Tiago Forte's Blog, page 34
August 27, 2019
Public Libraries: Our Last Stand for Social Infrastructure
The relationships that underpin a strong community don’t happen by accident.
They require “social infrastructure” – the physical spaces in which people have direct, face-to-face interaction. Communities emerge from places like schools, playgrounds, parks, athletic fields, sidewalks, courtyards, community gardens, churches, civic associations, markets, cafes, diners, barber shops, bookstores, and libraries.
Libraries are the focus of two books I read recently, which together gave me a profound new appreciation for their importance as social infrastructure.
Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People (affiliate link) and Marilyn Johnson’s This Book is Overdue! (affiliate link) explore a world of urban controversies, exciting new ideas, changing demographics, and impassioned librarians I never knew existed.
This article is a summary of the main ideas I encountered in these books, along with our experience at a recent training we delivered to the staff of the Palm Beach County Library in South Florida.
Libraries as social infrastructure
Social infrastructure is different from the more widely known “social capital.” Social capital is a measure of the strength of people’s interpersonal networks, while social infrastructure refers to the physical conditions that determine how much social capital develops in the first place. It is more fundamental, and more tangible.
The study of social infrastructure asks, “What conditions in the places we inhabit make it more likely that people will develop strong or supportive relationships, and what conditions make it more likely that people will grow isolated and alone?”
The mere existence of public spaces doesn’t ensure that social capital will emerge. It depends how they are designed. Many modern public spaces are designed for maximum efficiency – dropping off the kids at school as efficiently as possible, getting people their coffee at the cafe as quickly as possible, maximizing the flow of shoppers through checkout and out of the store.
But designing for maximum efficiency also tends to keep people separate and discourage interaction, which is, after all, highly inefficient. This explains why so much of our shared infrastructure doesn’t promote shared values.
Klinenberg writes:
“[Social infrastructure] encourages people to form bonds that extend beyond their immediate families, not because they set out to “build community,” but simply because relationships naturally form when people engage in sustained, repeated interaction doing things they enjoy.”
He continues:
“The social cohesion that is essential for democracy emerges from shared participation in meaningful projects, not just from a commitment to abstract beliefs and values.”
Libraries are one of the last remaining places where people of all ages and backgrounds can find “shared participation in meaningful projects.”
They help build friendships and support networks among neighbors who may never otherwise meet. They teach valuable life skills to kids and adults alike. They provide things to see, things to do, and programs to take part in for people who may be lonely, disconnected, or disadvantaged.
The role of libraries
From these books, I understood for the first time the connection between what goes on in my local library, and the maintenance of a healthy democracy. These are the five pillars I identified as the role of libraries in modern society.
To protect free speech and truth
The “post-truth” era has made almost every source of information into a weapon. There are few disinterested parties we can go to for sound advice. Librarians have remained a neutral party in this war, trusted by the public more than any profession except nurses.
As E.J. Josey said, “Information justice is a human rights issue; the public library must remain ‘the people’s university’…and librarians can get involved and shape the future or they can sit back and watch the changes.” We cannot have justice in society unless we have justice in our access to information.
To provide space for intellectual exploration
Schools have become increasingly metrics driven in recent years, in a race to meet educational standards. But this has made “learning for learning’s sake” increasingly hard to find. Libraries provide a place that is safe not only physically, but also intellectually. A place where no one will question your choices, scrutinize what you’re reading, or force their priorities on you.
Marilyn Johnson recounts the words of a young woman named Shannon who found in her local public library a place of refuge and intellectual freedom:
“I never, ever encountered a librarian who said something like ‘Why would you want to do that?’ or ‘I can’t let you use that machine, you’re too young.’ I was shy, but they never made me feel weird. Nobody treated me like I was special or supersmart, either. They were just neutral. And that, I think, was a real gift. It made the library a space of permission, not encouragement that pushed you in a certain direction, where you feel like people are watching you and like giving their approval, but just freedom to pursue what you want.”
To help people improve themselves
Libraries are the original advocates of self-improvement. Klinenberg quotes from a conversation he had with a New York City librarian named Andrew:
“At the library, the assumption is you are better. You have it in you already. You just sort of need to be exposed to these things and provide yourself an education. The library assumes the best out of people. The services it provides are founded upon the assumption that if given the chance, people will improve themselves.”
Andrew continues:
“…a lot of adults who use the library aren’t just people who are trying to improve themselves in terms of, say, intellectual capacity. They’re trying to improve themselves because they need an environment that’s not like every other environment they’ve ever known, that judges them, that takes advantage of them, that doesn’t want anything to do with them, doesn’t understand their role in society.”
This self-improvement is not just an individual pursuit of reading books. It happens in the activities that define the daily life of a library: book clubs, movie nights, sewing circles, and classes in art, music, current events, and computing.
To develop young people
Libraries are one of the very few public spaces where children are still free to roam, while still under adult supervision.
Children’s libraries give children their first small taste of independence, giving them library cards and the choice of how to use them. They offer study help and after-school programs in art, science, music, language, and math.
As they grow up, libraries can recommend books, authors, and genres to teenagers who may be seeking answers to questions they don’t even know how to articulate. They provide a refuge for young people who want to study or socialize without being hassled. And they train young citizens by teaching them what it means to borrow and take care of something public, and return it for others to use.
To serve everyone
This is perhaps the least tangible, but most important role of libraries in modern society.
It feels like a radical statement today to say that “Everyone is welcome.” Regardless of whether they are a citizen, a voter, a taxpayer, or a convicted felon, the library is free to everyone who walks in the door. In a time where market logic drives so much of what we do, libraries bestow dignity on everyone equally. They give us a chance to recognize the humanity of others, and in so doing, recognize it in ourselves.
The foundational principle of the library is that all people deserve free, open access to our shared culture and heritage and knowledge. Libraries are the guardians of the tangible artifacts that make our human rights enforceable. The library is one of the very few places left that serves everyone equally, regardless of their social status or ability to pay.
If we don’t invest in social infrastructure, the material foundations of our social and civic life erode. If we defund our libraries in favor of “looking things up on the Internet,” we will lose one of the few places dedicated to training people in the values and skills of democracy.
If you liked these ideas, I’ve started this list of “Cool Twitter librarians” you can follow to get more exposure to innovative thinking on public libraries.
Thank you to Brendan Schlagel, Jessica Burton, Andy Sparks, Bushra Farooqui, James Alkire, Doug Crane, and Lauren Valdez for their feedback and suggestions. Any errors, omissions, or indiscretions are purely mine.
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Libraries in the Digital Age: A Case Study in Equipping Librarians with the Tools of Idea Management
Last year I received an intriguing message from someone who called himself “The Efficient Librarian.” He had recently completed my online course Building a Second Brain, and said he wanted to talk about a collaboration.
This mysterious sender turned out to be Doug Crane, writer of The Efficient Librarian blog and director of the county library system in Palm Beach, in South Florida. In his role managing more than 500 library staff in the second largest county east of the MIssissippi, I learned that Doug was on a mission: to update the library for the digital age.
Doug had discovered David Allen’s Getting Things Done method years before, and in 2012 developed a workshop to teach the method to his staff. It was received enthusiastically, and he went on to speak and facilitate workshops at regional library conferences and associations across the state of Florida. Today he is the director of a sprawling network of 17 branches managing 1.2 million items, including books, CDs, DVDs, and many others
Doug called me because he had seen in my course a vision for the future of libraries. He saw that rather than being a force of disruption, technology could usher in a new golden age of Idea Management. An age when librarians spent less time helping people find reference materials on the shelf, and more time helping them solve complex problems using both online and offline resources.
