Building a Second Brain (Kindle Highlights)
Metadata
- Building a Second Brain
- Author: Tiago Forte
- ISBN: 1800812213
- Online Highlights: https://read.amazon.com/?asin=B09MDNDYYF
- Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09MDNDYYF
- Kindle link
Highlights
information we value, we need a way to package it up and send it through time to our future self. We need a way to cultivate a body of knowledge that is uniquely our own, so when the opportunity arises—whether changing jobs, giving a big presentation, launching a new product, or starting a business or a family—we will have access to the wisdom we need to make good decisions and take the most effective action. It all begins with the simple act of writing things down. — location: 60
harness the full potential of what we know. — location: 67
According to the New York Times, the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes. 1 A separate study cited by the Times estimates that we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986.2 Instead of empowering us, this deluge of information often overwhelms us. Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society-wide poverty of attention.* — location: 235
Research from Microsoft shows that the average US employee spends 76 hours per year looking for misplaced notes, items, or files. — location: 242
And a report from the International Data Corporation found that 26 percent of a typical Knowledge Worker’s day is spent looking for and consolidating information — location: 243
spread across a variety of systems. — location: 245
Note
Simplifying my digital System
The practice of writing down one’s thoughts and notes to help make sense of the world has a long legacy. For centuries, artists and intellectuals from Leonardo da Vinci to Virginia Woolf, from John Locke to Octavia Butler, have recorded the ideas they found most interesting in a book they carried around with them, known as a “commonplace book.”* — location: 259
The length and format don’t matter—if a piece of content has been interpreted through your lens, curated according to your taste, translated into your own words, or drawn from your life experience, and stored in a secure place, then it qualifies as a note. — location: 324
So many of us share the feeling that we are surrounded by knowledge, yet starving for wisdom. — location: 362
never quite able to focus and also never quite able to rest. — location: 365
Your Second Brain becomes like a mirror, teaching you about yourself and reflecting back to you the ideas worth keeping and acting on. — location: 395
They admire your incredible dedication to developing your thinking over time. In reality, you are just planting seeds of inspiration and harvesting them as they flower. — location: 399
As you begin to — location: 401
There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete. Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives. Let’s examine each of these. — location: 457
researchers Deborah Chambers and Daniel Reisberg found in their research on the limits of mental visualization, “The skills we have developed for dealing with the external world go beyond those we have for dealing with the internal world.”2 — location: 477
Neuroscientist Nancy C. Andreasen, in her extensive research on highly creative people including accomplished scientists, mathematicians, artists, and writers, came to the conclusion that “Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections.” — location: 481
The more diverse and unusual the material you put into it in the first place, the more original the connections that will emerge. — location: 491
This tendency is known as Recency Bias. 4 We tend to =favor the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones. — location: 497
A recent study from Princeton University found that there is a certain kind of job that is least likely to be automated by machines in coming years. Surprisingly, it wasn’t jobs that required advanced skills or years of training that were predicted to fare best. It was jobs that required the ability to convey “not just information but a particular interpretation of information.”5 — location: 506
you need a deeper well full of examples, illustrations, stories, statistics, diagrams, analogies, metaphors, photos, mindmaps, conversation notes, quotes—anything that will help you argue for your perspective or fight for a cause you believe in. — location: 521
notes are ideal for free-form exploration before you have a goal in mind. — location: 537
quickly capture stray thoughts so you can remain focused on the task at hand. — location: 539
The first way that people tend to use their Second Brain is as a memory aid. They use their digital notes to save facts and ideas that they would have trouble recalling otherwise: takeaways from meetings, quotes from interviews, or the details of a project, for example. — location: 558
Their Second Brain evolves from being primarily a memory tool to becoming a thinking tool. — location: 564
The ideas they’ve captured begin gravitating toward each other and cross-pollinating. — location: 567
The same way we have a genetic code that determines our height and eye color, we also have a creative code that is hardwired into our imagination. It shapes how we think and how we interact with the world. — location: 592
The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside. — location: 609
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: 614
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. — location: 614
The best way to organize your notes is to organize for action, according to the active projects you are working on right now. Consider new information in terms of its utility, asking, “How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?” — location: 627
There is a powerful way to facilitate and speed up this process of rapid association: distill your notes down to their essence. — location: 640
Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?” That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention. Your notes will be useless if you can’t decipher them in the future, or if they’re so long that you don’t even try. Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand. — location: 649
Notes
Coincidentally, I wrote about how to make it most useful for your future self in Day 17 - The Crucial Note Taking Principles I Follow to stay Sane
This is why I recommend you shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating.† We all naturally have a desire to create—to bring to life something good, true, or beautiful.
9 It’s a part of our essential nature. — location: 667
Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?” That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention. — link: 649, 04-02-2023, p.649, yellow
Your notes will be useless if you can’t decipher them in the future, or if they’re so long that you don’t even try. Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand. — link: 651, 04-02-2023, p.651, yellow
This is why I recommend you shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating. — location: 667
Create more than you Consume
Everything not saved will be lost.
