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Hey everyone, welcome back to the third installment of the series I'm titling How to Journal Like Ralph Waldo Emerson. This is a six part series and yes, this is the third in that series. Today we're talking about the John Locke method of indexing a notebook. The goal for Emerson was to figure out the best way possible to get information out of his notebooks so that he could use them in his own personal life. Let's get into it. Welcome to this week's episode of the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm your host where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes and let's get ready to learn something fascinating. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Readwell podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I am so grateful that you're here. It has been a crazy week. If you've been following my story. I have been trying to purchase a building from my bookstore. I own a little bookstore online called Edgewater but bookstore, which many of you shop at. And I'm so grateful that you do that. And I've always had a dream of turning that into a real brick and mortar location. Well, the perfect location came into well onto the market recently and I didn't quite have enough money saved up to make that down payment. And so my wife and I thought maybe we could just try a Kickstarter and see if the community might be able to help us a little bit. And you guys absolutely showed up. We had almost 140 members of the community help us raise over $25,000 and meet our Kickstarter goal. All that to say I've recently been able to make an offer on this building and it has been accepted by the seller. So now I have a 60 day process ahead of me wherein I need to go through the inspections and make sure the house is up to snuff. And it is a house. I'll tell you about it here in a minute. But if it does pass inspections and everything works as planned, then we will be moving in within roughly 60 to 75 days. At that point I won't be a bookstore yet because I have to now save up the money for the inventory. But I have been working like mad to get ready for that. So that is the community update. I mentioned really quickly that it is a house and not a building. I feel like a bookstore's location is 80% of the wonder that it creates. Right. I didn't want a bookstore in a like a strip mall. Or something. I wanted it to be a really cool old house. And this particular home was built in 1933 by this incredible architect. And it just sort of wanders. And as you explore the building, it's going to feel like you're reading a book as you move through the different sections. So that's the update there. And I will keep you informed. And at the end of this show today, after we get done talking about Emerson's indexing method, I'll give you a few more details if you're interested in that side of the news. Okay, so what is this John Locke indexing thing? Well, Emerson is sitting at his desk and he's looking at his notebooks, which, by the way, at the end of his Life, he'd amassed 263 of these things, possibly more, plus several different books, just to index the knowledge found within. But there was a time where he's just looking at these notebooks going, my goodness, there's a lot of really good stuff in here, but I don't know how to find it. How do I extract those great notes on a class I took? Or how do I prepare for a lecture I need to give in Concord next month with all of these journals? And he realized that he needed a way to search his notebooks. And this is a great place to start if you are wanting to be a better note taker and you're not sure if you should go the digital route and use something like Obsidian to keep your notes, or if you should go the analog route and keep a physical paper notebook, I really do think both are valuable and helpful in the note taking space. I personally prefer the paper notebooks just because it forces me to slow down. And that's something I value. My mantra, read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. I've noticed for me, my brain goes a thousand miles an hour. And if I don't have a sort of a physical system in place that forces me to slow down and be present and be thoughtful, then I just run wild. And so I like the process of notebooks, not because they're the best medium, but because of their sort of influence on me as a person trying to improve my thoughts. Now, if you can identify with that, then you have embraced the notebook world. And yes, I do have both digital and paper notes, but again, I lean towards the notebooks. So this episode and this series is for the analog crew out there, the people who want to get better at keeping notes in a paper notebook. And you probably have felt the same thing that Emerson felt you've probably thought, boy, this is a good idea that I'm putting in here, but I am never going to find it again. It's going to get lost in this notebook. It's going to go on my shelf. And how on earth am I supposed to find it? Well, that's why you need an index. But here's the thing. There are many ways to index a notebook. John Locke was this sort of philosopher, physician guy who lived a very long time ago, and he created a system that would help him do this. Now, I want to point out first that Emerson began using this method because it was popular at the time, and then he abandoned it because it was too complex, it was too hard for him to do or use efficiently. I've tried it. I've