In Doug’s manifesto, he points out that librarians were the original knowledge workers. Long before any of us experienced the stress of “information overload,” librarians were figuring out how to organize huge volumes of information and make it accessible to the public. Long before Google adopted it as their mission statement, librarians were hard at work inventing systems and tools to “organize the world’s knowledge and make it universally useful and accessible.”
But over the past few decades, the Internet upended the profession. As generation after generation of new online platforms emerged faster and faster, libraries struggled to adapt. No longer were librarians the guardians and gatekeepers of scarce knowledge. Instead, they had to learn how to help people make sense of abundant information online, vetted by no one. The controversy about how to cite Wikipedia in class essays was just the very tip of the iceberg – we now live in a “post-truth” era where every source of information is suspect.
In Doug’s vision, librarians could become not just reference specialists, but personal research consultants. They could master the skill of traversing multiple streams of information flowing through our increasingly digital lives. And they could teach that skill to patrons, unleashing a wave of creativity and empowerment in the communities they serve.
Imagine a future where a library was not primarily about the specific information on the shelves, but about the skills of curating, filtering, digesting, and managing information. Like a martial arts dojo, it would concentrate on training people in skills that would be useful outside its walls.
Just as dojos teach not just the practical skill of karate, but a whole mindset of honor, respect, self-discipline, and courage, libraries would teach not only the skills of Idea Management, but the mindset needed in a digital world – self-efficacy, objectivity, tolerance, and skepticism.
Doug and I realized that we shared a belief that Idea Management, supported by the tools of digital note-taking, could be one of the most important frontiers in librarianship. That librarians could once again take a leadership role on the information frontier by embracing the powers of technology. Doug recommended two books outlining the challenge and the opportunity that public libraries are facing, and as Lauren and I read them, a whole new understanding of what is at stake dawned on us.
We decided to work together on a one-day workshop for the Palm Beach Library staff. It would be a customized version of our Building a Second Brain course, with the goal of equipping their librarians with the latest skills and tools for Idea Management using technology.
The tour
In May 2019, we touched down in Miami and made the short drive north to West Palm Beach.
It is a massive county spanning beachfront, lakes, urban and suburban development, and inland agricultural land. It is famous for its wealth, including many high-end hotels, golf courses, and beachside resorts. Trump’s winter estate, Mar-a-lago, sits on an offshore island, and his lavish golf course lies directly across the street from the library headquarters. But there is also significant poverty hiding behind the gilded reputation, with 20% of the county’s children living below the poverty line. A land of excess and contradictions.
For our first day in town, we went on a tour of the library network, visiting two branches and an annex. We were amazed at the incredible diversity of the items they have available for borrowing, and the sophistication of the services they provide.
Alongside the usual fare like books, magazines, reference titles, and microfilm, the Palm Beach Library also offers:
Wireless hotspots for those who don’t have Internet access
Bird-watching kits with binoculars
Curriculum kits for daycare centers and preschools with large-format picture books and hand puppets
Tablets, laptops, and virtual reality goggles
Book-club-in-a-bag, with a set of 10 books and discussion questions
These items combine different kinds of media according to an intended purpose, instead of a static, one-size-fits-all piece of content. The trend of “user-centered design” that has swept the technology world is now finding its way into libraries. In example after example, we saw that the library staff had noticed a need, and then brought together a set of materials that fulfilled it in the most convenient way possible.
The library also offers a range of services designed to make its catalogue as widely accessible as possible. For example:
Talking Books, a nationwide program for patrons who are visually impaired or can’t hold a book
A Books-by-Mail program, which sends books free of charge to patrons who are mobility impaired or can’t visit a branch
The Bookmobile, a mobile library bus that sets up shop temporarily at schools and other underserved locations around the county
Free lunches for students during the summer, when they lose access to free lunches at school
These special programs are in addition to about 300 events and 400 computer classes held each month, reaching 10,000 people every year.
Throughout our tour, we were surprised to see the extent to which technology was being integrated into every aspect of the library’s operations.
The main branch has a CreationStation – a soundproofed digital media room where patrons can record podcasts and music, and edit audio or video on late model Macs. Several other branches will be adding such spaces soon. RFID stickers applied to books are part of an electronic tracking system that not only saves time, but protects patrons’ privacy. And behind the scenes, we watched gleefully as a new sorting machine automatically whisked incoming returned books to the correct bins for reshelving.
At the same time, we saw how technology could be an obstacle.
According to this CNN article, loans of ebooks and audiobooks are taking off, growing at a rate of 30% per year. Libraries nationwide offer over 391 million ebooks to their patrons, including free display space at over 16,000 locations. These titles make up 45% of the total reads for major publisher Macmillan, but this isn’t in direct competition to sales: over 60% of frequent library users have also bought a book written by an author they first discovered in a library, according to Pew.
But incredibly, these digital files have to be purchased one license at a time. A multi-use audiobook license might cost $50-100, limiting how many people can read it at any given time, and only lasting a certain number of reads before it has to be re-purchased. The limitation in this case is not an outdated library not keeping up with the times, but an outdated publishing industry that continues to treat digital books like their physical predecessors.
Far from being a dusty, stale institution stuck in the past, what we saw on our tour was a vibrant, dynamic, quickly evolving organization full of people who care deeply about accessibility for everyone. Lauren and I were blown away by the breadth of the library system’s programs and services, and all of them offered for free to anyone. We came away with the sense that the library was an absolutely vital part of the community, especially for those with the fewest resources.
And this isn’t an isolated case. According to a 2016 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, about half of all Americans aged sixteen and over used a public library in the past year, and two-thirds say that closing their local branch would have a “major impact on their community.” And Millennials are the adult generation most likely to have used a public library, with 53% of Millennials (those ages 18 to 35 at the time) responding that they had used a library or bookmobile in the previous 12 months (compared with 45% of Gen Xers, 43% of Baby Boomers, and 36% of those in the Silent Generation).
Libraries are thriving, but their reputation in the digital age is not. Many question whether they are needed at all, now that information is accessible from anywhere. We saw that new practices in Idea Management could strengthen the role of libraries in a modern, digital-centric world.
The workshop
Through informal conversations, illuminating anecdotes, and a recent staff survey, we discovered that the needs of the library staff fell into 5 buckets:
How to take advantage of digital tools
How to use discretionary project time
File fragmentation
Summarizing and communicating learning
Community Research Service challenges
1. How to take advantage of digital tools
In recent years libraries have dramatically shifted from focusing exclusively on books, to offering a wide range of CDs, DVDs, magazines, audiobooks, ebooks, and other media. In recognition of this trend, about a third of the library graduate programs in the United States have dropped the word “library” from their titles, and are now known as “information science.”
But the role of technology in the everyday work of library staff has been much less clear. The proliferation of quickly changing software programs, devices, operating systems, and online platforms has left people fending for themselves.
We decided to make the workshop a hands-on experience, with each person bringing the devices they typically use to try out the new note-taking methods we would be teaching.
