The Second Brain A Life-Changing Productivity System

So last year I spent a stupidly large amount of money on this online course that genuinely changed my life. It's called building a second brain and it promises to supercharge your productivity and creativity. And like I was already pretty good at the productivity stuff in terms of getting things done but through the course I discovered the field of personal knowledge management which is like the next level of productivity. And it really helped me unlock kind of the next frontier.

The main idea is that over time you build up this second brain which is a digital note-taking system. Whereby anything that you read watch and listen to that resonates with you goes into your system. And then you can use your second brain to organize your ideas and thoughts and you can ultimately convert them into your creative output.

In this video we're going to go over the 10 fundamental principles of building a second brain so that you can also maximize your productivity and creativity. If you want to check out the course itself there will be a link in the video description. And very excitingly I am now an official alumni mentor for the course. So when it happens with a live cohorts which happened twice a year I'll be joining and offering my expert mentoring services on these live zoom calls. But yeah not gonna lie it's super expensive like for me.

It was totally worth it because I derive value from this sort of stuff and if you're the right sort of person if you're a knowledge worker it'll probably be worth it for you. But it's definitely not for everyone. And so hopefully in this video you'll learn the 10 fundamental principles of it so you can start getting some of the knowledge from this course without having to pay for it.

The first principle is borrowed creativity. And that's the idea that we all intuitively think of creativity as kind of creating original stuff and like I don't consider myself a very creative person because I feel like I don't really have any original ideas. But one of the key insights from the course is that actually creativity is all about remixing stuff. It's about taking ideas that already exist based on the things that you read watch and listen to and then adding your own spin to them and sort of combining things in interesting ways. And that is what creativity is.

It's like what Pablo Picasso famously said that: "Good artists copy but great artists steal." And this is one of the key ideas of building a second brain. It's the idea that if you have all of the little bits that resonate with you from all the stuff that you read watch and listen to. If you have all that in one place it becomes a lot easier to start putting things together and to start seeing connections that you wouldn't have seen before. Whereas if you try and do that all in your head it doesn't work as well.

Secondly we've got the capture habit and this is a fundamental part of productivity. It's based around the idea that our brains are for having ideas, not for storing them. And so whenever we get any sort of idea whenever anything resonates with us in any way from anything in life even if we're just walking down the park or if we're in the shower or if we're listening to a podcast we want to capture that idea as soon as possible because our brains are not going to hold on to it for a very long period of time.

Since I took the course in 2019 I've now started taking this very very seriously. And so I have all sorts of different mechanisms for capturing ideas depending on where I get them like if i'm listening to a podcast or an audiobook in the car. And i've got my apple watch I will dictate voice notes into drafts the app on my apple watch and that'll sync automatically with evernote.

Or if i'm reading a book on kindle I will highlight it on the kindle I'll add a note and that will automatically sync to evernote and notion through read-wise which is an amazing app. And a couple of weeks ago I realized that when I was in the shower I was having so many ideas and I was just forgetting about them by the time I got out of the shower. So I now have a waterproof notebook on the windowsill next to the shower next to me. And so if I have an idea I capture it right there. And then because I know that my own brain is a dumbass and it's not going to hold on to that idea for very long.

Thirdly we've got the principle of idea recycling. And the main view here is that ideas are not single use like I certainly used to think them, but we can actually recycle ideas and reuse them over time. And so one of the things we want to do in our second brain like whatever note-taking app we're using for it is.

We want to keep track of all of the stuff that we're creating and all of the ideas that we're using for certain projects because we can just reuse those ideas for others. And so for me whenever I now make a video or write a blog post or a tweet or anything all of that goes straight into my second brain because I know somewhere down the line I'm gonna want to reuse some of that information. And then it means that I've got these building blocks already that I can then build other things out of. So for example most of the online courses that I make are actually just very easily put together from building blocks from my second brain based on this idea of idea recycling. And it just meant that over the last few months even while I was working full-time as a doctor I could churn out these online classes on skillshare (link in the video description). And those have just made such a stupidly large amount of money relative to my full-time job salary. And the fact that I had all of these ideas in my second brain system. So that I could recycle them made that whole process infinitely easier.

The fourth principle is the idea of projects over categories. And this is one of the things that I really learned early on when I took the course. And that's I sort of used to take notes in the past, but I would categorize things in terms of category. Like, you know, if I saw an interesting thing about marketing I'd put it in a marketing folder in Evernote. Or if I saw an interesting thing about motivation I'd put it in a motivation folder. But then I'd end up with these sort of folders with lots of notes in them and didn't really have anything to do with them. But now I think of it more in terms of projects. And so if I capture an idea firstly it goes into my kind of general capture inbox. But then I will try my best to associate it to some kind of project that I'm currently working on because then the information is going to be directly useful rather than it just sitting in a bookmark folder that I'm never going to look at again.

