Building a Second Brain, page 6
With the abundance of content all around us, it can be hard to know exactly what is worth preserving. I use an insightful exercise to help people make this decision easier. I call it “Twelve Favorite Problems,” inspired by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman.
Feynman was known for his wide-ranging, eclectic tastes. As a child he already showed a talent for engineering, once building a functioning home alarm system out of spare parts while his parents were out running errands. During his colorful lifetime Feynman spent time in Brazil teaching physics, learned to play the bongo and the conga drums well enough to perform with orchestras, and enthusiastically traveled around the world exploring other cultures.
Of course, Feynman is best known for his groundbreaking discoveries in theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1965. In his spare time, he also played a pivotal role on the commission that investigated the Challenger space shuttle disaster and published half a dozen books.
How could one person make so many contributions across so many areas? How did he have the time to lead such a full and interesting life while also becoming one of the most recognized scientists of his generation?
Feynman revealed his strategy in an interview4:
You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”
In other words, Feynman’s approach was to maintain a list of a dozen open questions. When a new scientific finding came out, he would test it against each of his questions to see if it shed any new light on the problem. This cross-disciplinary approach allowed him to make connections across seemingly unrelated subjects, while continuing to follow his sense of curiosity.
As told in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick,5 Feynman once took inspiration for his physics from an accident at dinner:
… he was eating in the student cafeteria when someone tossed a dinner plate into the air—a Cornell cafeteria plate with the university seal imprinted on one rim—and in the instant of its flight he experienced what he long afterward considered an epiphany. As the plate spun, it wobbled. Because of the insignia he could see that the spin and the wobble were not quite in synchrony. Yet just in that instant it seemed to him—or was it his physicist’s intuition?—that the two rotations were related.
After working the problem out on paper, Feynman discovered a 2-to-1 ratio between the plate’s wobble and spin, a neat relationship that suggested a deeper underlying principle at work.
When a fellow physicist and mentor asked what the use of such an insight was, Feynman responded: “It doesn’t have any importance… I don’t care whether a thing has importance. Isn’t it fun?” He was following his intuition and curiosity. But it did end up having importance, with his research into the equations underlying rotation informing the work that ultimately led to him receiving the Nobel Prize.
Feynman’s approach encouraged him to follow his interests wherever they might lead. He posed questions and constantly scanned for solutions to long-standing problems in his reading, conversations, and everyday life. When he found one, he could make a connection that looked to others like a flash of unparalleled brilliance.
Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?” This could include grand, sweeping questions like “How can we make society fairer and more equitable?” as well as practical ones like “How can I make it a habit to exercise every day?” It might include questions about relationships, such as “How can I have closer relationships with the people I love?” or productivity, like “How can I spend more of my time doing high-value work?”
Here are more examples of favorite problems from my students:
How do I live less in the past, and more in the present?
How do I build an investment strategy that is aligned with my mid-term and long-term goals and commitments?
What does it look like to move from mindless consumption to mindful creation?
How can I go to bed early instead of watching shows after the kids go to bed?
How can my industry become more ecologically sustainable while remaining profitable?
How can I work through the fear I have of taking on more responsibility?
How can my school provide more resources for students with special needs?
How do I start reading all the books I already have instead of buying more?
How can I speed up and relax at the same time?
How can we make the healthcare system more responsive to people’s needs?
What can I do to make eating healthy easier?
How can I make decisions with more confidence?
Notice that some of these questions are abstract, while others are concrete. Some express deep longings, while others are more like spontaneous interests. Many are questions about how to live a better life, while a few are focused on how to succeed professionally. The key to this exercise is to make them open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have a single answer. To find questions that invoke a state of wonder and curiosity about the amazing world we live in.
The power of your favorite problems is that they tend to stay fairly consistent over time. The exact framing of each question may change, but even as we move between projects, jobs, relationships, and careers, our favorite problems tend to follow us across the years. I recommend asking your family or childhood friends what you were obsessed with as a kid. Those very same interests probably still fire your imagination as an adult. Which means any content you collect related to them will likely be relevant far into the future as well.
As a kid, I had a passion for LEGOs, the modular toy blocks beloved by generations of children. My parents noticed that I didn’t play with LEGOs like other kids. Instead I spent my time organizing and reorganizing the pieces. I remember being completely captivated by the problem of how to create order out of the chaos of thousands of pieces of every shape and size. I would invent new organizational schemes—by color, by size, by theme—as I became obsessed with the idea that if I could just find the right system, I would finally be able to build my magnum opus—a LEGO spaceship like the ones I saw in the sci-fi movies I loved.
