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title:: Books / Building a Second Brain type:: book purchased:: Jun 14th, 2022 start:: Jun 14th, 2022 end:: published:: length:: 269 pages author:: cover:: tags:: - Progressive Summarizations - The Digital Commonplace Book collapsed:: true - This digital commonplace book is what I call a Second Brain. Think of it as the combination of a study notebook, a personal journal, and a sketchbook for new ideas. - A calendar app is an extension of your brain’s ability to remember events, ensuring you never forget an appointment. Your smartphone is an extension of your ability to communicate, allowing your voice to reach across oceans and continents. It’s time to add digital notes to our repertoire and further enhance our natural capabilities using technology. - For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head. - By this definition, a note could include a passage from a book or article that you were inspired by; a photo or image from the web with your annotations; or a bullet-point list of your meandering thoughts on a topic, among many other examples. A note could include a single quote from a film that really struck you, all the way to thousands of words you saved from an in-depth book. - **Being scatterbrained leads you to lower your expectation with your own self** - TODO - Creative Process #systemvsgoals collapsed:: true - Think about your favorite athlete, musician, or actor. Behind the scenes of their public persona, there is a process they follow for regularly turning new ideas into creative output. - The same goes for inventors, engineers, and effective leaders. Innovation and impact don’t happen by accident or chance. Creativity depends on a creative process. - It’s not a matter of having enough raw talent. Talent needs to be channeled and developed in order to become something more than a momentary spark. collapsed:: true - In an interview about how she wrote the smash hit “Blank Space,”3 Swift says, “I’ll be going about my daily life and I’ll think, ‘Wow, so we only have two real options in relationships—it’s going to be forever or it’s going to go down in flames,’ so I’ll jot that down in my notes… I’ll come up with a line that I think is clever like ‘Darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream’ and I just pick them and put them where they fit and construct the bridge out of more lines that come up within the last couple of years… ‘Blank Space’ was the culmination of all my best ones one after the other.” - Twelve Favorite Problems - “You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!“ — @Richard Feynman - - ### Random Highlights - Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. —David Allen, author of Books / GTD - Human capital includes “the knowledge and the knowhow embodied in humans—their education, their experience, their wisdom, their skills, their relationships, their common sense, their intuition.” id:: 62a885db-bfab-41ec-b40f-1500c090d28d - It is about optimizing a system outside yourself, a system not subject to your limitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment. #systemvsgoals - In The Case for Books,5 historian and former director of the Harvard University Library Robert Darnton explains the role of **commonplace books**: collapsed:: true - Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. - Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.III id:: 62ab560e-5bfb-4d1c-a563-626a2905fb7e - Instead of consuming ever-greater amounts of content, we could take on a more patient, thoughtful approach that favors rereading, reformulating, and working through the implications of ideas over time. id:: 62ab5786-2127-48fe-bd50-40919a9338e7 - Herbert Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…” - There is a powerful way to facilitate and speed up this process of rapid association: distill your notes down to their essence. - Every idea has an “essence”: the heart and soul of what it is trying to communicate. id:: 62adb9d5-e2e6-49e4-a59c-bb2f3af6bb86 - Einstein famously summarized his revolutionary new theory of physics with the equation E=mc2. If he can distill his thinking into such an elegant equation, you can surely summarize the main points of any article, book, video, or presentation so that the main point is easy to identify. - Information becomes knowledge—personal, embodied, verified—only when we put it to use. You gain confidence in what you know only when you know that it works. Until you do, it’s just a theory. id:: 62adbad0-e88a-4a6f-9fa5-efd323e31077 - The word “productivity” has the same origin as the Latin verb producere, which means “to produce.” Which means that at the end of the day, if you can’t point to some kind of output or result you’ve produced, it’s questionable whether you’ve been productive at all. id:: 62adbbef-b87f-4c9d-9c3c-c4a4354ddded - You can capture those thoughts too! They could include: - Stories: Your favorite anecdotes, whether they happened to you or someone else. id:: 62bcc3bf-f99f-4637-ae8c-4644acd24569 - Insights: The small (and big) realizations you have. - Memories: Experiences from your life that you don’t want to forget. - Reflections: Personal thoughts and lessons written in a journal or diary. - Musings: Random “shower ideas” that pop into your head. -