How to Organise your Life - Building a Second Brain - video Dailymotion

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Transcript

00:00All right, so one of the most annoying problems that I face in my life is information overwhelm.

00:03I read all these books, listen to all these podcasts, watch all these YouTube videos,

00:06and consume all this stuff, but I end up like information overloaded and don't really know

00:10what to do with that information. And that is what this book claims to solve. This is

00:14Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, which is what we're discussing in this episode of Book Club,

00:18the ongoing series where we distill and discuss highlights and summaries from some of my favorite

00:22books. And the whole idea is that this system, this second brain system, helps you solve that

00:25problem. Now, I've been using this system for the last several years. I took Tiago's course,

00:28Building a Second Brain. And so in this video, we're going to be talking about why you should

00:31build a second brain and then how to build a second brain using the code framework. And I'm

00:35going to share a bunch of examples about how this kind of thing has helped my life. So hopefully it

00:38can help yours as well. All right, so let's start with the question of what is a second brain and

00:43why should you have one? And to answer this, we need to start from the root problem, which is this

00:47idea of information overwhelm. We all have these dozens and dozens, apparently 34 gigabytes a day

00:52of information is what we consume. There was this other news article that said we consume the

00:56equivalent of 174 full newspapers every single day of our lives with all of the content that we

01:02get deluged with. Now, the easy solution to this problem of information overload is to write things

01:07down. And honestly, this is the first step that most of us don't even take. We don't bother to

01:11write things down. If you listen to something in a podcast, or you come across a quote, or you have

01:14an interesting thought, or you think of an interesting story that happened in your life,

01:17or an anecdote, we tend not to default to, I should probably write this down somewhere.

01:21We tend to think, oh, I will just remember the thing. If it's from a podcast or a video, you

01:25think, yeah, I'm gonna apply it to my life and you never end up applying it to your life. Now,

01:27if we do decide to write things down as a way of combating information overload,

01:31one old school way of doing that is called a commonplace book. This is the sort of thing that

01:35like the great artists in our time and before used to use to write their thoughts down. You've got

01:40people like Taylor Swift, who talk about how whenever they have an interesting thought in

01:44their day to day life, they write it down. You've got comedians like Jerry Seinfeld to say that

01:47whenever they think something interesting or a funny little quip in the shower, they make sure

01:50to write it down on a piece of paper. This is like a standard part of the creative process for so

01:54many people. I know you think people are going to be interested in this, but they're not. Even

01:58back in the day, people like Leonardo da Vinci used to apparently have a commonplace book where

02:02as he was kind of going about his life, he would gather inspiration and he would do these little

02:06sketches and he'd put them all into a single book. And then that book became the source of his

02:10creativity. It's where he would generate those ideas from. Now, I do in fact, carry a physical

02:14journal with me at all times to try and do this commonplace book type thing, but it's just, you

02:18know, doing it in an analogue system is pretty inefficient. You can't search, you can't organise,

02:22it's a bit of a faff. And so thanks to this tech-enabled world that we live in, instead of

02:26making an analogue commonplace book, we can make a digital commonplace book. So hypothetically,

02:30we could have a single source where any time we come across inspiration from anything at all in

02:36our lives, internally or externally, so externally might be books or movies or podcasts or quotes or

02:40a friend says something and that sparks an interesting thought in you, you have a place

02:43where you write it down in a digital kind of system. Internally, it might be a random musing

02:47that you have or like you're in the shower and you think of something or like you're on a car

02:50journey and you think, oh, this would be a cool thing to do. It might be related to your job,

02:53it might be related to your family and you think, you know what, I should probably write this down

02:56and it goes into a digital system. And this digital commonplace book is what Tiago Forte

03:01calls a second brain. But why should you have a second brain in the first place? Like what is the

03:05point of writing all this stuff down? Now, again, if you're in the creative world, it's really

03:09abundantly obvious. If you're a songwriter, if you're a poet, if you're a book writer, if you're

03:12a YouTuber, if you're a podcaster, you need a place to capture ideas from all the world around

03:16you because it really helps you express your creativity because now it's not the case that

03:21you're sitting down and thinking, shit, what do I write this week for my book or for my blog or for

03:24my newsletter? You're thinking, I have all these abundant ideas and I can just go through my little

03:29second brain and I can decide what I want to write about this week. And this is how basically all

03:33creatives have done it since the beginning of time. But the question is, what if you're not?

03:36What if you're one of those people that does not want to be a content creator in some capacity?

03:40You'd have no aspirations of like writing a book or starting a podcast or a newsletter

03:43or anything obviously creative that requires you to do this kind of stuff.

