I find interesting and all this stuff when I look through it it organizes itself in a sort of organic way that then I can just by glancing at it for five minutes I can get all sorts of spontaneous insights that would be completely impossible without this thing in place without it I don't think actualised org would be possible I started my commonplace book in 2012 right around the time where I was getting the idea the first inceptions for actualized org and what ended up happening over the next five years is that it just sort of built and built and snowballed on itself and insights were had creative ideas were had that would not be possible otherwise and it's not just for my business and it's not just because I teach personal development as a significant for me but also for my own personal growth I've gotten so much of my own personal growth actualized because of this because in this book I have my values my purpose various visions that I have for my business and for myself personally various exercises that I've done over the years hundreds and hundreds of various exercises journaling exercises and so on and it just goes on and on it's hard to it's hard for me to even bring to mind all the stuff that's in there there's quite a lot which is why you have it because you just can't contain that kind of stuff all in your mind you see so really the commonplace book is like an extension of your mind and it overcomes the limitations of the mind because the mind thinks in a linear fashion whereas this commonplace book it's more like a tangled hierarchy and this sort of network like a web which is much more powerful than being able to just think linearly and also of course it overcomes the problem of memory and all that sort of stuff I actually bought a laptop specifically so that my commonplace book could be portable back in 2012 and at the time I was thinking like man do I really want to spend $1,200 on a cute little portable laptop for this purpose I thought it was kind of being frivolous and just wasting money but what turned out to be the case is that that one investment in the infrastructure of my life and I've talked about in the past infrastructure building infrastructure for personal development building infrastructure for your own success I have a whole episode about that well this is one of the most important infrastructures that I put into place in my life and has changed my life forever that's just been five years of this thing being in effect so it's just gonna continue to snowball and snowball and snowball and what I've seen is that the growth from this sort of thing is just exponential and it also excites you intellectually it excites you it incites you creatively because you can always turn to this thing to this commonplace book if you build it robustly you can turn to it for ideas and inspiration that is just never-ending it is infinite and then you just add more and more and more to it who is a commonplace book good for well first and foremost for sages and philosophers for self actualize errs for designers any kind of designers whether you're software design or a clothing designer doesn't matter artists also any kind of artists musicians authors and writers researchers scientists engineers architects entrepreneurs and of course students so really every human being I think needs to have one of these especially if you're intellectually inclined you know some people hoard weapons as Arsenal's because they love guns some people hoard golf clubs or fishing equipment and tackle boxes because they love to fish or some people hoard collectibles stuffed animals or stamps and coins and all this sort of stuff but you know what the most powerful thing to hoard is knowledge not just knowledge but wisdom and also creative ideas so that's what this commonplace book amounts to in the end is it's a hoard of the best of the best ideas and what's really amazing about ideas is that ideas are the kernels and seeds of everything that you see around you in your life so as much as we talk about non-duality and the evils and dangers of the monkey mind and how thinking is wrong and bad yes that's true one hand but then there's also the other side of that equation which is that even though thinking can be problematic when you're doing consciousness work it's also really important because thinking is what inspires you thinking is what creates a vision what motivates you to go out there and do stuff and in fact what motivates you to go do consciousness work or to pursue enlightenment and thinking is responsible for every single thing that you see around you right now so look around you look at the device or phone you're holding in your hand or the computer screen you're looking at look at the building that you're sitting in look at the chair that you're sitting in or the sofa you're on or the shoes that you're standing in look all around you everything you see started from a kernel of an idea that hot that happened in the human mind that's creativity at work so if you want to really be powerful at executing on your life purpose if you want to contribute creatively to the world there's nothing more important to you than having this very personalized commonplace book in place so let's move on to talk about how to actually keep one of these so how do you keep it well of course the preliminary question is should it be digital should be paper in the old days it used to be paper nowadays I definitely favor digital because there are just things that are possible with a digital commonplace book that are just not at all remotely possible in a paper