搭建个人笔记系统——醋泡白豆

🎯 三句话总结

第二大脑即“数字摘记本”，让思绪具象化，拓展思维的边界，让虚渺的思绪更易整理；

使用CODE—— 捕获、整理、提炼、输出 这样的程序进行信息处理；

使用PARA—— 项目、领域、信息源、归档 这样的分类方式对信息进行规制

💭 对这本书的印象

我是如何发现这本书的：社交网络上看到的

阅读时间：5个小时

应该推荐给谁： 信息整理爱好者

🙌 这本书如何改变了我

1/ 重新思考整理笔记的重要性，打算重读《卡片笔记写作法》，写一篇相关的文章。

2/ 优化了我记录东西的流程：CODE 顺序可以采用

3/ 几个受启发的观点：

a、记录能让自己情绪共振的内容，文字、视频、图片、声音等

b、信息流动起来最有价值，不用苛求自己整理最完美的笔记

c、为未来的自己整理、像厨师做菜一样整理信息，目的是为了创造，是为了做出菜，而不是单纯为了整理而整理

b、layer1 摘抄重点词语、layer2 粗体标注重要信息、 layer3高亮填充字体、layer4 自己的话语总结

🖋️ 摘抄

Building a Second Brain

Tiago Forte

Introduction: The Promise of a Second Brain

“information hoarders,”

Theonly problem is that you’re often consuming it at the wrong time.

1 Where It All Started

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.—David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

I started using digital notetaking in other parts of my life. In my collegeclasses, I turned stacks of disheveled spiral-bound notebooks into anelegant, searchable collection of lessons. I learned to master the process ofwriting down only the most important points from my classes, reviewingthem on demand, and using them to compose an essay or pass a test.

学生时代就养成整理笔记的习惯，真是不错。

I saved examples of lessons andexercises anywhere I found them: from textbooks, websites, and USB drivespassed around by other teachers. I mixed and matched English phrases,expressions, and slang into word games to keep my energetic third gradersengaged. I taught the older students the basics of personal productivity—how to keep a schedule, how to take notes in class, and how to set goalsand plan their education.

device merged into a ceaseless melody of

“How can anyone get anything done here? What’s their secret?”

2 What Is a Second Brain?

Aseparate study cited by the Times estimates that we consume theequivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content each and every day,five times higher than in 1986.2

Research from Microsoft shows that the average US employee spends 76hours per year looking for misplaced notes, items, or files.

Every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spentdoing the thinking that only humans can do: inventing new things, craftingstories, recognizing patterns, following our intuition, collaborating withothers, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories. Everyminute we spend trying to mentally juggle all the stuff we have to doleaves less time for more meaningful pursuits like cooking, self-care,hobbies, resting, and spending time with loved ones.

查了一下 是摘录本的意思

Commonplace Book

This digital commonplace book is what I call a Second Brain. Think of it asthe combination of a study notebook, a personal journal, and a sketchbookfor new ideas. It is a multipurpose tool that can adapt to your changingneeds over time.

A calendar app is an extension of your brain’s ability to remember events,ensuring you never forget an appointment. Your smartphone is anextension of your ability to communicate, allowing your voice to reachacross oceans and continents.

It’s not at all clear what you should be taking notes on.No one tells you when or how your notes will be used.The “test” can come at any time and in any form.You’re allowed to reference your notes at any time, provided you took them in the first place.You are expected to take action on your notes, not just regurgitate them.

There is a constant hum of background anxietythat she has come to expect, as she wonders what needs her attention andwhat she may be missing.

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 pervasivefeeling of discontent and dissatisfaction—the experience of facing an endless onslaught ofdemands on their time, their innate curiosity and imagination withering away under thesuffocating weight of obligation.

这个描述实在是太贴切了

surrounded by knowledge, yet starving forwisdom.

surrounded by knowledge, yet starving forwisdom.

You take ten minutes before the meeting starts to organize your notes. About a third ofthem aren’t a priority, and you put them aside. Another third are critical, and you makethem into an agenda for the meeting. The remaining third are somewhere in between, andyou put them into a separate list to refer to if appropriate.

• Herbert Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “Whatinformation consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence awealth of information creates a poverty of attention . . .”

3 How a Second Brain Works

It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists. I amfree because I remember.—Abhinavagupta, tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher and mystic

其实使用软件就能完成大部分工作

What would the job description for such a personal assistant look like? What “jobs” wouldyou hire them to do for you? The same way you would hold your assistant accountable to acertain standard of performance, the same is true for your Second Brain. You need to knowwhat it should be doing for you so you know if it’s worth keeping around.

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.

Digital notes aren’t physical, but they are visual. They turn vague concepts into tangibleentities that can be observed, rearranged, edited, and combined together.

Incubate Our Ideas Over Time

American journalist, author, and filmmaker Sebastian Junger once wrote on the subject of“writer’s block”: “It’s not that I’m blocked. It’s that I don’t have enough researchto write with power and knowledge about that topic. It always means, not that I can’t findthe right words, [but rather] that I don’t have the ammunition.”7

Multimedia: Just like a paper notebook might contain drawings and sketches, quotes and ideas, and even a pasted photo or Post-it, a notes app can store a wide variety of different kinds of content in one place, so you never need to wonder where to put something.Informal: Notes are inherently messy, so there’s no need for perfect spelling or polished presentation. This makes it as easy and frictionless as possible to jot things down as soon as they occur to you, which is essential to allow nascent ideas to grow

Open-ended: Taking notes is a continuous process that never really ends, and you don’t always know where it might lead. Unlike more specialized kinds of software that are designedto produce a specific kind of output (such as slide decks, spreadsheets, graphics, or videos),notes are ideal for free-form exploration before you have a goal in mind.

Remembering, Connecting, Creating: The Three Stages of Personal Knowledge Management

Introducing The CODE Method: The Four Steps to Remembering What MattersTo guide you in the process of creating your own Second Brain, I’ve developed a simple,intuitive four-part method called “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express.

Capture: Keep What Resonates

Like a scientist capturing only the rarest butterflies to take back to the lab, our goal shouldbe to “capture” only the ideas and insights we think are truly noteworthy.

Organize: Save for Actionability

“How is thisgoing to help me move forward one of my current projects?”

