Become An Expert In Almost Any Subject By Using Compendiums

TITLE: Become an Expert in (Almost) Any Subject By Using Compendiums CHANNEL: ParkNotes DATE: 2025-04-28 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Compendiums are ubiquitous today. They are everywhere. They exist as things like the Peterson field guides books to different species and subspecies. This is the reptiles and amphibians Peterson’s guide. It’s awesome. Beautiful. This is a compendium of all the reptiles and amphibians in North America. So, there’s that. There are things like the Warhammer 40k ultimate guide. This is a compendium of all things 40k, which is super nerdy in a different way. We have things like the worst case scenario survival handbook. This is a compendium of jokes about worst case scenarios. We have things like the Westminster Confession of Faith or the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith. These are compendiums of these different Protestant denominations beliefs and why they believe them. We have things like the Dune Encyclopedia, which is a compendium, not really an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is a compendium about all of human knowledge. So, I guess this would be all of human knowledge about Dune, but it’s a compendium, not necessarily an encyclopedia, but it is organized from A to Z. It’s alphabetical, and that is what encyclopedias are organized by. There’s also things like the bullet journal compendium. If you buy one of these VO term loy term 1917 bullet journals, you will find at the end of it there is a compendium of how to keep a bullet journal. It’s a compendium of information. So these things are they’re everywhere and I love compendiums. I think that we use them as reference books when we want to look up a particular fact. But I think that if we make our own compendiums, we can actually use them to master topics that we want to be experts in. So in this video, I’m going to show you how you can make your own compendium in order to become an expert on almost any topic.

This video is sponsored by Hungry Minds, but more on that later. Let’s jump right in with what we mean by expert. So I looked up definitions of an expert online, and most of them said pretty much the same thing. Something like this. An expert has broad and deep understanding and competence in terms of knowledge, skill and experience through practice and education. An expert has knowledge not possessed by most people and an expert is said to possess comprehensive knowledge which is is totally false. Uh none of us have comprehensive knowledge but we do have a more comprehensive knowledge than most other people about a given topic if we’re an expert in that topic. So the kind of expertise that I have in mind, the kind of expertise that I think you can gain by creating your own compendium, it is knowledgewise. It is not uh authoritywise and it probably is not skill-wise either. So there are experts who are authority figures and they’ve gone to school and they have the right credentials. You’re not going to get the credentials just by making your own compendium. So sorry about that. And you may not get the skill, the knowhow knowledge from just going through the different information and collecting it and putting it in your own compendium. But I think you can gain a lot of knowledge. The kind of knowledge that will set you apart from the rest of the world when it comes to a particular topic. So if you want to be recognized as an authoritative expert, then you’re going to have to go and get some qualifications. But if you’re interested in the knowledge aspect of being an expert, then I think you can do that on most topics with your own compendium.

So what exactly is a compendium? Well, a compendium is a collection of information and analysis about a particular topic. It is usually meant to be systematic in presentation and comprehensive in its scope. So like this compendium at the back of the bullet journal, this is going to be systematically presented. This is you start from zero. Here is a brand new notebook. Here’s the first step you need to do in order to make it into a bullet journal. So, it’s systematically presented and it is comprehensive in scope. This is everything you need, all the information you need in order to keep a bullet journal. That is what a compendium is. Now, an encyclopedia on the other hand is like a massive super uber compendium, which is a compendium of all human knowledge. The very idea of encyclopedia used to be a project in philosophy and theology. It’s a massive huge project and these are usually systematically presented alphabetically from A to Z because there’s so much information. How do you find any of it? Well, it needs to be alphabeticalized. So that was an older understanding of encyclopedia. That is the more technical understanding of it. But today we use encyclopedia and compendium pretty much interchangeably. So, think of Augustine through the ages. This is a beautiful, amazing book on St. Augustine. I say Augustine. Augustine’s in heaven. Augustine is in Florida, but that one’s for free. This is an encyclopedia of all things Augustine. Now, does this represent all of the human knowledge on Augustine? No. I don’t think it should be called an encyclopedia. I think this is a compendium of, you know, Augustine’s teachings and background and philosophy and theology, all that stuff. Anyways, this is alphabeticalized. It is meant to be comprehensive in scope and systematically presented. It’s presented alphabetically. I think that’s a compendium, not an encyclopedia, but who cares? It’s fine. So, a compendium or compendia is the broader category of which encyclopedia is one branch. Encyclopedia is meant to be more comprehensive and not just limited to one particular topic. So all encyclopedias are compendiums, but not all compendiums are encyclopedias.

