Bookworm Transcripts

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I feel like this could be a long one, Mike.

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- It could be.

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This is gonna be a fun topic though.

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I can't wait to dive in here.

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- Yeah, and I know that you've had early access

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to this book, so I know that you've got

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a little bit of a leg up on me on this one,

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but I did finish it almost a week early,

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so I've had a little bit of time with it as well.

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So maybe we'll be uneven putting with that.

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However, before we can get into the thing

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that everybody wants us to get into this time around,

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we have some follow up to do, Mike.

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- We do.

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- And I don't really wanna talk about follow up

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this time around.

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(laughs)

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- Why is that?

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- As you would expect, two reasons.

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One, I didn't do either, one of mine.

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And--

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- Oh, come on.

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- I know, I know, I know.

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But two, I really didn't wanna do one of the two,

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so then that, yeah.

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- Yes, bad things.

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- Show.

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- Bad things happened.

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- Come on.

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- I know, right?

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- I was going to share my eulogy with six different people

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this week, you being one of them, and nobody else did it.

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(laughs)

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- Yep, yep.

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So this is partly because I,

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if I only had a brain, good job, Blake.

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I think that part of this is that I had a lot of time

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to set aside to do both of mine.

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One of was to write my eulogy.

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The other one was to create my daily plan type thingy,

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which is like the printable, daily, whatever,

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piece of paper.

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- Yep.

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- And I ended up, this was somewhat caught me off guard,

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I ended up taking last week off of work,

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so I wasn't around computers at all,

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so that meant that I had an entire week's worth of stuff

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that I didn't get done.

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So it happens, but on the positive note,

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I built a tree house for our girls,

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which is super fun. (laughs)

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- Nice job.

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- Yeah, telephone poles in the ground,

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tree house in the air, awesome, super fun.

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- Very big, very exciting.

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Okay, my failures have been talked about,

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can we talk about your stuff?

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Hopefully your system is bad as mine.

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- My failures instead.

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(laughs)

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- I said stuff, I didn't say fairs.

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- Sure, sure.

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(laughs)

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- No, so the ask what if this was really just trying

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to get myself to think bigger?

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What if, basically, I was able to do anything

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that I wanted to do?

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If failure wasn't an option, what would that look like for me?

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And I feel like that kind of manifested itself in my eulogy,

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which, I've gone back and forth on this,

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but whether I wanted to read it on air or not,

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I think I'm going to, just because

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I want other people to do this.

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I found the whole exercise very rewarding,

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so I'll share that in a second.

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- Okay.

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- The other one was what elements of my story

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do I want to make normal for my kids?

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And as I started thinking about this,

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I realized that all the elements of my story

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that I want to make normal are kind of expressed

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through the core values that we've identified.

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So all of the individual things,

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I even shared some examples in the last episode

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of the one on ones that I do with my kids.

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I want that to become a normal part of my story

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that my kids choose to implement in their own families

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when they have the opportunity.

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We have this thing at church after prayer,

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I have a different handshake I do with each one of my kids.

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They've all got their own special handshake.

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We do them all one right after the other,

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just as a way to make prayer a fun thing.

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And so there's lots of stuff like that,

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which as I was thinking about those things,

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I realized that the specifics there,

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the actual activities aren't as important

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as the values that they're based on.

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And if I really instill the values,

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then the activities take care of themselves.

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It's kind of like lead versus lag measures

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for personal stuff.

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So I didn't spend a whole lot of time on that one.

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All right, enough dilly dallying.

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Here's the eulogy.

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You ready for this?

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- Hit me.

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- All right, now this was interesting timing, by the way,

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because as I was working on this week,

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my wife's grandmother passed away.

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So we went to a funeral and heard a eulogy

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and got the little brochure thing

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with the thing printed on the back.

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So I had a real life example to go off of.

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And I realized looking at that,

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that there were, that shaped how mine finished up,

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but it also highlighted things of a standard eulogy

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that I wanted to change.

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So here we go.

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Mike Schmitz was a loving husband to his wife Rachel,

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an ever-present father to Toby, Joshua, Jonathan,

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Malachi, and Adelaide.

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Family was his first ministry,

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and he always made sure to put them first.

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He frequently said no to work and business opportunities

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to spend time and go on adventures

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with the people that he valued most.

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Mike was a committed member of his church.

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When he wasn't spending time with his family,

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he could often be found serving there.

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He believed that God had blessed him richly,

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and he gave generously of his time and treasure

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to those who had need.

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Mike's life was driven by a desire to be a good steward

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of what was entrusted to him by God.

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He desired to inspire, encourage, and teach others

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to connect to their calling, discover their destiny,

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and live a life they were created for.

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Everything he did was filtered through his life theme,

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and he helped others to accept responsibility,

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glean clarity, and take action

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in living a purpose-driven and meaningful life.

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He was an entrepreneur who loved building businesses

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and making art.

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Before he died, he wrote "Sover in New York Times"

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best-selling books and gave away over $10 million.

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There's the thinking bigger part.

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- Nice.

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- He taught his kids to be lifelong learners

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and discover their own creativity.

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They've all followed in his footsteps

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as creative entrepreneurs who live life on their own terms.

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What do you think?

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- Well done, sir.

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The only thing, there's only one point that stood out to me

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that was like, hmm, that seems odd,

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was the $10 million piece.

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And the only reason I say that is not because

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of the thinking big piece, it's just like,

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okay, why does that need to be in there?

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'Cause just from my perspective,

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if giving away $10 million is something

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that you want to aspire towards,

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my guess is that at some point,

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you're probably gonna reach the mindset

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where you really don't want people to know about it.

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- That's fair, yeah.

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So that number really means nothing

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other than it's unattainable for me right now.

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- Sure, sure.

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It just seems odd from,

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I'm looking at this perspective of this is your public

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publish in the pamphlet at your funeral perspective, right?

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I don't know that I would put it in that.

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However, that said, having a personal eulogy

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that is not shared publicly, this would be spot on.

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- Exactly, so this is not actually intended

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to be shared publicly.

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I feel like some of the stuff in Domino Miller's example,

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there was some specific things in there.

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He didn't have a specific number in terms

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of how much money he made or gave away or something like that.

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But I put it in there just because I want

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to give more than I take.

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And I picked a number that was absurd

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that would force my world to be drastically different

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in order for me to hit it, right?

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So, yeah, I definitely wouldn't want this exact thing

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printed in a paper that's handed out

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at my actual funeral.

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But as I read through it though,

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that's also one of the more exciting

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or motivating parts of it for me.

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So I feel like it does its job.

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And again, I probably, I don't know,

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an argument could be made that this was never meant

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to be read out loud, but I want other people to do this.

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So I shared it.

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- Yeah, yeah, no, it's spot on.

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I'm glad that you went through it.

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I'm gonna do my best to make sure I've got mine done

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by the time we talk next.

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So I'm not discarding the two action items

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that I completely failed on.

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Just because I took the week off,

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like I just need to get it going again.

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- Sure.

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- And today's book's gonna give me more action items.

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So this is the way things go, right?

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- Is it will?

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(laughs)

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- So anyway, well done.

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It's a pretty solid eulogy, I would say.

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- Hey, thanks.

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- So, unless there's something else

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we need to chit chat about before we get into

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a potentially long episode here,

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we should jump into this one.

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This is, today's book is Building a Second Brain

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by Tiago Forte.

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And I have to say there are a lot,

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well, there's a lot of buzz about this book right now.

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And part of me thinks that that's partially

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because of the size of Tiago's audience

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and just him being able to do that sort of thing.

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At the same time, it's also,

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this book has a lot of a promise behind it

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that is pretty solid as well.

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So because of those two,

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I think it ends up elevating it quite high

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in the marketing and buzz worlds.

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So some of that's probably justified, some of it.

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Maybe, we'll see.

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So we'll see how this episode goes.

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- I'm actually gonna push back on that a little bit,

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I think, in terms of the size of the audience that Tiago has.

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Maybe he has more influence than I realize,

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but when I think about building a second brain

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and compare it to something like Atomic Habits by James Clear,

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I feel like James Clear was starting at a point

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where he was much further ahead than Tiago was.

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And what I have seen from following both of those journeys

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fairly closely, it feels like Tiago's is accelerating

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faster than James Clear's was.

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And I think that is partly maybe in terms of the promise

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of the whole building a second brain idea.

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Partly, he's got a potentially very resonating message.

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I think the quick trajectory that we've seen with this

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is an indication that,

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separating it from the book that we're about to discuss,

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that the idea itself is very important to people right now.

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- Yeah, and I think that's the latter part of what I was saying,

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like the concept of what he has is striking a chord

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as opposed to the size of the audience.

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I mean, he does have, from my perspective,

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he does have a pretty large following.

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I wouldn't say it's on the James Clear level,

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and it's certainly not like Tim Ferriss level,

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or Jill Rogan level, like we're not talking about that size,

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but size enough that you send out a few newsletters

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and you've got a few thousand copies sold,

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like at that scale, he's definitely there.

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So that sometimes is all it takes to start creating that buzz.

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As long as there's a little bit of authenticity involved

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and there's some truth behind what you're promoting, right?

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There has to be some element there.

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That's the part I wanna try to flush out today,

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is how does this concept of a second brain,

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the promise of a second brain,

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as the introduction is here,

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how does that impact us?

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Maybe, specifically you and I Mike,

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but also the digital world in general,

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'cause I know that that's,

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essentially we're gonna be talking about PKMs a lot today.

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(laughs)

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I think that's pretty obvious.

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So just what are the ramifications of that,

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and why is that needed?

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So there's a lot of that discussion

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that's gonna come out here.

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So, we'll see, see how it goes.

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All right.

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That all said, the introduction starts us off

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with the promise of a second brain.

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Basically, what are you gonna get out of this?

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And it's kind of a, why should you do this?

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And he has, I think, is it just the one list?

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Yeah, there is a list in here,

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that the building a second brain,

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which you should know,

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building a second brain started,

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maybe you should speak to this.

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It started as a video course, or like a cohort?

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Is it a cohort or a video course?

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I think it's kind of both.

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- To be honest, I don't know exactly how it started.

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I do remember seeing it show up, though,

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as a $99 course back in the day.

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- Yes.

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- That might have been--

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- It is far from that now.

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(laughs)

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- Yeah, it is much more expensive now.

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I have actually gone through it,

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and I can recommend it.

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I have things that I disagree with

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in the system itself,

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which I'm sure we will talk about.

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Yeah, but I will say that the course itself

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that Tiago has put together is very, very good.

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He has, at this point, I think 15 or 16 different cohorts

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that he's done, so he's got a whole bunch of alumni,

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and they come in and they present some guest sessions

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on how they've implemented it in different tools

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and things like that,

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which is a pretty genius approach.

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It's expensive, like I said,

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and I think for most people who are listening to this episode,

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if you're unsure about building a second brain,

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the place to start is absolutely going to be

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to read this book first.

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That being said, if you are convinced

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that building a second brain might be for you

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and you just hesitating based on the high price tag,

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you get out of these sorts of courses,

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what you put into it,

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but I can put my stamp of approval on this one,

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and I would recommend it,

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but it is gonna be intensive

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and it's gonna take some work.

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- Yeah, I know that it started out much cheaper.

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If you do some digging online and try to figure out,

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is it worth it or not?

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You'll run across articles and forums

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and stuff where people have talked about like,

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"Hey, yeah, I did this,"

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but it was $200 when I did it,

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and now it's 800.

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I don't know where it's at right now.

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- More than 800. - So it's not cheap, I know that.

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So anyway, that said,

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the beginning of this book in the introduction,

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he's basically spelling out why a second brain

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and what is it that you're going to get out of this?

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Honestly, a lot of it,

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from my perspective, if I had to distill this down,

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it has to do with being able to find things quickly,

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like just raw facts that you've collected,

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and maybe the other side of that

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is being able to process your thoughts ahead of time.

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Right?

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Again, this is probably your territory.

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Interesting that I'm leading this,

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but to me, it's one collecting things quickly,

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finding things quickly,

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but then processing your thoughts ahead of time.

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Thus, the thinking part of this

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and trying to get things out of your head,

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the second brain, quote unquote,

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like that's where that's starting to come from.

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So you're externalizing thoughts and thinking

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so that you have something to reference later

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that you can then process.

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What do you want to add to that, Mike?

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Sounds good to me.

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(laughs)

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Figured it would.

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So let's jump into the book itself.

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Surprise, surprise.

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Guess what?

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Three parts, introduction, three parts,

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plus a bonus chapter.

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Did you do the bonus chapter, Mike?

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I realized when you put the outline together

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that I did not.

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(laughs)

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My previous one didn't have it,

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and I didn't bother to go read the hardcover one

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that showed up in the mail.

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So I completely missed the section.

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That being said, I have thoughts on the tagging itself.

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So.

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Okay.

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So that'll be a fun one-sided conversation.

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That all.

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Well, if you want to open this can of worms right now,

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I will say the issues that I have with this

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is that he doesn't really talk about

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the bidirectional linking in apps

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like Obsidian and Rome and Kraft and stuff like that.

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So our view tagging is just another way to organize things,

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just like folders, just like bidirectional links.

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Like when you use all these things together

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you can achieve some cool results.

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I have no interest in how specifically

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you want me to do this per para.

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So.

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I will say that what you just described

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as far as like tagging as a way to find things,

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that is what he recommends you don't do.

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So that's not what he wants you to do with him.

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We'll get into that.

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That'll be fun.

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We'll get there.

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I suppose you probably know as you point on that,

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even though you didn't read it, but yes.

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So let's jump into part one here,

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which is the foundation.

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And I didn't list all the chapters in the outline

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'cause I didn't want to follow the chapters exactly.

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So the three chapters, as I work my way there,

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are where it all started, what is the second brain

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and how a second brain works.

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And the first chapter of those where it all started,

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which by the way, I noticed the very beginning,

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he does what a lot of people do with nonfiction books.

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He's got quotes at the very beginning of the chapters.

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And the very first quote is by none other than David Allen

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of getting things done fame.

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Your mind is for having ideas not holding them,

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which is probably one of David Allen's most commonly

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quoted phrases, I guess.

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So yes, interesting that he started out there.

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But anyway, he tells the story about how

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he suddenly experienced pain,

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like physical pain.

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And then it became unexplained as far as where it was coming from.

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And he goes through this whole thing

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of trying to figure out where it is

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and ultimately lands on the process of writing things down,

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getting things out of his head,

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so that he can then see them all

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and try to make connections between them.

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And to summarize the end of the story there, it works.

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It helps him find ways to help alleviate the pain

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and get healthier.

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Again, not gonna go into the details there.

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But the point he's trying to make is like externalizing things

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and writing things down is ultimately what led him

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to having success in coming up with the ideas

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in what to do from there.

