[MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLENE WANG: Welcome
to Talks at Google. My name is Charlene Wang, and
I'm a Product Manager at NIST. I'm so excited to
moderate today's session with Tiago Forte. Tiago Forte is the
best-selling author of "Building a Second Brain." He's one of the world's foremost
experts on productivity. He has taught thousands
of people around the world how timeless principles
and the latest technology can revolutionize their
productivity, creativity, and personal effectiveness. Tiago, thank you for being here. TIAGO FORTE: Thank you. I'm so excited and
happy to be here. CHARLENE WANG: Yeah, can
you tell us your story? How did it all get started? TIAGO FORTE: Absolutely. I'd love to. So to understand
what I mean, what I'm talking about when I
say a second brain-- it's quite a lofty claim-- and also, to understand
what I have to offer, why you might want to
build a second brain, you have to know a
bit about my story. It starts in 2007. I was 22 years old, undergrad
at San Diego State University. And life was really good. Life was very simple,
very straightforward. I was studying business. I was having the
time of my life. I had nothing but hope and
optimism for my future. I had an obsession,
which was with computers. I worked, at the time,
at the Apple Store, Fashion Valley in San Diego-- at the time, one of the
five biggest Apple Stores in the world. This photo is from June 2007. Does anyone remember what
happened in June 2007? It was the launch of the iPhone. You remember? Were you around? This photo was actually--
that's me in the bottom right-- was taken on launch day,
right outside our store as we welcomed customers to
buy the very first iPhone. And this photo actually made
it to the home page of Apple for a few days. This is my claim to fame. And I was having
the time of my life, as I said, until, around that
same time, the summer of 2007, I started feeling a pain
and tension in my throat, in my neck. It started off as just a little
tickle, barely noticeable. I ignored it, thought,
oh, it's probably a cold. It'll go away on its own. It didn't go away. The tickle became a scratch. The scratch became an itch. The itch became serious pain
and almost unbearable tension. I would wake up in the morning-- most mornings-- and feel like
there was a vise gripping me by the throat. Made it hard to speak. Made it hard to sing or laugh. Over the months and
eventually years that this continued to
deteriorate, I started-- my ability to
communicate, my ability to connect with other
people slowly constricted as my voice condition
got worse and worse. Eventually, I started
seeing doctors, and then more doctors, and
then more doctors. Eventually, I saw over a
dozen different specialists, all of them trying to find the
cause, much less the solution, to what I was feeling. And none of them could. I did every test, and
scan, and diagnostic you can imagine over years. None of them could find even
a clue as to what it might be. Finally, after
years of this, they gave me-- a neurologist
actually gave me a last resort. He said, look, we
can't find the cause. But if you take this pill,
the pain will largely go away. It was a powerful
antiseizure medication called carbamazepine, usually
used to treat schizophrenia. And what carbamazepine
does is it basically numbs your entire nervous
system from head to toe. It's like the off switch
to your nervous system. And I took it. I took it without hesitation
because I was desperate. I went through my days as if I--
the way that I felt day to day was as if I was drunk. It was the feeling of being
drunk every day that I took this pill. Those were the
first side effects. But later on, I would
eventually discover there was an even worse side
effect that I wasn't even warned about, one that
would come to shape my life, my career, and
ultimately my business and the work that I do today. And that side effect was
severe short-term memory loss. I started to realize
that this medication was wiping my short-term memory,
as if it never happened. Books I read,
conversations I had, relationships, trips
I took were gone as if they had never happened. I remember one day turning
to my friend Alison. We were serving
in the Peace Corps in Eastern Ukraine at the time. And I turned to her
and said, Alison, we should go visit Russia. We should visit Moscow. And she turned to me in
shock and said, Tiago, we just visited Moscow
just a few months ago. Don't you remember? And I didn't. I didn't remember anything. Seeing these photos, which prove
that I was there, it was like-- it felt vaguely
familiar, but it was like looking at someone else's
memories of someone else's life. So I was ultimately
faced with a choice. Every day, what would
you choose if you had to decide between
being pain-free on one hand or having access to your
memory on the other? Now, I'm going to tell
you how the story ended up a bit later on. Don't worry. There will be a resolution. But there was a couple of
things that I took away from this experience
that I really value. One was that I
learned, I realized that memory is everything. Memory is everything,
your past, the experiences that shaped you, the
realizations you've had, the relationships
you've had, the stories, the story of your life. That's who you are. Without your memory,
you're someone else. I became so committed to
preserving the memories of what had happened in my life. As I started my career around
the same time in my mid-20s, I realized something
else, which is, the life that I wanted to
lead, my ambitions, my goals, the family I wanted to have,
the business I one day wanted to start-- those, I could not rely
on my biological mind and my biological body
to give me those things. I actually feel grateful years
later now that I learned this so early on. I didn't have the option of
powering through, working all-nighters, working
through the weekend, trying to remember
more, trying to make results happen in my
career through brute force. My body just wouldn't allow it. I had to learn, from
such an early age, to depend on external systems-- external systems of
support when my brain, when my memory failed me. Now, think about your
own life for a sec. Let's bring this back
to the modern age. We live in this time of
information overload. There's too much, isn't there? Too much information, too
many details, too many facts, too much research, too many
emails, too many to do's, too many messages, too
many things from all sides. And I think, in a way,
my experience gave me a window into the future. It gave me a window into the
future that we are all now living, where our brains
simply cannot keep up. It's not a question of just
being productive or having the right computer
setup or whatever. It is reaching a
biological breaking point, is what I believe. I hear constantly from my
