Building a Second Brain, page 11
As interesting as this content is, it’s not nearly succinct enough. Once again, in the midst of a chaotic workday, I would be hard-pressed to find the time to casually look through multiple paragraphs of text to find the relevant points. Unless I highlight those points in a way that my future self can instantly grasp, I’ll likely never see them again.
To enhance the discoverability of this note, I need to add a second layer of distillation. I usually do this when I have free time during breaks or on evenings or weekends, when I come across the note while working on other projects, or when I don’t have the energy for more focused work. All I have to do is bold the main points within the note. This could include keywords that provide hints of what this text is about, phrases that capture what the original author was trying to say, or sentences that especially resonated with me even if I can’t explain why. Looking over the bolded parts of the same note below, can you see how much easier it is to quickly grasp the gist of this note by looking only at those parts?
At layer two, this note is already dramatically more discoverable. Imagine the difference between reading the original article, which might take five to ten minutes of focused attention, versus glancing over these bolded points, which would take less than a minute.
We’re not done yet! For those notes that are especially long, interesting, or valuable, it is sometimes worth adding a third layer of highlighting. I advise using the “highlighting” feature offered by most notes apps, which paints passages in bright yellow just like the fluorescent highlighters we used in school (which appear in light gray below). If your notes app doesn’t have a highlighting feature, you can use underlining or another kind of formatting instead. Look only at the bolded passages you identified in layer two and highlight only the most interesting and surprising of those points. This will often amount to just one or two sentences that encapsulate the message of the original source.
Looking at the note above, can you see how those few highlighted sentences jump out and catch your eye? They convey the main message of this article in a highly distilled form that takes just seconds to grasp. When I come across this note in the future—while doing a search or browsing the notes within a folder—I’ll be able to decide in the blink of an eye whether this source is relevant to my needs. If it is, I’ll have all the additional details and context I need to remember it right in front of me, as well as the link to the original article to check the source.
There is one more layer we can add, though it is quite rarely needed. For only the very few sources that are truly unique and valuable, I’ll add an “executive summary” at the top of the note with a few bullet points summarizing the article in my own words. The best sign that a fourth layer is needed is when I find myself visiting a note again and again, clearly indicating that it is one of the cornerstones of my thinking. Looking only at the points I’ve previously bolded and highlighted in layers two and three makes it far easier to write this summary than if I was trying to summarize the entire article all at once.
I recommend using bullet points to encourage yourself to make this executive summary succinct. Use your own words, define any unusual terms you’re using, and think about how your future self, who may not remember anything about this source, might interpret what you’re writing.
By reviewing this executive summary, I can rapidly recall the main takeaways from this article in a fraction of the time it would take to reread the original. Since the takeaways are already in my own words, they are easy to incorporate into whatever I’m working on. Speed is everything when it comes to recall: you have only a limited amount of time and energy, and the faster you can move through your notes, the more diverse and interesting ideas you can connect together.
Zooming In and Out of Your Map of Knowledge
The layers of Progressive Summarization give you multiple ways of interacting with your notes depending on the needs of the moment. The first time you read about a new idea, you might want to dive into the details and explore every nuance. The next time you revisit that idea, you probably don’t want to repeat all that effort and read the same piece from beginning to end again. You want to pick up where you left off, looking only at the highlights left over from the last time you visited that note. You can review all the details at layer one, or if you’re pressed for time (and when are we ever not pressed for time?), just focus on layers two, three, or four. You can customize how much attention you spend on a note based on your energy level and time available.
It’s like having a digital map of your notes that can be zoomed in or out depending on how many details you want to see, like a maps app on your smartphone. Navigating to a new destination, you might want to zoom in and see exactly which driveway to turn into. On the other hand, if you’re planning a cross-country road trip, you might want to zoom out and see your entire itinerary in one glance. The same is true for your landscape of knowledge—sometimes you want to zoom in and examine one specific research finding, while other times you want to zoom out and see the broad sweep of an argument all at once.
With Progressive Summarization, you are building up a map of the best ideas found in your Second Brain. Your highlights are like signposts and waypoints that help you navigate through the network of ideas you’re exploring. You are building this map without moving anything or deleting anything. Every sentence gets left right where you found it, giving you the freedom to leave things out without worrying that you’ll lose them. With this map in hand, you can actually see what you’ve captured, helping you find what you’re looking for but also what you don’t even know you’re looking for.