—Nintendo “Quit Screen” message — location: 712
Richard Feynman revealed his strategy in an interview4: 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: 838
As told in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick, 5 Feynman once took inspiration for his physics from an accident at dinner: … he was eating in the student cafeteria when someone tossed a dinner plate into the air—a Cornell cafeteria plate with the university seal imprinted on one rim—and in the instant of its flight he experienced what he long afterward considered an epiphany. As the plate spun, it wobbled. Because of the insignia he could see that the spin and the wobble were not quite in synchrony. Yet just in that instant it seemed to him—or was it his physicist’s intuition?—that the two rotations were related. — location: 846
When a fellow physicist and mentor asked what the use of such an insight was, Feynman responded: “It doesn’t have any importance … I don’t care whether — link: 854, 04-02-2023, p.854, yellow
When a fellow physicist and mentor asked what the use of such an insight was, Feynman responded: “It doesn’t have any importance … I don’t care whether a thing has importance. Isn’t it fun?” — location: 855
How do I live less in the past, and more in the present? — location: 865
See Living in the Moment
How can I speed up and relax at the same time? — location: 871
recommend asking your family or childhood friends what you were obsessed with as a kid. Those very same interests probably still fire your imagination as an adult. — location: 879
Take a moment now to write down some of your own favorite problems. Here are my recommendations to guide you: — link: 889, 05-08-2023, p.889, yellow
Ask people close to you what you were obsessed with as a child (often you’ll — link: 890, 05-08-2023, p.890, yellow
continue to be fascinated with the same things as an adult). — link: 890, 05-08-2023, p.890, yellow
Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me? — Location: 923 ^ref-41270
Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful? — Location: 929 ^ref-34318
I keep a folder full of stock photos, graphics, and drawings I find both online and offline. Any time I need an image for a slide deck, or a web page, or to spark new ideas, I have a plentiful supply of imagery I’ve already found compelling ready and waiting. — location: 935
Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?
Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?
Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal? — link: 938, 05-08-2023, p.938, yellow
Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising? — link: 945, 05-08-2023, p.945, yellow
people take are of ideas they already know, already agree with, or could have guessed. We have a natural bias as humans to seek evidence that confirms what we already believe, a well-studied phenomenon known as “confirmation bias.” — location: 946
7 If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it? Surprise is an excellent — location: 950
Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think. — location: 951
Our ability to capture ideas from anywhere takes us in a different direction: By saving ideas that may contradict each other and don’t necessarily support what we already believe, we can train ourselves to take in information from different sources instead of immediately jumping to conclusions. By playing with ideas—bending and stretching and remixing them—we become less attached to the way they were originally presented and can borrow certain aspects or elements to use in our own work. — location: 957
By saving ideas that may contradict each other and don’t necessarily support what we already believe, we can train ourselves to take in information from different sources instead of immediately jumping to conclusions. — location: 958
If what you’re capturing doesn’t change your mind, then what’s the point? — location: 961
steps that add far more value: making connections, imagining possibilities, formulating theories, and creating new ideas of your own. — location: 966
We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.”8 — location: 973
We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.” — location: 973
When something resonates with us, it is our. emotion-based, intuitive mind telling us it is interesting before our logical mind can explain why. — location: 974
If you ignore that inner voice of intuition, over time it will slowly quiet down and fade away. If you practice listening to what it is telling you, the inner voice will grow stronger. You’ll start to hear it in all kinds of situations. It will guide you in what choices to make and which opportunities to pursue. — location: 985
I can’t think of anything more important for your creative life—and your life in general—than learning to listen to the voice of intuition inside. — location: 988
It’s a good idea to capture key information about the source of a note, such as the original web page address, the title of the piece, the author or publisher, and the date it was published.* — location: 992
Capturing voice memos: Use a voice memo app that allows you to press a button, speak directly into your smartphone, and have every word transcribed into text and exported to your notes. — location: 1031
Note
Havent found tool for that yet
Capturing parts of YouTube videos: This is a little-known feature, but almost every YouTube video is accompanied by an automatically generated transcript. Just click the “Open transcript” button and a window will open. From there, you can copy and paste excerpts to your notes. — location: 1033
Capturing excerpts from emails: — location: 1036
Note
How to capture full emails in a secure way to Obsidian?
First, you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,” — location: 1045
Thinking doesn’t just produce writing; writing also enriches thinking. — location: 1052
Perhaps the most immediate benefit of capturing content outside our heads is that we escape what I call the “reactivity loop”— — location: 1060
The moment you first encounter an idea is the worst time to decide what it means. You need to set it aside and gain some objectivity. — location: 1062
I’m always amazed that when I revisit the items I’ve previously saved to read later, many of them that seemed so important at the time are clearly trivial and unneeded. — location: 1066
Note
Letting an idea age
What Would This Look Like If It Was Easy? — location: 1070
Note
Coincidentally came across this saying today in the Weekly Review session of Khe (10k work)
What would capturing ideas look like if it was easy? — location: 1073
Capture isn’t about doing more. It’s about taking notes on the experiences you’re already having. It’s about squeezing more juice out of the fruit of life, savoring every moment to the fullest by paying closer attention to the details. — location: 1079
If you’re looking for a more precise answer of how much content to capture in your notes, I recommend no more than 10 percent of the original source, at most. Any — location: 1094
This is called “detachment gain,” as explained in The Detachment Gain: The Advantage of Thinking Out Loud by Daniel Reisberg, and refers to the “functional advantage to putting thoughts into externalized forms” such as speaking or writing, leading to the “possibility of new discoveries that might not have been obtained in any other fashion.” — location: 1102
We know that the details of lighting, temperature, and the layout of a space dramatically affect how we feel and think. There’s a name for this phenomenon: the Cathedral Effect. — location: 1164
When we are in a space with high ceilings, for example—think of the lofty architecture of classic churches invoking the grandeur of heaven—we tend to think in more abstract ways. When we’re in a room with low ceilings, such as a small workshop, we’re more likely to think concretely. — location: 1167
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: 1229
Knowing which projects you’re currently committed to is crucial to being able to prioritize your week, plan your progress, and say no to things that aren’t important. — location: 1263
Resources: Things I Want to Reference in the Future — location: 1297
What topics are you interested in? — location: 1300
What subjects are you researching? — location: 1301
Note
Solves poblem of how to organize my research notes
What useful information do you want to be able to reference? — location: 1302
Which hobbies or passions do you have? — location: 1303
Any note or file that isn’t relevant or actionable for a current project or area can be placed into resources for future reference. — location: 1307
Archives: Things I’ve Completed or Put on Hold — location: 1309
Note
Does highlighting this help me for summrizing?