Okay, so like I said, compendiums are everywhere. They are ubiquitous. Not all are created equal. And I want to share with you one of the coolest ones I’ve ever seen, which is actually the sponsor for this video, so that’s perfect. It’s called The Book, The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization by Hungry Minds. [SPONSOR SEGMENT]

All right, so actually just one more thing. I want to distinguish a compendium from a commonplace book and an anthology and an omnibus. So, an anthology is a collection of writings like this philosophy of mind anthology put together by David Chalmer’s. He’s the editor. This is a collection of a bunch of really popular, prominent, important essays on the philosophy of mind. Some are excerpts from books, some are journal articles, but it’s an anthology. This is not a compendium. It’s not just the information systematically presented or comprehensive in scope. These are just a bunch of important essays that you should read and be able to talk about if you want to talk about the philosophy of mind. So that would be an anthology. Now an omnibus as opposed to an anthology would be a complete collection of a written material. So think of like the invincible compendium. I brought this one out because it says compendium, but I don’t think of this as a true compendium. It’s not just a presentation of information about the comic series Invincible. It is the entire comic series. This is volume two with Conquest there. Conquest is awesome. This is volume two, but there’s three volumes. And together, the three volumes make up the Omnibus, which is the complete collection of all Invincible comic books in the official series. So, not a compendium, at least not a compendium in the way we’re using the word. And then lastly, we have a commonplace book. This is different than a compendium, though. Maybe I’ve mixed these up in my first couple videos. I have a working definition I’ve been working on of a commonplace book. So, let me just read it so I don’t get it wrong and get mad at myself later. A commonplace book is a collection of quotations, usually kept in a notebook, which is organized according to a particular scope and for a particular purpose, often according to common places or common categories or headings. So commonplace books are collections of quotations and they are organized according to scope and purpose. So like this is a commonplace book of CS Lewis’s quotes. It’s called the quotable CS Lewis. So the purpose is for you to be able to find CS Lewis quotes more easily. It’s organized according to common places or categories like heaven or hero or holiness. These are all hes. So the common places are actually organized alphabetically in order for you to be able to find them more easily. This is not an encyclopedia and therefore it is not a compendium. This is a collection of quotations. It is a commonplace book.

Okay. So we’ve seen some examples of compendiums. Now how do we make our own? Well, I like to keep mine in a notebook. I think that physically writing down information is the best way for me to encode it into my short-term and long-term memory. And then being able to have all that information in one spot and thumbming through it helps me get focused back into the state of mind where I was thinking about that topic. So I really like notebooks. You can use whatever digital methods you like, but I’m going to give you examples of physical notebook compendium. So start with a notebook like this Loyerm 1917 A5. I absolutely love Loyterm. These are my favorite notebooks. You grab one and you give it a topic. This is my transcendentals and transcendental arguments compendium. So this is going to be different than a commonplace book. I’m not just putting quotes in here and ordering them according to common places or categories or anything like that. I’m just concerned with collecting the information and analyzing it here in this notebook. So it’s going to be comprehensive in scope in that this is going to be everything I’ve learned about transcendentals and transcendental arguments. Transcendentals are things like truth, goodness, maybe beauty, but unity or maybe the one. These were really prominent in the medieval philosophers. And I want to know about them. I want to learn about how transcendentals influenced Kant in his transcendental deductions and then how the analytic philosophers grabbed that and made more analytic transcendental arguments out of his deductions. That doesn’t really matter. But what matters is that I have a compendium to help me remember all different information about transcendentals. So here I was reading the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and I made my own entry on their entry of medieval theories of transcendentals. Don’t worry about all the goofy words. Just know this is a dedicated notebook to a particular topic that I want to become an expert in. I want to know all the information. So, I’m going to check out other encyclopedias or other compendiums and I’m going to abstract the information that’s most pertinent to me and I’m going to put that down in my notebook. The actual act of writing it down will help me remember and if I put it into my own words, that’s going to go even further in helping me remember the information. I also do my own analysis and I make connections that are not made in the entries I’m pulling from.

Now, my three favorite compendiums, at least so far, are these three. First is a philosophy compendium. So I have a notebook. I have a leather cover for it, but you don’t need a leather cover. This is Loy turnurn 1917. And this is my philosophy compendium. And it’s only a couple pages in here. But I’ve written down things that I often want to talk about, but I forget the names of. So the first entry is on ipsity, hexad, and quiddity. So a hexad is a property of being. It is a unique and individual thing. Now I’ve heard some people say a hecade. I hate that pronunciation. I say hexad but whatever. Uh this is that property or quality of a thing by virtue of which it is unique or describable as this one. So hexad is like something that uh demarcates something from everything else. It is something that individuates something. So whether that’s your soul or your essence or whatever that is a hexity. Next up, a quiddity is the inherent nature or essence of someone or something. So it’s a whatness and hexity is a thisness. So like quiddity might be human nature and then a hexad would be my own individual unique human nature. And then ipsity is the one that I would always forget but always want to talk about. IPS is selfhood or like personal identity. I also have entries on transcendental arguments and then derivation. Derivation is something I always would forget. An argument is an ordered pair consisting of premises and conclusions. But a derivation is a series of statements with intermediate steps providing the transition from premises to conclusion. So a derivation is like a beefed up argument where it shows you the steps between the premises as well. So I love that. I need to work on this more. One of the hardest things about keeping your own compendium is finding time to work on it. And so that’s actually one of my tips for keeping your own personal compendium. You need time to research the main topic of your compendium. So I need to do the hard work of reading philosophy, but I also need to make time to sit down and write that information into my compendium and give some analysis. So if you don’t make time for making your compendium, you will never make it. And so I need to make more time for making my philosophy compendium.