03:47Well, the thing that Tiago argues, and I fully agree with him on this, is that basically

03:50every job in the world these days involves knowledge work of some kind. Bertrand Russell

03:56back in the day used to say that a job is moving matter at or above the earth's surface,

04:01which I think it's quite funny. In the world that we live in today, there is a third form of job

04:05and that's moving knowledge, moving information, getting information as inputs, doing something

04:09with it, i.e. processing it and then turning it into outputs of some sort. Even something like

04:12being a doctor involves information. You've got this profound amount of information as inputs,

04:17i.e. from medical journals and textbooks and things, that turns into a knowledge bank in your

04:21head but also externally. And then you do stuff with that information and it gives you a result,

04:25i.e. tells you what to do with your patient or what dose of drugs to prescribe or anything like

04:28that. If you're working in a more normal job like, I don't know, investment banking or consulting or

04:32anything that involves making loads of PowerPoint slides, it's really all about information,

04:36input, processing and output. That's basically what every single job involves.

04:39We're now going to talk about the four parts of the methodology for building a second brain,

04:43which is the code system C, O, D and E. And once we've done that, I'm going to share with

04:47you some of my personal use cases so you can see what effect a second brain has had in my life

04:51and then you can decide if you want to build one for yourself, if you want to get the book,

04:54any of that kind of stuff. Now the key insight here is a quote from David Allen from the book

04:59Getting Things Done, amazing productivity book, which is that your brain is for having ideas,

05:03not for holding them. We spend so much of our kind of mental brain space trying to remember

05:08random stuff. Whereas if we were able to capture all that random stuff into a note taking app or

05:12a second brain or into even pen and paper, any kind of system, it frees up our own brain to do

05:17the important things like be creative or make connections or self-care or relaxation or just

05:22having fun, like rather than having to remember what was on my calendar, what's on my to-do list.

05:26Now, the easy way of solving this problem for most people, and this is sort of the standard

05:29part of any productivity system is to have a calendar and a to-do list so that you don't

05:33have to remember what you're supposed to be doing at any given minute of the day. And you also,

05:37you don't have to remember what all those random tasks were, your shopping list, that kind of thing.

05:40That would be a real faff to remember in your head. But one step beyond that, which is what the

05:44second brain talks about, is about how we should capture any kind of idea that resonates with us

05:48and put it into this note taking app. If you're interested, the app that I use these days is

05:52actually Apple Notes. I use Apple Notes for most of my second brain use cases. I use Notion for

05:56all the team-based stuff when it comes to making videos, podcasts and things, because it's very

05:59good for team collaboration. But Apple Notes is my second brain. I just capture everything. Anytime

06:04I have a thought, it just goes straight into Apple Notes. And basically the idea is that anything

06:07that feels resonant, anything that resonates with me personally is something I'm going to write down.

06:11So this could be highlights from a book, for example. It could be an interesting quote that

06:15I've come across on a podcast or in real life. It could be a website that I've liked and I'm like,

06:18oh, this is a sick website. I really want to remember this website or really want to remember

06:21this blog post from this website. Let me just save it into Apple Notes. It could be notes from a

06:24meeting. So for example, anytime I have a coaching call or if I have lunch with like an author or a

06:28creative friend, often we talk about interesting stuff and often I'll just think, you know what,

06:32pause for a second. That was a really good point. I'm just going to write that down. And then I open

06:35up Apple Notes and I write it down. Oh, and speaking of capturing, quick thing. If you have

06:38any video ideas that you'd like me to make on this channel, you can submit them in a form that's

06:42linked down in the video description. And if you submit an idea and we make the video, we will pay

06:46you $100 either in US dollars or in Bitcoin, depending on whichever one is easier to send to

06:50you, depending on where you are in the world. So $100 for video ideas that will competition down

06:54below. The other thing that I capture as well is, for example, my own thoughts. So often if I'm on

06:58a train journey, I'll just bust out the iPad. I'll open up Apple Notes and I'll just think, okay,

07:02what are some thoughts I've had in the last week that I just want to write down? And one of the

07:06learnings that I've picked up over the last couple of years is really recognizing that my own

07:10perspective is actually quite valuable. And, you know, now that I'm, for example, writing a book,

07:14I'm coming across thoughts that I saved into my note system like a year ago, two years ago,

07:19and thinking, oh, this thought was actually pretty reasonable. And this could actually form the basis

07:23of like a few paragraphs or even a whole book chapter. And I completely forgot that I had the

07:28thought it wasn't in my first brain because my brain is bad at remembering things. It was in my

07:31second brain. It was in my note-taking system. And then I could expand on that and it could become

07:35kind of material for my book. Within capturing so far, we've talked about manual ways of capturing

07:39stuff like, you know, writing things down, but there's also automatic ways of capturing stuff.

