Second brain

I've got a second brain.

No, it's not a reference to Neuralink. Although clears throat, Elon if you're reading, I'm available for human trials.

No, a second brain is a digital repo that keeps track of the info that you consume.

Did you know that you consume a staggering 34 terabytes of information on average each day?

Every single day, we basically read 200 complete newspapers.

You probably didn't need this statistic to know it's impossible to keep track of all the information you come across.

Your second brain picks up the slack.

And it is freeing.

Once I started using this framework, I felt like a weight had been lifted. There was no more need for instant recall (haha, yeah right) or consulting notebooks from 2 years ago.

When you start using a second brain there are other benefits besides being a repo.

In Tiago Forte's book "Building a Second Brain", he says that "you start to see recurring patterns in your thinking: why you do things, what you really want, and what’s really important to you. Your Second Brain becomes like a mirror, teaching you about yourself and reflecting back to you the ideas worth keeping and acting on. Your mind starts to become intertwined with this system, leaning on it to remember more than you ever could on your own."

The information only transforms into knowledge when you actively apply it in your personal experiences and suss out what it means from your unique perspective.

Here I'll show you my framework for doing just this.

Inputs (info-diet)

Your info diet is everything that you consume. These can be inputs like TikTok videos, Medium articles, Tweets, or Kindle highlights. You know what you do.

And information flow is important for coming up with ideas. Who you choose to follow, which book to read, which podcast? Which sources of information are higher signal than others? The better information flows yields better ideas.

For me, most (>60%) of the diet is newsletters. I am a huge consumer. It is my favorite source of information. A big reason is that I feel I can trust the source based on consistent posting and familiar tone. It's generally just one person, and they are in control of their content. Large media outlets don't give that to me.

Podcasts are the next biggest source (~30%). Tim Ferriss is my boi. With Snipd, you can save snips from the transcription on the fly. Super handy.

I also read a lot of Medium articles and Twitter is my social media platform of choice.

My book reading is between physical books and Kindle books. With physical books, I use Shortform to find relevant highlights. This saves me from trying to retype my highlights online.

This is a mind numbing amount of information and data to keep track of. Luckily, there are tools that can curate from all of these sources. The one I use is Readwise.

Readwise curates saved data from all of the sources in my info diet:

• Twitter

• Kindle

• Medium

• All web pages with highlights through the Readwise Reader

• Newsletter pages by forwarding the email to Readwise

• Snipd podcast player

• Even YouTube transcriptions (with some hand waving)

Curating inputs is only half of the Readwise magic. The best part is that it will sync directly to your note-taking, curating, synthesizing second brain.

Second brain

I use Logseq and Notion as my second brain.

My main tool for gathering data, and organizing it is Logseq.

The magic in Logseq (much like Roam Research or Obsidian) is that it is block based and utilizes backlinks. You can manually create links by tagging or linking pages within other blocks OR you can rely on the "Unlinked Reference" that Logseq automatically creates. It is visually represented with a beautiful graph view.

We can do the same in our second brain by rearranging our ideas until something unexpected appears. The connections that form will be more creative the more unique and different the initial content you use is.

I also love that it opens on a blank page in the Journal view. This helps fuel my creativity. Knowing that whatever I write will be automatically linked to other journals, links, or tweets that are stored in Logseq.

My main method for organization is tagging blocks or creating a page around a certain topic, for instance AI prompts.

Then, when I add new information through journaling or any other source, it will automatically get tagged and added to that page.

This keeps all of your information related and accessible for when you are ready to use it.

Notion is my go to for task management and includes my to-do lists, daily agenda, reading lists, and ideas for content creation. There is functionality in Logseq to do this stuff as well, but Notion is cloud-based and easier to reach from my phone when I want to consult on hour-by-hour tasks.

Typically, I will curate, create, and polish in Logseq, then post stuff that I want to have available on my phone to Notion.

Review + work

All the previous steps, capturing and organizing, are geared toward one ultimate purpose: sharing your own ideas, your own story, and your own knowledge with others.

To do this you have to distill all of this information using your perspective and insights. Only then will it be useful to you and your audience.

Distilling is centered around two activities: journaling and reviewing.

I journal everyday, and review content weekly, monthly, and annually, depending on the review. For instance I have an annual review, a monthly review of annual plan/goals, and I review curated info on a weekly basis.

During these journalling and reviewing exercises I will take information that has been curated and rewrite or make my own notes and thoughts.

A recent tool I've been using is AI. ChatGPT changed the game on November 30th, 2022. And, it is available in Logseq. So, I've been taking advantage of it. Primarily, I use it to generate an outline and to provide some inspiration with writer's block hits.

The biggest benefit that I've found using this system though is clarification of thought. When I write about information I have consumed, it forces me to confront my own biases, beliefs, and come up with ideas. There is no better way to understand what you believe and how you see the world than reading and then writing.

Outputs

At the end of the day, the distilled information doesn't provide an impact on anyone else until you share it.

My blog is the main outlet, but I also have this newsletter that I publish 1x/week for both long form and short form content.

A cool feature is that Logseq allows you to export content in a markdown format which is what most blogs use, like my Wordpress site.

One of my goals in the short term is to start condensing this longer form content into short form video on my YouTube and TikTok channels, and short form content on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Summary

So, if you want to keep track of the vast amount of information you consume on a daily basis and turn it into knowledge that you can use to enrich your personal experiences, use a second brain.

Try it, it will make a difference.