Building a Second Brain, page 12
When it comes to notetaking for work, less is more. You can capture entire books, articles with dozens of pages, or social media posts by the hundreds. No one will stop you, but you’ll quickly learn that such volume will only create a lot more work later on when you have to figure out what all that information means. If you’re going to capture everything, you might as well capture nothing.
Remember that notes are not authoritative texts. You don’t need to and shouldn’t include every tiny detail. They are more like bookmarks peeking out from the pages of a book on the shelf, signaling to you, “Hey! There’s something interesting here!” You will always be able to go back and review the full, original source if needed. Your notes only solve the problem of rediscovering those sources when you need them.
A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer. If you save a series of excerpts from a book amounting to five hundred words, the bolded second layer should include no more than one hundred words, and highlighted third layer no more than twenty. This isn’t an exact science, but if you find yourself highlighting everything, this rule should give you pause.
Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind
The most common question I hear about Progressive Summarization is “When should I be doing this highlighting?” The answer is that you should do it when you’re getting ready to create something.
Unlike Capture and Organize, which take mere seconds, it takes time and effort to distill your notes. If you try to do it with every note up front, you’ll quickly be mired in hours of meticulous highlighting with no clear purpose in mind. You can’t afford such a giant investment of time without knowing whether it will pay off.
Instead, wait until you know how you’ll put the note to use. For example, when I’m preparing to write a blog post or article, I’ll usually start by highlighting the most interesting points from a group of notes that I think will be relevant to the topic at hand. That way I have a predictable, not-too-difficult task to get me warmed up for writing, the same way an athlete might have a warm-up and stretching routine.
When I’m about to get on a call with my lawyer, I’ll often prepare by highlighting my notes from our last call and drawing out decision points and action items into an agenda. He always thinks I’m well prepared, when in fact I just want to finish the call quickly to minimize the time I’m being billed for!
You have to always assume that, until proven otherwise, any given note won’t necessarily ever be useful. You have no idea what your future self will need, want, or be working on. This assumption forces you to be conservative in the time you spend summarizing notes, doing so only when it’s virtually guaranteed that it will be worth it.
The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future selfVII—by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary. This is the “campsite rule” applied to information—leave it better than you found it. This ensures that the notes you interact with most often will naturally become the most discoverable in a virtuous cycle.
Mistake #3: Making Highlighting Difficult
Don’t worry about analyzing, interpreting, or categorizing each point to decide whether to highlight it. That is way too taxing and will break the flow of your concentration. Instead, rely on your intuition to tell you when a passage is interesting, counterintuitive, or relevant to your favorite problems or a current project.
Just as you listened for a feeling of internal resonance in deciding what content to save in the first place, the same rule applies for the insights within the note. Certain passages will move you, pique your attention, make your heart beat faster, or provoke you. Those are clear signals that you’ve found something important, and it’s time to add a highlight. You can apply the same criteria I introduced earlier in Chapter 4, looking out for individual points that are surprising, useful, inspiring, or personal to decide which ones are worth highlighting.
When you learn the art of distillation, you will gain a lifelong skill that will impact every area of your life. Think of a storyteller who captivates you with every word. Their story is well distilled, with unnecessary details stripped away. Think about the last time you were entranced by a drawing or painting. Its ability to grab you immediately is a sign that the concept behind the artwork is compressed into its most compact form, allowing it to travel efficiently from the canvas straight into your brain.
Even in our daily conversations, the ability to be succinct without missing key details is what leads to exciting conversations that leave both people feeling enlivened. Distillation is at the heart of the communication that is so central to our friendships, our working relationships, and our leadership abilities. Notetaking gives you a way to deliberately practice the skill of distilling every day.
Your Turn: Keep Your Future Self in Mind
The effort we put into Progressive Summarization is meant for one purpose: to make it easy to find and work with our notes in the future.
More is not better when it comes to thinking and creating. Distilling makes our ideas small and compact, so we can load them up into our minds with minimal effort. 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.
When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start reading books and doing research. You need that research to already be done.VIII You can prepare in advance for the future challenges and opportunities you don’t even yet know you’ll face, by taking advantage of the effort you’re already spending reading books, learning new things, and simply being curious about the world around you.
To put what you’ve just learned into practice immediately, find an interesting piece of content you consumed recently, such as an article, audiobook, or YouTube video. This could be content you’ve captured already and organized in one of your PARA folders. Or it could be a new piece of content floating around your email inbox or in a read later app.
