Myth 5: A Second Brain requires me to have technical skills

What do you mean when you say that you don't need specialized skills to build a second brain? Don't I need to know how to use the tools beforehand? Don't I need to know all these theories and methodologies from years that have been developed? What do you mean when you say I don't need those specialized skills?

There are many specialized methods of managing information. Some of them, many of them are very powerful. Many of them you can do just incredible things. I mean, think about dedicated workflows for data. Like if you're working in big data, you have massive databases, thousands or millions of records. We're not trying to replace any of that. Right. The problem with some of these more specialized, you know, information management workflows is you have to know how to code, you have to know how to, you know, input very like use a particular syntax or like, like do search queries in a very particular way. And all of those have their place. What a second brain is. It is a general, it's a generalist knowledge management system that's really important to keep in mind. It is a general, it's a generalized system. So, you know, if you have a very particular kind of content that you need to manage, use a specialized workflow. For example, photos, okay, don't put photos into a digital notes app. That's not what it's for. Use Lightroom, use Google Photos. Use an app that is designed just for photos. If you're doing, I don't know, web analytics, you don't want to be typing into a freeform blank note. The different, you know, things that, that you're measuring on your website. Use Excel, use Google Sheets. But what a second brain is actually just like your first brain. What makes the first brain, the human brain, so powerful? It's a general purpose machine. It's a general purpose computer, right? It's not like designed for one specific kind of task, cooking or cleaning or walking in the forest. It can take on a huge variety of different kinds of tasks. So your second brain is the same. It is a general purpose thinking tool for managing kinds of knowledge that you don't really know initially what they're for. You don't initially know what you're going to use it for. It's not for a very specific use case. And so when we say you don't need to have specialized skills to build a second brain, really the ones you need to know are like reading, writing and maybe the very basics of using a computer, like turning it on, creating a new document, creating a link, stuff like that. That's important because it's like the second brain is for the open ended kinds of knowledge that don't yet have a very specific use.

But isn't a second brain only for people who are working in particular industries who want to achieve particular ends, or for people who have specific kinds of knowledge? Like what do you mean? How could something possibly go in your second brain if you have no idea how you're going to use it? Why would you ever want to do that?

Yeah, this is one of the, one of the interesting paradoxes is if you come across a piece of information and you know exactly how you're going to use it, you just use it, you just immediately apply it to whatever problem or situation you have in mind. Where the need for a, like a, like an overarching system comes into play is when that relationship is less clear. So, so it's something in between. You come across a piece of information that seems interesting, it resonates, it has something that intrigues you. Right? So you have this sense, this feeling that it will be useful or it could be useful or one day it will be useful. But you can't say exactly how it's that in between, that in between zone. It's not. The application is not immediately 100% clear, but nor is it just something completely random that has no point to it. It's somewhere in between. And I think to answer your question, I. There's certain kinds of professions that are early to this. It's people who solve open ended problems. People like writers, like graphic designers, like software engineers who have an input of different kinds of knowledge over here and then an output of different knowledge over here. But how it gets from the input to the output is a little unclear. But I do think that kind of profession is going to become more and more common. All the kinds of professions that don't have that inherent ambiguity, that uncertainty are going to go away, they're going to be outsourced to machines.

So why can't I just use Google for my second brain? Tiago, I have the entire Internet in my pocket. Why can't I just do that?