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Thus, second brains are important.

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That's what he's telling us.

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- So to summarize his health issues,

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this is in my node file,

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the pain in his throat was only treated

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by anti-seizure medication.

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And one of the side effects of that medication

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was severe short-term memory loss

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and a numbing sensation throughout the body.

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So pretty severe side effects.

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What he did is he asked for his complete patient file

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and he started digitizing everything which started

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and then started to manage his health

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with some different lifestyle changes.

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So building a second brain, the whole idea

00:19:34

was born out of a season of pain

00:19:37

and trying to find a solution

00:19:38

to a very real physical problem that he was dealing with.

00:19:43

I feel like that's the best way to start this story.

00:19:46

You know?

00:19:47

- Yeah.

00:19:48

- A lot of people,

00:19:50

a lot of the productivity books that we read,

00:19:53

a lot of the gurus that create the systems,

00:19:56

they try to make it,

00:19:57

they try to make this thing

00:20:00

that's generally applicable to all these different people.

00:20:03

But how they start the explanation

00:20:06

of how they arrived at that system

00:20:07

is really important to me.

00:20:09

If it's not born out of you solving a problem

00:20:12

that you had yourself,

00:20:13

if you're just trying to answer a problem

00:20:15

that you see somewhere else,

00:20:17

but you haven't had to wrestle through it yourself,

00:20:19

I got no time for you.

00:20:20

But this is a very authentic,

00:20:22

I feel a very vulnerable start.

00:20:24

Had a Tago Forte on the Focus podcast

00:20:27

and he talked about this.

00:20:29

Wasn't sure how comfortable he was gonna be

00:20:32

talking live about the specific things

00:20:35

that he had struggled with,

00:20:36

but he was very open and honest about it.

00:20:40

So I have a lot of respect for him as a person.

00:20:45

And I feel this is a very good introduction

00:20:49

to the whole concept.

00:20:52

You have my attention

00:20:54

and you have authority in my eyes

00:20:56

to speak to this at this point.

00:20:58

Oh, other thing regarding David Allen,

00:21:01

there's actually a David Allen Blurb,

00:21:02

I think on the back of the book cover maybe.

00:21:06

And I think building a second brain

00:21:09

probably has a lot of similarities to GTD.

00:21:14

It feels kind of like GTD for the modern age.

00:21:19

That's very general

00:21:24

and I'm sure there's places where that analogy falls down,

00:21:26

but I feel like building a second brain now

00:21:30

is maybe what GTD was 20 years ago.

00:21:33

Yeah, that might be true.

00:21:35

I know that, again, if you do some digging on this online,

00:21:39

there's quite a few folks.

00:21:41

There's obviously people on both sides of the fence,

00:21:43

people who will say building a second brain is terrible

00:21:46

and you should never have anything to do with it.

00:21:48

And there are folks who say like,

00:21:49

"This changed my life and it's what everybody should do."

00:21:53

There's obviously people on both sides of the fence.

00:21:54

Same thing with GTD, same deal.

00:21:57

But there are quite a few folks who talk about

00:22:00

how this has so many similarities and connections to GTD.

00:22:05

Like it has a lot of the same methodologies behind it

00:22:10

if you look at the core philosophies and not the technicals.

00:22:14

So like that's what they're getting at now.

00:22:16

Having gone through this and reading the book on it,

00:22:20

like I can see where they're making that point

00:22:24

and there are elements of it.

00:22:26

I guess that's true, but, and I've said this for a while,

00:22:29

there are a lot of elements of GTD

00:22:31

that are just natural human actions.

00:22:34

Like it's not something that David Allen invented

00:22:36

and proposed and then people adopted and it became a big deal.

00:22:41

He was simply acknowledging something

00:22:42

that people do naturally,

00:22:44

thus like his natural planning model.

00:22:47

So like stuff like that comes about.

00:22:48

Now I don't like the whole of GTD.

00:22:52

You know, we've talked about that.

00:22:54

But at the same time, I think you and I would both agree,

00:22:57

we don't necessarily like the whole

00:22:59

of building a second brain either.

00:23:02

Just from the quick interactions you and I've had,

00:23:05

I would assume you're putting on that,

00:23:06

but maybe I'm putting words in your mouth.

00:23:08

Yes.

00:23:10

Anyway, let's keep going here.

00:23:11

What is a second brain is the second chapter in this,

00:23:16

he gives us kind of a history, I guess, of like,

00:23:20

this isn't something new.

00:23:21

Like a lot of times when people see this

00:23:24

or talk about BASB, they will refer to things like PARRA,

00:23:29

now code, and then also like, this is a new concept.

00:23:34

Well, no, he takes us back and it's like,

00:23:36

okay, no, this is something that people have done

00:23:38

for a long time in the concept of like commonplace books

00:23:42

or just notebooks in general.

00:23:44

People have grabbed onto the collection of ideas

00:23:48

and tried to find ways to organize those.

00:23:50

So it's not a new thing.

00:23:52

You know, trying to externalize things.

00:23:54

Anyone who has worked in the world of knowledge work,

00:23:58

like this is definitely something

00:23:59

that you're doing somehow.

00:24:02

And it's something that more and more people

00:24:05

are needing to do, 'cause more and more people

00:24:06

are working in the world of knowledge,

00:24:08

as opposed to being welders and pipe fitters,

00:24:12

plumbers, electricians and such.

00:24:14

Like there's not as many people in those trades.

00:24:16

So anyway, there's a whole bunch,

00:24:18

like there's a whole nother issue of people not being,

00:24:20

in those trades I know there's a shortage of that,

00:24:21

but at the same time, like we work in knowledge.

00:24:24

Like this is something we need to think about doing

00:24:27

is how do we collect our own ideas?

00:24:28

How do we process them?

00:24:29

How do we think ahead, et cetera, et cetera.

00:24:32

- Yeah, I like the part in this chapter

00:24:36

about the commonplace book.

00:24:38

The commonplace book is something that I had heard about

00:24:41

before, but I never really understood the history of it.

00:24:46

Interestingly, in the MacPower users forum,

00:24:50

there's a whole bunch of people who are complaining

00:24:52

at the moment about Tiago's use of the commonplace book

00:24:57

and how it really started somewhere else.

00:25:00

And I just kind of laugh at those comments,

00:25:02

like whatever, congratulations,

00:25:04

maybe you're technically right.

00:25:06

Who cares?

00:25:07

(laughs)

00:25:09

Commonplace book as Tiago defines it is a place

00:25:12

to connect bits of information from other sources.

00:25:15

And I think that's a really cool idea.

00:25:18

I had been doing that for a long time inside of day one.

00:25:22

I was using it not just for journaling,

00:25:24

but I was using it to collect quotes that I wanted to keep.

00:25:27

I was building a database of these quotes

00:25:29

that I wanted to remember.

00:25:32

And when he talks about the second brain

00:25:33

being a digital commonplace book

00:25:35

and he gave a couple of specific examples

00:25:37

that he used it for, like a study notebook,

00:25:38

a personal journal, sketchbook for new ideas.

00:25:41

I mean, those are the ones that resonated with me.

00:25:43

I mean, yeah, that's basically how I'm using obsidian

00:25:46

at the moment.

00:25:48

But I never really considered obsidian to be a second brain

00:25:52

just because everything that goes along

00:25:53

with building a second brain,

00:25:55

and this isn't Tiago's fault,

00:25:57

but I feel like a lot of people have latched on

00:25:59

to a surface level understanding of some article

00:26:03

that he wrote and they're like, oh yeah, yeah, I get it.

00:26:05

I get it.

00:26:06

I know all about that second brain stuff.

00:26:07

You don't need to talk to me about that anymore.

00:26:10

And if I'm Tiago, I'm really frustrated

00:26:12

'cause I'm like, no, you don't get it.

00:26:14

I'm like, you understood the technical process

00:26:17

for progressive summarization or something

00:26:19

and you decided that it wasn't for you

00:26:21

and you just wrote off the entire idea

00:26:24

without getting to understand what it really means.

00:26:27

And so the whole idea of a commonplace book

00:26:29

at the beginning here, this resonates.

00:26:32

This, I feel kind of sets the stage

00:26:35

like building a second brain,

00:26:36

that the second brain could be anything that you want.

00:26:39

It could be one specific bucket

00:26:41

for this type of thing that you wanna collect.

00:26:43

And if that's all it was, then you've got a second brain.

00:26:46

You don't have to manage everything out of a single app,

00:26:51

which is kind of how I think some people think about it.

00:26:54

He also does a really good job

00:26:55

of articulating the pain points.

00:26:57

The average US employees spend 76 hours,

00:27:00

76 hours per year, I think I missed the term there.

00:27:04

Looking for misplaced notes, items, or files.

00:27:07

And 26% of a typical Knowledge Workers Day

00:27:10

is looking for and consolidating information across systems.

00:27:14

So much wasted time for what.

00:27:18

(laughs)

00:27:20

And this also kind of speaks to

00:27:24

what kind of information are you trying to manage?

00:27:26

Are you trying to manage all the information?

00:27:29

Which is what I've saw a lot of people do

00:27:31

with Evernote back in the day.

00:27:33

Just dump it all in there.

00:27:34

I mean, even the logo, it's an elephant, right?

00:27:37

'Cause an elephant never forgets anything.

00:27:38

You've got it in your system.

00:27:40

If you ever need to go back and find it.

00:27:42

And I feel like that is selling the whole concept

00:27:45

of a second brain a little bit short.

00:27:47

Yeah, I think it's easy.

00:27:49

We love to rip on Evernote.

00:27:51

Anytime it's something along Evernote's lines comes up,

00:27:54

at least I do.

00:27:55

I love to rip on it.

00:27:55

It's not the tool though, it's how people use it.

00:27:58

Correct.

00:27:59

Yes, so the thing that,

00:28:02

at least I tend to overlook

00:28:04

because it's more fun to rip on a tool like that,

00:28:07

is that despite the fact that I think Evernote

00:28:10

was regularly used incorrectly,

00:28:14

I think it definitely opened the doors

00:28:17

or helped us learn ways to operate

00:28:21

with collecting, collected information.

00:28:24

Thus, we've been led to things like Rome Research

00:28:26

in Obsidian and Notion and Craft and et cetera, et cetera.

00:28:30

Like those tools have kind of built on

00:28:32

what Evernote started.

00:28:34

So I'm not gonna give all the credit to Evernote

00:28:37

by any means, but I think it's definitely a part

00:28:40

of that puzzle in helping us to understand it.

00:28:42

Thus leading us to some of what Tiago Forte

00:28:46

is telling us about here in this book.

00:28:48

So it is still,

00:28:49

I think it is still a tool that people can use well.

00:28:54

He's gotta be smart in how you do it.

00:28:56

So.

00:28:57

Yes.

00:28:58

'Cause doesn't Tiago still use it?

00:28:59

I think he uses Evernote still.

00:29:01

He does.

00:29:02

I believe in the focused episode,

00:29:06

he mentioned that he doesn't like to use an app

00:29:10

that's less than 10 years old.

00:29:11

Okay, sure.

00:29:13

'Cause he wants it to be around for the long haul

00:29:16

and I think that is a perfectly valid approach.

00:29:19

I mean Obsidian, even though it's been around

00:29:21

for a couple of years now, is technically still in beta.

00:29:24

They could decide, you know what,

00:29:25

there's no business model here, let's shut it down,

00:29:27

let's go home.

00:29:28

At that point, I don't know what I'm gonna do.

00:29:31

Hopefully they open source it

00:29:34

and you and I can take over and start running away.

00:29:37

Yeah, there's definitely other options at this point.

00:29:39

I consider this to be the golden age for note-taking apps.

00:29:44

There's a lot of really cool things,

00:29:45

a lot of really interesting things

00:29:48

that are possible now.

00:29:50

And it's kind of interesting,

00:29:52

it's like modern note-taking apps

00:29:54

built on a very old technology, markdown files, plaintext.

00:29:58

But what you can do with those plaintext files is,

00:30:01

it's kind of mind-blowing when you think about it.

00:30:05

Yep, especially if you learn shell scripting, Mike,

00:30:08

you should do that.

00:30:10

I would love to see you write a shell script.

00:30:12

(laughing)

00:30:13

I'd be very excited to run it the first time.

00:30:15

Well, maybe I wouldn't, maybe I wouldn't do that.

00:30:18

That might be a bad idea.

00:30:19

Might be a bad idea.

00:30:20

We found a watch though.

00:30:21

(laughing)

00:30:23

Okay, let's go into the third chapter here

00:30:25

'cause we haven't even made it to the meat of this.

00:30:27

How a second brain works.

00:30:30

And I think we'll, as we go through part two,

00:30:33

I think we'll end up talking about

00:30:35

like some of the technicals of what this could look like

00:30:37

or what a second brain looks like.

00:30:39

But in this section,

00:30:42

at least the part that stood out to me is he talks about

00:30:45

like the superpowers of a second brain.

00:30:48

And there's four that he works through.

00:30:52

One is making our ideas concrete.

00:30:55

So because you're externalizing things

00:30:57

and you have things somewhere that you can process it,

00:31:00

it becomes something more long-term.

00:31:02

So it's something you can build off of.

00:31:04

So making our ideas concrete,

00:31:06

revealing new association between ideas.

00:31:09

So because you have them externalized,

00:31:11

you can now start to have them pop up in places

00:31:15

where you wouldn't expect them.

00:31:16

Thus new associations between different areas.

00:31:19

The third one incubating our ideas over time.

00:31:22

Again, because you have it external,

00:31:25

it can come back up later, like 10 years later,

00:31:28

and then start to process it

00:31:31

and distill it quite a bit more.

00:31:33

And then the last one, sharpening our unique perspectives.

00:31:37

That's kind of what I was talking about early on

00:31:38

is how if you're able to externalize your thoughts,

00:31:42

you've now created a way for you to process your own ideas

00:31:46

and thinking ahead of time.

00:31:47

And then when you're in a conversation,

00:31:50

kind of like what you and I are having, Mike,

00:31:53

you kind of know what you think already.

00:31:54

So then when someone asks you a question,

00:31:57

there's not this, I don't know.

00:31:59

I don't know what I'm thinking about that.

00:32:01

Or you say something or a phrase

00:32:03

or a monologue of sorts trying to pass the time

00:32:07

because you haven't processed it.

00:32:09

Instead, you've already thought through some of those ideas.

00:32:12

So then you can speak intelligently about it

00:32:14

instead of putting off the question.

00:32:17

As people will do sometimes in interviews

00:32:19

when I go off script, super fun to do that.

00:32:23

So, yes, these are the four superpowers.

00:32:27

What do you want to add to that?