That very same question—How can creativity emerge out of chaos?—still drives me to this day. Only now, it’s in the form of organizing digital information instead of LEGOs. Pursuing this question has taught me so many things over the years, across many seasons of my life. The goal isn’t to definitively answer the question once and for all, but to use the question as a North Star for my learning.
Take a moment now to write down some of your own favorite problems. Here are my recommendations to guide you:
Ask people close to you what you were obsessed with as a child (often you’ll continue to be fascinated with the same things as an adult).
Don’t worry about coming up with exactly twelve (the exact number doesn’t matter, but try to come up with at least a few).
Don’t worry about getting the list perfect (this is just a first pass, and it will always be evolving).
Phrase them as open-ended questions that could have multiple answers (in contrast to “yes/no” questions with only one answer).
Use your list of favorite problems to make decisions about what to capture: anything potentially relevant to answering them. Use one of the capture tools I recommend later in this chapter, or in the Second Brain Resource Guide at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources.
Capture Criteria: How to Avoid Keeping Too Much (or Too Little)
Once you have identified the kinds of questions you want your Second Brain to answer, it’s time to choose specifically which pieces of information will be most useful.
Imagine you come across a blog post during your web browsing that details how a marketing expert you respect runs her campaigns. You’re hooked: this is the kind of material you’ve been looking for! Finally, the master reveals her secrets!
Your first instinct might be to save the article in its entirety. It’s high-quality information, so why not preserve all of it? The problem is, it’s an in-depth how-to article that is thousands of words long. Even if you spend the twenty or thirty minutes it would take to consume it now, in the future you’ll just have to spend all that time reading it again, since you’ll have forgotten most of the details. You also don’t want to just bookmark the link and save it to read later, because then you won’t know what it contains in the first place!
This is where most people get stuck. They either dive straight into the first piece of content they see, read it voraciously, but quickly forget all the details, or they open dozens of tabs in their web browser and feel a pang of guilt at all those interesting resources they haven’t been able to get to.
There is a way out of this situation. It starts with realizing that in any piece of content, the value is not evenly distributed. There are always certain parts that are especially interesting, helpful, or valuable to you. When you realize this, the answer is obvious. You can extract only the most salient, relevant, rich material and save it as a succinct note.
Don’t save entire chapters of a book—save only select passages. Don’t save complete transcripts of interviews—save a few of the best quotes. Don’t save entire websites—save a few screenshots of the sections that are most interesting. The best curators are picky about what they allow into their collections, and you should be too. With a notes app, you can always save links back to the original content if you need to review your sources or want to dive deeper into the details in the future.
The biggest pitfall I see people falling into once they begin capturing digital notes is saving too much. If you try to save every piece of material you come across, you run the risk of inundating your future self with tons of irrelevant information. At that point, your Second Brain will be no better than scrolling through social media.
This is why it’s so important to take on a Curator’s Perspective—that we are the judges, editors, and interpreters of the information we choose to let into our lives. Thinking like a curator means taking charge of your own information stream, instead of just letting it wash over you. The more economical you can be with the material you capture in the first place, the less time and effort your future self will have to spend organizing, distilling, and expressing it.II
Here are four criteria I suggest to help you decide exactly which nuggets of knowledge are worth keeping:
Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?
Inspiration is one of the most rare and precious experiences in life. It is the essential fuel for doing your best work, yet it’s impossible to call up inspiration on demand. You can Google the answer to a question, but you can’t Google a feeling.
There is a way to evoke a sense of inspiration more regularly: keep a collection of inspiring quotes, photos, ideas, and stories. Any time you need a break, a new perspective, or a dash of motivation, you can look through it and see what sparks your imagination.
For example, I keep a folder full of customer testimonials I’ve received over the years. Any time I think what I’m doing doesn’t matter or isn’t good enough, all I have to do is open up that folder and my perspective is completely shifted.
Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?
Carpenters are known for keeping odds and ends in a corner of their workshop—a variety of nails and washers, scraps of lumber cut off from larger planks, and random bits of metal and wood. It costs nothing to keep these “offcuts” around, and surprisingly often they end up being the crucial missing piece in a future project.
