Building a Second Brain, page 15
Even if you’re not writing a book now, or creating a presentation now, or developing a new framework now, that doesn’t mean you never will. Every little digital artifact you create—the emails, the meeting notes, the project plans, the templates, the examples—is part of the ongoing evolution of your body of work. They are like the neurons in an intelligent organism that is growing, evolving, reaching for higher levels of consciousness with each new experience it has.
Your Turn: You Only Know What You Make
My favorite quote about creativity is from the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico: Verum ipsum factum. Translated to English, it means “We only know what we make.”
To truly “know” something, it’s not enough to read about it in a book. Ideas are merely thoughts until you put them into action. Thoughts are fleeting, quickly fading as time passes. To truly make an idea stick, you have to engage with it. You have to get your hands dirty and apply that knowledge to a practical problem. We learn by making concrete things—before we feel ready, before we have it completely figured out, and before we know where it’s going.
It is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life really begins to change. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to show your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately in your career or business, thinking several steps beyond what you’re consuming to consider its ultimate potential.
It’s not necessarily about becoming a professional artist, online influencer, or business mogul: it’s about taking ownership of your work, your ideas, and your potential to contribute in whatever arena you find yourself in. It doesn’t matter how impressive or grand your output is, or how many people see it. It could be just between your family or friends, among your colleagues and team, with your neighbors or schoolmates—what matters is that you are finding your voice and insisting that what you have to say matters. You have to value your ideas enough to share them. You have to believe that the smallest idea has the potential to change people’s lives. If you don’t believe that now, start with the smallest project you can think of to begin to prove to yourself that your ideas can make a difference.
You might realize you have lots of notes on eating healthy and decide to experiment with your own take on a classic recipe. You might see the notes from courses you’ve taken to improve your project management skills and decide to put them together into a presentation for your coworkers. You could draw on the insights and life experiences you’ve written about in your notes to write a blog post or record a YouTube video to help people who are facing a similar challenge.
All of these are acts of self-expression enabling you to begin unlocking your full creative potential.
I. Intermediate Packets are abbreviated as IPs, a lucky coincidence that is appropriate, because they are absolutely your Intellectual Property. You created them, you own them, and you have the right to use them again and again in any future project.
II. Barbara Tversky, a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College in New York, notes that “We are far better and more experienced at spatial thinking than at abstract thinking. Abstract thought can be difficult in and of itself, but fortunately it can often be mapped onto spatial thought in one way or another. That way, spatial thinking can substitute for and scaffold abstract thought.”
III. Tagging for personal knowledge management is a subject unto itself. While not necessary to get started, I’ve written a free bonus chapter on tags you can download at buildingasecondbrain.com/bonuschapter.
IV. One of my favorite rules of thumb is to “Only start projects that are already 80 percent done.” That might seem like a paradox, but committing to finish projects only when I’ve already done most of the work to capture, organize, and distill the relevant material means I never run the risk of starting something I can’t finish.
PART THREE
The Shift
Making Things Happen
Chapter 8
The Art of Creative Execution
Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.
—Silvano Arieti, psychiatrist and author of Creativity: The Magic Synthesis
I was fortunate to grow up in a multicultural household full of art and music.
My mother is a singer and guitarist from Brazil, and some of my earliest memories are of her soprano voice singing beautiful Portuguese lyrics to the tune of a classical guitar. My father is a professional painter born in the Philippines. His canvases bursting with colorful fruits, verdant landscapes, and monumental figures covered every wall of our house, giving our home the ambience of an art gallery.
I’ve never recognized the common stereotypes of the “tortured artist”—mercurial, unpredictable, brooding, and unreliable. My father is one of the most orderly, responsible people I’ve ever met. Yet this regularity didn’t take away from his fantastically creative artwork—it contributed to it. I saw how rigorous his routines had to be to allow him to pursue his creative calling while raising a family.
He had a series of what he called his “strategies.” These were habits and tricks that he used to integrate creativity into every aspect of his life and quickly get into a creative state of mind whenever he had time to paint.
During sermons at our local church, my father would practice sketching biblical stories in a small paper notebook as he listened. Those sketches would often become the starting point for larger, full-scale works measuring eight or ten feet high. While browsing the supermarket he would buy vegetables with unusual shapes to take home and incorporate into his still lifes. Our groceries doubled as models before we ate them. Often in the evening when we were watching TV together as a family, I’d catch him looking off to the side, at the wall of our living room, where he had hung a painting he was working on. He said he could have insights about what was missing by looking at it in a new light and out of the corner of his eye.
