I was not taking notes when I watched Vicky Zhao's video on the shift from prompt engineering to context engineering.

I was not inspired to start a new habit.

I was not learning something I did not know.

I was sitting with three years of daily documentation behind me — seven days a week, volume on maximum — watching someone finally put words to the thing I had been doing without being able to call it anything at all.

She talked about implicit knowledge versus explicit knowledge. The things we carry but cannot yet say. The gap between what we know and what we can actually use.

I had been closing that gap every single day. I just did not have the name for it.

People talk about note-taking like it is a productivity habit.

For me it was closer to a discipline. A practice. The kind of thing a musician does with scales or an athlete does in training — unglamorous in the doing, extraordinary in what it builds over time.

Over three years I documented:

A career clarity dashboard. Client work across multiple clients. Client typologies — patterns not just within relationships but across them. Personal findings. Articles. Summaries as a thinking tool. Communication events for one client alone that crossed five thousand entries.

This was not storage.

This was an operating system for how I think, work, and create.

Vicky outlines three note categories that most people already know from prompt engineering — role, goal, format. The three most people skip are the ones that change everything:

Inputs. What data can the AI actually draw from? What are you feeding it?

Source of truth. What documents outrank everything else? What should the AI prioritize above generic information?

Judgment. What does good look like to you specifically? What is off-brand? What are your actual standards?

That last one is the hardest and the most valuable.

When I bring my notes — my real notes, built across years — Claude does not give me a list. It gives me a mirror. It surfaces the patterns I was already building but could not see because I was too close to them.

That is what five thousand documented communication events does when you finally have a tool that can read across all of it at once.

There is a version of this story where being wide-ranging is a problem.

Yoga and volcanoes and Shakespeare and fashion and merchandising and cinema and music that makes you want to roller skate and a Level 2 Vibrational Sound Healing certification from Kyle Lam — on the surface, that looks like someone who cannot pick a lane.

What I understand now is that it was never multitasking.

It was context engineering.

Every domain, every talent, every passion, every seemingly unrelated interest was going into the system. The yoga informs how I think about flow states in a campaign. The love of great cinema informs how I direct visual stories. Shakespeare — the compression, the human complexity, the way a single line can hold a whole world — lives inside how I write and communicate strategy.

The vibrational sound work changes my frequency. And frequency changes everything about how I show up for clients.

None of it is separate. None of it is scattered.

It is all context. And context compounds.

Most people approaching AI are starting from zero.

They give it a role. A goal. A format. They get a decent answer and wonder why it feels generic.

The answer is simple: generic inputs produce generic outputs.

When you bring years of structured, cross-domain, daily documentation — when you bring your actual judgment, your real frameworks, your lived experience across every area of your life — the quality of what comes back is not "pretty good."

It is yours.

AI does not replace your thinking. It reveals the thinking you were already doing — the patterns you could not see because you were too close to them. The connections across domains that your conscious mind was too busy to surface.

The implicit becomes explicit.

And then it compounds.

What I am noticing. The raw signal. Unfiltered, daily, maximum volume.

What I think is true. The distillation. The frameworks starting to form.

What I am still questioning. The honest edge. Where the thinking is not finished yet.

Bring those three layers into a conversation with AI and ask:

What patterns do you see across my notes?

What frameworks are already emerging here?

What am I actually trying to say?

That is where the compounding begins.

I have spent three years building a knowledge infrastructure that most people have not started yet.

A career clarity dashboard. Client systems. Typologies. Creative frameworks. Personal findings. A body of documented thinking that spans fashion, strategy, sound, cinema, yoga, commerce, and identity.

And now, for the first time, I have a collaborator that can hold all of it at once.

Not to replace my thinking.

To meet it.

I was not scattered. I was not multitasking. I was not ahead of my time in a way that felt like a disadvantage.

I was building the context that would eventually make everything compound.

Your notes are not busywork. They are your future self leaving you breadcrumbs.

— Will Forrester, Will Works Studios