Building a Second Brain, page 3
She sits down at the computer, and the questions begin: “Where did I leave off last time? Where did I put that file? Where are all my notes?”
By the time Nina gets set up and ready to go, she’s far too tired to make real progress. This pattern repeats itself day after day. After enough of these false starts, she starts to give up. Why even try? Why keep attempting to do the impossible? Why resist the temptation to watch another Netflix episode or scroll through social media? Without the time and energy to move things decisively forward, what’s the point of starting?
Nina is a competent, responsible, and hardworking professional. Many people would feel privileged to be in her shoes. There’s nothing wrong with the work she does or the life she leads, yet underneath the respectable exterior, there is something missing. She isn’t meeting her own standards for what she knows she’s capable of. There are experiences that she wants for herself and her family that seem to continuously get postponed, waiting for “someday” when somehow she will have the time and space to make them happen.
Does anything about Nina’s experience sound familiar? Every detail of her story is real, drawn from messages people have sent me over the years. Their stories convey a pervasive feeling of discontent and dissatisfaction—the experience of facing an endless onslaught of demands on their time, their innate curiosity and imagination withering away under the suffocating weight of obligation.
So many of us share the feeling that we are surrounded by knowledge, yet starving for wisdom. That despite all the mind-expanding ideas we have access to, the quality of our attention is only getting worse. That we are paralyzed by the conflict between our responsibilities and our most heartfelt passions, so that we’re never quite able to focus and also never quite able to rest.
There is an alternative story. A different way a Monday morning can go. It is also drawn from the real-life stories I’ve received, this time from people who have built a Second Brain for themselves.
You wake up Monday morning, looking forward to starting your day and your week. As you get out of bed, take a shower, and get dressed, the thoughts start arriving. You have just as many worries and responsibilities as anyone else, but you also have a secret weapon.
In the shower, you suddenly realize there’s a better way to advance the project you’re focused on at work. As you step out onto the mat, you jot down the idea as a digital note on your smartphone. Over breakfast with your family, you find your mind already working out the new strategy, pondering its implications. Those thoughts get jotted down as well, in the brief moments between feeding the kids and sending them off to school. As you drive to work, you start realizing there are challenges you haven’t considered. You dictate a quick audio memo to your phone as you drive, which gets automatically transcribed and saved in your notes.
Monday morning in the office is the usual whirlwind, with emails and chat messages and phone calls arriving at their usual frantic pace. As you share your new idea with your colleagues, they start asking questions, pointing out valid concerns, and adding their own contributions. At each of these moments, you are ready to save them as notes in your Second Brain. You withhold judgment, seeking to gather the widest possible range of feedback before deciding on a course of action.
Before you know it, it’s lunchtime. As you take a break to grab a bite to eat, your thoughts turn philosophical: “What is the ultimate point of the project, and are we forgetting it? How does it fit into the long-term vision of the product we want to build? What is the impact of the new strategy on shareholders, customers, suppliers, and the environment?” You have only thirty minutes to eat lunch, and you don’t have time to ponder these questions in depth, but you note them down as a reminder to think about later.
You are on your smartphone just like everyone else, but you aren’t doing what they are doing. You are creating value instead of killing time.
By the time the afternoon meeting comes around to review the strategy you’ve come up with, you already have a formidable collection of notes ready and waiting: the ideas, strategies, objectives, challenges, questions, concerns, contributions, and reminders you’ve collected over just a few hours on a Monday morning.
You take ten minutes before the meeting starts to organize your notes. About a third of them aren’t a priority, and you put them aside. Another third are critical, and you make them into an agenda for the meeting. The remaining third are somewhere in between, and you put them into a separate list to refer to if appropriate.
As the meeting begins, the team sits down to start discussing the project. You are already prepared. You’ve already considered the biggest problems from several different angles, mapped out a number of possible solutions, and started thinking about the big-picture implications. You’ve even received feedback from some of your colleagues and incorporated it into your recommendations. You argue for your point of view while also remaining open to the perspectives of your team. Your goal is to stay present and guide the conversation to the best possible outcome, making use of everyone’s unique way of seeing things. All the important reflections, new ideas, and unexpected possibilities your colleagues come up with also get recorded in your Second Brain.
As this way of working with information continues over days and weeks and months, the way your mind works begins to change. You start to see recurring patterns in your thinking: why you do things, what you really want, and what’s really important to you. Your Second Brain becomes like a mirror, teaching you about yourself and reflecting back to you the ideas worth keeping and acting on. Your mind starts to become intertwined with this system, leaning on it to remember more than you ever could on your own.
All this is literally not just in your head. People can tell there is something different about you. They start to recognize that you can draw on an unusually large body of knowledge at a moment’s notice. They remark on your amazing memory, but what they don’t know is that you never even try to remember anything. They admire your incredible dedication to developing your thinking over time. In reality, you are just planting seeds of inspiration and harvesting them as they flower.
As you begin to see all the knowledge you’ve gained in tangible form, it dawns on you that you already have everything you need to strike out toward the future you want. There’s no need to wait until you’re perfectly prepared. No need to consume more information or do more research. All that’s left is for you to take action on what you already know and already have, which is laid out before you in meticulous detail.
Your brain is no longer the bottleneck on your potential, which means you have all the bandwidth you need to pursue any endeavor and make it successful. This sense of confidence in the quality of your thinking gives you the freedom to ask deeper questions and the courage to pursue bigger challenges. You can’t fail, because failure is just more information, to be captured and used as fuel for your journey.
This is what it’s like to build and harness the power of a Second Brain.
Leveraging Technology as Thinking Tools
Throughout the twentieth century, a series of scholars and innovators7 offered a vision for how technology could change humanity for the better. They dreamed of creating an “extended mind” that would amplify human intellect and help us solve the greatest problems facing society.VI The possibility of such a technological marvel shined like a beacon for the future, promising to liberate knowledge from dusty old books and make it universally accessible and useful.VII
Their efforts were not in vain. Those ideas inspired much of the technology that we use every day, but paradoxically, despite all the technological inventions of the Information Age, we are in some ways further from their original vision than ever. We spend hours every day interacting with social media updates that will be forgotten in minutes. We bookmark articles to read later, but rarely find the time to revisit them again. We create documents that are used once and then get abandoned in the abyss of our email or file systems. So much of our intellectual output—from brainstorms to photos to planning to research—all too often is left stranded on hard drives or lost somewhere in the cloud.
I believe that we have reached an inflection point, where technology has become sufficiently advanced and user-friendly that we can integrate it with our biological brains. Computers have become smaller, more powerful, and more intuitive, to the point that they are unmistakably an essential component of how we think.
The time has come for us to realize the vision of technology’s early pioneers—that everyone should have an extended mind not just to remember more and be more productive, but to lead more fulfilling lives.
I. Herbert Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…”
II. The word “commonplace” can be traced back to Ancient Greece, where a speaker in law courts or political meetings would keep an assortment of arguments in a “common place” for easy reference.
III. The practice of keeping personal notes also arose in other countries, such as biji in China (roughly translated as “notebook”), which could contain anecdotes, quotations, random musings, literary criticism, short fictional stories, and anything else that a person thought worth recording. In Japan, zuihitsu (known as “pillow books”) were collections of notebooks used to document a person’s life.
IV. “Marginalia” refers to the marks made in the margins of a book or other document, including scribbles, comments, annotations, critiques, doodles, or illustrations.
V. Have you ever lost your smartphone or been unable to access the Internet, and felt like a critical part of yourself was missing? That’s a sign that an external tool has become an extension of your mind. In a 2004 study, Angelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki discovered that when monkeys and humans consistently use a tool to extend their reach, such as using a rake to reach an object, certain neural networks in the brain change their “map” of the body to include the new tool. This fascinating finding reinforces the idea that external tools can and often do become a natural extension of our minds.
VI. Recent advancements and discoveries in the field of “extended cognition” have shed new light on how practical and powerful it can be to “think outside the brain.” This book isn’t focused on the science, but for an excellent introduction to extended cognition I recommend The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul.
VII. Vannevar Bush wrote of a “scholar’s workstation” called a “Memex,” which was “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”
Chapter 3
How a Second Brain Works
It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists. I am free because I remember.
—Abhinavagupta, tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher and mystic
Think of your Second Brain as the world’s best personal assistant.
It is perfectly reliable and totally consistent. It is always ready and waiting to capture any bit of information that might be of value to you. It follows directions, makes helpful suggestions, and reminds you of what’s important to you.
What would the job description for such a personal assistant look like? What “jobs” would you hire them to do for you? The same way you would hold your assistant accountable to a certain standard of performance, the same is true for your Second Brain. You need to know what it should be doing for you so you know if it’s worth keeping around.