My father planned for creativity. He strategized his creativity. When it was time to make progress on a painting, he gave it his full focus, but that wasn’t the only time he exercised his imagination. Much of the rest of the time he was collecting, sifting through, reflecting on, and recombining raw material from his daily life so that when it came time to create, he had more than enough raw material to work with. This attention to organizing his creative influences fueled a prolific body of work made up of thousands of paintings created over decades, while still allowing him plenty of time to attend our soccer games, cook delicious meals, and travel widely as a family.
What I learned from my father is that by the time you sit down to make progress on something, all the work to gather and organize the source material needs to already be done. We can’t expect ourselves to instantly come up with brilliant ideas on demand. I learned that innovation and problem-solving depend on a routine that systematically brings interesting ideas to the surface of our awareness.I
All the steps of the CODE Method are designed to do one thing: to help you put your digital tools to work for you so that your human, fallible, endlessly creative first brain can do what it does best. Imagine. Invent. Innovate. Create.
Building a Second Brain is really about standardizing the way we work, because we only really improve when we standardize the way we do something. To get stronger, you need to lift weights using the correct form. A musician relies on standardized notes and time signatures so they don’t have to reinvent the basics from scratch every time. To improve your writing, you need to follow the conventions of spelling and grammar (even if you decide to break those rules for special effect down the road).
Through the simple acts of capturing ideas, organizing them into groups, distilling the best parts, and assembling them together to create value for others, we are practicing the basic moves of knowledge work in such a way that we can improve on them over time.
This standardized routine is known as the creative process, and it operates according to timeless principles that can be found throughout history. By identifying the principles that stand the test of time despite huge changes in the underlying technology, we can better understand the essential nature of creativity.
The products of creativity are constantly changing and there is always a new “hot” trend to run after. One year it’s Instagram photos, the next it’s Snapchat stories, the next it’s TikTok videos, and so on forever. Even the long tradition of the novel has evolved for each era.
But if you go one level deeper, to the process of creativity, it is a very different story. The creative process is ancient and unchanging. It was the same thousands of years ago as it is today. There are lessons we can learn on that deeper level that transcend any particular medium and any particular set of tools.
One of the most important patterns that underlies the creative process is called “divergence and convergence.”II
Divergence and Convergence: A Creative Balancing Act
If you look at the process of creating anything, it follows the same simple pattern, alternating back and forth between divergence and convergence.
A creative endeavor begins with an act of divergence. You open the space of possibilities and consider as many options as possible. Like Taylor Swift’s notes, Twyla Tharp’s box, Francis Ford Coppola’s prompt book, or Octavia Butler’s commonplace notebooks, you begin to gather different kinds of outside inspiration, expose yourself to new influences, explore new paths, and talk to others about what you’re thinking. The number of things you are looking at and considering is increasing—you are diverging from your starting point.
The activity of divergence is familiar to all of us: it is the classic whiteboard covered in sketches, the writer’s wastepaper basket filled with crumpled-up drafts, and the photographer with hundreds of photos laid out across the floor. The purpose of divergence is to generate new ideas, so the process is necessarily spontaneous, chaotic, and messy. You can’t fully plan or organize what you’re doing in divergence mode, and you shouldn’t try. This is the time to wander.
As powerful and necessary as divergence is, if all we ever do is diverge, then we never arrive anywhere. Like Francis Ford Coppola highlighting certain passages and crossing out others in The Godfather novel, at some point you must start discarding possibilities and converging toward a solution. Otherwise, you will never get the rewarding sense of completion that comes with hitting “send” or “publish” and stepping back from the canvas or screen knowing you got the job done.
Convergence forces us to eliminate options, make trade-offs, and decide what is truly essential. It is about narrowing the range of possibilities so that you can make forward progress and end up with a final result you are proud of. Convergence allows our work to take on a life of its own and become something separate from ourselves.
The model of divergence and convergence is so fundamental to all creative work, we can see it present in any creative field.
Writers diverge by collecting raw material for the story they want to tell, sketching out potential characters, and researching historical facts. They converge by making outlines, laying out plot points, and writing a first draft.
Engineers diverge by researching all the possible solutions, testing the boundaries of the problem, or tinkering with new tools. They converge by deciding on a particular approach, designing the implementation details, and bringing their blueprints to life.
