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

by Tiago Forte

So much of the time we are “information hoarders,” stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our anxiety.

all begins with the simple act of writing things down.

Those who learn how to leverage technology and master the flow of information through their lives will be empowered to accomplish anything they set their minds to. At the same time, those who continue to rely on their fragile biological brains will become ever more overwhelmed by the explosive growth in the complexity of our lives.

my notes were a practical medium for turning any new information I encountered into practical solutions I could use.

I learned to master the process of writing down only the most important points from my classes,

I knew only one trick, and it started with writing things down.

You know the feeling of satisfaction when you are the only one in the room who remembers an important detail? That feeling became the prize in my personal pursuit to capitalize on the value of what I knew.

Human capital includes “the knowledge and the knowhow embodied in humans—their education, their experience, their wisdom, their skills, their relationships, their common sense, their intuition.”

It is about optimizing a system outside yourself, a system not subject to your limitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

We extend beyond our limits, not by revving our brains like a machine or bulking them up like a muscle—but by strewing our world with rich materials, and by weaving them into our thoughts. —Annie Murphy Paul, author of The Extended Mind

In other words, we go to work five days per week, but spend more than one of those days on average just looking for the information we need to do our work.

you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

discussions about the important topics of the day; it could also preserve our mental health and heal our splintered attention.

a Second Brain. Think of it as the combination of a study notebook, a personal journal, and a sketchbook for new ideas.

This is when the reality sets in: after a morning spent fighting fires, she’s far too scatterbrained and tired to focus.

She sits down at the computer, and the questions begin: “Where did I leave off last time? Where did I put that file? Where are all my notes?” By the time Nina gets set up and ready to go, she’s far too tired to make real progress.

She isn’t meeting her own standards for what she knows she’s capable of. There are experiences that she wants for herself and her family that seem to continuously get postponed, waiting for “someday” when somehow she will have the time and space to make them happen.

So me

Every detail of her story is real, drawn from messages people have sent me over the years. Their stories convey a pervasive feeling of discontent and dissatisfaction—the experience of facing an endless onslaught of demands on their time, their innate curiosity and imagination withering away under the suffocating weight of obligation.

despite all the mind-expanding ideas we have access to, the quality of our attention is only getting worse. That we are paralyzed by the conflict between our responsibilities and our most heartfelt passions, so that we’re never quite able to focus and also never quite able to rest.

You withhold judgment, seeking to gather the widest possible range of feedback before deciding on a course of action.

everyone else, but you aren’t doing what they are doing. You are creating value instead of killing time.

Your goal is to stay present and guide the conversation to the best possible outcome, making use of everyone’s unique way of seeing things.

Your brain is no longer the bottleneck on your potential, which means you have all the bandwidth you need to pursue any endeavor and make it successful. This sense of confidence in the quality of your thinking gives you the freedom to ask deeper questions and the courage to pursue bigger challenges. You can’t fail, because failure is just more information, to be captured and used as fuel for your journey.

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention . .

Herbert simon

The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul.

There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete. Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives.

the limits of mental visualization, “The skills we have developed for dealing with the external world go beyond those we have for dealing with the internal world.”2

creativity is about connecting ideas together,

“Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections.”

mix up the order of our ideas until something unexpected emerges.

I call this approach a “heavy lift”—demanding instantaneous results from our brains without the benefit of a support system.

What are the chances that the most creative, most innovative approaches will instantly be top of mind?

Our careers and businesses depend more than ever on our ability to advance a particular point of view and persuade others to adopt it as well.

It just means you don’t yet have enough raw material to work with.

that will help you argue for your perspective or fight for a cause you believe in.

Second Brain: a digital notetaking app.

encourage. Those stages are remembering, connecting, and creating.

Their Second Brain evolves from being primarily a memory tool to becoming a thinking tool. A piece of advice from a mentor comes in handy

The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside.

The best way to organize your notes is to organize for action, according to the active projects you are working on right now. Consider new information in terms of its utility, asking, “How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?”

There is a powerful way to facilitate and speed up this process of rapid association: distill your notes down to their essence.

Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?” That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention. Your notes will be useless if you can’t decipher them in the future, or if they’re so long that you don’t even try. Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand.

I’m here to tell you that that is no way to live your life. Information becomes knowledge—personal, embodied, verified—only when we put it to use. You gain confidence in what you know only when you know that it works. Until you do, it’s just a theory.

shift as much of your time and effort as possible from consuming to creating.

All these actions—evaluate, share, teach, record, post, and lobby*—are synonyms for the act of expression.

Since nothing is ever truly final, there is no need to wait to get started. You can publish a simple website now, and slowly add additional pages over time.

The sooner you begin, the sooner you start on the path of improvement.

CODE steps to radically expand your memory, intelligence, and creativity.

if you can’t point to some kind of output or result you’ve produced, it’s questionable whether you’ve been productive at all.

Instead of trying to find “the best” content, I recommend instead switching your focus to making things, which is far more satisfying.