Great, very good question. So I think many people effectively do that. There's been some interesting studies that the way that people's minds operate changes when they have Google. They actually remember specific details. Less and more of their kind of bandwidth becomes dedicated to remembering how to find things. So you may have noticed this. Like there's a question that you have to answer repeatedly. For example, you know how to add an image on WordPress where you have gone through the steps to find that answer so many times, right? You go to Google, you put in that search query, you recognize the search result because you visited it before. You click there. You have some memory of where on the page that answer is. You go through all those steps so quickly that it's as if you know it. Even though if I force you to come up with it, without Google, you wouldn't be able to, right? So I think Google in a funny way, has actually introduced us to this idea of like, cognitive extension more than we realize. But there's a couple things that Google can't do. Okay, so a couple things. First, Google doesn't have your version of that knowledge, your interpretation, your take. Because when you come across a Google result, you can't edit it. That's control. That's owned, that's literally owned and monetized by someone else or some other company. So if you have any interpretation, even if that, even if that's just you want to put more emphasis on a idea instead of B idea, you can't change it. There's nothing, no highlighting, no reorganizing, no editing, no annotating, none of that you can do on that webpage. But there's something else too, which is there's this idea in the world of finance, of Alpha, right? This idea that there's certain knowledge that is not universally known that you can't just do a Google search. You can't just look it up either, because it's not well distributed, it's not widely known, it's not on the Internet. It's only in the minds of certain people, for example. And that's the most valuable knowledge, right? That rare or secret or esoteric knowledge is the best knowledge precisely because not everyone has it, right? There's no advantage in anything on Google. Any knowledge on Google everyone has access to. So there's no advantage to knowing. It's just kind of one of the ironies of knowledge, right? Once everyone knows it, there's no, like, special, you know, advantage that you gain. And so when we look at Alpha, in the world of knowledge work, it's things like, you know, you live in a certain part of the country, what do people in that part of the country know that people in other places don't know? It's like things in the culture, things in the soil, things in that particular environment. It's things like knowledge that is difficult to express in writing. The Internet is very good for, like, audio, video and text. But there's certain things, like how to dance Right. Like when you actually go through the choreography of steps, you know how to do those steps. But if someone had you write down all the steps, you'd only be able to capture maybe 10% of what you know. So there's all these little kinds of knowledge at the periphery that you can only gain through real world experience that you have. That's the kind of knowledge you have to capture through note taking.

Yeah, I have a couple comments here. So when I look at my second brain, one of the things that I find that I would never find on Google is things like texts, like emails, and my own reflections on experiences. And so I can insert personal ideas. You talked about dance. One of the things I do whenever I play golf is when I get off the golf course, I talk about in what way did I struggle that day, and in what way did I fix the way that I was struggling. And so what I have is whenever I struggle, I now have a years of data on I was hitting the ball right in this particular way. Here's how I solve that problem. And my mind forgets me having written that idea down. And that becomes the advantage of having a second brain. That's the first thing. But then there's sort of two S's. There's speed and there's safety. And so speed comes from. I can pull ideas from my second brain because I've already made the decision that everything I'm going to insert in my second brain is of high value. And so whenever I'm playing in my second brain, in the sandbox, everything is high quality. Whereas in Google, I don't trust every piece of information. Then secondly, there's a certain kind of ineffable pit that you get in your stomach when you lose a piece of information that you really wanted.

Yes.

And Google things can disappear. Things can. A tweet can be deleted, an article can be removed from the Internet, but in your second brain, things stay there forever. And so from the speed of being able to work through your second brain, having thought through it all, you end up getting trust in your system. And then from the safety, you end up going to sleep every night with the comfort of knowing that your most precious ideas won't be lost.

That's right. On the money. It's something about control, something about. Yeah, it's like we live in a world where knowledge really is truly like, not metaphorically, but practically the most valuable resource. Like, we've always had that idea kind of in the culture, but like now it's literally true. And so you can't out if that is true. You can't outsource that. You can't just trust some server on the other side of the planet is going to just always be there, ready and waiting to give you exactly what you need. That's just crazy. To live that way. You need to sort of like you create this boundary into which you draw the things that you want to fill your mind with, to fill your consciousness with. And then you exert agency over those things. You organize it, you distill it, you change it around, restructure it. That's, to me, what it means to be not just a knowledge worker. I like this distinction. It's like a knowledge worker is like working on the factory floor, you know? Yeah. You work with knowledge like you have your anvil and you're just like hammering knowledge. Right. But now it's more like we are like the factory foreman. We are up on the catwalk above, looking at all the different apps and pieces of software that is working the knowledge for us. But we're the owner of the factory. We're that conductor, that orchestrator of this bigger system that we have some kind of agency over.