Story with a Second Brain
by Swagman · 13 things on Twos
- You wake up Monday morning, looking forward to starting your day and your week. As you get out of bed, take a shower, and get dressed, the thoughts start arriving. You have just as many worries and responsibilities as anyone else, but you also have a secret weapon.
- In the shower, you suddenly realize there’s a better way to advance the project you’re focused on at work. As you step out onto the mat, you jot down the idea as a digital note on your smartphone. Over breakfast with your family, you find your mind already working out the new strategy, pondering its implications. Those thoughts get jotted down as well, in the brief moments between feeding the kids and sending them off to school. As you drive to work, you start realizing there are challenges you haven’t considered. You dictate a quick audio memo to your phone as you drive, which gets automatically transcribed and saved in your notes.
- Monday morning in the office is the usual whirlwind, with emails and chat messages and phone calls arriving at their usual frantic pace. As you share your new idea with your colleagues, they start asking questions, pointing out valid concerns, and adding their own contributions. At each of these moments, you are ready to save them as notes in your Second Brain. You withhold judgment, seeking to gather the widest possible range of feedback before deciding on a course of action.
- Before you know it, it’s lunchtime. As you take a break to grab a bite to eat, your thoughts turn philosophical: “What is the ultimate point of the project, and are we forgetting it? How does it fit into the long-term vision of the product we want to build? What is the impact of the new strategy on shareholders, customers, suppliers, and the environment?” You have only thirty minutes to eat lunch, and you don’t have time to ponder these questions in depth, but you note them down as a reminder to think about later.
- You are on your smartphone just like everyone else, but you aren’t doing what they are doing. You are creating value instead of killing time.
- By the time the afternoon meeting comes around to review the strategy you’ve come up with, you already have a formidable collection of notes ready and waiting: the ideas, strategies, objectives, challenges, questions, concerns, contributions, and reminders you’ve collected over just a few hours on a Monday morning.
- You take ten minutes before the meeting starts to organize your notes. About a third of them aren’t a priority, and you put them aside. Another third are critical, and you make them into an agenda for the meeting. The remaining third are somewhere in between, and you put them into a separate list to refer to if appropriate.
- As the meeting begins, the team sits down to start discussing the project. You are already prepared. You’ve already considered the biggest problems from several different angles, mapped out a number of possible solutions, and started thinking about the big-picture implications. You’ve even received feedback from some of your colleagues and incorporated it into your recommendations. You argue for your point of view while also remaining open to the perspectives of your team. Your goal is to stay present and guide the conversation to the best possible outcome, making use of everyone’s unique way of seeing things. All the important reflections, new ideas, and unexpected possibilities your colleagues come up with also get recorded in your Second Brain.
- As this way of working with information continues over days and weeks and months, the way your mind works begins to change. You start to see recurring patterns in your thinking: why you do things, what you really want, and what’s really important to you. Your Second Brain becomes like a mirror, teaching you about yourself and reflecting back to you the ideas worth keeping and acting on. Your mind starts to become intertwined with this system, leaning on it to remember more than you ever could on your own.
- All this is literally not just in your head. People can tell there is something different about you. They start to recognize that you can draw on an unusually large body of knowledge at a moment’s notice. They remark on your amazing memory, but what they don’t know is that you never even try to remember anything. They admire your incredible dedication to developing your thinking over time. In reality, you are just planting seeds of inspiration and harvesting them as they flower.
- As you begin to see all the knowledge you’ve gained in tangible form, it dawns on you that you already have everything you need to strike out toward the future you want. There’s no need to wait until you’re perfectly prepared. No need to consume more information or do more research. All that’s left is for you to take action on what you already know and already have, which is laid out before you in meticulous detail.
- Your brain is no longer the bottleneck on your potential, which means you have all the bandwidth you need to pursue any endeavor and make it successful. This sense of confidence in the quality of your thinking gives you the freedom to ask deeper questions and the courage to pursue bigger challenges. You can’t fail, because failure is just more information, to be captured and used as fuel for your journey.
- This is what it’s like to build and harness the power of a Second Brain.