Distill: Find the Essence

Every idea has an “essence”: the heart and soul of what it is trying to communicate. Itmight 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.

Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for myfuture self?” That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explainwhy you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention.

Express: Show Your Work

This is why I recommend you shift as much of your time and effort as possible fromconsuming to creating.

What should you create?It depends on your skills, interests, and personality. If you are highly analytical, you couldevaluate the many options for camping gear and create a list of recommended products toshare with your friends. If you like to teach, you could record your favorite dessert recipeand post it on social media or a blog. If you care about a local cause such as public parks,you could create a plan to lobby the city council for more funding.

Information is always in flux, and it is always a work in progress. Since nothing is ever trulyfinal, there is no need to wait to get started. You can publish a simple website now, andslowly add additional pages over time. You can send out a draft of a piece of writing nowand make revisions later when you have more time. The sooner you begin, the sooner youstart on the path of improvement.

• The word “productivity” has the same origin as the Latin verb producere , which means“to produce.” Which means that at the end of the day, if you can’t point to some kind ofoutput or result you’ve produced, it’s questionable whether you’ve been productive atall.

4 Capture—Keep What Resonates

Everything not saved will be lost.—Nintendo “Quit Screen” message

A garden is only as good as its seeds, so we want to start by seeding our knowledge gardenwith only the most interesting, insightful, useful ideas we can find.

digital hoarding

As she says: “I disappear into my phone because my phone is where I keep mynotes and my phone is where I’m editing.”

Creating a Knowledge Bank: How to Generate CompoundingInterest from Your Thoughts

Knowledge isn’t always something “out there” that you have to go out and find. It’severywhere, all around you: buried in the emails in your inbox, hidden within files in yourdocuments folder, and waiting on cloud drives. Knowledge capture is about mining therichness of the reading you’re already doing and the life you’re already living.

Highlights: Insightful passages from books or articles you read.Quotes: Memorable passages from podcasts or audiobooks you listen to.Bookmarks and favorites: Links to interesting content you find on the web or favorited social media posts.Voice memos: Clips recorded on your mobile device as “notes to self.”Meeting notes: Notes you take about what was discussed during meetings or phone calls.Images: Photos or other images that you find inspiring or interesting.Takeaways: Lessons from courses, conferences, or pre

n my experience, there are four kinds of content that aren’t well suited to notes apps:

sensitive information

a special format or file type

large file?

collaboratively edited

Feynman revealed his strategy in an interview4:You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in yourmind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hearor read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems tosee 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!”

“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.

Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?” This could includegrand, sweeping questions like “How can we make society fairer and more equitable?” aswell as practical ones like “How can I make it a habit to exercise every day?” It mightinclude questions about relationships, such as “How can I have closer relationships with thepeople I love?” or productivity, like “How can I spend more of my time doing high-valuework?”

一本书有价值的地方可能就在那几个章节，甚至是几句话

There is a way out of this situation. It starts with realizing that in any piece of content, thevalue 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 onlythe most salient, relevant, rich material and save it as a succinct note.

There is a way out of this situation. It starts with realizing that in any piece of content, thevalue 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 onlythe most salient, relevant, rich material and save it as a succinct note.

Here are four criteria I suggest to help you decide exactly which nuggets of knowledge areworth keeping:Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?

You can Googlethe answer to a question, but you can’t Google a feeling.

有启发的句子可以整理到notion文档中

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 dashof motivation, you can look through it and see what sparks your imagination.

Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?

Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?

No one else has access to the wisdom you’ve personally gained from a lifetime ofconversations, mistakes, victories, and lessons learned. No one else values the smallmoments of your days quite like you do.

I often save screenshots of text messages sent between my family and friends. The smallmoments of warmth and humor that take place in these threads are precious to me, since Ican’t always be with them in person. It takes mere moments, and I love knowing that I’llforever have memories from my conversations with the people closest to me.

Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?

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 informationthat doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential tochange how we think.

Your Second Brain shouldn’t be just another way of confirming what you already know.

Ultimately, Capture What Resonates

Here’s why: making decisions analytically, with a checklist, is taxing and stressful. It is thekind 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 yourown. Not to mention, if you make reading and learning into unpleasant experiences, overtime 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.

This special feeling of “resonance”—like an echoin your soul—is your intuition telling you that something is literally “noteworthy.”

Besides capturing what personally resonates with you, there are a couple other kinds ofdetails that are generally useful to save in your notes. It’s a good idea to capture keyinformation about the source of a note, such as the original web page address, the title ofthe piece, the author or publisher, and the date it was published.*

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 manydifferent kinds of software you use, don’t leave all the knowledge they contain scatteredacross dozens of places you’ll never think to look.

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 yournotes.

The Surprising Benefits of Externalizing Our Thoughts

When you express an idea in writing, it’s notjust 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 triggersmental cascades and internal associations, leading to further ideas, all of which can cometumbling out onto the page or screen.*

Note taking is the easiest and simplest way of externalizing our thinking. It requires nospecial skill, is private by default, and can be performed anytime and anywhere. Once ourthoughts are outside our head, we can examine them, play with them, and make thembetter. It’s like a shortcut to realizing the full potential of the thoughts flowing through ourminds.

Capture isn’t about doing more. It’s about taking notes on the experiences you’realready having. It’s about squeezing more juice out of the fruit of life, savoring everymoment to the fullest by paying closer attention to the details.

software

• This is called “detachment gain,” as explained in The Detachment Gain: The Advantageof Thinking Out Loud by Daniel Reisberg, and refers to the “functional advantage toputting 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.” Ifyou’ve ever had to write out a word to remember how it’s spelled, you’ve experiencedthis.

5 Organize—Save for Actionability

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in yourwork.—Gustave Flaubert, French novelist

在她最畅销的书“ The Creative Habit（有声读物）”中，Tharp讨论了她成功的秘诀之一：“我通过仪式开始我生命中的每一天; 我早上5:30起床，穿上健身服，我的暖腿袜，运动衫和帽子。我走到曼哈顿的家外面，叫出租车，然后告诉司机带我去第91街和第一大道的抽水铁健身房，在那里锻炼两个小时。仪式不是我每天早上在健身房穿着的拉伸和重量训练; 仪式是出租车。我告诉司机去哪里的那一刻我已经完成了仪式。这是一个简单的行为，但每天早上以相同的方式习惯它 - 使其可重复，易于操作。它减少了我跳过它或以不同方式做的机会。这是我的常规工具中的另外一项，而且还要少考虑一下。“

Twyla Tharp is one of the most celebrated, inventive dance choreographers in moderntimes. Her body of work is made up of more than 160 pieces, including 129 dances, twelvetelevision specials, six major Hollywood movies, four full-length ballets, four Broadwayshows, and two figure-skating routines.

