The System Behind My Book

Happy March, everyone. Before we get into today’s essay, a quick update:

I have submitted my manuscript to copyediting!

After fifteen weeks of revisions with my editor, I turned in my final draft of The Stoic Systems Thinker last week. There is still much to do — copyediting, proofreading, cover design, layout, printing — but the writing is mostly done. I now shift my focus from writing the book to launching it. I’m still targeting May for publication and will share more details on preordering soon.

With this weight off my shoulders, expect to hear from me more often. I’m aiming for roughly twice a month — a step up from the once-every-six-weeks rhythm I fell into during revisions.

As I approach the launch date, I’ll be sharing more about the book itself: updated excerpts, ideas I cut from the manuscript that deserve their own essays, and information about how to get your hands on a copy. Consider this the start of that push.

Now, onto today’s essay.

One of the most common questions I’ve gotten from friends and colleagues over the past year is some version of the same thing: Where did you find the time to write a book?

It’s a fair question. I have a full-time job. I have a family. I’m not sitting around with empty hours to fill. And yet, over the course of about four months last year, I produced a 75,000-word first draft of a nonfiction book.

Part of the answer is sacrifice. I don’t watch much TV anymore. I play far fewer video games than I once did. A lot of that time has been quietly reallocated to writing. But sacrifice alone doesn’t produce a book. Plenty of people have the time and never write a word. What made the difference for me was a system.

I want to pull back the curtain on that system today. A quick disclaimer before I do: I don’t claim this is the only or best way to write. It’s simply what works for me. And none of it is my innovation. As Seneca says, “The best ideas are common property.” Everything I’m about to describe is built on concepts I borrowed from others and adapted to fit my own working style.

At the beginning of last year, before I had even committed to writing a book, I wrote about my commonplace book practice here in this newsletter. I’ve advanced my thinking since then, but the spirit of the idea still anchors my system.

A commonplace book is a centralized repository for refined notes and thinking. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is my favorite example of one. We now know it as one of the foundational texts of Stoic philosophy, but it was his private journal, never intended for publication. He captured ideas from Epictetus, Heraclitus, and others, remixing them with his own reflections as reminders to live a virtuous life.

Within that essay, I referenced the notecard system that forms the backbone of how Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene write their books. Their method is simple but powerful. When they encounter something worth remembering — a story, an idea, a historical detail — they write it down on a notecard in their own words. This part is important. Rewriting forces you to process an idea rather than simply archive it. Those notecards go into an organized catalog, ultimately becoming the raw material for their books. I imagine Holiday and Greene early in their process with index cards spread across the floor of a room, constantly being reorganized into what will eventually become the bestsellers they publish.

Their system is a version of the Zettelkasten — a method covered in detail by Sönke Ahrens’s book, How to Take Smart Notes. In this quick read, Ahrens describes the working life of Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who was absurdly productive. Over his career, Luhmann published roughly 70 books and nearly 400 scholarly articles. Hearing about someone like that, you might assume he worked around the clock. But he didn’t. According to Ahrens, Luhmann lived a relatively normal life, steadily publishing throughout his career.

Much of his productivity was tied to this Zettelkasten system. He stayed consistent over time. And consistent effort, compounding over time, adds up to more than most people expect.

I read Ahrens’s book two years ago and was immediately drawn to the concept, but I didn’t know how to implement it in practice. Then, right as I was beginning to write The Stoic Systems Thinker, I revisited the book. Being familiar with Holiday and Greene’s notecard method and wanting to build a career as an author, I decided to try building my own version.

I knew right away that a purely analog system wouldn’t work for me — I lean digital. While I still have notebooks filled with scratch writing, I virtually never return to them. I also recognized that an offline method would prevent me from taking advantage of modern tools. Search, tagging, and linking make it far easier to find old notes and draw connections across them. A digital tool was essential.

For years, I’ve used Notion to run my life. All of my notes, tasks, and plans live there. It’s the one piece of software I couldn’t live without (or at least without a comparable replacement). But when I tried to implement my Zettelkasten inside Notion, it kept blending with everything else — my project lists, meeting notes, and personal tasks. My boundaries dissolved, and I ended up with another disorganized mess of notes.

That’s when I turned to Obsidian — software built around Markdown files. In addition to being a great editor, it manages and understands the links among those files, allowing you to build a web of interconnected notes — in essence, a digital Zettelkasten.

I’ve stayed on Notion for everything else. But I’ve been running this setup for my commonplace notes in Obsidian for close to a year now, and the difference is tangible.

With the tools settled, let me walk through how the system actually works.