place a folder in “cold storage” — location: 1314
Note
My term for cold storage refers to whether i sync it with my notes or keep it in my cloud
there is no penalty for keeping digital stuff forever, as long as it doesn’t distract from your day-to-day focus. — location: 1315
Areas related to my business begin with “FL” for Forte Labs, so they appear together in alphabetical order. — location: 1338
Where Do I Put This?—How to Decide Where to Save Individual Notes — location: 1353
The four main categories are ordered by actionability — location: 1369
Projects are most actionable because you’re working on them right now and with a concrete deadline in mind. Areas have a longer time horizon and are less immediately actionable. — location: 1370
Resources may become actionable depending on the situation. Archives remain inactive unless they are needed. — location: 1372
In which project will this be most useful? If none: In which area will this be most useful? If none: Which resource does this belong to? If none: Place in archives. — location: 1374
The goal of organizing our knowledge is to move our goals — link: 1386, 05-08-2023, p.386, yellow
The goal of organizing our knowledge is to move our goals forward, not get a PhD in notetaking. — location: 1386
whatever doesn’t help you make progress on your projects is probably detracting from them. — location: 1387
Imagine how absurd it would be to organize a kitchen instead by kind of food: fresh fruit, dried fruit, fruit juice, and frozen fruit would all be stored in the same place, just because they all happen to be made of fruit. — location: 1395
this is exactly the way most people organize their files and notes—keeping all their book notes together just because they happen to come from books, or all their saved quotes together just because they happen to be quotes. — location: 1397
I recommend organizing them according to where they are going—specifically, the outcomes that they can help you realize. — location: 1399
Your Turn: Move Quickly, Touch Lightly — location: 1463
A mentor of mine once gave me a piece of advice that has served me ever since: move quickly and touch lightly. — location: 1463
how to set my intentions, craft a strategy, and look for sources of leverage that would allow me to accomplish things with minimal effort. — location: 1468
Ask yourself: “What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?” — location: 1471
Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you think of the projects that might be on your plate: — location: 1474
Notice what’s on your mind: What’s worrying you that you haven’t taken the time to identify as a project? What needs to happen that you’re not making consistent progress on? — location: 1475
Look at your calendar: What do you need to follow up on from the past? What needs planning and preparation for the future? — location: 1477
Look at your to-do list: What actions are you already taking that are actually part of a bigger project you’ve not yet identified? What communication or follow-up actions you’ve scheduled with people are actually part of a bigger project? — location: 1478
Look at your computer desktop, downloads folder, documents folder, bookmarks, emails, or open browser tabs: What are you keeping around because it is part of a larger project? — location: 1481
Chapter 6 Distill—Find the Essence To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. —Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher — link: 1511, 05-08-2023, p.511, yellow
Coppola’s strategy for making the complex, multifaceted film rested on a technique he learned studying theater at Hofstra College, known as a “prompt book.” He started by reading The Godfather novel and capturing the parts that resonated with him in a notebook—his own version of Twyla Tharp’s box. — link: 1530, 05-08-2023, p.530, yellow
When you first capture them, your notes are like unfinished pieces of raw material. They require a bit more refinement to turn them into truly valuable knowledge assets, like a chemist distilling only the purest compound. This is why we separate capturing and organizing from the subsequent steps: you need to be able to store something quickly and save any future refinement for later. In this sense, notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self. — link: 1566, 05-08-2023, p.566, yellow
Progressive Summarization helps you focus on the content and the presentation of your notes,* instead of spending too much time on labeling, tagging, linking, or other advanced features offered by many information management tools. It gives you a practical, easy thing to do that adds value even when you don’t have the energy for more challenging tasks. Most importantly, it keeps your attention on the substance of what you’re reading or learning, which is what matters in the long term. — link: 1684, 05-08-2023, p.684, yellow
Let’s look at more examples of progressively summarized notes: A Wikipedia article A blog post A podcast interview Meeting notes — link: 1691, 05-08-2023, p.691, yellow
I was once on a panel when one of the speakers mentioned this term. Within the ten seconds before it was my turn to respond, I was able to run a search, look up this note on my tablet (where all my notes are synchronized), and speak confidently on the subject as if I had known it all along. — link: 1702, 05-08-2023, p.702, yellow
A few months later, we were preparing a launch campaign for a new version of our online course. I had only a couple of weeks to prepare for it—definitely not enough time to do more research. I had to make use of the ideas I’d already collected. As part of my preparation, I went through this note (which I found within an area folder for “Online education”) and bolded the parts that most resonated with me. Then just before our launch kickoff I highlighted the parts I wanted to apply to our own situation. The highlighted passages you see here were the sparks that eventually led to us hiring alumni of the course to coach new students. This freed up my time to implement another idea from Telpner’s interview: adding a new “” coaching tier. You truly never know where inspiration will come from and the extraordinary impact it can have. — link: 1730, 05-08-2023, p.730, yellow
Taking notes during meetings is a common practice, but it’s often not clear what we should do — link: 1738, 05-08-2023, p.738, yellow
with those notes. They are often messy, with the action items buried among random comments. I often use Progressive Summarization to summarize my notes after phone calls to make sure I’m extracting every bit of value from them. — link: 1739, 05-08-2023, p.739, yellow
One of Pablo Picasso’s most famous drawings, created in 1945 and known as Picasso’s Bull, offers a master class in how distillation works. It is a sequence of images that he drew to study a bull’s essential form. The process of distillation happens in every art form, but this example is unusual in that Picasso preserved each step of his process. — link: 1756, 05-08-2023, p.756, yellow
Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible. — link: 1781, 05-08-2023, p.781, yellow
