Having Tools That You Enjoy Is Important for Your Writing

I am a mentor for the Notion Advanced track of Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain, Cohort 12. This is the cleaned up audio of the first of 5 mentorship sessions with Q&A at the end.

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yY46bq527SyDCI3IgzMNrkumOnrhYwI9VeuhdGqr3Dg/edit?usp=sharing

Timestamps

• Intro [00:00:28]
• Why Build A Second Brain [00:07:58]
• Content Recap [00:09:32]
• Breakout Session [00:11:53]
• The CODE methodology [00:15:44]
• Q&A: Work vs Personal Capture Apps? [00:18:11]
• Q&A: Should I Capture Googlable Stuff? [00:19:55] 
• Q&A: Physical Book notes? [00:22:48]
• Q&A: Starting for the first time [00:24:23]
• Q&A: How to turn notes to action? [00:25:53]
• Q&A: Processing Notion vs SimpleNote [00:28:36]
• Capture Thinking [00:31:47]
• Q&A: Podcast Notes? [00:33:41] 
• Q&A: Grabbing notes on the go [00:37:06]
• Q&A: I dont like any of my apps, what do I do? [00:43:46]
• Q&A: Security & Privacy [00:46:31]
• Q&A: Triaging Information to be Productive [00:49:35]
• Q&A: Outdated content [00:51:46]
• Question: Defining Dealbreakers [00:53:25] 

Transcript

• swyx: [00:00:00] So we're here for BASB week one capture and I'm Shawn also known as Swyx. And I was part of cohort 10 and I'm back again to try to go through the new content. I know that Tiago has re-recorded a bunch of this stuff.
• Some of the content has changed and also just meet people. I think that you know something best when you teach it. So I do encourage you,  as you go through this journey to try to teach it to your friends or family members and you retain that much better as well. 

Intro [00:00:28]

• Okay. A little bit of self intro, and then we'll go into the specifics. I'm going to basically try to recap the stuff that we covered this week, and then try to get some feedback from you and get you talking amongst yourself. On some of the questions that were raised this week. 
• So hey, I'm Swyx I blog at swyx.io, I am a finance guy, turned developer.
• That's a long story. I just compressed there. We used to work at Netlify AWS, that's Amazon web services for the non-technical people. And now I'm currently head of developer experience at Temporal dot IO. I helped to run the React-TypeScript CheatSheet, which is one of the ways in which I build a second brain which is very specific for developers.
• Probably a bunch of you here are developers. I see Glenn is using reveal dot JS and I also wrote the coding career handbook as my capstone for building a second brain last year. So, part of the reason why this is a notion advanced course, even though I'm like not a huge notion expert is because we are very focused on trying to get people to produce output.
• So not just getting comfortable with the habits but also producing by blogging, speaking, and writing and hopefully making money. I'm very keen on helping people to make money with their second brains. Okay. So, I'm from Singapore. These are the pictures that I, I tweeted this once basically saying Singapore's that would kind of Asia.
• It's not usually so super overexposed like this, so don't come here and be super disappointed. But it does look pretty great. It does have a lot of manmade slash nature blended with it. And it is home for me. So, happy to answer any questions about Singapore. Alright.
• So here's a brief history of my blogging. This is me in 2016. Nobody knows about this.  I never talked about this. This is me on medium writing, trying to get into the whole content creation game and not really having much results. So this is my attempt at thought leadership and not really, and just engaging with stuff that I thought was interesting.
•  I was very into voice user interfaces because I coded an Alexa skill and at the time Alexa was going to be this huge thing is going to take over the planet. Yeah. And then just kept blogging and then just like fell off. And I think a lot of people here probably have some experience of this where like you tried to get started, didn't go anywhere and then you just stopped.
• And I think it's very authentic and original And I'm here to say that I'm one of you, I've definitely been there. The first real hit was when, because I started reading and listening to Ben Thompson got a bit lost in Ben Thompson's universe. And so decided to make a map.
• And so I applied some of my data analysis skills.  this was my first hit because it focused on a person and a prominent person at that, and it solves a problem for myself that other people had.
• And that was my first real breakthrough, like all these previous ideas were just things I had in my head that nobody cared about. And then. When you focus on such a small, specific topic as one person. And it's such a small specific question as how do you rank things?
• You perform a service that other people are interested in because I also had that same problem. So I think that was the beginning of my journey as to how do I productionize this second brain or like writing system towards building a network, towards building a reputation for myself, and then just making things that people want to read.
• So since then I have become a reasonable React/TypeScript/ JavaScript developer, happy to talk about tech stuff after the one hour, because we try to keep this general and inclusive. But this has probably been one of my major projects, which essentially running the community documentation for React and TypeScript developers.
• I teach a thousand people a day, React and TypeScript off of this thing. And it's literally my second brain of how to react and TypeScript and people from Uber, Microsoft, Airbnb, you name it, they've all contributed and taught me stuff as I have taught them. It's just really great when you start to do these advanced forms of second braining I call this open source knowledge in the way that people can give back.
• So second brain is, is often very one way. And when you can open source your knowledge it can be very powerful. So happy to talk about that as well, but I'm just giving you a brief overview of like what I do. I also have been focusing a lot on marketing, right? Every time you do something, you should also tell people that you've done it otherwise does it really exist.
• So framing it in things in ways in which people understand, and then tagging people who have had the exact pain points really starts to accelerate your growth as someone who learns in public. 
•  I also have been getting pretty steadily into the personal blogging. This is me getting serious last year in January, and then going from 20,000 uniques to 35,000 and now 40 ish. This is April. But with occasional, really big spikes, I think something you suddenly everyone should understand about blogging is that. It's a very hits driven business, and you put out your it's a very common phenomenon to put out all your effort into something and then have it fall completely flat and then spend two hours on a rant and then just see that go viral.
• The effort is completely disconnected with the results and you should be okay with that because ultimately you're working through something. You're trying to log something for yourself. And it's it's always a side benefit or side effects if other people feel the same way too. I do definitely preach the idea of having a  public second brain as some...