form and I get it some people love the analog feel of pen and paper and notebooks and I love that too and sometimes I still take notes on pieces of paper and I used to in the past but the power of digital is amazing because we have software and tools these days which allows you to do things that are unthinkable for paper notebooks and you would you would need a small personal library of notebooks to be able to do everything that one of these software's can do search features are especially important because you'd have so much information and I need to search through it quickly you can't do that with paper also there's formatting functions also there's a lot of multimedia stuff like how are you gonna have links to internet pages or articles or videos or audios on your on your paper notebooks it's just not gonna work so you need some kind of digital repository and also digital is great because it can be very very portable so I definitely recommend you go digital which of course then leads to the next question of which software is the best and there's a lot of suffer these days that's out there Evernote Microsoft products Apple products and all sorts of apps you have stuff for your PC you have stuff for your phone you have so for your laptop tablets combinations of all sorts of things so I'll make it really simple for you I found what I think is the perfect common book note-taking software and it's Microsoft OneNote it's actually a piece of Microsoft software that I think most people completely overlooked and yet it's the most powerful piece of software in the Microsoft Office suite it's more powerful than word more powerful than Excel more powerful than PowerPoint and yet most people don't really know about it and they haven't really tapped into it what OneNote allows you to do is it allows you to organize a bunch of digital notebooks and tabs and it has all the features that you could possibly want it's available for a PC it's available for Mac and there's different versions of it it's easy to get it's pretty cheap to get if you want to get a used version of it you could if you're scrapped for cash so that is my favorite software and let's talk about the requirements that you need for a commonplace book software so if you're going to toy around with other kind of software keep in mind these requirements and also this will show you why I think OneNote is perfect because it really fills all these features perfectly so the first thing you're going to want is you're going to want your commonplace book to be portable now it's a little tricky because portable doesn't necessarily mean that it's on your mobile phone in fact I don't have my commonplace book on my mobile phone portable I mean laptop because what I think you need for a commonplace book is a laptop with a real keyboard and no not an iPad that doesn't count you need a real keyboard and not even some of those stupid flimsy Windows tablet things which are like those too and ones which have a sort of flimsy flip-out keyboard you need a real solid keyboard so you can type fast on this thing and it feels good so what I recommend is getting a laptop but not a huge chunky laptop get a really small one I use a 11 inch MacBook Air and so Apple has some nice light laptops or you can find others Chromebooks won't work where at all because OneNote I don't think is available for Chromebooks so that's for Portability that allows you to use this commonplace book on your couch different parts of your house it allows you to go outside with it to Starbucks it allows you to use it on your airplane in a car that sort of stuff very easily now other features that needs to be there you need a system of robust tabs sections and categories so you're gonna have a bunch of pages in it but then those pages need to be organized in a multi-tier structure and that's exactly what OneNote allows you to do some less robust note-taking software it doesn't allow you to do this and it doesn't have enough hierarchy so it's going to be challenging for you to organize once you get hundreds and thousands of pages of notes and stuff in there you need of course a nice robust search function and OneNote covers that you want different rich formatting abilities you want of course bolding underlining different colors and highlighting and different texts and fonts and you want all that to be very easily applied and that also cleared Microsoft lets you do that easily then you also want robust easy-to-use bulleted lists I think this is one of the features that I use the most within OneNote is bullet list I just have lists and lists upon list and a lot of these lists are tiered lists with different tiers and levels of indentation in them I'll show that to you in the live demo and you want to be able to not just make these lists but then quickly reorganize them all very easily and that's something that OneNote is awesome at letting you do you want to be able to create tables those are useful you want to be able to do interlinking between different pages and that's something that I see that some less robust note-taking software doesn't let you do I don't just mean linking to a web page I mean linking to an internal page or an internal notebook within your commonplace book that's what lets you create this sort of a Wikipedia effect you want options for tagging you want options for quickly saving and loading files in fact you want this to be completely seamless you want this commonplace book to be so easy to use that it's always on you don't have to open an application you don't have to load a file you don't have to save