The Three Most Common Mistakes of Novice Notetakers — link: 1786, 05-08-2023, p.786, yellow
Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting — link: 1788, 05-08-2023, p.788, yellow
A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer. If you save a series of excerpts from a book amounting to five hundred — link: 1798, 05-08-2023, p.798, yellow
words, the bolded second layer should include no more than one hundred words, and highlighted third layer no more than twenty. — link: 1799, 05-08-2023, p.799, yellow
Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind — link: 1801, 05-08-2023, p.801, yellow
“When should I be doing this highlighting?” The answer is that you should do it when you’re getting ready to create something. Unlike Capture and Organize, which take mere seconds, it takes time and effort to distill your notes. If you try to do it with every note up front, you’ll quickly be mired in hours of meticulous highlighting with no clear purpose in mind. You can’t afford such a giant investment of time without knowing whether it will pay off. — link: 1802, 05-08-2023, p.802, yellow
You have to always assume that, until proven otherwise, any given note won’t necessarily ever be useful. You have no idea what your future self will need, want, or be working on. — link: 1812, 05-08-2023, p.812, yellow
The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future self*—by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary. This is the “campsite rule” applied to information—leave it better than you found it. — link: 1815, 05-08-2023, p.815, yellow
Mistake #3: Making Highlighting Difficult — link: 1819, 05-08-2023, p.819, yellow
Just as you listened for a feeling of internal resonance in deciding what content to save in the first place, the same rule applies for the insights within the note. Certain passages will move you, pique your attention, make your heart beat faster, or provoke you. Those are clear signals that you’ve found something important, and it’s time to add a highlight. You can apply the same criteria I introduced earlier in Chapter 4, looking out for individual points that are surprising, useful, inspiring, or personal to decide which ones are worth highlighting. — link: 1822, 05-08-2023, p.822, yellow
Even in our daily conversations, the ability to be succinct without missing key details is what leads to exciting conversations that leave both people feeling enlivened. Distillation is at the heart of the communication that is so central to our friendships, our working relationships, and our leadership abilities. Notetaking gives you a way to deliberately practice the skill of distilling every day. — link: 1830, 05-08-2023, p.830, yellow
The effort we put into Progressive Summarization is meant for one purpose: to make it easy to find and work with our notes in the future. — link: 1834, 05-08-2023, p.834, yellow
When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start reading books and doing research. You need that research to already be done. — link: 1839, 05-08-2023, p.839, yellow
In web design, a slight change of color for a button or a slightly reworded headline can easily have a double-digit impact on the number of visitors who click on it. Imagine if we put as much thought into how the information on our own devices is presented to us as we do into the public web. Even something as simple as an informative heading, a paragraph break, or a highlighted phrase can make it dramatically easier to absorb a piece of text. — link: 1870, 05-08-2023, p.870, yellow
This principle is called stigmergy—to leave “marks” on the environment that make your future efforts easier. It is a strategy used by ant colonies to find food. If an ant finds a food source, it will bring a piece of it back to the colony, while leaving a special pheromone along the trail. Other ants can follow this trail to find the food for themselves, enabling a multitude of ants to quickly find and collect new sources of food. — link: 1878, 05-08-2023, p.878, yellow
Chapter 7 Express—Show Your Work — link: 1888, 05-08-2023, p.888, yellow
“The greater your ignorance the more verifiably accurate must be your facts,” she once remarked. — link: 1924, 05-08-2023, p.924, yellow
Butler pioneered Afrofuturism, a genre that cast African Americans as protagonists who embrace radical change in order to survive. — link: 1937, 05-08-2023, p.937, yellow
journals, commonplace books, speeches, library call slips, essay and story drafts, school notes, calendars, and datebooks as well as assorted odds and ends like school progress reports, bus passes, yearbooks, and contracts. This collection contained 9,062 items and filled 386 boxes when it was donated to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, after Butler’s passing.4 — link: 1940, 05-08-2023, p.940, yellow
She used every bit of insight and detail she could muster from both her daily life and the books she immersed herself in: “Use what you have; even if it seems meager, it may be magic in your hands.” — link: 1951, 05-08-2023, p.951, yellow
As knowledge workers, attention is our most scarce and precious resource. The creative process is fueled by attention at every step. It is the lens that allows us to make sense of what’s happening, to notice what resources we have at our disposal, and to see the contribution we can make. The ability to intentionally and strategically allocate our attention is a competitive advantage in a distracted world. We have to jealously guard it like a valuable treasure. — link: 1957, 05-08-2023, p.957, yellow
What are the knowledge assets you’re creating today that will be most reusable in the future? What are the building blocks that will move forward your projects tomorrow? How can you package up what you know in a form that you’ll be able to revisit it again and again no matter what endeavors you take on in the future? — link: 1974, 05-08-2023, p.974, yellow
Intermediate Packets: The Power of Thinking Small — link: 1980, 05-08-2023, p.980, yellow
Here’s what most people miss: it’s not enough to simply divide tasks into smaller pieces—you then need a system for managing those pieces. Otherwise, you’re just creating a lot of extra work for yourself trying to keep track of them. — link: 1989, 05-08-2023, p.989, yellow
Intermediate Packets are the concrete, individual building blocks that make up your work.* For example, a set of notes from a team meeting, a list of relevant research findings, a brainstorm with collaborators, a slide deck analyzing the market, or a list of action items from a conference call. — link: 1992, 05-08-2023, p.992, yellow
There are five kinds of Intermediate Packets you can create and reuse in your work: Distilled notes: Books or articles you’ve read and distilled so it’s easy to get the gist of what they contain (using the Progressive Summarization technique you learned in the previous chapter, for example). — link: 2006, 05-08-2023, p.006, yellow
Outtakes: The material or ideas that didn’t make it into a past project but could be used in future ones. — link: 2009, 05-08-2023, p.009, yellow
