Myth 6: There is a ‘right way’ to build a Second Brain

A lot of people think that there's just one right way to build a second brain. Why is that a myth?

I really take issue with a comment that sometimes people say, which is, I haven't yet implemented your system. Actually it bugs me anytime someone says your system. Because what I hear in that comment is this idea that I have figured out the ultimate perfect way for them to be successful. They need to just perfectly copy and mimic my perfect way. And that just couldn't be further from the truth. I mean, unless they happen to have my exact life circumstances, my exact same temperament and personality, my same learning style, my same goals, you, you know, unless they are a literal clone of me, then my system will not be their system. I think the reason PKM Personal Knowledge management is a process is you have to find the toolkit that is going to make sense for you. So one aspect of that is there's a spectrum of formality from formal to informal. And I think a really fundamental assumption that many, many people have is that more formal is better. They come into my course thinking I'm going to be more formal, meaning I'm gonna be more rigid, there's gonna be more rules, I'm gonna follow the exact steps in more precise order. And I think this is something that I get from my cultural background. You know, my mom's from Brazil and my dad's from the Philippines. They, these are developing world cultures, informal cultures. And I've spent a lot of time in these cultures and there are such powerful things that come from informality. There's hard things, right? Like in Brazil, nothing is on time, right? No bus or train or plane is ever on time. Okay? Like it's definitely missing some things. But when you have an informal culture, there's a spontaneity, there's an improvisation to even just everyday existence that is really beautiful. I mean people notice this when Americans go to Brazil they just go, wow, there's just something in the air. There's a magic. There's like things happen that we just surprise you and you would never expect. That is informality. It's this just open ended possibility that things can happen that you didn't expect or plan for. So in building a second brain, I try to dissuade people that more formality is necessarily better and instead help them find where on the spectrum of formal to informal they're most comfortable and also most capable. And sometimes they're surprised that they don't actually need to be more formal at all in order to have the benefits of it.

So on this Idea of the right way to build the system. There seems to be some kind of tension between that. There's no right way to build a system. So then I think, oh well, you can just do whatever you want. But that's also not true. So talk about the principles of building a second brain and why those are important.

That's a very good point. There's no perfect right way, but there are wrong ways. Right. There are wrong ways. And I think what makes this something that can be a methodology, something that I can teach in a course, is there are pitfalls. There are things you can. And I think many of these pitfalls, they're built into our culture. They're like cultural blind spots that we just are born into. We just kind of inhabit without realizing it. That's why so much of this learning process is just learning to see, learning to see new distinctions, Learning to see your unconscious habits that just were invisible to you before. But I think it is those principles, principles such as externalizing, having as much of your work in process happen outside of your head as inside your head. That's a principle thousand and one different ways it can look. From paper to digital, from audio to visual, from writing to drawing. The principle of organizing by actionability. We go to organize and we don't even realize that we are operating within a certain paradigm which we take from libraries. Oh, there needs to be categories. Art and architecture and zoology and these, these library like categories. That works for a library. It doesn't work at all for personal knowledge management where it makes much more sense to organize according to your projects and what you're trying to achieve. I think these are the. So it's a trade off. When you go to principles, you're working on a level that's much more timeless, but the exact implementation is less clear. So the trade off is you get more timeless, but you have to put in a little more effort to figure out how it looks in your own life.

You know, one of the things about the right way to build a second brain. One of the biggest pitfalls that I see when I study how people take notes and organize information is they actually try to make the system too perfect. And a note taking system that's too perfect, too rigid and doesn't allow for the free flow of ideas actually reduces serendipity, it reduces spontaneity. And so what you see is you want something that is organized enough that there's some structure which allows you to dive into your second brain and make sense of it. Just like looking at a city with A map. Now, I can navigate it. But if a system is too rigid and too structured, then it doesn't allow for this clash of ideas that makes a second brain so generative for you.

So true. That's something that's so hard to wrap your head around. That perfection that there's diminishing returns to more perfection and precision. And then you actually go over the hump and it starts negatively impacting you a bunch of different directions. We could take this, but one is the power of forgetting. We think of forgetting as a flaw, as a defect. Oh, if we just could remember everything, our life would be great. That's just not the case. One example is research on people who have super memory. There's people who can say, like, okay, the third Thursday in January 1974, what were you doing? And they can tell you, right, they have perfect memory. There's an article I read recently about this. And you'd think, oh, great, perfect memory, what a blessing. It's hell, it's awful. Like one woman describes, she can recall the day, I think, her husband had a heart attack and died like it was yesterday. And the memory never fades, never goes away, never gets any weaker. Can you imagine? You know, and there's something else too. I mean, that's a dramatic, that's an extreme example, but just they. They really lose the plot. If you can remember what happened, you know, 30 years ago the same as yesterday, the level of detail in your head becomes like a noise. Nothing gets forgotten, nothing falls away. Everything is front and center. It's like having 50 stereos right in front of you all turned up to maximum volume, right? And so I think more and more, in the study of the human brain, we're understanding that forgetting is actually a powerful capability. And then you go to digital note taking, and people are doing everything they can to never, ever forget anything, ever. Isn't that an interesting paradox? Right? So I'm actually curious. Like, I want a note taking app that has forgetting as a feature. If you don't access a note, or at least, you know, change it or edit it, or modify or distill it in some way, after a certain period of time, it just falls away, just gets deleted. And people hear that, they're like, no, no, but think about what that would do. Or let's take an even more extreme example. Imagine a note taking app on December 31st. It erases itself.

Even I'm intimidated.

Awful, awful, right? But now think about if you use such an app, what would happen? Your impulse to publish would just go on overdrive you would just be. It would be like the house is burning and you're trying to get your stuff out onto the front lawn as fast as possible. It's burning. It's burning down as we speak. You would just get it out the door. Get it out the door, get out the door. All your perfectionism, all your fear, your fomo, your imposter syndrome would just be out the door because you know it's not going to last forever. And isn't that true? Like, it won't last forever. Like, at the very least, you will die someday. You cannot take your notes with you into the afterlife, right? Since it's finite, why not pull forward that horizon? And really, like, in some ways, this is like living each day or each year as if it's your last. Like living for the moment and not waiting to capitalize on the value of your ideas years into the future, but doing it now, this week, this month.

So tell me, once I get inside of Second Brain, how do you help me figure out where on these various spectrums I am in terms of thinking very analytically, being a bit more creative in terms of being very high in order, or being like me, a little bit more okay with randomness? How do you actually help me figure this out?

Two ways. Models and experiments. Okay, so the first is models. One of the very basic ways that humans learn is just mimicking. Before you learn to do something original or originally, you have to just copy someone, right? So I try to fill the course with just models and examples from history. We look at, like, what did they do in ancient Greek times? What did they do in the 18th, 19th century, during the Enlightenment or whatever? What, what did they do in the Renaissance? What do modern day writers and artists and entrepreneurs and engineers do? Just many, many examples. Because when you see an example that resonates with you because there was something about the way that person thought that is similar to you. It's usually very clear and you can just borrow it, you can just copy it. But the second way is experiments. And this is what's so unique about Zoom. And delivering this live is the lecture takes place on your own time. We give you prerecorded videos because that's just one way information transfer. But what we are increasingly filling the live calls with is just little experiments. Try distilling this. Try organizing these five files and see what comes naturally. This rapid series of very low stakes experiments. And often, you know, we'll do five experiments and four. You're just like, okay, what was the point of that? Like, there was no point. But then the fifth, you're like, oh, my gosh, this is so cool. How did I never discover this before? And the one experiment that really resonates with you is different for each person. Right? So different experiments that we run will resonate with different people.

Yeah, that first part about the benefit of examples and case studies, I call imitate, then innovate. So you look at what somebody has done, you imitate them, then you innovate beyond what they've done. And as you do that, as you begin to run your own sets of experiments, the system becomes yours. This isn't a second brain. That is Tiago's system. It's a second brain that is my system that works for me. And only once you make the system your own, are you really beginning to properly build a second brain.

The way I see that manifested is sometimes people, you know, six months after they finish the course, will write me this very long apologetic email and they'll say, I'm really sorry. I've made my own system. Instead of doing it how you do it, I'm gonna do it this way. And they have these explanations and again, apologies and oh, but I really liked what I learned from you. And they think they're, like, offending me. They think they're like going outside of the, you know, official holy doctrine. But what they don't realize is that right there is the evidence of mastery. When you know the rules well enough to break them, you understand why the conventions are the way they are. And then you decided those conventions or certain conventions are not for you, and you made your own style. That is the moment I go. The student has become the master. You no longer need my tutelage. You have taken responsibility, actually, you've taken on the agency, the self efficacy to actually design your own system. That's ultimately what we're after.