a new file every time you jot down a note and that's what's so awesome about OneNote is that it it's completely seamless I have it on 24/7 on my laptop I'd never closed the application I never have to even click the Save button on it because everything is saved every five minutes automatically I don't need to create new files the way you would if you're working with Microsoft Word or something you don't need to create individual files there all of it is saved into one file and it's constantly open so you don't even need to waste time opening up the application and then that's that's the ideal situation there because you have you have a lot of you have a lot of sort of like friction usually for taking notes because to take a note when you get a random idea you have to like go get a pen pen you're gonna go get a piece of paper write it down file it somewhere make sure that you remember that then you have to organize that also see that that is an obstacle to you writing down all your ideas and this commonplace book is supposed to make all that completely effortless and frictionless you also want local storage so that your files are stored locally which is what OneNote allows you to do although some newer versions of OneNote are now designed to only work in the cloud I've heard that from people definitely don't use those versions use one that allows you to do local storage there's some older versions you can buy which work perfectly as a bonus nice features to have are the ability to make screenshots and screen clippings and insert that into your commonplace book the ability to insert pictures to actually record your own voice and audio take audio notes and stick them right in there all of this OneNote lets you do drawing little pictures and schematics and sketches and as a bonus of course cloud sharing cloud backup and if you can get it mobile access on your phone but I wouldn't sacrifice all the above just to get mobile access so there are a lot of apps that are available for iPhone and Android users these days which are all centered about mobile access but then they lack a lot of these other features there is a OneNote for smart phones you can get that the trick there is that it is then have to be stored in the cloud I'm not sure how that works with local copies I actually don't use it because I I don't like taking notes on my phone on my phone I just I do sometimes take notes on my phone if I'm in a in a bind and I don't have any other option no piece of paper or anything but usually all write down notes on a on a post-it note and then I'll transfer into my commonplace book at some other time so anyways these are all the features that you really want and OneNote offers it to you so if you could find some other application that does then great I haven't explored all of them so you know people will talk about Evernote I doubt Evernote has all these features it has many of them but I don't think it has it all of them if you're wondering whether you can keep a commonplace book with just using Microsoft Word definitely not that's highly inefficient or if you're thinking about using notepad definitely don't use notepad Google keep I know that one that's not robust enough either maybe you're thinking oh maybe I can use some personal Wikipedia software there actually is a possibility of setting up your own like free wiki software and developing your own literal private wiki I don't think that's ideal it's it's cumbersome there's all sorts of coding and stuff that goes into it and it's just not as as effortless as OneNote would be so that's my case for OneNote I make a pretty powerful case for it because well I don't get paid for it it's not a sponsorship or anything like that I don't have any affiliate links for it I'm just talking about it because I love the software that's been really helpful for me in the last five years don't be lazy or cheap when it comes to investing in your commonplace book invest in a good high-quality laptop which is very portable has a good battery life and invest in one of these software's like Microsoft OneNote I actually use a version of Microsoft OneNote which is 2010 it's quite old but it works perfectly for me you can buy that on eBay for 50 to $100 if you're worried about the expenditures here and don't sign up to any stupid subscription services where they force you to these days you know software companies love the subscription services where they force you to pay every single month or every single year for this sort of stuff to have access to your own data no don't do that just go buy an old copy on eBay and you pay once and you use it for the rest of your life and it works perfectly no problems you don't need internet connection you just use it locally so without further ado let's get into the live demo and I'll show you how I run my own commonplace book that'll give you some ideas for how you can set up yours all right welcome to the live demo of my commonplace book so this is my PC and this is my desktop and I'll be showing you around here in a second so I am screen recording this and if you're listening to me on iTunes or mp3 audio that means that you should go check out the video cuz all the magic is gonna be happening here on the screen and I don't think you're gonna get very much just by listening to me but anyways let's get started so here I have opened OneNote this is Microsoft OneNote 2010 edition it's a little bit old but actually it has all the features I want you can check out the newest versions there are some even free versions but actually there are limitations there that