00:32:28

- I would just add that in the situation

00:32:31

that you described about thinking about something ahead

00:32:34

of time and deciding what you really think,

00:32:36

the real value of this is not in predicting those moments

00:32:39

and being ready for every possible scenario,

00:32:42

but recognizing when you get asked one of those questions

00:32:44

and you don't have a good answer being like,

00:32:45

"Huh, I should figure that out."

00:32:48

And valuing, figuring it out enough

00:32:51

to put some notes into your second brain

00:32:56

as Tiago defines it.

00:32:58

As he's talking about these superpowers of a second brain,

00:33:01

every single one of these, I completely agree with.

00:33:05

And if you would have given me this list

00:33:07

prior to reading "Building a Second Brain,"

00:33:10

I'd been like, "Yes, 100%.

00:33:11

"That is what I believe."

00:33:13

And then if you would ask me,

00:33:15

"So are you gonna do "Building a Second Brain?"

00:33:16

and be like, "No, not for me."

00:33:18

(laughs)

00:33:19

Right, so I feel like I, for a long time,

00:33:22

had an improper understanding of what this actually was.

00:33:26

But this is really just the creative process.

00:33:29

I mean, all of these things have kind of discovered over time

00:33:33

through like, steel like an artist

00:33:36

and all those conversations that we've had about collecting

00:33:40

and connecting dots and things like that.

00:33:42

That's really what he's talking about here.

00:33:45

And so I think there's a link between the whole

00:33:48

second brain idea and creating,

00:33:52

which is not explicitly seen.

00:33:58

You first come across "Building a Second Brain"

00:34:00

and you probably think kind of like I did

00:34:03

with "Ever Note" back in the day.

00:34:05

So it's a thing that I dump stuff in

00:34:07

and then I never have to worry

00:34:08

about being able to find something again.

00:34:11

But that's not really it.

00:34:12

It's really about what are you gonna do

00:34:16

with the quality, not the quantity,

00:34:19

of the things that you put into it.

00:34:22

And the whole idea of incubating,

00:34:24

that's interesting to me.

00:34:25

For a long time, I actually described Obsidian

00:34:30

as my greenhouse for my ideas,

00:34:32

which I think fits that whole idea really well.

00:34:36

Like you don't really even know what an idea is

00:34:39

until you've given it some time

00:34:42

and you've bounced it around in your brain

00:34:44

and looked at this thing a few times

00:34:46

and you can figure out different ways

00:34:48

to connect it to some different things.

00:34:50

But your brain is kind of doing that anyways.

00:34:54

If you're reading all the books that we're reading

00:34:56

and you're collecting all these different dots,

00:34:58

your brain is gonna start connecting some of these things

00:35:00

in new and interesting ways automatically.

00:35:02

But what's so fascinating to me about

00:35:04

these connected notes apps is that graph

00:35:06

and the ability to actually see for the first time

00:35:10

the types of connections that I believe my brain

00:35:13

was making anyways.

00:35:15

But now I can kind of see it externally.

00:35:19

It is my second brain in a sense.

00:35:22

But also I can influence it.

00:35:25

I can see the things that are there

00:35:26

that I don't recognize there's a connection there

00:35:29

in my brain and I can be inspired by that connection

00:35:32

and I can formalize it with a couple of brackets

00:35:36

and then I'm off to the races

00:35:37

'cause you never know what that one connection,

00:35:40

what sort of chain reaction that is going to trigger.

00:35:44

But the ultimate goal has to be, I think,

00:35:46

the output, the sharpening your unique perspective.

00:35:49

How are you gonna do that?

00:35:51

I mean, it can't just be enhancing your thinking.

00:35:55

There's gotta be some output associated with it, I believe.

00:35:58

Whether that's writing it down into a notebook

00:36:00

or creating a blog post, recording a video,

00:36:02

even if it's just the whole, I know you hit the idea

00:36:05

like the map of content, right?

00:36:07

But that sort of idea, the workbench where you're playing

00:36:09

with these things and deciding for yourself,

00:36:11

what do I actually think about this?

00:36:13

There's a lot of inspiration and revelation

00:36:16

that comes from that process.

00:36:19

- Yeah, for sure.

00:36:20

I think, well, let's keep going 'cause I think

00:36:24

more of what I'm thinking about what you just said

00:36:27

is gonna come out as we continue here.

00:36:30

So let's jump into part two and in order to do that,

00:36:34

I'm gonna wrap up the last part of part one

00:36:37

because he introduces this framework called code.

00:36:42

I think I mentioned that a little bit ago.

00:36:44

Code is an acronym that stands for capture,

00:36:49

organize, distill, express.

00:36:52

And the next four chapters in part two,

00:36:55

each chapter is dedicated to one of those letters,

00:37:00

one of those components.

00:37:02

And the first one of those is capture.

00:37:07

The tagline on this is keep what resonates.

00:37:10

And one thing that I haven't really done in the past,

00:37:15

capture is one of those things that,

00:37:19

even to use that term, makes me immediately think of GTD.

00:37:23

I can't help that, it's just immediately what came to mind.

00:37:28

But one of the things that he calls out here

00:37:32

is that you don't necessarily need to capture everything.

00:37:38

And this is, I think maybe the deciding factor

00:37:41

that differentiates this from what we all used to do

00:37:46

in Evernote was just capture everything and all the things

00:37:48

and put it all in one spot and hope you could find it later.

00:37:51

In here, he even has a section of what not to keep in this.

00:37:57

And I'm not used to someone telling me that.

00:38:02

In the world of digital files,

00:38:04

it's easy to keep everything and never get rid of anything.

00:38:09

So it's just interesting, like, okay, don't keep this,

00:38:12

get rid of this.

00:38:13

So I'm not used to that.

00:38:15

So anyway, that's a little bit refreshing

00:38:17

to have someone take that perspective.

00:38:20

There's more I wanna say about this, but I'll pause

00:38:23

'cause I think there's so many places you could go with this.

00:38:28

Capture is an important piece 'cause like,

00:38:30

that's the point at which you're grabbing the big thing

00:38:34

to get it out of your head.

00:38:35

Like that's your starting point, right?

00:38:37

If you don't have that process super simple,

00:38:41

it doesn't happen at all.

00:38:42

I have this habit on my phone.

00:38:46

I still do it today.

00:38:47

What's the number one thing we'll do

00:38:50

before they lock their phone?

00:38:53

Like it's pretty common, you'll swipe up

00:38:54

and it takes you back to the home screen, right?

00:38:56

Like that's the most common thing that people will do

00:38:59

when they're closing their phone.

00:39:01

Mine's a little bit different.

00:39:02

I have drafts in the dock and my habit is to swipe up

00:39:06

out of whatever app I'm in and tap that and lock it.

00:39:09

Oh yeah, that's right.

00:39:10

I've done this for a very long time,

00:39:12

which means every single time I open my phone,

00:39:15

drafts is already open.

00:39:17

So just unlocking my phone immediately has drafts open

00:39:20

at all times.

00:39:21

Highly, highly recommend this.

00:39:24

Super fun.

00:39:26

Anyway, awkward talking.

00:39:30

So yeah, there's lots in this capture section.

00:39:34

I do like the, in this chapter four

00:39:41

and the whole idea of resonance, that's interesting

00:39:46

and that's a great descriptive word.

00:39:48

I've been using that a lot more since I read this.

00:39:52

You don't need to capture everything.

00:39:56

And again, in the Mac Power Users Forum,

00:39:58

there are people arguing that, well,

00:40:00

depends on those type of books that you read.

00:40:02

Maybe you do need to capture everything.

00:40:03

Like, okay, fine.

00:40:06

For what I do, I'm looking for ideas,

00:40:11

not details of a process I'm gonna have to be able

00:40:15

to repeat over and over and over again.

00:40:16

If that's what you wanna do, that still applies here.

00:40:20

Like that is a second brain example.

00:40:22

He talks about code libraries as a second brain.

00:40:25

Go ahead and build those or swipe files for marketers.

00:40:29

But the point is that there's all this information

00:40:33

all around us and information is food for your brain.

00:40:36

And this kind of gets into like the quality

00:40:38

of the dots that you collect, right?

00:40:40

So this is an idea I picked up years ago

00:40:42

and I've been trying to collect better dots,

00:40:44

have a better information diet,

00:40:47

things that are more valuable, more nutritious, right?

00:40:51

If you wanna get into like the diet analogy here,

00:40:55

you can choose what you want to feed on,

00:40:59

but you are what you consume is another point

00:41:02

that he makes in this section.

00:41:05

So collect the things that are important to you

00:41:09

and have the idea of these things that you collect,

00:41:14

these are gonna become, he calls them knowledge assets.

00:41:18

And I like the term asset because that implies

00:41:20

something that is going to be valuable over time.

00:41:23

It's not something that seems important right now.

00:41:25

It's not something that will be important at some point.

00:41:28

It is something that is both important now

00:41:31

and in the future, but it is going to get better

00:41:34

as I keep it in this second brain and as I develop it.

00:41:38

He's got a whole bunch of different examples

00:41:40

of these knowledge assets.

00:41:43

But the very, my very favorite thing from this chapter

00:41:46

is this idea of thinking like a curator.

00:41:50

Because I've realized as I was going through this

00:41:54

and understanding the code system,

00:41:58

I've actually developed my own sort of version of this.

00:42:02

I call it the five C's of creativity

00:42:07

and it's capture, curate is the second one.

00:42:10

So he's just kind of combine those two.

00:42:13

But for me, I capture everything that seems important

00:42:16

in the moment and then I transfer about 10% of it

00:42:21

over into obsidian and 10% even maybe high.

00:42:24

The things that are really important will come over

00:42:27

but most of it I throw away.

00:42:29

And a curator, like a curator in a museum,

00:42:32

kind of like you're deciding what to add to the collection.

00:42:35

But the collection becomes more valuable

00:42:37

not just based on the things that you add

00:42:39

but also on the things that you choose not to add

00:42:42

because it doesn't fit.

00:42:44

One of these things is not like the other.

00:42:46

Well, don't put it in your second brain then.

00:42:48

It may be important for somebody else

00:42:50

doing something totally different

00:42:51

but for what you're doing right now,

00:42:52

it doesn't belong in your collection.

00:42:55

And I feel like that's a really important step

00:42:58

that coming back to like the problem with Evernote,

00:43:02

just dump everything in there.

00:43:03

There's no filter.

00:43:04

This might be important and it's just text.

00:43:07

These are just markdown files.

00:43:09

I may as well just throw it in there

00:43:10

and then I can find it if I think about it later

00:43:12

but you lose some of the spontaneity

00:43:15

and the spontaneous reactions that can occur

00:43:19

as your ideas bump into each other

00:43:20

if you have a whole bunch of garbage in there.

00:43:23

And garbage isn't the right word

00:43:24

but things that don't belong.

00:43:25

Things that really don't have any sort of value to you.

00:43:29

- There's another piece of this section

00:43:32

curious your thoughts on it Mike.

00:43:34

The 12 favorite problems piece.

00:43:36

(laughing)

00:43:37

And this comes from Nobel Prize winning

00:43:40

physicist Richard Feynman.

00:43:42

Feynman, Feynman.

00:43:44

- Feynman.

00:43:45

- Feynman, there you go.

00:43:46

- I know this because David Sparks and I recorded

00:43:49

a focused episode on this specific thing,

00:43:52

the 12 favorite problems. (laughing)

00:43:54

- Got it.

00:43:55

Basically the concept here is that Feynman had

00:44:01

12 problems that he would regularly try

00:44:07

to come up with new ideas for

00:44:11

or keeping top of mind I guess would be the way to say it.

00:44:14

And these questions would be things that would be

00:44:19

something that he wants to try to solve

00:44:24

doesn't mean he's gonna make that his life goal.

00:44:27

It's just things he wants to keep around.

00:44:28

Something to have his list pet projects I guess.

00:44:32

And I've never really thought about this

00:44:35

but having certain problems

00:44:39

and he has a list of examples here like

00:44:41

how do I live less in the past and more in the present?

00:44:44

Like if that's a problem that you're trying to

00:44:47

keep on your mind and you're trying to solve,

00:44:51

your tendency is going to be to see things

00:44:56

through that lens.

00:44:58

So if let's say you're talking about PKMs and obsidian

00:45:02

but I'm thinking about how can I live less

00:45:04

in the past and more in the present,

00:45:08

my tendency is going to be wanting to see how obsidian

00:45:12

or PKM can help me process things now

00:45:14

instead of processing things from the past.

00:45:17

Like you get what I'm saying, like the lens changes.

00:45:20

But if I have things in my past that I've never dealt with

00:45:25

and my problem is how do I overcome things

00:45:28

that I've dealt with in the past?

00:45:30

I'm gonna see the exact same topic through the lens of

00:45:33

how can I process what happened to me in the past?

00:45:36

You know what I'm saying?

00:45:37

So it can completely change the way that you view that topic

00:45:41

because of that, because you have these problems

00:45:43

on top of mind, like it just can help form

00:45:46

your thinking at the time.

00:45:48

If you ever tried to do something like this,

00:45:50

like writing down favorite problems to process,

00:45:53

is this, I've never even tried this.

00:45:55

- Got a list right here.

00:45:56

- You wanna hear 'em? - You wanna hear 'em?

00:45:57

- I'm not sure, go for it.

00:46:00

But I've been debating coming up with 12.

00:46:03

I've not ever done this, but it seems like

00:46:05

it would be a cool idea.

00:46:06

It is, it's a fascinating idea.

00:46:08

I haven't actually implemented these,

00:46:12

well I guess I've written them down

00:46:14

and the goal is to look at these weekly

00:46:17

and just kind of bring attention to them

00:46:18

and then I'm believing that they are going to

00:46:21

subconsciously kind of change how I approach

00:46:25

some of the things that I come in contact with.

00:46:28

That's the whole idea behind the 12 problems.

00:46:31

I did some research into this after reading about it

00:46:34

in the book because I thought it was an interesting idea.

00:46:37

And then, yeah, David and I wrote them down together.

00:46:41

So, how can I make things easier or simpler

00:46:44

as my first one?

00:46:46

How can I live with more meaning?

00:46:48

How can I create more and consume less?

00:46:51

Who are my true fans and what do they want?

00:46:54

How can I better lead and serve my family, wife and kids?

00:46:57

How can I better understand the other side?

00:47:00

That one in particular, like just to give you an example

00:47:03

of how these can be beneficial.

00:47:05

How can I better understand the other side?

00:47:07

There's a lot of ways that that could manifest

00:47:09

but one obvious example could be

00:47:12

with somebody who doesn't believe the same way you do

00:47:16

politically or religiously, whatever.

00:47:18

They have a different set of beliefs.

00:47:20

The tendency is just to, oh well,

00:47:21

you're not as enlightened as I am, right?

00:47:25

You haven't discovered the truth yet

00:47:28

so I'm not gonna listen to anything that you have to say.

