How to Think On Paper (Become A Genius-Level Thinker)

2 distinct phases, and 1 complete walkthrough so you don't skip the first phase like most people do...

I’m embarrassed to admit this.

But you do need to understand the reason as to why I am saying it.

I once wrote 70,000 words of notes from just 3 books.

I remember my old Obsidian database looking like a vast web of knowledge.

It made my ego happy looking at how well organized it was, and I did this organizing for hours every day (during lectures, usually) instead of focusing on my final-year thesis.

But if only it wasn’t a web of fake knowledge on my screen and a web of real knowledge inside my own head.

This is the danger that comes from cognitive offloading, and it’s likely ruining your thinking without you even realizing it.

And that’s the thing.

Most learning and productivity tools - yes my friend that includes AI - lead you toward this danger without you knowing it.

The most sought after resource in the world today is unique knowledge.

Not money.

Definitely not information.

Not anymore...

AI can write a 3000 word essay that sounds like a Profound Ideas newsletter written by Craig Perry, in 10 seconds, for a subscription anyone can afford.

But if something is fast and cheap, it likely won’t be very good.

That’s why I like to give myself a full week to write my newsletters by hand, and to focus on the quality of the ideas I write about. Hence, the name of my newsletter being, profound ideas. :)

Average information, writing, and thinking is no longer scarce.

The new scarcity is novel perspectives.

An undeniable judgment.

An individual’s intuition or taste.

All of which stem from a person’s unique knowledge of being themselves.

Knowledge which cannot be taught or trained for inside a classroom; think of it like mastery or expertise.

The greatest future-proof skill a learner, writer, or creator can develop, is learning how to learn.

This is ultimately how you build unique knowledge that cannot be replicated.

So.

Whether or not you can process information into new knowledge is going to depend on your ability to think about information.

This newsletter will teach you how to think... using paper.

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Watch the YouTube video (and my full walkthrough example) here:

You can listen to this on video, but on Spotify, here:

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What does bad thinking look like?

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But why not create a massive second brain, highlight tons of books, or just outsource all your thinking to your AI best-friend like everyone else?

The problem is that most of these tools don’t amplify your thinking straight out of the box. They replace it, especially since most people lack the judgement to use it correctly right in the offset.

Highlighting philosophy books. Writing 2000 word mini-essays and letting them gather dust inside a second brain. Using AI to connect ideas, or even write for you (which I don’t necessarily have a problem with, once you are conveying exactly what it is you wish to communicate to the reader)

These all feel productive, but they also feel easy, which is why none of these tools build knowledge where knowledge is supposed to be built - inside the brain, done by the brain.

AI can make this worse. And I say the word CAN. Because if you outsource your thinking to a machine before you’ve developed your own judgment and taste, you don’t just fail to build knowledge, you let a machine’s perspective shape how you see the world without you knowing it. Which is important to understand since AI doesn’t have knowledge, and it doesn’t have a perspective, it simply imitates an avatar or personality that offers you one.

This is why people make poor life decisions.

This is why creators go blank when they sit down to write.

This is why learners spend hundreds of hours “studying” and retain practically fuck-all of what they’ve studied.

Learning speed is determined by how fast you can make connections, not how much you write down.

The barrier that prevents all of this is real and unique knowledge. And unique knowledge is built by one thing, one thing alone, and that’s your ability to think with nothing but your brain.

Your brain is not a vault. It is a spider’s web.

You can’t view information as something that just gets stored and therefore becomes knowledge.

Knowledge is information warped, manipulated, stretched, and woven into connection with other information until it becomes something new. Something that couldn’t have existed before you thought of it. Something only you could have made.

If you confuse capturing information with processing and connecting the dots yourself, it’s like trying to escape from a lion while running on a treadmill.

This matters beyond just learning, writing, or being a creator.

The exact ideas you think up are the same dots that connect to shape your identity. Your unique web of knowledge, built from your prior experiences, your reading, your curiosity, your interests, is not just how you think but who you are. Cognitive offloading makes you lose the very thing that makes your perspective worth having in the first place. All of this being a learning problem is just the surface level.

The most profound thinkers in history understood these (profound) ideas, mainly because they had no choice, being limited to having no technology, and being forced to thinking pure-analog style.

If you pay close attention, you’ll notice the pattern between them.

Nietzsche spent his mornings writing, reading, and walking. He believed any thought not conceived on a walk and written down in his notebook by hand was a poor one.

Dostoevsky’s notebooks for The Brothers Karamazov looked like this:

He created one of the greatest pieces of writing the world has ever seen... with nothing but his brain and paper to share his thinking.

Charles Darwin, the guy who theorized the theory of evolution, wrote by hand for 90 minutes a day and produced 19 books.

1 9 b o o k s

The common denominator between these profound thinkers is that they all thought on paper. Or, they wrote excessively, by hand, to consolidate, productize, and distribute their thinking. They created the things they wanted to see exist in the world with nothing but their own minds.

Isn’t that just brilliant to think about? Like seriously.

And imagine what they would have been capable of with AI, in an age of infinite information, if they had already built the knowledge and judgment to wield it...

Spooky shit.

So here’s how I’m going to help you do the same.

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2 ways to think on paper

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If you pay close attention, you will notice that most people skip the first mode for the second, and thus miss out on the benefits of both.

I don’t know what else to call them other than “modes.” You could stay steps or phases maybe.

We can break down thinking on paper into:

1. Actually thinking on paper.

2. Articulating your finalized thinking on paper.

They are not the same, and you will see why.

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Mode 1 - Thinking on paper (encoding)

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This is where knowledge gets built.

• Not with highlighting.

• Not with linear notes.

• Not with Obsidian.

With your brain, on paper, in real time.

Let’s introduce the learning technique of mind mapping.

Well, not the colorful kind with one big word in the centre of your page, that you see in most YouTube productivity thumbnails, which is also an ineffective way of mind mapping btw, since it doesn’t help with chunking and organizing information effectively, but that’s a topic for another day.

I’m still learning a lot about this, and I’m not a master at it, so I like to see this as me “learning in public,” which is something I advocate to all content creators and beginners building personal brands out there. But I like to think of mind mapping as relationship mapping.

When most people “think” on paper, they just... aren’t.

Not as well as they could be.

They express their thinking like they would with Mode 2. They write down tons of linear notes on a topic, without understanding the two things that actually build knowledge:

1. Understanding relationships

2. Making connections.

Leave the full-blown essays for Mode 2.

Mode 1 is for thinking in keywords, and grouping them based on their relationships on the page. Because sentences contain lots of filler words that hide relationships. It’s very linear. What we want is a non-linear understanding, which ultimately stems from making connections in a non-linear way.

The best thing you can do is spend 5-10 minutes scanning through a topic or article you plan to read and write down 5-15 keywords that stand out to you. Then, draw a shitty mind map as quickly as possible.

I learned this from Justin Sung a few months ago, who you absolutely should be watching if you want to become a profound thinker.

Also, you should aim to make your quickly-drawn mind map wrong.

Why?

This will leverage the hyper-correction effect. Because your brain is more likely to remember something if it gets corrected on it.

The learning loop of consumption and digestion, then, looks like this:

Consume → think → destroy and evaluate your shitty first mind map → rebuild and repeat

This is how knowledge actually gets built, and mind mapping in this way gets the right cognitive process working to do so.

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Mode 2 - Articulating on paper (retrieval)

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Since you have built new knowledge with Mode 1, you now have knowledge you get to express.

This is where you get to write pure analog style if you so choose. Full sentences. Structured essays or newsletters. Constructing the logical chains between ideas yourself, making ideas flow and fit together, but done by you and your own brain. Not AI (which is what most people now do)

If you like using a second brain, this is where it can truly shine, but not in Mode 1, which is where second brains fail at being of real benefit. That is why when I say I hate using second brains, it’s because I do not like using them for Mode 1. Mode 2, different story.

And I want to make something crystal fucking clear:

Mode 2 is NOT for “learning,” so to speak. I’m talking pages of hand-written summaries, mini essays in Obsidian, even mind maps drawn without looking at your original mind maps - and dare I say it... linear notes recalled from memory - these belong in Mode 2, and only in Mode 2.

Using Mode 2 for encoding and not retrieval is where most people ruin their learning. You need to build knowledge first before you can attempt to retrieve it.

Think first. Then articulate your thinking.

Because what separates a dogmatic note-taker and a profound thinker is relationship thinking.

Here’s a (niche) example.

Anytime I stop obsessing about tiny details in jiu-jitsu, and start connecting and abstracting them within the big picture, I understand faster and hit the moves with more success.

I’m not great at jiu-jitsu either... but it is something that I’ve noticed that speeds up my rate of progress.

Details always serve some underlying concept.