Work-in-process: The documents, graphics, agendas, or plans you produced during past projects. — link: 2010, 05-08-2023, p.010, yellow
Final deliverables: Concrete pieces of work you’ve delivered as part of past projects, which could become components of something new. — link: 2011, 05-08-2023, p.011, yellow
Documents created by others: Knowledge assets created by people on your team, contractors or consultants, or even clients or customers, that you can reference and incorporate into your work. — link: 2012, 05-08-2023, p.012, yellow
Making the shift to working in terms of Intermediate Packets unlocks several very powerful benefits. First, you’ll become interruption-proof because you are focusing only on one small packet at a time, — link: 2023, 05-08-2023, p.023, yellow
Second, you’ll be able to make progress in any span of time. Instead of waiting until you have multiple uninterrupted hours — link: 2026, 05-08-2023, p.026, yellow
Third, Intermediate Packets increase the quality of your work by allowing you to collect feedback more often. — link: 2029, 05-08-2023, p.029, yellow
You’ll find that people give much better feedback if they’re included early, and the work is clearly in progress. — link: 2032, 05-08-2023, p.032, yellow
Fourth, and best of all, eventually you’ll have so many IPs at your disposal that you can execute entire projects just by assembling previously created IPs. — link: 2033, 05-08-2023, p.033, yellow
Assembling Building Blocks: The Secret to Frictionless Output — link: 2043, 05-08-2023, p.043, yellow
Let’s look at an example: planning a large conference. If it’s a brand-new event, or you’ve never organized a conference before, it might seem like you have to produce everything from scratch. However, if you break down that mega-project into concrete chunks, suddenly the components that you’ll need become clear: — link: 2055, 05-08-2023, p.055, yellow
You could put them all on your to-do list and make them yourself, but there’s a different, much faster, and more effective approach. Ask yourself: How could you acquire or assemble each of these components, instead of having to make them yourself? — link: 2061, 05-08-2023, p.061, yellow
The conference agenda could easily be modeled on an agenda from a different conference, with — link: 2064, 05-08-2023, p.064, yellow
the topics and speaker names switched out. You could start compiling a list of potential breakout sessions, adding any topic suggested by others that strikes you as interesting. You might have a checklist for delivering effective keynotes left over from a live event you’ve organized in the past. — link: 2064, 05-08-2023, p.064, yellow
Emails can draw on an archive of examples you’ve saved from other conferences you’ve attended. Screenshots of conference websites you admire are the best possible starting point for designing your own. — link: 2066, 05-08-2023, p.066, yellow
The cost of not being quite sure whether you have what you need. The stress of wondering whether you’ve already completed a task before. There is a cost to your sleep, your peace of mind, and your time with family when the full burden of constantly coming up with good ideas rests solely on your fickle biological brain. — link: 2079, 05-08-2023, p.079, yellow
How to Resurface and Reuse Your Past Work — link: 2081, 05-08-2023, p.081, yellow
How can you find and retrieve Intermediate Packets when you need them? — link: 2084, 05-08-2023, p.084, yellow
A song overheard on the subway might influence a jingle you’re writing for your child’s school play. An idea about persuasion you read in a book might become a central pillar in a health campaign you are organizing for your company. These are some of the most valuable connections—when an idea crosses the boundaries between subjects. — link: 2086, 05-08-2023, p.086, yellow
there are four methods for retrieval that overlap and complement one another. — link: 2091, 05-08-2023, p.091, yellow
Search Browsing Tags Serendipity — link: 2094, 05-08-2023, p.094, yellow
Retrieval Method #1: Search — link: 2096, 05-08-2023, p.096, yellow
Retrieval Method #2: Browsing — link: 2107, 05-08-2023, p.107, yellow
If you’ve followed the PARA system outlined in Chapter 5 to organize your notes, you already have — link: 2108, 05-08-2023, p.108, yellow
a series of dedicated folders for each of your active projects, areas of responsibility, resources, and archives. — link: 2108, 05-08-2023, p.108, yellow
Retrieval Method #3: Tags — link: 2127, 05-08-2023, p.127, yellow
Retrieval Method #4: Serendipity — link: 2143, 05-08-2023, p.143, yellow
Serendipity takes a few different forms when it comes to retrieval. First, while using the previous retrieval methods, it is a good idea to keep your focus a little broad. Don’t begin and end your search with only the specific folder that matches your criteria. Make sure to look through related categories, such as similar projects, relevant areas, and different kinds of resources. — link: 2150, 05-08-2023, p.150, yellow
Three Stages of Expressing: What Does It Look Like to Show Our Work? — link: 2167, 05-08-2023, p.167, yellow
Patrick is a church pastor in Colorado, and he uses his Second Brain to help him design memorial services, which for him are a deeply creative experience about honoring life. His goal with creating a memorial service is to “tell the story of someone’s life in a way that honors and makes meaning in retrospect about how their life unfolded.” — link: 2184, 05-08-2023, p.184, yellow
Instead of spending five to seven hours at the end of all his interviews to distill everything he had heard, he began spending fifteen minutes after each interview to highlight only the parts that resonated. — link: 2191, 05-08-2023, p.191, yellow
Rebecca is a professor of educational psychology at a university in Florida, and she uses her digital notes to create programs and presentations as part of her teaching. — link: 2199, 05-08-2023, p.199, yellow
Once you understand how incredibly valuable feedback is, you start to crave as much of it as you can find. You start looking for every opportunity to share your outputs and gain some clarity on how other people are likely to receive it. These moments are so important that you will begin changing how you work in order to get feedback as early and often as possible, because you know it is much easier to gather and synthesize the thoughts of others than to come up with an endless series of brilliant thoughts on your own. — link: 2226, 05-08-2023, p.226, yellow
You have to value your ideas enough to share them. You have to believe that the smallest idea has the potential to change people’s lives. — link: 2276, 05-08-2023, p.276, yellow
PART THREE The Shift Making Things Happen — link: 2295, 05-08-2023, p.295, yellow
Chapter 8 The Art of Creative Execution — link: 2298, 05-08-2023, p.298, yellow
