Two Heads Are Better Than One; So Build A Second Brain
Your important ideas are too valuable to let slip away.
Two heads are better than one, so why not just build another brain? I'm referring here to personal knowledge management (P.K.M.). If you spent a ton of money to get a college degree but only utilize a small portion of that education in your actual job, then it can feel like you paid a great deal, and worked exceptionally hard, to acquire information that has no longer remained valuable. The other problem for me is that there remains limited space in my head to keep up with what matters at any given moment before my attention is drawn away by distractions: losing my train of thought.
To combat information overload, foster creativity, enhance personal organization, or facilitate lifelong learning, building a second brain is an approach to offer valuable solutions for individuals seeking to optimize their knowledge management and work processes.
"I have Google on my phone, and that gives me the answer to anything." You might say.
Google cannot tell you the opinion you had on a subject you read about last month. A search engine can't tell you the value of the lesson you learned from your experience and why that mattered at the time. You can’t google your memories. Unfortunately, the downside of memory is that your memory may eventually fail. So you could lose the resources, insights, and conclusions you’ve made if memory fails to keep that knowledge alive and fails to actively seek connections to new ideas that come into your life. This is how I view the idea of my second brain. It's the repository of my insights that Google can't make for me.
Zettelkasten
Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998), a German sociologist, has more than 50 published books and over 500 articles that he has credited to the effectiveness of his Zettelkasten system of storing individual notes of ideas. The Zettelkasten system of personal knowledge management, also known as the slip-box or note-card system, is a knowledge organization approach that involves using index cards to capture and connect ideas. Each card represents a single concept, fostering precise thinking, while the process of linking cards creates a network of knowledge. This method encourages non-linear thinking and facilitates new discoveries, allowing for the exploration of interconnected ideas.
Flash forward to 2023 and we have tools to do this sort of work for us automatically or at least with very little effort compared to Niklas Luhmann. A great introduction to Zettelkasten paths toward building your second brain is summed up well by Ali Abdaal, in his youtube video here.
Tiago Forte's website, https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/, promotes a transformative approach to personal productivity and information management. His P.A.R.A. method (Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives) is a framework for organizing digital information and personal knowledge.
So Ali Abdaal and Tiago Forte have given me some insights into how I can create my own second brain. However, I'm not focused on this subject as a way to better store the items on my grocery list so that I don't forget to buy some eggs.
I want to keep up with my unanswered questions from courses I’ve taken, or lectures I've listed to.
I want to keep track of why a certain song reminds me of a quote from a particular book, which then reminds me of something a philosopher said, etc.
I need a way to connect nodes of different streams of my own conscious thoughts together as they happen. I need to quickly and efficiently capture these volatile insights from my head before I get distracted and lose all trains of conscious thought (inevitable). And to be effective, I need to do this from anywhere I am without having to spend any significant time doing it.
Idolizing Sherlock Holmes
There is a quote from the novel, "A Study in Scarlet", by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle where Sherlock Holmes states the following to his friend, Dr. Watson.
"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
Years ago I tried to adopt this philosophy by assembling together pieces of relevant information that I thought was important to subjects I was interested in. Then I would spend time organizing that trove in the hopes that one day I would possess a series of tools to help me excel at any of my endeavors. This failed every time. At first, I discovered that I was spending a lot of time doing some digital equivalent of scrap-booking news articles and quotes and other things that I thought were relevant. The organization of such detail became cumbersome, I never knew what I had saved, and I could never find what I was looking for when I did go back to investigate something.
I tried again later on using apps such as Evernote, or Microsoft OneNote, but inevitably I ended up doing the same thing again: trying to build my own personal Google. This failed too, and I spent way too much time trying to make something that just became a chore that never produced any gains for me.
Several flaws were at the heart of my practice:
I was only recording information written by other people, not my own thoughts, questions, or conclusions.
I had trouble linking relevant information together when connections between ideas and previous notes emerged.
It required too much dedicated time to compile, build, and organize.