If you can understand the concept of an arm-bar, and the details that support that concept, you can arm-bar anyone, from anywhere.

That’s why I love the jiu-jitsu; it’s one of the most profound forms of creative expression using the physical body. Very profound.

Thinking in terms of relationships and connections, and not just isolated elements of information, will speed up your learning tenfold.

One last thing, and this applies to both modes:

These modes work better when they are pointed in a tangible direction. You don’t want to be learning for learning’s sake. If it’s not helping you improve your health, increase your wealth, make your relationships more enjoyable, or maximize your happiness and minimize your time doing something, reconsider what you are learning.

An exam to pass, a skill to develop, an audience to build. Whatever you want to aim at. You want your learning to help you build the life you want.

(If you want a hand with this, check out my Profound Self-Education Guide. It’s less of a guide or course - which I am not fully against btw - but more of a philosophy for learning and productivity. Read the opening sections of it for free, here.)

Let’s see what this looks like in practice, and I’m going to do this in real-time to show you how this works.

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A profound example

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What would this look like, for say, reading a book, or understanding a concept you want to apply to your daily life?

Let’s use two examples.

One for Mode 1, and one for Mode 2.

For Mode 1, let’s use Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics, one of the books I wrote 20-30k words of notes on in my old Obsidian database.

I don’t have the book physically on me, I gave it to my friend Sean who still has it, so let’s use ChatGPT for some keywords from Book 1.

The reason we do this is to prime our brains before we learn, to give ourselves an initial schema to start refining and constructing upon. You can learn more about priming in this guide here.

Here are the keywords we will be working with:

• happiness

• the highest goal in life

• purpose

• human function

• reason

• living well

• virtue

• good character

• practice and habit

• the role of society and politics

• external goods (money, friends, health)

• a complete life

Looking at these now - I’m doing this in real time writing this! - I have no fucking clue what they mean or how they connect.

But I’ll map them out.

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Ok so within 5 minutes, here is my absolutely 100% not-perfect mind map:

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Now I’ll open up my Kindle and begin reading.

I’ll get back to you when I spot something I do not understand, or that changes my understanding.

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Ok so I’ve read up as far as the 6th section of Book 1, and I’ve gone through 5 different mind map iterations.

This is how my thinking has evolved in real time:

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It’s not a perfect model as of now, but you can see the difference between the first and the last iteration. That difference is the evolving nature of understanding; knowledge being built in real time. So yeah. That’s what Mode 1 looks like.

Learning comes from the destruction-rebuild cycle of this schema. As David Deutsch puts it in The Beginning of Infinity, all we are doing is testing our explanations to refine them.

This mind map is a hypothesis. It’s not supposed to be perfect. If anything, I want it to be wrong. I want to keep making my understanding, my explanation of Book 1 of The Nicomachean Ethics, more and more irrefutable, until there is nothing left to add, remove, or change within my model. Which will likely never happen. It will never be perfect. But that’s what the process of learning is all about :)

Now onto Mode 2... which you are already looking at!

This newsletter is my Mode 2.

Everything you’ve just read started as a shitty mind map on paper. I accidently deleted the mind map I had for this newsletter, which annoys me... but hey. Maybe next week I won’t do that.

Mode 2 is where you take what you’ve built inside your head and share it with the world.

You create.

You express it.

You solve a problem that you have.

The best vessel I’ve found for doing that is writing online.

Writing online forces you to articulate your thinking clearly enough that a stranger can understand it. It builds your personal brand (as cringy as that term is). It attracts other thinkers who are curious about the same things you are, and over time, it becomes a meaningful body of work or a record of how your thinking and unique knowledge has grown over time.

Building a personal brand - whatever you choose to see it as, using social media to share your unique knowledge - is the ultimate vessel for personal self-development, learning, and thinking.

If you want to start doing this yourself, I’ve created two guides that will help. I keep getting tons of messages asking about all this writing-online stuff, so here are the first two guides I’ve written:

• How to do Research for Long Form (Essays, Newsletters, Articles etc.) - How to find validated topics to write about, build angles and reframes, and create unique perspectives.

• How To Learn & Master Any Topic through Writing - How to using writing one long-form essay (newsletter) per week as the most efficient learning/content system.

Hopefully this newsletter has encouraged you to start thinking on paper.

Thank you for your time and attention, I know it’s very valuable.

You’re an absolute legend.

Go draw a shitty mind map for me.

- Craig :)