The artifacts that Tharp collected weren’t just for her own use. They became sparks ofinspiration for her team: a pair of earrings and a macramé vest shared with the costumedesigner; books about psychedelic light events to inspire the lighting designer; photographsfrom other shows and Joel’s childhood home in Long Island to discuss with the productiondesigner.

The box gave her the security to venture out and take risks: “a box is like soil to me. It’s basic, earthy, elemental. It’s home. It’s what I can always go back to when I need toregroup and keep my bearings. Knowing that the box is always there gives me the freedomto venture out, be bold, dare to fall flat on my face.”

The Cathedral Effect: Designing a Space for Your Ideas

We buy nice furniture, deliberate for weeks over the color of our walls, and fiddle with theplacement of plants and books. We know that the details of lighting, temperature, and thelayout of a space dramatically affect how we feel and think.

the Cathedral Effect.2Studies have shown that theenvironment we find ourselves in powerfully shapes our thinking. When we are in a spacewith high ceilings, for example—think of the lofty architecture of classic churches invokingthe grandeur of heaven—we tend to think in more abstract ways. When we’re in a roomwith low ceilings, such as a small workshop, we’re more likely to think concretely.

Your Second Brain isn’t just a tool—it’s an environment. It is a garden of knowledge fullof familiar, winding pathways, but also secret and secluded corners.

Organizing for Action: Where 99 Percent of Notetakers Get Stuck (And How to Solve It)

The problem was that none of these systems was integrated into my daily life. They always required me to follow a series of elaborate rules that took time away from my other priorities, which meant they would quickly become outdated and obsolete.

I eventually namedthis organizing system PARA,* which stands for the four main categories of information inour lives: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. These four categories are universal,encompassing any kind of information, from any source, in any format, for any purpose.†

Imagine your future self a few weeks or months from now. In the middle ofyour workday, how much time will you have to search through all yournotes on such a broad subject? There might be notes from many dozens ofarticles, books, and other resources in there, much of which won’t beactionable at all. It would take hours just to figure out what you have.

nstead of requiring tons of time meticulously organizing your digital world,PARA guides you in quickly sorting your ideas according to what really

matters: your goals.

How PARA Works: Priming Your Mind (and Notes)for Action

Projects: Short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now.

Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time.

Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in the future.

Archives: Inactive items from the other three categories.

First, they have a beginning and an end; they take placeduring a specific period of time and then they finish. Second, they have aspecific, clear outcome that needs to happen in order for them to bechecked off as complete, such as “finalize,” “green-light,” “launch,” or“publish.”

Examples of projects could include:Projects at work: Complete web-page design; Create slide deck for conference; Develop project schedule; Plan recruitment drive.Personal projects: Finish Spanish language course; Plan vacation; Buy new living room furniture; Find local volunteer opportunity.Side projects: Publish blog post; Launch crowdfunding campaign; Researchbest podcast microphone; Complete online course.

.

Areas: What I’m Committed to Over Time

Examples of areas from your personal life could include:Activities or places you are responsible for: Home/apartment; Cooking; Travel; Car.People you are responsible for or accountable to: Friends; Kids; Spouse; Pets.

Resources: Things I Want to Reference in the Future

What topics are you interested in? Architecture; Interior design; English literature; Beer brewing.What subjects are you researching? Habit formation; Notetaking; Projectmanagement; Nutrition.What useful information do you want to be able to reference? Vacation itineraries; Life goals; Stock photos; Product testimonials.Which hobbies or passions do you have? Coffee; Classic movies; Hip-hopmusic; Japanese anime.

Archives: Things I’ve Completed or Put on Hold

Here’s an example of what the folders in my notes app look like with PARA:

This is why it’s so important to separate capture and organize into twodistinct steps: “keeping what resonates” in the moment is a separate

decision from deciding to save something for the long term.

Projects are most actionable because you’re working on them right now and with a concrete deadline in mind.Areas have a longer time horizon and are less immediately actionable.Resources may become actionable depending on the situation.Archives remain inactive unless they are needed.

In other words, you are always trying to place a note or file not only whereit will be useful, but where it will be useful the soonest .

Organizing Information Like a Kitchen—What AmI Making?

Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from , Irecommend organizing them according to where they are going —specifically, the outcomes that they can help you realize.

PARA isn’t a filing system; it’s a production system. It’s no use trying tofind the “perfect place” where a note or file belongs. There isn’t one.The whole system is constantly shifting and changing in sync with yourconstantly changing life.

When it comes to our personal knowledge, there is no such assigned spot.We are organizing for actionability, and “what’s actionable” is alwayschanging.

Completed Projects Are the Oxygen of Your Second Brain

It is aboutidentifying the structure of your work and life—what you are committed to,what you want to change, and where you want to go.

I knew I needed a new approach. I started asking questions and listening,and eventually realized that these people didn’t need or want anorganized computer. They had spent all this money and time moving to aMac because there was something they wanted to create or achieve.

Everything else was just an obstacle to get past on theway to their goal.

There are a few lessons I took away from this experience.

The first is that people need clear workspaces to be able to create

Second, I learned that creating new things is what really matters. I’d see afire light up in people’s eyes when they reached the finish line andpublished that slideshow or exported that video or printed that résumé.

I’ve learned that completed creative projects are the blood flow of your Second Brain.

move quickly and touch lightly

Ask yourself: “What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?”

Once you have a home for something,you tend to find more of it.

Find new doctor who accepts my insurance Plan goals and agenda for annual team retreat Collect list of common food supplies and set up recurring deliveries Develop content strategy for next quarterReview draft of new reimbursement policy and provide feedbackShare collaboration ideas with research partnerResearch and draft article on health equityComplete online course on creative writing

As you create these folders and move notes into them, don’t worry about reorganizing or “cleaning up” any existing notes. You can’t afford tospend a lot of time on old content that you’re not sure you’re evergoing to need. Start with a clean slate by putting your existing notes in thearchives for safekeeping. If you ever need them, they’ll show up insearches and remain just as you left them.

