Building a Second Brain Quotes

“Anything you might want to accomplish—executing a project at work, getting a new job, learning a new skill, starting a business—requires finding and putting to use the right information. Your professional success and quality of life depend directly on your ability to manage information effectively. According to the New York Times, the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes.1 A separate study cited by the Times estimates that we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986.2 Instead of empowering us, this deluge of information often overwhelms us. Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“The three habits most important to your Second Brain include: Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work. Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything. Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Everything not saved will be lost. —Nintendo “Quit Screen” message”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Your 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. That way your excitement and enthusiasm for your knowledge builds over time instead of fading away.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“It is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life really begins to change. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. 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’s not necessarily about becoming a professional artist, online influencer, or business mogul: it’s about taking ownership of your work, your ideas, and your potential to contribute in whatever arena you find yourself in. It doesn’t matter how impressive or grand your output is, or how many people see it. It could be just between your family or friends, among your colleagues and team, with your neighbors or schoolmates—what matters is that you are finding your voice and insisting that what you have to say matters. You have to value your ideas enough to share them. You have to believe that the smallest idea has the potential to change people’s lives. If you don’t believe that now, start with the smallest project you can think of to begin to prove to yourself that your ideas can make a difference.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“To guide you in the process of creating your own Second Brain, I’ve developed a simple, intuitive four-part method called “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“When you enter the professional world, the demands on your notetaking change completely. The entire approach to notetaking you learned in school is not only obsolete, it’s the exact opposite of what you need. In the professional world: It’s not at all clear what you should be taking notes on. No one tells you when or how your notes will be used. The “test” can come at any time and in any form. You’re allowed to reference your notes at any time, provided you took them in the first place. You are expected to take action on your notes, not just regurgitate them.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“In its most practical form, creativity is about connecting ideas together, especially ideas that don’t seem to be connected. Neuroscientist Nancy C. Andreasen, in her extensive research on highly creative people including accomplished scientists, mathematicians, artists, and writers, came to the conclusion that “Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections.”3”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Herbert Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention . . .”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Run after your obsessions with everything you have. Just be sure to take notes along the way.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“For many people, their understanding of notetaking was formed in school. You were probably first told to write something down because it would be on the test. This implied that the minute the test was over, you would never reference those notes again.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Like a scientist capturing only the rarest butterflies to take back to the lab, our goal should be to “capture” only the ideas and insights we think are truly noteworthy.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“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.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Research from Microsoft shows that the average US employee spends 76 hours per year looking for misplaced notes, items, or files.3 And a report from the International Data Corporation found that 26 percent of a typical knowledge worker’s day is spent looking for and consolidating information spread across a variety of systems.4 Incredibly, only 56 percent of the time are they able to find the information required to do their jobs. 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. Half the time, we don’t even succeed in doing that.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“According to the New York Times, the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes.1”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“If I could leave you with one last bit of advice, it is to chase what excites you.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Join the PKM community. On Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack, Medium, or your platform(s) of choice, follow and subscribe to thought leaders and join communities who are creating content related to personal knowledge management (#PKM), #SecondBrain, #BASB, or #toolsforthought. Share your top takeaways from this book or anything else you’ve realized or discovered. There’s nothing more effective for adopting new behaviors than surrounding yourself with people who already have them.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“In a 2004 study, Angelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki discovered that when monkeys and humans consistently use a tool to extend their reach, such as using a rake to reach an object, certain neural networks in the brain change their “map” of the body to include the new tool. This fascinating finding reinforces the idea that external tools can and often do become a natural extension of our minds.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“The curse of computer scientists is our blessing, because this tacit knowledge represents the final frontier on which humans outperform machines. The jobs and endeavors that rely on tacit knowledge will be the last ones to be automated.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Innovation and impact don’t happen by accident or chance. Creativity depends on a creative process.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside. When something resonates, it moves you on an intuitive level. Often, the ideas that resonate are the ones that are most unusual, counterintuitive, interesting, or potentially useful. Don’t make it an analytical decision, and don’t worry about why exactly it resonates—just look inside for a feeling of pleasure, curiosity, wonder, or excitement, and let that be your signal for when it’s time to capture a passage, an image, a quote, or a fact.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“menu to export all your highlights from the entire book all at once straight to your digital notes. You can also add comments right alongside”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“There is a constant hum of background anxiety that she has come to expect, as she wonders what needs her attention and what she may be missing.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Your Mind is for having ideas, not holding them”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“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”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“It’s time for us to put more intention into the digital environments where we now spend so many of our waking hours.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“The human mind is like a sizzling-hot frying pan of associations—throw a handful of seeds in there and they’ll explode into new ideas like popcorn.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Creativity depends on a creative process.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Look around you and notice that you already have many of these. It may be disorganized, spread around in different places, and saved in different formats, but it’s there. Just notice that you’ve already spent the effort to create or acquire it. All you need to do is gather it up and plant it as the first seeds in your knowledge garden. Soon I’ll show you how to do that. As you start collecting this material from the outer world, it often sparks new ideas and realizations in your inner world. You can capture those thoughts too! They could include: Stories: Your favorite anecdotes, whether they happened to you or someone else. Insights: The small (and big) realizations you have. Memories: Experiences from your life that you don’t want to forget. Reflections: Personal thoughts and lessons written in a journal or diary. Musings: Random “shower ideas” that pop into your head. The meaning of a thought, insight, or memory often isn’t immediately clear.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential