Building a Second Brain

Although I strongly enjoy the premise of the book, the book delivered little in actual practicality. This book is more to introduce the concept of the Second Brain or whatever you would like to call it. There are some nuggets within the text, but this book could have been a blog post.

Quotes:

According to the New York Times, the average person's daily consumption of information now adds up to a remarkable 34 gigabytes. A separate study cited by the Times estimates that we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers' worth of content each and every day, five times higher than in 1986.2 Instead of empowering us, this deluge of information often overwhelms us. Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we're forgetting something. Instantaneous access to the world's knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society-wide poverty of attention (p. 17)

Every bit of energy we spend straining to recall things is energy not spent doing the thinking that only humans can do: inventing new things, crafting stories, recognizing patterns, following our intuition, collaborating with others, investigating new subjects, making plans, testing theories. Every minute we spend trying to mentally juggle all the stuff we have to do leaves less time for more meaningful pursuits like cooking, self-care, hobbies, resting, and spending time with loved ones. (P. 18)

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. (P. 24)

Herbert Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...” (p. 31)

There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete. Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives. (P. 34)