Building a Second Brain

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Best notes from the book:

“Building a Second Brain, which draws on recent advancements in the field of PKM—or personal knowledge management”

“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. —David Allen, author of Getting Things Done”

“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.””

“Information is the fundamental building block of everything you do”

“Your professional success and quality of life depend directly on your ability to manage information effectively.”

“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”

“your Second Brain is a private knowledge collection designed to serve a lifetime of learning and growth, not just a single use case. It is a laboratory where you can develop and refine your thinking in solitude before sharing it with others. A studio where you can experiment with ideas until they are ready to be put to use in the outside world. A whiteboard where you can sketch out your ideas and collaborate on them with others.”

“Think of your Second Brain as the world’s best personal assistant”

“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… Second Brain Superpower #1: Make Our Ideas Concrete… As researchers Deborah Chambers and Daniel Reisberg found in their research on 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.”… Second Brain Superpower #2: Reveal New Associations Between Ideas… In its most practical form, creativity is about connecting ideas together, especially ideas that don’t seem to be connected… Second Brain Superpower #3: Incubate Our Ideas Over Time… Second Brain Superpower #4: Sharpen Our Unique Perspectives”

“Notetaking App: The Neural Center of Your Second Brain”

“From Microsoft OneNote, Google Keep, and Apple Notes to Notion and Evernote, digital notes apps have four powerful characteristics that make them ideal for building a Second Brain. They are: Multimedia… Informal… Open-ended… Action-oriented”

“Remembering, Connecting, Creating: The Three Stages of Personal Knowledge Management”

“As people set out on their Second Brain journey, there are three stages of progress I often observe—and even encourage. Those stages are remembering, connecting, and creating.”

“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.”

“CODE is a map for navigating the endless streams of information we are now faced with every day. It is a modern approach to creating a commonplace book, adapted to the needs of the Information Age.”

“Capture: Keep What Resonates”

“Organize: Save for Actionability”

“Distill: Find the Essence”

“Every idea has an “essence”: the heart and soul of what it is trying to communicate. It might take hundreds of pages and thousands of words to fully explain a complex insight, but there is always a way to convey the core message in just a sentence or two.”

“Express: Show Your Work”

“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.”

“The word “productivity” has the same origin as the Latin verb producere, which means “to produce.” Which means that at the end of the day, 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.”

“Everything not saved will be lost. —Nintendo “Quit Screen” message”

“Information is food for the brain. It’s no accident that we call new ideas “food for thought.””

“Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick”

“Don’t save entire chapters of a book—save only select passages. Don’t save complete transcripts of interviews—save a few of the best quotes. Don’t save entire websites—save a few screenshots of the sections that are most interesting. The best curators are picky about what they allow into their collections, and you should be too. With a notes app, you can always save links back to the original content if you need to review your sources or want to dive deeper into the details in the future.”

“Here are four criteria I suggest to help you decide exactly which nuggets of knowledge are worth keeping:… Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?.. Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?.. Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?.. Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?”

“One of the most valuable kinds of information to keep is personal information—your own thoughts, reflections, memories, and mementos. Like the age-old practice of journaling or keeping a diary, we can use notetaking to document our lives and better understand how we became who we are.”

“Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think.”

“There is also an array of more specialized “capture tools” that are designed to make capturing content in digital form easy and even fun.”

“Ebook apps, which often allow you to export your highlights or annotations all at once.”

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“Read later apps that allow you to bookmark content you find online for later reading (or in the case of podcasts or videos, listening or watching).”

“you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words.”

“Notetaking is the easiest and simplest way of externalizing our thinking. It requires no special skill, is private by default, and can be performed anytime and anywhere. Once our thoughts are outside our head, we can examine them, play with them, and make them better. It’s like a shortcut to realizing the full potential of the thoughts flowing through our minds.”

“Your Second Brain isn’t just a tool—it’s an environment. It is a garden of knowledge full of familiar, winding pathways, but also secret and secluded corners. Every pathway is a jumping-off point to new ideas and perspectives. Gardens are natural, but they don’t happen by accident. They require a caretaker to seed the plants, trim the weeds, and shape the paths winding through them. It’s time for us to put more intention into the digital environments where we now spend so many of our waking hours.”

“Projects: Short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now.”

“Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time.”

“Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful”

“Archives: Inactive items”

“Projects have a couple of features that make them an ideal way to organize modern work. First, they have a beginning and an end; they take place during a specific period of time and then they finish. Second, they have a specific, clear outcome that needs to happen in order for them to be checked off as complete, such as “finalize,” “green-light,” “launch,” or “publish.””

“Projects at work: Complete web-page design; Create slide deck for conference; Develop project schedule; Plan recruitment drive.”

“Personal projects: Finish Spanish language course; Plan vacation; Buy new living room furniture; Find local volunteer opportunity.”

“Side projects: Publish blog post; Launch crowdfunding campaign”

“Knowledge is best applied through execution, which means whatever doesn’t help you make progress on your projects is probably detracting from them.”

“Para is a Greek word that means “side by side,” as in “parallel”; this convenient definition reminds us that our Second Brain works “side by side” with our biological brain.”

“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. —Lao Tzu”

“Progressive Summarization helps you focus on the content and the presentation of your notes, instead of spending too much time on labeling, tagging, linking, or other advanced features offered by many information management tools.”

“Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible.”

“The biggest mistake people make when they start to distill their notes is that they highlight way too much.”

“A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer.”

“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.”

“Verum ipsum factum (“We only know what we make”) —Giambattista Vico, Italian philosopher”

“Tags are like small labels you can apply to certain notes regardless of where they are located. Once they are tagged, you can perform a search and see all those notes together in one place.”

“The purpose of knowledge is to be shared.”

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