Second Brain
A digital support system.
Also see My Second Brain.
Benefits of a Second Brain
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Consistently move your projects and goals to completion by organizing and accessing your knowledge in a results-oriented way
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Transform your personal knowledge into income, taking advantage of a rapidly growing knowledge economy
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Uncover unexpected patterns and connections between ideas
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Reduce stress and “information overload” by expertly curating and managing your personal information stream
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Develop valuable expertise, specialized knowledge, and the skills to deploy it in a new job, career, or business
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Cultivate a collection of valuable knowledge and insights over time without having to follow rigid, time-consuming rules
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Unlock the full value of the wealth of learning resources all around you, such as online courses, webinars, books, articles, forums, and podcasts
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You’ll connect with new collaborators who you never would have imagined would find your work compelling,
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You’ll find clients or customers, in some cases even when you weren’t seeking them.
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Others will reflect back to you with reactions, comments and appreciation.
How to build a second brain?
- Capture worthy ideas and insights in a single, centralized place
- Recurring themes and questions
- Insightful, high value information
- Resurface knowledge to stimulate future thinking
Make conscious, strategic decisions about what you consume digitally. Save articles for later and organize these articles by project. Keep only what resonates.
- Create connections
- distill your notes into actionable, bite-sized summaries.
- design notes for your future self in a consumable way
- add links to resources
- organize opportunistically and just-in-time
- use the PARA organization system
- similar to the Boyscout Rule, improve a note every time you touch it
- Create tangible results in the real world
- stop consuming information passively, put it to use
- create smaller, reusable units of work End each work session with an intermediate packet. This allows for more breaks and creates immediate value
- share your work with the world
- everything is in flux, everything is a work in progress
Tipps from Ali Abdaal
- We only really internalize things that we create ourselves
- Make it easier for your future self. Keep that in mind when creating notes, how your future self can most likely benefit from it.
- Keep your Ideas moving! If you are not doing something with your notes, they are useless. The most important aspect is getting it on, not getting it right.
CODE
- Capture (Highlights, Throughts, Ideas)
- Organize (based on project, actionable)
- Distill
- Express (Create something from it)