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Building a Second Brain

book · in 10 sources (2019–2024)

Sources by year: 2019: 2 · 2020: 7 · 2024: 1

Also known as: The Second Brain

Threads

Also named in the threads: Ali promises more videos on how he has incorporated Tiago Forte's teachings into his own productivity system (2019) · Ali promises a review of the IQUnix F96 keyboard (2020)

Often together

What comes up in the same parts of the videos; the number is how many parts.

second brain (9) · Tiago Forte (8) · Evernote (7) · Christian (3) · Notion (8) · Apple Watch (3) · Roam Research (3) · Slack (2) · Angus (2) · Drafts (2)

What the videos say

The most important statements of each year; all statements.

2020

  • 2020-08-20 · The Second Brain - A Life-Changing Productivity System — Ali: In 2019 Ali spent a stupidly large amount of money on Building a Second Brain, an online course that he says genuinely changed his life. — 00:00:00
    • The main idea of Building a Second Brain, Ali explains: over time you build a second brain, a digital note-taking system that takes in what resonates with you from what you read, watch and listen to, and you use it to organise your ideas and turn them into creative output. — 00:00:00
    • The first Building a Second Brain principle, borrowed creativity: creativity is about remixing existing ideas from what you read, watch and listen to, adding your own spin and combining them in interesting ways. — 00:01:35
    • The second Building a Second Brain principle, the capture habit: our brains are for having ideas, not storing them, so capture any idea or anything that resonates as soon as possible. — 00:02:07
    • The third Building a Second Brain principle, idea recycling: ideas are not single use, as Ali used to think, and can be recycled and reused over time. — 00:03:18
    • The fourth Building a Second Brain principle, projects over categories: Ali's old topic folders, such as one for motivation, filled with notes he did nothing with; now each captured idea goes into his general capture inbox and then to a project he is working on. — 00:04:40
    • The fifth Building a Second Brain principle, slow burns: keep a list of the projects you are working on, all on the slow burner, instead of doing each as a heavy lift. — 00:05:44
    • The sixth Building a Second Brain principle, start with abundance: you are never starting from scratch; to write about motivation, search your second brain in Evernote or Notion for the word and draw on the articles you have read and annotated over the years. — 00:07:14
    • The seventh Building a Second Brain principle, intermediate packets: an essay is made up of many intermediate packets, which Ali called content blocks in his third year of writing essays. — 00:07:59
    • The eighth Building a Second Brain principle, you only know what you make: what you internalise and can use is what you create yourself, such as a summary of a book or a tweet storm of insights from a podcast. — 00:10:12
    • One of Ali's biggest regrets in life is that he did not take notes on what he read until 2019, when he discovered Building a Second Brain; he wishes he had started at 15, when he first read non-fiction books. — 00:10:41
    • The ninth Building a Second Brain principle, make it easier for your future self: Ali sees his second brain, his suite of digital note-taking apps, as work he puts in now to create a resource his future self will find helpful. — 00:11:52
  • …and 16 statements more in 2020 — all statements of 2020

2019

  • 2019-05-31 · Monthly Favourites #9 - Ali Abdaal — Tiago Forte (quoted): In his blog post Building a Second Brain, the post that got Ali into his blog, Tiago Forte describes using apps to organise all the inputs of his life, such as news articles, books and to-do lists, to process them, and to turn them into content for his blog. — 00:05:22
    • Tiago Forte (quoted): To remember what you read, Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain says to keep an app such as Evernote as a second brain: summarise and distil what you read to its essence, put it in, and review it semi-regularly to build a treasure trove of knowledge. — 00:05:51
    • After Building a Second Brain led him through the rest of Tiago Forte's website, Ali changed his own productivity systems: he has watered Forte's ideas down to fit his life and is experimenting with them over the coming weeks and months. — 00:05:51
  • 2019-12-27 (said on 2019-12-20, implied) · My Annual Review using Notion — Ali: Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain, a workshop, online course and series of blog posts, has changed the way Ali thinks about content creation and note-taking. — 00:07:02

Also named in other years (nothing said): A Beginner's Guide to Making Money with Online Courses (2024-05-21)