Why you should build up a second brain

We watch documentaries, spend our time on Youtube, listen to podcasts and audio books and read books. We are basically consuming content all day. The problem is that our brain is not able to store all this information. This is where the idea of a second brain comes in. It is basically a place where you store all your ideas, thoughts and all the valuable stuff you learn while consuming content in any way. This sounds like a lot of effort and in the first place it probably is, but I can assure you that you will benefit from it a lot in the future. Whenever you hear, read or think about something, which could be usefull to keep in mind or where you could benefit from in the future, write it down and store it at some place. This storage can be digital in apps like notion, roam or evernote or in the form of little pieces of paper. It doesn´t really matter, but I would recommend you giving your second brain some way of organization. Categorize your notes based on the topic they fit into. This will make it easier to find things in your second brain. In addition an organised second brain makes it much easier to make connections between your notes based on the topic in which you categorised that note. Roam Research is especially good at making these connections.

"I want to learn something once and use it for life". This Quote comes to mind, when I think about the benefits of having a second brain. Our brain is really good at having ideas, but bad at remembering them. This is the reason why I would encourage you to build your second brain now and take the time to take some notes whenever you learn something interesting. After a few years of using your second brain consistently, you will have build up a solid library of notes, which you can use whenever you need some advice on something you learned some time ago, but could not apply to your life right in that moment.

I personally like to use notion as my second brain, but you should choose your platform based on the fact, where you are most likely to use it. This is propably the place, where the friction is the lowest, so basically where it takes the least effort to open up a notes page.

I hope you enjoyed this weeks blogpost and maybe you learned something, which you can store in your second brain right away.