Building a Second Brain Quotes

“Digital notes aren’t physical, but they are visual. They turn vague concepts into tangible entities that can be observed, rearranged, edited, and combined together.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

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

“The time has come for us to realize the vision of technology’s early pioneers—that everyone should have an extended mind not just to remember more and be more productive, but to lead more fulfilling lives.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“I believe that we have reached an inflection point, where technology has become sufficiently advanced and user-friendly that we can integrate it with our biological brains.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“So much of our intellectual output—from brainstorms to photos to planning to research—all too often is left stranded on hard drives or lost somewhere in the cloud.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Like the LEGO blocks you may have played with as a kid, they can be rapidly searched, retrieved, moved around, assembled, and reassembled into new forms without requiring you to invent anything from scratch.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“More than half the workforce today can be considered “knowledge workers”—professionals for whom knowledge is their most valuable asset, and who spend a majority of their time managing large amounts of information.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“your Second Brain is a private knowledge collection designed to serve a lifetime of learning and growth, not just a single use case.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“We have the chance to turn that historical practice into something far more flexible and convenient.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Popularized in a previous period of information overload, the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the commonplace book was more than a diary or journal of personal reflections. It was a learning tool that the educated class used to understand a rapidly changing world and their place in it.”
― 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.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society-wide poverty of attention.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“In the same way that personal computers revolutionized our relationship with technology, personal finance changed how we manage our money, and personal productivity reshaped how we work, personal knowledge management helps us harness the full potential of what we know.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“We spend countless hours reading, listening to, and watching other people’s opinions about what we should do, how we should think, and how we should live, but make comparatively little effort applying that knowledge and making it our own. So much of the time we are “information hoarders,” stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our anxiety.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“the inclination to amass information can become an end in itself. It is all too easy to default to collecting more and more content without regard to whether it is useful or beneficial to us. This is indiscriminate consumption of information, treating every meme and random post on social media as if it was just as important as the most profound piece of wisdom. It is driven by fear—the fear of missing out on some crucial fact, idea, or story that everyone is talking about. The paradox of hoarding is that no matter how much we collect and accumulate, it’s never enough. The lens of scarcity also tells us that the information we already have must not be very valuable, compelling us to keep searching externally for what’s missing inside.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“There are certain notes in your Second Brain that are disproportionately valuable, that you will nd yourself returning to again and again. These are the cornerstones of your work on which everything else is built, but you can’t usually know which notes are cornerstones up front. You discover them by sharing your ideas with others, and seeing which ones resonate with them. It is by sharing our ideas with other people that we discover which ones represent our most valuable expertise.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“If you can’t locate a piece of information quickly, in a format that’s convenient and ready to be put to use, then you might as well not have it at all. Our most scarce resource is time, which means we need to prioritize our ability to quickly rediscover the ideas that we already have in our Second Brain.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“I’ve often noticed that many of the notes people take are of ideas they already know, already agree with, or could have guessed. We have a natural bias as
humans to seek evidence that conrms what we already believe, a well-studied phenomenon known as “conrmation bias.”
That isn’t what a Second Brain is for. The renowned information theorist Claude Shannon, whose discoveries paved the way for modern technology, had a simple denition for “information”: that which surprises you.
If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it? Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t t neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“I’ll show you how this simple habit is the first step in a system I’ve developed called Building a Second Brain, which draws on recent advancements in the field of PKM—or personal knowledge management.I In the same way that personal computers revolutionized our relationship with technology, personal finance changed how we manage our money, and personal productivity reshaped how we work, personal knowledge management helps us harness the full potential of what we know. While innovations in technology and a new generation of powerful apps have created new opportunities for our times, the lessons you will find within these pages are built on timeless and unchanging principles.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“The layers of Progressive Summarization give you multiple ways of interacting with your notes depending on the needs of the moment.”
― 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.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise 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.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

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

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

“Every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spent doing the thinking that only humans can do: inventing new things, crafting stories, recognizing patterns, following our intuition, collaborating with others, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“It was jobs that required the ability to convey “not just information but a particular interpretation of information.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

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

“We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

“It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists. I am free because I remember. —Abhinavagupta, tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher and mystic”
― Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential