Myth 7: If I create a Second Brain, it will kill my creativity

I want to talk about the relationship between creativity and freedom. How could building a system possibly make me more creative? Isn't it just going to limit me and constrain me in terms of what I can actually do?

I think this is one of the biggest myths, one of the very biggest myths. You know, I first noticed this as a kid. My father is a professional artist, which is the quintessential creative life. I mean, the image of a painter going in, looking at the canvas for hours a day and painting, that's creativity, right? And then, you know, in school or in movies or on tv, I would see depictions of creativity. You know, the starving artist, the depressed poet, you know, on the banks of the Seine in Paris, just, you know, smoking and stuff. Like, none of those images of artists that I saw on TV resonated with what I saw. My dad was, like, super responsible, had a very structured routine, just did things in a certain order. He'd always tell me, you know, I can't paint when I'm stressed. So being not stressed, you know, paying my bills on time, having things be predictable, planning in advance is not a luxury for me. If I don't do those things and my life gets too chaotic, I literally can't work. I can't do my art when I am stressed. And that always hit me that he used structure and discipline in order to create the freedom, in order to create a space, that he could be so imaginative and creative with his art. And I think I've sort of adopted that mindset in my own life. And I think this is something that, as millions of people become creatives or begin to think of themselves as creatives, they're taking on the images and the models they saw on TV and trying to mimic those models, when what they should really look at is professional creatives, people who get up every day, go to work as if they were a truck driver or something else, the same time, the same number of hours each day or whatever it is, and just treat it like a job rather than this sort of mystical, you know, this mystical thing.

There's a quote from Gustave Flaubert, and he says, you want to be regular and orderly in your home so you can be violent and original in your work. And what I take away from that is, is that life is a balance of order and chaos. And the more order that you have in one part of your life, the more chaotic and creative you have the liberty to be in another part of your life. And very practically, what I see is that I can be all over the place, creatively because I know that I have the stability of a second brain.

Yeah, it's like you have a chaos budget. There's only so much chaos any human being can have in their life. So chaos, or let's say like serendipity or imagination. So if you want your work to be very imaginative and very spontaneous and very freeform and unorthodox, well, the rest of your life has to be orthodox. It has to be at least somewhat structured. I think that's. That's something that is just really hard to see when you're looking at a creative life from the outside, but that you very quickly discover when you're on the inside.

Talk about the actual second brain. How does working with a computer actually unlock my creativity? You know, I'll give you a very practical example. I find ideas in my second brain all the time that I didn't even remember were in there. Often things I have written in my second brain that I never even remembered thinking. And that then becomes like a rocket booster on my creative process.

Yeah, Let me give you a bit of the history. So I think there's a basic question here, which is modern knowledge work is so inherently unpredictable and variable. Right. If you are a designer or an entrepreneur or an engineer or these kinds of professions, I mean, every day might be different. One day you're in meetings, the next day you're solo in front of a whiteboard. The next day you're on a computer, the next day you're off site. Like, there's so much variability day to day that I think sometimes we just think, no, my work is just completely unpredictable, unplanned. I just have to roll with it. And what I really saw with this is the years that I was really kind of developing this approach to knowledge management. I was living all over the world. It was the most variable lifestyle you can imagine. I mean, I went to four different colleges in Washington, D.C. in Southern California, two different universities in Brazil. And then as soon as I graduated, I didn't want to come back to the U.S. i went to Colombia. So I went from U.S. to Brazil for a year, Colombia for six months. But then even after Colombia, I didn't want to come back to the US So I went to the Peace Corps in Ukraine, and then I was in Ukraine for a little over two years. And then finally I came back to California. These were the prime years that I was developing this completely different climates, different kinds of work. In one place I was teaching English, another place I was volunteering. Another place I was interning. Another place I was in college myself. But what I noticed is that there was a common thread between all these radically different lifestyles, which was my digital life throughout this entire time. I had different computers, actually, but I would, in every case, log on. I had my Gmail account, I had my little blogger website. I had my Google account, I had my Facebook account, I had Google photos. It's kind of like there's an environment, there's a layer of our lives which is the digital world that is its own environment, its own world. And that part I could make consistent. There were consistent ways that I could process my email, consistent ways I could take notes on the E books. I would only read ebooks because I had no room in my luggage to carry around books, Right? And so the part of my life that took on order and structure was the digital part, which allowed my physical life to be so crazy and chaotic and random. So when I started my career, I moved to San Francisco and started my career. I just continued that I still wanted to have variety in the places I went, the people I met, the hobbies I would get into, the places I would travel. But the part that stayed somewhat predictable and allowed me to kind of keep accumulating knowledge was the digital was the computer.