#status/processed Summary:: [[Book Summary - Building a Second Brain]]  # Metadata Author:: [[Tiago Forte]] Title:: Building a Second Brain Full Title:: Building a Second Brain Import Date:: 2023-04-18 Source:: #source/readwise/clippings_html Review URL:: [Review URL](https://readwise.io/bookreview/26049996) # Document Tags:: [[Personal Knowledge Management]], [[Non-Fiction]], [[Calm Thinking]] # Highlights - Maybe you conceived of a brilliant new idea while driving or in transit, but by the time you arrived at your destination, it had evaporated. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Tags: [[Fleeting Thoughts]] - Find: Location 19 - We spend countless hours reading, listening to, and watching other people’s opinions about what we should do, how we should think, and how we should live, ==but make comparatively little effort applying that knowledge and making it our own.== - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Tags: [[Knowledge Creation]] - Find: Location 25 - We need a way to cultivate a body of knowledge that is uniquely our own, ==so when the opportunity arises—whether changing jobs, giving a big presentation, launching a new product, or starting a business or a family—we will have access to the wisdom== - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 33 - When you transform your relationship to information, you will begin to see the technology in your life not just as a storage medium but as a tool for thinking. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Tags: [[Tools for Thought]] - Find: Location 49 - Whether you call it a “personal cloud,” “field notes,” or an “external brain” as some of my students have done, it is a digital archive of your most valuable memories, ideas, and knowledge to help you do your job, run your business, and manage your life without having to keep every detail in your head. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 53 - ==Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.—David Allen, author of Getting Things Done== - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 84 - In the digital realm, information could be molded and shaped and directed to any purpose, like a magical, primordial force of nature. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 124 - Every day I received hundreds of emails, every hour dozens of messages, and the pings and dings from every device merged into a ceaseless melody of interruption. I remember looking around at my colleagues and wondering, “How can anyone get anything done here? What’s their secret?” - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Tags: [[Productivity]] - Find: Location 142 - I wrote down feedback from my more experienced colleagues so I could make sure I digested it and took it to heart. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 147 - Every new productivity app promised a breakthrough, but usually ended up becoming yet another thing to manage. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Tags: [[Productivity]] - Find: Location 166 - According to the New York Times, the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes.1 - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 205 - Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 209 - In other words, we go to work five days per week, but ==spend more than one of those days on average just looking for the information we need to do our work.== Half the time, we don’t even succeed in doing that. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 216 - Every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spent doing the thinking that only humans can do: inventing new things, crafting stories, recognizing patterns, following our intuition, collaborating with others, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 221 - Instead of consuming ever-greater amounts of content, we could take on a more patient, thoughtful approach that favors rereading, reformulating, and working through the implications of ideas over time. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 246 - As a knowledge worker, where does your knowledge live? Where does your knowledge go when it’s created or discovered? “Knowledge” can seem like a lofty concept reserved exclusively for scholars and academics, but at the most practical level, knowledge begins with the simple, time-honored practice of taking notes. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 276 - For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 288 - Like the LEGO blocks you may have played with as a kid, they can be rapidly searched, retrieved, moved around, assembled, and reassembled into new forms without requiring you to invent anything from scratch. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 295 - Without the time and energy to move things decisively forward, what’s the point of starting? - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 320 - As the meeting begins, the team sits down to start discussing the project. You are already prepared. You’ve already considered the biggest problems from several different angles, mapped out a number of possible solutions, and started thinking about the big-picture implications. - Date:: [[2023-04-04]] - Find: Location 351 - Your Second Brain becomes like a mirror, teaching you about yourself and reflecting back to you the ideas worth keeping and acting on. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 358 - ==Your brain is no longer the bottleneck on your potential, which means you have all the bandwidth you need to pursue any endeavor and make it successful. This sense of confidence in the quality of your thinking gives you the freedom to ask deeper questions and the courage to pursue bigger challenges.== ^619b68 - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 366 - Tags: [[Favorite]], [[Second Brain]] - We bookmark articles to read later, but rarely find the time to revisit them again. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 378 - Note: I am so guilty of this! - So much of our intellectual output—from brainstorms to photos to planning to research—all too often is left stranded on hard drives or lost somewhere in the cloud. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 380 - Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…” - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 386 - This is a remarkable aspect of one of the most famous scientific discoveries of the last century: at the decisive moment, even highly trained scientists deeply familiar with mathematical and abstract thinking turned to the most basic, ancient medium available: physical stuff. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 435 - I call this approach the ==“slow burn”—allowing bits of thought matter to slowly simmer like a delicious pot of stew brewing on the stove.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 462 - Our careers and businesses depend more than ever on our ability to advance a particular point of view and persuade others to adopt it as well.6 - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 473 - Most important of all, don’t get caught in the trap of perfectionism: ==insisting that you have to have the “perfect” app with a precise set of features before you take a single note.