For example, every month, my articles from the last seven years are read by over 100,000 people without any promotion from me. This leads to enough people signing up for our courses that I would barely need to work moving forward. I wanted the same thing for my notes.

To guide my journey, I tried to answer two simple questions:

Learner: Can I remember what I read for decades?
Writer: Can my “research waste” be turned into a knowledge asset?
More specifically, I wanted my knowledge to be an asset that would:

Get traffic (ie, search engines, others sharing it, social media)
Earn passive income by people paying for access
Serve as a resource for me decades into the future

For example…

Keywords. If I started to see the same jargon word over and over, I would use that as a signal that it was important and that I should put the term in my notes and document definitions and examples.
People. If I was reading a book and the author mentioned someone who had a big influence on them, I would research that person and put their profile in my notes.
Resources. If I came across a really good book, I would create a book summary document, save my highlights into it, and summarize the big ideas.

So, I thought I would share my top insights on public note-taking. Hence this article. Forewarning, this article is beast, so if you’d prefer to jump to a specific insight, you can use the list below as a guide:

You’re already a mental millionaire
Sell your sawdust
Learn knowledge with lasting value
Create research templates
Use Notion to take notes
Break your notes into atomic units
Learn information architecture and usability
Make your notes default-public
Package your notes so others experience their value
Make each piece of content free and paid
Start by sharing as you learn on social media
Free resource to help you jumpstart your notes now >>
Let’s start with the most foundational insight first. It’s a mindset shift…

With a Super.so integration, I can turn my notes into a beautiful, SEO-optimized website that’s customizable with CSS.

We ask ourselves, “Who am I to share what I know?” Actually, who are you not to share? You have an embarrassment of riches. You know more than 99.9% of people in human history. You having impostor’s syndrome does not serve the world. Everyone is a teacher. Knowledge is abundant. The more you give it, the more you have it. When you teach others, you teach a student and create a future teacher. You become a link in the chain of wisdom that gets passed from human to human and generation to generation.