Name: Ali Abdaal 如何建立第二大腦（How to Organise your Life - Building a Second Brain）
Uploaded: 2022-11-14T10:46:11.000Z
Duration: 15 min 21 s
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So one of the most annoying problems that I face in my life is information overwhelm.

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

and consume all this stuff, but I end up information overloaded and don't really know what to do

And that is what this book claims to solve.

This is Building a Second Brain, by Tiago Forte, which is what we're discussing in this

episode of Book Club, the ongoing series, where we distil and discuss highlights and

summaries from some of my favourite books.

And the whole idea is that this system, the second brain system, helps you solve that

Now, I've been using this system for the last several years.

I took Tiago's course, Building a Second Brain.

And so in this video, we're going to be talking about why you should build a second brain

and then how to build a second brain using the code framework.

And I'm going to share a bunch of examples about how this kind of thing has helped my

life so hopefully, it can help yours as well.

So let's start with the question of what is a second brain and why should you have one?

And to answer this, we need to start from the root problem, which is this idea of information

We all have these dozens and dozens, apparently, 34 gigabytes a day of information is what

There was this other news article that said we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers

every single day of our lives with all of the content that we get deluged with.

Now, the easy solution to this problem of information overload is to write things down.

And honestly, this is the first step that most of us don't even take.

If you listen to something in a podcast or you come across a quote, or you have an interesting

thought, or you think of an interesting story that happened in your life or an anecdote,

we tend not to default to, I should probably write this down somewhere.

Ali (01:21): We tend to think, oh, I will just remember

If it's from a podcast or a video, you think, yeah, I'm going to apply it to my life, and

you never end up applying it to your life.

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

one old school way of doing that is called a commonplace book.

This is the sort of thing that the great artists in our time, and before, used to use to write

You've got people like Taylor Swift, who talk about how, whenever they have an interesting

thought in their day-to-day life, they write it down.

You've got comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, who say that whenever they think something

interesting or a funny little quip in the shower, they make sure to write it down on

This is a standard part of the creative process for so many people.

Jerry Seinfeld (01:55): I know you think people are going to be interested

Ali (01:58): Even back in the day, people like Leonard

DaVinci used to apparently have a commonplace book where, as he was kind of going about

his life, he would gather inspiration and he would do these little sketches and he'd

And then, that book became the source of his creativity.

It's where he would generate those ideas from.

Now, I do, in fact, carry a physical journal with me at all times to try and do this commonplace

But it's just doing it in an analogue system is pretty inefficient.

And so thanks to this tech-enabled world that we live in, instead of making an analogue

commonplace book, we can make a digital commonplace book.

So hypothetically, we could have a single source where anytime we come across inspiration

from anything at all in our lives, internally or externally, so externally might be books

or movies or podcasts or quotes, or a friend says something, and that sparks an interesting

thought in you, you have a place where you write it down in a digital kind of system.

Ali (02:45): Internally, it might be a random musing that

you have, or you're in the shower and you think of something or you're on a car journey

and you think, oh, this would be a cool thing to do.

And this digital commonplace book is what Tiago Forte calls a second brain.

But why should you have a second brain in the first place?

What is the point of writing all this stuff down?

Now, again, if you are in the creative world, it's really abundantly obvious.

If you're a songwriter, if you're a poet, if you're a book writer, if you're a YouTuber,

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

because it really helps you express your creativity.

Ali (03:19): Because now, it's not the case that you are

sitting down and thinking, shit, what do I write this week for my book or for my blog

You're thinking, I have all these abundant ideas and I can just go through my little

second brain and I can decide what I want to write about this week.

And this is how basically all creatives have done it since the beginning of time.

What if you're one of those people that does not want to be a "content creator" in some

capacity, you'd have no aspirations of writing a book or starting a podcast or a newsletter

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

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

every job in the world these days involves knowledge work of some kind.

Ali (03:56): Bertrand Russell, back in the day, used to

say that a job is moving matter at or above the Earth's surface, which I think it's quite

In the world that we live in today, there is a third form of job and that's moving knowledge,

Getting information as inputs, doing something with it.

Are you processing it and then turning it into outputs of some sort?

Even something like being a doctor involves information.

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Ali Abdaal 如何建立第二大腦（How to Organise your Life - Building a Second Brain）

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