The Curious Cat is a journey where I aim to reconnect with my inner-child and explore my curiosity. I pinpoint themes & topics I’ve been interested in recently, ask myself questions about them and then write about them. I hope you find value within this issue and have a fantastic day doing what you love.
I have decided to start writing book reviews. Both for myself and for you. Please do message me if you have different interpretations or ideas about the book.
I’ve been following Tiago Forte for a couple of years now; so when he published his book ‘Building a Second Brain’ I was keen to bite the bullet. It came at a particularly convenient time for me, as I have recently been slacking on this blog, and I was dedicating very little time to organising the stupid amount of information I process. Reading this book changed both of those. Without further ado, here are my thoughts after reading ‘Building a Second Brain.’
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
It is a hub of all the ‘best’ advice and literature surrounding Personal Knowledge Management and notetaking.
Your Second Brain is a digital area where you can efficiently store and access information.
Use C.O.D.E to take notes; then use P.A.R.A to organise & categorise these notes (not by topic, but by urgency).
📖 Who Should Read It?
Those who feel overwhelmed by floods of information. Not even that, but those who consume lots of information daily.
Those who are into note-taking, self-improvement and/or organisation.
Anyone whose main contribution to their work is their ideas, not their physical labour. For many, our success in the workforce depends on our ability to make use of the information more effectively and to think better, and faster. Having a 2nd Brain helps.
📒 Summary + Notes
To truly make an idea stick, you have to engage with it. The book shares 2 frameworks to help you achieve this:
CODE
andPARA.
CODE
stands for Capture Organise Distill and Express. Code is a method for consuming and storing helpful information.Capture: Selecting the info that resonates with you
Organise: Arranging & storing said information [use PARA]
Distil: Refine. Strip away unnecessary so only essential remains
Express: Sharing that knowledge in your own way. Gathering information for the sake of it isn’t productive. Only when you digest and express it, can it become knowledge.
CODE
helps shift your brain’s processing power away from information storage, to a place where it can invent, innovate and create. I’ve found that by obeying the laws ofCODE,
nothing I write or create truly gets lost - it gets saved for future use.To complement
CODE,
you can build a ‘waiting area’ where you quickly jot down the core idea and then organise it with finer detail in the future. I recommend docs.new or notion.new as quick methods for writing down an idea.Using
CODE
helps make connections between different notes. Sometimes creativity isn’t about the act of creation, but combining previous creations in a way that is uniquely your own.
PARA
is a tool shared by Tiago that helps us organise our information. Anything you write down should fit into one of these four categories. Instead of foldering items by category,PARA
organises per urgency. That way, you limit yourself to 4 main categories, as opposed to unlimited. Categorising by urgency, with the help of keyword search, makes finding information within your second brain a lot easier.Projects: short-term efforts working on now
Areas: Long-term responsibilities managed over time
Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in future
Archive: Inactive items.
When organising information with
PARA,
first you ask in which project can this help me with? If none, then you see which area/long-term responsibility it overlaps with. If still unclear, you then ask which resource does this belong to? And if you can’t answer any of the above, then it goes into the archive.When managing information, take inspiration from managers of money. When investors make money, they don’t immediately spend it all. They reinvest it so that it can provide compounding value for a future date. Same with information. Save it and use to your benefit later.
Helpful to embolden the main points within notes. That way you build an archipelago of key ideas that anyone can quickly digest.
Information comes in trends where it can be ‘hot’ and interesting one week, and then borderline useless the next week. So as the products of creativity are constantly changing, there is a case that the time spent on these products of creativity, learning facts and knowledge, could be better spent to master the process of creativity, which remains very similar today than it did 6000 years ago.
✍️ My Top Quotes
“Think of it as planting your own knowledge garden. And a garden is only as good as its seeds.”
“If we use busy as an excuse for not doing something what we are really saying is that it’s not a priority. Simply put: You don’t find the time to do something; you make the time to do things.”
“Everything not saved will by lost” - Nintendo Quit Screen message
“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day” - Lao Tzu
“The challenge we face in building a 2nd brain is how to establish a system for personal knowledge that frees up attention, instead of taking more of it.” “Habits reduce cognitive load and free-up mental capacity. It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity” - James Clear.
🍀 Impressions/How the Book Changed Me
After this book, I’m now significantly more confident that I will fulfil my objectives; solely because I have a powerful system pushing me on from behind.
Tiago’s book inspired me to get organised with my note-taking and information organisation. And that encouraged me to take more notes. And the positive endorphins emitted from that encouraged me to take even more notes, creating a positive feedback loop.
It introduced me to the idea that the mind is for having thoughts, not holding them.
If information is truly a valuable asset, it deserves to be managed, just like any other asset. You can plan for and strategies creativity.
Rating out of 10: This is a tricky one to review because despite it serving me incredibly well, I don’t think the book is THAT good. It’s one of those books that could’ve been written in 30 pages, instead of the 250 pages Tiago decided to give it. Definitely worth the money but struggling to give this a high rating. 6.5/10