Building a Second Brain

• Rating: 3/5

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Key takeaways §

• Notes can incubate in a PKM and be discovered later
• Keeping all notes in one place facilitates connections between diverse ideas
  • Cross-pollination
• Commonplace book
• Writer’s block means that you dont have enough material to work with
  • Hemingway bridge
• Note capture should focus on what resonates
  • The value in any piece of content is not evenly distributed
• Keep a list of important problems and test new ideas against them
• Knowledge work contains building blocks that can be used in multiple projects
• There is no inherent value in being organized, but it creates space for creativity because it reduces overhead
• As a notes database grows, search becomes more difficult

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Highlights §

• most of it will become relevant only at some point in the future. (Location 36)
• it is a digital archive of your most valuable memories, ideas, and knowledge to help you do your job, run your business, and manage your life without having to keep every detail in your head. (Location 59)
• Popularized in a previous period of information overload, the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the commonplace book was more than a diary or journal of personal reflections. It was a learning tool that the educated class used to understand a rapidly changing world and their place in it. (Location 234)
• This digital commonplace book is what I call a Second Brain. (Location 260)
• Think of it as the combination of a study notebook, a personal journal, and a sketchbook for new ideas. (Location 261)
• It is a laboratory where you can develop and refine your thinking in solitude before sharing it with others. A studio where you can experiment with ideas until they are ready to be put to use in the outside world. A whiteboard where you can sketch out your ideas and collaborate on them with others. (Location 264)
• For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head. (Location 291)
  • Note: He emphasizes that notes are from your own POV
• So much of our intellectual output—from brainstorms to photos to planning to research—all too often is left stranded on hard drives or lost somewhere in the cloud. (Location 383)
  • Note: But this is good too! The goal is not to remember everything you have ever encountered. Filtering and forgetting are important selection mechanisms
• Making our ideas concrete. (Location 424)
• Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives. (Location 424)
• Digital notes aren’t physical, but they are (Location 440)
• visual. They turn vague concepts into tangible entities that can be observed, rearranged, edited, and combined together. They may exist only in virtual form, but we can still see them with our eyes and move them around with our fingers. (Location 440)
• By keeping diverse kinds of material in one place, we facilitate this connectivity and increase the likelihood that we’ll notice an unusual association. (Location 449)
  • Note: I can use mental models and ideas from various disciplines to inform new ideas in my own work
• Having a Second Brain where lots of ideas can be permanently saved for the long term turns the passage of time into your friend, instead of your enemy. (Location 466)
• “writer’s block”: “It’s not that I’m blocked. It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words, [but rather] that I don’t have the ammunition.” (Location 478)
• It just means you don’t yet have enough raw material to work with. (Location 482)
• Unlike a library or research database, personal notes don’t need to be comprehensive or precise. They are designed to help you quickly capture stray thoughts so you can remain focused on the task at hand. (Location 499)
• Remembering, Connecting, Creating: The (Location 515)
• An illuminating metaphor from a book finds its way into a presentation they’re delivering. The ideas they’ve captured begin gravitating toward each other and cross-pollinating. (Location 526)
• “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express. (Location 544)
• We need to adopt the perspective of a curator, stepping back from the raging river and starting to make intentional decisions about what information we want to fill our minds. (Location 559)
• our goal should be to “capture” only the ideas and insights we think are truly noteworthy. (Location 561)
• By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us, we can improve not only our ability to take better notes, but also our understanding of ourselves and what makes us tick. It is a way of turning up the volume on our intuition so we can hear the wisdom it offers us. (Location 571)
  • Note: Note capture is highly personal. Record what resonates because you can always google facts
• There are relatively few things that are actionable and relevant at any given time, which means you have a clear filter for ignoring everything else. (Location 586)
  • Note: This is what happens when I read studies for one of my own papers. It’s easy to see when they are relevant
• You can publish a simple website now, and slowly add additional pages over time. You can send out a draft of a piece of writing now and make revisions later when you have more time. The sooner you begin, the sooner you start on the path of improvement. (Location 631)
• Songwriters are known for compiling “hook books” full of lyrics and musical riffs they may want to use in future songs. Software engineers build “code libraries” so useful bits of code are easy to access. Lawyers keep “case files” with details from past cases they might want to refer to in the future. Marketers and advertisers maintain “swipe files” with examples of compelling ads they might want to draw from. (Location 719)
• “Twelve Favorite Problems,” inspired by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman. (Location 775)
• You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!” (Location 784)
• The power of your favorite problems is that they tend to stay fairly consistent over time. The exact framing of each question may change, but even as we move between projects, jobs, relationships, and careers, our favorite problems tend to follow us across the years. (Location 819)
• in any piece of content, the value is not evenly distributed. There are always certain parts that are especially interesting, helpful, or valuable to you. When you realize this, the answer is obvious. You can extract only the most salient, relevant, rich material and save it as a succinct note. (Location 850)
• If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it? (Location 888)
• Capture What Resonates (Location 899)
• Instead of inventing a completely different organizational scheme for every place you store information, which creates a tremendous amount of friction navigating the inconsistencies between them, PARA can be used everywhere, across any software program, platform, or notetaking tool. You can use the same system with the same categories and the same principles across your digital life. (Location 1152)
  • Note: Having a consistent system across platforms will save you time in the long run
• While there is no goal to reach, there is a standard that you want to uphold in each of these areas. (Location 1210)
  • Note: I have “core habits” instead but it leads to the same thing
• Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, I recommend organizing them according to where they are going—specifically, the outcomes that they can help you realize. The true test of whether a piece of knowledge is valuable is not whether it is perfectly organized and neatly labeled, but whether it can have an impact on someone or something that matters to you. (Location 1309)
