Heptabase - How I Am Learning About Investing with It
In this article I will talk about how I started to learn about investing with the help of Heptabase using a system of atoms of knowledge.
I was born in Italy, and one thing is for sure: our education system is old, inefficient, and doesn’t prepare you well for real life. The consequences of this are disastrous, and in the long run, it will keep getting worse. One area of my life that school didn’t teach me at all was finance and how the world economy works. Right out of high school, I was flooded with questions like “What is a bank? What is inflation? Where do people keep their money?” I now look back at these questions, and they seem obvious to me, but I am sure lots of people don’t know the answers to them.
In this article, I would like to show you how I am learning more about finance and investing through Heptabase, my favorite PKM tool with a 2D canvas.
A 5-Step Process
Learning something well is tough; there is no way around it. I have several ways of learning information, and most of the time, they are dictated by the tool I am using to help me out.
With Heptabase, there is no exception. When studying a new topic like investing, I go through the following 5 steps:
Searching
Filtering
Condensing
Connecting
Grouping
Before starting to learn about investing, I created a whiteboard, which is the best entry point for learning about something since you can attach things to it and start your 2D exploration. For me, it feels like a desk where I have the superpower to search and delete super easily, so it’s much better than a desk.
Searching
Of course, you have to start somewhere by looking for information, which can be done in many ways. Heptabase allows me to search for information right from the tool in 3 ways:
I can look up any finance-related cards that I may have written in the past. This is the power of compounding knowledge.
I can use the built-in browser to easily search for things on the web and drag text and images onto the whiteboard. This is great for keeping me focused on one tool.
I can use the highlights that I synchronized from Readwise and PDFs to search for other finance-related knowledge. For example, I have read “The Intelligent Investor” book, and I have synchronized it via Readwise.
With these 3 integrated data sources, I can very easily look up a lot of knowledge for this specific topic, making the research a breeze.
Filtering
The amount of information that I find when searching can be quite overwhelming, and my brain is not able to process it efficiently. For this reason, I generally start to extract important pieces of knowledge from what I am reading and paste them as text elements on the whiteboard.
It’s important to note that I use the text element of the whiteboard and not the card. This distinction is quite important since, in this step, my goal is to extract text and place it on the whiteboard because it’s meant to be ephemeral. If I were to create a card, it would already be available in my entire knowledge base. It’s a persistent step (even if you could delete that card). Using text can be seen as a way to keep the data private to the whiteboard until it is refined into cards. More on that later.
Since text elements can be connected, I tend to connect things that have connections or semantic similarities. This visually helps me condense the knowledge into cards. If I see arrows, I just follow them, and I know that things will make sense as a whole.
Condensing
Now that I have filtered text, which is interlinked, I can start to figure out how to make that information digestible and, most importantly, learnable.
In Heptabase, I found a surprisingly effective way to do this; I create cards tagged as #atom
, which means that the card will contain an atomic piece of knowledge. To make the knowledge more easily searchable, I add two optional properties: a topic and a source. They help me tremendously to categorize my knowledge:
The topic is a multi-select that has all sorts of topics that I studied in the past (e.g., finance, and distributed systems).
The source is the place where the information surfaced (e.g., a book, or an article).
Since I am learning investing and finance, I will create atoms with topics such as Investing, Finance, ETFs, Bonds, and Money Market Funds and the source is mainly Investopedia.
The power of atoms is that they can be reused across whiteboards, and they can compose to build something bigger. What I mean by that is if I have my knowledge base composed of atoms, they can be used independently to create something with them. An atom talking about a bond can be used to write a finance book, make a whiteboard about fixed-income securities for newbies, and much more.
I am still trying to understand how I want atoms to play with other notes that I take, but for now, I am accepting that an atom can contain duplicated content from another source of knowledge like course notes or highlights.
Connecting
Once the atoms are in place, I already have a good knowledge base for the topic I am studying. However, I tend to go through another active phase in which I connect atoms.
Connecting atoms is analogous to connecting the text elements in the filtering steps, but these connections are meant to be persistent. The goal of connecting atoms is to try and reason about relationships between information, which for me strengthens my understanding and also helps me to build a visual map of the things I am learning.
Grouping
When studying a topic, it’s very important for me to build a hierarchical view of the knowledge; otherwise, my brain can’t easily remember the information. I do this because I am a very visual person, and I tend to remember things if I recall the place where they were located.
Heptabase offers two features for spatial organization on whiteboards, namely:
Sections → I use sections to group cards for a specific topic. On my board, I have a section for ETFs, Bonds, Money Market Funds…
Nested whiteboards → When the board starts to become more difficult to manage, I generally create a nested whiteboard in which I move all the atoms that fit the topic of the whiteboard. I currently do not have nested whiteboards on my board, but I plan on creating them to separate assets knowledge from general finance knowledge.
Conclusion
Thanks to Heptabase, I learned about investing in a completely new way. Moving away from linear documents and approaching this new system of atoms and whiteboards makes learning much more effective.
The fact that I can reuse my knowledge across multiple whiteboards and contexts makes the effort of creating atoms well worth it. I might make another follow-up article in which I describe how this system performed when taking course notes, which are generally more complex to process.
If you liked this article and found my process in Heptabase interesting, a subscription to Productivus will be highly appreciated!