Ep 11: 2nd Brain

Dear friends & family,

I hope that you’ve all had a great week! ☀️ 

These past couple of weeks, my family has been mourning the passing of my dear uncle. In preparing his eulogy, I struggled to wrap my head around the vast amount of information he must have accrued throughout his lifetime: the knowledge passed down from generations before him, his incredible life experiences and accomplishments, and most of all, his story, the way he would’ve liked it to be told.

Many, if not all, are gone forever. In the same vein, I’m being absolutely bombarded by the vast amount of information that is necessary for the medical management of complex disease processes in the hospital. The combination of these two experiences has really forced me to revisit ways to enhance how I capture, organize, distill, and share information.

A year or so ago, I came across this incredible framework for doing just this. Here are the key takeaways from Tiago Forte’s book, Building a Second Brain. Ironically, I pulled my notes from my 2nd brain, because my 1st brain has 0 bandwidth left at the moment! Nothing a good restart/sleep can’t fix though 😴 

📖 Thiago Forte’s, Building a Second Brain Highlights:

1. Organize Effectively: Develop an organizational system that fits your workflow. Forte talks about the PARA method, which categorizes information into Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. From highest actionabilty, to lowest. See the video on his PARA method hyperlinked above for more info.

2. Retrieval: The real power of having a Second Brain is in its ability to retrieve information effortlessly(what our brains are not designed to do, especially with the amount of information we’re bombarded with daily). I am currently using an INCREDIBLE set of apps called Readwise to integrate my Kindle notes/highlights into my Notion (where my 2nd brain lives), automatically!

3. Task Management: Organize the information you’re consuming in terms of the projects you hope to apply that information to! (vs by topic, which is close to useless from a productivity standpoint)

4. Improvement: Regularly revisit and refine your Second Brain. Adapt it to your evolving projects and new technologies! Regular improvement will help make your system more intuitive and reflective of your thought processes—how your own story will be told by someone one day.

5. Creativity = Innovation: By offloading memory tasks, which computers are THE best at doing, WE can then focus on creating new ideas and generating insights (what computers are NOT good at doing).

   Here is a great video explaining this process:

That’s all this week! If you’re interested in getting started on building your 2nd brain, let’s share notes! 🤓 

See you all next week! 🌻 

Deepak

Currently: 📖 | 👀 | 🎵 | Team messages 🥷 

📚️: Outlive: by Peter Attia

📽️: Building the Ultimate Productivity System

🎶 : Something About The Way You Look Tonight - Elton John

🥷: Physics conundrum: The Infinite Square Well by our very own STEM ninja, Gian