00:47:30

And I want to instead listen to understand,

00:47:33

like I wanna understand where the other side is coming from

00:47:36

even if it doesn't completely change my mind about something,

00:47:40

I want to at least understand their arguments

00:47:43

instead of just assuming that they're wrong

00:47:45

until they get my attention and prove otherwise.

00:47:48

So I feel like just approaching conversations that way

00:47:50

obviously can have a world of good

00:47:53

in the atmosphere and the culture that we live in right now.

00:47:57

How can I have more fun?

00:47:58

What about this would make a good story?

00:48:00

What can I learn here?

00:48:02

How can I set my kids up for success?

00:48:04

How can I leave my dent in the universe?

00:48:05

How can I focus on what really matters?

00:48:08

These are not specific problems to be solved.

00:48:11

There's no project associated with these.

00:48:13

There's no completion date on a lot of these.

00:48:15

I guess you could say the ones with my kids,

00:48:18

those will be completed when they're adults.

00:48:20

But otherwise that's kind of the whole point

00:48:22

of the favorite problems is that

00:48:25

this will mean something when you read it once

00:48:28

and oh I know exactly how to apply this

00:48:32

and then that thing is done

00:48:33

and then you find a new way to apply it in the future.

00:48:37

Yes and now I feel like I want to do this.

00:48:41

Running it down.

00:48:42

All right, action item.

00:48:43

I'll take this on.

00:48:44

Yep, I'll take it on.

00:48:46

It just sounds like it would be super helpful

00:48:48

just to have these, I guess how often do you review these?

00:48:52

That would be a question for you.

00:48:53

Goal is weekly.

00:48:55

But I've only had them for a week.

00:48:58

So I've done it once.

00:48:59

See, I don't know.

00:49:01

Once.

00:49:02

Nice work.

00:49:05

That would be the question is like I know that

00:49:10

the goal with this is to have them fresh enough

00:49:12

in your mind that they are a lens of sorts

00:49:16

that you see things through.

00:49:18

And if you're not reviewing them,

00:49:22

probably weekly, at least every other week,

00:49:24

I would think they would get to the point

00:49:26

where they're not on the front of your mind.

00:49:29

So then it doesn't work.

00:49:30

Like the problem doesn't follow through, I guess.

00:49:34

Could be.

00:49:35

I think this is a lot like the core values

00:49:40

or anything that you want to ingrain

00:49:43

in your day to day living.

00:49:46

Like the core values, I have them framed

00:49:48

and printed on the living room wall.

00:49:50

So I see them all the time.

00:49:52

I'm not gonna frame my 12 favorite problems.

00:49:55

But if I really wanted to make them top of mind

00:49:59

all the time, I could make them my desktop wallpaper.

00:50:02

Or I could put them on my lock screen on my phone

00:50:05

or something like that.

00:50:07

I think for me personally, reviewing them once a week

00:50:10

is gonna be enough once I get in the habit of it

00:50:12

to kind of ingrain these and give me the value

00:50:15

from creating them.

00:50:17

But your mileage may vary.

00:50:19

Okay, I'm gonna rabbit trail here for a second.

00:50:23

When people put images of their questions

00:50:26

or things that they want to be reminded of regularly

00:50:28

on their wallpaper, why?

00:50:33

Because it's always covered.

00:50:34

If you're a rational working person on your computer,

00:50:39

it's always covered.

00:50:40

Maybe that's just me.

00:50:42

I don't know, that's weird.

00:50:43

Like I could have something on my wallpaper

00:50:46

but I would never see it.

00:50:48

- Sure. - Yeah.

00:50:49

- There's no point in me doing that.

00:50:50

Anyway, I don't know why, I don't understand that.

00:50:52

Do you see yours?

00:50:53

I feel like this is, maybe I'm just strange.

00:50:56

- Mine is a cool moods wallpaper by Matt Burchler.

00:51:01

So I don't need to see it all the time.

00:51:04

- Sure, sure.

00:51:06

I don't know, this diversion, that's what that was.

00:51:12

Okay, unless there's something you wanna see on Capture,

00:51:15

I feel like we should go to organize

00:51:16

'cause this one's gonna cause us some

00:51:18

consternation potentially.

00:51:20

- All right, let's do it.

00:51:21

- So let's go on to organize,

00:51:23

save for actionability.

00:51:26

And in this, there are a lot of things.

00:51:31

I'm like, where do I even wanna start here?

00:51:36

So let's just jump into the one

00:51:38

that everybody knows about, PARA, P-A-R-A,

00:51:42

if you don't know that.

00:51:44

It stands for projects, areas, resources, and archives.

00:51:48

This is his recommendation for how you store notes.

00:51:53

Like, again, we're working our way

00:51:55

into the tactical side of this.

00:51:57

And his recommendation is you have a folder.

00:52:01

This could be in mail, your email,

00:52:03

it could be in our case, like obsidian,

00:52:06

in your documents folder everywhere.

00:52:09

You have a folder for projects,

00:52:11

you have a folder for areas,

00:52:12

you have a folder for resources,

00:52:14

and you have a folder for archives.

00:52:16

And if I can explain this correctly,

00:52:18

anytime you have a project,

00:52:20

it's a time bound work that you're doing.

00:52:22

You're creating that project folder in all of those.

00:52:26

Okay?

00:52:27

You also have areas, these are things

00:52:28

that are not time bound, health, finances,

00:52:31

faith, husband, father, et cetera, et cetera, right?

00:52:35

Your work life, like those are your areas with goals,

00:52:39

like in games that you're working towards.

00:52:41

Again, you have those in all of your places.

00:52:43

You have resources, these are topics of interest

00:52:46

that you just wanna collect the information on.

00:52:49

Maybe you'll use it in the future, maybe you won't,

00:52:51

but it's of interest to you, hobbies, you know,

00:52:55

all that sort of thing, manuals, maybe.

00:52:57

Those are things that you're collecting,

00:52:58

they end up in resources.

00:52:59

And then archives is the collection of things

00:53:03

from the other three categories

00:53:04

that you're no longer actively working on, right?

00:53:08

And the part of this, there's a term for this,

00:53:11

and I forgot it,

00:53:12

but the point of this is that when you work from projects

00:53:16

to areas, to resources, to archives,

00:53:19

it's a progression of actionability.

00:53:22

So the entire structure is built on action

00:53:25

and driven towards movement forward.

00:53:28

So projects are your most action worthy, I guess.

00:53:33

Areas are your second, resources, your third,

00:53:36

archives are cold storage, right?

00:53:39

So they're not actioned at all.

00:53:41

That's the concept there.

00:53:43

And I know that you likely have strong opinions on this.

00:53:47

I've actually gone through the process

00:53:49

of experimenting with this in the past

00:53:52

and have kind of some mixed reviews on it.

00:53:57

Having read this,

00:53:58

I kind of have a better understanding

00:54:00

of what was intended with it.

00:54:03

What are your thoughts, Mike?

00:54:05

Do you do this?

00:54:06

I'm guessing the answer is no,

00:54:08

I'm not entirely certain why I think that.

00:54:11

No, I do not do this.

00:54:13

(laughs)

00:54:15

I think the goal of this system I agree with,

00:54:20

'cause he mentions that PAR is not a filing system,

00:54:23

it's a production system.

00:54:24

What people really care about

00:54:25

is the ability to create something new.

00:54:28

And that manifests differently for me than it does

00:54:32

for an engineer.

00:54:33

But I think that if you were gonna start by project,

00:54:40

the things that have a start and end date

00:54:43

and have a clear outcome,

00:54:45

that provides the clarity that you need

00:54:47

to actually do something with the rest of the information

00:54:50

that you collect.

00:54:51

So I agree with it in principle.

00:54:54

I just don't feel like I need this.

00:54:59

I feel my system at the moment

00:55:02

is very much working for me

00:55:07

in terms of helping me to create.

00:55:11

So I have been looking for ways to,

00:55:14

rather than implement PARRA,

00:55:16

implement some of the ideas and refine

00:55:19

what I currently have going.

00:55:21

Like I said, I basically got my five C's of creativity

00:55:25

that I do instead,

00:55:26

which is to capture, to curate.

00:55:29

I think I didn't go through the rest of them,

00:55:32

but cultivate, and that's basically the,

00:55:36

it's in my system

00:55:38

and I'm going to continue to grow it

00:55:41

and connect it with the fourth one.

00:55:43

So once I understand what the idea is in isolation,

00:55:45

then I compare it with some of the other things

00:55:48

in my collection.

00:55:50

Very a la, how to read a book,

00:55:53

syntopical reading.

00:55:55

And then the last part is the Create Express,

00:55:59

what this means to me.

00:56:01

Now I don't have a book to sell you, but.

00:56:04

(laughs)

00:56:05

- Yeah.

00:56:06

- That's the one that resonates with me

00:56:07

more than code or even PARRA.

00:56:11

But I do think a lot of what I just described

00:56:14

exists inside of code.

00:56:16

I feel like PARRA for the right person

00:56:18

is how code gets implemented.

00:56:20

I think it's also, for me, specifically the area

00:56:23

where there is not as much overlap

00:56:27

with the stuff that's important to me.

00:56:30

- Yeah, this is,

00:56:30

so I guess the five C's of creativity,

00:56:35

do you use that to organize files and such?

00:56:37

'Cause I feel like that's ultimately what he's getting at.

00:56:39

It's like, how do you organize this stuff?

00:56:41

I know, let's ignore PKM world, right?

00:56:46

- Yep.

00:56:47

- Knowing that that is something separate

00:56:50

'cause I texted you about that in this week.

00:56:52

And I have thoughts on that one

00:56:53

that I wanna get into here in a second.

00:56:55

But as far as like file storage systems,

00:56:57

he's recommending this PARRA method.

00:57:00

Does your five C's translate into that?

00:57:02

- I guess maybe I'm asking a weird question.

00:57:04

- I know because I don't want it to.

00:57:05

(laughs)

00:57:07

- Sure.

00:57:08

- So, and that's fair.

00:57:08

- I mean, this is why I kind of judged

00:57:13

the last section on tagging

00:57:16

because I know that Tiago uses Evernote

00:57:19

and I know that with Evernote specifically,

00:57:21

there are a couple of mechanisms you can use

00:57:24

to group things together.

00:57:26

Why do you want to group things together

00:57:28

because I wanna consider them in certain scenarios,

00:57:31

certain situations.

00:57:33

It's the same sort of thing with a task manager.

00:57:35

If you're using a task manager the right way,

00:57:37

what it does is you dump everything in there

00:57:40

and then it surfaces at the right time,

00:57:42

the things that you should be paying attention to.

00:57:43

So you don't have to sort through everything else

00:57:45

and figure out what is the thing that is really important

00:57:48

that I should be paying attention to at this moment.

00:57:51

So PARRA is basically a folder-based structure

00:57:55

or a tag-based structure that you can use

00:57:58

to group and clump things together.

00:58:01

But you know what's better than both of those

00:58:02

in my opinion, bi-directional linking.

00:58:05

- But I can't do that with Photoshop files.

00:58:09

- Sure, that's fine.

00:58:10

- Do that with, so that's why I was saying

00:58:13

if I leave the PKM piece out of this, right?

00:58:16

- I don't think Photoshop files are really ideas.

00:58:20

They are something that you create

00:58:22

as the expression of an idea,

00:58:24

but as you're doing the rest of the process with the idea,

00:58:28

that's not existing most likely as a Photoshop file.

00:58:32

That's probably text in some way, shape, or form.

00:58:35

- Yeah, so here's an example.

00:58:38

I'm in the middle of recording a bunch of video interviews

00:58:42

for a consolidated video that I'm working on

00:58:45

for a Sunday morning service, right?

00:58:47

I have eight different interviews on recording,

00:58:50

which means I'm gonna end up with three video files

00:58:54

and one, two, three, four, five, six audio files

00:58:58

for every interview, right?

00:59:00

So all of that has to get consolidated somehow in one place.

00:59:04

So like somehow I have to keep track of all those.

00:59:08

This is where the projects thing comes in handy

00:59:09

'cause I can create the folder for the project

00:59:11

and it all goes there.

00:59:13

Now, I would also have a text file that corresponds to that

00:59:18

to help me understand some of my notes around that,

00:59:20

but I still have to store those files somewhere.

00:59:22

Like I can't throw that into Obsidian cleanly.

00:59:26

That's just painful.

00:59:28

I've looked at people trying to do that before

00:59:29

and I'm like, just don't do that.

00:59:32

(laughs)

00:59:33

It's a bad idea.

00:59:34

So I guess that's the part that doesn't add up there.

00:59:38

- Yeah.

00:59:40

I mean, it depends what you're trying to do.

00:59:45

I have one version of that,

00:59:48

but none of my stuff is Photoshop files

00:59:50

that I do dump inside of Obsidian.

00:59:53

An example would be notes.faithbaseproactivity.com,

00:59:58

which I showed with you, my cross-reference library

01:00:01

for my sermon sketch notes,

01:00:02

which is a combination of images that I've drawn

01:00:04

in good notes plus the plain text files

01:00:07

for each individual verse.

01:00:08

And if you go to that URL, it's public.

01:00:12

You can kind of navigate around my sermon sketch notes

01:00:15

and see how like verse referenced here

01:00:17

was also referenced in other places.

01:00:20

That's the real value of that kind of stuff for me.

01:00:23

How do I fit something like that into Para?

01:00:26

I could probably figure out a way to do it,

01:00:27

but I just don't want to.

01:00:30

Now you could also,

01:00:31

even your Para system inside of your Notes app,

01:00:35

you could probably link to a Photoshop file

01:00:38

or something that you are working on,

01:00:41

or a video file or things like that.

01:00:43

I tried to do video inside of Obsidian for a while.

01:00:45

I was collecting my guitar lessons,

01:00:47

which I would always get these little videos

01:00:48

on like what I'm supposed to work on

01:00:50

and dump them in there, but it just got too big.

01:00:53

So there are limitations with it.

01:00:56

And I think that's okay.

01:00:58

You don't really want a single app that does everything.

01:01:02

JARO kind of talks about that in the first section, actually.

01:01:05

See if I can find that.

01:01:06

He mentions that the perfect app doesn't exist,

01:01:10

but what you want is a reliable set of tools.

01:01:15

So everyone's set of tools are gonna be different

01:01:20

based on the types of knowledge and information

01:01:23

that you're trying to manage.

01:01:24

And however you're going to create and express that,

01:01:27

that's fine if you gotta jump over to a different tool.

01:01:32

But, and I think if you're talking about files

01:01:35

that exist across a bunch of different tools,

01:01:37

then having a folder based Para structure

01:01:41

on your computer makes a ton of sense.

01:01:43

It just doesn't work for me.

