How to Build a Second Brain
Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte is about implementing a system and processes to download your thoughts. Doing so gives you what you need to not just be more productive but to create more too.
Now that ChatGPT is a year old, you’re probably aware that it isn’t going away anytime soon. AI-powered chatbots are here to stay. With that knowledge, you might be tempted to dive deep into learning new skills on how to use it.
That isn’t a bad approach. In fact, it’s something I recommend.
But before you do that, you need to get your own intellectual house in order first.
Ever since I read The 4-Hour Workweek back in 2017, I’ve been obsessed with life design and productivity. That book was like a gateway drug into the new-to-me genre of personal development and self-help.
What I’ve discovered since then is that the only way to actually be productive is to build systems and processes that can sustain productivity. Learning about productivity is all fine and dandy, but without systems in place, it can’t last.
One thing that I think is missing from the conversation around productivity and personal growth is personal knowledge management. This is a subset of productivity that focuses on creating systems and processes to not just learn how to become a better, more productive person — but how to take action on everything you’re learning.
Building a Second Brain is arguably one of the best books — if not the best book — in the personal knowledge management space. Tiago Forte has crafted a framework for how to approach information, take note of it, and curate it to provide value not just for your life, but for the lives of those around you.
If you plan to bring a more robust reading habit into your life, make sure Building a Second Brain is at the top of your list.
Information is vital to harnessing the full potential of artificial intelligence. Before you can use it properly, you first need to have a system in place to capture information and quickly process it.
Contrary to popular belief, money isn’t the currency driving our modern economy — it’s information.
If you look at tech companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon, they’re as large as they are, thanks to their ability to capture and process information at scale. Google’s core business is deciding what comes up in the search results after all. That, combined with the ability to sell selective information to advertisers, is what makes tech companies so powerful.
The same is true for individuals. Those who can process information quickly and turn it into something of economic value are the ones who will continue to excel in the years to come.
That’s why setting up a personal knowledge management system now is so important. Before you begin adding more and more AI-enabled software subscriptions to your productivity stack, you need to understand what information is and for what purpose you’re collecting it.
How do you process the information you currently have? What do you create from it?
Do you just store it for the sake of storing it — like a digital hoarder who’s too afraid of letting a file go? Or do you have a system for deeply analyzing a piece of information and collating it with related content to create something of value?
That’s what Building a Second Brain helps you create: a system for organizing and processing information so you can use that information to create, teach, and build for the benefit of others.
Building a Second Brain’s framework for organizing information is broken down into four parts: capture, organize, distill, and express.
Without spoiling the book too much, Tiago Forte offers a four-part roadmap for how to take information and turn it into something actionable.
The reason is simple: the best way to take action on something is to first make it easy to discover. Information is great, but information for information’s sake is nothing more than digital clutter. Without a process for organizing information, you have no way of knowing what’s important or how you can take action from it.
The first part of the framework is capturing. This is how you take in information that you think is interesting or relevant to something you’re currently working on. Capturing information can take a variety of forms. It could be a picture of something you saw while walking down the street or it could be a memorable quote from a book you’re reading.
Once you figure out what you’d like to capture, you need a place to put the information you gather. Forte recommends using the notes app on your phone and I wholeheartedly agree. I use Google Keep and have started capturing information based on the project or idea it’s related to.
Here’s an example. I’m currently writing this from a coffee shop in east Austin. I recently started a coworking club, and I noticed a sign on a table that is relevant to the club. It’s not something I need to take action on now but it’s something I want to take action on in the future. I snapped a picture of the sign, added it to Google Keep, and jotted down some contact information, so when I am ready to take action, I have everything I need.
The next part of the process is organizing. It’s all fine and dandy to store notes in an app like Google Keep but if you’re anything like me that means you might add hundreds of new notes every single day. Once you have a repository for all the information you capture, you need a process for sorting it.
Forte’s organization method is broken down into another framework called the PARA Method. Using PARA, you can organize information in the following buckets:
Projects
Areas
Resources
Archives
Projects are things you’re currently working on. Information placed here is immediately actionable. Areas are topics — think finances or health — that aren’t immediately actionable now, but are important to keep on the backburner. Resources are ideas, topics, or things you want to reference later on. And archives are things you’ve done and want to hold onto for future reference, but there’s no new action that you need to take.
Using the PARA Method, you’re not only able to more effectively store information but by doing so, you filter the important from the unimportant. Figuring out what information actually matters is half the battle of personal knowledge management.
Once you’ve organized your notes, the next step is distilling. This is taking all of the actionable information you have and parsing through it to figure out what it actually means and what you can do with it.
Actively reading a book is a great example of this. If you read like I do, you probably have a lot of highlights and tons of notes in the margins. Distilling is a process for essentially taking notes from your notes. That might entail highlighting critical pieces of information with a different color or whipping out some Post-it notes to mark down pages you want to easily access.
Distilling is important because it helps you identify what’s important and why. It’s this information that’s the most valuable and it’s what will help you create value from all the information you collect.
The last part of the framework is expressing. One of the best ways to retain information is to create something from it. That could look like teaching it to someone else or it could be doing what I’m doing here — writing an essay that captures the core learnings from a book I read.
More importantly, expressing is a process for generating economic value from information. Elon Musk didn’t just magically build Tesla. The cars, charging stations, and gigafactories operated by Tesla are the outcome of decades of study. Different pieces of information had to be brought together and expressed in such a way that it led to the creation of the company we know as Tesla today.
All of this — capturing, organizing, distilling, and expressing — is part of a creative process to generate something new. It’s about taking a bunch of information to create something that didn’t quite exist before.
That’s what personal knowledge management is all about. It’s not just a path to increased productivity. It’s a process for creating, and through the process of creating, you’re able to build a more fulfilling life for yourself.
Final takeaway.
Knowledge is the most valuable asset of the future.
Not having a bunch of money in the bank. Or owning a home. Or having a ton of stocks in your retirement account for that matter.
The ability to identify and capitalize on valuable information as quickly as possible — ideally before anyone else does — is one of the new ways our society is going to define success in the future.
This is important to think about from the context of artificial intelligence. Tools like ChatGPT are primarily viewed from a productivity lens. The goal is to use them to augment human knowledge work and eventually replace it.
But before that can happen, we first need a better understanding of what knowledge is, how it’s obtained, and how it can be leveraged to create economic value — for ourselves and the communities we live in.
That’s why I think Building a Second Brain is the most important book to read right now. It helps you create a process to answer some of those questions. Instead of hoarding information, we can begin leveraging it to create and build a more prosperous version of the world we want to live in.
Pick up a copy of Building a Second Brain and give it a read. I HIGHLY recommend downloading a digital version of the book and using Readwise to facilitate the notetaking process. I sync Readwise with Notion, which automatically stores all of my notes and highlights in one place. This is what works for me but feel free to use whatever system works for you.
P.S.
Check out this piece on
to learn more about how to use Readwise.
Ready to dive in? Pick you a copy of Building a Second Brain at your favorite book dealer.
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