- It's really difficult to wrap your head around
just how much information we intake every day.
Too many emails, too many messages,
too many things to do, too many things to remember.
We are trying to run complex, modern lives,
trying to take in and make sense
of more information than ever
on brains that haven't changed biologically
in 200,000 years.
Now, as I went about solving that problem,
over time, I started to realize,
oh, this wasn't just a solution to one problem,
it was actually this cognitive exoskeleton,
this system that people could use to create better work,
to make better decisions, to be more productive,
to save time.
And so it started as the solution to a problem
and over time became this entire methodology
of how to do creative work
in an environment of information overload.
(upbeat music)
My name is Tiago Forte.
I am the founder of Forte Labs
and the author of the book, "Building A Second Brain."
I wrote this book in the first place
to solve the problem of information abundance.
We can't be the first people
to ever have too much information to manage.
So I went back through history when society was changing,
the economy was changing,
the way that we lived was changing,
and it turned out throughout history again and again,
every time humanity faced too much change
and too much information going on around them,
they turned to the same solution.
They turned to this solution,
this thing called a Commonplace book,
almost like a journal,
except it wasn't just a place for them to pour out
their personal thoughts and reflections.
It was a place for them to keep
a much wider variety of things,
quotes and Bible verses and recipes
and bits of advice and wisdom,
a leaf that they found in the garden
or later on a photograph.
It became this central repository
of all the information and content
that was meaningful to them.
It's the one place you control and you can make sense
of all this stuff happening around you.
And what I'm trying to do essentially
is reinvent that age-old practice
in digital form for modern lives and modern work.
My message to you is that you need a second brain,
a personal system for knowledge management.
It's saving little bits of material and content
and information from both your physical environment,
but more importantly, your digital environment
to cultivate and retrieve and review it over time.
The heart and soul of building a second brain
is called C.O.D.E.
C for capture, O for organize,
D for distill, and E for express.
Capturing information, organizing it, distilling it,
and then expressing it in in some way.
Our memory, especially our working memory,
is kind of like the RAM in a computer.
It's fast, it can make decisions quickly,
but what happens when you restart your computer,
which is kind of like going to sleep at night?
The RAM gets wiped.
Notes are simply a way to preserve
the value of that thinking so that you can benefit from it
again and again and again in the future and not just once.
The first question that a lot of people have
when they embark on digital note taking
is what should I capture?
If you need to know the population of France,
just Google that.
There is no reason to write that down.
But you can't Google a feeling.
Often, what we're actually seeking
when we seek information is a feeling.
You can save content that evokes those feelings,
save a photograph that just inspires you,
save some lines from a poem or a song,
save a story that moves you, that touches you,
that means something to you.
Think about the knowledge and the wisdom
that is created out of your life experiences.
If you've ever lost a job
or had a failure or a disappointment,
there are certain lessons, certain bits of,
I would say wisdom that sunk into your soul.
That's the kind of stuff
that you want to write in your notes and revisit over time
because it really reveals things to you
about who you are.
A great barometer for the things that are worth saving
is things that surprise you,
things that are genuinely novel,
things that you've never encountered before,
you never thought about it quite that way before.
Often, these are things whose meaning is initially unclear.
What that is is you're subconscious telling you
there's something here.
There's something valuable or important
or something relevant to you,
even before your logical mind knows what's going on.
By saving all of these observations
in one single centralized place, your second brain,
you drastically increase the odds
that you're gonna notice how things connect and relate.
My father is a professional artist, a painter,
has been his entire life,
but he's also one of the most
productive people I've ever met.
I always noticed that people would have
this image of my father,
oh, he must be so imaginative,
just wandering around the house, kind of head in the clouds,
and that just could not be further from the truth.
In order to do his art and to be prolific with four kids,
he had to have rules and routines and structures.
Everything had to be very well planned out.
And I'd say this is true of any creative endeavor.
You can't just leave it up to chance.
You can't just leave it purely up to
being in the right mood.
And that's where productivity
is kind of the other half of the coin of creativity,
is not inventing something from nothing,
it is just applying a tool or a technique or an insight
from one domain and then translating it to another one
and this is really what it's all about.
That is the very essence of creativity.