Next we have the principle of slow burns and I think this is another really important aspect of my own personal productivity and that most of the things I do are slow burns rather than heavy lifts. So on the one hand we've got heavy lifts so like imagine you want to write a book or you want to make an online course. And you think right I'm going to go to a cabin in the woods and I'm going to sit down and do the thing and I'm going to do all the work for it in a small amount of time. And that'll be like like you you're lifting a very heavy load. this project is like a big thing that you have to do all at once, and this sort of heavy lift mentality. And like at least for me it stops me from doing a lot of things because I think well I haven't got the time to spend three weeks going to a cabin in the woods to write this book. But the opposite of heavy lifts is the idea of slow burns and that's a big part of the building a second brain methodology.

And the main idea is that we have this list of projects that we're working on, and they're all kind of on the slow burner like for me. Right now for example I've got a handful of online courses and like books and other kind of products in the pipeline but, I'm never sitting down and kind of bashing through them one at a time. Instead I've got them on the slow burn and so over time as I read and watch and listen to things and discover interesting ideas and come up with my own ideas. Some of the time it'll just go in straight into my second brain and into the relevant project and so over time instead of kind of doing a big project one at a time I'm doing all 10 of these projects like in very very very small amounts. And so now when it comes for me to you know spend a day consolidating all of the bits into the next skillshare class. For example it's actually very easy to put together because I've already done the work over time. It's not a heavy lift that I'm struggling with. Instead it's a slow burn.

That just by default through spending time on the internet and capturing notes into the right place in my second brain. I've kind of got a system for that. And that's another really big plus of having a centralized note-taking system that is connected to whatever thing you're using to keep track of your projects on.

The next principle is to start with abundance. And when we're doing writing or creating anything or writing an essay or an assignment or a presentation or pretty much anything we all have that issue that we tend to start from a blank page. And we have the blank page in front of us. And we think right this is hard I've got writer's block I don't really know what to do, but another main thing in the second brain stuff is. That if you have collected all this stuff over time all of your inspirations and bits then you're never really starting from scratch. You're always starting from abundance. And so let's say you're using Evernote for your second brain or Notion and you want to write an article about motivation or productivity. All you have to do is search the word motivation and automatically you've got like a ton of articles that you have read and annotated and made your own notes on over the last few years. And you can just kind of draw from those and take bits from here and bits from there and ultimately that'll lead to a really nice blog post or video script or whatever you're making about motivation. Because you're querying the data set of stuff in your second brain. And that just kind of changes the game because it means you're never starting from a blank page. You're always starting with abundance. You're starting with this pre-existing treasure trove of information that you yourself have decided in the past that was worth saving.

Next we have the idea of intermediate packets and this is something that I kind of knew intuitively but I didn't really have the terminology for. Back in the day so if you imagine let's say you're a university student and you're writing an essay. An essay isn't actually like we think of it as like a big thing, but actually it's made up of a lot of intermediate packets. I used to call them content blocks in my head when I was in my third year writing loads of essays. It's like you know your introduction is a block an intermediate packet then you've got maybe a paragraph or a section on short-term memory versus long-term memory then you have a section on the phonological loop versus the visual spatial sketch pad which are aspects of working memory. Or whatever you've got these kind of five or six different intermediate packets and when you put them together they form an essay. But one of the crucial insights which helps make students lives more efficient is that a lot of these intermediate packets you can actually put in different essays.

So what I would do when I was at university and this was the method that helped me rank first in the group one year what I used to do is I would memorize the intermediate packets or the content blocks and then I'd be able to essentially in my head drag and drop them into whatever I say I wanted to. That was relevant to memory for example. And even outside the world of essay writing and academia it's really relevant like for you know. For example this video on 10 principles of building a second brain. Each of these 10 principles are their own intermediate packet. And I know that in the future when I make another kind of video or if I'm writing a blog post or if I'm writing a book there are surely some aspects of this video some intermediate packets that I can just drag and drop into my other thing.

So, firstly thinking in that way really helps because it means that it's a lot easier to put stuff together for your next project, but also in a way it makes it easier to get started on your current project. So for example when I'm writing an essay I don't think of it as: "Oh, damn, I need to sit down and write the whole essay." Which would be more of a heavy lift. I think of it as: "O'kay, I just need to focus on the introduction", or: "I just need to write that one intermediate packet of short-term memory versus long-term memory." And then it just kind of makes the work more doable because a big problem that me and a lot of other people have is getting started with doing the work and if there's like a big mountain in front of us. Like writing a whole essay.

