Related: Personal Development MOC
Related Books:
📚 Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte
Quick Summary + My Review
A place to organize and access information, constantly evolving and refining itself, to reduce the burden of needing to remember everything. BASB gives a philosophical framework on how to organize ideas in the age of information as a knowledge worker. It’s a personal knowledge management system designed to serve a lifetime of learning. I recommend everyone reads it.
I’d been keeping a “Second Brain” across different notebooks and note-taking apps since college without realizing it. As I advanced in my career, took classes, or just learned something new, I was hitting my limit of retrieving useful information in a timely way, and it was giving me a lot of anxiety. Since originally reading it in 2022, I’ve used Obsidian as my Second Brain of choice and Quartz as a way for me to publish and get feedback on public notes. For me, the book was less on how to take notes, but rather changing our mindset about their function.
Why bother?
“Knowledge worker” is a fluffy, modern (read: corporate) title for people working with ideas. The truth is everyone is a knowledge worker: you learn from experiences, and you use that information for a project or life event. Rinse and repeat x infinity.
My first experience of overwhelm was my first job as a research associate fresh out of university. I had pages and pages of class notes, experiment tips, and keystone research papers. But I couldn’t remember this information when I needed it, going in circles between colleagues and the internet, only to realize “aha I remember this now.” I felt anxious and useless.
So I started writing.
It started on my personal Notion: helpful tips for minipreps and cloning, notes on bacteria media, how to lead lab meetings. Then, the lab decided to create an internal wiki, and I wrote even more: how to place orders (& track them), sending plasmids for sequencing, and waste disposal protocols.
It helped me visualize how tasks and experiments flowed together in lab (even across projects), developed improvements on old workflows, and linked concepts together. Most importantly, my mental health improved. I didn’t feel the pressure to remember everything at the drop of a hat! I could consult my notes. Everytime I encountered a new problem, or something changed, I put it on my Notion and (if relevant) the lab wiki. I benefited from “past” me and was helping “future” me.
the 4 benefits of a second brain
1. Making our ideas concrete: writing translates an abstract thought to a concrete insight.
2. Revealing new associations between ideas: keeping ideas close together helps spark new connections.
3. Incubating our ideas over time: we draw on accumulated learnings across time
4. Sharpening our unique perspectives: the result of the above points
Save only what’s relevant to you
You must fight the urge to highlight, save, and export everything. A second brain doesn’t have everything known to mankind. It’s not Wikipedia!
We learn best when we connect new info to already existing info, or when it’s directly applicable to us. Second brains are useful to handle the information you’re already consuming, not an external pressure to consume more.
Capture - Keep What Resonates
Often, the ideas that resonate are the ones that are most unusual, counterintuitive, interesting, or potentially useful. Don't make it an analytical decision, and don't worry about. why exactly it resonates just look inside for a feeling of pleasure, curiosity, wonder, or excitement, and let that be your signal for when it's time to capture a passage, an image, a quote, or a fact.
How to identify when to take notes
Using the example of reading an article online:
- Put down your first impressions about a text, argument, or piece of info
- Notice your interest piquing - if you feel curiosity, wonder, excitement, write it down!
- Ideas that are “unusual, couninteruitive, interesting, or potentially useful”
- Cross-reference ideas with your Twelve Favorite Problems - this will help with making connections
Write your “Twelve Favorite Problems”
Famous physicist Richard Feynman had “Twelve Problems” he always kept in his head. Whenever he learned a new piece of information, he “tested” it against these questions. Was there a link? Did it support, or negate, any of them?
Twelve Favorite Problems
Feynman’s approach was to maintain list of dozen questions, When a new scientific finding came out, he would open test against each of his questions to see if it shed any new light on the problem. This cross-disciplinary approach allowed him to make to connections across seemingly unrelated subjects, while continuing follow his sense of curiosity.
You don’t need to be a physicist to have twelve favorite problems. Here are some examples:
Examples of problems from Forte's students
- How can we make society fairer and more equitable?
- How do I live less in the past and more in the present?
- What can I do to make eating healthily easier?
- How do I start reading all the books I already have instead of buying more?
Your notes only solve the problem of rediscovering those sources when you need them.
Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible. It is method for forgetting as much as possible.
How to identify when to take notes
“I think it’s important to put your impressions down on the first reading because those are the initial instincts about what you thought was good or what you didn’t understand or what you thought was bad.”
We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize-rather than disrupt-rational thinking.’ When something resonates, it is our emotion-based, intuitive mind telling us it is interesting before our logical mind can explain why.
Setting yourself up for success
It is only the steady completion of tangible wins that can infuse you with a sense of determination, momentum, and accomplishment. It doesn’t matter how small the victories. Even the tiniest breakthrough can become a stepping-stone to more creative, more interesting futures than you can imagine.
There’s a name for this phenomenon: the Cathedral Effect. Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves in powerfully shapes our thinking. 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. No one questions the importance of having physical spaces that make us feel calm and centered, but when it comes your digital to workspace, it’s likely you’ve spent little time, if any, arranging that space to enhance your productivity or creativity.
As knowledge workers we spend many hours every day within digital environments our computers, smartphones, and the web. Unless you take control kinds of think of those virtual spaces and shape them to support the thing you want to do, every minute spent there will feel taxing and distracting.
Raw Notes
-
quartz-to-do-note
-
we spend many hours every day within digital environments