I remember the exact moment I was radicalized about climate change. Standing on the front porch of our new home in Southern California in the summer of 2020, I watched the sky turn a burnt orange as wildfires blazed in the inland summer heat. The particles of smoke didn’t just fill the air—they filled our…
The conventional approach to intelligence has been to rely only on our own personal mental capabilities. We tend to assume that intelligence resides only in our skulls, the same way the computation of a computer is sealed inside its aluminum case. But in her book The Extended Mind (affiliate link) Annie Murphy Paul argues otherwise:…
I recently sat down to attempt something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time: using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically create a high-quality book summary. As I wrote in my Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books, writing book summaries is one of the very best ways I’ve found to absorb an author’s ideas deeply into…
About a decade ago, I came across a video on YouTube that profoundly shaped my view of how culture works. Everything Is A Remix by documentary filmmaker Kirby Ferguson argues that all new creative works are built from preexisting ones in an endless process of what he calls “remixing.” From music to movies to video…
For years I’ve heard about a phenomenon called intergenerational trauma – the idea that the impact of traumatic events can be passed down from one generation to the next. I have to admit I never believed it was a real thing. I had only heard about it in very woo-woo circles in San Francisco, and…
As I was researching and writing my book Building a Second Brain, I picked up another book to read on the side: The Bullet Journal Method (affiliate link) by Ryder Carroll. There aren’t many books on effective notetaking for the modern world, especially ones that have been as successful as BuJo (as it’s affectionately called)….
If you set out to create an educational system with the goal of preventing people from acquiring the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in today’s world, you would create the modern schooling system. Before they start school, children learn at a pace that is simply mind-blowing. They come into the world burning to learn…
Popular productivity YouTuber and Ali Abdaal summarized Building a Second Brain in this 15-minute video. This is an incredible distillation and expression of the book’s core principles. Ali discussed: What is a Second Brain and why should you have one The CODE method: my 4-step process for knowledge management and creative work How having a Second Brain…
One book has impacted me more than any other over the past 10 years: The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer.
I first read it in 2014 about a year after becoming self-employed. The first rush of excitement at my newfound freedom had waned, and I was beginning to feel the turbulence of the uncertain freelance
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Every fad diet and nutrition philosophy has one problem in common: they all ask you to mistrust the signals coming from your body, and to instead place your trust in an external authority. Even if the diet succeeds, you’ve…
Many of the case studies I share about how I use digital notes involve major writing projects, because that is the most challenging kind of project I use my Second Brain for. But there is a different kind of use case that is just as meaningful: everyday life challenges. Challenges like troubleshooting the wifi at…
Knowledge work is unique among skilled professions in that we lack a culture of systematic improvement. Other skilled trades – from carpenters to welders to nurses to pilots – have been around long enough and are repeatable enough that the best practices are widely understood. How to frame a door, how to weld a seam,…