Building a Second Brain by
Tiago Forte
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Table of Contents
What Is Building a Second Brain About?
The Five Big Ideas
Building a Second Brain Summary
What Is a Second Brain?
How a Second Brain Works
Capture—Keep What Resonates
Organize—Save for Actionability
Distill—Find the Essence
Express—Show Your Work
What Is Building a Second Brain
About?
Building a Second Brain is about how to capture,
remember, and benefit from the vast quantities of
information around us by building a personal system for
knowledge management.
The Five Big Ideas
1. Capture only the ideas and insights we think are truly
noteworthy.
2. Organize your notes for action, according to the
active projects you are working on right now.
3. Turn the ideas you capture and organize them into
your own message.
4. Draw on the material you distill and use it to express
your own point of view.
5. Highlight the main points of each note, and then
highlight the main points of those highlights to distill
the essence of a note in several “layers.”
Building a Second Brain Summary
Information lies at the heart of everything we do. Yet, in
today’s digital age, where the world’s knowledge is more
accessible than ever, we’re paralyzed with indecision
about where to focus our attention.
We need to manage information more effectively to get
ahead and arm ourselves with the knowledge that will help
us achieve our biggest, most audacious goals. We need,
what Forte calls, a Second Brain.
What Is a Second Brain?
A Second Brain is a digital commonplace book. Part study
notebook, part notebook, and part sketchbook for new
ideas, a second brain is a private knowledge collection
designed to serve a lifetime of learning and growth.
If you’re a knowledge worker—a professional for whom
your knowledge is your most valuable asset—your
knowledge is the basis for regularly coming up with ideas,
solving problems, and communicating effectively with
others.
Notetaking, says Forte, is one such way of storing
knowledge:
For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a
“knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of
information interpreted through your unique
perspective and stored outside your head.
If a piece of content has been interpreted through your
lens, curated according to your taste, translated into your
own words, or drawn from your life experience, and stored
in a secure place, then it qualifies as a note.
How a Second Brain Works
There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a
Second Brain to perform for us:
1. Making our ideas concrete. An idea, in its infancy, is
abstract. But when we turn an idea into a visual
entity, such as a digital note, we can begin to move it
from abstract to concrete.
2. Revealing new associations between ideas.
Formulating ideas is easier when we connect ideas.
By keeping all our ideas in one place, we can inspire
creativity and bridge gaps in our knowledge.
3. Incubating our ideas over time. When we go
beyond relying on ideas we can only think of right
now, we draw on weeks, months, or even years of
accumulated imagination.
4. Sharpening our unique perspectives. All too often,
our creative wells run dry, not because of something
wrong with us, but because we don’t yet have
enough raw materials to work with.
Digital notes apps have four powerful characteristics that
make them ideal for building a Second Brain. They are:
1. Multimedia
2. Informal
3. Open-ended
4. Action-oriented
There are three stages of progress Forte often observes—
and even encourages—as people set out on their Second
Brain journey. Those stages are remembering,
connecting, and creating.
The first way people use their Second Brain is as
a memory aid. The second way that people use their
Second Brain is to connect ideas. The third and final way
that people use their Second Brain is to create new
things.
To help guide people in creating a Second Brain, Forte has
developed a simple, intuitive four-part method called
“CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express—which he
explains throughout the remaining chapters.
Capture—Keep What Resonates
Knowledge is everywhere, waiting to be discovered. But
knowledge isn’t limited to the pages of didactic pursuits
or academic journals. Forte writes, “Knowledge capture is
about mining the richness of the reading you’re already
doing and the life you’re already living.”
Capturing a knowledge asset—anything that we can use in
the future to solve a problem, save time, illuminate a
concept, or learn from a past experience—can help
spark new creative ideas and realization in your inner
world.
To help inform knowledge worth collecting and
preserving, Forte suggests writing down your “Twelve
Favorite Problems,” inspired by Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Richard Feynman.
“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems
constantly present in your mind,” Feynman told one
interviewer. “Every time you hear or read a new trick or a
new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to
see whether it helps.”