also abandoned it. So why would I dedicate an entire episode of this series to this method? Well, mainly because I want to point out that whatever system you choose, it needs to be so simple and so easy to do that you'll actually do it. If you make it complex, if you over entangle the thing, then you're never going to do it. And this is a big sort of value drive that I have in the notebook space. So many of us feel like our notebooks have to be these works of art. They have to be masterpieces, and they have to have no mistakes in them. Our handwriting has to be perfect, and we have to draw beautiful pictures to coincide with the notes that we're taking. And for most of us, me included, that is such an overwhelming feeling that if I were to believe that, I would never use my notebook. And your indexing system also must be simple, otherwise you'll never index it. Okay, so I'm starting today, this week, with Locke's method because it is way too overcomplicated, and I believe I can explain it on the podcast. And then next week, I will share with you what Emerson eventually did, and I'll also share with you what I'm doing in my own notebooks. Okay, so John Locke would get a notebook and he would open up to the front page, and what he would do is he would divide that page down the middle, and then what he would do is he would create several spaces, one for each letter of the Alphabet. A, B, C, D, and so on in a grid fashion. But for each letter, he would create, let's see, A, E, I, O, U. Five individual spaces. So in. Just picture this in your mind with me. I know we're on a podcast here, but in the A section, he would have five little sort of Squares for the vowels A, E, I, O, and U. And then he would move down in the grid to the B section and have five more squares for A, E, I, O, and U, then down to C, A, E, I, O, and U, and so on. And he would do that for every letter of the Alphabet. And this index would fill the first page or two of his notebook. Now, why on earth is he doing this? Well, I'll tell you why. Let's pretend you're interested in gardening. I don't know, Maybe you like gardening. I've been. I've been thinking about gardening lately because my wife and I, as we've gotten older, have gotten really frustrated with our own personal yard because plants are just, like, randomly dying. And our neighbors have somehow figured out how to make even, you know, the most complicated things bloom easily. And she has become quite the green thumb. My wife has not. I says, eddie, but I'd like to learn anyway. My brain is bent on gardening a little bit now. Let's say you are learning how to prevent weeds, and you want to keep, I don't know, dandelions out of your garden. And so you've got your little. Your little notebook, and you're. You're maybe doing some research online, or you're reading some. Some books from the library, and you come across dandelions, and you think, ooh, okay, this is something I need to understand. I really want to get this right. I'm sick of dandelions everywhere. So you start taking notes. You take notes on how to prevent dandelions, how they spread, and, I don't know, whatever, on and on and on, right? And you look at your notebook and you think, my goodness, this is some really useful information. I'm so proud of myself. And then when you shut the notebook, you think also to yourself. And I'm never going to see that information again because I know how I am. I'm busy, and I'm. I'm just not going to remember that. This is in here. This is the problem we're solving for you now. So if you were to use John Locke system, you would open to that page and you would look at it, and you would ask yourself, what are the key words on this page or the key topics that I am taking notes on? And in our case, the key word or the key topic would be dandelion, right? So you have to start by reading the actual page in your journal, and then you have to identify the keyword or keywords that exist on that page, the major topics. Once you do that, we're going to stick with the word dandelion. What you do is you begin by identifying the first letter of that keyword. In our case, that letter is D as in dog or dandelion. Oh boy. Anyway, next you have to identify the very first vowel that comes after that first letter. So in the word dandelion it's A. So the key for the keyword dandelion is D, A, A. And then what you would do, I know this is getting mad, but just stick with me is you would look and look at the page number that this exists on. And most journals actually don't have page numbers printed on them, which is maddening to me. You can write them in and absolutely you should write them in because every notebook needs page numbers. So you would look and let's say you're on page 48 of this thing. Well, now all you do is you go to your front table where you've, you know, you've listed out every letter with all the vowels and you would go down to the D section and remember that got in the D section, five little boxes, one for each vowel. A, E, I, O and U. Our vowel. We're concerned with the very first one after the letter D in dandelion is A. So you'd go to the D section and then you'd go down to the A box and you would write in the page number 48. Okay, so stick with me here. In the D section in the A vowel box, you have the page number 48. And this is in your gardening notebook. This works better in my opinion if you have notebooks dedicated to important topics. So for this example, a gardening notebook. Right. This doesn't work as well if, if you've got a notebook that's just sort of day to day thoughts, stream of conscious. If it's got your to do lists and you're, you're writing about gardening as well as writing as well as philosophy. Right. Better if you have a topic specific notebook. Well, the reason why is because next time you want to learn about gardening or use your gardening knowledge, you would pull out your gardening notebook and you would think, okay, I got weeds in my garden and I specifically got dandelion weeds. And then you would tap your chin thoughtfully because you're a thoughtful person and you would think to yourself, I wonder if I have notes on dandelions. In fact, I think I do. So then you would open up to your front page index and you would think about the word dandelion and you would say, okay, what's the first letter D. And then what's the first vowel after that? A. Okay, so then you would go to your, your opening index, you would go down to the D box, look at the A vowel box and you would say ah, there's something here with the keyword DA that exists on page 48. So then you would flip over to page 48 and you would see your notes on dandelions and you would celebrate joyously because you're able to extract your information from this notebook. That's the method. That's the John Locke method. And I cannot stand it for so many reasons, but I wanted to share it with you today just to again point out sort of the tomfoolery that exists with trying to get creative and trying to overcomplicate something. Look, Locke was a smart guy. Lots of people use this system. Lots of people still use this system. And I'm not sure why, but good on you. If you like it, I hate it. Next week I will share with you what Emerson evolved to. And I think it's quite good. And it's far simpler and it resembles what you're used to at the back of most non fiction books where the index exists there. Okay, well every week I like to give a book recommendation and this week is no different. However, I'm not going to recommend a book. I'm going to recommend an essay. And this is an essay by Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson himself. And yes, yes, yes, I am recommending his most popular of essays titled Self Reliance. But I, and I know that's overdone, but please forgive me, I have found that most people actually have not read it. They've heard of it, they know it's important, they know that it is sort of his flagship essay for thinking. And I would argue that there are many others that are probably better. But it is so critical that you read this one if you want to get a better understanding not just of who Emerson was, but why he taught what he taught. And this is a fantastic essay and here's why. Self Reliance argues that in order for you to achieve your greatest level of human sort of fulfillment, right, that thing that the Greeks used to call eudaimonia. You know, Aristotle and Plato would talk about eudaimonia all the time, which just meant flourishing. In order to flourish as a human, they taught that you had to, you know, be a rational human, you had to follow your rationality. Emerson would argue that in order for you to flourish as a human, you need to be self reliant, you need to exist in this thing called life. In and of your own accord. Now that does not just simply mean paying your own bills and being your own boss and stuff. There's an extra special quality to being self reliant. And to get that across, I'd like to read two very fascinating quotes from this essay. Well, the first is right in the beginning paragraph. It says to believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men. That is genius. Now all he's saying here, and he's actually, he's making the argument that it's a skill for you to actually listen to your own thoughts and not discount them. You ever done that where you think about something and it's probably pretty smart, it's probably the right thing you should do, but because it's your idea, you think, eh, it's that's not right, that something's wrong with that. I usually get things wrong. We're pretty harsh on ourselves. And what Emerson wants you to do is to stop doing that. To instead build the skill of actually valuing your opinion, probably higher than most, if not everybody else's opinions. Because you know what's best for yourself, you know what's in your heart and you know how you want to spend your time. If you don't do this, then you'll end up living a life of another person. You'll live the life that society crafts for you instead. Now you might be faced with the concept of thinking, okay, well that, that sounds very motivational, Eddie. I'm going to begin listening to myself. What on earth does that mean and how do I do it? Well, this next quote hopefully will be a little helpful. It says, the power which resides in him is new in nature and none but he knows what that is, which he can do. Nor does he know until he has tried. So Emerson knew that you would probably be reading his essay and sitting at your desk or in your reading chair and you'd think to yourself, okay, nice platitude, Mr. Emerson, but in real life things are hard and I'm not very good at stuff anyway. Emerson seems to be saying that, kind of almost jabbing you through the pages here and saying, how do you know until you try, right? You can sit there and you can forecast all of the doom and gloom in the world, but the people who actually achieve things are simply the people that gave it a shot. And you'd