Building a Second Brain, page 7
I can’t think of anything more important for your creative life—and your life in general—than learning to listen to the voice of intuition inside. It is the source of your imagination, your confidence, and your spontaneity. You can intentionally train yourself to hear that voice of intuition every day by taking note of what it tells you.
Besides capturing what personally resonates with you, there are a couple other kinds of details that are generally useful to save in your notes. It’s a good idea to capture key information about the source of a note, such as the original web page address, the title of the piece, the author or publisher, and the date it was published.III Many capture tools are even able to identify and save this information automatically. Also, it’s often helpful to capture chapter titles, headings, and bullet-point lists, since they add structure to your notes and represent distillation already performed by the author on your behalf.
Beyond Your Notetaking App: Choosing Capture Tools
Now that you know what kinds of material to save in your Second Brain, it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty: How does capturing work exactly?
Let’s say while reading that in-depth marketing article, you decide a specific piece of advice is highly relevant to your own plans. Most notetaking apps (introduced in Chapter 2 and covered in detail in the Second Brain Resource Guide at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources) have built-in features that allow you to capture excerpts from outside sources, and you can always simply cut and paste text directly into a new note. There is also an array of more specialized “capture tools” that are designed to make capturing content in digital form easy and even fun.
The most common options include:
Ebook apps, which often allow you to export your highlights or annotations all at once.
Read later apps that allow you to bookmark content you find online for later reading (or in the case of podcasts or videos, listening or watching).
Basic notes apps that often come preinstalled on mobile devices and are designed for easily capturing short snippets of text.
Social media apps, which usually allow you to “favorite” content and export it to a notes app.
Web clippers, which allow you to save parts of web pages (often included as a built-in feature of notes apps).
Audio/voice transcription apps that create text transcripts from spoken words.
Other third-party services, integrations, and plug-ins that automate the process of exporting content from one app to another.
Some of these tools are free, and others charge a small fee. Some are completely automatic, working silently in the background (for example, to automatically sync your ebook highlights with a notes app), while others require a bit of manual effort (such as taking photos of paper notebooks to save them digitally).IV But in any case, the act of capture takes only moments—to hit share, export, or save—and voilà, you’ve preserved the best parts of whatever you’re consuming in your Second Brain.
Make no mistake: you will continue to use many kinds of software to manage information—such as computer folders, cloud storage drives, and various platforms for sharing and collaborating on documents. Think of your capture tools as your extended nervous system, reaching out into the world to allow you to sense your surroundings. No matter how many different kinds of software you use, don’t leave all the knowledge they contain scattered across dozens of places you’ll never think to look. Make sure your best findings get routed back to your notes app where you can put them all together and act on them.
Here are some of the most popular ways of using capture tools to save content you come across:
Capturing passages from ebooks: Most ebook apps make it very easy to highlight passages as you read. On Amazon Kindle, you can simply drag your finger across a sentence or paragraph you like to add a highlight. Then use the share menu to export all your highlights from the entire book all at once straight to your digital notes. You can also add comments right alongside the text as you read, which will help you remember what you found interesting about a passage.
Capturing excerpts from online articles or web pages: When you come across an online article or blog post you want to read, save it to a “read later” app, which is like a digital magazine rack of everything you want to read (or watch or listen to) at some point. Whenever you have some free time (such as on breaks or in the evening after work), scroll through the articles you’ve saved and pick one to read. You can make highlights, just as with ebooks, and they can also be automatically exported to your notes app using a third-party platform.
Capturing quotes from podcasts: Many podcast player apps allow you to bookmark or “clip” segments of episodes as you’re listening to them. Some of them will even transcribe the audio into text, so you can export and search it within your notes.
Capturing voice memos: Use a voice memo app that allows you to press a button, speak directly into your smartphone, and have every word transcribed into text and exported to your notes.
Capturing parts of YouTube videos: This is a little-known feature, but almost every YouTube video is accompanied by an automatically generated transcript. Just click the “Open transcript” button and a window will open. From there, you can copy and paste excerpts to your notes.
Capturing excerpts from emails: Most popular notes apps include a feature that allows you to forward any email to a special address, and the full text of that email (including any attachments) will be added to your notes.
Capturing content from other apps: You might edit photos in a photos app, or make sketches in a drawing app, or like posts in a social media app. As long as that app has a “share” button or allows for copy-and-paste, you can save whatever you’ve created directly to your notes for safekeeping.
The Surprising Benefits of Externalizing Our Thoughts
Often ideas occur to us at the most random times—during our commute, while watching TV, when we’re playing with our kids, or in the shower.