01:01:46

- Yeah, I will say that,

01:01:48

and this is an action item for me,

01:01:50

I'm gonna do a Para experiment.

01:01:52

I've done this before without fully understanding it.

01:01:56

And it didn't go well.

01:01:58

Now that said, part of the reason I'm interested

01:02:01

in doing this, and I've currently got this set up,

01:02:04

so I know how that structure can go,

01:02:07

but for years now I have operated under the process

01:02:12

of having a folder for projects

01:02:14

that then get moved into an archive.

01:02:16

Like I've done that for a long time.

01:02:18

And then outside of that I've had folders

01:02:22

for like areas of my life and in like work areas,

01:02:27

alongside like hobby type folders.

01:02:31

Like I've done that for a very long time.

01:02:34

Reading this made me realize that I've kind of done Para

01:02:38

for a long time, just in a different layout.

01:02:42

And the one part of it that doesn't add up,

01:02:46

and I texted you about this,

01:02:47

it's like the thing that does work really well

01:02:50

is like if I'm in Finder,

01:02:51

or well I don't even do this in my email stuff,

01:02:54

email just goes on one folder, I'm terrible.

01:02:57

Maybe it's not terrible, maybe it's genius, I don't know.

01:02:59

It's one of the two.

01:03:00

And I have kept things in folder structures

01:03:05

that mimic something similar to this for quite a while.

01:03:09

The part that doesn't add up is when you get to like PKM world,

01:03:13

and you're trying to categorize,

01:03:16

I guess it was the way to say it different notes.

01:03:19

Like when you get into just the text notes side of it,

01:03:23

that part didn't add up.

01:03:25

But I say that, and yet I've got a script

01:03:29

and I use this weekly, at least if not more than,

01:03:34

for creating a note for a project in a project's folder

01:03:39

in Obsidian, that also creates the folder in Finder for me,

01:03:44

and then creates links between the two.

01:03:46

So that I can get to one or the other from either place.

01:03:49

I've done that for a while now.

01:03:52

So I just maintain that,

01:03:54

'cause I did go ahead and try to set up Para in Obsidian,

01:03:58

and I think I found something that works well,

01:03:59

at least given the structure that I already had.

01:04:02

Keeping my projects like I had before,

01:04:04

I already got the folder.

01:04:05

The areas actually acts kind of like the maps piece,

01:04:10

because I realized that I was kind of doing that.

01:04:12

I could see that already in Obsidian,

01:04:14

so it kind of translates to that.

01:04:16

So it's not folders of notes for areas.

01:04:19

It's one folder that has notes of, I guess, maps,

01:04:24

would be what to call it.

01:04:26

And then the resources piece has like your assets folder.

01:04:30

Like everybody seems to have a folder for where,

01:04:32

if you drag and drop a picture in there,

01:04:34

it's gotta go somewhere, right?

01:04:35

The picture file has to go somewhere.

01:04:37

Templates, dated, like daily notes and stuff,

01:04:40

like those types of folders are under there.

01:04:42

That's really it.

01:04:43

I don't keep folders under the rest of the resources piece

01:04:47

at all.

01:04:48

That's kind of like having the notes piece

01:04:50

that's like everything thrown in one spot.

01:04:52

That's what ends up going in resources.

01:04:54

And then the archive is the same as it always has been for me.

01:04:57

It's like that's where the done projects and done areas go.

01:05:02

But outside of that, I've got what I call a zero note.

01:05:05

A lot of people have these like the starting note,

01:05:09

where you can jump off of from into a bunch of different areas.

01:05:14

All I really did, 'cause I had my set up,

01:05:19

which is I think was somewhat similar to yours, Mike,

01:05:21

where most everything was kind of in one spot

01:05:23

and you had notes with links that got you

01:05:26

a lot of different places.

01:05:28

It's still kind of the same for me.

01:05:31

It's just laid out differently.

01:05:33

Yes.

01:05:34

The way you jump from thing to thing is all the same.

01:05:36

I don't know that this is gonna work long term,

01:05:39

but it's at least a starting off point.

01:05:41

I just wanna kind of see how it plays out,

01:05:43

'cause so far it hasn't changed much at all for me.

01:05:46

So I don't know, we'll see.

01:05:48

That's the thing about Para, to be honest,

01:05:50

is I don't think it's a simple,

01:05:54

just apply this structure everywhere.

01:05:58

And I think in the past, maybe it was,

01:06:02

but the real value of applying the principles

01:06:05

that Tagos talking about as it pertains to Para,

01:06:09

this can look very different nowadays.

01:06:13

And it should look very different as you figure out

01:06:17

what is the right way to apply this for yourself.

01:06:20

I came across a quote in The Road Less Stupid

01:06:24

by Keith Cunningham.

01:06:25

He talks about beware of people selling Kool-Aid.

01:06:30

And he uses examples of like Warren Buffett

01:06:34

who took him nine years to make his first

01:06:36

$10 million on the stock market.

01:06:37

He's like, "No one's gonna buy a book

01:06:39

"how to make $10 million in nine years."

01:06:41

(laughs)

01:06:42

Yeah, right.

01:06:43

But that's what success looks like.

01:06:45

Is it slow and it's methodical.

01:06:47

And so the people who are like,

01:06:49

"Hey, I did this and it blew up and just do this thing.

01:06:51

"Those are the people you gotta be wary of."

01:06:54

And there's a quote in there that said,

01:06:56

"Consultants have a recipe,

01:07:00

"but masters have a cookbook."

01:07:03

And I was thinking about that as it pertains

01:07:06

to the productivity space and the types of things

01:07:08

that we read, the different systems that we hear about.

01:07:11

And I feel like Tiago is not selling a recipe.

01:07:15

He is providing you a cookbook, a whole bunch of principles

01:07:18

that if you really wrestle with and grapple

01:07:21

and understand the arguments,

01:07:24

then you will find how to express these for yourself

01:07:27

in a way, but for me, if you're asking me,

01:07:29

do I use PARRA, I've taken the principles

01:07:33

and morphed them so much from the original

01:07:36

that I can't in good faith say, "Yes, I do this."

01:07:38

(laughs)

01:07:39

Right, right.

01:07:40

But everybody does this in some way, shape or form,

01:07:42

if they're into the whole personal knowledge management idea.

01:07:46

Yeah, it's totally true.

01:07:48

I think some of what, and you can see that

01:07:50

based on what I just explained,

01:07:52

these are things that I've kind of done already.

01:07:55

Just haven't organized them in that way.

01:07:58

That said, the concept of organizing it

01:08:01

for most actionable to least actionable,

01:08:04

one of the things that I personally struggle with

01:08:08

is knowing what to work on next.

01:08:10

That's forever the thing that I find myself fighting.

01:08:13

It's like, okay, I have these six things or 400 things,

01:08:17

and I wanna know which of those 200

01:08:21

that I need to put above the other 200.

01:08:24

Within that, I gotta figure out

01:08:26

where in the hierarchy do things land.

01:08:30

It's very easy for me to take something that's a hobby

01:08:32

and put it over something I have to get done today.

01:08:34

I have no idea why I have to fight this battle

01:08:36

every single day, but here we are.

01:08:38

And so knowing that I already struggle

01:08:42

with the actionability and knowing what comes next,

01:08:45

organizing things in a way that automatically puts it

01:08:49

in order for me is extremely helpful.

01:08:53

So--

01:08:54

Mission accomplished.

01:08:55

Right, you've got a little bit of structure,

01:08:56

which makes what you gotta do easier.

01:08:58

You don't have to try to bend it and,

01:09:00

oh, I gotta follow it exactly.

01:09:02

Get the value and move on, right?

01:09:04

Correct, yep.

01:09:06

So that's, that's, that concept is one that I didn't have

01:09:11

in the back of my head when I first started

01:09:13

this PARA experiment, but had slowly been working

01:09:17

my way towards something similar to that.

01:09:19

So I think maybe that's why I'm interested in this.

01:09:24

I don't think I'm gonna end up keeping the terminology

01:09:27

over time, but the concept of actionability,

01:09:30

like that one I get.

01:09:31

So that's partly why I wanna do this experiment,

01:09:35

'cause I know that that's something I struggle with

01:09:36

and it feels like this is, at least in my short term,

01:09:39

stint of using it, it seems to help.

01:09:43

But as anyone who listens to the bookworm knows,

01:09:47

long term for Joe is always the trick, right?

01:09:50

That's, that's forever the thing that I have a challenge with.

01:09:53

So like that I wanna know, how does it handle six months

01:09:58

or now am I still using that type of structure?

01:10:00

We'll see.

01:10:01

The goal of the structure in this chapter is to place things

01:10:06

where they will be useful the soonest.

01:10:09

So if PARA helps you recognize where things

01:10:14

will be useful the soonest, go ahead and use it.

01:10:18

For me, that's not where they're gonna be useful

01:10:21

for the soonest.

01:10:22

I know exactly what that looks like for me though.

01:10:24

And so if you have no idea where to start,

01:10:27

I have no problem starting with PARA.

01:10:30

I have morphed my system into something

01:10:34

that no longer resembles it though.

01:10:36

- Yeah, yeah, for sure.

01:10:39

Let's go on to the next section.

01:10:42

I think this is one that we're both kind of excited about.

01:10:45

I know especially you are putting words in your mouth again.

01:10:49

Distill, find the essence.

01:10:53

And there's one core piece inside of this

01:10:58

that I think is absolutely the most important.

01:11:01

I think we maybe mentioned the term earlier.

01:11:04

And that is the progressive summarization technique.

01:11:08

And just as a, by way of example, what this is

01:11:13

and maybe get into the importance of it.

01:11:16

But let's say that you have an article that you find online

01:11:21

that is super helpful.

01:11:23

Like you found an article on tuning the carburetor

01:11:28

for a chainsaw.

01:11:29

I bring that up 'cause it's something I had to do here recently.

01:11:32

And that's got a lot of information in it.

01:11:36

There's a whole bunch of stuff in it

01:11:37

that might be helpful, might not.

01:11:40

But regardless, you're pulling the Evernote mindset

01:11:44

and you saved the whole thing, right?

01:11:47

Tiago would probably not be thrilled with you

01:11:48

that you saved the whole thing.

01:11:49

So you go through and you grab the parts

01:11:53

that are most important that you're gonna hold onto in that.

01:11:56

You get rid of the ones you don't.

01:11:58

Once you've done that, then you have this process of,

01:12:01

what is it, four steps?

01:12:03

Yeah, you've got the capturing piece that you start with.

01:12:06

Then you go through, I'm gonna use the way

01:12:08

that he recommends it.

01:12:09

You bold the sections or the components within that

01:12:13

that are the most important.

01:12:15

Then within those bold pieces,

01:12:17

you highlight the pieces that are even more important

01:12:20

that are like the core of those bolded sections.

01:12:24

And then beyond that, the fourth step is writing

01:12:27

in an executive summary that summarizes the entire piece.

01:12:32

So then you've taken what started off as a pretty long,

01:12:36

maybe a two or three paragraph excerpt

01:12:39

and you've got it distilled down into maybe a one

01:12:41

or two sentence summary.

01:12:44

That's what he's referring to as a progressive

01:12:47

summarization technique.

01:12:48

Now, that said, this is not something you do immediately.

01:12:52

You can, but he's not saying that you have to.

01:12:56

It's an as needed basis.

01:12:58

Like you come back onto this note six months from now

01:13:02

and you've got a meeting where you're gonna be talking

01:13:04

about some of the things in it.

01:13:05

Well, that's a good time to go through and bold

01:13:08

all the important parts and maybe highlight on top of that.

01:13:12

And then you've got a talk you're gonna give,

01:13:14

write your summary for it.

01:13:16

Like you don't have to do these all at once,

01:13:18

but it's that process of moving it from one step to the next.

01:13:21

So you can get down to the essence as he calls it

01:13:24

of that section.

01:13:25

How'd I do?

01:13:26

Did I tell it well?

01:13:28

- You did?

01:13:28

Do you do this?

01:13:30

- Not yet.

01:13:31

- You gonna do it?

01:13:32

- Maybe.

01:13:33

In theory, it's a great idea.

01:13:35

It seems like an awful lot of work.

01:13:37

But I think that's the point, right?

01:13:39

- So as you were describing that,

01:13:42

I got the revelation that I do this already.

01:13:46

- Yeah.

01:13:48

Do you do it in the same form or do you have different

01:13:50

ways of doing it?

01:13:51

- Nope, I don't do it in the same form.

01:13:52

So I published something on my blog years ago

01:13:57

on how and why I take notes in the books that I read.

01:14:00

But let's just walk through these four different levels though,

01:14:04

right?

01:14:05

So you've got the original work, right?

01:14:11

That's the books that we read.

01:14:14

And then you want to distill that down into just

01:14:19

the important pieces, right?

01:14:22

So that's what I do with the Mind Node files.

01:14:25

And then from there,

01:14:27

so that's kind of like bolding things, I guess.

01:14:29

And then you've got the highlighted passages.

01:14:33

So all the stuff that's bold with everything

01:14:35

that's in the Mind Node file,

01:14:36

I have an emoji system for calling out specific things.

01:14:41

Anichi emoji means a different thing.

01:14:42

So it's not as simple as a highlighted.

01:14:44

And essentially I've got several different emoji-based

01:14:46

highlighters.

01:14:48

And then when I bring it all into Obsidian,

01:14:50

I force myself at the top of the book note

01:14:53

to write a three-sentence summary of the book itself.

01:14:56

So I follow this point-by-point.

01:15:00

But only for super long-form things that I read

01:15:06

that are hundreds of pages long.

01:15:08

Could I do this for a lot of the other things

01:15:11

that articles that I read and things like that?

01:15:14

Yeah, I could.

01:15:15

I'm not going to.

01:15:16

And I think that's okay because I feel like

01:15:20

with all of this stuff, you gotta figure out,

01:15:22

I've said this over and over again today,

01:15:23

but you gotta figure out what parts of this system

01:15:26

work for you and how to make it your own.

01:15:28

And I think if Tiago were here,

01:15:29

he would say the same thing.

01:15:31

So for me, I'm gonna implement this with my book notes.

01:15:35

I'm not gonna worry about it for anything else.

01:15:36

And somebody else is gonna be like,

01:15:37

"Oh, I can't believe you're not doing it

01:15:38

with this other thing."

01:15:39

And they're gonna just implement it in that arena.

01:15:42

And that's gonna be fine as well.

01:15:45

But the idea itself, obviously I agree with it.

01:15:48

And obviously I think it has value

01:15:50

because I've been doing it even though

01:15:51

I didn't realize it for the last several years.

01:15:54

Yeah, which is similar to my experience

01:15:59

with the Para thing, right?

01:16:00

Realizing, oh yeah, I'm doing a lot of this already.

01:16:03

Just hadn't termed it quite like that.