Sometimes you come across a piece of information that isn’t necessarily inspiring, but you know it might come in handy in the future. A statistic, a reference, a research finding, or a helpful diagram—these are the equivalents of the spare parts a carpenter might keep around their workshop.
For example, I keep a folder full of stock photos, graphics, and drawings I find both online and offline. Any time I need an image for a slide deck, or a web page, or to spark new ideas, I have a plentiful supply of imagery I’ve already found compelling ready and waiting.
Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?
One of the most valuable kinds of information to keep is personal information—your own thoughts, reflections, memories, and mementos. Like the age-old practice of journaling or keeping a diary, we can use notetaking to document our lives and better understand how we became who we are.
No one else has access to the wisdom you’ve personally gained from a lifetime of conversations, mistakes, victories, and lessons learned. No one else values the small moments of your days quite like you do.
I often save screenshots of text messages sent between my family and friends. The small moments of warmth and humor that take place in these threads are precious to me, since I can’t always be with them in person. It takes mere moments, and I love knowing that I’ll forever have memories from my conversations with the people closest to me.
Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?
I’ve often noticed that many of the notes people take are of ideas they already know, already agree with, or could have guessed. We have a natural bias as humans to seek evidence that confirms what we already believe, a well-studied phenomenon known as “confirmation bias.”6
That isn’t what a Second Brain is for. The renowned information theorist Claude Shannon, whose discoveries paved the way for modern technology, had a simple definition for “information”: that which surprises you.7 If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it? Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think.
Sometimes you come across an idea that is neither inspiring, personal, nor obviously useful, but there is something surprising about it. You may not be able to put your finger on why, but it conflicts with your existing point of view in a way that makes your brain perk up and pay attention. Those are the ideas you should capture.
Your Second Brain shouldn’t be just another way of confirming what you already know. We are already surrounded by algorithms that feed us only what we already believe and social networks that continually reinforce what we already think.
Our ability to capture ideas from anywhere takes us in a different direction: By saving ideas that may contradict each other and don’t necessarily support what we already believe, we can train ourselves to take in information from different sources instead of immediately jumping to conclusions. By playing with ideas—bending and stretching and remixing them—we become less attached to the way they were originally presented and can borrow certain aspects or elements to use in our own work.
If what you’re capturing doesn’t change your mind, then what’s the point?
Ultimately, Capture What Resonates
I’ve given you specific criteria to help you decide what is worth capturing, but if you take away one thing from this chapter, it should be to keep what resonates.
Here’s why: making decisions analytically, with a checklist, is taxing and stressful. It is the kind of thinking that demands the most energy. When you use up too much energy taking notes, you have little left over for the subsequent steps that add far more value: making connections, imagining possibilities, formulating theories, and creating new ideas of your own. Not to mention, if you make reading and learning into unpleasant experiences, over time you’re going to find yourself doing less and less of them. The secret to making reading a habit is to make it effortless and enjoyable.
As you consume a piece of content, listen for an internal feeling of being moved or surprised by the idea you’re taking in. This special feeling of “resonance”—like an echo in your soul—is your intuition telling you that something is literally “noteworthy.” You don’t need to figure out exactly why it resonates. Just look for the signs: your eyes might widen slightly, your heart may skip a beat, your throat may go slightly dry, and your sense of time might subtly slow down as the world around you fades away. These are clues that it’s time to hit “save.”
We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.”8 When something resonates with us, it is our emotion-based, intuitive mind telling us it is interesting before our logical mind can explain why. I often find that a piece of content resonates with me in ways I can’t fully explain in the moment, and its true potential only becomes clear later on.
There’s scientific evidence that our intuition knows what it’s doing. From the book Designing for Behavior Change:9
Participants in a famous study were given four biased decks of cards—some that would win them money, and some that would cause them to lose. When they started the game, they didn’t know that the decks were biased. As they played the game, though, people’s bodies started showing signs of physical “stress” when their conscious minds were about to use a money-losing deck. The stress was an automatic response that occurred because the intuitive mind realized something was wrong—long before the conscious mind realized anything was amiss.
The authors’ conclusion: “Our intuitive mind learns, and responds, even without our conscious awareness.”
If you ignore that inner voice of intuition, over time it will slowly quiet down and fade away. If you practice listening to what it is telling you, the inner voice will grow stronger. You’ll start to hear it in all kinds of situations. It will guide you in what choices to make and which opportunities to pursue. It will warn you away from people and situations that aren’t right for you. It will speak up and take a stand for your convictions even when you’re afraid.
