The Capture Habit

Thiago, tell me about the capture habit in building a second brain.

The capture habit comes from the GTD methodology. GTD stands for Getting things done. It's a best selling book and a methodology created by David Allen starting in 2001. And it's so simple and so hard. It's simple because it can be summarized with write it down, whatever it is, if it's the most harebrained idea, if it's a profound quote, if it's an amazing insight that you had through a book you read, a podcast you listened to, a video you watched, write that down. Write. Write it down before you know if it's good. Write it down before you know how you're gonna use it. Write it down. Even if you're certain you're never gonna forget it for the rest of your life. And the reason for that is your mind has a certain carrying capacity, what's known as working memory. If you are trying to hold onto things, it's kind of like, you know, you're coming home from the grocery store and your arms are full of groceries. As long as they're full of groceries, you can't cook a beautiful meal, you can't buy one more thing. You can't do anything until you unload those groceries. That's the very first step. And unless you do that, you're going to be sort of like juggling this armful of things, which those could be the best ideas to have in mind. Probably not. You really want to have this flow. You want to be capturing things, writing them down, offloading, so then you can get even more.

Why don't people do this?

I think there's a few reasons. One is they don't value their own ideas. And it's funny, when I say your own ideas, people really differentiate between my ideas and the ideas of others. To me, that distinction almost doesn't exist. And the reason is, Nothing is truly 100% yours, and nothing is truly 100% someone else's. Everything that comes in through your senses, something you see, something you hear, something you touch, something you taste, is interpreted. This has been some of the great discoveries of cognitive science in recent decades, is you interpret everything all the time. So by the time something hits your prefrontal cortex, hits your brain, you've already interpreted it, therefore it's already yours. So I make no distinction between your ideas and the ideas of others. I just call them ideas. I think people. So wherever those ideas are coming from, they don't give them value. They think, oh, someone must have thought of this. Before, oh, this, this can't be the first time that someone came up with this. Or maybe they think, oh, this is a good idea, but I'll never be able to act on it. I'll never be able to put it into action. And that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If you don't value your ideas, who is going to? If you don't take even the minimal energy to record them in a place outside your head, what are the chances they're ever going to actually become real in any sense?

Tell me about the capture habit in your life. A time where you had an epiphany, you wrote it down. A. A time where capturing something that you thought, oh, I'll just remember it forever, 60 years from now, no problem. Where 60 days in the future you had totally forgotten about it went through, your second brain said, wow, thank you. I captured this and now I can use it.

I have a great example, which is the building a second brain course itself. In mid December 2016. I remember it as if it was yesterday. I walked into the Whole Foods cafe next to Lake Merritt in Oakland, where I was living at the time, and I was terrified. It's like, you know, when your heart is beating, your body's in fight or flight mode. Because I was gonna sit down and do something that I had told myself I was gonna do for a long time, which was to create a new course with my ideas on note taking, knowledge management, and the second brain concept. I remember sitting down and making this outline and in one hour, that's all I could handle in terms of time. I made an outline that guided the evolution of this course for three years. And the incredible thing is, first of all, it required no new research. I had everything I needed, had all the sources, all the lessons, all the takeaways, all the principles. So there was no Googling, there was no reading books, there was no getting, you know, no external search of any kind. It was only looking at my own second brain. And second, it was amazing how, what a long span of time I drew on, you know, one unit of the course, might draw on an idea, and did draw on an idea from last week. And then the second point was from a year ago. And in some cases five, six, seven, eight years ago, I had insights that because I had tracked them and managed them through time, go got synthesized into this course. And people ask me where I came up with such great insights as if I sat down and just put it all down straight from my brain. No, I was drawing on a decade of my life experience, books. I Read things I listened to and distilling those into one outline, tell me.

About what the capture habit feels like in your life. So when you have an epiphany, how do you actually capture that epiphany? When you see an image at a museum that you like, how do you actually capture the that image?

I think a couple things I look for, I really try to listen to my intuition. If I try to make it an analytical thing, then I can't enjoy anything. If I'm at an art museum trying to strategize, I'm a very strategic, analytical person, but I have to turn that part of my brain off. If I try to strategically analyze how I'm going to use something in some future project, it's not even really possible because I don't know what my future projects are. And also, I just want to enjoy the art, I just want to enjoy the movie, I want to enjoy my friends. I don't want to be there trying to like copy down quotes for future use. So what I really listen to is when something that I consume has a certain energy, I notice like a change in my physiological state. I notice my eyes dilate, my heart beats, my skin sometimes has this electrical feeling. And this is something I think that you can actually get better at. The more you listen to it, the more you respond to it, the more your body kind of does it. And I think the second thing is there's an element of trust. I still notice this after all these years. When I go to write something down, there's a voice in my head that says, that's not that important. Oh, don't worry about it. Take it easy. Doesn't matter. You'll think of it again. And there's a certain radical act of trust that you think my ideas matter. My thinking is unique. My perspective has something to offer. And I feel that it's a little bit of a risk. It's a little bit of a leap of faith when you go, no, it is worth the 15 seconds for me to write this down in my notes.

It's a radical act of self worth. It is you saying to yourself, my experiences are worth remembering and I am worse. My ideas are worth listening to, even just for myself. So I'm curious, when you've dropped those groceries, when you have externalized and captured those ideas, how does your mindset begin to shift? Those groceries are no longer in your hand now. What can you do that you weren't able to do before?

I think you're able to play. You're really able to play. You know, if you look at computers, what computers are able to do, they're able to think in certain very basic ways. They're able to remember things, they're able to do very basic kinds of processing. I think we should give computers those jobs. Anything a computer can do, we should just outsource to them. And what's left over, I found, and I've seen this in my students, is what only humans can do. It's spontaneity, it's intuition, it's creativity. It is spontaneity. It's responding, it's adapting, it's playing, it's making jokes, being weird, all these human things, which really is where art comes from. That's really where originality comes from. But the brain is so oriented to survival, right? The brain will only let go and engage in those playful things when it's not burdened by the necessities of survival. The necessities of what am I doing tomorrow? What is my schedule? What is the project? What is the phone call? These kind of mundane details. I just think human consciousness is way too precious to be occupied with mundane details. My mission is to offload from the collective human consciousness every single mundane detail that doesn't need to be done by humans.

So what we're trying to do here, and what Second Brain lets you realize, is you can spend 15, 30 seconds capturing an idea, and that idea can live with you in your pocket for the rest of your life. No matter who you're with, no matter what you're working on, no matter where you go, as long as you have an Internet connection, that idea will be with you.

Yes. And you have no idea where it's going to end up. That's the faith again. It's the trust. You know this quote you write down from a documentary you watched that could go and be one of those quotes at the beginning of one of the chapters of the book. You write one day, that could be an opening screen on a YouTube video or a documentary you make one day. I mean, it could just be something you bring up in conversation that has an impact on your friend. Right? You can't predict. And you don't. You have to have a certain sense of humility that you're just a channel. Ideas will. The good ideas, the valuable ideas, will find a way to live and grow and be expressed. You get to be part of that channel and benefit in so many countless ways or not. It's up to you. But you're just the carrier. You're the channel through which ideas flow.