Your goal is to clear your virtual workspace and gather all the items relatedto each active project in one place.

6 Distill—Find the Essence

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom,remove things every day.—Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher

Coppola’s strategy for making the complex, multifaceted film rested on atechnique he learned studying theater at Hofstra College, known as a“prompt book.” He started by reading The Godfather novel andcapturing the parts that resonated with him in a notebook—his ownversion of Twyla Tharp’s box. But his prompt book went beyond storage: itwas the starting point for a process of revisiting and refining his sources toturn them into something new.

Coppola then began to add his own interpretations, distilling andreconstituting his own version of the story. He broke down each sceneaccording to five key criteria: a synopsis (or summary) of the scene; thehistorical context; the imagery and tone for the “look and feel” of ascene; the core intention; and any potential pitfalls to avoid. In his ownwords, “I endeavored to distill the essence of each scene into a sentence,expressing in a few words what the point of the scene was.”

Quantum Notetaking: How to Create Notes for an Unknown Future

in this sense, notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets ofknowledge through time to your future self.

You probably consume a lot of books, articles, videos, and social mediaposts full of interesting insights, but what are the chances that you’ll beready to put any given piece of advice into action right at that instant? Howlikely is it that life will intervene, in the form of a crisis at work, an urgentmeeting at your kid’s school, or an unexpected cold? In my experience,life is constantly pushing and pulling us away from our priorities.

We feel enrapturedand obsessed with it. It’s difficult to imagine ever forgetting the new idea.It’s changed our lives forever! But after a few hours or days or weeks, itstarts to fade from our memory.

Discoverability—The Missing Link in Making Notes Useful

Discoverability is the element most often missing from people’s notes.

highlighting the most important points.

Highlighting is an activity that everyone understands, takes hardly anyadditional effort, and works in any app you might use.

Imagine your future self as a demanding customer. They will surely beimpatient and very busy. They won’t have time to pore through page afterpage of details just to find the hidden gems. It’s your job to “sell” themon the value of the notes you are taking now

What do you do when communicating with a very busy, very impatient,very important person? You distill your message down to the key pointsand action steps.

Highlighting 2.0: The Progressive Summarization Technique

Here is a snapshot of the four layers of Progressive Summarization:

This is what I call “layer one”—the chunks of text initially captured in mynotes. Notice that I didn’t save the entire article—only a few keyexcerpts

To enhance the discoverability of this note, I need to add a second layer ofdistillation. I usually do this when I have free time during breaks or onevenings or weekends, when I come across the note while working on otherprojects, or when I don’t have the energy for more focused work.

it is sometimes worth adding a third layer of highlighting. Iadvise using the “highlighting” feature offered by most notes apps,which paints passages in bright yellow just like the fluorescent highlighterswe used in school (which appear in light gray below).

When Icome across this note in the future—while doing a search or browsing thenotes within a folder—I’ll be able to decide in the blink of an eye whetherthis source is relevant to my needs.

Foronly the very few sources that are truly unique and valuable, I’ll add an“executive summary” at the top of the note with a few bullet pointssummarizing the article in my own words.

he next time you revisit that idea, youprobably don’t want to repeat all that effort and read the same piecefrom beginning to end again.

It’s like having a digital map of your notes that can be zoomed in or outdepending on how many details you want to see, like a maps app on yoursmartphone.

Four Examples of Progressive Summarization

Let’s look at more examples of progressively summarized notes:A Wikipedia articleA blog postA podcast interviewMeeting notes

Meeting NotesLike many people, I spend a fair percentage of my time on phone calls andin meetings. I want to make the best use of that time, so I take notes duringmost meetings of new ideas, suggestions, feedback, and action steps thatcome up.

it’s often notclear what we should do with those notes.

Often your own thoughtsneed some distillation before you can take action on them.

Picasso’s Secret: Prune the Good to Surface the Great

Pablo Picasso, Le Taureau (series of 11 lithographs), 1945–46 (© 2021 Estateof Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York).

Another example comes from documentary filmmaking. Ken Burns, therenowned creator of award-winning films like The Civil War , Baseball , andJazz , has said that only a tiny percentage of the raw footage he captureseventually makes it into the final cut. This ratio can be as high as 40- or 50-to-1, which means that for every forty to fifty hours of footage he captures,only one hour makes it into the

Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much aspossible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible.

Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind

Mistake #3: Making Highlighting Difficult

Your Turn: Keep Your Future Self in Mind

When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time tostart reading books and doing research. You need that research to alreadybe done.* You can prepare in advance for the future challenges andopportunities you don’t even yet know you’ll face, by taking advantageof the effort you’re already spending reading books, learning new things,and simply being curious about the world around you.

Each time you decide to add a highlight, you are developing yourjudgment: distinguishing the bits that truly matter from those that don’t.

7 Express—Show Your Work

The emerging Octavia made three rules for herself:

1. Don’t leave your home without a notebook, paper scraps, something to write with.
2. Don’t walk into the world without your eyes and ears focused and open.
3. Don’t make excuses about what you don’t have or what you would do if you did, use that energy to “find a way, make a way.”

but she always said that her work came from simply imagining, “If this goes on . . . it extrapolates from current technology, current ecological conditions, current social conditions, current practices of any sort. It offers good possibilities—as well as warnings.”

She used her notes and her writing to confront her demons: “The biggest obstacle I had to overcome was my own fear and self-doubt—fear that maybe my work really wasn’t good enough, maybe I wasn’t smart enough; maybe the people telling me I couldn’t make it were right.”

As knowledge workers, attention is our most scarce and precious resource.

“Modules” in software development• “Betas” tested by start-ups• “Sketches” in architecture• “Pilots” for television series• “Prototypes” made by engineers• “Concept cars” in auto design• “Demos” in music recording

Here’s what most people miss: it’s not enough to simply divide tasks into smaller pieces—you then need a system for managing those pieces. Otherwise, you’re just creating a lot of extra work for yourself trying to keep track of them.That system is your Second Brain, and the small pieces of work-in-process it contains I call “Intermediate Packets.” Intermediate Packets are the concrete, individual building blocks that make up your work.* For example, a set of notes from a team meeting, a list of relevant research findings, a brainstorm with collaborators, a slide deck analyzing the market, or a list of action items from a conference call. Any note can potentially be used as an Intermediate Packet in some larger project or goal.

