A knowledge building block is discrete. It stands on its own and has intrinsic value, but knowledge building blocks can also be combined into something much greater—a report, an argument, a proposal, a story.
Like the LEGO blocks we may have played with as a kid, they can be rapidly searched, retrieved, moved around, assembled, and reassembled into new forms without requiring us to invent anything from scratch. We need to put in the effort to create a note only once, and then we can just mix and match and try out different combinations until something clicks.
Technology doesn’t just make notetaking more efficient. It transforms the very nature of notes. No longer do we have to write our thoughts on Post-its or notepads that are fragile, easy to lose, and impossible to search. Now we write notes in the cloud, and the cloud follows us everywhere. No longer do we have to spend countless hours meticulously cataloging and transcribing our thoughts on paper. Now we collect knowledge building blocks and spend our time imagining the possibilities for what they could become.
Before we do anything with our ideas, we have to “off-load” them from our minds and put them into concrete form. Only when we declutter our brain of complex ideas can we think clearly and start to work with those ideas effectively.
Digital notes aren’t physical, but they are visual. They turn vague concepts into tangible entities that can be observed, rearranged, edited, and combined together. They may exist only in virtual form, but we can still see them with our eyes and move them around with our fingers. As researchers Deborah Chambers and Daniel Reis-berg found in their research on the limits of mental visualization, “The skills we have developed for dealing with the external world go beyond those we have for dealing with the internal world.” By keeping diverse kinds of material in one place, we facilitate this connectivity and increase the likelihood that we’ll notice an unusual association.
Quotes from a philosophy book written in ancient times might sit next to the latest clever tweet. Screenshots from an interesting YouTube video can live right by scenes from classic movies. An audio memo might be saved alongside project plans, a link to a helpful website, and a PDF with the latest research findings. All these formats can be combined in a way that would be impossible in the physical world.
If you’ve ever played the word-tile game Scrabble, you know the best way to come up with new words is to mix up the letters in different combinations until a word jumps out at you.
Every time we turn on our smartphone or computer, we are immediately immersed in the flow of juicy content they present. Much of this information is useful and interesting how-to articles that could make us more productive, podcasts with experts sharing hard-won lessons, or inspiring photos of travel destinations we might want to visit. Here’s the problem: we can’t consume every bit of this information stream. We will quickly be exhausted and overwhelmed if we try. We need to adopt the perspective of a curator, stepping back from the raging river and starting to make intentional decisions about what information we want to fill our minds.
Like a scientist capturing only the rarest butterflies to take back to the lab, our goal should be to “capture” only the ideas and insights we think are truly noteworthy. Content tends to pile up all around us even without our involvement. There are probably emails filling your inbox, updates popping up in your social media feeds, and notifications proliferating on your smartphone as you’re reading this.
When something resonates, it moves you on an intuitive level. Often, the ideas that resonate are the ones that are most unusual, counterintuitive, interesting, or potentially useful. Don’t make it an analytical decision, and don’t worry about why exactly it resonates, just look inside for a feeling of pleasure, curiosity, wonder, or excitement, and let that be your signal for when it’s time to capture a passage, an image, a quote, or a fact.
By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us, we can improve not only our ability to take better notes, but also our understanding of ourselves and what makes us tick. It is a way of turning up the volume on our intuition so we can hear the wisdom it offers us.
Adopting the habit of knowledge capture has immediate benefits for our mental health and peace of mind. We can let go of the fear that our memory will fail us at a crucial moment. Instead of jumping at every new headline and notification, we can choose to consume information that adds value to our lives and consciously let go of the rest.
The human mind is like a sizzling-hot frying pan of associations-throw a handful of seeds in there and they’ll explode into new ideas like popcorn. Every note is the seed of an idea, reminding you of what you already know and already think about a topic. There is a powerful way to facilitate and speed up this process of rapid association: distil your notes down to their essence.
Every idea has an “essence”: the heart and soul of what it is trying to communicate. It might take hundreds of pages and thousands of words to fully explain a complex insight, but there is always a way to convey the core message in just a sentence or two.
Source : Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential by Tiago Forte
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59616977-building-a-second-brain
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