I don't like as is commonly the case with software developers these days new versions tend to be less not more than they used to be which is rather unfortunate but you can experiment with that and just see what will work best for you what you like best if you want to buy this version you can find a cheap copy on ebay very easily a used copy so I am running this on a Windows machine I'm just running it on my desktop here because it's easier to record usually though I run it on my laptop now I told you my laptop is a Mac so you might be wondering how do I run this on a Mac well there are Mac versions but I don't use Mac OS whenever I buy a Mac laptop for example I'll always install Windows on it just because I need Windows because it's a lot more flexible it allows me to do stuff that would be unimaginable to do on a Mac and anyways all my software and all my knowledge is windows-based so that's just an FYI in case you were wondering about that disparity so here we are in OneNote here's how it works you've got a section here on the left you got a section at the top and you've got a section here on the right and then you got your formatting options up here so on the left here we have the highest level of organization these are like actual digital notebooks which contain tabs here and then each tab contains pages that can are gonna go down here so you can see I've got three different notebooks and you can have more you can create as many as you want but mine are main misc and business so if I click on misc and business you see the tabs here they change the pages they also change because the pages are connected with the tabs so this is the highest level so let's just take the main and then if we click on one tab here like blueprint this is a product I developed fractionalize that'll work a long time ago it's sort of antiquated so I don't really recommend using it very much it's about four or five years old maybe I'll work out in the future but anyways so you can see that this is the tab there's a page here and then there's a bunch of other pages and you can click on those and you can see what's going on here so that's how it works pretty simple so let me show you how to create new tabs if you want create a new tab you just click this button here boom got a new tab we can name it we can give it a title usually I erase this stuff I don't need the dates although you can use those if you care about it and then you can just start typing away like this if you've got a idea you got to write down real quick that's your note right there and OneNote puts it into a little nice floating text box which you can drag around and you can resize and what's really cool is that if I click here and I just start typing again it'll create a second text box you see how it works and these text boxes are very flexible that are resizable they scale and they stretch as you type they can go infinitely far down there's no limit to how long your pages can be they can go on forever so this is very convenient by the way if I want to re color a tab I can just right click on it choose a different color let's pick teals to see now it's teal colored this changes to teal color if I want to create a second page I can do that page number two and put stuff here and see now I've got the first page in the second page I can rename this page number one there you go and of course we can change the order of these pages we can add more pages as many pages as you'd like the order of these pages is easy to change like this like that see and of course the tab itself you can change the position of this tab you can put it anywhere you'd like like that let me show you some other features that we've got here so of course you've got all your standard formatting functions like you can bold stuff you can change the size of fonts to your heart's content you can color them any color you want you can highlight stuff in a ton of different colors like so what else can you do you can create lists so let me show you how that works so if I want a list I just click like this very easy I can also convert this entire thing into a list just by doing that now you might say so what you know every software has lists Microsoft Word has lists but not like these let me show you what I mean so let's say I type a BBB see here's what you can't do in Microsoft Word you can't grab an item on a list and just drag it like this too quickly reorder stuff lists for me are the bread and butter of all my notes I don't write long paragraph notes I don't write you know diary entries I make lists of stuff it's very condensed it's very easy and then what I do is I just manipulate the lists so I can just drag it to indent create all sorts of deep structures like this if I want to I can take this entire thing here and I can just drag it over here like that see quickly rearrange stuff this is impossible to do in most software and yet this is something that I do all the time here super valuable what else I can do is I can use the tag functions which are really nice a tag is just a little icon that you put next to an item so like this a star question mark a to-do box you can actually check this off mm-hmm there's all sorts of stuff exclamation points but these are not just aesthetic these are functional because if I click on this button fine tags OneNote pulls up this tag search which pulls up all the tags on every page throughout the whole notebook and I can quickly search through the specific items that I've tagged so for example I will use this gold star very very often to tag the most important item so if I have a