I had no idea what I had and what I didn't: I couldn't search effectively what I had compiled.
My Second Brain
I like Sherlock Holmes's analogy of the little "brain attic". In my attic, or P.K.M. toolbox, I have dedicated primary space for the following apps (there probably half a dozen others but these four are the most important):
Obsidian
Readwise
Notion
Google Drive
Obsidian
My second brain's skull of choice is Obsidian. There are others out there: Notion, Roam, Evernote, etc. For me, the entire philosophy of having a second brain will continue to remain a failed endeavor if I have to spend more than about fifteen seconds recording a note or thought I have about something I'm reading or thinking about.
I don't want to spend time exporting notes, re-organizing stuff, making the interfaces look more appealing, etc. I want to jot down or dictate what's important, and move on. I want all handling of that information to work automatically in the background of my phone or computer. Obsidian does this perfectly.
Obsidian is a note-taking software that prioritizes effective knowledge organization and interconnectivity. It adopts the concept of a knowledge graph, where notes are linked in both directions, forming a network of ideas and connections. This enables users to navigate and explore their notes in a non-linear way, stimulating creativity and generating valuable insights. Additionally, Obsidian's use of plain text format guarantees long-term accessibility and ease of use, as notes are stored as simple text files that can be effortlessly synced, backed up, and shared across various platforms. Obsidian gives me complete control over my second brain so that all of the data is stored locally on my machine, or I can store it in personal cloud storage. A subscription isn't required to keep access to my data.
To learn more about using obsidian as your second brain, check out Vicky Zhao's youtube playlist to get started.
Readwise
The Readwise app deserves its own blog post. That's why I wrote about it first a few weeks ago, here.
Readwise is an app that connects to the different e-book readers, and web browsers of your choice. Any highlights you make in Kindle, Overdrive, Libby, etc. can automatically connect and dump into Readwise behind the scenes. This is stored in my Readwise account. I have Readwise automatically connected (synced) to Obsidian, (my second brain). Obsidian downloads all of my Readwise highlights as individual notes into my second brain. All of this happens automatically in the background. I never have to export or import anything.
Notion
Notion is another great app that I use. Some people use it solely as the repository for their second brain. Thomas J. Frank has a youtube channel where he discusses this topic in detail.
Notion however is not the skull of choice for my second brain. I use it mainly because I like Notion’s phone app better than Obsidian’s. I use Notion as a way to keep working information together for stuff that Sherlock Holmes would swear should never be in your brain attic. For example, if one of my kids goes to the doctor on a certain date, I'll start a note in notion about the event, because I will inevitably get six different bills from multiple departments about services that they performed on this visit, and those bills will arrive at random intervals over the course of the next year. By then I can't keep up with what I've paid and what I haven't. If I make a notion note about the dr. visit, I can just add to that note as new events occur, like billing phone calls in regards to payments, payments made, etc. I'll do the same for maintenance updates on my car, etc. This way each note, is a self-contained repository of details related to this subject. Then once the event is completed and finalized, months later, I can then delete it when I'm satisfied I don't need it anymore. So Notion is great for me because It's instantly fast, I can attach photos, tasks, .pdf files, audio clips, etc. into the note as needed.
Google Drive
Free cloud storage for data. It perfectly syncs up between the cloud, phone, and computer. This is ideal for syncing your second brain.
Takeaways
Building a second brain, or personal knowledge management (P.K.M.), offers a solution to information overload and limited cognitive capacity. By utilizing tools like Obsidian, Readwise, Notion, and Google Drive, we can capture and organize our thoughts and ideas efficiently. This approach goes beyond creating a digital archive or relying on search engines; it allows us to retain our own unique insights and connect them in a meaningful way.
The exciting thing for me in this has been that I found a way to start building my 'little brain attic' without having to do any real work to keep it moving. And I have to admit, it’s a very satisfying thing to watch the Obsidian graphs show how your notes form into idea neurons over time (the video below is not from my personal vault, but it’s still fun to watch).