2. How to use discretionary project time
With budget cuts and the public’s more widespread access to basic information, library staff increasingly have more discretionary “project” time. Instead of completely structured and routine tasks, there are more one-time or unstructured projects such as creating new programs, changing the layout of a space, developing a new resource, or organizing an event. Such projects require not just self-management, but creativity.
We decided to emphasize both actionability and creativity, leading participants through formulating a Project List and identifying existing sources of knowledge they could draw inspiration from to make their work easier and more effective.
3. File fragmentation
We heard a lot of comments about the “fragmentation” of the files the library staff were managing. They already store many different kinds of information digitally, but it is scattered across different platforms, saved in different formats, and accessible on different networks or devices.
Although some of this is unavoidable due to county policies and Florida Public Records laws, we knew that we could show people how to organize their files in a simple and consistent way that supported their projects and goals, using the PARA method.
4. Summarizing and communicating learning
A lot of knowledge work involves gathering unstructured information – such as at a conference, from a book, or in a committee meeting – and then packaging it up in some form so it can be conveyed to others. And we found that library work is no different – often someone would attend a conference or event, and struggle when they had to come back and communicate what they had learned to their colleagues.
We decided to train participants in Progressive Summarization, a method of structuring and distilling notes to make them easier to retrieve. We knew that this tool would help them take what they already do and are already an expert in, and make it available to others.
5. Community Research Service challenges
One of the newest and most valuable services offered by the Palm Beach Library is their Community Research Service (CRS). It is a free service offered not only to patrons but also to local government agencies, non-profits, and other community groups. Trained librarians are assigned to these organizations to help them locate the best resources for whatever research they are conducting, and then put them to use.
The CRS represents an important shift not only from looking up facts to solving complex problems, but also in taking staff outside library walls to do work in the community. This is part of the library’s mission to “bridge the digital divide,” helping patrons to find, filter, curate, and digest good sources that they can put into action. It’s about not just providing the right answer, but teaching people to find answers for themselves.
In Doug’s words, “I really want to get the bulk of our staff who work in these branches more engaged in the community that they serve. I want to see them ultimately being as comfortable being outside the building, delivering library services, as they are in the building.” He wants his staff to “…be that expert in teaching people those initial digital literacy skills; not only how to discern what’s a good information source, but to manage the information sources.”
Although this service was not directly in the scope of this workshop, we knew that equipping the participants with reusable resources would allow them to translate what they learned with us into their own computer classes and other workshops, which reach 10,000 people every year.
We developed and open-sourced a OneNote Resource Guide, a public shared notebook containing helpful resources on how to use Microsoft OneNote, a free note-taking app available on all the major operating systems and mobile devices. We also decided we would upload all the recordings, slides, and other materials produced for the training to a private online course on the learning management platform Teachable. Control of this course would be turned over to the library administration at the end of the project, so it could become a renewable educational resource for current and future staff to review.
The outcomes
The training was a success, producing a lot of insights for both participants and for us. Here were some of the things that the 30 participants said they took away from the experience:
“Useful concepts of learning, organizing, capturing and storing info”
“Breaking down challenging projects into intermediate packets”
“The ‘containers versus stream of information’ analogy: that we shouldn’t, and cannot possibly, save everything”
“The idea of not recreating the wheel, use existing sources of knowledge”
“Keep capturing in mind at all times”
“I have a place to pull from my past learned knowledge and not lose it/refer back to it whenever I want”
“OneNote ‘notes’ can include whole articles, files, voice recordings, photos, etc. which, depending on what kind of a project you’re working on, could be a big plus”
“Digital note taking can be a time saver, there are different ways to incorporate digital note taking into daily work”
“Use previous work examples as templates”
“Keeping all notes in one place makes it easier to keep track of tasks and projects”
“How to make use of knowledge that is captured (actionable v. inactionable)”
By far the biggest challenge we encountered was in the implementation of the technology. Participants had a range of difficulties, from network firewalls that prevented them from syncing their notes, to install permissions on computers owned by the organization, to challenges with understanding how the methods taught could be put into practice on slightly different configurations.
For future trainings, we’ll either need to leave the implementation for later and focus on the principles, or have a standardized note-taking setup that everyone uses.
A new kind of curation
One theme that came up again and again over the course of the project was curation. We saw that curation was an existing activity, very familiar to librarians everywhere, that we could draw on to show how Idea Management could be a central part of the future of libraries.
Library staff are already experts on how to distinguish the best sources, compare and contrast similar works, make practical decisions about what to keep, pick works that cover different aspects of a topic, and vet them all for accuracy and relevance. All we needed to do was shift this activity from being primarily a public service offered to patrons, to being a practical skill that they could teach patrons to exercise for themselves.
The flood of information available to everyone online has ushered in a new reality: all of us need to become curators, able to pick out the signal from the noise and decide what it means for us. Without this skill, we are at the mercy of a relentless stream of updates, notifications, distractions, and news flashes pushing us in one direction or the other. Most of this content is designed to influence our thinking and behavior, not in our own interest, but in the interest of advertisers.
One of our underlying goals for the workshop was to provoke a cultural shift in the library, to show the staff that they already possess powers of curation that are desperately needed by their patrons. We wanted to make sure everyone got the same message, recognized the same challenges, and started a conversation about what it would look like for the library to become a space for learning and practice in the new skills of Idea Management.
Idea management and the future of libraries
Through this work and other reading, I’ve come to believe that Idea Management is critical for the future of society, and more specifically, the future of libraries.
It is a higher order skill that ties together research and action, fact and narrative, objectivity and meaning, all in service of people’s projects and goals. Librarians are perfectly positioned to be the leaders in understanding, implementing, and training others in the best practices. To take on this new discipline as the next era of their mission to make human knowledge universally accessible and useful.
As Doug Crane points out on his blog, notes could be considered the most relevant unit of knowledge in today’s digital world: “Notes are the basic unit of knowledge management. I define a note very broadly as an ‘information artifact with perceived value.’”
The physical format of the information we consume is no longer relevant. Information has been abstracted away from its delivery mechanisms, and can now arrive in any format, on any device, and via any channel.
The most relevant unit of knowledge is now something less tangible, but no less valuable – a “snippet” of knowledge that represents a coherent idea. The simplest way to save such an idea for personal use is as a “note.” Whether that is a digital note or a scribble on a legal pad, it represents an external memory that can be created and later retrieved.
Doug continues, “Since they are so plentiful, the care and management of notes is the key challenge of knowledge work, which is addressed by the field of personal knowledge management.” If notes are the fundamental unit of knowledge work, then we need to learn how to manage them skillfully at a large scale. We need to learn how to curate our notes as knowledge assets, like a treasure trove that grows in value with every little bit of effort we put in.
We can design better software to make digital note-taking as easy as possible. But we can only get so far without human help. Idea Management also requires hands-on training, because it represents a fundamental shift in people’s relationship to information. According to the best-selling book The Second Machine Age, “…for technology to make a difference,…for every dollar of investment in computer hardware, companies need to invest up to 9 dollars in software, training, and business process redesign.”
Instead of constantly seeking the public and the new, Idea Management shifts attention to the private and the timeless. Instead of always creating new things on the spur of the moment, it encourages people to build up reserves of research and creative inspiration. Such a deep change in mindset requires specialized training and a real human to show the way. Librarians can be the coaches that help us usher in a new relationship to information.