07:42I've got a video up there about five apps that changed my life. And that talks about an automated

07:46way of getting capturing highlights from books and articles and podcasts. And I use that as well.

07:51And so over the last, I don't know, many, many, many years, I've built up hundreds, if not thousands

07:55of highlights from all of the books and all of the articles that I've ever read. And that's been

07:59incredibly valuable for, again, my own book project, but also for me thinking, you know,

08:04I read this book about this thing and I know I want to apply some of the insights from that to

08:07my life, but I can't remember what those are. So let me revisit my highlights from that. You know,

08:10and people often ask, you know, Ali, how you stay productive, et cetera, et cetera. How do you seem

08:14to do the things without worrying about it so much? Oh, to be honest, like a big part of it is having

08:18a decent productivity system, having a way to capture things into a digital system so that my

08:23own brain does not have to remember it. And when you can free your own brain up of having to remember

08:26all the crap in your life, then it really kind of reduces your own stress levels. All right. So the

08:32next step of the code framework is organized. Now, the idea here is now that we've captured all this

08:36stuff into this big ass inbox, we now want to organize it in some capacity. Now, the wrong way,

08:41as Tiago says, the wrong way to organize notes is in terms of where you found them. So people

08:47will be tempted to be like, I want to have a book notes folder. I want to have a podcast notes

08:50folder. I want to have a lesson notes folder. And the problem with that is that it's just not

08:53particularly useful unless you decide one day, I just want to happen to look through my book notes.

08:56You're probably not going to look through your book notes because like we don't have that much

08:59time in our lives to revisit the stuff that we once thought was useful. Instead, what Tiago suggests,

09:03and he talks about it extensively in the book, which kind of gives a whole system for this,

09:06is to organize things by actionability. Where will I potentially use this information? So I've taken

09:12this on board. And now anytime I come across anything at all, whether it's a quote or a blog

09:15post or a podcast or whatever, and it's relevant to the book that I'm writing, it goes straight

09:20into my book project folder. And then I don't, I don't bother like categorizing and tagging and

09:24doing all of that crap. I'm pretty messy in the way I do things. I just chuck it into the book

09:28folder, knowing that it will be resurfaced whenever I need it. And knowing that, you know, the nice

09:32thing about a digital system is that I can always use control F or command F if I need to, I can

09:37always search and search is now so good these days that you almost don't need a specific hierarchical

09:42organizational system. I'm at the moment really interested in the idea of longevity, really

09:45interested in like, how do we live longer? And so I've been reading books like Lifespan by David

09:49Sinclair, listening to David Sinclair's podcast, listening to the Huberman Labs podcast. And

09:53initially I was tempted to organize it by like, you know, by topic. Oh, these are my notes about

09:57health or about longevity, but I know that's not particularly useful. Instead I'm organizing it by

10:01actionability. So I'm working on the script for a video called how I'm trying to live forever,

10:05the basics of anti-aging. And as I'm reading stuff, it's going into that particular project,

10:09which means it's organized by this unit of output. The fact that I'm making a video about it, or I

10:13might be writing a newsletter or sharing a blog post about it. And even if I never end up making

10:16the thing, the fact that I'm organizing it based on that project rather than based on a topic means

10:21that I'm far more likely to be more targeted in my approach. This is the advice I give to students at

10:25university and students in school writing essays. It's actually not very helpful to think I'm going

10:29to study philosophy today, or I'm going to study biochemistry today because it's like, how do you

10:34know? Like, what are you going to do? What are you going to work on? Like, it's really hard to figure

10:38out what that means. But if you organize your notes in the sense of, I need to answer the question of

10:42what is the structure and function of the sodium potassium pump. At that point, when you do your

10:45reading, it's very targeted. You're looking for stuff around the sodium potassium pump. It goes

10:49into that particular essay. And now as you're doing that, you're building up a mental map of

10:53the subject as a whole within this specific niche, rather than thinking I'm going to study physiology.

10:58So it's the same concept, like organized by actionability rather than by topic. It can sound

11:01pretty complicated. It's sort of hard to explain this in a video, but you can get the book. That'll

11:04be linked down below if you want it. At this point, we have captured loads of stuff. We've

11:09organized about actionability, but now we're left with this mess. There's like, you know, random

11:13quotes, random highlights, random blog posts. How do we know what the important essence of that thing

11:18is? And that's where distilling comes in. Basically, Tiago talks about this whole method called

11:22progressive summarization, which is basically like highlighting, but like highlighting on steroids.