students, my customers, my clients about indecision
and the problem of distraction, and the stress, and the
anxiety, and this feeling of procrastination. I think they have
a common cause. I think there is this
underlying pervasive phenomenon that the information we have to
deal with has become inhuman. It's far exceeded our capacity
as human beings to manage. OK. Now, this is kind of
uncontroversial at this point. We've been hearing about
information overload for 20 years. And yet, and yet, there's
things we want to accomplish, isn't there? Right? Isn't there things that you
want to build, and create, and achieve, impacts
you want to have, change you want to make
from your personal life, to your family, to your
community, to your company, to the world? What do we do in the face
of this overwhelming burden on our brain when we
have things that we want to accomplish in our lives? As I was experiencing
my condition, I started to research. And I discovered,
there's an entire field-- there's an entire
scientific field called Extended Cognition. OK, Extended Cognition. It's only been around
20 years or so. And one of the best
places to learn more about it is a book
called "The Extended Mind" by Annie Murphy
Paul, who I know has done a Google
Talk in the past. Highly recommend her book. But as I started to
research Extended Cognition, I was introduced to a
tremendous possibility by a study on monkeys. I cite this study in my book. But what they found,
the researchers, is that they had
monkeys, in this case, use a tool, like a rake,
to reach for an object that they couldn't
reach otherwise. So the monkeys were
using a small rake to reach for something
and pull it toward them-- pretty straightforward,
pretty simple. But when they scanned
those monkeys' brains, they found something really
unusual and extraordinary was happening in
their brains, which was the part of
the monkey's brain that is responsible for mapping
the boundaries of the body, where does the body begin and
end, that part of the brain remapped the map of the body
to incorporate the new tool. Do you get the
implications of this? From the perspective
of the monkey's brain, that rake was just
as much a part of its body as its own
hand, as its own limbs. This is kind of the main finding
of Extended Cognition, that not only can our minds
remap how they operate to include external tools. We're doing that all day long. There's nothing
more natural for us than incorporating tools and
objects in our environment into our cognition. Now, think about your phone. What does this mean for
our phones, this device that you carry with you
everywhere you go and depend on for practically everything? I think it's pretty clear that
our smartphones have become a part of our cognition,
that they're just as much a part of our
cognition as our own body. Have you ever lost your phone? That feeling of
total panic, I think, is a good indication
that your body treats that as part of itself. Another example-- have you
ever gone to Google something, and you realize you
don't have internet? And it's like, oh, this
interruption, like, oh, a part of my
extended mind that I thought was there that I
depend on and always expect to be available isn't there. It's jarring. It's disturbing. So there's a way of
thinking of our technology as prosthetic devices-- not just things but these
prosthetic equipment, prosthetic devices that
gets added onto ourselves and not just makes up for where
we're weak but actually extends our capabilities. Prosthetic devices might
seem kind of obscure, but you're wearing
several of them right now. How many of you are wearing
glasses or contacts? Those are prosthetic devices
to enhance your sight. How many of you
are wearing shoes? Prosthetic devices
to enhance your feet. How many of you are
wearing a watch? A prosthetic device to enhance
your perception of time. We're trying to live
these complex modern lives with a brain that is
200,000 years old. We're trying to run
a complex modern life with cognitive hardware
that is 200,000 years old. I think it's well
past time for us to have a prosthetic
device for the mind. We have prosthetic devices for
every other part of the body. What about the most
important one, the brain? Now, when I say a prosthetic
device for the mind, when I say a second
brain, people think of something very
technological, very advanced, and sophisticated,
and futuristic-- basically, science fiction. And this is coming. I mean, this is
definitely coming. One day, we will have an
actual brain implant, I'm sure, that just plugs right in. But in the meantime, for the
problems that we're facing now, today, what I mean is something
so simple and so mundane. I'm talking about notes, notes,
notetaking, this thing that's existed for hundreds, even
thousands of years, this habit that you probably already do
all the time that requires no special skill besides
reading and writing and no special technology except
paper or software, the software that we already have today. So the question that
my career, my business is dedicated to
answering is this one. What would it look
like to reinvent the ancient, timeless
practice of notetaking for our modern, connected age? This is the question that
a second brain answers. Super-charging
notetaking, enhancing it, making it something
far more powerful than just some scribbles
on a piece of paper that you do one time, but a
lifelong practice of learning, and creating, and producing. And I have some
more to say on that, but I'd love to talk
to you, Charlene, about what you'd like
to dive into next. CHARLENE WANG: Yeah,
Tiago, thank you so much for sharing the story. And for anyone
tuning in, if there's any question you have for Tiago,
please drop in the YouTube chat, and we'll get to it. But first, Tiago,
what's a second brain? TIAGO FORTE: Yes,
so a second brain is a trusted place
outside of your brain, a trusted tool where you
save, for the long term, the information that
matters most to you, the information that
you want to revisit, you want to reflect on, that is
personal to you, unique to you, whether it's on paper or
in a piece of software. It is a lifelong record, an
archive of your learnings, your discoveries, your
research, not just for one test, or
to write one paper, or even to do one
project, but for years, for a lifetime of
learning and growth. That is the definition
of a second brain. I personally like to
do it in software, in a second brain app, which
we can talk more about. But that is what
a second brain is. CHARLENE WANG: Wonderful. And we'll have you show us
a little bit more in a bit. But before that, can
you tell us how can second brain make us
more effective at work? TIAGO FORTE: Yes, so
I'm really focused on the needs of professionals. There are ways of using a
