The 9 Biggest Myths about Building a Second Brain

[MUSIC] And season two of the building, a second brain podcast begins. And I want to start off by talking about the first season. And let's spend just a couple of minutes recapping it. >> Great. Yeah, super excited for this. >> Season one was really an introduction. It was the 10 principles or the 10 main ideas that underlie this concept, this approach, which I call building a second brain, which is a methodology for creating a system of knowledge management. So we covered in eight to 12 minute episodes, each of the 10 principles. And the way we created it actually, I thought was very much a manifestation of those principles. There was minimal planning. We sat down. I think the day of pull together just our notes, basically, of what those principles are and our ideas on them. And then in half a day, recorded all those 10 podcasts in one shot. >> So I want you to talk about what some of those principles are, just do a quick gloss over them and then we can get into what we're going to talk about today. >> Yeah, let's do it. Those 10 principles are really the principles that underlie modern creativity. And I use that word, I always have this voice in the back of my head creativity that, even for myself, cringes a little bit because of the connotations of something not concrete, not real world, not practical. I really believe that there's a new conception of creativity, which is something that we all have to learn. There's practically no job left for human beings that doesn't involve some element of creativity. And I think this whole creative economy, creator economy movement is largely the mainstream population for the first time having to think of themselves as creatives or having to think of their work as creative. So things like borrowed creativity, you don't have to make it up, you can't make it up all yourself. Things like the capture habit, you need to write down and capture a little bits of inspiration from outside your head. Things like idea recycling, one way of thinking of that as plagiarizing from yourself, you're allowed to plagiarize from your own ideas. And then more practical things like projects over categories, being very project centric in the way we organize our notes, our files, our ideas, slow burns, collecting and sort of incubating and digesting ideas over time instead of sitting down and trying to just like, quote unquote, do a brainstorm or something. Starting with abundance, it's a big one that we both teach in our courses, not trying to stare at a terrifying blank white screen or page, but starting with a little treasure trove of material, intermediate packets, thinking of our creative works as made up of smaller pieces and you can kind of create those smaller pieces in advance or as part of other projects. So then you come to the table with these intermediate packets. And then there's a few at the end, like you only know what you make. So getting your hands dirty, getting into action before you've done all the research and checked all the boxes and feel perfectly prepared, making it easier for your future self, constantly thinking, when you take a note, how is my future self going to see this? What are they going to know? What are they going to understand? What are they going to remember? And then the last one is keep your ideas moving, instead of stockpiling this kind of garage full of notes that you never put into action, kind of putting them out there and talking about them and writing them down and speaking them and trying them because ideas come alive when you just keep them, keep them moving. So in this season, we're going to talk about the myths of a second brain and we're going to go into the specific myths, but before we do that, can you define what a second brain is? Yes. A second brain is my term for a system of knowledge management. So a system of knowledge management. More concretely, you can think of that as a system for digital note taking. So it's the age old practice of note taking, writing down bits of inspiration, quotes, facts, research, journaling, your own thoughts, your own reflections, all of that stuff, except leveraging the incredible capabilities of technology to make it more than just like a scribble on a pad that you stuff in a drawer and something more like a lifelong incubator, lifelong engine of insight and creativity and productivity. That's really what I mean by a second brain and that term just comes from the idea that we can extend the capabilities of our mind for the first time in history into our computers and our smartphones and social media and software, that's where a second brain comes from. And our first episode is going to be that a second brain is not one single monolithic system. So let's begin.