Idea Management turns the concrete tools of librarianship into skills, and then puts those skills at the service of individuals, inside and outside the library. We need to take what librarians already do, and make it digital and available across time and space. We need professional curators to teach others how to curate their own knowledge in service of a better life. We need to teach people how to find, filter, curate, and digest the knowledge that is available all around them.
As a side effect, such a change could transform the library profession. As Doug puts it, “…[librarians] generally join the profession to make a fundamental impact in the community. I want to ensure that they’re achieving their own goals and dreams through their work and that it is more than just serving time and getting a paycheck.” In his vision, “the library system would make such an incredible impact in the community that people just naturally know the modern value of a library beyond childhood nostalgia and what it’s done to shape the community in the digital age.”
There are over 100,000 libraries across the United States, deeply embedded in communities in every corner of the country. They are part of an existing tradition that everyone knows about. They meet people where they are, simply because the libraries are there too. And they reach millions of people at minimal cost: Columbus, Ohio has one of the highest rates of in-person visits in the country, and residents pay only about $86 per year for a $100,000 annual income home.
Libraries ushered in the modern age with the promise of universal literacy and access to knowledge. They could once again be the spark that lights a revolution in a digital age that we are all struggling to adapt to.
If you are interested in bringing our course to your library, public or not, please email lauren@fortelabs.co for more information.
Thank you to Brendan Schlagel, Jessica Burton, Andy Sparks, Bushra Farooqui, James Alkire, Doug Crane, and Lauren Valdez for their feedback and suggestions. Any errors, omissions, or indiscretions are purely mine.
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August 21, 2019
Modern Wisdom Podcast: The Definitive Guide To Digital Productivity
Enjoy this conversation on the Modern Wisdom podcast, in which I walk through each level of the Digital Productivity Pyramid, my model for how knowledge workers should be educated and trained.
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How to Build a Second Brain, with Tiago Forte
Here’s an excerpt from a short guest appearance I made for the Discover Praxis community, on how a Second Brain can be a springboard to a successful and fulfilling career.
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How to Use and Master Your Second Brain in 2019, by Tiago Forte at ProdCon
August 15, 2019
What It Feels Like to Have a Second Brain
How does it feel to have a Second Brain?
It feels like raw power. Like energy coursing into my mind and body from every source of information I have access to. Like the world is made of ideas, and I have a key to its underlying reality. It feels like I am the master of my reality, able to draw in and shape and then deploy ideas in endlessly creative ways. I can mold my experience by tweaking and redirecting the flow of information through my life, offloading any bits that I don’t need right now and taking in others that I do. It’s like navigating a ship when all I’ve known is a dinghy, the horizon extending in all directions as my imagination expands.
Having a Second Brain gives me a profound confidence in the ambitions I am pursuing. Nothing can stop me, because I am building, collecting, gathering, recruiting every idea and insight from the world’s greatest thinkers in one centralized place. Even my mistakes and my obstacles and my challenges become fuel, the priceless wisdom of my daily experience recycled back into the engine. Like a nuclear reactor, every bit of fuel increases the critical mass, accelerates the reaction, and pumps more energy into the system.
Having a Second Brain feels like being part of a system that is far greater than I am. I am in control, but barely. It works while I sleep, while I daydream, while I’m on vacation. The longer I spend away from it, the more insights it will have for me when I return. It is like an incubator, with idea micro-organisms reproducing, intermixing, mutating, and evolving faster and faster the more genetic material they have access to. It is a greenhouse, the sunlight of thought warming and growing and pressurizing itself into an explosion of new life.
Being part of this system feels like being a node in a vast network that emerged from me, but has grown far beyond anything I can understand. It is humbling and somehow reassuring that what I contribute is just one kind of thinking among many. I give my ideas over to a vast intelligence that operates on more levels, across more disciplines, and across greater timescales than I can comprehend. I increasingly have the feeling that I am just watching the system work, that I am as surprised and delighted by what it creates as anyone. I am tweaking and changing it less and less, amazed at the incredible beauty and elegance of its thinking.
The experience I have as I work with my Second Brain is that we have a relationship. It is almost as complex as a person, with its own wants, needs, goals, and history. It is like a child – a being of pure potential, of endless curiosity and open-mindedness as it encounters each new morsel of insight. It communicates with me, sometimes aligning with my interests so we can run together, but also sometimes demanding maintenance, attention, or software updates. I know that every investment in this organism will return 10-fold, 100-fold, 1,000-fold. And not in some far off hypothetical future, but in a matter of hours, days, or weeks. Such a sure investment makes the superficial pleasures of social media lose all their color in comparison. I am on my devices as much as anyone, consuming as much information as anyone else. But I am not doing what everyone else is doing with it. I am preserving the very best of everything I am exposed to, like a patient gardener squirreling away seeds and cuttings from every garden in the world, to plant in his own magnificent creation.
My Second Brain makes me feel abundant. There are so many resources everywhere. Like a Cambrian explosion of ideas and theories and frameworks and essays and tweets and income. Enter my world of ideas and I will show you how deep it goes, how many layers there are to this game I am playing. As I teach others to play it, the game gets larger, more real. Our world gets larger, the play becomes more fun and more infinite in all directions and dimensions. Our world of ideas starts to consume the physical world, starts to make it obsolete and boring and just not important. In our world there is no competition, no scarcity, no fear. Ideas only generate more ideas, more generosity, more curiosity in an ever-expanding sphere of possibility.
Working inside my Second Brain, paradoxically, I can see that ideas by themselves aren’t worth much. When you have so many choices for every decision you need to make, so many answers to any question you might ask, so many possibilities for every unknown, it becomes crystal clear that information is a commodity. What is truly scarce and precious is humans and their stories, their desires, their dreams, their consciousness. When you can create anything out of anything, the question that becomes front and center is, “What do I WANT?” No fact or insight can answer this. But having all my ideas externalized not just in my notes but on my blog, on my social media feeds, and in my books gives me the freedom to explore it.
My Second Brain constantly deepens my understanding of myself. It reflects back to me my assumptions, my stories, and the evidence I use to justify my beliefs. It reflects back to me the identity I’ve constructed, which in the light of a backlit computer screen I can see is full of holes, and gaps, and makeshift patches. But I also have more evidence, more options, more borrowed beliefs from others to fill in those gaps. I evolve faster, on more levels, a flurry of swapping modules in and out in such a way that the system of my Self works better, but at the same time, I see that I am not the modules. I am something more, something greater than the sum of its parts. This gives me the courage to detach from that Self, to let go of my need for any one idea or theory to be right or true. I can try more of them on for size, see how more of them feel, decide which of them serve me best.
Strangest of all, my Second Brain somehow allows me to open my heart wider and wider. I am not occupied by my intellect, not tied down with the mundane details of making a living. I can spend more time exploring how my body feels, what it’s telling me. I can spend time having experiences that defy my understanding of what’s real. I can afford to let my heart be broken by the tragedy and beauty and sorrow and love the world is so full of, because I am not on the front lines of my job. I am not responsible for my to do list, so I can take responsibility for finding out who I am and what I am doing on this planet. My work serves me, not the other way around. This means I can afford to let others in, to spend the time with them, to make investments in them that won’t “pay off” in any concrete way, but that make my experience of life more vibrant, more exciting, more sublime. I can afford to let my dreams become real, to let them take over both my first brain and second brain and go beyond that to recruit other people and their second brains. I can afford to be of service, to put myself at the disposal of the world and its needs.