second brain across your health, and your personal life, your
friendships, your hobbies. I think the highest
leverage place is really in your career or your business. And the way I think
of it is just, think about any time you
do valuable thinking. Isn't this, as knowledge
workers, what we're doing most of the time? We're making brainstorms. We're doing research. We're making decisions. We're evaluating
different options. Those things are hard. It's really hard to take in
information, make sense of it, and then have some sort
of result, or decision, or outcome. If you invest your most precious
resource, which, in my opinion, is your attention, which
is so limited and becoming even more limited every day-- if you invest at
one time, there's no reason to just
throw away the results of that thinking at the end of
the day or the end of the week. Keep the results
of that thinking. Keep the notes, the
brainstorms, the bullet points, the action steps. Keep them in your second
brain, so the next time you're in a meeting
like that one, or you're trying to solve
a problem like that one, or you're in a
similar situation, you can just revisit
your best thinking, so you don't have
to do it again. What that does over time,
it's just like investing. The compounding
effect of investing in your knowledge over
time is you free yourself up from more basic,
simpler, more repetitive uses for your own brain
and frees up your time and bandwidth to solve
more interesting, more exciting, more unusual, more
complex problems over time. CHARLENE WANG: I can't
wait to see your brain-- your second brain. Can you show us how you
and your team use it? TIAGO FORTE: Absolutely. So like I said, this is the
most mundane, everyday tool. It's notes. I keep my second brain
in a software program called Evernote. Evernote is kind of
the OG of this space. They were the first company
to market themselves as a second brain. And you can use really
any software you want. You can use Google Keep. Many of you are
probably using that. You can use Microsoft
OneNote, Apple Notes. There's a whole new wave of
second brain apps, like Notion, like Obsidian, like Roam. You can take your pick. But I've been using
Evernote for about 10 years. And if you look at my notetaking
app, it's very straightforward. Over here on the
left, I have folders, which in Evernote are called
Notebooks, which correspond to my different projects. You can see this
talk right here. I have the notes right
there in that folder. I also have events
that I'm speaking at, roles that I'm hiring for,
products I'm creating, pieces of writing that
I'm doing, my taxes. All my active projects, all
the information related to them is right there. I have areas of
responsibility, which are other aspects of my life,
such as cooking, finances, health, different
aspects of my business, finance, legal,
content, marketing. And then finally, down
here, I have everything else I'm interested in-- culture,
design, the economy, languages, marketing, music,
overlanding, philosophy. And so inside each of these
folders are just simple notes. And when I say
note, I really just mean a simple document with
some combination of text, images, links,
attachments that I want to reference in the future. So you can see here,
I have 7,000 notes, which I know is kind of insane. That is what you get when you've
been doing this for 10 years. The interesting thing is, if
you actually do the calculation, on average, that's two
notes per day that I take-- two notes per day. I mean, this one you
see on the screen here is my highlights
from a book called "The Whole-Brain Child,"
which is a book that I'm reading right now. But a note can be short. In fact, most of them are
probably 30 to 50 words, a few bullet points, a
sentence, a quote, some ideas that I have in a meeting. They're short. And if you're wondering,
what do these notes contain, I'll just show you
a few examples. These are my highlights
from an e-book that I'm reading on the Kindle
called "The Whole-Brain Child." We have a two-year-old,
and so I'm very interested in how the
brains of children develop. And by the way, these highlights
are imported automatically using a service called Readwise. So I don't have to export. I don't have to sync. They just appear here as
soon as I make the highlight. I have things like-- this is a Google Sheet
that a friend of mine sent out in his email
newsletter with-- I think it's the most
important books in history. He put into a spreadsheet
the most important books, sorted by date of when
they were written, which is one of those things. I don't know how I'm
going to use that. I don't even know
if I'm going to read any books from that list. But it's something that I
want to keep for the future. It's something that
I won't necessarily be able to find in the future. I have things like an
outline for a YouTube video that I'm going to be creating. I have things like a few
notes from my discussions with my team about a role and
a job description that we're going to be hiring for. Think about something like this. These are just a
handful of bullet points from two phone
calls that I've had with my team, trivial from
a technology perspective. It's, like, 50 words. And yet, to remember
this with my first brain would be impossible. A week from today,
if you ask me, what did you talk about in those
two phone calls, I don't know. I have no clue. So we're basically using
technology and software to do, easily, what the
first biological brain is so terrible at, which
is remembering details. And that's my second brain. CHARLENE WANG: We got a
few audience questions. People have been asking
as the demo goes on. And one of them from
Emma is, "If you record all your
brainstorming, do you end up with so much
info in the second brain that it's hard to find
what you need later? How do you balance knowing
what's worth recording?" TIAGO FORTE: This is the
whole-- this is the whole thing. This is the whole question, is-- so in the past, the
difficult part of notetaking was capturing. Think about how hard it was. Even just 20, 30 years ago,
I'll find a piece of paper, turn to the right
place, find a pen, write it down, hope
that somehow you'll find it in the future,
no way to search, no real way to edit what
you've written down. It was full of friction. That's completely changed. Now capturing is so easy. It can be as simple as hitting
Bookmark on a web page. Like I said, you can
use integration services like Readwise that
automate it for you. So now I'm not even
doing anything, and notes are just
appearing in my second brain without any further
effort on my part. So basically, the bottleneck
on notetaking moves. It moves from the
initial capture, which has now become trivial, and it
moves to the subsequent steps. And that's what
my book is about. I have four steps, which follow