It can feel really hard but if it's just a small intermediate packet like writing a single paragraph. It becomes a lot easier and then those bits those intermediate packets are then like go into our second brain and they're useful for future projects further down the line.

Next we have the idea that you only know what you make and this is like a big part of the building second brain thing. This is a big part of my personal spiel as well.

These days is that like we can read watch and listen to all the stuff that we want, but really the stuff that we're really going to internalize and that's really going to affect our lives and that we can feasibly use in our future projects is going to be the stuff that we have created ourselves. So whether that's reading a book and then writing a summary of it or whether it's listening to a podcast and kind of turning it into like a tweet storm of like insights from the podcast or even if it's having a random idea and then writing like fleshing out that idea into an intermediate packet and chucking it into our second brain.

When we engage with the material ourselves rather than relying on just pre-existing material we end up becoming much more familiar with it. And then we can do interesting creative original whatever things with that stuff. And actually one of my biggest regrets in life is that I didn't start taking notes on stuff until like last year when I discovered this building a second brain course and I really wish I'd been doing this since like the age of 15 when I first started reading non-fiction books.

Because if I imagine all the hundreds of books that i've read over the last like decade of my life if I'd thought to summarize them or just just like quickly right up my insides or the interesting things I was thinking about or that I'd come across from reading the book. Looking back at that now would have been such a huge treasure trove of information and now I'm having to kind of go back through all the books I've ever read and and like reread them and then summarize them. And I really wish I'd been doing that more as I was growing up and so occasionally you know I'll do like an Instagram live and people will ask me what's your biggest regret in life. And I say honestly you know it's that I didn't take more notes from books.

Or people ask, you know: "What advice do you have for a 14 year old?" It would be like: "Bro make an evernote account make a notion account like whatever it doesn't matter which app you use just start writing down the notes from all the stuff that you're reading because in 10 years time you're going to be so glad that"

That's what you're doing principle number nine is you want to make it easier for your future self and the way that I think of my second brain. I.e. my kind of suite of digital note-taking apps that I use for different things is that ultimately I'm putting in the work now to create a resource that my future self is going to find helpful. And so while right now I might be listening to a podcast and I hear the word transactional analysis. Let's say I'm listening to a podcast about transactional analysis, that was an episode that me and my brother did on a podcast somewhat recently. I might be tempted to just write down transactional analysis because I kind of know right now what it means but that's not particularly useful to my future self because my brain is a dumbass and I'm going to forget exactly what it's meant.

And so I'll take a little bit of time right now to write a few notes on it to flesh it out in my own words. So that when future me comes across this note on transactional analysis future me will know exactly what current me was talking about. And this is something that like endlessly frustrates me of what I used to do back in the day where I looked through my Evernote from like 2015 and I think what the hell does this even mean. Like I don't remember what I was thinking when I took this note because I assumed too much intelligence on the part of my of my future self.

And so now when I'm creating stuff I'm always thinking with my future self in mind equally if I'm studying for an exam and I'm using Anki flash cards or anything. I'm thinking to myself my brain is a dumb ass. I'm not going to remember this therefore I need to create the flash card or create the note in a way that my future self will easily be able to access it. And that's another big part of the building second brain methodology and our final principle is the idea that you want to keep your ideas moving and that's kind of this.

It's like an anti-perfectionist take on this because one of the traps that we can fall into if we're building out a note-taking system is that we can fall into the trap of perfectionism where we think o'kay well right I've just discovered how to use Notion I've watched Ali and Thomas Frank's videos on how to use notion. I'm going to create this elaborate database of all the stuff that I've ever read. And it's going to have like 18 pieces of metadata assigned for each one. And we can get stuck kind of appreciating the intricacies of the app and the intricacies of our system rather than focusing on what matters which is to keep our ideas moving and get stuff kind of into our second brain.

And then organize it and distill it into our own insights and then convert it into creative output because really the most important thing is the output. It really doesn't matter what's in your second brain. So what if you save all the podcasts you've ever listened to like unless you're doing something with that information unless you're turning it into something or sharing something or applying it to your own life in some way it's completely useless.

And that's why I really like this principle of keep your ideas moving like it's not about having a perfect note-taking system because there is no perfect note-taking system there is no perfect app it's about having a system that just keeps your ideas moving and flowing through it in an imperfect way and that's one of the key things that I learned on the course it's that we don't have to worry about getting it right up front we can just kind of improve the system over time and as long as we're like creating the output that's the main thing that matters so those were the 10 principles of building a second brain.