Feynman was known for his wide-ranging, eclectic tastes. As a child he already showed a talent for engineering, once building a functioning home alarm system out of spare parts while his parents were out running errands. During his colorful lifetime Feynman spent time in Brazil teaching physics, learned to play the bongo and the conga drums well enough to perform with orchestras, and enthusiastically traveled around the world exploring other cultures.
Of course, Feynman is best known for his groundbreaking discoveries in theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1965. In his spare time, he also played a pivotal role on the commission that investigated the Challenger space shuttle disaster and published half a dozen books.
How could one person make so many contributions across so many areas? How did he have the time to lead such a full and interesting life while also becoming one of the most recognized scientists of his generation?
Feynman revealed his strategy in an interview4:
You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”
In other words, Feynman’s approach was to maintain a list of a dozen open questions. When a new scientific finding came out, he would test it against each of his questions to see if it shed any new light on the problem. This cross-disciplinary approach allowed him to make connections across seemingly unrelated subjects, while continuing to follow his sense of curiosity.
As told in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick,5 Feynman once took inspiration for his physics from an accident at dinner:
… he was eating in the student cafeteria when someone tossed a dinner plate into the air—a Cornell cafeteria plate with the university seal imprinted on one rim—and in the instant of its flight he experienced what he long afterward considered an epiphany. As the plate spun, it wobbled. Because of the insignia he could see that the spin and the wobble were not quite in synchrony. Yet just in that instant it seemed to him—or was it his physicist’s intuition?—that the two rotations were related.
After working the problem out on paper, Feynman discovered a 2-to-1 ratio between the plate’s wobble and spin, a neat relationship that suggested a deeper underlying principle at work.
When a fellow physicist and mentor asked what the use of such an insight was, Feynman responded: “It doesn’t have any importance… I don’t care whether a thing has importance. Isn’t it fun?” He was following his intuition and curiosity. But it did end up having importance, with his research into the equations underlying rotation informing the work that ultimately led to him receiving the Nobel Prize.
Feynman’s approach encouraged him to follow his interests wherever they might lead. He posed questions and constantly scanned for solutions to long-standing problems in his reading, conversations, and everyday life. When he found one, he could make a connection that looked to others like a flash of unparalleled brilliance.
Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?” This could include grand, sweeping questions like “How can we make society fairer and more equitable?” as well as practical ones like “How can I make it a habit to exercise every day?” It might include questions about relationships, such as “How can I have closer relationships with the people I love?” or productivity, like “How can I spend more of my time doing high-value work?”
Here are more examples of favorite problems from my students:
How do I live less in the past, and more in the present?
How do I build an investment strategy that is aligned with my mid-term and long-term goals and commitments?
What does it look like to move from mindless consumption to mindful creation?
How can I go to bed early instead of watching shows after the kids go to bed?
How can my industry become more ecologically sustainable while remaining profitable?
How can I work through the fear I have of taking on more responsibility?
How can my school provide more resources for students with special needs?
How do I start reading all the books I already have instead of buying more?
How can I speed up and relax at the same time?
How can we make the healthcare system more responsive to people’s needs?
What can I do to make eating healthy easier?
How can I make decisions with more confidence?
Notice that some of these questions are abstract, while others are concrete. Some express deep longings, while others are more like spontaneous interests. Many are questions about how to live a better life, while a few are focused on how to succeed professionally. The key to this exercise is to make them open-ended questions that don’t necessarily have a single answer. To find questions that invoke a state of wonder and curiosity about the amazing world we live in.
The power of your favorite problems is that they tend to stay fairly consistent over time. The exact framing of each question may change, but even as we move between projects, jobs, relationships, and careers, our favorite problems tend to follow us across the years. I recommend asking your family or childhood friends what you were obsessed with as a kid. Those very same interests probably still fire your imagination as an adult. Which means any content you collect related to them will likely be relevant far into the future as well.
As a kid, I had a passion for LEGOs, the modular toy blocks beloved by generations of children. My parents noticed that I didn’t play with LEGOs like other kids. Instead I spent my time organizing and reorganizing the pieces. I remember being completely captivated by the problem of how to create order out of the chaos of thousands of pieces of every shape and size. I would invent new organizational schemes—by color, by size, by theme—as I became obsessed with the idea that if I could just find the right system, I would finally be able to build my magnum opus—a LEGO spaceship like the ones I saw in the sci-fi movies I loved.