the acronym CODE, C-O-D-E. The C is Capture. That's the first one. But then the subsequent
steps are O for Organize, D for Distill,
and E for Express. And we can talk
more about those. But basically, yeah,
it's now up to us to filter, to distill down
that big quantity of notes to a small, viable amount that
we can actually interact with and we can actually review. Last thing I'll
say is, often when people discover
digital notetaking, they go a little crazy, and they
just start capturing and saving everything. They start hoarding. It's kind of like if you
were on a shopping spree, and everything in
the store was free. At first, you'd be
like, oh, my gosh, let me just take everything. But then your house
is full of stuff, and you can't even
walk through the house. And you realize,
oh, wait a minute. I need to actually
get rid of things. And the same thing happens
in the digital world. You get past that
phase of hoarding. And then the whole
idea is that you want to be more succinct,
more picky and selective about what you keep, to the point
that, today, I note down two things per day. A handful of bullet points
in a day is all that I do, maybe five minutes of
notetaking in a day. But it does take some
time to get there. CHARLENE WANG: Two things per
day is a very high threshold. I think in your book, you also
mentioned, don't highlight over 10%-- TIAGO FORTE: [COUGHS] Sorry. CHARLENE WANG:
--in Kindle, right? Or they don't let you do that. TIAGO FORTE: Yeah, it's
funny because, in the past, we had a scarcity
of information. So we have all these
assumptions from the past, such as, more
information is better. Who said? Or this assumption that
the information that's really valuable must be
out there somewhere and not the information
that I already have. This is like the
consumerist mindset of more is better, more consumption,
more accumulation. With consumerism, we've started
to realize, wait a minute. There should be some
limits on our consumption of goods and services. But in the digital
world, we still operate under those
assumptions-- more is better, endless accumulation. And so it's like, all my
tricks, and my habits, and my strategies are mostly
about limiting, trying to get myself to be
more selective and picky and to capture less. CHARLENE WANG: And we
have another question on the note of capturing. Let's pop them up. So from Dave, "Keeping
notes seems easier when sitting at my computer. Do you also take breaks to hop
on your phone and record notes while socializing or
otherwise engaged," especially now after or during
the post-pandemic world, "in something more active?" TIAGO FORTE: Oh, absolutely. The mobile functionality
is critical, is critical. I think, both as a society
and on the individual level, over time, more of your notes
will be taken on the go. They'll be taken in the moment. You just stepped
out of the shower because you had a good
idea in the shower. For some reason, shower
thoughts are a thing. Or you take them when you
arrive somewhere from driving, or you take them in the
middle of a meeting, or you take them somewhere
that you're not just sitting there at your computer. And then, in
general, mobile usage is increasing as a
percentage of the time that we spend on our devices. This is why I think one
of the few key criteria of a second brain
app is that it has a seamless, quick,
frictionless mobile app. Absolutely. CHARLENE WANG: And since
we talked a little bit about capture here,
can you tell us more about what CODE
stands for and how can people use that in life? TIAGO FORTE: Yes, so
let's talk about CODE. So when we talk
about a second brain, people think about a thing. They think about this
object, this system, this mechanical thing
called a second brain. And it is a thing. It is a system. But I think, more importantly,
it's a set of behaviors. It's a set of habits. It's how you work with software
that leads to a second brain, not having a particular app
that looks a particular way. So the best way to build
a second brain, honestly, is to use the information
that you're already consuming, that you're already
encountering every single day. Use it more effectively. Use it more intentionally. Use it more systematically. So CODE is a workflow. It's like a factory. It's like a production line. It's directional. There's a beginning,
middle, and end. Things come in as
they get captured. Then they get organized. Then they get distilled. And then the last
step, the E, is Express, which if
you're wondering, like, what is the point of all
this, what really justifies this effort, it's expression. It's self-expression, to
communicate more effectively, tell your story,
spread your message, persuade the people around
you, to spread an idea in a way that is more powerful. And so I don't know. Do you want to get
into-- we can really get into each letter of code,
but it's basically encouraging you not to just store things. You can just throw things
in a digital filing cabinet and forget about them. But what actually
matters in all this is moving your ideas, and
your projects, and your goals forward from capture, all the
way to sharing an expression. CHARLENE WANG: Can you
show us one example? TIAGO FORTE: Yeah. Actually, yes. Can I show my screen again? CHARLENE WANG: Yes. TIAGO FORTE: So this
example just came to mind. So notice that I just
did a quick search for "happy sleeper," which
is the only thing I remember, is a couple of words from
the title of this book, which I read back in March. You can see right here. So this is an example. I just read a book-- not exactly revolutionary. And I read a book
on something that I was facing in my life, which
was our infant son was not sleeping. I had a real use case. This isn't just
abstract research. We can't sleep. My wife and I are suffering
because this kid is waking up multiple times a night. I have a problem, and
I need a solution. So I read the book. I think I read it in
three or four days. I was very desperate. And you can see here, every
time I kept a highlight-- you can see the location
in the e-book right there-- it got saved to this note. So you can see this
is a very long note. This is one of the longest
notes that I will ever take. That's capture. For Organize, I simply got
this note, and I moved it. I actually had a project called
Caio, who's our son's name-- Caio's Sleep Plan. I had a concrete project. I'm not just going
to read stuff. I'm going to make a
plan to help him sleep. So organizing was as simple
as getting this note-- oh, actually, you can
see the project right here, Caio's Sleep Training. So all I did was get
this note and move it from the inbox, which is where
notes appear when I first take them, and in one action
moved it to the Caio's Sleep Training project folder. That's it. That was Organize,
one 10-second action. Then is Distill, the D.
