The Biggest Mistake All Enthusiast Beginners Do With Their Second Brain

And how your approach matters a lot!

Francesco Amighetti
5 min readFeb 16, 2023
Photo by Yan Krukau

Nurturing a Second Brain, a tool to collect and organize all your notes and ideas in a unique place, is a grandiose way to discover yourself and master your passions.

In an efficient and personalized way, it lets you manage what has become the most precious resource of our age: information, knowledge.

Digital or paper-based, note-taking apps or Moleskine notebooks, no matter what you choose, you can move on confidently in the world, letting your knowledge compound day after day. You can put into perspective thoughts or concepts you came across months ago with new pieces of evidence, or you can continue studying where you left off and continue from there.

However, as with any new shiny tool, it can hide costly pitfalls in the hands of a beginner.

And yes, it happened to me as well.

A syndrome nobody talks about

With the potential of these tools in your hands, it’s easy to fall into the trap of not being very thoughtful about what you’re taking note of.

That’s because without a proper goal, all of a sudden everything seems potentially useful, and must be collected in…

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Francesco Amighetti

Fieldnotes on the polyhedric shapes of reality. Books, reflections, and personal experiments. francescoamighetti.substack.com