Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

by Tiago Forte

Images:

Takeaways:

As you start collecting this material from the outer world, it often sparks new ideas and realizations in your inner world.

Stories:

Insights:

Memories:

Reflections:

Musings:

four kinds of content that aren’t well suited to notes apps:

sensitive information you’d like to keep secure?

special format or file type better handled by a dedicated app?

very large file?

need to be collaboratively edited?

Feynman’s approach was to maintain a list of a dozen open questions. When a new scientific finding came out, he would test it against each of his questions to see if it shed any new light on the problem.

Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?”

The key to this exercise is to make them open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have a single answer.

The goal isn’t to definitively answer the question once and for all, but to use the question as a North Star for my learning.

Ask people close to you what you were obsessed with as a child

Don’t worry about coming up with exactly twelve

Don’t worry about getting the list perfect

Phrase them as open-ended questions that could have multiple answers

Use your list of favorite problems to make decisions about what to capture:

in any piece of content, the value is not evenly distributed. There are always certain parts that are especially interesting, helpful, or valuable to you.

Don’t save entire chapters of a book—save only select passages.

The best curators are picky about what they allow into their collections, and you should be too. With a notes app, you can always save links

Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?

evoke a sense of inspiration more regularly: keep a collection of inspiring quotes, photos, ideas, and stories.

Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?

Sometimes you come across a piece of information that isn’t necessarily inspiring, but you know it might come in handy in the future.

Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?

No one else has access to the wisdom you’ve personally gained from a lifetime of conversations, mistakes, victories, and lessons learned. No one else values the small moments of your days quite like you do.

Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?

If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it?

Your Second Brain shouldn’t be just another way of confirming what you already know.

Ultimately, Capture What Resonates

When something resonates with us, it is our emotion-based, intuitive mind telling us it is interesting before our logical mind can explain why.

“Our intuitive mind learns, and responds, even without our conscious awareness.”

You can intentionally train yourself to hear that voice of intuition every day by taking note of what it tells you.

Ebook apps, which often allow you to export your highlights or annotations all at once.

Read later apps that allow you to bookmark content you find online for later

Basic notes apps that often come preinstalled on mobile devices and are designed for easily capturing short snippets of text.

Social media apps, which usually allow you to “favorite” content

Web clippers, which allow you to save par...

Audio/voice transcrip...

No matter how many different kinds of software you use, don’t leave all the knowledge they contain scattered across dozens of places you’ll never think to look.

Capturing quotes from podcasts: Many podcast player apps allow you to bookmark or “clip” segments of episodes as you’re listening to them.

Capturing parts of YouTube videos:

Just click the “Open transcript” button and a window will open. From there, you can copy and paste excerpts to your notes.

Capturing excerpts from emails: Most popular notes apps include a feature that allows you to forward any email to a special address, and the full text of that email

you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”