And all distilling means is to highlight or, in this
case, bold the key points. This note is probably thousands
of words, I'm guessing. Yeah, it's 11,000 words. This is a book unto itself. I can't work with 11,000 words. I can't make sense
of 11,000 words. So I went through, and I
highlighted the key points specifically that I
thought we could use. So I was looking for things
like the correct age. There's advice they had
when he's two or three. But we weren't ready for that. There was advice when he
was two or three weeks. We were already past that. So I highlighted,
not just in general, but specifically,
the points that would allow me to solve
the problem that I had. And then finally, Expression. You might think,
OK, this is just a personal problem you have. So I knew that
this needed to take a form that, in the middle
of the night, at 3:00 in the morning, in
the dark, I could look at one piece of paper-- actually, it needed
to be on paper because I wasn't going to
take out my phone, my tablet and blind us all with
this artificial light. And so I distilled just the
points you see in bold here into a one-page sleep plan that
we tacked right to the wall outside Caio's bedroom door. That was Expression. So this is what you got to get. Expression can be
writing a blog post. And actually, I think
I did eventually write a blog post on this
because so many people that I know had trouble with
their infant sleeping. So I actually did
make it public. But you don't have to. It doesn't have
to be like you're an online independent creator. Expression is just
making something. It's making some
concrete artifact that then becomes the
solution to the problem that you're facing. So that's one little
case study of how I use CODE in my personal life. CHARLENE WANG: Thank
you so much for sharing. I'm sure everyone has
a friend or family member they want
to share, and this is a really helpful example. TIAGO FORTE: Absolutely. CHARLENE WANG: So I'm going
to take a question from Mike. So Mike has this question. "How do you mentally
encode information while you're recording to it
efficiently preserve context? My first brain connects
memories with context in which the
information applies, which seems important." TIAGO FORTE: Yes,
it's a great question. So a couple of things-- so short answer is,
preserve the context. You can save as much of
the context or as little as you think is necessary. Also, save the source. The source, whether it is an
actual hyperlink, or even just the name of the book, or
the MLA citation, or some-- even just the author's
name-- some clue where this thing came from is
essential because the truth is, context matters. But often, you don't know
what context matters. Yeah, you might want to
go back to the source and find some details. Where did this come from? What are the subtleties? What are the extra
considerations? What are the exceptions? But you can't know
upfront what those are. So I prefer to just extract
just the part that I need, save the source citation. And if I want to
know more context, I just go back and
visit the source. But then there's a more
subtle answer, which is, who says the original
context is the right context? It's like when I read a book. A book is the author's
opinion about what they think is important. And obviously, everything
in that book they think is very important. Otherwise, it wouldn't
be in the book. But who says that's correct? This is where notetaking enters
the realm of art, of artistry, of creativity is-- maybe there's an
idea from gardening on how to grow organic
plants that you pluck out of that context and put
into online marketing on how to organically
grow your followers. So much of innovation is this
sort of cross-pollination. And to do cross-pollination
effectively, you have to treat context
a little bit loosely. So last thing I'll say is,
part of the reason we're keeping everything in
a centralized place in your second brain is
so it can mix, and match, and melt together. You see very different ideas
from very different fields juxtaposed and stacked
on top of other ideas. Sometimes, the most
random combination of things that
appears together ends up being an incredible
breakthrough for something that you're trying to do. So that's what I would say
about the question of context. CHARLENE WANG: And also, that's
why the final step is Express, right? Because when they
all come together, you can create something you
couldn't think of before. TIAGO FORTE: Absolutely, yeah. Your expression is a-- it
always comes from somewhere. Originality is a myth. No one's ever had
an original idea. It's not a thing. Everything that we come up with
is a recombination or a remix of things that came before. And so to do remixes,
you've got to give yourself a little permission. Cite your sources. Sometimes, people
think this means you're stealing people's ideas. No. In fact, I can cite my
sources very thoroughly because I have a second brain. One of the ancestors
of a second brain is what's called
citation management. You look at tools like
Mendeley or Zotero, where you very rigorously track
every little bit of research. That's what we're doing
is, we care so much about citing where things came
from that we're documenting it in a piece of software. CHARLENE WANG: Yeah,
that's wonderful. And then I'm going to take
the next question from Misha. "Externalizing my
personal private thoughts comes with anxiety for me. What if someone else reads this? Would they think poorly of me? Do others have similar fears? I feel that it limits me." TIAGO FORTE: Yeah, it's
funny because we're talking a lot about engineering terms. This is a very left brain,
analytical, rational, logical approach to information,
which I kind of enjoy. But this pops up in my book,
in the course that I teach. It's like, as soon as you start
entering this arena of building a second brain, it very quickly
becomes a personal growth experience, because
what limits you, the constraints you
face, the challenges you face as you go
about this, they're not rational challenges. They're emotional ones. Yeah, absolutely,
you'll experience all kinds of anxiety,
fears around privacy, around security, fears around
putting your own ideas out there, fears around
