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

by Tiago Forte

You’ll feel more stressed, anxious, like there are way too many balls in the air.

Your fears, doubts, mistakes, missteps, failures, and self-criticism—it’s all just information to be taken in, processed, and made sense of.

and abundance. We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can choose the lens we look through. This is the basic choice we have in creating our own experience—which aspects to nourish or starve, using only the magnifying power of our attention.

leave behind one identity and step into another—an identity as the orchestrator and conductor of your life, not its passenger.

Shift from Scarcity to Abundance

information is scarce, and therefore we need to acquire and consume and hoard as much of it as possible. We’ve been conditioned to view information through a consumerist lens:

Life tends to surface exactly what we need to know, whether we like it or not. Like a compassionate but unyielding teacher,

reality doesn’t bend or cave to our will. It patiently teaches us in what ways our thinking is not accurate, and those lessons tend to show up across our lives again and again.

letting go of low-value information that seems important, but that doesn’t make us better people. It’s about putting down the protective shield of fear that tells us we need to protect ourselves from the opinions of others, because that same shield is keeping us from receiving the gifts they want to give us.

Shift from Obligation to Service

Ryder Carroll says in The Bullet Journal Method, “Your singular perspective may patch some small hole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity.”

There are people who will be reached only if they are reached by you.

tacit knowledge

two discoveries that changed, and saved, my life.

first was meditation and mindfulness.

my thoughts were the constant background chatter of my subconscious mind, and that I could choose whether to “believe” what they were telling me.

writing in public.II I started a blog,

self-expression is a fundamental human need.

Your Turn: The Courage to Share

Decide what you want to capture. Think about your Second Brain as an intimate commonplace book or journal. What do you most want to capture, learn, explore, or share? Identify two to three kinds of content that you already value to get started with. Choose your notes app. If you don’t use a digital notes app, get started with one now. See Chapter 3 and use the free guide at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources for up-to-date comparisons and recommendations. Choose a capture tool. I recommend starting with a read later app to begin saving any article or other piece of online content you’re interested in for later consumption. Believe me, this one step will change the way you think about consuming content forever.

Practice Progressive Summarization. Summarize a group of notes related to a project you’re currently working on using multiple layers of highlighting to see how it affects the way you interact with those notes.

Experiment with just one Intermediate Packet. Choose a project that might be vague, sprawling, or simply hard, and pick just one piece of it to work on—an Intermediate Packet. Maybe it is a business proposal, a chart, a run of show for an event, or key topics for a meeting with your boss. Break the project down into smaller pieces, make a first pass at one of the pieces, and share it with at least one person to get feedback.

Schedule a Weekly Review.

PKM), #SecondBrain, #BASB, or #toolsforthought.