Borrowed Creativity

This is the Building a Second Brain podcast where I share my best advice on how to save your ideas, organize your learning, and dramatically expand your creative output with digital note taking. My name is Tiago Forte and I am your host and the creator of the Building a Second Brain course where I've taught people from around the world how to build their own second brain, a trusted place outside their head where they can collect their important ideas and insights and then use them to do their best work and live a better life. Season one is a deep dive into the top 10 most useful principles that I've discovered through my teaching and coaching, packaged into short episodes for your listening convenience. In episode one, my co host, David Perel and I will be talking about the first principle, borrowed creativity.

Thiago, tell me about borrowed creativity.

Borrowed creativity is the idea that creativity doesn't come from nothing. It doesn't just emerge from the void in some mysterious kind of unexplainable process. It comes from somewhere. All creativity is remixed, all of it is translated or repurposed from somewhere. And this is really something that I, that I noticed growing up with artists as parents. My dad is a painter, always has been a painter since he was three years old. My mom is a really talented musician. And what I noticed is that they had this constant consumption, this constant input of creative raw material, you could call it. You know, people would see my dad's paintings on his website, in a gallery somewhere like that, and they would only see the final product. They would only see the very, very end point of a long, long process. And that process was this really lifestyle of gathering. He would be in church making sketches in his sketchbook. A lot of his art is religious. He would go to museums. Every weekend we would go to a museum. He would have art books, he would watch TV programs that inspired his artistic creativity. He was constantly colle, constantly digesting. And only when he had consumed a lot and distilled it down to the parts that were most insightful, most relevant, most interesting, then did that distilled nugget of insight become the seed of a new, in his case, painting.

So it sounds like you're saying that we still want to be consuming, but we want to be consuming through the lens of producing.

Yes, it changes when you know you're going to produce something. Everything about how you consume changes. You're more discerning, you have higher standards, you're not willing to waste time consuming anything, but the very best you can get your hands on because you know, you know, there's that saying garbage in, garbage out, your output is going to be directly constrained. It's going to be limited to the quality of your inputs.

So it sounds like what building a second brain does is it changes how you consume things and through that then becomes a solution to information overload. Can you talk about that? Because so many of us feel overwhelmed by all of our Twitter feeds, our Facebook feeds, all the emails that we get, all the information in the world. How does borrowed creativity factor into building a second brain to then become a solution to information overload?

I think that's exactly right. And I think it has to do with this feedback loop. When you're producing things, when you're sharing things, when you're publishing things. And when I say that, I don't just mean, you know, that sort of the big creative milestones like publishing a book, putting on a play, you know, these kind of like well known things. I mean something as simple as publishing a blog post, publishing even some Facebook posts kind of are longer and take more creativity, making a podcast, these simple things that everyone has access to. When you start doing those things, you have a different lens on the world. And that lens changes from there's so many interesting things, there's so many great things. How can I do it all to. Oh my gosh, there's hardly anything good. Everything is terrible. Almost you get so discerning that you realize how rare it is to see truly good art in the world. It is exceedingly rare as long as you have that filter of I need the best inputs to my own creative process.

I want to get practical here and talk about the web design project that we did with WordPress. Remember, they came to us and we were talking to them about what we would be doing and generally it would take the average person two to six weeks to go out and compile all the different assets for what a good web development project could look like. But because of your second brain, you had a design library, a collection of a different headers, different images, different assets on websites distributed through the Internet. And within 48 hours, you and I were able to sit down, compile all of the assets that we had previously collected in our second brains and send them a sheet that was better than what they usually receive.

Yeah, this happens on a regular basis. We sit down and it's almost as if we're having a meeting. But actually our second brains are having a meeting. We're not really sitting down like, okay, let's think of a good idea. David, do you have any good ideas? It's more like we're rummaging, we're sorting. It's like we poured the puzzle pieces from both of our note taking systems onto the table and we're just seeing what fits, what goes together, what contradicts each other, what connects, what are the patterns. And every time we do this, we're just amazed that I think what's amazing is what we can do when we're not drawing on only our best. Thinking in the moment. This is one of the things that really bothers me about. It's sort of one of the myths of genius that geniuses just always have in their back pocket some completely novel idea. I think that can happen, but it's exceedingly rare. Most often what happens is that moment of genius is drawing on. It's pulling from a large span of time. That could be a week, it could be a month, it could be a year, it could be longer. But when you can draw on the accumulated wisdom, not just of yourself, but of others, all these examples and models that you found across the Internet, across your life experience, you can just pull together such a relevant and rich set of, in this case, examples that we were using for our web design project.

What I think of a lot is like a Rubik's Cube. You have a cube in your hands and you shift it one way, you shift it another way, and all of a sudden the colors on the Rubik's Cube begin to change and you see the same raw elements in a whole new way. And then that leads to new epiphanies. And so when you talk about borrowed creativity, you are taking in existing ideas, sounds, images, knowledge. You're shifting it like a Rubik's cube, looking at it in a new way. And then that becomes the creativity. And it's not trying to sit in a room just quietly and letting a new idea emerge.

I have a theory. I think you're absolutely right. And I have a theory why this is so hard for people. Think about what we were taught in school. No cheating. That was the sacrosanct, the most important rule in school. We all heard stories, oh, did you hear about so and so in class number three, who cheated? And now he has something on his permanent record. He might not get into college. Basically, his life was ruined because he cheated. But look at how cheating was defined in school. It was using, it was drawing on someone else's work, right? You weren't allowed to borrow, you weren't allowed to copy, you weren't allowed to emulate. Everything had to be original. But then even during research, like you're Writing a paper, an essay or something. You can borrow sources, but they have to be the most kind of the most basic sources, the most raw sources. So then in our professional lives, we do that, right? We don't want to take, say we don't want to borrow from a fully designed website, but in the professional world, that's exactly what you want to borrow. You want to borrow the most refined, the most distilled, the most advanced pieces of work. Because something like a very well designed website has so much thinking that's gone into it. It's such a dense kind of intellectual artifact. You want to take that. Now, don't take literally, like the name of the website, the trademarked brand, but if you just go just a little bit that and take kind of the essence of the thinking that's been done, you can save, I mean, countless hours of work.

So tell me, what does it feel like to be creative once I have my second brain?

I think it feels like you're skipping steps. I mean, this podcast is an example. One week ago, we decided we're gonna make a season of the Building a Second Building a Second Brain podcast. I knew that in a week I could do all the research, borrow all the models that I needed. Draw on your experience. Experience. Draw on the experience of an online course that I took just this past week. And I knew that I could start this podcast that you're listening to right now at level 8 or level 9, rather than start at 1 and slowly work my way up the ladder. I can kind of jump to the end of a process by borrowing others thinking.