My father planned for creativity. He strategized his creativity. When it was time to make progress on a painting, he gave it his full focus, but that wasn’t the only time he exercised his imagination. Much of the rest of the time he was collecting, sifting through, reflecting on, and recombining raw material from his daily life so that when it came time to create, he had more than enough raw material to work with. — link: 2316, 05-08-2023, p.316, yellow
The Archipelago of Ideas: Give Yourself Stepping-Stones — link: 2394, 05-08-2023, p.394, yellow
An archipelago is a chain of islands in the ocean, usually formed by volcanic activity over long spans of time. The Hawaiian Islands, for example, are an archipelago of eight major islands extending over about 1,500 miles of the Pacific Ocean. — link: 2405, 05-08-2023, p.405, yellow
To create an Archipelago of Ideas, you divergently gather a group of ideas, sources, or points that will form the backbone of your essay, presentation, or deliverable. Once you have a critical mass of ideas to work with, you switch decisively into convergence mode and link them together in an order that makes sense. — link: 2407, 05-08-2023, p.407, yellow
An Archipelago of Ideas separates the two activities your brain has the most difficulty performing at the same time: choosing ideas (known as selection) and arranging them into a logical flow (known as sequencing). — link: 2432, 05-08-2023, p.432, yellow
The reason it is so difficult to perform these activities simultaneously is they require different modes: selection is divergent, requiring an open state of mind that is willing to consider any possibility. Sequencing is convergent, requiring a more closed state of mind focused only on the material you already have in front of you. — link: 2433, 05-08-2023, p.433, yellow
The Hemingway Bridge: Use Yesterday’s Momentum Today Ernest Hemingway was one of the most recognized and influential novelists of the twentieth century. He wrote in an economical, understated style that profoundly influenced a generation of writers and led to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. — link: 2441, 05-08-2023, p.441, yellow
Hemingway was known for a particular writing strategy, which I call the “Hemingway Bridge.” He would always end a writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. — link: 2444, 05-08-2023, p.444, yellow
Instead of burning through every last ounce of energy at the end of a work session, reserve the last few minutes to write down some of the following kinds of things in your digital notes: — link: 2453, 05-08-2023, p.453, yellow
Write down ideas for next steps: — link: 2455, 05-08-2023, p.455, yellow
Write down the current status: — link: 2456, 05-08-2023, p.456, yellow
Write down any details you have in mind that are likely to be forgotten once you step away: — link: 2457, 05-08-2023, p.457, yellow
Write out your intention for the next work session: — link: 2459, 05-08-2023, p.459, yellow
To take this strategy a step further, there is one more thing you can do as you wrap up the day’s work: send off your draft or beta or proposal for feedback. Share this Intermediate Packet with a friend, family member, colleague, or collaborator; tell them that it’s still a work-in-process and ask them to send you their thoughts on it. — link: 2464, 05-08-2023, p.464, yellow
Dial Down the Scope: Ship Something Small and Concrete — link: 2468, 05-08-2023, p.468, yellow
When the full complexity of a project starts to reveal itself, most people choose to delay it. This is true of projects at work, and even more true of side projects we take on in our spare time. — link: 2487, 05-08-2023, p.487, yellow
Waiting until you have everything ready before getting started is like sitting in your car and waiting to leave your driveway until all the traffic lights across town are green at the same time. — link: 2494, 05-08-2023, p.494, yellow
If you want to write a book, you could dial down the scope and write a series of online articles outlining your main ideas. If you don’t have time for that, you could dial it down even further and start with a social media post explaining the essence of your message. — link: 2511, 05-08-2023, p.511, yellow
If you want to deliver a workshop for paying clients, you could dial it down to a free workshop at a local meetup, or dial it down even further and start with a group exercise or book club for a handful of colleagues or friends. — link: 2513, 05-08-2023, p.513, yellow
If you’d like to make a short film, start with a YouTube video, or if that’s too intimidating, a livestream. If it’s still too much, record a rough cut on your phone and send it to a friend. — link: 2515, 05-08-2023, p.515, yellow
If you want to design a brand identity for a company, start with a mock-up of a single web page. Even easier, start with a few hand-drawn sketches with your ideas for a logo. — link: 2517, 05-08-2023, p.517, yellow
Here are some useful questions to ask as you conduct your search: Is there a book or article you could extract some excerpts from as inspiration? Are there websites that might have resources you could build upon? Are there podcasts by experts you could subscribe to and listen to while commuting or doing household chores? Are there relevant IPs buried in other projects you’ve worked on in the past? — link: 2562, 05-08-2023, p.562, yellow
Set a timer for a fixed period of time, such as fifteen or twenty minutes, and in one sitting see if you can complete a first pass on your project using only the notes you’ve gathered in front of you. — link: 2568, 05-08-2023, p.568, yellow
Ask yourself, “What is the smallest version of this I can produce to get useful feedback from others?” — link: 2576, 05-08-2023, p.576, yellow
Chapter 9 The Essential Habits of Digital Organizers — link: 2595, 05-08-2023, p.595, yellow
Consider how chefs work in a commercial kitchen. They have incredibly high demands on both the quality and quantity of their output. — link: 2612, 05-08-2023, p.612, yellow
Chefs have a particular system for accomplishing this daunting feat. It’s called mise en place, a culinary philosophy used in restaurants around the world. Developed in France starting in the late 1800s, mise en place is a step-by-step process for producing high-quality food efficiently. Chefs can never afford to stop the whole kitchen just so they can clean up. They learn to keep their workspace clean and organized in the flow of the meals they are preparing. — link: 2617, 05-08-2023, p.617, yellow
The three habits most important to your Second Brain include: Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work. Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything. Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self. — link: 2641, 05-08-2023, p.641, yellow
Checklist #1: Project Kickoff — link: 2665, 05-08-2023, p.665, yellow
This is where the Project Kickoff Checklist comes in. Here’s my own checklist: Capture my current thinking on the project. Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes. Search for related terms across all folders. Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder. — link: 2674, 05-08-2023, p.674, yellow
Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project. — link: 2678, 05-08-2023, p.678, yellow
