Reading is an act of discovery, a journey of emotions, a conversation with your inner self.
This is my commonplace book, a treasure trove of words to revisit and share.
May these words spark your curiosity, challenge your assumptions, and open your mind to new perspectives.
- Title: Building a Second Brain
- Author: Tiago Forte
- Language: English
When you feel stuck in your creative pursuits, it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you.
When you feel stuck in your creative pursuits, it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. You haven’t lost your touch or run out of creative juice. It just means you don’t yet have enough raw material to work with. If it feels like the well of inspiration has run dry, it’s because you need a deeper well full of examples, illustrations, stories, statistics, diagrams, analogies, metaphors, photos, mindmaps, conversation notes, quotes—anything that will help you argue for your perspective or fight for a cause you believe in.
The solution is to keep only what resonates
The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside.
When something resonates, it moves you on an intuitive level. Often, the ideas that resonate are the ones that are most unusual, counterintuitive, interesting, or potentially useful. Don’t make it an analytical decision, and don’t worry about why exactly it resonates—just look inside for a feeling of pleasure, curiosity, wonder, or excitement, and let that be your signal for when it’s time to capture a passage, an image, a quote, or a fact.
By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us, we can improve not only our ability to take better notes, but also our understanding of ourselves and what makes us tick. It is a way of turning up the volume on our intuition so we can hear the wisdom it offers us.
Information: that which surprises you
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.
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.
Information: change your mind
If what you’re capturing doesn’t change your mind, then what’s the point?
Every note is the seed of an idea
The human mind is like a sizzling-hot frying pan of associations—throw a handful of seeds in there and they’ll explode into new ideas like popcorn. Every note is the seed of an idea, reminding you of what you already know and already think about a topic.
There is a powerful way to facilitate and speed up this process of rapid association: distill your notes down to their essence.
Every idea has an “essence”: the heart and soul of what it is trying to communicate. It might take hundreds of pages and thousands of words to fully explain a complex insight, but there is always a way to convey the core message in just a sentence or two.
Notetaking is like time travel
In this sense, notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self.
Ideas are merely thoughts until you put them into action
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.
Refusing to wait until you have everything perfectly ready before you share what you know
The final stage of the creative process, Express, is about refusing to wait until you have everything perfectly ready before you share what you know. It is about expressing your ideas earlier, more frequently, and in smaller chunks to test what works and gather feedback from others. That feedback in turn gets drawn in to your Second Brain, where it becomes the starting point for the next iteration of your work.
Building a Second Brain is really about standardizing the way we work. This standardized routine is known as the creative process
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.”