More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tiago Forte
Read between
July 2 - July 26, 2025
Chapter 1 Where It All Started
Chapter 2 What Is a Second Brain?
Chapter 3 How a Second Brain Works
Chapter 4 Capture—Keep What Resonates
Everything not saved will be lost. —Nintendo “Quit Screen” message
“knowledge assets” that crystallize what you know in concrete form.I
External knowledge could include: Highlights: Insightful passages from books or articles you read. Quotes: Memorable passages from podcasts or audiobooks you listen to.
Bookmarks and favorites: Links to interesting content you find on the web or favorited social media posts. Voice memos: Clips recorded on your mobile device as “notes to self.” Meeting notes: Notes you take about what was discussed during meetings or phone calls. Images: Photos or other images that you find inspiring or interesting. Takeaways: Lessons from courses, conferences, or presentations you’ve attended.
Musings: Random “shower ideas” that pop into your head.
realizing that in any piece of content, the value is not evenly distributed.
Curator’s Perspective—that we are the judges, editors, and interpreters of the information
Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?
Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?
Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?
Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?
Ultimately, Capture What Resonates
special feeling of “resonance”—like an echo in your soul—is your intuition telling you that something is literally “noteworthy.”
hit “save.”
Designing for Behavior Change:9 Participants in a famous study were given four biased decks of cards—some that would win them money, and some that would cause them to lose. When they started the game, they didn’t know that the decks were biased. As they played the game, though, people’s bodies started showing signs of physical “stress” when their conscious minds were about to use a money-losing deck. The stress was an automatic response that occurred because the intuitive mind realized something was wrong—long
before the conscious mind realized anything was amiss.
The authors’ conclusion: “Our intuitive mind learns, and responds, even without o...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
capture key information about the source of a note, such as the original web page address, the title of the piece, the author or publisher, and the date it was published.III
Capturing quotes from podcasts: Many podcast player apps allow you to bookmark or “clip” segments
Capturing voice memos:
Must be automated to text
Surprising Benefits of Externalizing Our Thoughts
corral the jumble of thoughts tumbling through your head and park them
more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”10
generate
w...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
speaking or writing, more parts of their brai...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Writing things down is a way of “rehearsin...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Writing creates new knowledge that wasn’t there before. Each word you write triggers mental cascades and internal associations, leading to further ideas, all of which can come tumbling out onto the page or screen.V
“translating emotional events into words leads to profound social, psychological, and neural changes.”
escape what I call the “reactivity loop”—the
first encounter an idea is the worst time to decide what it means. You need to set it aside and gain some objectivity.
taking notes on the experiences you’re already having. It’s about squeezing more juice out of the fruit of life, savoring every moment to the fullest by paying closer attention to the details.
MIT economist César Hidalgo in his book Why Information Grows describes how physical products, which he calls “crystals of imagination,” allow us to turn what we know into concrete objects that other people can access: “Crystallizing our thoughts into tangible and digital objects is what allows us to share our thoughts with others.” And elsewhere: “Our ability to crystallize imagination… gives us access to the practical uses of the knowledge and knowhow residing in the nervous systems of other people.”
no more than 10 percent of the original source,
This is called “detachment gain,” as explained in The Detachment Gain: The Advantage of Thinking Out Loud by Daniel Reisberg, and refers to the “functional advantage to putting thoughts into externalized forms” such as speaking or writing, leading to the “possibility of new discoveries that might not have been obtained in any other fashion.” If you’ve ever had to write out a word to remember how it’s spelled, you’ve experienced this.
Chapter 5 Organize—Save for Actionability
Cathedral Effect.
important to separate capture and organize into two distinct steps: “keeping what resonates”
Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, I recommend organizing them according to where they are going—
“move quickly and touch lightly”
Chapter 6 Distill—Find the Essence
“prompt
book.”
short documentary titled Francis Coppola’s Notebook3 released in 2001, Coppola explained his process.
life is constantly pushing and pulling us away from our priorities. The more determined we are to focus and get something done, the more aggressively life tends to throw emergencies and delays in our face.
job as a notetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can survive the journey into the future.