Start by saving only the best excerpts from that piece of content in a new note, either using copy-paste or a capture tool. This is layer one, the initial excerpts you save in your Second Brain. Next, read through the excerpts, bolding the main points and most important takeaways. Don’t make it an analytical decision—listen for a feeling of resonance and let that be your guide for what to bold. These bolded passages are layer two.
Now read through only the bolded passages, and highlight (or, if your notes app doesn’t have a highlighting feature, underline) the best of the best passages. The key here is to be very picky: the entire note may have only a few highlighted sentences, or even just one. Not only is that fine, it represents a highly distilled and discoverable note. These highlights are layer three, which is distilled enough for most use cases.
The true test of whether a note you’ve created is discoverable is whether you can get the gist of it at a glance. Put it aside for a few days and set a reminder to revisit it once you’ve forgotten most of the details. When you come back to it, give yourself no more than thirty seconds and see if you can rapidly get up to speed on what it’s about using the highlights you previously made. You’ll quickly be able to tell if you’ve added too many highlights or too few.
Each time you decide to add a highlight, you are developing your judgment: distinguishing the bits that truly matter from those that don’t. This is a skill you can become better at over time. The more you exercise your judgment, the more efficient and enjoyable your notetaking will become because you know that every minute of attention you invest is creating lasting value. There are few things more satisfying than the feeling of making consistent progress.
In the next chapter, we will move on to the final step of CODE, drawing on the material you’ve collected and distilled and using it to express your own point of view.
I. Discoverability, Wikipedia
II. I like to think of layer one as the “soil”—an excerpt from a source or my own thinking (whether as words, drawings, images, or audio) I initially capture into my notes. They are like the ground on which my understanding will be built. Layer two is “oil,” as in “I’ve struck oil!,” conveniently represented by black, bolded text. Layer three is “gold,” which is even more valuable, and shines in highlighter yellow in many apps. Layer four is the “gems,” the most rare and illuminating finds that I’ve distilled in my own words as an executive summary.
III. In his book A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, John Locke similarly advised that “We extract only those Things which are Choice and Excellent, either for the Matter itself, or else the Elegancy of the Expression, and not what comes next.”
IV. As humans we are exquisitely sensitive to the way information is presented. In web design, a slight change of color for a button or a slightly reworded headline can easily have a double-digit impact on the number of visitors who click on it. Imagine if we put as much thought into how the information on our own devices is presented to us as we do into the public web. Even something as simple as an informative heading, a paragraph break, or a highlighted phrase can make it dramatically easier to absorb a piece of text.
V. Distillation also applies to other kinds of media such as images, audio, and video, but looks quite different and is beyond the scope of this book.
VI. In a class on documentary filmmaking on the educational platform MasterClass, Burns offered his suggestions for keeping track of material related to a film project: “Is there an article in the newspaper that relates to your project? Cut it out and file it. Have you written a draft of narration or dialogue? Print it out and file it. Thought of some great questions to ask your first interview subject? Jot them down on a scrap of paper and file that too.”
VII. This principle is called stigmergy—to leave “marks” on the environment that make your future efforts easier. It is a strategy used by ant colonies to find food. If an ant finds a food source, it will bring a piece of it back to the colony, while leaving a special pheromone along the trail. Other ants can follow this trail to find the food for themselves, enabling a multitude of ants to quickly find and collect new sources of food.
VIII. As Sönke Ahrens observes in his book How to Take Smart Notes, this is the fundamental paradox at the heart of writing: you have to do the research before you know what you will write about. In his words: “We have to read with a pen in hand, develop ideas on paper and build up an ever-growing pool of externalised thoughts. We will not be guided by a blindly made-up plan picked from our unreliable brains, but by our interest, curiosity and intuition, which is formed and informed by the actual work of reading, thinking, discussing, writing and developing ideas—and is something that continuously grows and reflects our knowledge and understanding externally.”
Chapter 7
Express—Show Your Work
Verum ipsum factum (“We only know what we make”)
—Giambattista Vico, Italian philosopher
In June 1947, a baby girl named Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California.
Known in her early years as simply “Estelle,” she was raised by a single, widowed mother who worked domestic jobs to make ends meet. Painfully shy and introverted from a young age, Estelle became an easy target for bullying at school, which led her to believe she was “ugly and stupid, clumsy, socially hopeless.”1 Her shyness combined with mild dyslexia made schoolwork difficult.
In response, Estelle turned inward to her own imagination and outward to the Pasadena Central Library, where she would spend countless hours reading fairy tales and horse stories, and later, the fantasy and science-fiction novels that would eventually inspire her to become a writer.