Distilled notes:Books or articles you’ve read and distilled so it’s easy to get the gist of what they contain (using the Progressive Summarization technique you learned in the previous chapter, for example).• Outtakes:The material or ideas that didn’t make it into a past project but could be used in future ones.• Work-in-process:The documents, graphics, agendas, or plans you produced during past projects.• Final deliverables:

• Documents created by others:Knowledge assets created by people on your team, contractors or consultants, or even clients or customers, that you can reference and incorporate into your work.

You should always cite your sources and give credit where credit is due. A scientist doesn’t obscure her sources—she points to them so others can retrace her footsteps. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and it’s smart to build on the thinking they’ve done rather than try to reinvent the wheel.

The Secret to Frictionless OutputEvery time you make a sketch, design a slide, record a short video on your phone, or post on social media, you are undertaking a small creative act that produces a tangible by-product. Consider the different kinds of documents and other content that you probably regularly produce as part of your normal routines:• Favorites or bookmarks saved from the web or social media• Journal or diary entries with your personal reflections• Highlights or underlined passages in books or articles• Messages, photos, or videos posted on social media• Slides or charts included in presentations• Diagrams, mind maps, or other visuals on paper or in apps• Recordings of meetings, interviews, talks, or presentations• Answers to common questions you receive via email• Written works, such as blog posts or white papers• Documented plans and processes such as agendas, checklists, templates, or project retrospectivesWhile you can sit down to purposefully create an IP, it is far more powerful to simply notice the IPs that you have already produced and then to take an extra moment to save them in your Second Brain.

Consider the different kinds of documents and other content that you probably regularly produce as part of your normal routines:• Favorites or bookmarks saved from the web or social media• Journal or diary entries with your personal reflections• Highlights or underlined passages in books or articles• Messages, photos, or videos posted on social media• Slides or charts included in presentations• Diagrams, mind maps, or other visuals on paper or in apps• Recordings of meetings, interviews, talks, or presentations• Answers to common questions you receive via email• Written works, such as blog posts or white papers

Tags can overcome this limitation by infusing your Second Brain with connections, making it easier to see cross-disciplinary themes and patterns that defy simple categorization.For example, maybe you work in customer service and notice that the same questions from customers keep coming up again and again. You might decide to write a Frequently Asked Questions page and add it to your company website. That is a project, but not one that you previously recognized and started gathering materials for. You might have various notes that you want to draw on to design this page, but don’t want to move them from the project, area, and resource folders where they’re currently located.It’s time for tags. You could take fifteen minutes and perform a series of searches for terms relevant to the FAQs you’ll be writing. For any useful note you find, apply a tag called “FAQ” while leaving it right where you found it. Once you’ve found enough material to work with, you can perform a single search—for the “FAQ” tag—and instantly see all the notes you’ve tagged collected in one place. Now you are free to review them more closely, highlight any specific points you want to use, and move those points into an outline to guide your writing.I don’t recommend using tags as your primary organizational system. It takes far too much energy to apply tags to every single note compared to the ease of searching with keywords or browsing your folders. However, tags can come in handy in specific situations when the two previous retrieval methods aren’t up to the task, and you want to spontaneously gather, connect, and synthesize groups of notes on the fly.*Retrieval Method #4: SerendipityThe fourth retrieval method is the most mysterious but, in many ways, the most powerful. Beyond searching, browsing, and tagging, there is a frontier of possibility that simply cannot be planned or predicted by human minds. There are moments when it feels like the stars align and a connection between ideas jumps out at you like a bolt of lightning from a blue sky. These are the moments creatives live for.

Serendipity takes a few different forms when it comes to retrieval.First, while using the previous retrieval methods, it is a good idea to keep your focus a little broad.

Third, sharing our ideas with others introduces a major element of serendipity. When you present an idea to another person, their reaction is inherently

Connect: Use Notes to Tell a Bigger Story

In Patrick’s words: “Using my first brain only for what it is best at is freedom. Freedom to be present and not multitasking as I sit with grieving people hearing stories of their loved ones. Freedom to know I have everything recorded. Freedom to know that when I go to pull the memorial together, 80 percent of the work is already done.”

*Creative expression isn’t always about self-promotion or advancing our own career. Some of our most beautiful, creative acts are ones in which we connect the dots for others in ways they wouldn’t be able to do themselves.

Create: Complete Projects and Accomplish Goals Stress-FreeRebecca is a professor of educational psychology at a university in Florida, and she uses her digital notes to create programs and presentations as part of her teaching.

In my experience, this isn’t how creativity works at all. It doesn’t matter what medium you work in; sooner or later you must work with others. If you’re a musician, you’ll need a sound engineer to mix the record. If you’re an actor, you’ll need a director who believes in you. Even writing a book, which may suggest images of a lonely cabin deep in the woods, is an intensively social exercise. A book is created out of a dance between an author and their editor.

Everything Is a Remix

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.

It is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life really begins to change. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to show your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately in your career or business, thinking several steps beyond what you’re consuming to consider its ultimate potential.

8 The Art of Creative Execution

Chapter 8The Art of Creative Execution

Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.—Silvano Arieti, psychiatrist and author of Creativity: The Magic SynthesisI was fortunate to grow up in a multicultural household full of art and music.My mother is a singer and guitarist from Brazil, and some of my earliest memories are of her soprano voice singing beautiful Portuguese lyrics to the tune of a classical guitar. My father is a professional painter born in the Philippines. His canvases bursting with colorful fruits, verdant landscapes, and monumental figures covered every wall of our house, giving our home the ambience of an art gallery.I’ve never recognized the common stereotypes of the “tortured artist”—mercurial, unpredictable, brooding, and unreliable. My father is one of the most orderly, responsible people I’ve ever met. Yet this regularity didn’t take away from his fantastically creative artwork—it contributed to it. I saw how rigorous his routines had to be to allow him to pursue his creative calling while raising a family.He had a series of what he called his “strategies.” These were habits and tricks that he used to integrate creativity into every aspect of his life and quickly get into a creative state of mind whenever he had time to paint. During sermons at our local church, my father would practice sketching biblical stories in a small paper notebook as he listened. Those sketches would often become the starting point for larger, full-scale works measuring eight or ten feet high.

Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process isancient and unchanging.—Silvano Arieti, psychiatrist and author of Creativity: The MagicSynthesis

What I learned from my father is that by the time you sit down to make progress on something, all the work to gather and organize the source material needs to already be done. We can’t expect ourselves to instantly come up with brilliant ideas on demand. I learned that innovation and problem-solving depend on a routine that systematically brings interesting ideas to the surface of our awareness.*

Building a Second Brain is really about standardizing the way we work, because we onlyreally improve when we standardize the way we do something.

One of the most important patterns that underlies the creative process is called “divergence and convergence.”

A creative endeavor begins with an act of divergence.

You open the space of possibilities and consider as many options as possible. Like Taylor Swift’s notes, Twyla Tharp’s box, Francis Ford Coppola’s prompt book, or Octavia Butler’s commonplace notebooks, you begin to gather different kinds of outside inspiration, expose yourself to new influences, explore new paths, and talk to others about what you’re thinking. The number of things you are looking at and considering is increasing—you are diverging from your starting point.The activity of divergence is familiar to all of us: it is the classic whiteboard covered in sketches, the writer’s wastepaper basket filled with crumpled-up drafts, and the photographer with hundreds of photos laid out across the floor. The purpose of divergence is to generate new ideas, so the process is necessarily spontaneous, chaotic, and messy. You can’t fully plan or organize what you’re doing in divergence mode, and you shouldn’t try. This is the time to wander.As powerful and necessary as divergence is, if all we ever do is diverge, then we never arrive anywhere. Like Francis Ford Coppola highlighting certain passages and crossing out others in The Godfather novel, at some point you must start discarding possibilities and converging toward a solution. Otherwise, you will never get the rewarding sense of completion that comes with hitting “send” or “publish” and stepping back from the canvas or screen knowing you got the job done.

The activity of divergence is familiar to all of us: it is the classic whiteboard covered insketches, the writer’s wastepaper basket filled with crumpled-up drafts, and thephotographer with hundreds of photos laid out across the floor.

Convergence forces us to eliminate options, make trade-offs, and decide what is trulyessential. It is about narrowing the range of possibilities so that you can make forwardprogress and end up with a final result you are proud of. Convergence allows our work totake on a life of its own and become something separate from ourselves.

The first two steps of CODE, Capture and Organize, make up divergence. They are aboutgathering seeds of imagination carried on the wind and storing them in a secure place. Thisis where you research, explore, and add ideas.

Should you do more research, or start organizing the research you’ve already done?Should you widen your horizons, or narrow your focus?Should you start something new, or finish something you’ve already started?

he more imaginative and curious you are, the more diverse your interests, and the higheryour standards and commitment to perfection, the more difficult you will likely find it toswitch from divergence mode into convergence mode.

When you sit down to finish something—whether it’s an explanatory email, a new productdesign, a research report, or a fundraising strategy—it can be so tempting to do more research.

太贴切了，每当面临要写篇文章和新读一本书时候，新读一本书总是容易的。

Those actions are tempting because they feel like productivity.They feel like forward progress, when in fact they are divergent acts that postpone themoment of completion.

1. The Archipelago of Ideas: Give Yourself Stepping-Stones

Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I’m looking at a document filledwith quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimeseven my own notes. It’s a great technique for warding off the siren song ofprocrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling beforeeach new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now eachchapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seemfar less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

The underlined links (which appear in green in my notes) are the sources I’m drawing on asresearch. Clicking a link will lead me not to the public web, where I can easily get distracted,but to another note within my Second Brain containing my full notes on that source.

I can focus only on the relevant points right in front of me,but all the other details I might need are just a click away.

Creating outlines digitally instead of on paper offers multiple major advantages:A digital outline is far more malleable and flexible

The outline can link to more detailed content

The outline is interactive and multimedia

The outline is searchable

The outline can be accessed and edited from anywhere

selection is divergent, requiring an open state of mind that is willing to consider anypossibility. Sequencing is convergent, requiring a more closed state of mind focused only onthe material you already have in front of you.

2. The Hemingway Bridge: Use Yesterday’s Momentum Today

This meant that the next time he satdown to work on his story, he knew exactly where to start. He built himself a bridge to thenext day, using today’s energy and momentum to fuel tomorrow’s writing.*

Instead of burning through every last ounce of energy at the end of a work session, reserve the last few minutes to write down some of thefollowing kinds of things in your digital notes:Write down ideas for next steps:

Write down the current status:

Write down any details you have in mind that are likely to be forgotten once you step away:

Write out your intention for the next work session:

To take this strategy a step further, there is one more thing you can do as you wrap up theday’s work: send off your draft or beta or proposal for feedback. Share this Intermediate Packet with a friend, family member, colleague, or collaborator; tell them that it’s still awork-in-process and ask them to send you their thoughts on it. The next time you sit downto work on it again, you’ll have their input and suggestions to add to the mix of materialyou’re working with.

3. Dial Down the Scope: Ship Something Small and Concrete

When the full complexity of a project starts to reveal itself, most people choose to delay it.

You can’t wait until everything is perfect. There will always be something missing, orsomething else you think you need.

By dropping or reducing or postponing theleast important parts, we can unblock ourselves and move forward even when time isscarce.

That doesn’t mean you have to throw away those parts. One of the best uses for a SecondBrain is to collect and save the scraps on the cuttingroom floor in case they can be usedelsewhere. A slide cut from a presentation could become a social media post. Anobservation cut from a report could become the basis for a conference presentation. Anagenda item cut from a meeting could become the starting point for the next meeting.

If you want to write a book, you could dial down the scope and write a series of online articles outlining your main ideas. If you don’t have time for that, you could dial it down even further and start with a social media post explaining the essence of your message.

Divergence and convergence are not a linear path, but a loop: once you complete one roundof convergence, you can take what you’ve learned right back into a new cycle ofdivergence.