That very same question—How can creativity emerge out of chaos?—still drives me to this day. Only now, it’s in the form of organizing digital information instead of LEGOs. Pursuing this question has taught me so many things over the years, across many seasons of my life. The goal isn’t to definitively answer the question once and for all, but to use the question as a North Star for my learning.
Take a moment now to write down some of your own favorite problems. Here are my recommendations to guide you:
Ask people close to you what you were obsessed with as a child (often you’ll continue to be fascinated with the same things as an adult).
Don’t worry about coming up with exactly twelve (the exact number doesn’t matter, but try to come up with at least a few).
Don’t worry about getting the list perfect (this is just a first pass, and it will always be evolving).
Phrase them as open-ended questions that could have multiple answers (in contrast to “yes/no” questions with only one answer).
Use your list of favorite problems to make decisions about what to capture: anything potentially relevant to answering them. Use one of the capture tools I recommend later in this chapter, or in the Second Brain Resource Guide at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources.
Capture Criteria: How to Avoid Keeping Too Much (or Too Little)
Once you have identified the kinds of questions you want your Second Brain to answer, it’s time to choose specifically which pieces of information will be most useful.
Imagine you come across a blog post during your web browsing that details how a marketing expert you respect runs her campaigns. You’re hooked: this is the kind of material you’ve been looking for! Finally, the master reveals her secrets!
Your first instinct might be to save the article in its entirety. It’s high-quality information, so why not preserve all of it? The problem is, it’s an in-depth how-to article that is thousands of words long. Even if you spend the twenty or thirty minutes it would take to consume it now, in the future you’ll just have to spend all that time reading it again, since you’ll have forgotten most of the details. You also don’t want to just bookmark the link and save it to read later, because then you won’t know what it contains in the first place!
This is where most people get stuck. They either dive straight into the first piece of content they see, read it voraciously, but quickly forget all the details, or they open dozens of tabs in their web browser and feel a pang of guilt at all those interesting resources they haven’t been able to get to.
There is a way out of this situation. It starts with realizing that in any piece of content, the value is not evenly distributed. There are always certain parts that are especially interesting, helpful, or valuable to you. When you realize this, the answer is obvious. You can extract only the most salient, relevant, rich material and save it as a succinct note.
Don’t save entire chapters of a book—save only select passages. Don’t save complete transcripts of interviews—save a few of the best quotes. Don’t save entire websites—save a few screenshots of the sections that are most interesting. The best curators are picky about what they allow into their collections, and you should be too. With a notes app, you can always save links back to the original content if you need to review your sources or want to dive deeper into the details in the future.
The biggest pitfall I see people falling into once they begin capturing digital notes is saving too much. If you try to save every piece of material you come across, you run the risk of inundating your future self with tons of irrelevant information. At that point, your Second Brain will be no better than scrolling through social media.
This is why it’s so important to take on a Curator’s Perspective—that we are the judges, editors, and interpreters of the information we choose to let into our lives. Thinking like a curator means taking charge of your own information stream, instead of just letting it wash over you. The more economical you can be with the material you capture in the first place, the less time and effort your future self will have to spend organizing, distilling, and expressing it.II
Here are four criteria I suggest to help you decide exactly which nuggets of knowledge are worth keeping:
Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?
Inspiration is one of the most rare and precious experiences in life. It is the essential fuel for doing your best work, yet it’s impossible to call up inspiration on demand. You can Google the answer to a question, but you can’t Google a feeling.
There is a way to evoke a sense of inspiration more regularly: keep a collection of inspiring quotes, photos, ideas, and stories. Any time you need a break, a new perspective, or a dash of motivation, you can look through it and see what sparks your imagination.
For example, I keep a folder full of customer testimonials I’ve received over the years. Any time I think what I’m doing doesn’t matter or isn’t good enough, all I have to do is open up that folder and my perspective is completely shifted.
Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?
Carpenters are known for keeping odds and ends in a corner of their workshop—a variety of nails and washers, scraps of lumber cut off from larger planks, and random bits of metal and wood. It costs nothing to keep these “offcuts” around, and surprisingly often they end up being the crucial missing piece in a future project.
Sometimes you come across a piece of information that isn’t necessarily inspiring, but you know it might come in handy in the future. A statistic, a reference, a research finding, or a helpful diagram—these are the equivalents of the spare parts a carpenter might keep around their workshop.