As I open up the subterranean channels in my heart and body, I also gain access to new kinds of knowledge that the mind simply cannot access. I struggle to describe what this knowledge is and how I know it, but I assume it is the knowledge of my ancestors, my genetic and cultural inheritance, the knowledge of my evolutionary history over eons. Ideas arise from these channels, unbidden and fully formed, with a sense of certainty that no amount of logic or analysis or proof could ever muster. This certainty carries me through my days like an unstoppable river, flowing on its inexorable path toward some kind of destiny, some kind of purpose. This kind of knowledge can’t be stored in my digital notes. But I have room for it, because my mind is vacated, which means any time I need energy or motivation I can dip into the reserve of energy stored right inside my body.
My Second Brain allows me to go beyond the veil of knowledge, to see that knowledge doesn’t change anything really. It’s all interchangeable and all leads to the same place. What really changes things is experiences, and I can create those experiences for people. I can draw them in with the promise of creating such a system for themselves, and lead them through building it, and then let them in on the joke that it’s not really about knowledge. It’s about who you become in the process of creating a system that you can fully trust. The stories you have to let go of to completely put your faith in something, anything, outside of yourself. That trust then starts to spread, to yourself, to other people, to institutions, to society. They trust you in return, and before you know it you live in a world that is fundamentally friendly and in your favor. You gain access to sources of communal power that were unimaginable when you were on guard, hypervigilant for any sign that someone somewhere is taking advantage of you.
The very best word I can find to describe what it feels like to have a Second Brain is awe. I spend more time in a state of awe than I thought was possible. Awe at the complexity of what I’ve created, what it’s capable of, what it knows. Awe at how everything works out in the end, how that last note that seems to have no place becomes the lynchpin in the next project. Awe at how all knowledge is connected on such a deep level, that the same principles turn up again and again, that I can follow any thread and it will eventually lead somewhere eye-opening. I feel awe that the underlying layer of reality can actually be uncovered, against all odds, and every inch I uncover gives me more freedom, more insight, and more aliveness. And also I feel awe that the world I am uncovering is so much more complex and mysterious than anything that could ever be written down. That feels reassuring, as well.
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What it Feels Like to Have a Second Brain
How does it feel to have a Second Brain?
It feels like raw power. Like energy coursing into my mind and body from every source of information I have access to. Like the world is made of ideas, and I have a key to its underlying reality. It feels like I am the master of my reality, able to draw in and shape and then deploy ideas in endlessly creative ways. I can mold my experience by tweaking and redirecting the flow of information through my life, offloading any bits that I don’t need right now and taking in others that I do. It’s like navigating a ship when all I’ve known is a dinghy, the horizon extending in all directions as my imagination expands.
Having a Second Brain gives me a profound confidence in the ambitions I am pursuing. Nothing can stop me, because I am building, collecting, gathering, recruiting every idea and insight from the world’s greatest thinkers in one centralized place. Even my mistakes and my obstacles and my challenges become fuel, the priceless wisdom of my daily experience recycled back into the engine. Like a nuclear reactor, every bit of fuel increases the critical mass, accelerates the reaction, and pumps more energy into the system.
Having a Second Brain feels like being part of a system that is far greater than I am. I am in control, but barely. It works while I sleep, while I daydream, while I’m on vacation. The longer I spend away from it, the more insights it will have for me when I return. It is like an incubator, with idea micro-organisms reproducing, intermixing, mutating, and evolving faster and faster the more genetic material they have access to. It is a greenhouse, the sunlight of thought warming and growing and pressurizing itself into an explosion of new life.
Being part of this system feels like being a node in a vast network that emerged from me, but has grown far beyond anything I can understand. It is humbling and somehow reassuring that what I contribute is just one kind of thinking among many. I give my ideas over to a vast intelligence that operates on more levels, across more disciplines, and across greater timescales than I can comprehend. I increasingly have the feeling that I am just watching the system work, that I am as surprised and delighted by what it creates as anyone. I am tweaking and changing it less and less, amazed at the incredible beauty and elegance of its thinking.
The experience I have as I work with my Second Brain is that we have a relationship. It is almost as complex as a person, with its own wants, needs, goals, and history. It is like a child – a being of pure potential, of endless curiosity and open-mindedness as it encounters each new morsel of insight. It communicates with me, sometimes aligning with my interests so we can run together, but also sometimes demanding maintenance, attention, or software updates. I know that every investment in this organism will return 10-fold, 100-fold, 1,000-fold. And not in some far off hypothetical future, but in a matter of hours, days, or weeks. Such a sure investment makes the superficial pleasures of social media lose all their color in comparison. I am on my devices as much as anyone, consuming as much information as anyone else. But I am not doing what everyone else is doing with it. I am preserving the very best of everything I am exposed to, like a patient gardener squirreling away seeds and cuttings from every garden in the world, to plant in his own magnificent creation.
My Second Brain makes me feel abundant. There are so many resources everywhere. Like a Cambrian explosion of ideas and theories and frameworks and essays and tweets and income. Enter my world of ideas and I will show you how deep it goes, how many layers there are to this game I am playing. As I teach others to play it, the game gets larger, more real. Our world gets larger, the play becomes more fun and more infinite in all directions and dimensions. Our world of ideas starts to consume the physical world, starts to make it obsolete and boring and just not important. In our world there is no competition, no scarcity, no fear. Ideas only generate more ideas, more generosity, more curiosity in an ever-expanding sphere of possibility.
Working inside my Second Brain, paradoxically, I can see that ideas by themselves aren’t worth much. When you have so many choices for every decision you need to make, so many answers to any question you might ask, so many possibilities for every unknown, it becomes crystal clear that information is a commodity. What is truly scarce and precious is humans and their stories, their desires, their dreams, their consciousness. When you can create anything out of anything, the question that becomes front and center is, “What do I WANT?” No fact or insight can answer this. But having all my ideas externalized not just in my notes but on my blog, on my social media feeds, and in my books gives me the freedom to explore it.
My Second Brain constantly deepens my understanding of myself. It reflects back to me my assumptions, my stories, and the evidence I use to justify my beliefs. It reflects back to me the identity I’ve constructed, which in the light of a backlit computer screen I can see is full of holes, and gaps, and makeshift patches. But I also have more evidence, more options, more borrowed beliefs from others to fill in those gaps. I evolve faster, on more levels, a flurry of swapping modules in and out in such a way that the system of my Self works better, but at the same time, I see that I am not the modules. I am something more, something greater than the sum of its parts. This gives me the courage to detach from that Self, to let go of my need for any one idea or theory to be right or true. I can try more of them on for size, see how more of them feel, decide which of them serve me best.
Strangest of all, my Second Brain somehow allows me to open my heart wider and wider. I am not occupied by my intellect, not tied down with the mundane details of making a living. I can spend more time exploring how my body feels, what it’s telling me. I can spend time having experiences that defy my understanding of what’s real. I can afford to let my heart be broken by the tragedy and beauty and sorrow and love the world is so full of, because I am not on the front lines of my job. I am not responsible for my to do list, so I can take responsibility for finding out who I am and what I am doing on this planet. My work serves me, not the other way around. This means I can afford to let others in, to spend the time with them, to make investments in them that won’t “pay off” in any concrete way, but that make my experience of life more vibrant, more exciting, more sublime. I can afford to let my dreams become real, to let them take over both my first brain and second brain and go beyond that to recruit other people and their second brains. I can afford to be of service, to put myself at the disposal of the world and its needs.
