Have you ever tried to remember something but you could feel yourself actively forgetting it? Maybe it was a fact during conversation or a business idea while you were driving — the point is, you’re not alone
Tiego Forte recognized this and decided it doesn’t have to be this way. Join us in the next ___ minutes as we learn how to build a second brain.
Part One: The Foundation
Where It All Started
While in his junior year of college, Tiego felt a pain in the back of his throat that would simply not go away for whatever reason. After countless prescriptions and doctor’s visits later and still no progress, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He eventually discovered that what he had was not a medical condition but a functional one that required changes in how he took care of his body.
Tiego looked back on how his notetaking was just as important as the medicine he was taking, and so he applied this to other aspects of his life. By writing things down and keeping track of things in a systematic way, Tiego was slowly beginning to develop his Second Brain.
What Is a Second Brain?
The average person consumes so much media today that it is often times overwhelming. All of this mental juggling leaves us with less time to focus on what we really care about.
Tiego solution? We need a new relationship with information.
Writing notes has proved helpful for centuries now, as people have been able to pour their thoughts and insights into what Tiego calls the “commonplace book.” But as our technology has become more digital, so have our notes. Today, our notes can be synced into a digital commonplace that is readily available.
Tiego calls this digital commonplace book the Second Brain. It’s the combination of a study notebook, a personal journal, and a sketchbook for new ideas.
Traditionally, we were taught how to take proper notes in school, but in the professional world it’s not always clear as to what we should be taking notes on. For modern notetaking, a note is a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head. This could include book passages, bullet points, or even photos.
Everybody should have an extended mind not just to remember more, but to lead more fulfilling lives; and all of this starts with how we think.
How a Second Brain Works
There are four things that our Second Brain can do really well for us:
Make our ideas concrete — In order to solidify our ideas we need to first declutter our brains of more complex ideas. Visualization is not only human, but also crucial for making your advancing ideas. And although digital notes are not physical, you can still see them and move them with your fingers.
Reveal new associations between ideas — It’s important that you connect ideas that may not seem to be connected at first. By keeping these ideas in one place, you’re increasing the likelihood that they may in fact be related.
Incubate our ideas over time — Often times we rely on our most recent ideas when we brainstorm. Tiego suggests that we use the “slow burn” approach instead, where we gradually accumulate ideas instead of all-out binging
Sharpen our unique perspectives — The ultimate purpose of our Second Brain is to allow our own thinking to shine. If you feel like you’ve hit writer’s block or that your creative well has run dry, then you need a deeper well.
Part Two: The Method
Capture—Keep What Resonates
The same way we need food and water to survive, we need information to live. You can have raw talent, but talent can be channeled and developed in order to become something more than a one-time spark. If you consider your favorite actor or musician, even they have their own systematic way of turning regular ideas into creative output. And the same goes for innovators and engineers.
At this point you might be asking yourself: How do we know what information is worth keeping and what information isn’t? The knowledge assets you gather from the external world could include:
Highlights;
Quotes;
Voice Memos;
And images.
If you look around you’ll see you already have these, albeit spread around in different places. And as you start gathering knowledge from your external world, you’ll spark new ideas within your inner world which usually include
Stories;
Insights;
Memories;
And reflections.
While the examples listed are expansive and personal, there are still four kinds of content that may not be well-suited for notes apps:
Is this sensitive information you’d like to keep secure?
Is this a special format or file type better handled by a dedicated app?
Is this a very large file?
Will it need to be collaboratively edited?
Organize—Save for Accountability
Consider the time and effort we put into buying nice furniture for our homes. The Cathedral Effect takes note of this and claims that the environment we surround ourselves with shapes our thinking. The same can be said for our Second Brain.
As you start gathering more and more material, you may get stuck wondering what to do with all of it. Tiego suggests following the acronym PARA, which stands for the four main categories of information in our lives:
Projects: Short-term efforts you’re working on right now
Areas: Longer-term responsibilities
Resources: Topics that may be useful in the future
Archives: Inactive items from the other categories
PARA is universal and is designed to work across your digital world. It organizes your information based on how actionable it is instead of what kind of information it is. Instead of sorting your notes into topics and subtopics, now you only have to as the question “In which project would this be most useful?”
Distill—Find the Essence
Our notes are things to use, not just things to collect.