list like this and I have this item which is most important I will tag it with that gold star so that I can easily see it and of course if I drag it around the gold star comes with it and it doesn't even need to be a list item it can just be a regular like this line I can just put a nice little gold star next to it pretty cool what else I can do is I can create tables very easily right on the fly you just type and then you press tab type tab type tab type tab type tab and and then enter to create the next row like this and of course you can quickly resize stuff here you can do things like that and of course you got a individual text box you can even overlap them in case you would want to do something so crazy but yeah you have all these kinds of options and that's not all it goes on we have all sorts of multi media functions which are really cool of course you can insert images right into here you can do screen clippings from the internet you can do hyperlinks so if I want to turn this into a hyperlink to some online website I can do that even better let's say I want to turn this into an internal link so I want to make my own sort of personal Wikipedian let's say I have something important over there on some other page some other tab that I want to link to I can just see I can just find that tab here and then let's say I want to link to life purpose page see and if I click this look what happens it takes me to the tab it opens the tab and it takes me to the page not only that I can even link to a specific line so if I want to link and have me jump right here I can do that and that turns out to be a super valuable structuring tool you can make some very complicated documents using all these sort of structures whereas with Microsoft Word you couldn't do that because you have all sorts of different individual documents linking them is a challenge because then you're renaming them as soon as you rename them that breaks your links and you have to have folder structures and you have problems you can't rename your folders so you see all sorts complications arise that do not arise here other multimedia functions you can insert files like PDFs and so on you can even record audio and video directly into here and it will spit it out right here with a player and you can click the button you can play it so audio recordings if I just click this button I can record my audio I won't do that now or a video if you have a webcam you can do that there's all sorts of calendar functions equations and symbols and for the artists in the audience there are drawing tools which are super cool I'm just using a mouse here so it looks ugly as hell but if you had a tablet one of those Windows machines with a tablet then you could really do some creative stuff here you see and see you're not going to some third party paint application it's all happening right here very seamlessly which is what's so what's so awesome about it of course there's a very powerful search function so if I click control F I can search and find stuff right on the page like if I type in the letter with the number one there you go see what it did is it highlighted one one one one all the instances of one were highlighted but what's really powerful about the search there's an advanced search which lets you limit where you're searching so you can search on this page or on this whole tab all these pages or you can search across this entire notebook all these tabs or you can search the entire commonplace book all these notebooks so that level of specificity is super useful to you when you've got a very large bulky commonplace book going which you probably will after years of doing this stuff and perhaps lastly the most cool feature that I love about this is the auto saving feature of OneNote so the way that I run OneNote is as follows I just leave it on my laptop running 24/7 I wrote I leave it running for months at a time I never opened files I never closed files I never save files I never rename files none of that ever happens all I do is I just open this thing and I start typing away the only things I have to name or rename or or move is these tabs really I very rarely need to create a new notebook just these tabs and then mostly pages and that's it it auto-saves about every five minutes so everything is saved the program runs very stable II it doesn't crash I don't think I've ever had it crash on me in five years they're using this thing so that's great and just try to imagine how you would pull that off it's something like Microsoft Word where you would have to be again renaming all your files changing stuff even just opening a word file it takes half a second but still that's half a second too long and then saving it yet I remember to save it and then you got to give it a name to save it no that's a pain in the ass and so that's why you don't take notes as much because it's not effortless when you have a system like this it becomes so easy and so painless that you start taking a lot more notes and everything just works it's quite perfect so that's it as far as the features now let me show you how I organize my tabs and let me just start by cautioning that of course this is a very custom thing that you want to customize to yourself so don't try to copy me just to copy me you are gonna have your own requirements if you're an artist or an engineer or a programmer or whatever you're gonna need your own tabs your own structure but of course some of this stuff is universal so for example let's start with goals everyone I think needs to have a goals tab and these are some of my goals