Despite the odds stacked against her, this young woman would eventually become one of the most successful and influential science-fiction writers of her generation, winning multiple Hugo and Nebula awards (the genre’s highest honors) and in 1995 becoming the first sci-fi writer to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.
But Estelle wasn’t always so successful. Her teachers at Garfield Elementary School evaluated her earliest writing harshly, with comments like “Hyperbolic” and “You’re not even trying” scribbled in the margins.2 An elementary school teacher once asked, “Why include the science fiction touch? I think the story would be more universal if you kept to the human, earthly touch.” The teacher reported to her mother that “She has the understanding, but doesn’t apply it. She needs to learn self-discipline.”
When she was twelve years old, Estelle watched the 1954 film Devil Girl From Mars, a sensationalist B movie that was so terrible it convinced Estelle that she could write something better. She recalls, “Until I began writing my own stories, I never found quite what I was looking for… In desperation, I made up my own.”
As the possibility of becoming a professional writer slowly dawned on her, Estelle began her transformation into “Octavia,” whom she thought of as her powerful, assertive alter ego. Octavia took on a series of temporary or part-time jobs after graduating from high school: clerical, factory, warehouse, laundry, and food preparation gigs—anything that wasn’t too mentally taxing, and that allowed her to maintain her routine of waking before dawn each morning to write.
The emerging Octavia made three rules for herself:
Don’t leave your home without a notebook, paper scraps, something to write with.
Don’t walk into the world without your eyes and ears focused and open.
Don’t make excuses about what you don’t have or what you would do if you did, use that energy to “find a way, make a way.”
Thus began a lifelong relationship with her commonplace books. Butler would scrape together twenty-five cents to buy small Mead memo pads, and in those pages she took notes on every aspect of her life: grocery and clothes shopping lists, last-minute to-dos, wishes and intentions, and calculations of her remaining funds for rent, food, and utilities. She meticulously tracked her daily writing goals and page counts, lists of her failings and desired personal qualities, her wishes and dreams for the future, and contracts she would sign with herself each day for how many words she committed to write.
Of course, Butler also gathered material for her fantastic stories: lyrics to songs she’d heard on the radio, an idea for a character’s name or motivation, a new topic to research, details of news stories—everything she needed to build the worlds her stories would take place in. She studied dozens of topics—anthropology, English, journalism, and speech. She traveled to the Amazon and Incan ruins in Peru to get a firsthand taste of biodiversity and civilizational collapse. Like a journalist, Butler had a love for cold, hard facts to imbue her stories with a sense of authenticity and concreteness: “The greater your ignorance the more verifiably accurate must be your facts,” she once remarked.
One of Butler’s novels, The Parable of the Sower, hit the New York Times bestseller list for the first time in 2020,3 fulfilling one of Butler’s life goals fourteen years after her death. The book portrays a postapocalyptic future in the aftermath of runaway climate disasters, in which small communities must band together in order to survive. These eerily prescient forecasts resonated with readers as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, as our own time began to seem similarly bleak and uncertain. The radical reimagination of what life could look like in the midst of a crisis was no longer idle speculation—it had become a daily preoccupation for people around the world. Butler has been called a prophet for her ability to forecast the future, but she always said that her work came from simply imagining, “If this goes on… it extrapolates from current technology, current ecological conditions, current social conditions, current practices of any sort. It offers good possibilities—as well as warnings.”
Butler knew that science fiction was more than entertainment. It was a transformative way of viewing the future. As one of the first Black women to gain recognition in the sci-fi genre, Butler explored ideas and themes that had been previously ignored: the potential consequences of environmental collapse due to climate change, corporate greed and the growing gap between the wealthy and poor, gender fluidity and the “othering” of marginalized groups, and criticism of the hierarchical nature of society, among other themes.
Butler pioneered Afrofuturism, a genre that cast African Americans as protagonists who embrace radical change in order to survive. Her stories allowed her readers to visualize futures in which marginalized people are heroes, not victims. Through her writing, she expanded our vision of the future to include the untold stories of the disenfranchised, the outcast, and the unconventional.
How do we know so much about even the tiniest details of Butler’s life? Because she kept it all—journals, commonplace books, speeches, library call slips, essay and story drafts, school notes, calendars, and datebooks as well as assorted odds and ends like school progress reports, bus passes, yearbooks, and contracts. This collection contained 9,062 items and filled 386 boxes when it was donated to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, after Butler’s passing.4
How could a painfully shy little girl become a world-renowned, award-winning writer? How could an impoverished and overworked young woman emerge as a powerful prophet of the future? In her own words: “My mother was a maid, my father shined shoes, and I wanted to write science fiction, who was I kidding?”
