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

by Tiago Forte

Giving credit where credit is due doesn’t lessen the value of your contribution—it increases it.

Reframing your productivity in terms of Intermediate Packets is a major step toward this turning point.

Instead of thinking of your job in terms of tasks, which always require you to be there, personally, doing everything yourself, you will start to think in terms of assets and building blocks that you can assemble.

You will start to seek out ways of acquiring or outsourcing the creation of these assets to others, instead of assuming you have to build them all yourself. These changes will enable you to get things done at a pace that is far beyond what mere “productivity tips” can ever achieve.

They are like the neurons in an intelligent organism that is growing, evolving, reaching for higher levels of consciousness with each new experience it has.

eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico: Verum ipsum factum. Translated to English, it means “We only know what we make.”

Thoughts are fleeting, quickly fading as time passes. To truly make an idea stick, you have to engage with it.

It is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life really begins to change.

This was my experience As a SB professional

You’ll naturally seek venues to show your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else.

You’ll begin to act more deliberately in your career or business, thinking several steps beyond what you’re consuming to consider its ultimate potential.

It doesn’t matter how impressive or grand your output is, or how many people see it.

All the steps of the CODE Method are designed to do one thing: to help you put your digital tools to work for you so that your human, fallible, endlessly creative first brain can do what it does best. Imagine. Invent. Innovate. Create.

This standardized routine is known as the creative process, and it operates according to timeless principles that can be found throughout history. By identifying the principles that stand the test of time despite huge changes in the underlying technology, we can better understand the essential nature of creativity.

The creative process is ancient and unchanging. It was the same thousands of years ago as it is today. There are lessons we can learn on that deeper level that transcend any particular medium and any particular set of tools.

The Archipelago of Ideas technique is valuable any time you are starting a new piece of work—whether it’s a how-to guide, a training workshop, a brief for a new project, or an essay you’re publishing on your blog.

Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I’m looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes.

A digital outline is far more malleable and flexible—you can add bullet points and cross them off, rearrange and expand on them, add bolding and highlights, and edit them after the fact as your thinking changes.

The outline can link to more detailed content—instead of trying to cram every last point onto the same page, you can link to both your own private notes and public resources on the web, which helps avoid overloading the outline with too much detail.