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 510 - I’ve developed a simple, intuitive four-part method called “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express. These are the steps not only to build your Second Brain in the first place, but also to work with it going forward. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 541 - Instead of jumping at every new headline and notification, we can choose to ==consume information that adds value to our lives and consciously let go of the rest.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 572 - When it comes to digital notes, we can use much easier and lighter ways of organizing. ==Because our priorities and goals can change at a moment’s notice, and probably will, we want to avoid organizing methods that are overly rigid and prescriptive.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 580 - Surprisingly, when you focus on taking action, the vast amount of information out there gets radically streamlined and simplified. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 583 - Note: Is this also the principle for self organizing teams - An article you read about gardening will give you an insight into growing your customer base. An offhand testimonial from a client will give you the idea to create a web page with all your client testimonials. A business card will remind you of a fascinating conversation you had with someone who you could reach out to for coffee. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 589 - Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 605 - Whether your goal is to lose weight, get a promotion at work, start a side business, or strengthen your local community, personal knowledge management exists to support taking action—anything else is a distraction. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 610 - Information becomes knowledge—personal, embodied, verified—only when we put it to use. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 617 - 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 of output or result you’ve produced, it’s questionable whether you’ve been productive at all. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 651 - Information isn’t a luxury—it is the very basis of our survival. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 669 - Note: Bit too dramatic - For Swift, writing songs is not a discrete activity that she can do only at certain times and in certain places. It is a side effect of the way her mind works, spinning off new metaphors and turns of phrase at the most unexpected times: - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 694 - Think about your favorite athlete, musician, or actor. Behind the scenes of their public persona, ==there is a process they follow for regularly turning new ideas into creative output.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 711 - Note: This issomethibg im so deeply inerested in - how people at the top of their fields can create - Software engineers build “code libraries” so useful bits of code are easy to access. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 719 - Note: Really? - A knowledge asset is anything that can be used in the future to solve a problem, save time, illuminate a concept, or learn from past experience. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 735 - 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 presentations you’ve attended. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 737 - Stories: Your favorite anecdotes, whether they happened to you or someone else. Insights: The small (and big) realizations you have. Memories: Experiences from your life that you don’t want to forget. Reflections: Personal thoughts and lessons written in a journal or diary. Musings: Random “shower ideas” that pop into your head. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 748 - Note: Musings especially i ant to highlight - While it’s always up to you what you choose to note down, remember that your Second Brain is private too. You can share certain notes if you want to, but by default everything inside is for your eyes only. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 756 - During his colorful lifetime Feynman spent time in Brazil teaching physics, learned to play the bongo and the conga drums well enough to perform with orchestras, and enthusiastically traveled around the world exploring other cultures. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 777 - Note: Now that's a life I want to lead! - Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?” This could include grand, sweeping questions like “How can we make society fairer and more equitable?” as well as practical ones like “How can I make it a habit to exercise every day?” It might include questions about relationships, such as “How can I have closer relationships with the people I love?” or productivity, like “How can I spend more of my time doing high-value work?” - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 803 - How do I build an investment strategy that is aligned with my mid-term and long-term goals and commitments? - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 808 - How can I speed up and relax at the same time? - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 813 - To find questions that invoke a state of wonder and curiosity about the amazing world we live in. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 818 - That very same question—How can creativity emerge out of chaos?—still drives me to this day. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 827 - ==The biggest pitfall I see people falling into once they begin capturing digital notes is saving too much.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 855 - Thinking like a curator means taking charge of your own information stream, instead of just letting it wash over you. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 858 - For example, I keep a folder full of customer testimonials I’ve received over the years. Any time I think what I’m doing doesn’t matter or isn’t good enough, all I have to do is open up that folder and my perspective is completely shifted. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 867 - Note: Is it inspiring - Sometimes you come across a piece of information that isn’t necessarily inspiring, but you know it might come in handy in the future. A statistic, a reference, a research finding, or a helpful diagram—these are the equivalents of the spare parts a carpenter might keep around their workshop. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 872 - Note: Is it useful - No one else has access to the wisdom you’ve personally gained from a lifetime of conversations, mistakes, victories, and lessons learned. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 879 - Note: Is it personal - Our ability to capture ideas from anywhere takes us in a different direction: By saving ideas that may contradict each other and don’t necessarily support what we already believe, we can train ourselves to take in information from different sources instead of immediately jumping to conclusions. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 895 - Note: Capture what is surprising - 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. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 924 - Thinking doesn’t just produce writing; writing also enriches thinking. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 986 - ==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.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 995 - “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.” - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1022 - Which means that any time she works on that project, she knows exactly where to look—in the box. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1054 - Note: Kinda like [[Montessori]] for adults - “The box makes me feel connected to a project… I feel this even when I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it’s there. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1080 - ==We don’t need complex, sophisticated systems to be able to produce complex, sophisticated works.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Tags: [[Complexity]] - Find: Location 1089 - Unless you take control of those virtual spaces and shape them to support the kinds of thinking you want to do, every minute spent there will feel taxing and distracting. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1100 - 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. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1118 - Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1126 - By taking that small extra step of putting a note into a folder (or tagging it) for a specific project, such as a psychology paper you’re writing or a presentation you’re preparing, you’ll encounter that idea right at the moment it’s most relevant. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1140 - We need to always be wary of ==accumulating so much information that we spend all our time managing it, instead of putting it to use== in the outside world. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Tags: [[Action Orientation]] - Find: Location 1152 - 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. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1164 - “A project is identified; a team is assembled; it works together for precisely as long as is needed to complete the task; then the team disbands… The Hollywood model is now used to build bridges, design apps or start restaurants.” - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1176 - As important as projects are, not everything is a project. For example, the area of our lives called “Finances” doesn’t have a definite end date. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1188 - 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. Standards of performance you are responsible for: Health; Personal growth; Friendships; Finances. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1202 - In your job or business: Departments or functions you are responsible for: Account management; Marketing; Operations; Product development. People or teams you are responsible for or accountable to: Direct reports; Manager; Board of directors; Suppliers. Standards of performance you are responsible for: Professional development; Sales and marketing; Relationships and networking; Recruiting and hiring. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1206 - In which project will this be most useful? If none: In which area will this be most useful? If none: Which resource does this belong to? If none: Place in archives. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1287 - Imagine how absurd it would be to organize a kitchen instead by kind of food: fresh fruit, dried fruit, fruit juice, and frozen fruit would all be stored in the same place, just because they all happen to be made of fruit. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1307 - PARA isn’t a filing system; it’s a production system. It’s no use trying to find the “perfect place” where a note or file belongs. There isn’t one. The whole system is constantly shifting and changing in sync with your constantly changing life. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1313 - Any piece of information (whether a text document, an image, a note, or an entire folder) can and should flow between categories. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1321 - Once we set that aside and just focused on what they actually wanted to do right now, they suddenly gained a tremendous sense of clarity and motivation. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1351 - The first is that ==people need clear workspaces to be able to create==. We cannot do our best thinking and our best work when all the “stuff” from the past is crowding and cluttering our space. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1361 - I’ve learned that ==completed creative projects are the blood flow of your Second Brain.== They keep the whole system nourished, fresh, and primed for action. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1366 - I want to give the same advice to you: don’t make organizing your Second Brain into yet another heavy obligation. Ask yourself: “What is the smallest, easiest step I can take that moves me in the right direction?” - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1377 - Practice capturing new notes, organizing them into folders, and moving them from one folder to another. Each time you finish a project, move its folder wholesale to the archives, and each time you start a new project, look through your archives to see if any past project might have assets you can reuse. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1398 - To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.—Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1418 - Our notes are things to use, not just things to collect. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1467 - The most important factor in whether your notes can survive that journey into the future is their discoverability—how easy it is to discover what they contain and access the specific points that are most immediately useful. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1488 - When you send an email to your boss, you don’t bury your request somewhere near the bottom of a massive wall of text. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1507 - Here is a snapshot of the four layers of Progressive Summarization: - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1520 - Progressive Summarization helps you focus on the content and the presentation of your notes, instead of spending too much time on labeling, tagging, linking, or other advanced features offered by many information management tools. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1581 - To get started, I moved the entire folder from resources to projects. Then I spent about thirty minutes to review the notes it contained and highlight the most relevant takeaways. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1612 - Note: It's this recll that i am missing - As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1674 - ==If you’re going to capture everything, you might as well capture nothing.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Tags: [[Information Overload]] - Find: Location 1685 - A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1689 - You have to always assume that, until proven otherwise, any given note won’t necessarily ever be useful. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1702 - The rule of thumb to follow is that every time you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more discoverable for your future selfVII—by adding a highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary. This is the “campsite rule” applied to information—leave it better than you found it. This ensures that the notes you interact with most often will naturally become the most discoverable in a virtuous cycle. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1705 - Even in our daily conversations, ==the ability to be succinct without missing key details is what leads to exciting conversations that leave both people feeling enlivened==. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Tags: [[Precision Questions & Answers]], [[Communication]] - Find: Location 1719 - When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start reading books and doing research. You need that research to already be done. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1728 - The true test of whether a note you’ve created is discoverable is whether you can get the gist of it at a glance. Put it aside for a few days and set a reminder to revisit it once you’ve forgotten most of the details. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1740 - “We extract only those Things which are Choice and Excellent, either for the Matter itself, or else the Elegancy of the Expression, and not what comes next.” - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1755 - Verum ipsum factum (“We only know what we make”)—Giambattista Vico, Italian philosopher - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1779 - Don’t leave your home without a notebook, paper scraps, something to write with. Don’t walk into the world without your eyes and ears focused and open. 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.” - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1800 - Like a journalist, Butler had a love for cold, hard facts to imbue her stories with a sense of authenticity and concreteness: “The greater your ignorance the more verifiably accurate must be your facts,” she once remarked. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1811 - Note: For a science fiction writer - Because we manage most of our “work-in-process” in our head, as soon as we finish the project and step away from our desks, all that valuable knowledge we worked so hard to acquire dissolves from our memory like a sandcastle washed away by the ocean waves. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1854 - 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. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1862 - 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.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1873 - There are five kinds of Intermediate Packets you can create and reuse in your work: - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1889 - Note: DIstilled notes outtakes works in process final deliverables other peoples output - Making the shift to working in terms of Intermediate Packets unlocks several very powerful benefits. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1904 - Note: ==Interruption proof make progress in smaller chunks Increase quality of work through feedback Assemble IP to create whole pieces== - You become less vulnerable to interruptions, because you’re not trying to manage all the work-in-process in your head. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1906 - Note: A must for new parebts - This lens reframes creativity as an ongoing, continual cycle of delivering value in small bits, rather than a massive all-consuming endeavor that weighs on you for months. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1922 - Tags: [[Favorite]] - The cost of not being quite sure whether you have what you need. The stress of wondering whether you’ve already completed a task before. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1957 - These are some of the most valuable connections—when an idea crosses the boundaries between subjects. They can’t be planned or predicted. They can emerge only when many kinds of ideas in different shapes and sizes are mixed together. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 1966 - Sometimes you know a project is coming and can start saving things to a project folder in advance, but sometimes you don’t. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2000 - ==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.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2015 - Tags: [[Favorite]] - Three Stages of Expressing: What Does It Look Like to Show Our Work? - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2042 - Remember: Retrieve an Idea Exactly When It’s Needed - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2046 - Connect: Use Notes to Tell a Bigger Story - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2057 - Create: Complete Projects and Accomplish Goals Stress-Free - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2072 - The CODE Method is based on an important aspect of creativity: that it is always a remix of existing parts. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2106 - Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.—Silvano Arieti, psychiatrist and author of Creativity: The Magic Synthesis - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2169 - My father is a professional painter born in the Philippines. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2174 - Note: Wow [[Tiago Forte]] is yet another product of the Filipino Diaspora - Much of the rest of the time he was collecting, sifting through, reflecting on, and recombining raw material from his daily life so that when it came time to create, he had more than enough raw material to work with. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2186 - 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.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2190 - Note: This is a really good insigt to apply to pedagogy - Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2267 - An Archipelago of Ideas separates the two activities your brain has the most difficulty performing at the same time: choosing ideas (known as selection) and arranging them into a logical flow (known as sequencing). - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2294 - He would always end a writing session only when he knew what came next in the story. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2307 - That doesn’t mean you have to throw away those parts. ==One of the best uses for a Second Brain is to collect and save the scraps on the cutting-room floor in case they can be used elsewhere.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2360 - Knowing that nothing I write or create truly gets lost—only saved for later use—gives me the confidence to aggressively cut my creative works down to size without fearing that I’ve wasted effort or that I’ll lose the results of my thinking forever. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2364 - If you want to write a book, ==you could dial down the scope and write a series of online articles outlining your main ideas.