Divergence and Convergence in the Wild:Behind the Scenes of a Home Project

Even with some existing material to work with, there were gaps in our plan. Over the nextfew weeks, whenever I had a free window of time, I collected and captured tidbits of contentto inform our home studio remodel.

Make an outline with your goals, intentions, questions, and considerations for the project.

Here are some useful questions to ask as you conduct your search: Is there a book or article you could extract some excerpts from as inspiration?Are there websites that might have resources you could build upon?Are there podcasts by experts you could subscribe to and listen to while commuting or doing household chores?Are there relevant IPs buried in other projects you’ve worked on in the past?

You will probably betempted to go off and “do more research,” but you are not completing the entire projectin one sitting. You are only creating the first iteration—a draft of your essay, a sketch of yourapp, a plan for your campaign. Ask yourself, “What is the smallest version of this I canproduce to get useful feedback from others?”

9 The Essential Habits of Digital Organizers

bits of Digital Organizers

Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate yourattention to other tasks . . . It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier thatyou can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.—James Clear, author of Atomic Habits

Being organized is a habit—a repeated set of actions youtake as you encounter, work with, and put information to use. If we’re constantlyscrambling to find our notes, drafts, brainstorms, and sources, not only do we wasteprecious time, but we also sabotage our momentum.

找个后厨的视频去看看

Consider how chefs work in a commercial kitchen. They have incredibly high demands on both the quality and quantity of their output. Every ingredient in every dish must be nearly perfect—one cold side or undercooked filet and the whole dish can be sent back, and thekitchen might have to produce hundreds of dishes on a busy night.

Chefs have a particular system for accomplishing this daunting feat. It’s called mise enplace , a culinary philosophy used in restaurants around the world. Developed in Francestarting in the late 1800s, mise en place is a step-by-step process for producing high-qualityfood efficiently. Chefs can never afford to stop the whole kitchen just so they can clean up.They learn to keep their workspace clean and organized in the flow of the meals they arepreparing .

In the kitchen, this means small habits like always putting the mixing spoon in the sameplace so they know where to find it next time; immediately wiping a knife clean after using itso it’s ready for the next cut; or laying out the ingredients in the order they’ll be used sothat they serve as placeholders.

Your business won’t last long if you turn customers away because you’re “maintaining your systems.” It’s difficult to find the time to put the world on hold and catch your breath. We tend to noticeour systems need maintenance only when they break down, which we then blame on ourlack of self-discipline or our failure to be sufficiently productive.

想起了阅读的一篇关于李安文章，作者的一个观点是李安的能力并不是在家中那几年就直接修炼成功的，是出来拍上片子之后继续努力成长。

Building a Second Brain is not just about downloading a new piece of software to getorganized at one point in time; it is about adopting a dynamic, flexible system and set of habits to continually access what we need without throwing our environment (and mind)into chaos.

We also need to follow an outer discipline—asystem of principles and behaviors—to channel our energies, thoughts, and emotionsproductively.

Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making useof past work.Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything.Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make themmore discoverable for your future self.

The Project Checklist Habit: The Key to Starting Your Knowledge Flywheel

knowledge work is about taking in information and then turning itinto results.

Checklist #1: Project Kickoff

f we consider that these projects are our biggestinvestments of attention, it’s worth adding a little bit of structure to how we start them.This is where the Project Kickoff Checklist comes in.

Capture my current thinking on the project.Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes.Search for related terms across all folders.Move (or tag) relevant notes to the project folder.Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project.

1. Capture my current thinking on the project.

This step can and should be messy: I pour out all my random musings, potential approaches,links to other ideas or topics, or reminders of people to talk to.Here are some questions I use to prompt this initial brainstorm:What do I already know about this project?What don’t I know that I need to find out?What is my goal or intention?Who can I talk to who might provide insights?What can I read or listen to for relevant ideas?

1. Review folders (or tags) that might contain relevant notes.

Create an outline of collected notes and plan the project. Finally, it’s time to pull together the material I’ve gathered and create an outline (an Archipelago of Ideas) for the project.

My goal is to end up not just with a loose collection of ideas. It is to formulate a logical progression of steps that make it clear what I should do next.

You should think of this five-step checklist as a first pass, taking no more than twenty to thirty minutes. You’re only trying to get a sense of what kind of material you already have in your Second Brain. Once you do, you’ll have a much better sense of how much time it will take, which knowledge or resources you’ll need access to, and what your challenges will likely be.I encourage you to use my kickoff checklist as a starting point and customize it over time as you understand how it fits into your own context. Depending on your profession or industry, you might need more or less formality, more or less time for a first pass, and more or fewer people involved. Here are some other options for actions you might want to include in your own version:• Answer premortem*questions:What do you want to learn? What is the greatest source of uncertainty or most important question you want to answer? What is most likely to fail?• Communicate with stakeholders:Explain to your manager, colleagues, clients, customers, shareholders, contractors, etc., what the project is about and why it matters.• Define success criteria:What needs to happen for this project to be considered successful? What are the minimum results you need to achieve, or the “stretch goals” you’re striving for?• Have an official kickoff:

Part of what makes modern work so challenging is that nothing ever seems to finish.

Here’s my checklist:1. Markproject as complete in task manager or project management app.

1. Cross outthe associated project goal and move to “Completed” section.
2. ReviewIntermediate Packets and move them to other folders
3. Moveproject to archives across all platforms.
4. If project is becoming inactive:add a current status note to the project folder before archiving.

I add a new note to the project folder titled “Current status,” and jot down a few comments so I can pick it back up in the future.

Here are some other items you can include on your Project Completion Checklist. I encourage you to personalize it for your own needs:• Answer postmortem questions:What did you learn? What did you do well? What could you have done better? What can you improve for next time?• Communicate with stakeholders:Notify your manager, colleagues, clients, customers, shareholders, contractors, etc., that the project is complete and what the outcomes were.• Evaluate success criteria:Were the objectives of the project achieved? Why or why not? What was the return on investment?• Officially close out the project and celebrate:Send any last emails, invoices, receipts, feedback forms, or documents, and celebrate your accomplishments with your team or collaborators so you receive the feeling of fulfillment for all the effort you put in.

The Review Habit: Why You Should Batch Process Your Notes (and How Often)

I suggest adding one more step: review the notes you’ve created over the past week, give them succinct titles that tell you what’s inside, and sort them into the appropriate PARA folders. Most notes apps have an “inbox” of some kind where new notes collect until they’re ready to be reviewed. This “batch processing” takes only seconds per note, and you can complete it within a few minutes.

