Second Brain

A second brain is an external, personal knowledge system: a place where what you read, hear and think is captured, organized and later put to use, so that memory does not have to carry it. The term is tied to Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain methodology.

Forte’s framing (Mar 20, 2021 thread). Retrieval is “a matching problem”: matching a note captured in the past to a problem or opportunity that arises later. It is not inherently desirable, since if a note is never relevant “the ideal amount of retrieval is exactly zero,” and the motto should be “as much as necessary, as little as possible.” Because you cannot know when a note will matter, retrieval has to take almost no human attention. No single method suffices: search is powerful but tops out, and people also use folders, links, tags, graphs, annotation, their social networks, physical artifacts and discussion. He frames the work as a four-stage CODE framework:

• Capture sparingly: only the best and most relevant things least likely to be found through search.
• Organize with a single action, according to the most concrete near-term use, usually a project.
• Distill later, when preparing to act.
• Express early, often and widely, because “the collective social brain is so much more powerful than even the smartest person.”

In practice.

• Austen Allred (Jan 18, 2022) wrote up his “Second Brain Stack,” how he captures and synthesizes books, articles, podcasts and daily meetings, after years of refining it.
• Building a Second Brain in Roam is a practitioner’s walkthrough of implementing the methodology in Roam Research, adapting Forte’s P.A.R.A. folders with no Resources page because every page in a linked graph is already a resource.
• USV’s The Librarian is described as the institutional-scale counterpart: the Second Brain at personal scale, the Librarian at firm scale.
• Venkatesh Rao (via a saved 2x2) crosses a centralized-to-decentralized “first brain” with a “second brain” to produce four styles: Hedgehog, Fox, Cactus and Weasel (see Hedgehog vs. Fox).
• Twelve Favorite Problems supplies the reason to capture at all, per Forte’s course.
• One saved tweet borrows the language of a religious parable to describe affection for a “Note Taking System / Second Brain.”

Related: Knowledge Management, Note-Taking, Zettelkasten.

Where this appears

• Long reads: Building a Second Brain in Roam, USV’s The Librarian
• Concepts: Twelve Favorite Problems
• Tweets: 1- My Latest Thoughts on… (tweet), 2x2 x = first brain… (tweet), Incredible parable. You who have… (tweet), Finally Wrote Down How I… (tweet)