not all of them and actually some of these are outdated a lot of my goals I just keep in my head these days bother to write many of them down but if you're starting off like when I started off years ago I would write down hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of goals so you can organize your goals by year by month by week by day you could have big goals little goals you can have business goals personal goals personal development goals fitness goals whatever so that's a great one I have you can have different pages for different types of goals I have some old pages here I usually would organize goals by year and I have different old years here and of course I'm not showing you everything so I'm gonna be going through these tabs here and showing you stuff but don't get the impression that this is exactly how it is for me I have deleted and moved and redacted some stuff here just to make sure that this information is not abused by people so you're getting a little just a little preview don't get the impression if this is all that I had that these are all my goals that's not how it is at all this is just to get you an idea all right speaking of ideas the next tab is called ideas so these are designed for typing any kind of random ideas I have for about for my business or for other stuff that's what I have this one for blueprint I already showed you a little bit of this this is a product I worked on a long time ago for actualized org I don't talk about it much because it needs a lot more work to really be useful to people in the way that I'd like maybe I'll do the work later but for now I just want to use it as an example to show you how you might structure something a little more complicated in the sort of private wiki fashion so see I would have different pages click on them there's I have hundreds of pages here and this is a really good way to organize a book that you might be writing or a big project you might be working on the book notes tab you definitely want to have one of these if you're a voracious reader like I encourage you to be here's just one example of a book and it's notes that I took again it's just a simple list with a couple of indentations here and there but no fancy formatting just very clean and simple and of course don't get the impression this is just one book I mean for every new book I would have a new page and again I removed some stuff here just to prevent people from abusing it because some of these books I put on my book list and some of these I recommend and the life purpose course as perks and bonuses for people who support actualized org because this thing does take money to run so that's the book notes I've got hundreds if I keep scrolling down there you'll see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds well maybe not hers but dozens at least many dozens of notes that I've taken then i've got product notes which is basically the same sort of tab as this one except there i put all the seminars i watch video courses i take audio courses that sort of stuff workshops i go to meditation retreats i'll take notes on all those and i basically just do one page per product ttc notes this is just some college lecture notes that I was taking here journals this one you'll definitely want to have so one of the problems when you have all these tabs and all these categories and all these pages is that when you have an idea you're not quite sure where to stick it and that actually takes mental resources to figure out where does something belong because sometimes a thing belongs in three different places you're not sure where to put it so in that case what I do is I come here I created just one generic catch-all chronological journal so here this is like my diary so if I want to jot down a quick idea I just come up here on the first line and I type in today's date and I jot down my ideas or whatever and there it is and then I just keep keep doing that you see and then tomorrow I'll do this like that and it just keeps going it keeps scrolling down and down and down and down and I've got if I keep scrolling there's literally hundreds of pages it all goes all the way back to 2012 now of course I don't take notes here every single day necessarily I mean you could that would be a journaling habit and that's probably great if you're new to this sort of work I don't find that I need to journal every single day maybe I will in the future but you know usually I only journal when I have something that I I need to put there which doesn't belong easily in some other tab a lot of the work that I do these days I put into my business tab rather than here in this journal so and of course that was just one page what I do on top of that is I created dedicated specific journals for specific things that I'm working on so if I'm doing yoga I'll have a yoga journal if I'm doing some other Sedona Method I'll have a Sedona Method Journal if I'm doing some other kind of thing like my meditation or my enlightenment or my trip reports or whatever I'm doing I'll have a separate journal dedicated to that activity so that can be quite useful the next tab is quotes I actually have an index here of different types of quote serious Coates funny quotes I also have other quotes that are listed in other areas not here see if I just show you the serious quotes this is a list of all the most profound quotes that I've ever found and no this is not the full list it's just a sample I can keep scrolling down it'll continue for dozens and dozens of pages of awesome inspiring quotes and you can have different pages for