Building a Second Brain summary

Meet John and Amelia. They’re both knowledge workers. John has a second brain; Amelia doesn’t. 

A typical day for Amelia looks something like this:

Amelia wakes up, and her mind is flooded with scattered thoughts and ideas, but before she can follow them through, she is distracted by the ping of email notifications. She spends the morning putting out fires in her inbox. There’s no time to gather her thoughts before an afternoon meeting. Worse, she spends half the meeting sifting through files trying to find the numbers she needs – and loses the thread of discussion completely. After work, exhausted, she carves out a little time to work on her passion project but gets quickly discouraged – she can’t remember where she left off last time, and has no idea what to prioritize now. She goes to bed, and the cycle repeats the next day.

John’s typical day looks a little different. 

John also wakes up to scattered thoughts – but he quickly types down promising ideas in his notes app. On his way to work, he mulls the ideas in more detail, making an audio voice note of potential challenges and solutions. When his afternoon meeting rolls round he has the agenda ready to go, as well as extra information he thinks could be pertinent to the discussion. And that idea he jotted down this morning? It’s refined enough by now to present to the board. That evening, with time to spend on his passion project, he knows just where to begin work. 

John isn’t smarter or more capable than Amelia. He simply has a second brain.

So, how do you build a second brain that works as well as John? It’s easy … once you crack the code. That’s code as in C-O-D-E. Each letter stands for one of the four steps for building a second brain: Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express. This section, and the three that follow, will break down each of those steps. And each section will end with an extra-credit assignment, designed to help you build your second brain as you listen. 

Let’s start with that first step. Capture.

We’re surrounded by information inputs, both external – like quotes, images, articles, meeting notes – and internal, like memories, musings, and insights. Capitalize on those inputs. When you encounter a piece of information you want to remember, you should capture it – that might look like taking a screenshot, bookmarking an article, or even recording a quick voice note. Simple!

Now, you might be thinking: “Hang on – I do this already. And I definitely don’t feel like I have a second brain!” Well, you’re probably making two mistakes. 

First, you’re capturing the wrong things. Often, we capture things because we think we should even when we don’t feel any connection to them. We end up with way too much information that doesn’t mean very much to us. Try and capture only information that sparks something inside you. It might help to think of the pieces of information you want to capture as knowledge assets. They’re more than a fact or an observation. They’re solutions, time savers, sparks of inspiration, perspective shifters.

Second, you’re not centralizing the knowledge you capture. There are all kinds of digital tools that let you capture knowledge assets. You can highlight e-books, like and bookmark on social media, excerpt audio clips from podcasts … the list goes on. But these tools aren’t the whole story. Think of everything you capture with these tools as nerve endings. They should all lead back to one central nervous system: your second brain. Any standard digital notes app should do the trick. Set all your modes of capture to export, and automatically update, everything you save to that one central digital space. 

Still feeling overwhelmed by all the information you’re capturing? Follow the lead of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who had a reputation for innovative, out-of-the-box thinking. Feynman wrote a list of about a dozen core questions that he wanted to answer in his research. Whenever he came across a new piece of information, he would test it against these core questions. Using this method, he often found solutions in the most unexpected places! Maintaining a list of core questions will help you focus your captures, even while you build an eclectic library of knowledge assets.

Ready to start capturing yourself? Here’s your extra-credit assignment: 

Everything you capture should feel potent and urgent. Tiago Forte, creator of the CODE system, captures on average just two assets a day. So, think back on your last 24 hours. What are your two key knowledge takeaways? Capture them!