Reading: Building a Second Brain
We consume too much information and read books, podcasts, online media, and articles. But we don’t transfer the information into value. As “information hoarders,” we stockpile endless amounts of content that only increases our anxiety. Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte gives us innovative methods and tools to cope with anxiety caused by information overwhelm.
Here are the reading briefs and insights from my reading.
Briefs
As we access much more information nowadays, it needs to change our mindset regarding the relationship between our natural brain and information. Ask our natural brain to hand over the job of remembering to an external system and free it to focus on creative work and self-expression.
On the other hand, building the second brain — A personal knowledge system that stores and manage our unique personal knowledge. Building a second brain standardizes how we capture, organize and distill external information. It is a practical system for enhancing our productivity and our creativity. The fundamental method of building the second brain is the CODE (Capture-Organize-Distill-Express) system. The PARA method guides us in organizing information based on our action’s priority.
Generally, it’s a method type of book. Most of it is about acquiring new tools in your relationship to information. But it also profoundly inspires us from a mindset view. We need to change our relationship with information. Don’t just consume and store data; leverage our second brain for connecting and creating.
Insights
1. From consuming information to creating meaningful things
2. Building the second brain needs efficient methods to standardize how to capture, organize and distill information. It’s the key to improving the productivity of using information. (See the C.O.D.E system)
3. The value of info isn’t evenly distributed. You have to capture the critical value part.
4. Build a hierarchy and relationships between the information for you to ease use.
5. Feynman’s approach inspires me to use external information to verify the big questions you most care about. Don’t capture information without purpose. (See the P61 of Chapter4_Capture_keep what resonate with the book)
6. Organize information purposefully and for action — no value if you just read many books but no practice. Only when transforming the data into your wisdom will it belong to you and benefit you.
7. Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, recommend organizing them according to where they are going — — the outcomes they can help you realize. (See the PARA method)
8. One critical step to transforming information into knowledge is distilling and finding its essence. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.
Quick Resources
Except for reading the book yourself, listed some great online resources to quickly know these critical methods introduced in Building a Second Brain.