Designers diverge by collecting samples and patterns, talking to users to understand their needs, or sketching possible solutions. They converge by deciding on a problem to solve, building wireframes, or translating their designs into graphics files.
Photographers diverge by taking photos of things they find interesting, juxtaposing different kinds of photos together, or experimenting with new lighting or framing techniques. They converge by choosing the shots for a collection, archiving unused images, and printing their favorites.
If we overlay the four steps of CODE onto the model of divergence and convergence, we arrive at a powerful template for the creative process in our time.
The first two steps of CODE, Capture and Organize, make up divergence. They are about gathering seeds of imagination carried on the wind and storing them in a secure place. This is where you research, explore, and add ideas. The final two steps, Distill and Express, are about convergence. They help us shut the door to new ideas and begin constructing something new out of the knowledge building blocks we’ve assembled.
The Three Strategies I Use to Bring Creative Work Together
Your Second Brain is a powerful ally in overcoming the universal challenge of creative work—sitting down to make progress and having no idea where to start.
Should you do more research, or start organizing the research you’ve already done?
Should you widen your horizons, or narrow your focus?
Should you start something new, or finish something you’ve already started?
When you distinguish between the two modes of divergence and convergence, you can decide each time you begin to work which mode you want to be in, which gives you the answers to the questions above. In divergence mode, you want to open up your horizons and explore every possible option. Open the windows and doors, click every link, jump from one source to another, and let your curiosity be your guide for what to do next. If you decide to enter convergence mode, do the opposite: close the door, put on noise-canceling headphones, ignore every new input, and ferociously chase the sweet reward of completion. Trust that you have enough ideas and enough sources, and it’s time to turn inward and sprint toward your goal.
Of the two stages of this process, convergence is where most people struggle.
The more imaginative and curious you are, the more diverse your interests, and the higher your standards and commitment to perfection, the more difficult you will likely find it to switch from divergence mode into convergence mode. It’s painful to cut off options and choose one path over another. There is a kind of creative grief in watching an idea that you know is full of potential get axed from a script or a story. This is what makes creative work challenging.
When you sit down to finish something—whether it’s an explanatory email, a new product design, a research report, or a fundraising strategy—it can be so tempting to do more research. It’s so easy to open up dozens of browser tabs, order more books, or go off in completely new directions. Those actions are tempting because they feel like productivity. They feel like forward progress, when in fact they are divergent acts that postpone the moment of completion.
There are three powerful strategies for completing creative projects I recommend to help you through the pitfalls of convergence. Each of them depends on having a Second Brain where you can manipulate and shape information without worrying it will disappear. Think of them as the tools in your Second Brain tool belt, which you can turn to anytime you need to get unstuck, find your way around obstacles, or decide what to do next.
1. The Archipelago of Ideas: Give Yourself Stepping-Stones
The Archipelago of Ideas technique is valuable any time you are starting a new piece of work—whether it’s a how-to guide, a training workshop, a brief for a new project, or an essay you’re publishing on your blog. It gives you a way to plan your progress even when performing tasks that are inherently unpredictable. The technique is named after a quote by Steven Johnson, the author of a series of fascinating books on creativity, innovation, and the history of ideas.1 As Johnson wrote:
Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I’m looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It’s a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.
An archipelago is a chain of islands in the ocean, usually formed by volcanic activity over long spans of time. The Hawaiian Islands, for example, are an archipelago of eight major islands extending over about 1,500 miles of the Pacific Ocean.
To create an Archipelago of Ideas, you divergently gather a group of ideas, sources, or points that will form the backbone of your essay, presentation, or deliverable. Once you have a critical mass of ideas to work with, you switch decisively into convergence mode and link them together in an order that makes sense.
Here’s an example of an Archipelago of Ideas note I created to help me write an in-depth article on commonplace books:
The underlined links (which appear in green in my notes) are the sources I’m drawing on as research. Clicking a link will lead me not to the public web, where I can easily get distracted, but to another note within my Second Brain containing my full notes on that source.III There I will find all the details I might need, as well as a link back to the original work for my citations.
Below each source, I’ve copied and pasted only the points I specifically want to use in this particular piece of writing. This Archipelago of Ideas includes external sources as in my example above, but also notes I’ve taken based on my own thoughts and experiences. This gives me the best of both worlds: I can focus only on the relevant points right in front of me, but all the other details I might need are just a click away. The bolds and highlights of Progressive Summarization help me quickly determine which parts are most interesting and important at a glance.