A few examples of favorite problems from Forte’s past
students include,
How can we make society fairer and more equitable?
How can I make it a habit to exercise every day?
How can I have closer relationships with the people I
love?
How can I spend more of my time doing high-value
work?
How do I live less in the past and more in the
present?
How do I build an investment strategy that is aligned
with my mid-term and long-term goals and
commitments?
What does it look like to move from mindless
consumption to mindful creation?
How can I go to bed early instead of watching shows
after the kids go to bed?
How can my industry become more ecologically
sustainable while remaining profitable?
How can I work through the fear I have of taking on
more responsibility?
How can my school provide more resources for
students with special needs?
How do I start reading all the books I already have
instead of buying more?
How can I speed up and relax at the same time?
How can we make the healthcare system more
responsive to people’s needs?
What can I do to make eating healthily easier?
How can I make decisions with more confidence?
One of the biggest pitfalls of capturing digital notes, says
Forte, is saving too much and risking inundating your
future self with tons of irrelevant information. To help
decide which nuggets of knowledge are worth keeping,
ask yourself the following:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Does it inspire me?
Is it useful
Is it personal?
Is it surprising?
Organize—Save for Actionability
Forte found that most organization systems, while well-
meaning, complicated his life and kept him from his
priorities. One day, after realizing the ease behind
dropping all his notes and files into a folder for which
project he was focusing on, he made his own organization
system called PARA, which stands
for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.
Projects are short-term efforts in your work or life that
you’re working on, such as projects at work (complete
webpage design) or personal projects (finish Spanish
language course). Areas are the long-term responsibilities
you want to manage over time (e.g., “Finances”).
Resources are topics or interests that may be useful in the
future but don’t belong to a project or an area. Archives
are inactive items from the other three categories,
including completed or canceled projects, areas of
responsibility that you are no longer committed to
maintaining, and resources that are no longer relevant.
Here’s how Forte explains PARA in his own words,
PARA can handle it all, regardless of your profession or
field, for one reason: it organizes information based on
how actionable it is, not what kind of information it is.
Forte expands on this idea by comparing PARA and how
kitchens are organized. Everything in a kitchen is
designed and organized to support an outcome, not by
kind of food. Everything in PARA, by contrast, must be
organized according to where ideas are going (i.e., the
outcomes they can help you realize), not where they came
from.
Distill—Find the Essence
The third step of Forte’s CODE model, Distill, is about
taking the ideas we’ve captured and organized and
turning them into our own messages. To do that, we need
to highlight our notes’ most important points to improve
their discoverability—the ease behind how quickly we can
access the specific points that are most immediately
useful. (Forte adds at the conclusion of the chapter that a
true test of whether a note you’ve created is discoverable
is whether you can get the gist of it at a glance.)
The technique Forte teaches to distill notes down to their
most important points is called “Progressive
Summarization,” which involves taking the raw notes
you’ve captured and organized and distilling them into
usable material that can directly inform a current project.
Here’s how Forte explains Progressive Summarization,
The technique is simple: you highlight the main points
of a note and then highlight the main points of those
highlights, and so on, distilling the essence of a note in
several “layers.” Each of these layers uses a different
kind of formatting so you can easily tell them apart.
The first layer comprises the chunks of text initially
captured in your notes. But to enhance the discoverability
of a note, you need to a second later of distillation: bold
the main points within the note. That might include
keywords that provide hints of what the text is about,
phrases that capture what the original author was trying
to say, or sentences that especially resonate with you.
However, it’s sometimes worth adding a third layer of
emphasis using the “highlighting” feature in your
notetaking app for notes that are especially long,
interesting, or valuable.
For the final layer, reserved only for the very few truly
unique and valuable sources, you can add an “executive
summary” at the top of the note with a few bullet
points summarizing the article in your own words.
