Myth 4: Building a Second Brain is just self-help for note-taking nerds

This one you get excited about. People say that building a second brain is about self improvement, but why is that a myth?

In some ways it is. Right when the book comes out, it will most likely be in the self improvement section. You know, it's about being more effective at life, having better results, being less stressed and doing more with less. Right, productivity, personal effectiveness, whatever you want to call it. But in another way, if you go deeper, building a second brain is actually the opposite of self improvement. So let me explain why every self improvement philosophy, it's you doing the improving you personally, your biological self and your brain are getting smarter or faster or stronger or thinner, or whatever it is. But if you look at what a second brain is, it's a system outside of you. You access it, you control it, you operate it. But in many ways, building a second brain is about the reason it's the opposite of self improvement is it's about optimizing a system outside of yourself so that you yourself can be happily un optimized. Which to me is a great definition of honestly a happy, relaxed life. Right? Like you want to be optimized, you want to optimize your life to achieve certain results. But when you really think, you know, think a few years into the future, a couple decades into the future, what I think we all really want is to have nothing on our minds, to just wake up in the morning, not have these urgent constraints and deadlines and priorities and things, but just to wake up and do what we feel like, think about what we feel like, pursue whatever calls to us, whatever inspires us, right? So to me that I'm already anticipating, like retirement or just in the future and thinking, okay, if I'm going to have nothing on my mind, I need to start preparing for that. I need to start outsource instead of taking on all the responsibility to myself, doing all the kinds of thinking myself, how can I already start delegating? You know, the most basic kinds of thinking to start to machines, to, to computers, so that over time I can have less on my mind instead of more.

Yeah, but the benefits begin way before the retirement. The benefits begin right now. Where what you realize once you begin to build a second brain is how many things your biological brain was storing and how many, how much of your life you're just cycling through. What do I need to do right now? What do I need to remember? What commitments did I make? What am I doing tomorrow, the day after that? How many emails do I have to respond to? And what you can do is you can take those ideas and offload them onto computers so that your brain isn't just spinning in cycles trying to remember things, but so that I see this when I work with you, I ask you a question and the answer is often I don't know, let me go consult my second brain. Because you have offloaded your memory and your thinking and then you can begin to be symbiotic with the computer so that you have a division of labor where the computer's focusing on what it's good at, which is remembering, and you're focused on what you're good at, which is open ended thinking.

Yeah, no, that's a great point. It's another parallel to finances is, you know, I never wanted to think about my finances, budget save because I thought oh, that's for retirement decades from now. But then when you go through really looking at your finances, the benefits are instantaneous. You right away, once you start budgeting, let's say, start having less stress, you know where your money is coming from, where it's stored, where it's going. You may better decisions, you're less impulsive, you have just a greater sense of security. So it's like you're using the future projection to make changes that benefit you right now. And I love that term, division of labor. I think that's exactly what it is. I mean a great question for the listeners you can ask yourself is for your workday, whether it's working in a company, working for yourself, whatever it is, what percentage of your day are you operating at your peak state? The very frontier of your intellectual capability, right? Just ask yourself, is it 1%, 5%, 10%? I ask people this question. It's rare to have someone that says more than 20 or 30%, right? And then I ask the obvious follow up question, well, what are you doing in that other 70 to 95%? And what's interesting is it's stuff that is first kind of beneath them and they know it. It's stuff that anyone could do, right? It's stuff that doesn't add that much value and it's stuff that is very routine and repeatable. Answering emails, scheduling things, summarizing their reading, writing up reports or plans or agendas. It's like this kind of just bread and butter of knowledge work that is the perfect target for stuff like for the stuff that you want to delegate to your second brain. How can you turn those repeatable low value activities into notes, into checklists, into templates, into models, into things that don't require you to reinvent them from scratch? Each time that you can just access the results of your past thinking.

I think one of the things that's such a deep assumption is that in order to achieve more, we need to work harder, we need to expel more energy, we need to grind and stuff like that. But what a second brain is, is it's about one time actions that have multi time benefits.

Exactly. Compounding again, finance, right? Like if you can make a single investment that has a return and a recurring return, you then get that return. So in finances it's money, but. But in productivity it's time. And get whatever time it saves you. And don't just spend it however, but reinvest it back into other notes and templates and checklists that save you even more time. If you just follow that cycle a few times, before you know it, you have way more free time. You're producing results much greater than you could ever do on your own. And you're just part of this flywheel that people look from the outside and they just can't understand how you do everything that you do at such a high quality, it seems superhuman. And yet over time you're working less and less instead of more and more. I feel like that's the big thing with our generation is we just looked at the baby boomers and Gen X and saw, oh, you could climb the corporate career ladder, which even if you succeed, which is so hard and unlikely, your life gets worse, you get more responsibility, less free time, more stress. And we just said, no thank you, we are not going down that path.