01:16:06

And it's slightly different.

01:16:07

Yeah, I get you.

01:16:10

So yes, I know that this is something that I don't do

01:16:14

currently.

01:16:15

One of the reasons for that is I've never,

01:16:19

I shouldn't say never.

01:16:20

I have not found myself capturing

01:16:25

longer like paragraphs of articles

01:16:30

or segments of a YouTube video or podcast clips.

01:16:34

Like I've not done that.

01:16:36

I'll grab the URL sometimes and then be done there,

01:16:40

which he talks about at one point during the capture piece.

01:16:43

He's like, "No, don't do that.

01:16:44

"Grab the part that matters."

01:16:46

Yep.

01:16:47

And like that was something that was super impactful for me

01:16:52

because I don't do that.

01:16:54

Which then means like I'm regularly going back

01:16:56

and redoing searches without realizing

01:16:59

that that's what I'm doing.

01:17:00

I could not have told you that I do that until I read this.

01:17:03

I didn't know that it was something that I did.

01:17:06

So to get to the point where I'm starting to process my,

01:17:11

like grabbing those components

01:17:13

and then doing that distillation,

01:17:16

like that I understand.

01:17:17

Now to use the books piece,

01:17:19

because this is the one arena that's a little weird,

01:17:22

I shouldn't say weird.

01:17:23

That's maybe got me in some of that.

01:17:27

Not all of those steps though.

01:17:29

So obviously we have the book itself, right?

01:17:32

I do the process of underlining

01:17:35

and creating an index in the back of the book.

01:17:38

I realize I don't talk about this a whole lot.

01:17:40

So I will underline or like put brackets around things

01:17:43

on the outside margins.

01:17:45

Ever once I'll write a note in the margins.

01:17:47

But then at the back, I regularly create,

01:17:50

and this one's actually kind of long,

01:17:52

an index of terms or action items and stuff

01:17:55

in the back of the book with the page number next to it.

01:17:58

So like that's kind of like the bolding component.

01:18:03

And then from there, what happens is I'll grab,

01:18:06

like especially in this case,

01:18:08

like this is my choice of a book, right?

01:18:10

I will grab the parts within that index

01:18:13

that I wanna talk about on bookworm.

01:18:16

That's kind of like the highlighting piece, right?

01:18:18

They go into the show notes for us to follow for the book.

01:18:23

Now, they kind of gets morphed into the outline for the book,

01:18:27

the table of contents,

01:18:29

like it kind of goes hand in hand once it hits the show notes,

01:18:34

but not entirely.

01:18:36

But from there, it kind of stops at us recording the podcast.

01:18:40

And then I'm done.

01:18:41

I move on to the next thing and frequently fail

01:18:46

to do the action items that I collected from those things.

01:18:49

So that is a thing that happens as well.

01:18:51

- Tiago might argue is the result of it

01:18:53

not getting into a digital commonplace book.

01:18:56

- Correct.

01:18:57

- Yes. - Which is why--

01:18:57

- You would probably make that argument.

01:18:58

- Yeah. - He's not necessarily wrong either.

01:19:01

- No, I was gonna say one of the things

01:19:02

that I have amended when I started bringing things

01:19:05

into Obsidian was in addition to the mind map

01:19:08

that I dumped into the file,

01:19:10

I also, because I do it all in my note,

01:19:11

I can export that as Markdown,

01:19:13

I copy and paste the text of the mind map

01:19:15

in the note file as well.

01:19:18

And that gives me the ability to link the text

01:19:21

through the bidirectional linking and things like that,

01:19:24

which we're gonna get into in the next chapter, hopefully.

01:19:27

(laughs)

01:19:28

- Yeah. - But I think that's valuable.

01:19:32

And I think even like the building a second brain concept,

01:19:36

you probably don't have to go all in

01:19:38

with just digital tools.

01:19:40

What you're doing, I think,

01:19:41

fits the definition of a second brain

01:19:44

and the description of the organization

01:19:46

that you're talking about here

01:19:47

in terms of distilling things down into your key ideas

01:19:50

in the back of a book.

01:19:51

That is an analog version

01:19:52

of this progressive summarization, I would argue.

01:19:55

I'm not sure if Tiago would agree with that part.

01:19:57

He may say you need to make it digital

01:19:59

in order to get the benefit of connecting the things

01:20:01

different ways, but.

01:20:03

- Yeah, well, let's go on to this last piece.

01:20:06

So the E here, capture organize to still express.

01:20:11

Okay, now the tag line here is show your work.

01:20:16

And in this, there's essentially a few things

01:20:21

that you're going to be doing.

01:20:23

So once you have notes that are distilled,

01:20:27

you've created like major notes for your own thoughts,

01:20:30

you've distilled the ones that you've captured,

01:20:33

you end up with what he calls intermediate packets.

01:20:37

- Pockets? - Yep.

01:20:39

- Intermediate packets, basically small little snippets

01:20:42

that can then be consolidated in a lot of different ways

01:20:46

or retrieved in a lot of different ways.

01:20:49

And he talks about the power of thinking small

01:20:52

and it has a whole bunch of examples

01:20:54

like betas and software, prototypes and car,

01:20:56

design, like people do this regularly.

01:20:59

You start with a minimum viable

01:21:01

and then you build up from there.

01:21:04

And he's referring to this as like an intermediate packet,

01:21:07

a small thing that is then put together

01:21:09

kind of like Lego blocks.

01:21:11

- Now, just call them brain Legos or something like that.

01:21:15

I actually-- - Yeah, totally.

01:21:16

- I actually have, so spoiler alert, I guess,

01:21:19

from my max stock talk, I'm going to be talking about

01:21:21

those five C's of creativity.

01:21:23

And PKM workflows associated with those.

01:21:26

And all of my slides are using images

01:21:29

that I drew in good notes.

01:21:31

And I have one which talks about ideas as Lego building blocks.

01:21:36

I was hoping we get to this point,

01:21:38

these intermediate packets,

01:21:39

these are individual building blocks

01:21:40

that make up your work.

01:21:42

But the whole term of intermediate packets,

01:21:43

that probably, maybe that resonates different for you

01:21:46

because developer, right?

01:21:48

But you lost me there.

01:21:50

I feel like there's a much more approachable term

01:21:53

that could be used there,

01:21:55

but the idea itself I really agree with.

01:21:57

- Sure, yeah, it didn't even,

01:22:00

I didn't even bat an eye when he said intermediate packets,

01:22:03

like, oh, yeah, it's the stuff

01:22:04

between the beginning and the end.

01:22:06

- Okay. - Like immediately,

01:22:08

my brain just jumped to that instantly.

01:22:10

- Atomic notes, I would call them.

01:22:12

- No. - Yeah.

01:22:13

- Okay, what was it?

01:22:14

- Atomic notes.

01:22:15

So-- - Atomic notes, okay.

01:22:17

- The whole idea of like the definition of atomic

01:22:19

from atomic habits, where it's the smallest part of a thing.

01:22:24

And then I argue that those are the types of notes

01:22:26

that you should create,

01:22:28

because then you can take those notes

01:22:30

and you can build them and combine your ideas

01:22:33

in cool and interesting ways.

01:22:34

It's the whole basis of the cross-referencing

01:22:37

that I shared earlier.

01:22:38

If you don't break it down into those

01:22:40

tiny little individual notes, it doesn't work.

01:22:43

- Yep, yeah, and then once you have those atomic notes,

01:22:48

intermediate packets, IPs, I'm gonna call them IPs,

01:22:52

it makes sense to me. (laughs)

01:22:54

Once you have these little tiny bits that you've distilled,

01:22:58

you can start putting them together,

01:23:00

but the important part is how do you retrieve those?

01:23:03

Like what are the methods by which you can retrieve those,

01:23:06

which is kind of what I think you're itching to get to here.

01:23:09

But the four, he has four methods here.

01:23:12

One is through search, which is probably people's first,

01:23:16

you know, easy one. - Yeah.

01:23:17

- Then browsing, just finding your way through.

01:23:20

I wanna come back to that one.

01:23:22

Three is tags, and he's got a bonus chapter we'll maybe talk

01:23:26

about later with that.

01:23:28

And then four are serendipity, just randomly shows up.

01:23:31

Like just out of nowhere.

01:23:32

That's kind of the way I took that.

01:23:34

Now, before you jump in, I wanna come back

01:23:37

to the browsing piece because he did not intend it this way,

01:23:42

but he's talking about how like when you're just working

01:23:47

through your folders, you'll run across things.

01:23:50

But I only got to the point where I understood

01:23:53

that that's what he meant, and after I read his section on it.

01:23:56

When he first mentioned it, what I thought he was gonna get

01:23:59

into, my expectation of where we were gonna go,

01:24:03

was that you can use folders, you could use tags,

01:24:05

you could use links, you could use all sorts of methods

01:24:10

to find your way around from note to note.

01:24:12

That's what I thought he was gonna say, that he didn't.

01:24:15

He focused on the folders piece.

01:24:17

- Yeah. - Okay, so just wanna point that out,

01:24:19

'cause I feel like that my original intention

01:24:22

would get us to where I think you're wanting to go.

01:24:25

But I think that's not what he originally would have said.

01:24:30

At least when he wrote this.

01:24:33

- Yeah, so knowing that building a second brain

01:24:37

has been around for a while, this feels like a historical

01:24:42

model that just hasn't been updated yet.

01:24:46

And I have no disagreements with any of the things

01:24:50

on this list, but you're right,

01:24:52

bi-directional linking is missing.

01:24:54

- Yes. - And it's an obvious one,

01:24:57

given our current landscape, right?

01:24:59

- Correct, it's also understandable why it's not in the list

01:25:02

when you understand that the author is using Evernote,

01:25:05

because it's missing from Evernote.

01:25:07

And so I'm going to read between the lines here

01:25:11

and say that Tiago would wholeheartedly endorse

01:25:15

that as another retrieval method.

01:25:17

But he is not gonna speak to it

01:25:19

because he has no experience with it.

01:25:22

And that's just understanding the basic ideas

01:25:26

that he's trying to communicate through this code framework,

01:25:28

which I completely agree with up until this point.

01:25:32

What about the bi-directional links?

01:25:34

So yeah, obviously for me, that's a big part

01:25:39

of how I express things.

01:25:42

I would argue that for me, bi-directional links

01:25:45

is more than just a retrieval mechanism though.

01:25:49

It's also part of the organization,

01:25:52

which I guess actually the first three of these tags,

01:25:55

browsing, maybe not search, although yeah, I don't know.

01:25:59

These all are all based off of like where you put something

01:26:02

and how you classified something.

01:26:05

So there's organizational aspects of these as well.

01:26:09

I feel like organization and expression are tied together

01:26:13

with how you would, how you organize determines

01:26:18

how you express things.

01:26:21

And really the real point of emphasis

01:26:24

and the place where the value is to be had here

01:26:26

is to put some thought into how you're gonna organize things

01:26:29

so that you can create more of those serendipitous moments

01:26:33

where you happen to be in a folder

01:26:35

or you happen to be looking at a note

01:26:37

and you see something that's linked to it

01:26:39

and oh, I get it now.

01:26:41

That's what we're really going after.

01:26:43

However you wanna do that is fine.

01:26:45

- Yeah, 'cause I think that the search piece,

01:26:49

like you're saying, the organization piece

01:26:50

and the express piece can be tied.

01:26:53

I think what he's getting at,

01:26:56

like if I try to capture the basis of what he's saying

01:27:01

in express is that the way that you've done everything

01:27:05

up to this point allows you to start putting things together.

01:27:08

Like the expression piece,

01:27:09

like I can connect all these dots.

01:27:11

Like that's what he's trying to get to

01:27:13

is how you do that here.

01:27:15

And the search component here,

01:27:18

like yes, that's his first one,

01:27:20

but at the same time,

01:27:22

like I find that messy because there's such a thing

01:27:27

as like a saved search or a query in there.

01:27:31

And then the question is, well, okay, well,

01:27:32

where does that actually fit?

01:27:34

And when you have something like a saved search combined

01:27:37

with something like links between things

01:27:41

and those two can coexist in one set,

01:27:45

like in one note,

01:27:48

this all gets super messy, super fast.

01:27:50

Right? - Yep, so agreed.

01:27:51

- I like that tools are now allowing us

01:27:55

to do that sort of thing.

01:27:57

Like this can be superfluid and help us surface things.

01:28:00

So I just think that like you're saying,

01:28:03

like Evernote's world doesn't really step into any of that.

01:28:06

And I know we're ripping on Evernote a little bit,

01:28:09

but I think that's okay.

01:28:12

I'm okay with it.

01:28:13

So just knowing that it does mean that it's a little dated.

01:28:17

Yeah, what else?

01:28:20

We got part three here.

01:28:21

- That's it. - Let's go to part three.

01:28:23

- Okay, the part three is called the shift,

01:28:26

making things happen.

01:28:28

Inside of this,

01:28:29

he starts to like make the shift from

01:28:34

how do you manage things to what's the results of managing it?

01:28:39

Like it starts to kind of get back into the promise

01:28:42

of a second brain, like what can become from this.

01:28:46

And inside this first chapter,

01:28:48

there's the concept of divergence and convergence

01:28:51

where you have an idea and then you want to collect

01:28:55

a whole bunch, like you're starting to widen the gates

01:28:57

on what you're collecting around an idea,

01:28:59

which as he spells out,

01:29:01

is kind of like the capture and organize piece.

01:29:03

Like you're broadening, trying to capture

01:29:05

and collect a bunch of things.

01:29:07

And then you reach a point

01:29:08

where then you start to diverge

01:29:10

and you come back together.

01:29:12

And at that point, you're starting to distill things,

01:29:14

you're starting to cull things.

01:29:15

And then you get to the expression point

01:29:16

where you have your final product.

01:29:18

So you do widen out and then come back together.

01:29:21

I've done really visualized it that way,

01:29:23

but it did kind of help me to understand it.

01:29:25

It's not really anything groundbreaking,

01:29:27

but kind of cool.

01:29:28

- I think it's potentially groundbreaking to be honest

01:29:31

because I feel, he says convergence

01:29:33

is where many people struggle

01:29:34

because you find something new and shiny,

01:29:38

something that might be important.

01:29:40

And then you see a whole bunch of ancillary things

01:29:42

that are related to it.

01:29:43

And so people have no problem widening,

01:29:46

but they have a lot of trouble eliminating options

01:29:50

and focusing on one thing.

01:29:52

You got to decide for yourself what is really important.

01:29:55

So the convergence part is the most important.

01:29:58

I feel if you do the convergence,

01:29:59

it's easy to express things at the end.

01:30:02

And I feel like this visual,

01:30:04

this very clearly communicates why

01:30:08

you may have trouble expressing something at the end

01:30:11

or creating something if you're going back

01:30:13

to my five C's of creativity.

