How to Double Your Brain Power | Tiago Forte  ## Metadata - Author: [[Big Think]] - Full Title: How to Double Your Brain Power | Tiago Forte - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/27f7f4db-70cc-465c-8688-965e7c4c0e70 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Modern Minds Face Information Overload** - We take in far more information daily than our brains evolved to handle. - Tiago Forte calls this gap a problem that requires an external system to solve. Transcript: Tiago Forte 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. ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/679662ed-057f-427f-bd5f-9d302c309c50)) - **Reviving the Commonplace Book** - Historical societies used commonplace books to manage overflowing information. - Forte reframes the commonplace book as a single centralized repository for meaningful content today. Transcript: Tiago Forte 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 the 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 the stuff happening around you. ([Time 0:01:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ef1c7a00-43a3-41e4-a48e-7ed83f0dfc27)) - **Use C.O.D.E. To Build A Second Brain** - Build a personal system for knowledge management: capture, organize, distill, express (C.O.D.E.). - Use notes to preserve thinking so ideas remain available after your working memory resets. Transcript: Tiago Forte 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 code. C for capture, O for organize, D for distill, and E for express. Capturing information, organizing it, distilling it, and then expressing it in some way. Our memory, especially our working memory, is kind of like the RAM in a computer. It's fast, 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. ([Time 0:02:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/40aa75d6-ff56-43bb-995a-d4290f09d812)) - **Capture Feelings And Personal Wisdom** - Capture things that evoke feelings or reveal personal wisdom, not mere facts you can Google. - Save photographs, lines, stories, and lessons from life to revisit and learn from them over time. Transcript: Tiago Forte 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. ([Time 0:03:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4c047adc-4ca0-4f2c-8e83-0d8572ea93e8)) - **Save Surprises To Reveal Connections** - Save surprising or novel observations because your subconscious flags their value. - Centralizing those notes increases the chance you'll notice meaningful connections later. Transcript: Tiago Forte A great barometer for the things that are worth saving is things that surprise you, things that are genuinely novel, things that you 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 your 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. ([Time 0:04:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7c7b4d79-00d4-4920-8362-7b9a6faeaeae)) - **An Artist's Discipline Behind Creativity** - Tiago describes his father, a professional painter, as highly disciplined and structured. - This discipline enabled prolific creativity despite many family responsibilities. Transcript: Tiago Forte 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. ([Time 0:05:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4f1a45f6-21e5-4377-a024-a828a35e6625)) - **Productivity Is Half Of Creativity** - Creativity requires structure and routines as much as inspiration. - Productivity supplies the tools and discipline to translate ideas across domains into creative work. Transcript: Tiago Forte 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. It's 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. ([Time 0:05:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f9ed4c54-a480-4401-a7e4-d101eecee483))