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The Second Brain - A Life-Changing Productivity System

2020-08-20 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 15:37 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time (also: Learning and studying) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, His own products discussed

Ali walks through the ten principles of Building a Second Brain, the course that he says changed his life and for which he is now an alumni mentor: borrowed creativity, the capture habit, idea recycling, projects over categories, slow burns, starting with abundance, intermediate packets, you only know what you make, making it easier for your future self and keeping your ideas moving.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The Building a Second Brain course, Ali as an alumni mentor, and its price

  • ★★★ 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 · Building a Second Brain
  • ★★ Through Building a Second Brain Ali discovered the field of personal knowledge management, which he calls the next level of productivity. — 00:00:00 · Building a Second Brain

  • ★★★ 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 · second brain, Building a Second Brain

    “you build up this second brain, which is a digital note-taking system”

  • ★★ Ali is now an official alumni mentor for the Building a Second Brain course: he will join its live cohorts, held twice a year, and offer mentoring on live Zoom calls. — 00:00:29 · Building a Second Brain

  • ★★ Ali calls the Building a Second Brain course super expensive: totally worth it for him, probably worth it for the right sort of person such as a knowledge worker, but definitely not for everyone. (hedged) — 00:00:59 · Building a Second Brain

00:01:20 — Borrowed creativity

  • ★★★ 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 · second brain, Building a Second Brain
  • ★★ With all the bits that resonate with you from what you read, watch and listen to in one place, Ali says, it becomes much easier to put things together and see connections. — 00:01:35 · second brain

00:02:07 — The capture habit

  • ★★★ 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 · Building a Second Brain
  • ★★ Ali captures by source: from podcasts or audiobooks in the car he dictates voice notes into Drafts on his Apple Watch, synced to Evernote; Kindle highlights and notes sync to Evernote and Notion through Readwise, which he calls amazing. — 00:02:39 · Apple Watch, Drafts, Evernote, Kindle, Notion
  • ★★ Ali now keeps a waterproof notebook on the windowsill next to the shower, so he can capture an idea there and then, since his brain will not hold on to it for long. — 00:03:08

00:03:18 — Idea recycling

  • ★★★ 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 · second brain, Building a Second Brain
  • ★★ Every video, blog post or tweet Ali makes goes straight into his second brain to be reused, and most of his online courses are put together from its building blocks. — 00:03:37 · second brain
  • ★★ Ali has churned out online classes on Skillshare, which have made a stupidly large amount of money relative to his full-time job salary; recycling ideas from his second brain made the process far easier. — 00:04:06 · second brain

00:04:22 — Projects over categories

  • ★★★ 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 · Building a Second Brain

00:05:04 — Slow burns

  • ★★ A heavy-lift mentality, such as planning three weeks in a cabin in the woods to write a book, stops Ali from doing a lot of things, because he has not got the time. — 00:05:14
  • ★★★ 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 · Building a Second Brain
  • ★★ Ali has a handful of online courses, books and other products in the pipeline, all on the slow burn rather than worked through one at a time. — 00:05:44
  • ★★ Because the work is already done over time, Ali finds a day spent consolidating the bits into his next Skillshare class very easy: a slow burn, not a heavy lift. — 00:06:16

00:06:50 — Start with abundance

  • ★★★ 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 · Evernote, Notion, second brain, Building a Second Brain

00:07:59 — Intermediate packets

  • ★★★ 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 · Building a Second Brain
  • ★★ Many of an essay's intermediate packets can go into other essays, an insight Ali says makes students' lives more efficient. — 00:08:23
  • ★★ At university Ali memorised the intermediate packets of his essays and, in his head, dragged and dropped them into any relevant essay, such as one on memory; he says the method helped him rank first in his year group one year. — 00:08:23
  • ★ Each of the ten principles in this video is its own intermediate packet that Ali expects to drag and drop into a future video, blog post or book. — 00:09:08
  • ★★★ Thinking in intermediate packets makes starting easier, Ali says: getting started is a big problem for him and many others, and a whole essay feels like a mountain while a single paragraph is much easier. — 00:09:43

00:10:04 — You only know what you make

  • ★★★ 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 · Building a Second Brain
  • ★★★ 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 · Building a Second Brain
  • ★★ Asked what advice he has for a 14-year-old, Ali says to make an Evernote or a Notion account: it does not matter which app you use. — 00:11:06 · Evernote, Notion
  • ★★ Ali advises young people to start writing down notes from everything they read, because in ten years' time they will be glad they did. — 00:11:46

00:11:52 — Make it easier for your future self

  • ★★★ 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 · second brain, Building a Second Brain
  • ★★★ Hearing a term such as transactional analysis on a podcast, Ali writes a few notes fleshing it out in his own words, so that his future self will know exactly what he meant. — 00:12:09
  • ★ Ali and his brother Taimur recently did an episode of their podcast, Not Overthinking, on transactional analysis. — 00:12:09 · Not Overthinking, Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★ Looking back at his Evernote notes from about 2015, Ali does not remember what he was thinking when he took them, because he assumed too much intelligence on the part of his future self. — 00:12:50 · Evernote
  • ★★ Studying for an exam with Anki flashcards, Ali assumes he will not remember, so he makes each flashcard or note in a way his future self can easily access. — 00:12:50 · Anki

00:13:19 — Keep your ideas moving

  • ★★★ The tenth Building a Second Brain principle, keep your ideas moving, is anti-perfectionist: a trap in building a note-taking system is perfectionism, such as making an elaborate Notion database of everything you have read with 18 pieces of metadata each. — 00:13:20 · Notion, Thomas Frank, Building a Second Brain

  • ★★★ The most important thing is the output, Ali says: what is in your second brain does not matter, and saving every podcast you have listened to is useless unless you turn it into something, share it or apply it to your life. — 00:13:49 · second brain

    “really the most important thing is the output”

  • ★★ There is no perfect note-taking system and no perfect app, Ali says: what matters is a system that keeps your ideas moving through it, even imperfectly. — 00:14:18

00:14:47 — Wrap-up: whom the course is for, more videos in the series

  • ★★ Ali says the Building a Second Brain course is not really for students who cannot afford it, but for creative professionals who make money from this and can treat its large price tag as an investment in their future. — 00:15:06 · Building a Second Brain
  • ★★ Ali says a few more videos are coming in his series on personal knowledge management. — 00:15:06

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked whether Ali uses Notion to house his second brain documents and ideas, the channel answers: mostly, yes. — creator comment · Notion, second brain
  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked which microphone records the audio, the channel names the NTG4+. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Building a Second Brain · intermediate packets · second brain · slow burns

Also: People: Pablo Picasso · Taimur Abdaal · Thomas Frank

Projects: Not Overthinking

Concepts: inbox for your brain · personal knowledge management · transactional analysis

Products: Anki · Apple Watch · Drafts · Evernote · Kindle · Notion · Readwise

Only in the description or credits: Rode NTG4

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