Most important of all, don’t get caught in the trap of perfectionism: insisting that you have to have the “perfect” app with a precise set of features before you take a single note. It’s not about having the perfect tools—it’s about having a reliable set of tools you can depend on, knowing you can always change them later.
“CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express.
Capture: Keep What Resonates
Here’s the problem: we can’t consume every bit of this information stream. We will quickly be exhausted and overwhelmed if we try.
The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside.
Don’t make it an analytical decision, and don’t worry about why exactly it resonates—just look inside for a feeling of pleasure, curiosity, wonder, or excitement, and let that be your signal for when it’s time to capture a passage, an image, a quote, or a fact.
By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us, we can improve not only our ability to take better notes, but also our understanding of ourselves and what makes us tick.
Organize: Save for Actionability (PARA)
Distill: Find the Essence
Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?” That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention.
Express: Show Your Work
You gain confidence in what you know only when you know that it works. Until you do, it’s just a theory.
Chapter 4: Capture—Keep What Resonates
Feynman’s approach was to maintain a list of a dozen open questions. When a new scientific finding came out, he would test it against each of his questions to see if it shed any new light on the problem. This cross-disciplinary approach allowed him to make connections across seemingly unrelated subjects, while continuing to follow his sense of curiosity. Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?” This could include grand, sweeping questions like “How can we make society fairer and more equitable?” as well as practical ones like “How can I make it a habit to exercise every day?”
The goal isn’t to definitively answer the question once and for all, but to use the question as a North Star for my learning.
Criteria for capturing →
Capture Criteria #1: Does It Inspire Me?
Capture Criteria #2: Is It Useful?
Capture Criteria #3: Is It Personal?
Capture Criteria #4: Is It Surprising?Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think.
Ultimately, Capture What Resonates
Chapter 5: Organize—Save for Actionability
“The box makes me feel organized,
It also represents a commitment.
“I believe in starting each project with a stated goal. Sometimes the goal is nothing more than a personal mantra such as ‘keep it simple’ or ‘something perfect’ or ‘economy’ to remind me of what I was thinking at the beginning if and when I lose my way. I write it down on a slip of paper and it’s the first thing that goes into the box.”
One of the biggest temptations with organizing is to get too perfectionistic, treating the process of organizing as an end in itself. There is something inherently satisfying about order,
We need to always be wary of accumulating so much information that we spend all our time managing it, instead of putting it to use in the outside world.
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.
It doesn’t matter how organized, aesthetically pleasing, or impressive your notetaking system is. It is only the steady completion of tangible wins that can infuse you with a sense of determination, momentum, and accomplishment.
Chapter 6: Distil—Find the Essence
The technique is simple: you highlight the main points of a note, and then highlight the main points of those highlights, and so on, distilling the essence of a note in several “layers.” Each of these layers uses a different kind of formatting so you can easily tell them apart.
Crucially, Picasso couldn’t have started with the single line drawing. He needed to go through each layer of the bull’s form step-by-step to absorb the proportions and shapes into his muscle memory.
Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible.
The Three Most Common Mistakes of Novice Notetakers
Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting
A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer.
Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in Mind
“When should I be doing this highlighting?” The answer is that you should do it when you’re getting ready to create something. Unlike Capture and Organize, which take mere seconds, it takes time and effort to distill your notes.
The true test of whether a note you’ve created is discoverable is whether you can get the gist of it at a glance.
Chapter 7: Express—Show Your Work
As knowledge workers, attention is our most scarce and precious resource.
Express, is about refusing to wait until you have everything perfectly ready before you share what you know. It is about expressing your ideas earlier, more frequently, and in smaller chunks to test what works and gather feedback from others. That feedback in turn gets drawn in to your Second Brain, where it becomes the starting point for the next iteration of your work.
it’s not enough to simply divide tasks into smaller pieces—you then need a system for managing those pieces. Otherwise, you’re just creating a lot of extra work for yourself trying to keep track of them.
Those four retrieval methods are: Search Browsing Tags Serendipity
Once you understand how incredibly valuable feedback is, you start to crave as much of it as you can find.