Your Second Brain gives you a place to corral the jumble of thoughts tumbling through your head and park them in a waiting area for safekeeping. Not only does this allow you to preserve them for the long term; there are multiple other profound benefits that come from the simple act of writing something down.
First, you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”10 researchers have found that when people actively generate a series of words, such as by speaking or writing, more parts of their brain are activated when compared to simply reading the same words. Writing things down is a way of “rehearsing” those ideas, like practicing a dance routine or shooting hoops, which makes them far more likely to stick.
Enhancing our memory is just the beginning. When you express an idea in writing, it’s not just a matter of transferring the exact contents of your mind into paper or digital form. Writing creates new knowledge that wasn’t there before. Each word you write triggers mental cascades and internal associations, leading to further ideas, all of which can come tumbling out onto the page or screen.V
Thinking doesn’t just produce writing; writing also enriches thinking.
There is even significant evidence that expressing our thoughts in writing can lead to benefits for our health and well-being.11 One of the most cited psychology papers of the 1990s found that “translating emotional events into words leads to profound social, psychological, and neural changes.”
In a wide range of controlled studies, writing about one’s inner experiences led to a drop in visits to the doctor, improved immune systems, and reductions in distress. Students who wrote about emotional topics showed improvements in their grades, professionals who had been laid off found new jobs more quickly, and staff members were absent from work at lower rates. The most amazing thing about these findings is that they didn’t rely on input from others. No one had to read or respond to what these people wrote down—the benefits came just from the act of writing.
Perhaps the most immediate benefit of capturing content outside our heads is that we escape what I call the “reactivity loop”—the hamster wheel of urgency, outrage, and sensationalism that characterizes so much of the Internet. The moment you first encounter an idea is the worst time to decide what it means. You need to set it aside and gain some objectivity.
With a Second Brain as a shield against the media storm, we no longer have to react to each idea immediately, or risk losing it forever. We can set things aside and get to them later when we are calmer and more grounded. We can take our time slowly absorbing new information and integrating it into our thinking, free of the pressing demands of the moment. I’m always amazed that when I revisit the items I’ve previously saved to read later, many of them that seemed so important at the time are clearly trivial and unneeded.
Notetaking is the easiest and simplest way of externalizing our thinking. It requires no special skill, is private by default, and can be performed anytime and anywhere. Once our thoughts are outside our head, we can examine them, play with them, and make them better. It’s like a shortcut to realizing the full potential of the thoughts flowing through our minds.
Your Turn: What Would This Look Like If It Was Easy?
I’ve introduced a lot of ideas in this chapter, and I know it’s a lot to absorb. There are so many ways to capture knowledge, but when you’re just getting started all those options can just feel overwhelming.
I want to give you an open question that will help guide you as you embark on this journey: What would capturing ideas look like if it was easy?
Think about what you would want to capture more of (or less of). How would that feel? What kinds of content are already familiar enough that it would be easy to begin saving them now? What would capturing look like today or this week? On average I capture just two notes per day—what are two ideas, insights, observations, perspectives, or lessons you’ve encountered today that you could write down right now?
It’s important to keep capturing relatively effortless because it is only the first step. You need to do it enough that it becomes second nature, while conserving your time and energy for the later steps when the value of the ideas you’ve found can be fully unleashed.
Capture isn’t about doing more. It’s about taking notes on the experiences you’re already having. It’s about squeezing more juice out of the fruit of life, savoring every moment to the fullest by paying closer attention to the details.
Don’t worry about whether you’re capturing “correctly.” There’s no right way to do this, and therefore, no wrong way. The only way to know whether you’re getting the good stuff is to try putting it to use in real life. We’ll get to that soon, but in the meantime, try out a couple of digital notes apps and capture tools to see which ones fit your style. Don’t forget the resource guide I’ve put together to help you make your choice.
If at any point you feel stuck or overwhelmed, step back and remember that nothing is permanent in the digital world. Digital content is endlessly malleable, so you don’t have to commit to any decision forever. While every step of CODE complements the others, you can also use them one at a time. Start with the parts that resonate with you and expand from there as your confidence grows.
In the next chapter, I’ll tell you what to do with the knowledge assets you’ve gathered in your Second Brain.
I. MIT economist César Hidalgo in his book Why Information Grows describes how physical products, which he calls “crystals of imagination,” allow us to turn what we know into concrete objects that other people can access: “Crystallizing our thoughts into tangible and digital objects is what allows us to share our thoughts with others.” And elsewhere: “Our ability to crystallize imagination… gives us access to the practical uses of the knowledge and knowhow residing in the nervous systems of other people.”