Highlighting can sometimes feel risky. You may wonder, “Am I making the right decision about which points are most important, or what this source means?” The multiple layers of Progressive Summarization are like a safety net; if you go in the wrong direction, or make a mistake, you can always just go back to the original version and try again. Nothing gets forgotten or deleted.
Progressive Summarization helps you focus on the content and the presentation of your notes,IV instead of spending too much time on labeling, tagging, linking, or other advanced features offered by many information management tools. It gives you a practical, easy thing to do that adds value even when you don’t have the energy for more challenging tasks. Most importantly, it keeps your attention on the substance of what you’re reading or learning, which is what matters in the long term.
Four Examples of Progressive Summarization
Progressive Summarization can be used across a wide variety of different kinds of content. As long as a source can be turned into text,V you can add layers of highlighting in any information management tool you use.
Let’s look at more examples of progressively summarized notes:
A Wikipedia article
A blog post
A podcast interview
Meeting notes
Wikipedia Articles
Have you ever found yourself visiting the same Wikipedia article again and again or trying to remember something from that one article you read weeks ago?
By saving the best excerpts from Wikipedia articles you read, you can create your own private encyclopedia with only the parts that are most relevant to you. In the note below, I captured a few key sentences from the article explaining “Baumol’s Cost Disease,” a somewhat esoteric term from economics that I’d seen referenced a few times.
When I first captured the note, I didn’t have time to add tags, highlights, or an executive summary of my own. I saved it to a resource folder for “Economics” to revisit later. A few months later, when it came up in a search for “wages,” I took a few moments to bold a couple of key sentences and highlight the most important one, so I could get the gist of it with a glance.
I was once on a panel when one of the speakers mentioned this term. Within the ten seconds before it was my turn to respond, I was able to run a search, look up this note on my tablet (where all my notes are synchronized), and speak confidently on the subject as if I had known it all along.
Online Articles
Much of the time we consume information without a specific purpose in mind. We might peruse the newspaper over breakfast, listen to a podcast while working out, or check out a newsletter to casually learn about a topic. We consume information to stay up to date, pass the time, entertain ourselves, and keep our minds engaged.
These moments are some of the most valuable opportunities to capture tidbits of insight that you probably might not find otherwise. Because this casual reading and listening tends to range over a wide number of topics and interests, you are exposed to more diverse ideas than usual.
One evening I was reading an online article that I saw shared on social media. The article explained how Google used “structured interviews” as part of their hiring process to reduce bias, ensure consistency, and learn from past hires. I was a solo freelancer at the time and had no immediate use for knowledge about hiring practices. I knew that someday I might, so I decided to save the paragraph you see below to my Second Brain.
Almost two years later, I was finally ready to hire my first employee. I remember the feeling of anxiety as I prepared to take on this major financial commitment, not to mention the responsibility of managing a direct report. Luckily, I had a handful of highly actionable notes saved in a resource folder called “Hiring.” To get started, I moved the entire folder from resources to projects. Then I spent about thirty minutes to review the notes it contained and highlight the most relevant takeaways. Those highlights were the starting point for the hiring process I ended up using for my own business, inspired by one of the most innovative and desirable employers in the world.
Podcasts and Audio
Notes can come in handy even when you’re not able to write them down in real time. I was driving with my wife one weekend to a small Airbnb cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, and we decided to listen to a podcast. It was a casual conversation between the host and a course instructor named Meghan Telpner, who ran an online school called the Academy of Culinary Nutrition.5
I had never heard of her and put on the episode without any particular goal in mind. Over the next hour, as we ascended the steep mountainside roads, we were captivated by the story of the education business she had managed to build. She had faced so many of the same challenges we had. It was a relief to hear that we weren’t alone in our struggles. I was driving and unable to write anything down, but as soon as we arrived I sat in the car for a few minutes and captured the ideas I remembered. This is actually a great way to filter down the volume of notes you’re taking—the best stuff always sticks in your mind for an hour or two.
A few months later, we were preparing a launch campaign for a new version of our online course. I had only a couple of weeks to prepare for it—definitely not enough time to do more research. I had to make use of the ideas I’d already collected. As part of my preparation, I went through this note (which I found within an area folder for “Online education”) and bolded the parts that most resonated with me. Then just before our launch kickoff I highlighted the parts I wanted to apply to our own situation. The highlighted passages you see here were the sparks that eventually led to us hiring alumni of the course to coach new students. This freed up my time to implement another idea from Telpner’s interview: adding a new “executive” coaching tier. You truly never know where inspiration will come from and the extraordinary impact it can have.