different types of quotes you can categorize and organize them however you want I also have this me tab the me tab is basically all the private personal stuff about myself like my vision my values my greatest fears my biggest obstacles and stumbling blocks stuff that I need to work on stuff that I have already solved in myself you know stuff about my health etc so I have different pages for all that sort of stuff I'm not going to go into it because that information can get abused so I'll just protect that privacy here for now but you know you definitely want to have something like this in fact if you took my life purpose course there I showed you how to create a Mii sheet this is the me sheet here where I show you how to list in one area all your values your strengths your your domain of mastery your life purpose and all that something how to figure it all out that's what I cover in the life purpose course the next tab is the actualize that org tab which has a lot of different pages here which all have to do with structuring all the information for actualized org and for the business not just for the videos themselves but here on this page as these are the video topics so I just have a long running list of thousands of items I can keep scrolling down and it'll just keep coming down and down and down and down forever of all sorts of topics now of course this doesn't mean that I'm going to shoot a topic on every single one there's way too much for me to shoot it would take me a lifetime to shoot them all I literally couldn't do it in my lifetime if I was shooting one every day I couldn't do it I would die from exhaustion so these are just ideas I come here to inspire myself at anytime I get a new idea just plop it on this list and then later I come back and I just scan through the list and I find topics that I like and I shoot stuff on that but again this list goes all the way down but I'm not gonna scroll down because I want to keep a little bit of surprise I don't want to spoil the fun for you the next tab is a neuro feedback tab I was doing some neurofeedback training and I needed to take notes on it and have various logs and stuff so here's an example of how you might do a chart so for example see if I do basically one row per week and then I have columns for day seven columns for seven days and then if I succeed in doing my training that day I just put an X like this see that's what these tables can be good for so that's that's how I did that I mean there's a lot more here but I'm not showing it to you just because also the other thing is that I noticed that when I show when I show very detailed things to people in a sense it also is a disservice to them because they see it and then what they do is they just start copying it like a monkey without doing it for themselves it's sort of like getting answers from the back of the book just because you have the answers in the back of the book doesn't mean you understand a damn thing and so I don't want people like going through this stuff and trying to copy all this stuff not because you know it's gonna hurt me per se but it's just it's gonna hurt you sitting there poring over this information that's not what you want to do nor do you want to get so invested in my own life that you need to pour through this stuff it's kind of silly anyways the next tab is psychedelics and here I have notes on various psychedelic substances and I have trip reports and all sorts of psychedelic related stuff like for example here I'm in a chart of various substances methods of ingestion dosages small medium large doses durations notes comments and stuff about that this is very useful to me but again don't just copy a blindly like a monkey because some of this stuff might be outdated some of it might be wildly inaccurate so you can't just copy stuff like this and expect it to work I mean this is serious stuff if you get one of these dosages wrong if you kill yourself or have a terrible terrible trip so be careful about that you got to do this own reason you know this research for yourself your own research I have various trip reports that I've written and insights from various trips and trip logs here where I keep a log of every trip I took how long it was what happened so these are just notes for myself to remember so that concludes the first notebook then of course I've got the miscellaneous notebook which is just more random stuff like I have recipes here that I like I have my old PA log here I have some old archive where I throw stuff I don't use anymore I have coaching notes where I was taking notes on how to improve my coaching when I was doing life coaching one-on-one with clients then I have my business no book business is a lot of stuff so here's where I develop my courses for example the life purpose course was developed here I have all these pages related to my life purpose course all of it is in their life purpose books those are related to the life purpose course I have my book lists here with all the different book lists I'm not showing it here so that not to spoil it for people the reprogramming course this is a new course on working on for reprogramming your subconscious mind it's still in its early phases of development Leo's resources also another thing I'm working for you guys is to get you some really good reviews of resources you can go to online resources seminars and other places like that that would be great for your self-actualization journey and then the epistemology book this is actually my most voluminous tab I have the most content here I have hundreds hundreds hundreds