Chapter 8: The Art of Creative Execution
To create an Archipelago of Ideas, you divergently gather a group of ideas, sources, or points that will form the backbone of your essay, presentation, or deliverable. Once you have a critical mass of ideas to work with, you switch decisively into convergence mode and link them together in an order that makes sense.
Write down ideas for next steps: At the end of a work session, write down what you think the next steps could be for the next one. Write down the current status: This could include your current biggest challenge, most important open question, or future roadblocks you expect.
Waiting until you have everything ready before getting started is like sitting in your car and waiting to leave your driveway until all the traffic lights across town are green at the same time. You can’t wait until everything is perfect. There will always be something missing, or something else you think you need. Dialing Down the Scope recognizes that not all the parts of a given project are equally important. By dropping or reducing or postponing the least important parts, we can unblock ourselves and move forward even when time is scarce.
Chapter 9: The Essential Habits of Digital Organizers
Weekly and Monthly Reviews:
review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything. Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.
Any time I need some motivation, I can look through this list and be reminded of all the meaningful goals I’ve achieved in the past
There’s no need to capture every idea; the best ones will always come back around eventually. There’s no need to clear your inbox frequently; unlike your to-do list, there’s no negative consequence if you miss a given note. There’s no need to review or summarize notes on a strict timeline; we’re not trying to memorize their contents or keep them top of mind.
Chapter 10: The Path of Self-Expression
Mindset Over Toolset—The Quest for the Perfect App
There is no divide between our inner selves and our digital lives: the beliefs and attitudes that shape our thinking in one context inevitably show up in other contexts as well.
How does such a dramatic change happen? Amelia didn’t necessarily learn a new fact that she didn’t know before. She took on a new perspective. She chose to look at the world through a different lens—the lens of appreciation and abundance. We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can choose the lens we look through. This is the basic choice we have in creating our own experience—which aspects to nourish or starve, using only the magnifying power of our attention.
I see so many people trying to operate in this new world under the assumptions of the past—that information is scarce, and therefore we need to acquire and consume and hoard as much of it as possible. We’ve been conditioned to view information through a consumerist lens: that more is better, without limit. Through the lens of scarcity, we constantly crave more, more, more information, a response to the fear of not having enough.
It is driven by fear—the fear of missing out on some crucial fact, idea, or story that everyone is talking about. The paradox of hoarding is that no matter how much we collect and accumulate, it’s never enough. The lens of scarcity also tells us that the information we already have must not be very valuable, compelling us to keep searching externally for what’s missing inside.
Abundance Mindset tells us that there is an endless amount of incredibly powerful knowledge everywhere we look—in the content we consume, in our social network, in our bodies and intuitions, and in our own minds. It also tells us that we don’t need to consume or understand all of it, or even much of it. All we need is a few seeds of wisdom, and the seeds we most need tend to continually find us again and again. You don’t need to go out and hunt down insights. All you have to do is listen to what life is repeatedly trying to tell you.
Life tends to surface exactly what we need to know, whether we like it or not. Like a compassionate but unyielding teacher, reality doesn’t bend or cave to our will. It patiently teaches us in what ways our thinking is not accurate, and those lessons tend to show up across our lives again and again.
The purpose of knowledge is to be shared. What’s the point of knowing something if it doesn’t positively impact anyone, not even yourself?
Polanyi observed that there are many tasks we can easily perform as humans that we can’t fully explain. For example, driving a car or recognizing a face. We can try to describe how we do these things, but our explanations always fall far short. That’s because we are relying on tacit knowledge, which is impossible to describe in exact detail. We possess that knowledge, but it resides in our subconscious and muscle memory where language cannot reach.
I discovered something through that experience: that self-expression is a fundamental human need. Self-expression is as vital to our survival as food or shelter. We must be able to share the stories of our lives—from the small moments of what happened today at school to our grandest theories of what life is about.
Summary
There are 4 basic components to a second brain: CODE ⇒ Capture, Organize, Distill, Express
Capture ⇒
Capture what resonates. By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us, we can improve not only our ability to take better notes, but also our understanding of ourselves and what makes us tick.