probably surprise yourself if you just gave it a try. You know, a case in point here. My wife is just incredible and she, she's a professor at Weber State University here in Utah. And I found out a while ago that as a husband of a professor, I am gifted with six free credit hours every semester. It's free college people. That is just incredible. If you have any friends or any family members that teach at a college level, you should go buddy up with them and see if you can get some free credit hours, if you know what I'm saying. Anyway, I heard about that, and I thought, wow, that would be so cool. But I have absolutely no time to go back and get a degree. And I'd always wanted to get a degree in philosophy. My first degree was in accounting. Very businessy, I know, but helpful if you want to run a bookstore. But I always wanted to get something that was more geared towards my heart. I never really loved accounting, and so I thought, boy, that would be so cool. And I chewed on this idea for, I don't know, six months, and I never did anything about it. And here I am on my podcast reading Emerson's self reliance essay, and I come across this passage that I just read to you, and I thought, gosh dang it, Emerson. Essentially, he was jabbing me through the pages, saying, look, you can make all the excuses in the world, but until you actually go and try this college thing out, you're just. You don't know what you're capable of. And so I registered. I was terrified. And I thought, how on earth is this going to happen? But you know what I found? I found that Emerson is right and that somehow the universe, if you believe in such things, seems to open up and accept the people that will try things. More often than not, the universe goes, absolutely. Anybody who is courageous enough to try something difficult or hard, I'm going to. I'm going to bring some. Some good into your life, and we're going to get this going. And somehow time became a little more flexible and I found ways to study. And, you know, I'm not saying it was easy. It's definitely been hard, but definitely worth it as well. And so, yeah, you never know what you can do until you try. And that's one of the core tenets of Emerson's self reliance. And I do feel like I'm flourishing a little more than I was before I started. Okay, so I. I mentioned that before we wrap up this episode today, I wanted to share one last sort of tidbit about the community if you were one of the 140 readers that helped me with my Kickstarter campaign. First of all, thank you so much. You have no idea what you've done, you've helped me move forward in, in my dream and my commitment to all of you guys, for those who are interested, is I'm going to be filming and recording the entire process of building a bookstore. I just think that's fascinating. Right? How do you, how do you turn an empty building into a coffee shop and a bookstore? I think that'll be fun to film and it'll be a fun story to tell over the years as we build this thing. And I share that with you because, well, last week I actually missed my podcast episode. I did not publish a show last week, which doesn't happen super often around here. I try to always be consistent, but it didn't happen because I was having sort of a paralysis moment. I thought, I feel like my content needs to change a little bit. It needs to evolve. I'm, I've got a YouTube channel and a podcast and then I, I like to write essays and post those on my blog@the readwellpodcast.com well, I feel like I'm going to want to be a little bit more of a storyteller as I am building this bookstore, which means vlogging. I know that, that viewer to vlog. Right. So I've actually been googling, like how to blog because it's not something I'm comfortable with and I need to figure out if I want to go that path or not. But it's going to be far more engaging if I'm carrying a camera around and we're out building bookcases and we're shopping for books and we're putting together a cafe, that'll be way better than me just sitting at my desk telling you what happened. So anyway, be on the lookout for that. And if you have any suggestions for how I might go about that and make that interesting for the community and keep it exciting for you all, I would love to hear from you. You can shoot me an email at Eddie Eddy. Readwellpodcast.com Last but not least, if you're listening to this, I've noticed that the podcast itself could use a few more testimonials or ratings. If you have a moment, could you go to Apple itunes where you listen to the little podcast app and just leave me a rating. If you think I'm doing okay, leave me a little, A little, hopefully five star rating. But it's even better if you can type a short message as to why you rated the podcast the way it is. If you think I'm doing terrible, leave me a one star rating. I'd like to know how I can get better, but we've been stuck at about 130ish ratings for quite a while, and it would be nice to get that moving again so that Apple knows that this is a podcast worth listening to. Anyway, thank you for all you do and for being here. I hope you enjoy Emerson's essay, and next week we're going to talk about how to index those journals. Until next week, as always, remember to read slowly, take notes, and apply the ideas. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to read well. You'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read slowly, take notes, and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well podcast.