The Purpose of Your Second Brain

I am a mentor for the Notion Advanced track of Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain, Cohort 12. You can catch Weeks 1, 2, 3, and 4 in the previous weekend episodes. This is the cleaned up audio of the last of 5 mentorship sessions with Q&A at the end.

Video version: https://youtu.be/emUfFWixQwE

Timestamps

• Recap of Last 4 Weeks [00:02:08]
• Shifting Perception to Sharing [00:03:07]
• IP's Personal Progress [00:09:38]
• How to Solve the Cold Start Problem [00:10:57] 
• The Invisible Pipeline and the 1% Rule [00:14:00]
• Peer Group Progress [00:15:48]
• Course Recap: Convergence vs Divergence, CO vs DE [00:20:41] 
• Your First Brain vs Your Second Brain [00:22:43] 
• Project Kickoff Checklist [00:24:06]
• Favorite Quotes [00:25:26] 
• Q&A: Denys on Learning in Public in YouTube [00:32:47] 
• Q&A: Meryl Johnston on Learning in Public [00:43:34] 
• The Resistance and Gratitude Journaling [00:46:04]
• Don't Just Write Essays: Remove Resistance [00:48:37]
• Three Strikes Rule [00:52:51]
• Guy Margalith on Fear and Your Second Brain [00:53:40]
• Organizing Files on your Mac [01:00:59]
• Swyx Twitter Journey [01:04:18]
• Tropical MBA and Balaji Srinivasan [01:09:05] 
• Closing Remarks [01:10:20]

Transcript

swyx: [00:00:00] Okay, so we're in week five. I didn't know what to call it. So I just called it finale week. I, at this point I feel like everyone knows each other even.

But feel free to say hi, if you're new you're still totally woke up and to jump around and visit the each other's sessions. I'm also going to blast through the housekeeping just because there's not that much more housekeeping left to do. And I will also want it to shout out what I did for last week's.

Events which well that's Swyx week app, which was essentially right up my own experience of intermediate packets. And I broke my own journey down into eight intermediate packets. So that's tweet, tweet, livestream, blog posts, conference, conference conference, a job interview. And this took place over the course of a year.

So it, it shocked me because even though I went through it, you don't, you never really think about intermediate packets dripping out over a year. And the thing that I really wanted to get across was that I think the way that immediate packets, which was presented last time was very much of a top-down thing.

Like I want to do something big, let me work backwards and break it down into intranet, small things that can ship. But it also equally works for bottom up where you have no idea what the end goal is, but you're just like. That's just ship of small things, and try to build up to something big if the interest is there. 

Glen G says, paddle reminds me of bubbling off events. Yep. That's a very WebDev analogy and that's fully true there. The two directions of bubbling. I forget what the opposite of bubbling is in the dumb, but that's beside the point anyway. I wanted to offer that as my own perspective on intermediate packets.

Oh, yeah. Dave says he is bubbling up NIST insider today. Yeah, totally. Yeah. We are bubbling ideas. That's great. That title doesn't resonate with me. So I just went with bottom up, but feel free to write your own policy. And I think that's something that we should talk about as well.

Who's written stuff as a result of this course. And what post ideas do you have to share? You can feel free to throw that in the chat as well. Housekeeping, we've covered this plenty of times, but stupid questions are welcome. Often beats. Perfect. And then this is the discussion and not a lecture.

Recap of Last 4 Weeks [00:02:08]

All right. So we've covered all these 12. I think it actually works out without the 12. So it's cohort 12 with 12 items. I think so. I grabbed this, I went back to lecture one and grab this slide. And actually  the last week changed quite a bit, I think, but  the first 3 have been relatively stable.

And it's quite a bit of content if you walk back and think about it. So I just wanted to acknowledge and pause for a bit and say I think the last five weeks have been a real blast in terms of flights and just a lot of ideas, especially if you're new to them for the first time. But even for me going through them the second time I felt like I just had a lot more to think about each on each in each time, because I've lived through it and I've had a year to really sit with it.

 I think it'd be interesting to hear from you in in, in the chat or if you wanna, if you want to speak up, I'm just going to pause here and it's just go was there, was there a particular idea that really stuck out to you during this these this whole curriculum w what's your favorite sort of takeaway that you really liked?

Shifting Perception to Sharing [00:03:07]

Speaker 2: [00:03:07] The one thing that I found which wasn't actually to deal with lessons wasn't to do with systems and processes. It was his perception for me. It's just been a shift in perception, but that's been the benefit of building a second brain, but I've taken that and I've applied that to everything. And I'm looking at, whether it be a task or whether it be something I want to do, what is the perception that motivates me most?

And I've realized from second brain that all I came in, they wanted to share more and I wanted an output and I think it came from a selfish point of view of, I just want to share, I want to share, I'm going to attract more people, get more business, be a thought leader, et cetera. What I realized when I was sharing that circle and sharing, and here I'm not having that going a backwards and forwards.

I like helping people and I look at even day-to-day friendships. I have conversations, anything that goes to the people I'm interested in they're gold as well. And I've realized that the perception was wrong for me to just look at output in isolation and say, oh, you just want to help her instead of, Hey, how do we respond most positively to actually get output?

And for me now, I realized that for helping other people I'm building connections, like even the last week I've been really lucky people that they messaging me, ask them to connect. I've had zoom calls with people. I'm emailing people and we're all having backwards and forwards dialogue, but that wouldn't have happened unless I output in the first place to 

share my opinion, to actually attract those like-minded people as well.

So that's where I say now to perception is going to help me. And I'm going to look at any future problem rather than just looking at like it's a task or a project on big into kind of alleviate and willpower and not having this battle that you have to get up every day and you have to do something against your will to finally get to the end of a journey.

And for me, if there's that kind of, if there's those breadcrumbs of emotion for me and breadcrumbs of connection with people, I'll get more addicted to it. I'll enjoy it more. It will be easier for me all the time. And I think it will become more and more natural to do. 

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