Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte is a book that immediately resonated with me💡. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it was my favorite book of 2023🤯. In this book, Tiago Forte discusses the power of collecting and making accessible all the knowledge and information we have at our disposal in today’s largely digital world💻. Forte refers to this collection and system as his ‘second brain’. This is a process I heard about from other productivity experts and was already incorporating into my own life, but this book provided some much-needed context on how to refine and improve my process📈.
Here are some of my takeaways:
- Retaining content from our daily lives can be vital to personal, social, and professional growth. There are so many things that we see, hear, and experience throughout each day that can (and do) shape the trajectory of our lives👀. Why try to shove all this information into our head🥴 or let it fall to the wayside when we can save it in digital form for whenever we want or need it? The human brain is not limitless, but building a second brain to work in conjunction with it can be🧠.
- The CODE Method is a template for how to save information and build a second brain. Let’s break down each component:
- Capture- Capture things that make you feel a strong emotion or give you a visceral reaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s a quote, a piece of art, a song, a YouTube video…if it changes you, capture it📸.
- Organize- Organize all the things you’ve captured into a system that makes sense for you. Digital systems and apps may provide powerful search features that allow you to retrieve this information very quickly when it is needed🔍.
- Distill- Distill the information in your system down to main, key elements. This not only removes a lot of excess, but doing this later in the process lowers the barrier of capturing content in the first place💧.
- Express- Use all this incredible information you've compiled to create something amazing🎨. ️It️ c️ould be a personal journey towards self-improvement, a project to help friends and family, a presentation for work…because you invested so much time to build your second brain, the sky is the limit⛅.
- The CODE Method does not take away from your creativity, but actually adds to it. By unloading the doom and gloom of trying to recall good ideas or find that helpful article from that one time long ago, we can instead focus on letting our creativity flow freely and seeing where it takes us🌈.
- Your second brain can (and should) be a repository for excess creativity. When completing a task or working on an exciting new project, not every single good idea makes it into the final product✂️. Rather than discarding these packets of information, keep them in your second brain for potential opportunities in the future🔒.
- Building a second brain is not about downloading an app, it’s about building and adopting a system to allow your productivity and creativity to flow freely. This is almost a quote verbatim from Forte himself. Although building a second brain may seem daunting at first, getting started and sticking with it can empower you to create and accomplish things you may not have thought possible⚡.