Building Second Brain — Chapter 3: How Second Brain Works

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59616977-building-a-second-brain

Table of Contents

About The Book
About The Page
The Summary
— The CODE Method
The Value
The MindMap
Outro

About The Book

I’ve written a story to introduce this book :

Building Second Brain — ToC

About The Page

This story will tell us the summary of the third part of this book, which is: Chapter 3: How Second Brain Works.

You can find the ToC from the link above

The Summary

It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists. I’m free because I remember

There are four essential capabilities we can rely on SecondBrain

Making our ideas concrete

• Before we do anything with our ideas, we have to “off-load” them from our minds and put them into concrete form. Only when we declutter our brain of complex ideas, we can think clearly and start to work with those ideas effectively

Revealing new associations between ideas

• In its most practical form, creativity is about connecting ideas together, especially ideas that don’t seem to be connected

Incubating our ideas over time

• A “heavy lift” is demanding instantaneous results from our brains without the benefit of a support system
• A recency bias is we tend to favor the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones
• A “slow burn”, allowing bits of thought matter to slowly simmer like a delicious pot of stew brewing on the store
• Having a Second Brain where lots of ideas can be permanently saved for the long term turning the passage of time into your friend, instead of your enemy

Sharpening our unique perspectives

• Until now we’ve talked mostly about gathering the ideas of others, but the ultimate purpose of a Second Brain is to allow your own thinking to shine
• When you feel stuck in your creative pursuits, it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. You haven’t lost your touch or run out of creative juice. It just means you don’t yet have enough raw material to work with

Three stages of Personal Knowledge Management

Remembering

• The first way that people tend to use their Second Brain is as a memory aid. They use their digital notes to save facts and ideas that they would have trouble recalling otherwise

Connecting

• The second way that people use their Second Brain is to connect ideas together. Their Second Brain evolves from being primarily a memory tool to becoming a thinking tool.

Creating

• The final way that people use their Second Brain is for creating new things. They realize that they have a lot of knowledge on a subject and decide to turn in into something concrete and shareable.

The CODE Method

CODE is a map for navigating the endless streams of information we are now faced with every day. It is a modern approach to creating a commonplace book, adapted to the needs of the Information Age.

Capture — Keep What Resonates

Problem:

We can’t consume every bit of this information stream. We will quickly be exhausted and overwhelmed if we try.

Solution:

Like a scientist capturing only the rarest butterflies to take back to the lab, our goal should be to “capture” only the ideas and insights we think are truly noteworthy

To keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside

When something resonates, it moves you on an intuitive level. Often, the ideas that resonate are the ones that are most unusual, counterintuitive, interesting, or potentially useful.

Adapting the habit of knowledge capture has immediate benefits for our mental health and peace of mind. We can let go of the fear that our memory will fail us at a crucial moment. 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.

Organize-Save For Actionability

• Once you’ve begun capturing notes with the ideas that resonate with you, you’ll eventually feel the need to organize them.
• The best way to organize your notes is to organize for action, according to the active projects you are working on right now.
• When you focus on taking action, the vast amount of information out there gets radically streamlined and simplified. There are relatively few things that are actionable and relevant at any given time, which means you have a clear filter for ignoring everything else.
• Organizing for action gives you a sense of tremendous clarity because you know that everything you’re keeping actually has a purpose.

Distill-Find The Essence

• Once you start capturing ideas in a central place and organizing them for action, you’ll inevitably begin to notice patterns and connections between them
• Every idea has an “essence”: the heart and soul of what is trying to communicate.

Express-Show Your Work

• What is the point of knowledge if it doesn’t help anyone or produce anything?
• A common challenge for people who are curious and love to learn is that we can fall into the habit of continuously force-feeding ourselves more and more information, but never actually taking the next step and applying it
• Information becomes knowledge-personal, embodied, and verified, only when we put it to use. You gain confidence in what you know only when you know that it works. Until you do, it’s just a theory
• We all naturally have a desire to create, to bring to life something good, true, or beautiful. It is a part of our essential nature
• What should you create? It depends on your skills, interests, and personality

The Value

The CODE the method described above really helps me to improve how I remember, think, and produce something. It really helped me to better organize and helped me to prevent being overwhelmed.

And the most interesting part that I’ve implemented it for myself is:

When you focus on taking action, the vast amount of information out there gets radically streamlined and simplified. There are relatively few things that are actionable and relevant at any given time, which means you have a clear filter for ignoring everything else.

When we know how to filter and ignore everything that we think is unnecessary or less important, we will be better to prioritize.

The MindMap

Outro

A SecondBrain is not just a common note or personal daily or personal note. It’s more than that. For me, it is a personal framework that we build the system not just to move our things to some notes, but also how we should interact with those notes.

The CODE the method described in this part, tells us what method we will use as our personal foundation.