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2369 - How can you know which direction to take your thinking without feedback from customers, colleagues, collaborators, or friends? And how can you collect that feedback without showing them something concrete? - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2376 - “What is the smallest version of this I can produce to get useful feedback from others?” - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2430 - If you feel resistance to continuing with this project later, try Dialing Down the Scope. Drop the least important features, postpone the hardest decisions for later, or find someone to help you with the parts you’re least familiar with. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2435 - Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks… It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.—James Clear, author of Atomic Habits - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2452 - Being organized is a habit—a repeated set of actions you take as you encounter, work with, and put information to use. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2463 - Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of 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 them more discoverable for your future self. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2495 - 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. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2525 - I keep all my goals in a single digital note, sorted from short-term goals for the next year to long-term goals for years to come. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2595 - Any IPs I decide could be relevant to another project, I move to that project’s folder. The same goes for notes relevant to areas or resources. This is a forgiving decision, and it’s okay if you don’t catch every single one. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2609 - ==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. For example, in a few bullet points I might describe the last actions I took, details on why it was postponed or canceled, who was working on it and what role they played, and any lessons or best practices learned.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2618 - Note: When archiving instead of completing the project - 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. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2647 - Clear my email inbox. Check my calendar. Clear my computer desktop. Clear my notes inbox. Choose my tasks for the week. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2655 - Note: Weekly Review Checklist - This weekly sorting process serves as a light reminder of the knowledge I’ve accumulated over the past week, and ensures I have a healthy flow of new ideas and insights flowing into my Second Brain. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2677 - my task manager app. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2679 - Note: I'm surprised fhat he doesn't use his notes tool as a task manager. - Review and update my goals. Review and update my project list. Review my areas of responsibility. Review someday/maybe tasks. Reprioritize tasks. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2688 - Note: Monthly review template - Area notebooks often contain notes that become the seeds of future projects. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2701 - 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. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2725 - A Perfect System You Don’t Use Isn’t Perfect - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2751 - **==A perfect system you don’t use because it’s too complicated and error prone isn’t a perfect system**—it’s a fragile system that will fall apart as soon as you turn your attention elsewhere.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2767 - Our knowledge is now our most important asset and the ability to deploy our attention our most valuable skill. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2791 - However, over the years I’ve noticed that it is never a person’s toolset that constrains their potential, it’s their mindset. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2797 - The more time your brain spends striving to achieve and overcome and solve problems, the less time you have left over for imagining, creating, and simply enjoying the life you’re living. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2818 - Your fears, doubts, mistakes, missteps, failures, and self-criticism—it’s all just information to be taken in, processed, and made sense of. All of it is part of a larger, ever-evolving whole. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2828 - ==Your mind will become calmer, knowing that every idea is being tracked. It will become more focused, knowing it can put thoughts on hold and access them later.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Tags: [[Second Brain]] - Find: Location 2839 - 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. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2843 - without our thoughts as distractions, we are left to sit with uncomfortable questions about our future and our purpose. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2859 - We’ve been taught that information must be jealously guarded, because someone could use it against us or steal our ideas. That our value and self-worth come from what we know and can recite on command. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2870 - If I share a new way of thinking about your health, or finances, or business, or spirituality, that knowledge isn’t less valuable to me. It’s more valuable! Now we can speak the same language, coordinate our efforts, and share our progress in applying it. Knowledge becomes more powerful as it spreads. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2900 - The process of knowing yourself can seem mystical, but I see it as eminently practical. It starts with noticing what resonates with you. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2934 - Note: This is so true. The converse is allowing what resonates with the majority - I learned, to my astonishment, that I am not my thoughts. That my thoughts were the constant background chatter of my subconscious mind, and that I could choose whether to “believe” what they were telling me. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2949 - 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. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2957 - Keep what resonates (Capture) Save for actionability (Organize) Find the essence (Distill) Show your work (Express) - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2982 - You can also simplify things by focusing on just one stage of building your Second Brain. - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 2987 - ==If I could leave you with one last bit of advice, it is to chase what excites you. When you are captivated and obsessed by a story, an idea, or a new possibility, don’t just let that moment pass as if it doesn’t matter.== - Date:: [[2023-04-08]] - Find: Location 3034