Checklist #2: Project Completion — link: 2729, 05-08-2023, p.729, yellow
Here’s my checklist: Mark project as complete in task manager or project management app. Cross out the associated project goal and move to “Completed” section. Review Intermediate Packets and move them to other folders. Move project to archives across all platforms. If project is becoming inactive: add a current status note to the project folder before archiving. — link: 2738, 05-08-2023, p.738, yellow
I also like to cross out the goal and move it to a different section called “Completed.” Any time I need some motivation, I can look through this list and be reminded of all the meaningful goals I’ve achieved in the past. It doesn’t matter if the goal is big or small—keeping an inventory of your victories and successes is a wonderful use for your Second Brain. — link: 2755, 05-08-2023, p.755, yellow
It’s very empowering to realize you can put a project in “cold storage” and let go of the mental toll of having to keep it in mind. — link: 2779, 05-08-2023, p.779, yellow
Here are some other items you can include on your Project Completion Checklist. I encourage you to personalize it for your own needs: Answer postmortem questions: What did you learn? What did you do well? What could you have done better? What can you improve for next time? Communicate with stakeholders: Notify your manager, colleagues, clients, customers, shareholders, contractors, etc., that the project is complete and what the outcomes were. Evaluate success criteria: Were the objectives of the project achieved? Why or why not? What was the return on investment? Officially close out the project and celebrate: Send any last emails, invoices, receipts, feedback forms, or documents, and celebrate your accomplishments with your team or collaborators so you receive the feeling of fulfillment for all the effort you put in. — link: 2781, 05-08-2023, p.781, yellow
The practice of conducting a “Weekly Review” was pioneered by executive coach and author David Allen in his influential book Getting Things Done. — link: 2800, 05-08-2023, p.800, yellow
Allen recommends using a Weekly Review to write down any new to-dos, review your active projects, and decide on priorities for the upcoming week. I suggest adding one more step: review the notes you’ve created over the past week, give them succinct titles that tell you what’s inside, and sort them into the appropriate PARA folders. — link: 2802, 05-08-2023, p.802, yellow
The Noticing Habits: Using Your Second Brain to Engineer Luck — link: 2875, 05-08-2023, p.875, yellow
Here are some examples: Noticing that an idea you have in mind could potentially be valuable and capturing it instead of thinking, “Oh, it’s nothing.” Noticing when an idea you’re reading about resonates with you and taking those extra few seconds to highlight it. Noticing that a note could use a better title—and changing it so it’s easier for your future self to find it. Noticing you could move or link a note to another project or area where it will be more useful. Noticing opportunities to combine two or more Intermediate Packets into a new, larger work so you don’t have to start it from scratch. Noticing a chance to merge similar content from different notes into the same note so it’s not spread around too many places. Noticing when an IP that you already have could help someone else solve a problem, and sharing it with them, even if it’s not perfect. — link: 2879, 05-08-2023, p.879, yellow
The entire point of building a Second Brain and pouring your thoughts into it is to make those thoughts less vulnerable to the passage of time. They will be ready to pick up right where you left off when you have more time or motivation. To make this concrete: There’s no need to capture every idea; the best ones will always come back around eventually. There’s no need to clear your inbox frequently; unlike your to-do list, there’s no negative consequence if you miss a given note. There’s no need to review or summarize notes on a strict timeline; we’re not trying to memorize their contents or keep them top of mind. When organizing notes or files within PARA, it’s a very forgiving decision of where to put something, since search is so effective as a backup option. — link: 2925, 05-08-2023, p.925, yellow
Chapter 10 The Path of Self-Expression — link: 2946, 05-08-2023, p.946, yellow
As you build a Second Brain, your biological brain will inevitably change. It will start to adapt to the presence of this new technological appendage, treating it as an extension of itself. Your mind will become calmer, knowing that every idea is being tracked. It will become more focused, knowing it can put thoughts on hold and access them later. I often hear that people start to feel a tremendous sense of conviction—for their goals, their dreams, and the things they want to change or influence in the world—because they know they have a powerful system behind them amplifying every move they make. — link: 3006, 05-08-2023, p.006, yellow
The Shift from Scarcity to Abundance — link: 3033, 05-08-2023, p.033, yellow
I see so many people trying to operate in this new world under the assumptions of the past—that information is scarce, and therefore we need to acquire and consume and hoard as much of it as possible. We’ve been conditioned to view information through a consumerist lens: that more is better, without limit. Through the lens of scarcity, we constantly crave more, more, more information, a response to the fear of not having enough.1 We’ve been taught that information must be jealously guarded, because someone could use it against us or steal our ideas. — link: 3036, 05-08-2023, p.036, yellow
It is all too easy to default to collecting more and more content without regard to whether it is useful or beneficial to us. — link: 3041, 05-08-2023, p.041, yellow
The paradox of hoarding is that no matter how much we collect and accumulate, it’s never enough. — link: 3045, 05-08-2023, p.045, yellow
The lens of scarcity also tells us that the information we already have must not be very valuable, compelling us to keep searching externally for what’s missing inside. — link: 3045, 05-08-2023, p.045, yellow
An Abundance Mindset tells us that there is an endless amount of incredibly powerful knowledge everywhere we look—in the content we consume, in our social network, in our bodies and intuitions, and in our own minds. — link: 3048, 05-08-2023, p.048, yellow
Life tends to surface exactly what we need to know, whether we like it or not. Like a compassionate but unyielding teacher, reality doesn’t bend or cave to our will. It patiently teaches us in what ways our thinking is not accurate, and those lessons tend to show up across our lives again and again. — link: 3052, 05-08-2023, p.052, yellow
