A second brain is a digital note-taking system where anything you consume and resonates with you goes into that system. Our brains are for having ideas not for storing them.
Your brain is lazy and often forget things.
Second brain capture most of your ideas so you can make use of them immeadiately or later. You can use this repository to build new ideas based on the nuggets you have collected along your digital note-taking journey.
Good artists copy, great artists steal.
Creativity is about remixing pieces of content that already exist out there and adding some enhancements of your own.
Develop the habit of capturing content.
Use the tools of the trade such as your notes, f. e. Notion Web Clipper. Readwise, Notebooks
1) Make use of Idea Recycling
Ideas are not single-use. Keep track of all the stuff you are creating. Reuse and mix your ideas together. Combine them. Projects over categories If you capture an idea, move that from your regular capture inbox and associate/integrate it into some project that you are working on, as the information will be more directly useful.
2) Slow burns vs. Heavy Lifts
Heavy lifts is the idea that there is some situation where you have to do a heavy lift.
Like a heavy project lift where you need to block off a couple of hours just to get something significant done.
But as you get older you have fewer and fewer three/four/five hour blocks of time – I can do maybe a quarter of the heavy lifts that I could do ten years ago. But I don’t want to scale back my ambitions so using my Second Brain I started discovering a different way of working which is the slow burn. Think of cooking – some of the best food is made through simmering for hours and hours. And you can only do a slow burn with a Second Brain – your physical brain just can’t keep that information for the same length of time.
Your own brain is designed for heavy lifting, your Second Brain is ideal for slow burns. You can check this idea on Ali's interview with Tiago Forte.
3) Start with abundance
If you construct a Second Brain, you will never start with a blank page. You will always have dots to connect, ideas to merge together and thoughts to mix. You will always start from abundance. Make sure you collect bits and pieces along the way. Grow your garden.
4) Intermediate packets
Construct the idea with small packets which can be used later.
Imagine writing an essay. The essay is constructed using different packets. You always start with an intro, then you have the body 1, then body 2, then the conclusion.
You can memorise the packets and simply mentally drag and drop them you whatever you are trying to build.
5) You only know what you make
Engaging with the material will make it more familiar, more easy to manipulate going further. Build this into your habits.
The content we internalise is (most of the times) the things we ran through our personal filters. Thinks like summarizing a piece of content, writing some notes from a book, listening to a podcast etc. Ali's biggest regret (sometimes) is that he started taking notes too late in life. But it is never to late to start.
