Context
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Why is it important: This helps you become faster at getting better, as you can store all of your learnings in an easy to access format + remix ideas to get better ideas
Keywords
Second Brain, Productivity, Principles, Knowledge Management
Summary
Take down notes from everything that you read, listen to, and watch that resonates with you. Make these notes easy to search. Convert them into bite-sized ideas (intermediate packets) that you can then use for future work.
This applies very well to code (functions/classes that can be reused across projects), content creation (quotes/arguments/how-tos), investing (repeatable insights/patterns), cooking (ingredients/techniques), and startups (playbooks for hiring, product dev, sales, and marketing).
Highlights
Main Idea: Over time, you should build up a second brain (a digital note-taking system), whereby anything that you read, watch, or listen to that resonates with you goes into your system. You can use your second brain to organize your ideas and thoughts, and ultimately convert them into your creative output
10 key principles:
- Borrowed Creativity: Remix creative ideas from everything that you read. Add your own spin to them and combine things in interesting ways
- The Capture Habit: Our brains are for having ideas, not for storing them. Anytime we have an interesting idea, we want to capture the ideas as soon as possible because our brains are not going to hold on to them
- Idea Recyling: Ideas are not single use, they can be recycled and reused over time. You can create building blocks of ideas that you can then create other things out of
- Projects over categories: Categorize things by the kinds of projects you can use them for, instead of just categorizing them by themes. For example: tag something as "automated content", instead of only tagging it as "marketing"
- Slow burns > heavy lifts: When attempting heavy lifts (a big thing that you have to do all at once), you'll be intimidated and just not do a bunch of things. The opposite of these, is a slow burn. You can have a continuous list of projects that you work on that are all on a slow burn. If you have a bunch of things in your second brain, you can just lift ideas from there and put them into the relevant project. This will significantly increase your turnaround speed for blogs, videos, and other things + parallelize the projects you are doing
- Start with abundance: Related to point 5. If you are already starting from 100 relevant notes instead of a blank page, you're always starting from abundance instead of from scratch
- Intermediate packets: Any idea is made up of a lot of intermediate packets/content blocks. You can re-use and remix these intermediate packets in loads of places. Applies to code (functions/classes that can be reused across projects), content creation (quotes/arguments/how-tos that can be reused and remixed across multiple pieces of content), investing (applying lessons for figuring out what to invest in), and startups (playbook for hiring, marketing, selling, analytics)
- You only know what you make: You'll best internalize things that you have created yourself (reading a book —> writing a summary, listening to a podcast —> creating a tweetstorm, learning about a market insight —> making an investment, discovering an idea —> converting it into an intermediate packet)
- Make it easier for your future self: if you learn of a term (like transactional analysis) in the short-term, your brain will totally remember what it means in the moment. But will forget about it a month from now. When taking down notes, make it easy for your future self to understand them
- Keep your ideas moving: Focus on the velocity of updating your existing ideas and taking down new ideas. Don't worry too much about adding too many pieces of meta-data