11:26Loads of us used to highlight and stuff when we were in school. It's not particularly effective

11:30for like retention in your own personal brain, but it is effective for flagging up the areas

11:34which are particularly important. And in the book, he's got a bunch of specific examples about how to

11:37do this. He also talks about this in his like really expensive online course. I took this course

11:41and I was a mentor on that course. I'll put a link down below if you want it.

11:45And then the final method of the code framework is E for express. And the idea basically here is

11:50you want to show your work. Now, what am I doing? Here, I am expressing. Like, you know, I am

11:54converting my knowledge of personal knowledge management and reading this book and my favourite

11:58highlights and stuff from this book into a video. This is me expressing. This is me showing my work.

12:02But if I wasn't making a video, if I wasn't a YouTuber, there are loads of other ways to express

12:06work as well. And really, that's the whole point of this second brain system at the end of the day.

12:10It's all well and good, like hoarding ideas and keeping them in a note-taking app. But unless

12:14we're expressing those ideas in some way, unless we're sharing those ideas with the world, unless

12:18we're using them to create something or make something of value, they're kind of useless. I

12:22mean, I guess you could just sort of hoard the knowledge and then you could apply to your own

12:25life. But it's way nicer if you can share it with other people. And basically, the point that Tiago

12:28makes is, again, almost every job involves expressing in some capacity. If you're a

12:32management consultant and you're making a PowerPoint slide deck, you are expressing,

12:35you are creating something, you're, you know, that is your output from all of that information

12:39you've inputted and then you've then processed. If you're an investment banker, you are creating

12:42something, i.e. your trading strategy. If you're a musician, obviously you're creating stuff. An

12:45artist, a writer, a photographer, you are creating these tangible units of output. And that's the

12:49whole idea behind this whole framework. Capturing, organizing, and distilling ultimately helps us

12:53express, it helps us show our work, it helps share our creativity, share whatever the thing we've

12:57been working on with other people. And being able to do it with a digital commonplace, a second

13:00brain, a digital note-taking system that brings all the ideas together, makes it way easier, way

13:05less friction, and way less stress to do all that stuff, which is an important part of our jobs

13:09anyway. I want to now just share a couple of ways in which the second brain has really helped me

13:13in terms of helping me be more productive, but also like be more creative and help my life

13:17become basically a lot less stressful. And the first one is the idea of slow burns versus heavy

13:21lifts. Like before I discovered the system, when it came to making YouTube videos, for example, or

13:25when it came to working on any kind of project, you know, at the time I was working on a bunch

13:29of publications that I was trying to go for because I was applying for medical specialty training,

13:32etc. I used to think of those things as a very heavy lift project. It was like, okay, I need to

13:36sit down and make a video this week. What's the video going to be? All right, let's do it. I need

13:40to sit down and like bash out this presentation I'm doing for like the European Society for

13:43Gynecological Oncology and figure out what I'm saying about this thing. But one of the things

13:47that the course taught me, and he talks about this in the book as well, is the idea of slow burns.

13:51Like what you can do is work on multiple projects in parallel. So right now I've got about eight

13:56video ideas that I'm slowly tinkering with and working on. I've got various book chapters that

14:00are in various stages of completion. Back in the day when I was in medicine, I had a bunch of

14:04medical projects that were at various stages of completion. And the idea is as I'm going through

14:08my life, as I'm coming across interesting information that I can put into these projects,

14:11it's going into my system and it's going into the projects. And therefore all of the projects

14:16are on a bit of a slow burn and they sort of simmer away and get slowly progressively more

14:20cooked over time. Which means when it comes to sit down and actually turn it into a book chapter,

14:24or turn it into a video, or turn it into a presentation or a poster for a medical conference,

14:28it means most of the work has already been done. And now my job is to just assemble things. And

14:32secondly, the system has also really helped with my own teaching work. Like I enjoy teaching.

14:36Teaching is my jam at the end of the day, whether it's making videos or going on podcasts or doing

14:39workshops in real life. You know, the other day I was doing a real life talk for a student,

14:43you know, for a hundred students of a part-time YouTuber academy. And I had about, I don't know,

14:47two minutes to prepare the talk. And I just went through my app thing off the top of my head. I

14:50came up with a few bullet points, found some supporting evidence in the second brain. And

14:54now the talk was ready within two minutes while I was in an Uber on the way to the conference venue.

14:57And if you like this video, you might like to check out this over here, which is my long form

15:01interview with Tiago Forte on my deep dive podcast. That'll be on the deep dive YouTube

15:04channel. Or alternatively, if you're interested in building your own productivity system,

15:07you should check out this video over here, where I break down how mine works and talk about how

15:11second brain physically and digitally ties into that productivity system. So thank you so much

15:15for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you in the next video.

How to Organise your Life - Building a Second Brain

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