For example, I keep a folder full of stock photos, graphics, and drawings I find both online and offline. Any time I need an image for a slide deck, or a web page, or to spark new ideas, I have a plentiful supply of imagery I’ve already found compelling ready and waiting.
Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?
One of the most valuable kinds of information to keep is personal information—your own thoughts, reflections, memories, and mementos. Like the age-old practice of journaling or keeping a diary, we can use notetaking to document our lives and better understand how we became who we are.
No one else has access to the wisdom you’ve personally gained from a lifetime of conversations, mistakes, victories, and lessons learned. No one else values the small moments of your days quite like you do.
I often save screenshots of text messages sent between my family and friends. The small moments of warmth and humor that take place in these threads are precious to me, since I can’t always be with them in person. It takes mere moments, and I love knowing that I’ll forever have memories from my conversations with the people closest to me.
Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?
I’ve often noticed that many of the notes people take are of ideas they already know, already agree with, or could have guessed. We have a natural bias as humans to seek evidence that confirms what we already believe, a well-studied phenomenon known as “confirmation bias.”6
That isn’t what a Second Brain is for. The renowned information theorist Claude Shannon, whose discoveries paved the way for modern technology, had a simple definition for “information”: that which surprises you.7 If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it? Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think.
Sometimes you come across an idea that is neither inspiring, personal, nor obviously useful, but there is something surprising about it. You may not be able to put your finger on why, but it conflicts with your existing point of view in a way that makes your brain perk up and pay attention. Those are the ideas you should capture.
Your Second Brain shouldn’t be just another way of confirming what you already know. We are already surrounded by algorithms that feed us only what we already believe and social networks that continually reinforce what we already think.
Our ability to capture ideas from anywhere takes us in a different direction: By saving ideas that may contradict each other and don’t necessarily support what we already believe, we can train ourselves to take in information from different sources instead of immediately jumping to conclusions. By playing with ideas—bending and stretching and remixing them—we become less attached to the way they were originally presented and can borrow certain aspects or elements to use in our own work.
If what you’re capturing doesn’t change your mind, then what’s the point?
Ultimately, Capture What Resonates
I’ve given you specific criteria to help you decide what is worth capturing, but if you take away one thing from this chapter, it should be to keep what resonates.
Here’s why: making decisions analytically, with a checklist, is taxing and stressful. It is the kind of thinking that demands the most energy. When you use up too much energy taking notes, you have little left over for the subsequent steps that add far more value: making connections, imagining possibilities, formulating theories, and creating new ideas of your own. Not to mention, if you make reading and learning into unpleasant experiences, over time you’re going to find yourself doing less and less of them. The secret to making reading a habit is to make it effortless and enjoyable.
As you consume a piece of content, listen for an internal feeling of being moved or surprised by the idea you’re taking in. This special feeling of “resonance”—like an echo in your soul—is your intuition telling you that something is literally “noteworthy.” You don’t need to figure out exactly why it resonates. Just look for the signs: your eyes might widen slightly, your heart may skip a beat, your throat may go slightly dry, and your sense of time might subtly slow down as the world around you fades away. These are clues that it’s time to hit “save.”
We know from neuroscientific research that “emotions organize—rather than disrupt—rational thinking.”8 When something resonates with us, it is our emotion-based, intuitive mind telling us it is interesting before our logical mind can explain why. I often find that a piece of content resonates with me in ways I can’t fully explain in the moment, and its true potential only becomes clear later on.
There’s scientific evidence that our intuition knows what it’s doing. From the book Designing for Behavior Change:9
Participants in a famous study were given four biased decks of cards—some that would win them money, and some that would cause them to lose. When they started the game, they didn’t know that the decks were biased. As they played the game, though, people’s bodies started showing signs of physical “stress” when their conscious minds were about to use a money-losing deck. The stress was an automatic response that occurred because the intuitive mind realized something was wrong—long before the conscious mind realized anything was amiss.
The authors’ conclusion: “Our intuitive mind learns, and responds, even without our conscious awareness.”
If you ignore that inner voice of intuition, over time it will slowly quiet down and fade away. If you practice listening to what it is telling you, the inner voice will grow stronger. You’ll start to hear it in all kinds of situations. It will guide you in what choices to make and which opportunities to pursue. It will warn you away from people and situations that aren’t right for you. It will speak up and take a stand for your convictions even when you’re afraid.