Meeting Notes
Like many people, I spend a fair percentage of my time on phone calls and in meetings. I want to make the best use of that time, so I take notes during most meetings of new ideas, suggestions, feedback, and action steps that come up.
Taking notes during meetings is a common practice, but it’s often not clear what we should do with those notes. They are often messy, with the action items buried among random comments. I often use Progressive Summarization to summarize my notes after phone calls to make sure I’m extracting every bit of value from them.
I captured this note during a conversation with a friend of mine who has experience designing recording studios. We were remodeling our garage into a home studio and I wanted to get his advice. He was kind enough to come over and walk me through his recommendations, and I wrote down the main points in a notes app on my smartphone as he spoke.
Sometime later, I happened to be driving by the local hardware store on my way home. I realized that I could pop in and get some of the supplies my friend had recommended. I took out my smartphone, did a search for “home studio,” and found this note. I took a few minutes while sitting in the car and bolded the items I would need to purchase at some point, which were buried among other suggestions he had made.
Here’s what it looked like:
I then copied and pasted only the bolded items I was ready to purchase into a separate list below my original notes, and suddenly I had a convenient shopping list I could easily reference while browsing the store.
This example illustrates how even Progressively Summarizing notes from our own conversations can be immensely useful. Often your own thoughts need some distillation before you can take action on them.
Picasso’s Secret: Prune the Good to Surface the Great
We can look at masters of creativity throughout history to see how distilling their ideas shaped their work.
One of Pablo Picasso’s most famous drawings, created in 1945 and known as Picasso’s Bull, offers a master class in how distillation works. It is a sequence of images that he drew to study a bull’s essential form. The process of distillation happens in every art form, but this example is unusual in that Picasso preserved each step of his process.
Pablo Picasso, Le Taureau (series of 11 lithographs), 1945–46 (© 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York).
Starting with the top left image and moving across and down, Picasso deconstructed the shapes of the bull one step at a time. In the first couple of drawings, he adds more detail. The horns are fuller, the tail becomes three-dimensional, and the hide has more depth and texture. Picasso is starting by building up detail so that he has more options to choose from when it comes time to take some away.
The process of distillation begins with the fourth image. He outlines the main muscles of the animal using sharp white lines. Soft curves become more angular, and the animal as a whole starts to take on a more geometric look. In the fifth and sixth images, the drawing starts to become radically simplified as Picasso drops most of the detail in the bull’s head and further simplifies its horns, tail, and legs. A thick white line representing the bull’s center of gravity is added, cutting across the animal from front to back.
By the last few images, the bull has become nothing more than an interconnected series of simple, black-and-white shapes. The legs have become single lines. Solid blocks of color define the front and back of the animal. In the final drawings, even those details are abstracted away. We end with a drawing that is nothing but a single, continuous stroke, which somehow still manages to capture the very essence of the bull.6
Picasso’s act of distillation involves stripping away the unnecessary so that only the essential remains. Crucially, Picasso couldn’t have started with the single line drawing. He needed to go through each layer of the bull’s form step-by-step to absorb the proportions and shapes into his muscle memory. The result points to a mysterious aspect of the creative process: it can end up with a result that looks so simple, it seems like anyone could have made it. That simplicity masks the effort that was needed to get there.
Another example comes from documentary filmmaking. Ken Burns, the renowned creator of award-winning films like The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz, has said that only a tiny percentage of the raw footage he captures eventually makes it into the final cut. This ratio can be as high as 40- or 50-to-1, which means that for every forty to fifty hours of footage he captures, only one hour makes it into the final film. Along the way, Burns and his team are performing a radical act of distillation—finding the most interesting, surprising, moving moments hidden amidst hundreds of hours of recordings.VI
Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible. As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly. To be clear, it takes skill and courage to let the details fall away. As Picasso’s bull and Burns’s documentaries illustrate, in making decisions about what to keep, we inevitably have to make decisions about what to throw away. You cannot highlight the main takeaways from an article without leaving some points out. You cannot make a highlight reel of a video without cutting some of the footage. You cannot give an effective presentation without leaving out some slides.
The Three Most Common Mistakes of Novice Notetakers
Here are a few guidelines to help you avoid common pitfalls as you embark on highlighting your own notes.
Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting
The biggest mistake people make when they start to distill their notes is that they highlight way too much. You may have experienced this pitfall in school, highlighting paragraph after paragraph or entire pages of textbooks in the vain hope that you’d automatically be able to remember everything in yellow for the test.