people criticizing you for being too nerdy about
this or being too fastidious. You're going to
encounter all sorts of limiting beliefs about
whether your ideas actually matter. Does your story matter? Does your message even matter? You're going to encounter life
scripts, like, oh, this is for scientists and researchers. But you're just a
product manager. Why do you need to create a
system of knowledge management? And you have to push back
against all those things, or go through them, or go around
them because it does matter. I really think every single
person's story matters. Every single person's
ideas matters. But you have to stand
up for yourself. You have to be the one to go
through the personal growth challenges and just
realize your potential. I mean, that's what it
ultimately comes back to. CHARLENE WANG: Yeah, I think
all productivity became personal growth experiments. And you couldn't separate
them from each other. TIAGO FORTE: You can't. You really can't. CHARLENE WANG: We
have a question around how to apply the
second brain further. So let's take this from Will. "Do you have any
examples or tips for applying building a
second brain to learning new technical skills? There is a lot of
new information, but it's mostly
reference material." TIAGO FORTE: Yeah, I mean, I do. Any kind of skill-- although,
one of my biggest influences, honestly, was, I
spent about seven, eight years working in Silicon
Valley in San Francisco. And a big inspiration
for all this was looking at
software engineers. I worked at a couple
of different places, either directly with software
engineers or just near them. Got to know them, heard about
the nature of their work. And software engineers are
just, like, five years ahead of everyone on this. They understand snippets,
like, code snippets. They understand going
on Stack Overflow and just finding a piece of
code that solves a problem, rather than trying to
figure it out from scratch. They understand wikis
and knowledge bases. They understand the
importance of documentation. When I talk to software
engineers, they're like, OK, what's the big deal? We've been doing this for years. I'm just getting that mentality
and that mindset and kind of introducing it
to everyone else. I think it's a core part of
learning technical skills. In fact, I don't think you
can learn technical skills without documentation
and reference of some kind along these lines. I mean, I could say more,
but any kind of skill you're learning that requires
ingesting information, making sense of it, structuring it is
going to benefit from a place that you can do that
not in your brain. As long as it's in here,
it's vague, it's ambiguous. It's hard to really
see objectively. It's hard to improve. But once it's been externalized,
you can do all those things. You can iterate. You can innovate. You can advance it and even
use the ideas and contributions of others, none of which you can
do as long as it stays up here. CHARLENE WANG: 100%. And this backs
the next question, which is, what is the smallest,
easiest step everyone can take to build a second brain? TIAGO FORTE: Yeah, you know
what, I have on my YouTube channel a very-- I think one of our most
popular videos, which is to do a 30-day experiment. Don't even take my
word for it that you're going to like this, that
you're going to be into it. I'm not one of the-- I'm not saying
that a second brain is the universal solution to
all problems for all people, no. It's for people who probably
have a certain personality, certain temperament. It's the nerds among us. It's people who have
to manage and make sense of large volumes
of information. It's for people who
work on computers a lot. So just give it a 30-day trial. And what you want to do is find
the default built-in notes app on your phone-- Apple Notes, Google Keep,
whatever your operating system offers. Don't even get into the
insanity of the whole market for second brain
apps, which people can spend many
months in indecision trying to find which app. Just use your built-in one. And just try taking
one note a day. Many people already use
these notes apps and probably already do this. But just try. What you might need to do
is expand your definition of notetaking to not just your
grocery list or your to-do list for the day-- that's
a good starting point. But take one note a day with
an evergreen idea, a theory, a framework, a quote, an
approach, a framing, a paradigm that you hear, or listen to, or
see, or read during your day. And I'm sure there's
probably dozens of things that you encounter
every day that qualify. Save one thing that is
evergreen that could be useful for the long term. And at the end of
30 days, you'll have 30 evergreen building
blocks, 30 knowledge assets. Look at this group of at
least 30 knowledge assets and just start to think,
how can I leverage these? How can I reuse them? How could I synthesize
them, combine them, almost like LEGOs, to solve
a problem that I'm facing, to answer a question
I'm trying to answer, to create some kind of
leverage in my life, so I don't have to keep
doing the thinking that went into those again, and
again, and again, and again? Free up your time
using those building blocks that you've
already created. And if you enjoy that,
you find value in it, then just keep the
experiment going. Maybe you might want to
go from one note of data to two notes a day, which
is my long-term average. But think about what this means
over the course of a year. What if you ended the
next year that is already going to pass anyway, that
you're going to do everything that you're still going to do
anyway, but instead, you have, what, 700-something notes,
700-something knowledge building blocks after
a year of your life. That's a priceless asset. You can't even calculate
what that is worth. CHARLENE WANG: Thanks for
sharing that 30-day challenge. I think we all have
something to look forward to for the next month. Let's pop the next question up. So Juliana has this question. "I'm curious how often
you go back and take a look at the data from
your second brain." TIAGO FORTE: Yes,
this is a common one is, basically, retrieval. It's easy to get stuff in,
organizing and distilling. Even expressing, we kind of
know what that looks like. But the moment that you