1. Clear my email inbox.
2. Check my calendar.
3. Clear my computer desktop.
4. Clear my notes inbox.
5. Choose my tasks for the week.

The final step of my Weekly Review is to select the tasks I’m committing to for the upcoming week. Because I’ve just completed a sweep of my entire digital world and taken into account every piece of potentially relevant information, I can make this decision decisively and begin my week with total confidence that I’m working on the right things.

Here’s mine:1. Review and update my goals.2. Review and update my project list.3. Review my areas of responsibility.4. Review someday/maybe tasks.5. Reprioritize tasks.

The Noticing Habits: Using Your Second Brain to Engineer Luck

Here are some examples:• Noticing that an idea you have in mind could potentially be valuable and capturing it instead of thinking, “Oh, it’s nothing.”• Noticing when an idea you’re reading about resonates with you and taking those extra few seconds to highlight it.• Noticing that a note could use a better title—and changing it so it’s easier for your future self to find it.

The nice thing about notes, unlike to-dos, is that they aren’t urgent. If one important to-do gets overlooked, the results could be catastrophic. Notes, on the other hand, can easily be put on hold any time you get busy, without any negative impact.

All these actions take mere moments, and are made in response to changes in your priorities and goals. We should avoid doing a lot of heavy lifting up front, not only because it takes up precious time and energy, but because it locks us into a course of action that might not end up being right.

We have to remember that we are not building an encyclopedia of immaculately organized knowledge. We are building a working system

10 The Path of Self-Expression

Chapter 10The Path of Self-Expression

An idea wants to be shared. And, in the sharing, it becomes more complex, more interesting, and more likely to work for more people.—adrienne maree brown, writer and activistF or most of history, humanity’s challenge was how to acquire scarce information.

There was hardly any good information to be found anywhere. It was locked up in difficult-to-reproduce manuscripts or stuck in the heads of scholars. Access to information was limited, but that wasn’t a problem for most people. Their lives and livelihoods didn’t require much information. Their main contribution was their physical labor, not their ideas.That has all changed in just the last few decades. Historically, in the blink of an eye. Suddenly, we are all plugged into an infinite stream of data, updated continuously and delivered at light speed via a network of intelligent devices embedded in every corner of our lives.

Not only that, but the very nature of labor has changed. Value has shifted from the output of our muscles to the output of our brains. Our knowledge is now our most important asset and the ability to deploy our attention our most valuable skill. The tools of our trade have become abstract and immaterial: the building blocks of ideas, insights, facts, frameworks, and mental models.Now our challenge isn’t to acquire more information; as we saw in the exploration of divergence and convergence, it is to find ways to close off the stream so we can get something done. Any change in how we interact with information first requires a change in how we think. In this chapter we’ll explore what it looks like and feels like to make that shift.

The quality of our thinking has become one of the central defining features of our identity, our reputation, and our quality of life. We are constantly advised that we need to know more to be able to achieve our goals and dreams.

We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can choose the lens we look through. This is the basic choice we have in creating our own experience—which aspects to nourish or starve, using only the magnifying power of our attention.

Instead of trying to optimize your mind so that it can manage every tiny detail of your life, it’s time to fire your biological brain from that job and give it a new one: as the CEO of your life, orchestrating and managing the process of turning information into results.

The purpose of knowledge is to be shared. What’s the point of knowing something if it doesn’t positively impact anyone, not even yourself? Learning shouldn’t be about hoarding stockpiles of knowledge like gold coins. Knowledge is the only resource that gets better and more valuable the more it multiplies.

cool

As Ryder Carroll says in The Bullet Journal Method , “Your singular perspective may patch some small hole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity.”

In a 1966 book, the British-Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi made an observation that has since become known as “Polanyi’s Paradox.” It can be summarized as “We know more than we can say.”*

As you build your Second Brain, you will collect many facts and figures, but they are just a means to an end: discovering the tacit knowledge that lives within you. It’s in there, but you need external hooks to pull it out and into your conscious awareness. If we know more than we can say, then we need a system for continuously offloading the vast wealth of knowledge we’ve gained from real life experience.

I discovered something through that experience: that self-expression is a fundamental human need. Self-expression is as vital to our survival as food or shelter. We must be able to share the stories of our lives—from the small moments of what happened today at school to our grandest theories of what life is about.

Some of what you say might not resonate with others or provide value to them, but occasionally, you will strike on something—a way of seeing, a perspective, a story—that blows people’s minds and visibly transforms how they see the world. It could be someone you’re having coffee with, a client or customer, or your online followers. In those moments, the vast chasm that separates us as humans is bridged. For a brief moment, you get to feel in your bones that we are all in this together. We are all part of a vast tattered fabric of humanity, and your highest calling is simply to play your part in it.With the power of a Second Brain behind you, you can do and be anything you want. Everything is just information, and you are a master at flowing and shaping it toward whatever future you desire.Final Thoughts: You Can Do This There is no single right way to build a Second Brain. Your system can look like chaos to others, but if it brings you progress and delight, then it’s the right one.You may start with one project and slowly move on to more ambitious or complex ones as your skills develop. Or you may find yourself using your Second Brain in completely unexpected ways that you hadn’t envisioned. As your needs change, give yourself the freedom to discard or take on whichever parts serve you. This isn’t a “take it or leave it” ideology where you must accept all of it or none of it. If any part doesn’t make sense or doesn’t resonate with you, put it aside. Mix and match the tools and techniques you’ve learned in this book to suit your needs. This is how you ensure your Second Brain remains a lifelong companion through the seasons of your life.Wherever you are at this moment—just starting a practice to consistently take notes, or finding ways to more effectively organize and resurface your best thinking, or generating more original and impactful work—you can always fall back on the four steps of CODE:

Keep what resonates (Capture)• Save for actionability (Organize)• Find the essence (Distill)• Show your work (Express)

Get set up with PARA.Set up the four folders of PARA (Projects; Areas; Resources; Archives) and, with a focus on actionability, create a dedicated folder (or tag) for each of your currently active projects. Focus on capturing notes related to those projects from this point forward.