Second Brain, Built!
Hi.
The Building A Second Brain course is done. I took it to learn how to:
“capture, organize, and share ideas and insights using digital notes, with a systematic approach and tools that you trust to support creative breakthroughs in your work.”
I used this newsletter to reflect and engage with course material.
This caused major struggle. Struggle to write. Struggle to make sense of what I write. Struggle to ask for and address feedback. Struggle to forgo ego and share.
Struggle is uncomfortable AND good. As author Jo Boaler states in Limitless Mind, “the more we struggle, the better the learning and brain growth.” Picture above from the same book.
That struggle resulted in these posts:
1/ Making Fruit on getting clear about why I’m taking the course
2/ Prep Work Makes the Dish Work on organizing information to support a “bias toward action” not perfection
3/ Playing in the Adjacent Space on progressive summarization and playing with ideas
4/ Map-maker: Make Me A Map on progressive summarization as map-making
To illustrate what this amounts to in practice I’ve recorded a short video walkthrough using Bear, Readwise and Instapaper. These latter tools capture highlights from books and articles.
Find that here: https://www.loom.com/share/397c6dcb8e874fed9a436c9582cafa3e
Other Tools I Use
Otter for transcribing podcast episodes, videos or voice memos. Here’s an example of a podcast episode I highlighted and annotated. The best part is I can export these into any note-taking app.
PDF Expert for marking up PDF’s and exporting only the highlights.
Dropbox for saving files that are too big for Bear (~25mb).
Procreate for sketches and illustrations.
My setup isn’t perfect but it’s an improvement in one of the key areas of any second brain:
It’s opportunistic: it help me take advantage of work I’ve already done and not require a huge amount of overhead time.
It’s easier to surface up knowledge that I’ve summarized and explore connections to make new things.
What’s Next?
I’ll continue sharing here, on twitter, linkedin and instagram.
One learning project that’s come out of this course is to improve my sketchnote-ability. That means improving my ability to communicate concepts using sketches. I’ve been impressed by the work Maggie Appleton (a mentor for the course) has done, illustrating programming concepts like this one for API’s:
In the meantime
Thank you for subscribing, reading, and sharing feedback these past weeks. Your presence has kept me accountable. And I’m grateful for it.
I’d love to know what you found helpful these past weeks (if anything)? And what would you like to hear more about?