• The purpose of a single note or group of notes can and does change over time as your needs and goals change. Every life moves through seasons, and your digital notes should move along with them, churning and surfacing new tidbits of insight from the deep waters of your experience. (Location 1324)
  • Note: He argues that PARA best meets this goal. Any drawback with having Johnny decimal instead? Now I have an “active projects” note
• Coppola’s story demonstrates that we can systematically gather building blocks from our reading and research that ultimately make the final product richer, more interesting, and more impactful. (Location 1457)
• Discoverability is an idea from information science that refers to “the degree to which a piece of content or information can be found in a search of a file, database, or other information system.”I Librarians think about discoverability when deciding how to lay out books on the shelves. Web designers think about it when they create menus for the websites you visit every day. Social media platforms work hard to make the best content on their platforms as discoverable as possible. (Location 1487)
• This points to a paradox that a lot of people experience as they take notes: the more notes they gather, the more the volume of information grows, the more time and effort it takes to review it all, and the less time they have to do so. (Location 1499)
  • Note: Search and cache chapter from algorithms to live by
• Distillation is at the very heart of all effective communication. The more important it is that your audience hear and take action on your message, the more distilled that message needs to be. The details and subtleties can come later once you have your audience’s attention. (Location 1507)
• The technique is simple: you highlight the main points of a note, and then highlight the main points of those highlights, and so on, distilling the essence of a note in several “layers.” (Location 1516)
• Often your own thoughts need some distillation before you can take action on them. (Location 1642)
• That simplicity masks the effort that was needed to get there. (Location 1664)
  • Note: A sign of mastery is when it looks effortless
• when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly. (Location 1671)
• Distilling makes our ideas small and compact, so we can load them up into our minds with minimal effort. (Location 1722)
• The challenge we face in building a Second Brain is how to establish a system for personal knowledge that frees up attention, instead of taking more of it. (Location 1845)
• If we consider the focused application of our attention to be our greatest asset as knowledge workers, we can no longer afford to let that intermediate work disappear. (Location 1852)
  • Note: Re-using the building blocks in multiple projects. My R code is a perfect example, but how to apply it to writing?
• Our time and attention are scarce, and it’s time we treated the things we invest in—reports, deliverables, plans, pieces of writing, graphics, slides—as knowledge assets that can be reused instead of reproducing them from scratch. (Location 1882)
• eventually you’ll have so many IPs at your disposal that you can execute entire projects just by assembling previously created IPs. This is a magical experience that will completely change how you view productivity. (Location 1910)
• It is much easier to show someone a small thing, and ask for their thoughts on it, rather than the entire opus you’re creating. It’s less confronting to hear criticism on one small aspect of your work, at an early stage when you still have time to correct it, than getting a negative reaction after months of effort. (Location 2086)
  • Note: It my experience with papers is that they need to include all the essential parts to make sense. I guess part of it is that when you write all the parts your thinking will become clearer along the way
• It is by sharing our ideas with other people that we discover which ones represent our most valuable expertise. (Location 2099)
• When you distinguish between the two modes of divergence and convergence, you can decide each time you begin to work which mode you want to be in, which gives you the answers to the questions above. In divergence mode, you want to open up your horizons and explore every possible option. Open the windows and doors, click every link, jump from one source to another, and let your curiosity be your guide for what to do next. If you decide to enter convergence mode, do the opposite: close the door, put on noise-canceling headphones, ignore every new input, and ferociously chase the sweet reward of completion. (Location 2237)
• The goal of an archipelago is that instead of sitting down to a blank page or screen and stressing out about where to begin, you start with a series of small stepping-stones to guide your efforts. (Location 2292)
  • Note: Like creating a small MOC
• Write down ideas for next steps: At the end of a work session, write down what you think the next steps could be for the next one. Write down the current status: This could include your current biggest challenge, most important open question, or future roadblocks you expect. Write down any details you have in mind that are likely to be forgotten once you step away: Such as details about the characters in your story, the pitfalls of the event you’re planning, or the subtle considerations of the product you’re designing. Write out your intention for the next work session: Set an intention for what you plan on tackling next, the problem you intend to solve, or a certain milestone you want to reach. (Location 2310)
  • Note: Superb prompts to include once you are done with a workday!
• When we are organized and efficient, that creates space for creativity to arise. When we have confidence in our creative process, we don’t have to think about it as much, significantly reducing the background stress of constantly worrying whether we’re going in the right direction. (Location 2449)
  • Note: Yes! Not being organized for its own sake but because it gives you space to be creative
• What most people are missing, however, is a feedback loop—a way to “recycle” the knowledge that was created as part of past efforts so it can be used in future ones as well. (Location 2498)
• Review Intermediate Packets and move them to other folders. (Location 2579)
• identify any Intermediate Packets I created that could be repurposed in the future. This could include a web-page design to be used as a template for future sites, an agenda for a one-on-one performance review, or a series of interview questions that might come in handy for future hires. It takes a certain lens to see each of these documents and files not as disposable, but as tangible by-products of quality thinking. Much of our work gets repeated over time with slight variations. If you can start your thinking where you left off last time, you’ll be far ahead compared to starting from zero every time. Any IPs I decide could be relevant to another project, I move to that project’s folder. The same goes for notes relevant to areas or resources. This is a forgiving decision, and it’s okay if you don’t catch every single one. The full contents of everything you archive away will always show up in future searches, so you don’t have to worry that anything will be lost. (Location 2597)
  • Note: This can be very much applied to research projects.