Making the shift to a mindset of abundance is about letting go of the things we thought we needed to survive but that no longer serve us. It means giving up low-value work that gives us a false sense of security but that doesn’t call forth our highest selves. It’s about letting go of low-value information that seems important, but that doesn’t make us better people. It’s about putting down the protective shield of fear that tells us we need to protect ourselves from the opinions of others, because that same shield is keeping us from receiving the gifts they want to give us. — link: 3054, 05-08-2023, p.054, yellow
The Shift from Obligation to Service — link: 3059, 05-08-2023, p.059, yellow
There are people who will be reached only if they are reached by you. People who have no other source for the kind of guidance you can provide. People who don’t know where to look for solutions to problems they might not even know they have. You can be that person for them. — link: 3078, 05-08-2023, p.078, yellow
The Shift from Consuming to Creating — link: 3084, 05-08-2023, p.084, yellow
The practice of building a Second Brain is more than the sum of capturing facts, theories, and the opinions of others. At its core, it is about cultivating self-awareness and self-knowledge. — link: 3085, 05-08-2023, p.085, yellow
When you encounter an idea that resonates with you, it is because that idea reflects back to you something that is already within you. Every external idea is like a mirror, surfacing within us the truths and the stories that want to be told. — link: 3086, 05-08-2023, p.086, yellow
In a 1966 book,* the British-Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi made an observation that has since become known as “Polanyi’s Paradox.” It can be summarized as “We know more than we can say.” — link: 3088, 05-08-2023, p.088, yellow
The process of knowing yourself can seem mystical, but I see it as eminently practical. It starts with noticing what resonates with you. Noticing what seems to call out to you in the external world and gives you a sense of déjà vu. — link: 3107, 05-08-2023, p.107, yellow
There is a universe of thoughts and ideas and emotions within you. Over time, you can uncover new layers of yourself and new facets of your identity. You search outside yourself to search within yourself, knowing that everything you find has always been a part of you. — link: 3108, 05-08-2023, p.108, yellow
It was around this time that I made two discoveries that changed, and saved, my life. The first was meditation and mindfulness. I began to meditate and discovered a whole realm of spirituality and introspection that I never knew existed. I learned, to my astonishment, that I am not my thoughts. That my thoughts were the constant background chatter of my subconscious mind, and that I could choose whether to “believe” what they were telling me. — link: 3121, 05-08-2023, p.121, yellow
Meditation gave me more relief from my symptoms than anything the doctors could prescribe. My pain became my teacher, showing me what needed my attention. — link: 3124, 05-08-2023, p.124, yellow
The only way to discover the answer to these questions is by speaking and seeing what comes out. Some of what you say might not resonate with others or provide value to them, but occasionally, you will strike on something—a way of seeing, a perspective, a story—that blows people’s minds and visibly transforms how they see the world. — link: 3139, 05-08-2023, p.139, yellow
You can also simplify things by focusing on just one stage of building your Second Brain. Think about where you are now and where you want to be in the near future: Are you hoping to remember more? Focus on developing the practice of capturing and organizing your notes according to your projects, commitments, and interests using PARA. Are you hoping to connect ideas and develop your ability to plan, influence, and grow in your personal and professional life? Experiment with consistently distilling and refining your notes using Progressive Summarization and revisiting them during weekly reviews. Are you committed to producing more and better output with less frustration and stress? Focus on creating one Intermediate Packet at a time and looking for opportunities to share them in ever more bold ways. — link: 3162, 05-08-2023, p.162, yellow
As you begin your journey, here are twelve practical steps you can take right now to get your Second Brain started. Each one of them is a starting point to begin establishing the habits of personal knowledge management in your life: Decide what you want to capture. Think about your Second Brain as an intimate commonplace book or journal. What do you most want to capture, learn, explore, or share? Identify two to three kinds of content that you already value to get started with. Choose your notes app. If you don’t use a digital notes app, get started with one now. See Chapter 3 and use the free guide at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources for up-to-date comparisons and recommendations. Choose a capture tool. I recommend starting with a read later app to begin saving any article or other piece of online content you’re interested in for later consumption. Believe me, this one step will change the way you think about consuming content forever. Get set up with PARA. Set up the four folders of PARA (Projects; Areas; Resources; Archives) and, with a focus on actionability, create a dedicated folder (or tag) for each of your currently active projects. Focus on capturing notes related to those projects from this point forward. Get inspired by identifying your twelve favorite problems. Make a list of some of your favorite problems, save the list as a note, and revisit it any time you need ideas for what to capture. Use these open-ended questions as a filter to decide which content is worth keeping. Automatically capture your ebook highlights. Set up a free integration to automatically send highlights from your reading apps (such as a read later or ebook app) to your digital notes (see my recommendations at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources). Practice Progressive Summarization. Summarize a group of notes related to a project you’re currently working on using multiple layers of highlighting to see how it affects the way you interact with those notes. Experiment with just one Intermediate Packet. Choose a project that might be vague, sprawling, or simply hard, and pick just one piece of it to work on—an Intermediate Packet. Maybe it is a business proposal, a chart, a run of show for an event, or key topics for a meeting with your boss. Break the project down into smaller pieces, make a first pass at one of the pieces, and share it with at least one person to get feedback. Make progress on one deliverable. Choose a project deliverable you’re responsible for and, using the Express techniques of Archipelago of Ideas, Hemingway Bridge, and Dial Down the Scope, see if you can make decisive progress on it using only the notes in your Second Brain. Schedule a Weekly Review. Put a weekly recurring meeting with yourself on your calendar to begin establishing the habit of conducting a Weekly Review. To start, just clear your notes inbox and decide on your priorities for the week. From there, you can add other steps as your confidence grows. Assess your notetaking… — link: 3168, 05-08-2023, p.168, yellow