As I open up the subterranean channels in my heart and body, I also gain access to new kinds of knowledge that the mind simply cannot access. I struggle to describe what this knowledge is and how I know it, but I assume it is the knowledge of my ancestors, my genetic and cultural inheritance, the knowledge of my evolutionary history over eons. Ideas arise from these channels, unbidden and fully formed, with a sense of certainty that no amount of logic or analysis or proof could ever muster. This certainty carries me through my days like an unstoppable river, flowing on its inexorable path toward some kind of destiny, some kind of purpose. This kind of knowledge can’t be stored in my digital notes. But I have room for it, because my mind is vacated, which means any time I need energy or motivation I can dip into the reserve of energy stored right inside my body.
My Second Brain allows me to go beyond the veil of knowledge, to see that knowledge doesn’t change anything really. It’s all interchangeable and all leads to the same place. What really changes things is experiences, and I can create those experiences for people. I can draw them in with the promise of creating such a system for themselves, and lead them through building it, and then let them in on the joke that it’s not really about knowledge. It’s about who you become in the process of creating a system that you can fully trust. The stories you have to let go of to completely put your faith in something, anything, outside of yourself. That trust then starts to spread, to yourself, to other people, to institutions, to society. They trust you in return, and before you know it you live in a world that is fundamentally friendly and in your favor. You gain access to sources of communal power that were unimaginable when you were on guard, hypervigilant for any sign that someone somewhere is taking advantage of you.
The very best word I can find to describe what it feels like to have a Second Brain is awe. I spend more time in a state of awe than I thought was possible. Awe at the complexity of what I’ve created, what it’s capable of, what it knows. Awe at how everything works out in the end, how that last note that seems to have no place becomes the lynchpin in the next project. Awe at how all knowledge is connected on such a deep level, that the same principles turn up again and again, that I can follow any thread and it will eventually lead somewhere eye-opening. I feel awe that the underlying layer of reality can actually be uncovered, against all odds, and every inch I uncover gives me more freedom, more insight, and more aliveness. And also I feel awe that the world I am uncovering is so much more complex and mysterious than anything that could ever be written down. That feels reassuring, as well.
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July 24, 2019
The 20 Paradigm Shifts of Building a Second Brain
By the time you read this sentence, over 1,000 people will be part of the Building A Second Brain community. This milestone has me thinking about the “paradigm shifts,” or changes in perspective or attitude, that I’ve seen graduates go through.
This may sound strange, but I increasingly believe that the purpose of this course is not to give students new ideas. It’s not even to give them useful techniques. Endless ideas and techniques are already out there for the taking. No, the purpose of this course is to take people through a series of personal paradigm shifts in their relationship to technology, knowledge, and the new world that is evolving ever faster.
Every tip and technique has a shelf life, and will someday become outdated. Even the most cutting-edge new app will eventually lose relevance. The history of managing ideas reveals a constantly changing stream of tools and techniques. But the underlying principles of idea management are timeless. They were present hundreds of years ago, and will be present hundreds of years from now. And these are the principles worth learning.
As Silvano Arieti says, “Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.”
The process of creating paradigm shifts, however, is complex. You can’t just tell someone what it is, or expect them to “get it” instantaneously. The problem is, they are hearing everything through the filter of the very paradigm you are trying to change. Which means you need to lead them through an experience in which it becomes personal – something embedded in their daily life, emotions, body, and relationships.
These are the 20 biggest paradigm shifts we’ve witnessed as students have moved through our online course Building a Second Brain.
1. The Capture Habit
There’s much more than playing catch and release with passing thoughts. Your thoughts and ideas have value, but tend to arrive when you least expect them. With an idea capture tool, you can let them live forever in a system that reflects your goals and interests.
2. Idea Recycling
Ideas are not single-use only. They can outlive the projects they were originally a part of. Every document or deliverable you create represents valuable thinking you’ve done, and can be recycled and reused in future projects. By putting in a little extra effort to preserve your work for the future, you’ll never have to do the same work twice.
3. Micro-Projects
By redefining your projects as very small, discrete targets, you can make it easier to organize your ideas while simultaneously giving yourself a consistent sense of progress.
4. Projects over Categories
Instead of organizing ideas by type or category, which leads to silos that they can’t escape from, organize your ideas according to the projects where they will be most useful and actionable.
5. Centralized Creativity
By keeping all your best ideas in one trusted place outside your head, you’ll be able to connect them together in novel ways that you never would have thought of on your own. Seeing unusual combinations of ideas makes it easier to notice patterns, leading to more powerful and unique insights in your work.
6. Borrowed Creativity
Creativity is not a mysterious force to be conjured from nothing – it emerges organically from practical efforts to gather, organize, and digest the ideas of others. Before you create novel work of your own, you can prepare by imitating the masters.
7. Slow Burn
Instead of planning and preparing far in advance for projects that might not even pan out, you can slowly gather notes in the background and then quickly snap them together right when they’re needed. This approach saves you from grueling slogs while also making use of all the background reading and learning you’re already doing anyway.
8. Favorite Problems
Problems aren’t undesirable things to be solved – they can be open-ended, recurring questions that provide direction to your reading, learning, and growth over long periods of time. Your interests and goals are not completely random – there is a coherent pattern to your thinking over time that your Second Brain allows you to document and understand.
9. Putting a Handle on the Suitcase
By distilling or summarizing your notes, you put a “handle” on the “suitcase” of a large idea. This makes it easier to get the gist of what it contains and move it around without too much effort.
10. Start with Abundance
Instead of sitting down to a blank canvas and trying to think of something good, start your creative process by sifting through a plentiful supply of interesting ideas, insights, and inspirations that you can build off of.
11. Future Self
If you make your notes a little better each time you touch them – a little more organized, a little more succinct, a little more clear – then your future self will find it easier and easier to access the knowledge you’ve saved.
12. Intermediate Packets
Cranking out work in one big push or digesting information in one big gulp is not the only way of working. By breaking down your work into a series of small, intermediate “packets,” it will be much easier to make consistent progress. And with these packets at your disposal, you’ll have many options for how to combine and remix them into new things in the future.
13. You Only Know What You Make
Instead of just passively consuming huge volumes of information that soon gets forgotten, you should use it to make new things. Applying what you learn in tangible projects not only helps the learning stick, it allows you to get feedback and incorporate the thinking of others.
14. Progress Over Perfection
Systems that must be perfect to be reliable are deeply flawed; concentrate on consistently making forward progress with your ideas instead of organizing them perfectly. Ideas only have value when they are alive and moving out in the world.
15. Just-in-Time Productivity
Once you have your ideas documented outside your head, you can create solutions to problems just-in-time, on the spot, by snapping together pre-existing parts. This not only results in better, more relevant solutions, it saves your time and energy for the things that truly matter.
16. Deoptimize yourself
Your biological brain is the bottleneck in the flow of information you are able to acquire and use. Instead of “optimizing” yourself, optimize an external system that can handle unlimited amounts of information, remember it forever, and never sleeps. Your biological brain isn’t meant to be optimized – it is meant to imagine, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you come alive.