To borrow a meta example, you might have noticed that
I’ve used the second layer, bolding, throughout this book
summary. For a more in-depth example, here’s how I use
Progressive Summarization to improve the discoverability
of a book summary in Notion:
Forte concludes his chapter on distillation by offering a
few guidelines to help avoid the three common pitfalls
when highlighting your own notes:
1. Mistake #1: Over-Highlighting. A helpful rule of
thumb is that each layer of highlighting should
include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous
layer.
2. Mistake #2: Highlighting Without a Purpose in
Mind. The rule of thumb to follow is that every time
you “touch” a note, you should make it a little more
discoverable for your future self—by adding a
highlight, a heading, some bullets, or commentary.
3. Mistake #3: Making Highlighting Difficult. Rely on
your intuition to tell you when a passage is
interesting, counterintuitive, or relevant to your
favorite problems or current project.
Express—Show Your Work
Suppose we assume that creativity emerges not from
flashes of brilliance but from the everyday efforts to
gather and organize our influences. In that case, we can
begin expressing our ideas earlier, more frequently, and in
smaller chunks to test what works and gather feedback
from others.
Our ideas—distilled notes, outtakes, work-in-process, final
deliverables, documents created by others—are the
concrete, individual building blocks (or Intermediate
Packets, as Forte calls them) that we can create and reuse
in our work.
Take planning a conference, to borrow an example from
the book. You might think you have to plan such a megaproject from scratch. But if you look at its Intermediate
Packets (IPs)—a conference agenda, a list of interesting
breakout sessions, a checklist for streaming the keynote
sessions, to name a few—you might realize that you could,
instead, acquire or assemble each Packet from a previous
event you attended.
In truth, creativity isn’t about copying or even modeling
others. Rather, creativity is about tapping into the
essential ideas you distilled in the previous step, Distill,
and combining them into something new, perhaps even
changing our trajectory in the process.
Of course, given the unpredictability between IPs we’ve
saved in the past the future projects, there’s no single,
perfectly reliable retrieval system for finding them when
you need them. To help, Forte offers four retrieval
methods we can use in our notetaking apps:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Retrieval Method #1: Search
Retrieval Method #2: Browsing
Retrieval Method #3: Tags
Retrieval Method #4: Serendipity
Additional Notes and Highlights
“We spend countless hours reading, listening to, and
watching other people’s opinions about what we
should do, how we should think, and how we should
live, but make comparatively little effort applying that
knowledge and making it our own. So much of the
time we are ‘information hoarders; stockpiling
endless amounts of well-intentioned content that
only ends up increasing our anxiety.”
“To be able to make use of information we value, we
need a way to package it up and send it through time
to our future self. We need a way to cultivate a body
of knowledge that is uniquely our own, so when the
opportunity arises—whether changing jobs, giving a
big presentation, launching a new product, or starting
a business or a family—we will have access to the
wisdom we need to make good decisions and take
the most effective action. It all begins with the simple
act of writing things down.”
“If a piece of content has been interpreted through
your lens, curated according to your taste, translated
into your own words, or drawn from your life
experience, and stored in a secure place, then it
qualifies as a note.”
To avoid information overload, keep only what
resonates in a trusted place that you control and
leave the rest aside.
“The best way to organize your notes is to organize
for action, according to the active projects you are
working on right now. Consider new information in
terms of its utility, asking, ‘How is this going to help
me move forward with one of my current projects?’”
“Every time you take a note, ask yourself, ‘How can I
make this as useful as possible for my future self?’
That question will lead you to annotate the words and
phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you
were thinking, and what exactly caught your
attention. Your notes will be useless if you can’t
decipher them in the future or if they’re so long that
you don’t even try. Think of yourself not just as a
taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving
your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to
find and understand.”
Further Reading
The 4 Levels of Personal Knowledge Management by
Tiago Forte
How to Write a Book Summary (Step-by-Step) by
Sam Thomas Davies
Progressive Summarization: A Practical Technique for
Designing Discoverable Note by Tiago Forte
Recommended Reading
If you like Building a Second Brain, you might also like:
Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results by
James Clear
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a
Distracted World by Cal Newport
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free
Productivity by David Allen
Buy The Book: Building a Second Brain
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