go back to find something is a key moment. So a couple of things I'll say. First of all, the key
here is really search. Much the same
technology that Google uses for its search engine,
search is just incredible. It blows my mind every day. If you can remember one or two
words from a note-- and often, that's all I can remember-- I search in Evernote,
and it comes up. I can find it probably with
90-plus percent accuracy. A lot of software is now
starting to introduce things like fuzzy search. Even if you only approximately
remember the term, it will find similar or related
words, or it will ignore typos. So search is really the
most powerful thing. This is why the organizational
methods that I recommend don't have to be
very rigorous or very precise, is search solves
90% of retrieval problems. And then the folders
and folder hierarchy are just for the last 10%. But here's the other
thing I'll say is, often, people think
that they need some kind of review process. I don't know where
this comes from. They think, oh, once
a week, I'm going to spend an hour just going back
through and reviewing my notes. I think it comes from
the legacy of this idea that we think we have
to memorize things. Like, spaced repetition is
a memorization technique. If you think you have
to keep things up here, then, yes, you better
be reviewing every day, every week, every month. And you can never stop. But the whole point
of a second brain is that we're not
limited by biology. And so I have no review
routine whatsoever. To answer your question,
the only time, really, that I go into my second
brain to look for something is the moment that I'm
starting a project-- the moment. You know that moment
when you're in a meeting, and you're thinking
of redesigning, let's say, the website
for your business. But then there's this moment
where it becomes a thing. Your boss says, OK, green light. Let's do this. Or the finance person says,
OK, the budget is approved. In that instant, a
project is created, right? What was just research
suddenly became actionable. That is the ideal moment. You don't know what's
going to happen. There's not yet any constraints. The project could look any way. It could take any
form, take any path. That is the one
point of leverage where you can
determine everything that will happen later. And that is the moment you want
to go into your second brain. And now you have all the
considerations and constraints of the project. You know what it is. You know the timeline. You know the budget. You know the
criteria for success. That is the moment to go
in, do a few searches, find just a handful
of existing notes, draw on that past
thinking that you've done on how to redesign websites. And you're starting at the
starting line of the race with the race halfway
finished, rather than trying to start from scratch. That moment of project inception
is the moment to do retrieval. CHARLENE WANG: In a
way, your notetaking is just in time, right? You don't do that in case
you need it in the future. You do it because you
need it right now. TIAGO FORTE: Exactly. This is the big shift we're
going through as a-- like, in business in general. We all grew up in a
just-in-case world. All the advice everyone
gave us-- go to school, get good grades. Why? Just in case. Have a good college application. Why? Just in case. Get a great job, just in case. Everything is preparing for
some future that we're promised will arrive. Now we live in a world of just
total chaos and uncertainty. You don't know what's going
to-- look at the pandemic. Look at what's happening
with supply chains. Look at what's happening
with the economy. We don't know what's
going to happen next week, or next month, or next year. And so we have to shift
from just-in-case world that is predicated on knowing
what's going to happen to a just-in-time world. In a just-in-time world,
you wait for the opportunity to arise, and then you
reorganize yourself to respond to that opportunity. You have to be more fluid,
more flexible, more adaptive because you simply don't
know the opportunities that are going to arise. But you can be much more
adaptive and much more flexible if you have a second
brain with all of this stuff prepared
and ready to go. CHARLENE WANG:
There is a key idea you mentioned in the second
brain, which is PARA. People have been asking
in the comments as well. There's projects which
basically has to be actionable. Can you tell us more
about what PARA is? TIAGO FORTE: Yes. So PARA is the part of
my book and probably, of the various techniques
that I've created, by far the most popular-- I mean, by a long shot. And it answers what is the
most common question, which is just simply, how do I
organize my notes and files. I understand, not
everyone is trying to expand their
creative expression. Some people are just like, I
have a lot of notes in my inbox or in My Documents folder. I just want to organize them. And I have an answer
for that, which is using PARA, which stands
for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. Everything in your life, from
the past, from the future, across your work, across
your personal life, across your hobbies,
across everything can be organized in just
one of four categories-- the Projects you're
working on that have a short-term outcome
that you're working toward; the Areas of responsibility
that are ongoing over time; Resources, which is just
everything else, potentially useful research, reference,
documents that you might want to use; and then Archives,
which is everything from the previous
three categories that is no longer actionable. The key principle
here is, you're not doing what most people
do, which is organizing these broad categories, like
Economics, Marketing, History, Psychology, which is how
libraries do organization. That doesn't make sense
on the individual level. You're organizing according
to what's actionable-- Projects, Areas, Resources. That's most actionable,
less actionable, and least actionable. So basically, since this is
probably a more nerdy audience, it's an information hierarchy. As humans, we always
need a hierarchy for what is most important,
what is less important, what is even less important. And that's what PARA does
