Building a Second Brain Summary

1-Sentence-Summary: Building a Second Brain is a simple, complete guide to setting up and using a personal knowledge management system that seamlessly plugs into your everyday life with a 4-step framework that works with any note-taking app.

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As a 22-year-old student, Tiago Forte felt a bit of pain in the back of his throat. As the pain got progressively worse and no doctor could tell him what was wrong, Tiago started struggling to laugh, speak, or even swallow.

This marked the beginning of a multi-year journey to recover his health. While Tiago eventually figured out he had some kind of “functional voice disorder,” there was no single treatment that could fix his condition. One day, sitting in yet another doctor’s office, Tiago decided to take charge of his own fate: he demanded his entire patient record and began to digitize it.

After reviewing and organizing all of his notes, Tiago decided he’d try a combination of better eating, meditation, and voice exercises. His pain didn’t go away, but it improved dramatically! From then on, note-taking became Tiago’s ultimate weapon. He used it to graduate with honors from college, teach Ukrainian students English during his Peace Corps assignment, and to land a job in consulting upon his return.

Seeing how his notes helped Tiago be more productive, organized, and creative, his colleagues asked him to share his ideas. One thing led to another, and in 2017, the Building a Second Brain online course was born. In 2022, Tiago condensed his 15 years of experience with the subject into a book of the same name.

Here are 3 lessons to help you implement Tiago’s powerful system and reap the rewards:

1. Build and use your Second Brain with the 4 “CODE” steps.
2. The PARA method ensures your notes stay manageable and relevant.
3. Your Second Brain will help you remember, connect, and create better.

Let’s learn how to build a second brain!

Lesson 1: There are 4 “CODE” steps of building and using a Second Brain.

How does Taylor Swift write smash hit after smash hit? What allowed dance choreographer Twyla Tharp to put together more than 160 pieces in her career? A Second Brain, which Tiago defines as “a private knowledge collection designed to serve a lifetime of learning and growth.”

Part digital archive, part journal, and part sketchbook, a Second Brain will make your knowledge searchable, rapidly retrievable, modular, and well-connected. To start, pick your note-taking app of choice. It could be Notion, Evernote, Roam, Obsidian, or the default app on your phone and laptop.

Then, it’s on to the 4 steps of both building and using your Second Brain, which you can remember with the acronym “CODE:”

1. Capture — keep what resonates. Use your intuition to save, highlight, or write down whatever speaks to you in today’s daily tsunami of information washing over you.
2. Organize — save for actionability. Ask “How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?” to sort your notes into 1 of 4 categories (more on this later).
3. Distill — find the essence. Use bolding, highlights, and bullet point summaries to make your notes accessible at a single  future glance.
4. Express — show your work. Tap into your Second Brain as you create on a daily basis, be it for work, passion projects, or to get stuff done in your personal life.

Capture. Organize. Distill. Express. CODE. That’s how you assemble your Second Brain in your note-taking app of choice. It’s also how you use it again and again to remember more, improve your thinking, and access your best ideas at a moment’s notice as you put together creative solutions for your problems.

But how do you organize your notes? Let’s talk about it!

Lesson 2: Sort your notes with the PARA method to make them actionable and manageable.

Why do most note-taking systems fail? A lack of sync with our everyday lives. “[The systems] always required me to follow a series of elaborate rules that took time away from my other priorities,” Tiago writes, “which meant they would quickly become outdated and obsolete.”

Enter the “PARA” method of sorting your notes. This acronym describes 4 simple buckets for capturing “any kind of information, from any source, in any format, for any purpose:”

1. Projects are “short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now.”
2. Areas include ongoing responsibilities you want to work on for the long run.
3. Resources are “topics or interests that may be useful in the future.”
4. Archives are where you move inactive items from the other categories once they are done or put on hold.

In his Evernote, Tiago has 4 top-level folders with these names. Inside each, there are then sub-folders for his various projects, areas, topics, and completed or abandoned efforts.

Perhaps the single-best thing you can do right now to improve your knowledge management is to set up the 4 PARA buckets in your notes application. Try it! Open these folders, and let new information find its place.

Then, it’s back to the other steps of CODE — and using your Second Brain to the fullest, which is what we’ll talk about next!

Lesson 3: Use your Second Brain to remember, connect, and create better than you ever have before.

A Second Brain isn’t a magic bullet, but where others are just killing time on their smartphones, you’ll create value instead, Tiago says. Specifically, you’ll gain 3 skills that will set you apart from most people:

1. The ability to remember great ideas exactly when you need them. Facts, quotes, project specs and details, useful questions, and lessons learned from meetings — all available at any time.
2. You’ll be able to connect more ideas for bigger breakthroughs. Browsing one note leads to another. In the end, both might find their way into your next presentation. Many apps now suggest connections automatically, and with some tagging, you can increase the amount of creative sparks firing in your mind exponentially.
3. The ability to create new things thanks to a massive body of supporting material which you refine over time. Since your knowledge is concrete and organized, it becomes much easier to compile it into something worth sharing with the world.

Remember, connect, and create. Ultimately, that’s what building a Second Brain is for. Tiago himself is living proof that you could leverage these skills in order to improve your health, teach others what you know, land a job, or excel at the one you have.

What will you use your Second Brain for? Whether it’s writing a book, earning a promotion, or becoming a better parent, I hope you’ll give Tiago’s system a try. May the notes be with you, and remember: Why rely on just one brain when you can have two?

Building a Second Brain Review

Building a Second Brain is an honest, down-to-earth knowledge management system that doesn’t get lost in fancy terminology or too many complicated rules. If you want a plug-and-play method for taking notes that’ll help you remember more and think better, this one’s definitely worth a read!

Who would I recommend our Building a Second Brain summary to?

The 19-year-old college freshman who has no idea how to handle all her classes, the 37-year-old mom with an unresolved chronic health issue, and anyone who hasn’t been able to find a note-taking system that sticks.

Last Updated on March 27, 2024