In this chapter we’ll see how the four main capabilities of a Second Brain will actively work for you—immediately and over time; the one basic tool you’ll need to get started; how your Second Brain will evolve to serve what is most important to you; and, finally, an introduction to the four steps of the CODE Method that lies at the heart of it all.
The Superpowers of a Second Brain
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.
Let’s examine each of these.
Second Brain Superpower #1: Make Our Ideas Concrete
Before we do anything with our ideas, we have to “off-load” them from our minds and put them into concrete form. Only when we declutter our brain of complex ideas can we think clearly and start to work with those ideas effectively.
In 1953, American biologist James Watson and English physicist Francis Crick made a profound discovery: the structure of DNA was a double helix. Their discovery was built on the groundwork laid by other pioneers, including advancements in X-ray crystallography by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, and ushered in a golden age in molecular biology and genetics.
Watson and Crick’s breakthrough is well recognized, but there is a part of their story that is much less well known. An important tool of the researchers was building physical models, an approach they borrowed from American biochemist Linus Pauling. They made cardboard cutouts to approximate the shapes of the molecules they knew were part of DNA’s makeup and, like a puzzle, experimented with different ways of putting them together. They would shift around their models on their desktops, trying to find a shape that fit everything they knew about how the molecules were arranged. The double helix structure seemed to fit all known constraints, allowing the complementary base pairs to fit together perfectly while respecting the ratios between elements that had been measured previously.1
This is a remarkable aspect of one of the most famous scientific discoveries of the last century: at the decisive moment, even highly trained scientists deeply familiar with mathematical and abstract thinking turned to the most basic, ancient medium available: physical stuff.
Digital notes aren’t physical, but they are visual. They turn vague concepts into tangible entities that can be observed, rearranged, edited, and combined together. They may exist only in virtual form, but we can still see them with our eyes and move them around with our fingers. 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.”2
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.
Neuroscientist Nancy C. Andreasen, in her extensive research on highly creative people including accomplished scientists, mathematicians, artists, and writers, came to the conclusion that “Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections.”3
By keeping diverse kinds of material in one place, we facilitate this connectivity and increase the likelihood that we’ll notice an unusual association.
Quotes from a philosophy book written in ancient times might sit next to the latest clever tweet. Screenshots from an interesting YouTube video can live right by scenes from classic movies. An audio memo might be saved alongside project plans, a link to a helpful website, and a PDF with the latest research findings. All these formats can be combined in a way that would be impossible in the physical world.
If you’ve ever played the word-tile game Scrabble, you know the best way to come up with new words is to mix up the letters in different combinations until a word jumps out at you. In our Second Brain we can do the same: mix up the order of our ideas until something unexpected emerges. The more diverse and unusual the material you put into it in the first place, the more original the connections that will emerge.
Second Brain Superpower #3: Incubate Our Ideas Over Time
Too often when we take on a task—planning an event, designing a product, or leading an initiative—we draw only on the ideas we have access to right in that moment. I call this approach a “heavy lift”—demanding instantaneous results from our brains without the benefit of a support system.
Even when we do a brainstorm, that still relies only on ideas that we can think up right now. What are the chances that the most creative, most innovative approaches will instantly be top of mind? What are the odds that the best way to move forward is one of the first ways we come up with?
This tendency is known as recency bias.4 We tend to favor the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones. Now imagine if you were able to unshackle yourself from the limits of the present moment, and draw on weeks, months, or even years of accumulated imagination.
I call this approach the “slow burn”—allowing bits of thought matter to slowly simmer like a delicious pot of stew brewing on the stove. It is a calmer, more sustainable approach to creativity that relies on the gradual accumulation of ideas, instead of all-out binges of manic hustle. Having a Second Brain where lots of ideas can be permanently saved for the long term turns the passage of time into your friend, instead of your enemy.
Second Brain Superpower #4: Sharpen Our Unique Perspectives
Until now we’ve talked mostly about gathering the ideas of others, but the ultimate purpose of a Second Brain is to allow your own thinking to shine.
A recent study from Princeton University found that there is a certain kind of job that is least likely to be automated by machines in coming years. Surprisingly, it wasn’t jobs that required advanced skills or years of training that were predicted to fare best. It was jobs that required the ability to convey “not just information but a particular interpretation of information.”5