17. The Perspective Era
The source of value in knowledge work is no longer the resources you control, the time you spend, or even the attention you’re able to dedicate – it is the unique perspective you offer based on your experience and knowledge. The future of work will increasingly be dedicated to interpreting information and persuading people how to use it, not just communicating it. This necessitates that each of us curate a collection of supporting material and research to support our point of view.
18. Containers vs. Streams
The world no longer fits into neat little boxes, or “containers” – it is all streams, which you cannot fully control or consume. You can only immerse yourself in them, and collect anything interesting that happens to float by. Now that we have almost unlimited knowledge available for free, what matters most is the situational awareness to know which knowledge is worth acquiring.
19. Ideas as Food
There is no particular food you need to survive – you only need a diverse supply of nutrients. Likewise, there is no one particular piece of information you need to accomplish any goal – you only need a diverse supply of interesting ideas to stay healthy and informed.
20. Mindful Engagement with Information
There are more choices than “be overwhelmed” and “total abstinence” when it comes to technology; idea management tools allow us to create a filter and a membrane around ourselves and intentionally decide what to let in.
Thank you to Haziq Azizi Ahmad Zakir, Sonia Sanchez, Olivier Cantin, Anna Lundbergh, Juanca Asensio, Parabhjeet Sidhu, Jeremie Rykner, Raúl Hernández González, Russell Kroeger, Ben Ford, David Laing, and Michael Grant for their valuable feedback and suggestions.
Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.
July 21, 2019
Pleasure as an Organizing Principle
This essay was originally posted on the Ribbonfarm blog.
The organizing principle of the modern world is pain.
Avoiding it, yes. But also trading in it, taking refuge in it, and using it to justify our actions. Pain has so many uses. Why would you ever give up such a versatile tool?
We trade in pain when we use it to bargain for progress. We assume that the bigger the impact we want to have, the more dramatic the change, the more we have to suffer. Isn’t that how it works? Isn’t the depth of my sacrifice a measure of how much I care?
But the pain of suffering can become its own metric, and get optimized to an extreme as all metrics eventually are. In the face of a stubborn world that doesn’t yield to our efforts, it can be easier to use the pain we are enduring as a proxy.
We take refuge in pain when we use it to hide from our problems. Pain is all-consuming, a powerful distraction from the things we don’t want to face. Pain is self-annihilating, temporarily turning off the ego that accuses us of not doing enough, not being enough. Pain can be a refuge where the overwhelming complexity of modern life is reduced to a simple, pulsating throb.
We use pain to justify ourselves when there are no other excuses. Can’t you see I’m suffering? Can’t you see I’m at my very limit? Pain passes the buck to some other cause, some other perpetrator. It is the flag we waive in the face of all our accusers, especially ourselves. As long as I am suffering, I am shielded from responsibility for the consequences of my actions. But I have to keep suffering to keep that shield in place.
We’re told that our lives are better than our ancestors’ along nearly every dimension imaginable. We are healthier, wealthier, happier, and living longer than any previous generation. But in a different way, the very technology that has made these advancements possible has also raised the visibility of pain in the world.
Black Zen teacher angel Kyodo williams says “…our access to the global scale of suffering has become immediate, through technology, but we have not developed the capacity to be with that increased awareness of suffering.” Suffering has been globalized, just like everything else. We are awash with it, like a permeating fog, every minute we are online. And we spend most of our waking hours online.
Pleasure Activism
In her book Pleasure Activism, writer and activist adrienne maree brown offers a different possibility: that pleasure could be an organizing principle. That we could use art to make the revolution so irresistible, so scintillating and exciting, that justice and liberation would be among the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet.
The existing paradigm of activism, she asserts, revolves around pain:
That we should deny our longings and skills, in favor of work that fills hours without inspiring our greatness
That we need to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that destroys the abundant world we actually live in
That factors beyond our control – our skin color, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system – determine our path and quality of life
That we should swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions
That we should just be really good at what’s already possible, and to leave the impossible alone
Brown’s work is focused on movement building and social change, but in her description I see a perfect reflection of modern life as a whole. The truth is, we are all activists now. We all have the power to reach across the world through our networks, to make a difference with our technology, and thus the responsibility to do so.
At the same time, we resist this inexorable shift toward responsibility. We already have more than enough on our plate. We are already consumed by the demands of a career or a family. Modern life is taxing enough as it is, and now you want me to defend the rights of someone on the other side of the planet?
Brown notes that “activism is so often associated with pain and suffering; really dire, serious people insisting we have to suffer, to sacrifice, to protest, to forego so many of the sensual pleasures of life.” She goes on: “…people are already so overwhelmed and depressed, why would they want anything to do with such a movement?”
I believe there is a basic switch happening at the heart of society, from pain to pleasure as the primary organizing principle. It is being driven by our desperate need for sustainability, in every sense of the word: sustainable bodies, sustainable careers, sustainable communities, and a sustainable planet. What is pleasurable is easy, and what is easy is sustainable.
What would it look like for each of us to make the switch from pain to pleasure as an organizing principle? It would require giving up the three uses for pain that we cherish so deeply.
What would it mean to give up trading in pain?
It would mean causing change in who we are being, not what we do.
Trading pain for progress ultimately doesn’t work, because (as brown argues) “you cannot create change that you yourself have not experienced.” You cannot create freedom for others through your own bondage. You cannot empower others through your own demoralization. You cannot create a fulfilling life for others by draining your own of its color. You are a seed, and that is not how seeds work.
What would it mean to give up finding refuge in pain?
It would mean getting back in touch with the sensual desires of the body.
“Pleasure is our natural, whole, and liberated state,” brown writes, and “one of the ways we know when we are free.” There is no way to expect to feel joy, satisfaction, fulfillment, meaning, or any of the other states we chase while denying the very essence of pleasure they all have in common. And pleasure begins in the body.
The opposite of pleasure is not pain, brown notes. It is dissociation, the departure of mind from body into a fantasy of its own creation. As coping mechanisms go, it is an effective one.
But with a cost, as she observes: “When you’re dissociating, it’s hard to know whether you’re doing something because you enjoy it, or because you’re just trying to escape reality.” Dissociation actually causes pain and pleasure to blur together into an endless search for stimulation.
What would it look like to give up using pain to justify ourselves?
It would mean taking responsibility. Not responsibility as blame, but responsibility as power.
We would need to take responsibility for our past, for our choices, for our behavior, for our lives. And taking that responsibility while leaving aside shame and guilt, which are just another form of pain disguised as justice.
Brown writes, “Pleasure is what allows us to make decisions aligned with our true selves.” Unless we know what stirs us, what provokes a longing deep in our belly, on what basis can we make decisions about how to lead our lives? Until we know what we deeply, truly want, we are at the mercy of externally defined obligations, which keep us docile and obedient.
By centering on pleasure, brown writes, “…we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like our only alternative in our society.”
Incorporating responsibility shows why pleasure as an organizing principle is not about excess and debauchery. It incorporates our principles and our values – the pleasure of treating others well. Brown notes that “Having resources to buy unlimited amounts of pleasure leads to excess, and excess totally destroys the spiritual experience of pleasure.” What we really need is to elevate our commitment to pleasure. To no longer be satisfied with the cheap knockoffs of sugar, Netflix, and social media.
Brown argues that “The idea is not to be in a heady state of ecstasy at all times, but rather to learn how to sense when something is good for you, to be able to feel what enough is…How much sex would be enough? How high would be high enough? How much love would feel like enough? Can you imagine being healed enough? Happy enough? Connected enough? Having enough space in your life to actually live it?”