II. If you’re looking for a more precise answer of how much content to capture in your notes, I recommend no more than 10 percent of the original source, at most. Any more than that, and it will be too difficult to wade through all the material in the future. Conveniently, 10 percent also happens to be the limit that most ebooks allow you to export as highlights.
III. Even if the original web page disappears, you can often use this information to locate an archived version using the Wayback Machine, a project of the Internet Archive that preserves a record of websites: https://archive.org/web/.
IV. The software landscape is constantly changing, so I’ve created a resource guide with my continually updated recommendations of the best capture tools, both free and paid, and for a variety of devices and operating systems. You can find it at buildingasecondbrain.com/resources.
V. This is called “detachment gain,” as explained in The Detachment Gain: The Advantage of Thinking Out Loud by Daniel Reisberg, and refers to the “functional advantage to putting thoughts into externalized forms” such as speaking or writing, leading to the “possibility of new discoveries that might not have been obtained in any other fashion.” If you’ve ever had to write out a word to remember how it’s spelled, you’ve experienced this.
Chapter 5
Organize—Save for Actionability
Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.
—Gustave Flaubert, French novelist
Twyla Tharp is one of the most celebrated, inventive dance choreographers in modern times. Her body of work is made up of more than 160 pieces, including 129 dances, twelve television specials, six major Hollywood movies, four full-length ballets, four Broadway shows, and two figure-skating routines.
Dance might seem like the creative medium that could least benefit from “organizing.” It is performed live each time, using primarily the dancers’ own bodies, and often seems improvisational and spontaneous. Yet in her book The Creative Habit,1 Tharp revealed that a simple organizing technique lies at the heart of a creative process that has propelled her through an incredibly prolific six-decade career.
Tharp calls her approach “the box.” Every time she begins a new project, she takes out a foldable file box and labels it with the name of the project, usually the name of the dance she is choreographing. This initial act gives her a sense of purpose as she begins: “The box makes me feel organized, that I have my act together even when I don’t know where I’m going yet. It also represents a commitment. The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I’ve started work.”
Into the box she puts anything and everything related to the project, like a swirling cauldron of creative energy. Any time she finds a new piece of material—such as “notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me”—she always knows where to put it. It all goes into the box. Which means that any time she works on that project, she knows exactly where to look—in the box.
In her book, Tharp tells the story of a specific project where the box proved invaluable: a collaboration with the pop rock icon Billy Joel to turn a collection of his songs into a full-length dance performance. It was a bold idea, somewhere between a concert and a musical, but quite distinct from either one. It wasn’t clear how the characters in different songs, who weren’t written as part of the same story, could be combined into the same narrative.
Even a project as open-ended as this one started the same way as all the others, with her goals: “I believe in starting each project with a stated goal. Sometimes the goal is nothing more than a personal mantra such as ‘keep it simple’ or ‘something perfect’ or ‘economy’ to remind me of what I was thinking at the beginning if and when I lose my way. I write it down on a slip of paper and it’s the first thing that goes into the box.”
For the collaboration with Joel, Tharp had two goals: The first was to understand and master the role of narrative in dance, a long-standing creative challenge that had captured her curiosity. The second goal was much more practical, but no less motivating: to pay her dancers well. She said, “So I wrote my goals for the project, ‘tell a story’ and ‘make dance pay,’ on two blue index cards and watched them float to the bottom of the Joel box… they sit there as I write this, covered by months of research, like an anchor keeping me connected to my original impulse.”
After that, every bit of research and every idea potentially relevant to the project went into Tharp’s box. Recordings of Billy Joel’s music videos, live performances, lectures, photographs, news clippings, song lists, and notes about those songs. She gathered news footage and movies about the Vietnam War, important books from the era, and even material from other boxes, including research from an abandoned project that never made it onto the stage.
The artifacts that Tharp collected weren’t just for her own use. They became sparks of inspiration for her team: a pair of earrings and a macramé vest shared with the costume designer; books about psychedelic light events to inspire the lighting designer; photographs from other shows and Joel’s childhood home in Long Island to discuss with the production designer.
All this creative raw material eventually filled twelve boxes, but all the collecting and gathering from the outside world doesn’t mean that Tharp didn’t add her own creativity. For example, she found an elaborate set of notes from an early song of Joel’s called “She’s Got a Way,” which was full of innocence and sweetness. She decided to change its meaning: “In my notes you can see the song morphing into something harsher, eventually becoming two simultaneous sleazy bar scenes, one in Vietnam, the other back home. I felt obliged to run this by Billy, warning him, ‘This is going to destroy the song.’ He wasn’t worried. ‘Go for it,’ he said.”
