# Building a Second Brain  ## Metadata - Author: [[Tiago Forte]] - Full Title: Building a Second Brain - Category: #books ## Highlights - the average person’s daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes. - You are expected to take action on your notes, not just regurgitate them. - You are creating value instead of killing time. - you can draw on an unusually large body of knowledge at a moment’s notice. - Think of your Second Brain as the world’s best personal assistant. - recency bias. We tend to favor the ideas, solutions, and influences that occurred to us most recently, regardless of whether they are the best ones. - not just information but a particular interpretation of information. - Those stages are remembering, connecting, and creating. ## New highlights added August 23, 2022 at 1:51 PM - Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. —Gustave Flaubert, French novelist - Organizing for Action: Where 99 Percent of Notetakers Get Stuck (And How to Solve It) - The problem was that none of these systems was integrated into my daily life. - Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives - Projects: Short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now. Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time. Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in the future. Archives: Inactive items from the other three categories. - Imagine how absurd it would be to organize a kitchen instead by kind of food: fresh fruit, dried fruit, fruit juice, and frozen fruit would all be stored in the same place, just because they all happen to be made of fruit. Yet this is exactly the way most people organize their files and notes—keeping all their book notes together just because they happen to come from books, or all their saved quotes together just because they happen to be quotes. - Instead of organizing ideas according to where they come from, I recommend organizing them according to where they are going—specifically, the outcomes that they can help you realize. - we can systematically gather building blocks from our reading and research that ultimately make the final product richer, more interesting, and more impactful. ## New highlights added August 28, 2022 at 4:17 PM - Our notes are things to use, not just things to collect. - notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self. - Your job as a notetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can - survive the journey into the future. - Highlighting 2.0: The Progressive Summarization Technique ## New highlights added September 8, 2022 at 2:39 PM - It’s like having a digital map of your notes that can be zoomed in or out depending on how many details you want to see Ideas [[Progressive Summarization ]] [[Attention Guard]] ## New highlights added September 16, 2022 at 2:57 PM - “When should I be doing this highlighting?” The answer is that you should do it when you’re getting ready to create something. - You have to always assume that, until proven otherwise, any given note won’t necessarily ever be useful. - Verum ipsum factum (“We only know what we make”) —Giambattista Vico, Italian philosopher - As knowledge workers, attention is our most scarce and precious resource. - Progressive Summarization - The first two steps of CODE, Capture and Organize, make up divergence. They are about gathering seeds of imagination carried on the wind and storing them in a secure place. This is where you research, explore, and add ideas. The final two steps, Distill and Express, are about convergence - Tags: [[green]] - All I have to do is build bridges between the islands. - Now our challenge isn’t to acquire more information; as we saw in the exploration of divergence and convergence, it is to find ways to close off the stream so we can get something done. - “We know more than we can say.”