In the past three years, I’ve read over 225 books. That's a tremendous amount of potential source material. But potential only becomes actual if I use it.

I’m a believer in making books your own. I read physical copies whenever possible, and I always have a pencil in hand. I underline passages. I bracket ideas. I write notes in the margins and on blank pages. I fold down the corners of pages I want to revisit. By the time I finish a book, it’s truly mine. I’ve even found myself warning friends when lending them a book that it’s going to be full of my handwriting.

Most of the time, I don’t stop my reading to fully write out my thoughts. I often mark what resonates, jot down a quick idea, and move on. My reaction to a passage on page 40 might shift entirely by the time I reach page 300. I don’t have all the context yet, so I hold off on my thoughts until I’ve digested the author’s full argument. When I finish a book, it doesn't go back on the shelf. It goes into a staging pile on my desk, ready for the next step.

Once a week — typically on the weekend — I spend about an hour working through that pile. During this session, I transcribe the passages I underlined and the notes I wrote into Obsidian onto a page dedicated to that particular book. I’m not adding my own analysis yet. I’m simply moving what I marked in the physical book into my digital system. This step alone has significantly improved my comprehension. Going back through a book after setting it down for a few days reinforces key ideas in a way that a single read-through never does.

During this transcription, I also flag the passages that really resonate — the ideas I want to think more deeply about. Those become atomic notes, the building blocks of a Zettelkasten system.

An atomic note isolates a single idea. I’m not trying to summarize a full book. I’m taking one concept, story, or insight and giving it its own space. This is where I rewrite things in my own words. These are my notecards, albeit in digital form.

Obsidian makes this easy. I can create individual pages that branch off from my main book notes, each one dedicated to a single idea. I include the original passage or quote for reference. Then I write about it — adding my own experiences, stories, and connections. Sometimes it’s a sentence or two. Other times, it’s several paragraphs long. The key is that I’m applying my own thinking. I’m making the idea mine.

The other powerful feature is tagging. My tags are generally topics or keywords — systems thinking, decision-making, feedback loops, Stoicism. When I search for a concept later, I can pull up ideas from across dozens of different sources. Those cross-source connections are where new threads begin to form.

After you do this consistently for a while, something begins to happen. Patterns emerge. Individual notes from different books, written at different times, start to cluster around common themes. Obsidian has a graph view that visualizes this — a web of interconnected nodes, where the biggest clusters represent the ideas you've engaged with most deeply.

This is emergence — a concept I explore in depth in my book. Notes captured in isolation, across different books over the span of years, connect to produce insights none of them contained on their own. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

When I started writing The Stoic Systems Thinker, I didn’t know how I would create all the content. Then one of my editors offered a piece of advice that unlocked everything: look at my bookshelf at what I’d previously read. That would be my material.

He was right.

Here’s a concrete example of what that looked like. Two years before I started the book, I’d marked a quote from Epictetus: “First, tell yourself what kind of person you want to be, and then act accordingly in everything you do.” Months later, when working through a planning system, I captured a quote from a Cal Newport essay in which he wrote: “Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.” I tagged both notes with planning.

When I pulled up that tag while drafting, those two ideas sat side by side — an ancient Stoic quote and a modern planning idea, essentially saying the same thing. That collision became the seed for an entire chapter.

That’s the pattern that repeated throughout the book. I still had to do additional research. I had to find new stories, papers, and ideas that enriched the material. But the bones were already there. All I had to do was figure out how the ideas I already had fit together.

What’s powerful about this method is that I’m always doing the preparatory work. The atomic notes I’m creating right now, on the books I’m reading this month, might become source material for my next book. Starting is far easier when you’re not staring at a blank page but working from material that already exists.

There’s a reason I write about this system in a book about Stoicism and systems thinking. It is a system. It has inputs, stocks of accumulated knowledge, and outputs. And like all good systems, the returns compound.

Seneca captured this idea well: "We should so learn them that words may become deeds." That’s the purpose of this whole practice. It’s not to build an impressive archive of quotes or to hoard knowledge for its own sake, but to turn the ideas we encounter into something we can act on.

So that’s my system. It will continue to evolve. Any system worth having will. But this practice took me from an initial idea to a 75,000-word manuscript draft in four months. Not because I’m unusually disciplined or talented, but because I had years of compounding intellectual capital to draw from.

If you take nothing else from this post, take this: start capturing. You don’t need the perfect tool or the perfect system. You need the habit. Read with a pencil. Write things down in your own words. Let the connections emerge over time.

More to come soon,
-Mike