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

with that information.

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

problem.

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.

Ali (00:41): All right.

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

overwhelm.

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

we consume.

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.

We don't bother to write things down.

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

the thing.

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

their thoughts down.

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

a piece of paper.

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

in this, but they're not.

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

put them all into a single book.

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

book type thing.

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

You can't search.

You can't organise.

It's a bit of a faff.

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.

It might be related to your job.

It might be related to your family.

And you think, you know what?

I should probably write this down.

And it goes into a digital system.

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

or for my newsletter?

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.

But the question is, what if you're not?

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

funny.

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

moving information.

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.

You've got this profound amount of information as inputs, i.e. from medical journals and

textbooks and things, that turns into a knowledge bank in your head, but also externally.

And then you do stuff with that information and it gives you a result, i.e. tells you

what to do with your patient or what dose of drugs to prescribe or anything like that.

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

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

input, processing, and output.

And that's basically what every single job involves.

Ali (04:39): We're now going to talk about the four parts

of the methodology for building a second brain, which is the code system, C, O, D, and E.

And once we've done that, I'm going to share with you some of my personal use cases, so

you can see what effect a second brain has had in my life, and then you can decide if

you want to build one for yourself, you want to get the book, any of that kind of stuff.

Ali (04:56): Now, the key insight here is a quote from

David Allen, from the book, Getting Things Done, amazing productivity book, which is

that your brain is for having ideas, not for holding them.

We spend so much of our kind of mental brain space trying to remember random stuff, whereas,

if we were able to capture all that random stuff into a note-taking app or a second brain

or into even pen and paper, any kind of system, it frees up our own brain to do the important

things, like be creative or make connections or self care or relaxation, or just having

fun, rather than having to remember what was on my calendar, what's on my to do list.

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

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

have to remember what you're supposed to be doing at any given minute of the day.

Ali (05:36): And also, you don't have to remember what

all those random tasks were, your shopping list, that kind of thing.

That would be a real faff to remember in your head.

But one step beyond that, which is what the second brain talks about, is about how we

should capture any kind of idea that resonates with us and put it into this note-taking app.

If you're interested, that the app that I use these days is actually Apple notes.

I use Apple notes for most of my second brain use cases.

I use Notion for all the team-based stuff, when it comes to making videos, podcasts,

and things, because it's very good for team collaboration, but Apple notes is my second

brain.

I just capture everything.

Anytime I have a thought, it just goes straight into Apple notes.

And basically, the idea is that anything that feels resonant, anything that resonates with

me personally, is something I'm going to write down.

Ali (06:11): So this could be highlights from a book, for

example.

It could be an interesting quote that I've come across on a podcast or in real life.

It could be a website that I've liked, and I'm like, oh, this is a sick website.

I really want to remember this website or I really want to remember this blog post from

this website.

Let me just save it into Apple notes.

It could be notes from a meeting.

So for example, anytime I have a coaching call or if I have lunch with an author or

a creative friend, often we talk about interesting stuff and often I'll just think, you know

what?

Pause for a second.

That was really good point.

I'm just going to write that down.

And then I open up Apple notes and I write it down.

Oh, and speaking of capturing, quick thing.

If you have any video ideas that you'd like me to make on this channel, you can submit

them in a form that's linked down in the video description.

Ali (06:43): And if you submit an idea and we make the

video, we will pay you $100, either in U.S. dollars or in Bitcoin, depending on whichever

one is easier to send to you, depending on where you are in the world.

So $100 for video ideas, little competition envelope.

The other thing that I capture as well is, for example, my own thoughts.

So often, if I'm on a train journey, I'll just bust out the iPad, I'll open up Apple

notes and I'll just think, okay, what are some thoughts I've had in the last week that

I just want to write down?

And one of the learnings that I've picked up over the last couple of years is really

recognising that my own perspective is actually quite valuable.

And now that I'm, for example, writing a book, I'm coming across thoughts that I saved into

my note system a year ago, two years ago, and thinking, oh, this thought was actually

pretty reasonable, and this could actually form the basis of a few paragraphs or even

a whole book chapter.

Ali (07:26): And I completely forgot that I had the thought.

It wasn't in my first brain, because my brain is bad at remembering things.

It was in my second brain.

It was in my note-taking system, and then I could expand on that and it could become

kind of material for my book.

Within capturing so far, we've talked about manual ways of capturing stuff, like writing

things down, but there's also automatic ways of capturing stuff.

I've got a video up there about five apps that changed my life, and that talks about

an automated way of capturing highlights from books and articles and podcasts, and I use

that as well.

And so, over the last, I don't know, many, many, many years, I've built up hundreds,

if not thousands of highlights from all of the books and all of the articles that I've

ever read.

Ali (07:58): And that's been incredibly valuable for, again,

my own book project, but also for me thinking, I read this book about this thing and I know

I want to apply some of the insights from that to my life, but I can't remember what

those are, so let me revisit my highlights from that.

And people often ask, Ali, how are you so productive, et cetera, et cetera.

How do you seem to do the things without worrying about it so much?

Oh, to be honest, a big part of it is having a decent productivity system, having a way

to capture things into a digital system, so that my own brain does not have to remember

it.

And when you can free your own brain up of having to remember all the crap in your life,

then it really kind of reduces your own stress levels.

Ali (08:31): All right.

So the next step of the code framework is organised.