Another compendium I’m very excited about is my personal handbook. This is a compendium of goals and resolutions for reflection and habituation. This is like who I want to be, who I am, what kind of things give me energy. What kind of food do I really enjoy? There’s personal goals. There’s dietary goals. There’s goals I have for being a father and a husband, for being a scholar. I have theology goals, philosophy goals. These are things that I want to remind myself of. So, I’m still working on this. Uh I’m not really sure about all the categories to use. If you have any idea for how I can better keep a personal handbook, leave me a comment. But I will work on that some more and then present this to you in a future video.

And then lastly, I have my TVA notebook, the time variant authority notebook. I got this off Etsy. If I can find the link, I’ll leave that in the description. But this is super cool. This is my time travel compendium. So, not a commonplace book. I’m not putting quotes in here, but I am putting information about the philosophy of time, which fits perfectly with the time variant authority. This is from Loki, the series on Disney Plus. Oh, it’s so cool. It’s like official. It’s got it’s got everything in here. It’s so beautiful. So, this is my compendium for the philosophy of time. And again, I haven’t added a ton of entries yet, but so far I’ve added information on the philosophy of time as a subd discipline or subgenre within the broader study of philosophy. I have fatalism and an argument for fatalism. I have the topology of time. That is what shape do we think time actually has? I have four kinds of time from an antology class that I took at Palm Beach Atlantic with Paul Gould. metaphysical time, physical time, cosmic time, psychological time. So, you don’t need to know everything that’s in here, but this is such a cool compendium. Partially because it’s just a really cool TVA handbook, but also because it represents a field of study that I’m not super familiar with, but I want to become more of an expert on.

So, here are my steps for creating your own compendium. First, dedicate a notebook to a topic. Next, find an overview of the topic so you know what you need to be looking for. If your compendium is going to be comprehensive in scope, well, then look up an encyclopedia entry on that topic so that you can see the broad scope of it. Where do I need to start? Where do I need to go? What topics do I need to include in my main compendium on this given topic? When it comes to putting the information into your compendium, I would say use the quiz and recall method of entry. So, don’t just write down verbatim. Don’t make it a commonplace book. When you’re reading, take notes in your own words. And by doing that, you’re going to force yourself to remember that information better. When you have to conceptualize the information in your own words instead of taking verbatim notes, you will help yourself master that information much faster and much more easily. So, quiz and recall means you’re going to quiz yourself and you’re going to use active recall in order to produce the information. So, you’re reading an article or a journal entry and then you take a break and you look over at the wall and then you try to reproduce that information through active recall. Next up, you have to schedule time to actually do your research. And then you should also schedule some time to be working on your compendium, to add entries into your compendium, to be quizzing yourself, to be using active recall, to present that information aresh, a new in your own words in your compendium. And then also give yourself a chance to review your notes. Maybe before bed, maybe when you’re on the train, maybe when you have some downtime, take your compendium back out and reflect on the information you’ve put inside.

And then maybe the best tip is treat your first pass as a working compendium. This is not the final product. It’s a work in progress. So this is my personal handbook, but is my first draft. I’m going to be walking through this. I’m going to be crossing things out. I’m going to be figuring out how to keep this better. So, this is a first draft. Don’t worry about making it systematic in your presentation yet. If you’re going to alphabetize it, you don’t know all the entries yet. So, you can’t make them alphabetical if you don’t know them yet. But, put them all down in a rough draft compendium and then go back later and make it into the final product. Now, I’m not really doing that with my time travel one because this is such a beautiful notebook. I don’t want to ruin it. I don’t want to uh go fast with it and put sloppy entries in and have to rewrite them. But that’s part of the reason why I haven’t filled this thing out yet cuz I’m I’m scared to ruin it. Whereas using this loy term soft cover B6 is much easier to scribble in and scribble out and redo entries. So I know that may sound like a lot of work, but if you want to be an expert in something, it takes a lot of time thinking about that topic, thinking through different subtopics in that topic. It takes a lot of time memorizing things and you’ll help yourself by writing with a pen or pencil on paper. That will help you remember things more and then working through a first draft compendium and adding those entries into a new notebook. That’s only going to help you master that topic even better. So if you want to master a topic, if you want to become an expert on a topic, do the hard work and make yourself your own personal compendium.