across your entire digital life, by the way. I use PARA to organize Evernote,
to organize Google Drive, to organize ClickUp, to organize
even things like my calendar. It is truly a
universal framework for your entire digital life. So even though you might use a
dozen or two different software programs-- I think we all do-- even then, I have one
system, one second brain with a parallel
identical structure across all the different
platforms that I use. CHARLENE WANG: And by
having that, you almost know what to do immediately,
even you're in the new system or context switching, right? Because that familiarity
carries through and makes you get into flow faster. TIAGO FORTE: Exactly, exactly. See, that's the thing
is, I have this kind of principle, which
is, the value is not evenly distributed. In any set of information,
anywhere, the value is not evenly distributed. So if you have,
let's say, 100 notes, and you're trying to evenly
spread your attention across 100 notes, that's not
a good use of your attention. The value, probably most of
it-- it's like the 80/20 rule-- is probably in 10% or
20% of those notes. So 80% or 90% of your attention
should go to 10% or 20% of your notes. It should be highly imbalanced. Well, how do you know
what that 10% or 20% is? It's your projects. Your projects are like
what's cooking on the stove, on the oven. Don't worry about the
pantry or the fridge when the pasta is
boiling and overflowing right in front of you. The great majority
of your attention should go to what is actionable,
what is active, what is moving forward, what has a deadline. Everything else
is less important. CHARLENE WANG: And we have
a question from Bhargav. How do you connect
Project and Areas? What happens to Projects
that are finished and Areas that you are no
longer interested in? TIAGO FORTE: They get archived. They get archived. So as a reformed
digital hoarder, I can never bring myself
to delete anything. I always think, oh, there's
going to be some use for this. It's going to be somehow
useful in the future, which is the classic psychology
of hoarding, right? Oh, no, one day, in 20
years, this will be useful. But the cool thing
is, you never need to delete anything anymore. You can just upgrade your
Cloud Storage for a few bucks. You can buy a hard drive. You can just expand the
storage as much as you need. But-- there's one but-- you can save as
much as you want, and you can keep it forever
as long as it doesn't clutter your workspace,
your physical workspace, your virtual
workspace, and detract from your current priorities. So that's what the last A,
the Archives is in PARA, is it's like cold storage. It's like the basement
freezer, where I put things in for long-term storage so
that I can access them sometime in the future if I want to. But in the meantime, they
are totally out of sight, totally out of mind. They don't distract
me in any way, shape, or form from what I'm trying
to accomplish right now. CHARLENE WANG: Tiago,
do you have any parting words of wisdom, advice,
or encouragement for others who are watching
this video out there? TIAGO FORTE: I do. And I also want
to finish my story because I don't
want to leave you with that devastating
conclusion. So when I reached a point-- I reached a point
in my relationship to my medical condition
that I realized I had to take ownership. I had to take control. I kept thinking someone
was going to save me. Some doctor was going to give
me some pill, some surgery, some magic bullet. And after seeing
a dozen doctors, I just realized, it's
not going to happen. I have to take control. And so I was actually in
a doctor's waiting room as I had this epiphany. I stood up right then, walked
over to the receptionist, asked her for my
complete patient record-- which, at that point, was
this big stack of papers. And I thought, I need
to understand this. I took that stack home. I digitized it, scanned
it all into my computer where I could then
start to work with it. I could annotate it. I could organize it. I could make connections,
literal links. I could compare and
contrast different advice that I had been given by
different specialists. And what I ultimately
arrived at, the conclusion, looking at
this complete holistic picture was that this wasn't an
illness or an infection that had a cure. It was a functional condition. It was a malfunction
in my body that required changes in how
I took care of myself, changes to my nutrition,
changes to my sleep, changes to my self-care,
changes to my mental health. Basically, as a 22-year-old--
at this point, 24, 25-year-old-- I had to take better
care of myself was the revolutionary
conclusion that I came to. And that's what I did. I created a protocol. I created a set of simple
habits to take care of my health and shared those with my
doctor, got their input. It was a collaborative
process, of course. But that ultimately
led me to a resolution. It was simply taking
better care of my body so that these symptoms
could go away. And the reason I share
the ending to that story is, the answers were there. All the answers that I needed
were there in the records, in the documentation. What they required of me was
to take ownership of them, to take it in, change
it, organize it, sort it, prioritize it, annotate it,
and then put it into action. And I challenge you. I would ask you, what issue,
problem, goal, situation that you're facing
in your life-- are the answers
already around you? The answers are there. The answers are maybe
in your own head. They're in your journals. They're in your family,
your colleagues, your boss, your organization's
wiki, or on the internet. For how many situations
are the answers out there? It's just waiting for you. It's waiting for you
to have the agency, and the will, and
the willingness to take it in, Capture
it, Organize it, Distill it, and Express, express
it back out into the world. I think, more than we
realize, we have access to more answers than ever. It's just up to us to
put them into practice. CHARLENE WANG: Thank you so
much for the encouraging words, Tiago. Everyone, please go check
out "Building a Second Brain" anywhere online. Tiago, we are so honored
to have you today. Thank you. TIAGO FORTE: Thank you so
much, Charlene and the team. It's been a pleasure. [MUSIC PLAYING]