Criteria for capturing → Does It Inspire Me?, Is It Useful?, Is It Personal?, It Surprising?
Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think.
Feynman’s questions, Feynman’s approach was to maintain a list of a dozen open questions. When a new scientific finding came out, he would test it against each of his questions to see if it shed any new light on the problem. This cross-disciplinary approach allowed him to make connections across seemingly unrelated subjects, while continuing to follow his sense of curiosity. Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?”
The goal isn’t to definitively answer the question once and for all, but to use the question as a North Star for my learning.
Organize ⇒
One of the biggest temptations with organizing is to get too perfectionistic, treating the process of organizing as an end in itself. There is something inherently satisfying about order,
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.
Distill ⇒
Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?”
Progressive Summarization → The technique is simple: you highlight the main points of a note, and then highlight the main points of those highlights, and so on, distilling the essence of a note in several “layers.” Each of these layers uses a different kind of formatting so you can easily tell them apart.
A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer.
“When should I be doing this highlighting?” The answer is that you should do it when you’re getting ready to create something. Unlike Capture and Organize, which take mere seconds, it takes time and effort to distill your notes.
Express ⇒
Express, is about refusing to wait until you have everything perfectly ready before you share what you know. It is about expressing your ideas earlier, more frequently, and in smaller chunks to test what works and gather feedback from others. That feedback in turn gets drawn in to your Second Brain, where it becomes the starting point for the next iteration of your work.
Art of executing a project, 3 primary ideas →
Archipelago of ideas → To create an Archipelago of Ideas, you divergently gather a group of ideas, sources, or points that will form the backbone of your essay, presentation, or deliverable. Once you have a critical mass of ideas to work with, you switch decisively into convergence mode and link them together in an order that makes sense.
Hemingways Bridge → Write down ideas for next steps: At the end of a work session, write down what you think the next steps could be for the next one. Write down the current status: This could include your current biggest challenge, most important open question, or future roadblocks you expect.
Dial down the tone → Waiting until you have everything ready before getting started is like sitting in your car and waiting to leave your driveway until all the traffic lights across town are green at the same time. You can’t wait until everything is perfect. There will always be something missing, or something else you think you need. Dialing Down the Scope recognizes that not all the parts of a given project are equally important. By dropping or reducing or postponing the least important parts, we can unblock ourselves and move forward even when time is scarce.
Habits → Weekly and Monthly Reviews: review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything. Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.
Miscellaneous →
There’s no need to capture every idea; the best ones will always come back around eventually. There’s no need to clear your inbox frequently; unlike your to-do list, there’s no negative consequence if you miss a given note. There’s no need to review or summarize notes on a strict timeline; we’re not trying to memorize their contents or keep them top of mind.
I see so many people trying to operate in this new world under the assumptions of the past—that information is scarce, and therefore we need to acquire and consume and hoard as much of it as possible. We’ve been conditioned to view information through a consumerist lens: that more is better, without limit.
It is driven by fear—the fear of missing out on some crucial fact, idea, or story that everyone is talking about. The paradox of hoarding is that no matter how much we collect and accumulate, it’s never enough.
Abundance Mindset tells us that there is an endless amount of incredibly powerful knowledge everywhere we look—in the content we consume, in our social network, in our bodies and intuitions, and in our own minds. It also tells us that we don’t need to consume or understand all of it, or even much of it. All we need is a few seeds of wisdom, and the seeds we most need tend to continually find us again and again. You don’t need to go out and hunt down insights. All you have to do is listen to what life is repeatedly trying to tell you.
The purpose of knowledge is to be shared. What’s the point of knowing something if it doesn’t positively impact anyone, not even yourself?
One of the biggest temptations with organizing is to get too perfectionistic, treating the process of organizing as an end in itself. There is something inherently satisfying about order,
Most important of all, don’t get caught in the trap of perfectionism:
“When should I be doing this highlighting?” The answer is that you should do it when you’re getting ready to create something. Unlike Capture and Organize, which take mere seconds, it takes time and effort to distill your notes.
Quotes →
We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can choose the lens we look through. This is the basic choice we have in creating our own experience—which aspects to nourish or starve, using only the magnifying power of our attention.