Because life is always pulling us away from our priorities, it can be difficult to get a note into your Second Brain. That is why it’s important to determine your note’s discoverability early on — how easy it is to discover your note has key points worth using. In fact, discoverability is actually missing from most people’s notes because most people can’t make their content accessible in the future.
Tiego also makes it a point to go over the idea of progressive summarization, a process that takes your raw notes and distills them into usable material. You highlight the main points of a note, then highlight the main points of those highlights and keep doing so, all the while distilling your note into several layers.
At layer one, you’ve already captured key excerpts
At layer two, the note is already more discoverable
At layer three, you are highlighting important parts of your highlights
Being able to easily recall your notes quickly is extremely important given the limited time and energy we have every day. This method would also make it easier to write summaries, given that you have already highlighted key points and important passages.
Express—Show Your Work
Traditionally, we have been told to work “with the end in mind” with an emphasis on achieving results. As a result, our notes, drafts, and outlines tend to go unappreciated. Considering what little time we have while we are alive, we can’t afford to let our notes and research disappear anymore.
Express is all about refusing to wait until everything is perfectly lined up for you. It’s better to express our ideas earlier in smaller chunks so we can see what does and doesn’t work early on rather than later.
Dividing our tasks into smaller parts isn’t something new, but we can’t just stop there. We need a system for managing those parts, and that system happens to be our Second Brain, and it’s made up of small works-in-progress called “Intermediate Packets.” In fact, there are five kinds of Intermediate Packets you can use in your work:
Distilled notes — Distilled books or articles that have easy-to-access information
Outtakes — Material that didn’t make it in a past project but could be useful in the future
Work-in-process — Documents/plans you produced in past projects
Final deliverables — Concrete pieces of work you’ve delivered in past projects
Documents created by others — Knowledge assets created by members of your team
Part Three: The Shift
The Art of Creative Execution
We can’t expect to come up with brilliant ideas on demand all the time. In order to truly do so, you need a routine that can consistently bring interesting ideas to the surface.
Tiego calls this routine the creative process and its roots can be found in history. And while the products of creativity are always changing to match what is hot or trendy, the process itself is immovable.
Simply put, the process of creating anything goes back and forth from divergence and convergence. It’s so fundamental that we can see it present in any kind of creative field. More often than not, the creative process begins with divergence as you draw on outside sources for inspiration. But if all we did was diverge, we would never arrive anywhere.
Convergence narrows our options and weeds out possibilities. This allows us to decide what is truly essential for our creation, and in turn we can make something that we are proud of.
If we were to categorize our four steps of CODE into being convergent or divergent, Capture and Organize would be convergent, as Distill and Express would be divergent.
The Essential Habits of Digital Organizers
Our Second Brain is used to harbor both productivity and creativity. When we are organized, these two become complementary, and this balance can actually be created in our Second Brain. Being organized is not a personality trait — it’s a habit.
Tiego refers to how a chef’s demand for quality and quantity is similar to that of a knowledge worker. The system for accomplishing this every night is called mise en place, which prioritized keeping the workplace clean in the flow of the meals they are preparing. Like a chef, knowledge workers need to learn how to externalize their thinking into their work environments.
There are three kinds of habits you should integrate into your Second Brain. These habits can create boundaries around what’s most important in your life and ensure that your Second Brain is always functional:
Project Checklists — Making sure you start and finish your projects in a timely manner
Weekly and Monthly Reviews — Reviewing your work and life every now and then to see if there are areas you want to change
Noticing Habits — Finding small opportunities to move notes to make them more discoverable for yourself in the future
The Path of Self-Expression
Building a Second Brain is not easy — it takes hard work and dedication. What may look like chaos from the outside to others may be perfectly synchronous to you. If you decide that you are ready, here are the twelve steps you can take right now that can jump start your second brain:
- Decide what you want to capture
- Choose your notes app
- Choose a capture tool
- Get set up with PARA
- Get inspired by identifying your twelve favorite problems
- Automatically capture your ebook highlights
- Practice Progressive Summarization
- Experiment with just one Intermediate Packet
- Make progress on one deliverable
- Schedule a Weekly Review
- Assess your noteteaking proficiency
- Join the PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) community
Chase what excites you. Run after your passions, dreams, and obsessions all while giving it your all. Just make sure you take some notes along the way.