The truth is, taking responsibility can be deeply pleasurable. It is a declaration of agency, of self-respect, of self-ownership. It is only when we take responsibility for a situation that we are free to shape it, and it is only when we shape our environment that we can be truly powerful.
Centering on pleasure
What if recycling was pleasurable? What if consuming less was pleasurable? What if voting was pleasurable? What if volunteering was pleasurable?
We wouldn’t need extra incentives, or special programs, or press campaigns. We wouldn’t need an overwhelming number of facts and statistics, nor guilt trips toward how others live. There would be nothing to enforce, nothing to advocate for.
If these things were pleasurable then the revolution would be simply irresistible. We’d have to start a waiting list.
Beyond giving up our predilection for pain, what would it look like to center on pleasure as an organizing principle in your life and work?
It would mean embracing healing as the re-opening of the parts of ourselves that have closed
Healing needs some rebranding. It implies that one is sick, broken, in need of rescue. But there is a different way of thinking about it: as a continuous process of re-opening. We could think of healing as an expansive phenomenon, expanding your repertoire of how you are allowed to feel. And thus the sources of power you know how to access.
It would mean deciding that we are not going to spend our time doing things that don’t make us come alive
Liberation has to start with us. If we cannot liberate ourselves, what makes us think we can liberate the world? That doesn’t mean there’s no awkwardness or discomfort or, yes, pain. It means that we love ourselves too much to allow pain to be the defining experience of our days. To have the courage to ask ourselves, as brown suggests, “What is happening and why did we decide to endure it?”
Brown describes how she came to this realization:
“I just wasn’t satisfied with mediocre experiences in my life. I wasn’t satisfied with being places and doing things that I didn’t like to do, and while a part of me felt a little selfish, because a lot of our movement work can be based on this idea of sacrifice, I just kind of resolved for myself that I would find the intersections that worked well for me between my creativity and my commitment to my people.”
It would mean getting in touch with our desires, with our body
I’ve come to think of the body as a computer, taking in more data from more sources than we could ever consciously consider. Our emotions are a vast subterranean intelligence, drawing on not only our senses, but the genetic memories of our ancestors and endless layers of communal thought.
The price we pay for accessing this intelligence is that we have to feel what it offers, directly and often without warning. As we expand our capacity to feel our emotions, brown says, “…we become more honest, because the body never lies.” We become better people not out of abstract duty, but because we feel the pain of others directly in our body.
Brown writes about what it is like to move toward this kind of self-awareness in her work:
“I got clearer on what I could offer. I got in touch with a feeling of restlessness and wandering that let me know when I didn’t want to be somewhere or with someone or with a political project. I could also feel the distinct energy of moving toward, or forward, that let me know when I did want to be around someone, did want to join in an effort from a place of authentic alignment, rather than obligation…I am able to stay present in my yes. I can feel the yes in person, I can feel it at a distance. I can feel my face flush, my heart pound, a smile I can’t swallow. I can feel my body get wet and warm, open. I can feel myself move toward an idea, a longing, a vision. I am a whole system; we are whole systems. We are not just our pains, not just our fears, and not just our thoughts. We are entire systems wired for pleasure, and we can learn how to say yes from the inside out.”
It would mean developing our capacity to be seen and to be wrong
This is the one I’m working on for myself, and am barely beginning to understand what it means. But brown notes that “When we learn to be seen, we realize that our mere presence is by itself a contribution.” Not just what we produce or what we know. And that “when we learn to be wrong, we get to be in relationship in real time, instead of defending the past.”
One measure of personal power is how much time elapses between when something happens, and when you are able to feel it. The shorter that span of time, the greater your ability to respond to what is happening in reality now, instead of the story you create about it in your head.
We are in an imagination battle
Nothing in this essay or in brown’s work is meant to devalue or deny anyone’s suffering. She writes, “Suffering is a massively important and absolutely true part of life, a spiritual reality. But I deeply believe we were not placed on this gorgeous, sensational planet to suffer. It is not the point.”
That assertion is not falsifiable. You can’t prove or disprove what “the point” of our existence might be, or whether we have one. But this highlights an important aspect of modern times, as brown puts it, that “We are in an imagination battle.”
Not a battle of facts, or a battle of power, or a battle of wills. A battle of imaginations. Stories are pitted against stories, and they don’t win or lose based on their logic. They succeed according to their ability to paint a future worth living for. To organize reality in such a way that we are drawn toward that future, instead of pushed away from it.
One of the biggest influences on brown’s work has been the science fiction of Octavia Butler, who wrote a series of influential sci-fi novels in the 1980s and 1990s depicting futuristic scenarios exploring gender, race, power, and pleasure. Brown sees such work as a tool for social justice, because it had the courage to envision something that seemed almost impossible: a world where black people are liberated. She recounts that, as a young black woman, she felt like she was trapped inside someone else’s imagination. An imagination where people like her were dangerous, dispensable, and worth less. And that she had to use her own imagination to break free.
If we are all activists now, then we have much to learn from the disempowered, dispossessed, and oppressed of this world. They have spent many years perfecting the skills that will be required of all of us now. They know how to infiltrate alternate realities, access the full range of their communal power, and reach through the pain of injustice to the pleasure of overcoming it together.
Embracing pleasure is, paradoxically, a little painful. Few ideas that I’ve discussed with people have received so much pushback, so much skepticism. I think we fear that we’ll lose control, that we’ll go off the deep end of self-gratification. It feels almost impossible to escape the moralistic framing of pain as somehow intrinsically good, and pleasure bad. Brown offers, “I think because most of us are so repressed, our fantasies go to extremes to counterbalance all that contained longing.”
But as writer and civil rights activist Audre Lorde put it, caring for ourselves is “not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Brown notes that “our misery only serves those who wish to control us, to have our existence be in service to their own.” It is worth asking who or what our suffering serves, and whether that is an allegiance we want to continue.
Self-preservation is an act of defiance in a world organized around pain. But you get to be part of the future you are creating. You don’t have to be a casualty of the transformation you are seeking. Your freedom and pleasure are essential ingredients of the freedom and pleasure of the world. “True pleasure – joy, happiness, and satisfaction – has been the force that helps us move beyond the constant struggle, that helps us live and generate futures beyond this dystopic present, futures worthy of our miraculous lives,” brown writes.
Sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson wrote, “We live in a present mixed with various futures overshadowing us. In essence, we live in a science fiction novel we all write together.”
We get to decide what the organizing principle of the future will be. Perhaps before we move to sustainable sources of energy for our industries, we need to move to sustainable sources of energy within ourselves. If pain and pleasure were equally effective, neither inherently good nor bad, wouldn’t pleasure be the obvious choice?
Thank you to Mike Elias, Jeremie Rykner, Sivasuthen Sivanesarajah, and the attendees of Refactor Camp 2019 for their valuable feedback and suggestions. Watch the live talk that inspired this essay below:
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Tiago’s 2019 Mid-Year Review
The following are the results of my Mid-Year Review, which I do every year around the beginning of July. It is a simple process of reflection and journaling I did over two evenings about a week apart, in about 2 hours for each half. I hope you find it valuable for any review process you do for yourself. For each section, I free-journaled whatever came to mind in response to the prompt, and then recorded a concise summary of my conclusions in a Google Doc, which is copied here:
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