Metadata
- Author: The Building a Second Brain Podcast
- Full Title: Myth 2: A Second Brain Means Tediously Overhauling and Restructuring My Entire Digital Life
- Category:
- URL: https://www.airr.io/episode/607dcd8bf887b0fb7ac750ce
Highlights
Speaker 1: just thought, no, I want like the engineering and everything very like technological. But now five years later I’m going back and realizing it’s just brilliant. And she does exactly the same thing when she starts a project. She gets a box, like a literal, like a crate and she just puts things in the box one at a time that she’s studying or looking at like a, like a mix tape of music. She might want to use a book, some photos, you know, some some some snapshots Polaroids. Uh, and just stacks things. And she talks about how it creates this almost like history of the project where she wants to know where it started. She just digs down to the bottom and sees that one photograph that sparked the entire dance that she’s that she’s um you know choreographing. (Time 0:02:10)
Speaker 1: works, the latest research is really moving away from this idea of function specific parts, right? Like that’s what we learned have been learning up until now. It’s like, oh that’s your visual cortex, this is the auditory center, this is where fear the amygdala is for fear right? But that’s not that’s not really how it how it works. Um The different parts of the brain can and do take on different functions right to the point that their stories of people losing half their brain like half from accidents or birth defects and they can still lead a normal life. The brain is incredibly plastic, it’s incredibly adaptable. Um And so I think that’s the biological (Time 0:04:07)
Speaker 1: you sort of expand from there. Like for me, my home base was organizing. I just, I love to organize. It’s like, it’s beautiful, it’s like patterns and structures and the act of creating categories to me is very satisfying. Um but when I became self employed, I had to train myself and it’s really hard to go past organizing and distilling, express. Distilling still to this day is painful for me. I’m like, I’m cutting, it’s like cutting out these ideas that I spent so much time and they’re so beautiful and lovely ideas, their precious, they’re like my Children, how can I put them aside? And other people of the opposite? They’re good at expressing like my wife Lauren, she’s an express her, she’s a verbal processor and so what she’s done is sort of gone (Time 0:07:08)
Speaker 1: to work with. Speaker 0: So I want to close by talking about the connectedness of these four things. Why is it worth thinking about collect organized distill end express as a unified idea rather than four disconnected parts. Speaker 1: Excellent point. That’s the other side of the spectrum, right? Is that’s something I also want to avoid as well is the random collection of tips and tricks and you see this you know that the classic airport business book you pick it up and it’s like okay, each one of these ideas is interesting and potentially useful but they’re not leading to anything, there’s nothing greater than the sum of its parts. Um (Time 0:08:02)
Speaker 1: each individual folder is too much to work with. Distilling solves that problem, boil it down. Distill it down. What is the most essential at the level of a folder or a tag? But also even within a note itself. But then you have a final problem which is, wow, you know, this is the moment the turning point I love seeing is when people realized, wait a minute, they look through their second brain, their digital notes and they just realized I have so much that feeling of scarcity, that scarcity mindset in their brain that I don’t have enough. I don’t know enough. I haven’t done enough. I am not good enough. Is just obliterated in the face of the visual evidence that they have a ridiculous abundance of knowledge wealth in front of them. And (Time 0:09:33)
Speaker 1: people realized, wait a minute, they look through their second brain, their digital notes and they just realized I have so much that feeling of scarcity, that scarcity mindset in their brain that I don’t have enough. I don’t know enough. I haven’t done enough. I am not good enough. Is just obliterated in the face of the visual evidence that they have a ridiculous abundance of knowledge wealth in front of them. And that’s why the final step is to express it to actually speak, draw record, published, deliver whatever that looks like for you. It’s the final release because those ideas made it all the way through really like through you. Um you (Time 0:09:51)