hundreds of pages I can just keep scrolling down and down and down and there's a lot of stuff here this is for my book that I'm writing don't ask me when it's getting released it's a year's away maybe five years maybe ten years I don't know how long it'll take this is very complicated stuff very nuanced tough there's insights here that I haven't shared with you guys and won't be able to share with you guys through videos and maybe for years to come because it's very complicated it's it's nuanced it's very difficult to articulate sometimes and it takes a lot of work to develop it and I've been working on already for a year or more and I've got all sorts of quotes related to a different pages here I have various kinds of outlines I have actual stuff that I've written paragraphs and entire pages and chapters some of it that I've written and all of that is in here so there you go those are the notebooks this is how it works I showed you the formatting you get the idea I hope that this has inspired you make sure that you customize it and tailor it to your own needs and if you're inspired go start your own right now so there you have it that's how you can set up your own commonplace book let me just guide you a little bit with the ultimate vision here I want you to just imagine what will happen if you set this up in your life starting tomorrow and then every single day for the rest of your life until you're dead which will hopefully be decades and decades you will keep adding all of the insights all the juicy quotes all the creative ideas that you have throughout your day throughout your life all the books you read all the audio books all the stuff you learn for me you just keep putting it all in there all in there all in all the stuff you find online links and videos and audios and pictures and you just cram this thing full of that imagine if you had a resource like that in your life and then think about what your life purpose is what your career is and how that could supercharge the creativity in your career whether you're an artist or a designer or a teacher or a a serious student a PhD student or research or a scientist whatever it is or maybe you're just doing personal development and you just want to get the most out of my content just imagine what would happen if you keep doing this imagine if you keep keeping journals and Diaries and doing exercises within these journals and then you can always reflect back and you can keep building on that year after year after year imagine what that would do for you and then go and do it that's it this commonplace book is just a very practical technique alright I'm done here please click the like button for me and come check out actualized org I've got my blog where I'm posting insights almost on a daily basis these days the forum which is it seems like the forum is is getting fired ups getting better and better over time it seems like the people who were there initially who were just kind of bullshitting and trolling and stuff that a lot of them left and now what we have is we have people left who really care about helping you grow helping themselves grow so you can get some valuable insights and advice there and just some inspiration from fellow self-actualize errs go check out the forum the life purpose course the book list and all have more resources for you in the future so that's basically it but let me just reiterate that see this episode here you might think Leo why don't you make more episodes like this it was very practical your other stuff is very abstract and theoretical and philosophical I'm an extremely practical guy despite what my abstract episodes might lead you to believe what you need to get good at is you need to get good at taking the theory and all the abstractness and then actually boiling it down to concrete stuff like this and believe it or not you can do that everything abstract I talked about you can take and you can distill it down into concrete steps for how to actualize it in your life that's something you have to get good at don't expect me to be like a mother bird regurgitating practic every practical step-by-step technique into your mouth you got to learn how to do that for yourself I talk about a lot of high-level stuff because if I have to go into every technical detail of how to actualize every big picture thing that I talk about I would need 10 lifetimes to do it there's just so much stuff to talk about here all right so the abstractness doesn't mean it's impractical it just means you have to go to extra steps you have to actually put some thinking and put some skin into the game start taking action and that's ultimately one of what I want you to start doing is start taking action on everything that I'm saying all the little things I give you little hints little exercises here and there little ideas for what you could do to get this stuff functioning in your life because if you're not getting it to function in your life is just mental masturbation it's just ideas ideas in and of themselves they can be powerful but you got a couple it with pragmatism and putting stuff into practice implementation the most successful people have a rapid speed of implementation that means as soon as they hear a cool idea they go and they they get to work to implement it into their life the very next day just like you should be doing with this commonplace book build your infrastructure for self-actualization build your infrastructure for consciousness work build your infrastructure for your life purpose for your creativity and stay with me or more in the future you