01:30:16

Same idea.

01:30:18

If you have trouble creating a tangible asset at the end,

01:30:20

whether that's a published post, a video

01:30:22

or just a simple note, I'm like,

01:30:23

this is what I think, a couple of sentences even,

01:30:27

then you probably are scared to start converging

01:30:32

on this idea.

01:30:33

And you got to ask yourself why.

01:30:35

- I just feel like that's,

01:30:37

maybe this is me being someone who's dealt

01:30:40

with a huge volume of ideas for a long time.

01:30:43

Like that doesn't seem like it's that big a deal.

01:30:45

Like, yeah, of course you have tons of ideas

01:30:47

and at some point you have to narrow them down.

01:30:48

Like that's something I've had to deal with

01:30:49

for a long time and I'm terrible at it,

01:30:51

but it is still something that I need to do.

01:30:53

So I just don't think of that as something as groundbreaking,

01:30:55

but maybe I'm wrong on that.

01:30:57

I'd be glad to be wrong on that.

01:30:59

(laughs)

01:31:00

So anyway, he has that concept,

01:31:03

divergence that leads you up and then convergence

01:31:05

that brings you back down as far as volume of things

01:31:07

going into a final work.

01:31:10

But then he has these three strategies

01:31:14

that he uses to bring creative work together

01:31:16

is the way that he puts it.

01:31:18

So essentially what he's got is three different methods

01:31:23

that he uses to keep momentum moving forward

01:31:28

or to connect things.

01:31:30

The first of which is what he calls the,

01:31:32

I can never say this word, archipelago.

01:31:34

Archipelago.

01:31:35

Archipelago, I can never get that right.

01:31:38

I always say it the wrong way.

01:31:40

Give yourself stepping stones, right?

01:31:42

So it's a way of giving yourself,

01:31:46

how do I say this?

01:31:48

Giving yourself a whole bunch of things in front of you

01:31:50

that you can then build on.

01:31:52

But I think we talked about this not so long ago

01:31:54

where like if you want to come up with ideas

01:31:56

for your next blog post,

01:31:59

go read a bunch of articles.

01:32:01

Like have a bunch of things already in front of you

01:32:03

that you can work from and build off of.

01:32:07

So that's the first one.

01:32:09

The second one is the Hemingway Bridge

01:32:12

using yesterday's momentum today.

01:32:14

Hemingway was known for whenever he would

01:32:18

wrap up his writing for the day.

01:32:20

He wouldn't stop until he knew the next point in the plot

01:32:24

where he knew where he was gonna go next.

01:32:26

Then he would quit.

01:32:27

That way when he got there tomorrow,

01:32:30

he would know where to start writing right away.

01:32:32

And it could get the mindset going

01:32:35

where he wanted them to go.

01:32:38

And then the last one is to dial down the scope,

01:32:41

ship something small and concrete.

01:32:44

This is something that I know a lot of people

01:32:46

are starting to recommend and do regular.

01:32:50

Like share small snippets quickly and regularly

01:32:54

as opposed to waiting for something longer

01:32:56

and bigger to be released.

01:32:58

I know you have a secret project you're doing

01:33:00

that's similar to this.

01:33:01

And I know that there's a lot of people

01:33:02

who do stuff like that where they've got these smaller bits

01:33:06

that they're going to release regularly.

01:33:09

I don't know what that means for me.

01:33:11

I feel like it's something I should do,

01:33:12

but it's still fascinating to me.

01:33:14

Anyway, these are all ways that he has

01:33:16

for trying to pull things together

01:33:18

and get things shipped to say that.

01:33:21

I guess to get things out the door.

01:33:23

- Yeah, I didn't really jot down a whole lot of notes

01:33:27

on these different strategies.

01:33:29

I guess I see where they could be useful,

01:33:32

but I feel like if you just follow the part two

01:33:37

and you figure out how to make it work for yourself,

01:33:41

then you kind of don't have to worry about these.

01:33:44

- Yeah, I know that this is,

01:33:47

some of these are just standard practice for a lot of people.

01:33:51

Like these are kind of like your tips and tricks

01:33:53

for how to keep going.

01:33:54

- Yeah, exactly.

01:33:54

- Really? - Exactly.

01:33:55

That's essentially what they are.

01:33:57

That said, let's go to the next one

01:33:59

'cause I'm quite certain,

01:34:01

at least I have opinions on this one.

01:34:03

The essential habits of digital organizers.

01:34:06

There's three, I believe.

01:34:10

- This is Tiago's system.

01:34:12

- Yes, this is Tiago's deal.

01:34:14

So the three pieces, project checklists,

01:34:20

one for the beginning and end of a project,

01:34:23

weekly and monthly reviews,

01:34:25

I know we're both super excited about that.

01:34:27

And then noticing habits,

01:34:29

like the habit of noticing things.

01:34:32

Which of these are your favorites

01:34:33

that you're gonna implement, Mike?

01:34:34

- I'm not gonna do any of these as he's outlined them,

01:34:37

but surprise, surprise.

01:34:40

- Yeah, I don't need project checklists.

01:34:43

My projects are typically podcast episodes

01:34:47

or videos or things,

01:34:49

and I know what the flywheel looks like

01:34:53

for making that stuff.

01:34:54

- Yep.

01:34:56

- So the whole idea of the structure

01:34:58

is to eliminate the friction,

01:35:00

but at some point there's diminishing returns

01:35:03

and more structure actually adds more friction.

01:35:06

So not gonna do those.

01:35:08

I do have a form of a weekly review,

01:35:11

and I guess you could say I don't have a formal monthly review,

01:35:14

but I do have a formal quarterly review

01:35:16

in the personal retreats.

01:35:18

So again, I'm doing the concepts,

01:35:20

but I'm not doing them this way.

01:35:22

Although if you were to just start,

01:35:25

if you're coming to this new,

01:35:27

and you're like, where should I begin,

01:35:28

I would have no trouble saying,

01:35:30

hey, start with the things

01:35:32

that Tiago has recommended here.

01:35:34

- What about the noticing habits?

01:35:36

- Oh, you mean journaling?

01:35:37

- I'm telling you to notice things.

01:35:39

Sure, that's how it comes out, sure.

01:35:42

- Yeah, I don't know.

01:35:43

When I hear opportunistic habits or noticing habits,

01:35:46

I immediately think of just reflection.

01:35:49

And I've mentioned my three questions

01:35:52

that I use everywhere.

01:35:54

What should I start doing, stop doing, keep doing?

01:35:56

Those are my opportunistic habits.

01:35:58

- Yeah, I'm with you.

01:36:01

There's so much of this I don't wanna do.

01:36:03

I'm not gonna do project checklist.

01:36:05

My stuff is regularly different,

01:36:08

but it's so obvious what done is

01:36:13

and what is success that it's just not worth.

01:36:15

It's not worth going through checklists to start and end them.

01:36:20

That doesn't make sense to me.

01:36:21

- Yeah, if you've read a lot of the books that we've read,

01:36:25

at this point in the book,

01:36:26

you can feel free to put it down.

01:36:28

- Yeah, it's really close.

01:36:30

Yeah, and I think even if you go to,

01:36:34

in the next chapter,

01:36:35

there's the only piece of it that I found

01:36:39

maybe helpful for people is starting on page 239.

01:36:45

So the last chapter is called

01:36:47

The Path of Self-Expression.

01:36:49

Basically, it's a get started chapter

01:36:52

and he has these 12 steps for getting the whole system

01:36:57

up and running.

01:37:02

If you wanted to implement this to the letter,

01:37:06

he's got a checklist for you on how to do that.

01:37:09

I don't think I'm going to do this in any capacity, really.

01:37:14

There's components of the whole thing I'll implement,

01:37:17

but not like this.

01:37:19

So yeah, if you wanted something to help you get going,

01:37:22

that's actually where he ends the formal book

01:37:25

is with those steps.

01:37:27

So. - Yep.

01:37:29

I did not jot these down.

01:37:30

I jotted down a couple of things,

01:37:31

which stood out to me from this chapter,

01:37:33

like the fact that information is abundant

01:37:35

and it's been scarce for most of human history.

01:37:37

What we do with our brains is more important now

01:37:41

for a lot of people than what we do with our hands.

01:37:43

Some powerful ideas there,

01:37:45

but I'm not going through any checklists, sorry.

01:37:48

- Yeah, yeah, I'm not going to either.

01:37:51

That leaves us with a bonus chapter about tagging.

01:37:55

And if you read this chapter, like Mike did.

01:38:01

- I actually think I did actually read this chapter,

01:38:05

but I did not write anything down from it.

01:38:08

(both laughing)

01:38:10

- Okay.

01:38:11

So you don't know if you read it.

01:38:14

- 'Cause initially my first thought was,

01:38:16

well, this wasn't in the first run version that I had,

01:38:20

but I did look and it was.

01:38:23

So I did look at this. - Okay.

01:38:24

- I read through it, but I did not write anything down.

01:38:28

- Yeah, basically he doesn't like tagging is my takeaway.

01:38:33

That might not be a hundred percent true,

01:38:37

but he recommends tags to indicate status of a note.

01:38:45

- Nope, it's probably the clean way to say that.

01:38:46

- Not gonna do it.

01:38:47

- So work in progress, done with the editor.

01:38:52

Like those are the types of tags that he would recommend.

01:38:57

Seems very odd to me to limit it to something like that.

01:39:02

I say that knowing I'm not a big tagger.

01:39:04

Like I'm not somebody that's big on tagging,

01:39:06

but I know that it's something

01:39:09

that a lot of people absolutely adore.

01:39:11

So not gonna diss on anybody who does that,

01:39:15

but I'm not gonna pick it up anytime soon.

01:39:18

- You probably do a version of this though, I would guess,

01:39:21

because I know you're into DataView,

01:39:22

and if you're into DataView,

01:39:24

you're probably use YAML metadata.

01:39:26

And YAML metadata is a form of tagging, I would argue.

01:39:28

It's a better form of tagging.

01:39:30

And I do use some of the things that he describes

01:39:33

in the YAML metadata section.

01:39:35

Like I have a status for all the articles that I write.

01:39:38

And if it's in progress, it stays in the folder,

01:39:42

but the minute I'm done with it,

01:39:43

I change it status to published,

01:39:46

and Hazel takes that file,

01:39:48

moves it to an archive folder for me.

01:39:50

- Sure.

01:39:51

- So am I doing Para?

01:39:53

I don't know, I've got the archive folder.

01:39:54

I've got the tags, quote unquote, being updated.

01:39:59

And then an automation that's triggered based on that,

01:40:01

but I don't view it that way,

01:40:04

because I've made it my own, I guess.

01:40:07

But yeah, and even like the DataView stuff,

01:40:09

I don't really think of that as tagging though,

01:40:11

because it's giving it a value within the value.

01:40:16

Like it's a table cell scenario.

01:40:21

It's not a binary scenario.

01:40:24

So it's not a yes or no Boolean at all times.

01:40:27

It's, I've got a data field for link,

01:40:32

and I'm putting in the link for the article when it's done.

01:40:35

Well, I can use that in a lot of different ways,

01:40:37

but it's not a yes or no, per se.

01:40:41

- Sure.

01:40:42

- It can be, but it's not in most cases,

01:40:44

at least for me, for some people I'm sure it is.

01:40:46

- But that's the thing is like,

01:40:48

if you're gonna try to teach me a tagging system,

01:40:51

I've already lost me,

01:40:54

because the beauty of tags is that they are so flexible,

01:40:57

and whatever you decide to do with yours

01:40:59

is not the way that other people

01:41:00

should implement their tagging systems.

01:41:03

- Yep.

01:41:04

Yeah, I struggle with tags and have for a long time

01:41:08

because I've had my spells with using them for everything,

01:41:11

and it ends up in a scenario where it's just too hard

01:41:15

to get it converted into a new system later.

01:41:18

Like whenever I wanna change the way I'm using them.

01:41:21

So like, that's always the part that makes a chance.

01:41:23

So anyway, long story short,

01:41:25

I'm not using Tiago's system for tagging, not at all.

01:41:28

- All right.

01:41:30

- All right, Mike, that brings us to action items.

01:41:33

- Let's do it.

01:41:33

- Something else you wanna cover, but.

01:41:35

- Nope.

01:41:36

- I have two carryovers from last time,

01:41:39

writing my eulogy and my daily plan type thingy.

01:41:42

And then I have three new ones for this time.

01:41:47

One I wanna write out my 12 favorite problems,

01:41:50

which sounds like it could be interesting.

01:41:53

I'm gonna do this Para Experiment,

01:41:55

which I'm in the middle of now,

01:41:57

so I'm just gonna keep what I have,

01:41:58

and we'll see how that pans out.

01:42:01

And then the last one that I wrote down here was,

01:42:05

I need to, I have a lot of ways of capturing things

01:42:10

in their entirety.

01:42:13

I don't have a lot of ways of capturing segments of things.

01:42:17

You follow me?

01:42:19

So grabbing like a paragraph from an article,

01:42:22

and then getting that into drafts

01:42:25

with the link to the article.

01:42:26

Like I don't have clean ways of doing it.

01:42:28

And I know that this is something,

01:42:29

it's just a matter of like building series shortcuts

01:42:31

and tying into drafts and such.

01:42:33

Like there are easy ways to do this.

01:42:34

I just don't have them right now.

01:42:37

So I need to build some of that stuff out,

01:42:39

and I've got four or five things written down here

01:42:41

that I wanna do for that.

01:42:43

Those actually might be shareable,

01:42:45

now that I say that when they're done.

01:42:48

I'll look into that.

01:42:49

- So is that kind of like a progressive summarization

01:42:51

sort of a thing, or what specifically are you getting?

01:42:55

- On the capture side,

01:42:56

like the beginnings of progressive summarization.

01:42:59

- I'm having trouble defining this action item for you.

01:43:01

(laughs)

01:43:02

- The way I wrote it was to develop ways

01:43:06

to capture segments of content.

01:43:09

That's the way I wrote it down.

01:43:11

If that helps you.

01:43:13

- All right.

01:43:14

- So that's what I got.

01:43:15

How about you, sir?

01:43:16

- Cool.

01:43:17

Believe it or not, I have no action items from this book.

01:43:22

- What?

01:43:23

- This book is like chock full of things

01:43:26

that could be action items.

01:43:27

- Well, I did the 12 favorite problems already.

01:43:31

- And four.

01:43:32

- So yeah, I'll justify my lack of action items

01:43:37

in the style and rating section, but.

01:43:39

- I'm very surprised by that.

01:43:42

- A lot of this stuff that's in here,

01:43:43

I have implemented already in the way that I want to.

01:43:47

And there was nothing in here that I was like,

01:43:49

"Aha, I need to change how I do something."

01:43:52

This reinforced a lot of things,

01:43:54

and it brought new excitement and motivation

01:43:56

to some of the stuff that I was bouncing around

01:43:59

in my brain is like,

01:44:00

"This is what I think works for me."

01:44:02

I have more confidence that,

01:44:03

"Yes, this is the way that these things work for me

01:44:05

"at the moment."

01:44:06

But there was nothing in here that I was like,

01:44:09

"I want to do this."

01:44:12

- Wow.

01:44:13

- Sorry to shack you.

01:44:14

- I don't know what I am.

01:44:15

I'm a bit speechless on that one.

01:44:17

Okay. (laughing)

01:44:19

I guess we'll just keep going.

01:44:20

So style and rating, I'll go first here.

01:44:22

I will say,

01:44:24

Tiago does a good job of telling stories in places.

01:44:30

He does get a little long-winded sometimes I found

01:44:33

whenever he would get to the parts

01:44:35

where he was trying to introduce a topic.

01:44:37

There were times when I wanted him to tell a story

01:44:40

in order to get the point across

01:44:41

as opposed to just trying to tell us the point.

01:44:44

So I did notice that.

01:44:45

There's also some discrepancies in

01:44:48

how he poses one view versus another,

01:44:52

the versus thing,

01:44:54

because he has,

01:44:55

especially towards the beginning,

01:44:57

there's a section of,

01:44:58

it's basically a story of two brains,

01:45:01

somebody who does it with their one and only brain

01:45:05

and somebody who does it with their second brain.

01:45:07

And in the one where it's someone without a second brain,

01:45:11

he gives them a name,

01:45:12

he gives them a background,

01:45:14

he tells the whole story of how things work

01:45:16

for them throughout their day.

01:45:18

When he gets into the story about somebody

01:45:19

with a second brain,

01:45:21

they don't have a name,

01:45:22

they don't have a background,

01:45:23

it's just all philosophical.

01:45:25

It's like there's no actual story there.

01:45:28

To me, that was a very stark contrast

01:45:30

and he didn't do a good job of making those two sides

01:45:33

seem equal, I guess, in the way that he presented him.

01:45:38

There were a handful of these things

01:45:40

that happened throughout the book

01:45:42

that I noticed these things coming about like that.

01:45:45

I think that some of that is purely choice

01:45:48

in how he put the book together.

01:45:52

And I wish he hadn't made those choices.

01:45:56

So anyway, that's a say.

01:45:57

I think he could improve his writing ability,

01:46:01

but he does do a good job.

01:46:02

It's not like this is a hard book to read,

01:46:03

I'm just being particular with it.

01:46:06

As far as a rating goes

01:46:08

and takeaways from this goes,

01:46:11

I feel like this is probably,

01:46:14

and folks who have followed me for a while know

01:46:18

that I have not been super receptive to the PKM world

01:46:23

nor the terms that come with it, right?

01:46:25

Maps of content and such.

01:46:27

Blake's always trying to help me find different ways

01:46:29

to interpret MOCs.

01:46:30

So there's a lot of stuff with it

01:46:33

that I've been very resistant to.

01:46:36

And some of that I think is purely

01:46:39

because I haven't fully understood some of the benefits

01:46:44

and knowing that my brain is super fast paced.

01:46:48

It gets difficult for me to figure out

01:46:50

how to use something like this

01:46:52

and get that to slow down to a point where it's tolerable.

01:46:56

So I say that and I put that preface in there

01:46:59

because I feel like this is the first time

01:47:00

I've been able to kind of get my head around

01:47:03

the details of something like a PKM

01:47:05

or to use his term,

01:47:09

a second brain, a way of externalizing thoughts.

01:47:12

Like I haven't been able to get my head around it very well.

01:47:14

This is probably the first time I've felt like,

01:47:17

okay, yeah, I think I'm ready to give this a full run.

01:47:21

Now I don't have an action item of do PKM

01:47:25

or build a second brain.

01:47:26

I don't have that 'cause I've kind of been

01:47:28

on some of that journey already.

01:47:30

Just trying to get my head around it.

01:47:32

So that said, he's done a very good job

01:47:35

of showing me the case for that.

01:47:37

And that's something that I know you have tried to do

01:47:40

a number of times Mike.

01:47:41

At some point I feel like you and I are close enough

01:47:45

that I tend to not listen sometimes.

01:47:49

So there is that component as well.

01:47:54

So that said, like I think as far as a rating goes,

01:47:57

I'm gonna put this at a 4.0,

01:47:59

knowing that there's a lot of really good stuff here.

01:48:03

And I've been able to have some pretty big takeaways

01:48:07

from it, I feel, but have some pretty big qualms

01:48:11

with the way he's pitching some of this.

01:48:14

And then also like there's some,

01:48:16

I don't need weekly reviews.

01:48:18

Like I'm not doing it.

01:48:19

Those are things that you do because you love GTD.

01:48:22

I'm not doing that.

01:48:23

It's just not a thing I'm gonna do.

01:48:26

So anyway, thanks for the MOC translations in the chat guys.

01:48:31

You guys are doing God's work right there.

01:48:33

- So you just justified my lack of action items.

01:48:37

I'm not sure if you recognize that.

01:48:39

You mentioned that you were on this PKM journey

01:48:44

and implemented some of this stuff already.

01:48:46

So I've been on this journey for the last couple of years.

01:48:51

And I feel like every other action item

01:48:54

that could have been associated with the stuff

01:48:56

that I would have read in this book,

01:48:59

I have implemented in some way, shape, or form.

01:49:01

As evidenced by the number of links of things

01:49:04

that I have made that have aligned with the topics

01:49:07

that we've discussed here today.

01:49:09

This is the first time.

01:49:10

- I was watching you grab links in the chat.

01:49:11

- Yeah, this is the first time I've got like four

01:49:13

or five different links.

01:49:13

It's like, "Hey, I already wrote this up over here."

01:49:16

(laughs)

01:49:17

That's never happened before.

01:49:19

- Now that being said,

01:49:21

I feel like the personal knowledge management stuff

01:49:23

and building a second brain stuff there

01:49:25

is a lot of overlap there.

01:49:27

They are kind of the same thing in a lot of ways.

01:49:30

But I'm 100% behind this idea.

01:49:35

I feel like the message in this book

01:49:39

is much better than honestly I thought it was going to be

01:49:42

because I had an idea building a second brain

01:49:45

previously of this is what it is.

01:49:49

And actually that started to change

01:49:50

once I went through the course.

01:49:52

But reading the book specifically,

01:49:54

there was a whole bunch of stuff in my notes here

01:49:56

that some of it we covered,

01:49:57

some of it we didn't, there was a lot of things that spoke

01:50:00

to me, resonated to me.

01:50:01

That's a word that comes up all the time

01:50:03

in the focus episode.

01:50:03

Tiago talks about that term because his dad was a musician.

01:50:07

They have other musicians over for dinner

01:50:08

and they'd look at art and be like,

01:50:09

"Oh, that really resonates with me."

01:50:11

And I really like that idea.

01:50:12

It's like something goes off inside of you.

01:50:14

Resonance is like a reverberation.

01:50:16

So it's like a reverberation in your soul.

01:50:18

You can tell when you look at something,

01:50:20

"Oh, I should keep this."

01:50:22

And that's totally different than the anxious pressure

01:50:26

of like, "I better keep this just in case I need this later

01:50:30

"so I don't get burned."

01:50:32

That's how I used Evernote for a really long time.

01:50:35

That's how a lot of people will use

01:50:37

a digital filing cabinet.

01:50:39

And I feel like building a second brain

01:50:41

with the emphasis on the creativity.

01:50:43

This is an idea whose time has come.

01:50:47

He talks about the very end, last chapter,

01:50:49

how when you implement this stuff,

01:50:50

your brain will shift from consuming to creating.

01:50:53

And that's where the real value is, create not consume.

01:50:56

It's on my lock screen because I want to,

01:50:59

whenever my home screens,

01:51:01

because when I open up my phone,

01:51:03

I want a couple of apps when I first look at it.

01:51:06

And it is a big message, create not consume as a reminder,

01:51:08

just a gentle nudge, like,

01:51:10

"Hey, don't just go consume things.

01:51:11

"Don't dip into the infinity pools,

01:51:13

"but do something positive,

01:51:15

"do something intentional with this technology."

01:51:17

With great power comes great responsibility.

01:51:20

Building a second brain shines a spotlight on

01:51:22

like how you can actually use this for your benefit.

01:51:27

And I feel like that's really, really important.

01:51:30

It's really, really powerful.

01:51:33

And the book itself, I feel like,

01:51:35

is a great entry point into this topic for people.

01:51:39

I don't know of a whole lot of other

01:51:40

like personal knowledge management or PKM type books.

01:51:44

I know courses, I know YouTube channels,

01:51:47

like Nick Milo, thinking you're thinking,

01:51:49

I love the stuff that he does,

01:51:51

but I don't know of another book I could recommend

01:51:56

to somebody to, "Hey, you're interested in PKM,

01:51:58

"this is the place to start."

01:52:00

I 100% recommend building a second brain.

01:52:05

This book is great.

01:52:07

And for me, the value kind of ended getting into part three,

01:52:12

but I can totally see how for somebody who is

01:52:15

beginning out on their PKM journey,

01:52:17

there's some revolutionary stuff in there

01:52:19

that compliments very well the things

01:52:20

that he's talking about in part one and part two.

01:52:24

Part two itself, I went into it thinking,

01:52:27

"Oh boy, a system.

01:52:29

"I'm not gonna get a whole lot out of this

01:52:31

"because I'm not gonna agree with the system."

01:52:33

Well, guess what, I don't agree with the system

01:52:36

as it's codified, but I agree with all of the principles

01:52:39

that the system is based upon.

01:52:40

- Right.

01:52:42

- So once I wrestle with that myself

01:52:46

and I realized that, you know what?

01:52:48

You have a lot more in common here than you have differences.

01:52:53

I view building a second brain not as like a contrary

01:52:58

system of a competing idea.

01:53:00

This is very much the exact same thing

01:53:02

that I'm doing with my five Cs of creativity.

01:53:04

We're allies, we're speaking the same language,

01:53:06

we're preaching the same message here.

01:53:09

And having met Tiago, I also feel that I,

01:53:14

my impression of him is he is a very authentic person.

01:53:19

This is not, he is not one of those snake oil salesmen.

01:53:23

I am happy to see the success that is happening right now

01:53:28

around this whole idea building a second brain

01:53:31

and the book itself I think is at the top

01:53:33

of the New York Times bestsellers list or something.

01:53:35

He tweeted something about that recently.

01:53:38

I think it's great that he's having all this success with it

01:53:41

because I think that this can help a lot of people.

01:53:44

Now, I'm trying to be more picky with my 5.0s.

01:53:49

So I'm not gonna rate it 5.0,

01:53:51

but I am gonna rate it 4.5 because even for me,

01:53:55

someone who had their system already,

01:53:58

and I could make the argument that there's nothing new here

01:54:01

for me because on one level,

01:54:03

a lot of these things have implemented in different ways,

01:54:06

but I still feel like reading through this,

01:54:08

Tiago brought a whole bunch of information

01:54:11

and kind of filled in a lot of my knowledge gaps.

01:54:13

He filled in a lot of the blank spaces

01:54:15

with what I thought about these things.

01:54:16

So as I think about what happened to me

01:54:19

as a result of reading this book,

01:54:21

like I said, I've got a lot more confidence

01:54:23

in the system that I have created.

01:54:26

So I think it's a really good book.

01:54:28

I'd recommend it to absolutely everybody.

01:54:30

If you're looking for something that's gonna say,

01:54:32

do this exactly in this specific tool,

01:54:35

that's not what you're gonna get.

01:54:37

But if you're okay with that, then it's a great read.

01:54:41

- All right, let's put it on the shelf. What's next, Mike?

01:54:44

- Next is "Love and Work" by Marcus Buckingham.

01:54:49

We are going to do what we love, Joe.

01:54:52

- Okay.

01:54:53

- Or something.

01:54:54

- Let's see how this goes.

01:54:55

(laughing)

01:54:57

Do what you love.

01:54:58

Well, following that, I put two in the outline,

01:55:00

but I'm gonna pick one here.

01:55:01

Do the hard things first by Scott Allen.

01:55:07

I feel like I'm someone who likes to do

01:55:09

the easy things first or the fun things first.

01:55:11

So I'm curious the thoughts on doing hard things first.

01:55:14

Has a lot of reviews and a lot of people

01:55:16

who seem to like it.

01:55:17

So seems like it would be a good fit.

01:55:20

We'll give it a shot.

01:55:21

Do the hard things first by Scott Allen.

01:55:23

How about a gap book, Mike?

01:55:25

- All right, I got one.

01:55:26

I read "Back of the napkin" by Dan Rome,

01:55:31

which is a follow up to the pencil pirates course

01:55:34

that I was doing communicating your ideas visually.

01:55:38

I've got a my notepad for this one,

01:55:39

which I will put up in the club,

01:55:41

which by the way, if you haven't checked that recently,

01:55:42

I dumped a whole bunch of them last week.

01:55:44

I was a little bit behind, but it is up to date now.

01:55:47

- Nice, nice work.

01:55:50

Don't have a gap book.

01:55:51

Was busy building a tree house last week,

01:55:53

but I have a couple. - Sure, sure.

01:55:55

- The old ones, actually, that I started one of.

01:55:58

I can tell you what it is to humdum with it.

01:55:59

- Okay, that's fine.

01:56:01

- It'd be super fun.

01:56:02

So I have started one, but I haven't finished it yet.

01:56:04

So I'll tell you when it's done.

01:56:05

That said, and like Mike mentioned,

01:56:08

if you haven't already joined the club,

01:56:10

club.bookworm.fm, and specifically club.bookworm.fm/membership,

01:56:15

if you want access to all of Mike's mine node files,

01:56:18

which he now has updated,

01:56:20

super cool group of people who are there

01:56:22

that support us and support the show,

01:56:25

help us keep the lights on.

01:56:26

So big thanks to you who have done that.

01:56:28

Simple five bucks a month.

01:56:30

And we're grateful to have you guys on board,

01:56:33

especially those of you who have joined us live here today.

01:56:35

We got quite a crew in the chat today.

01:56:37

So thanks for joining us on the YouTube.

01:56:39

If you're interested in joining us there,

01:56:41

I always sweet out a link from the bookworm Twitter account

01:56:45

once we've got that stream scheduled and set up.

01:56:48

So if you're interested in joining us live,

01:56:49

we'd love to have you here as well.

01:56:51

So thanks again, team.

01:56:52

- All right, if you're reading along with us,

01:56:54

which you totally should,

01:56:56

then pick up Love and Work by Marcus Buckingham.

01:56:58

And we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.