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title, source
| title | source |
|---|---|
| The biggest mistake all beginners do with a Second Brain | Medium | https://medium.com/@francesco.amighetti/the-biggest-mistake-all-enthusiast-beginners-do-with-their-second-brain-f5d4ebae8a05 |
And how your approach matters a lot!
Photo by Yan Krukau
Nurturing a Second Brain, a tool to collect and organize all your notes and ideas in a unique place, is a grandiose way to discover yourself and master your passions.
In an efficient and personalized way, it lets you manage what has become the most precious resource of our age: information, knowledge.
Digital or paper-based, note-taking apps or Moleskine notebooks, no matter what you choose, you can move on confidently in the world, letting your knowledge compound day after day. You can put into perspective thoughts or concepts you came across months ago with new pieces of evidence, or you can continue studying where you left off and continue from there.
However, as with any new shiny tool, it can hide costly pitfalls in the hands of a beginner.
And yes, it happened to me as well.
A syndrome nobody talks about
With the potential of these tools in your hands, it’s easy to fall into the trap of not being very thoughtful about what you’re taking note of.
That’s because without a proper goal, all of a sudden everything seems potentially useful, and must be collected in your Second Brain. Collecting feels like doing something, and you fall victim to the collector syndrome.
While you feel like you’re moving on, in reality, you’re not going anywhere. You will start noticing and taking note of a myriad of fleeting thoughts that have no connection with the overall purpose of your Second Brain.
Passing ideas, dreams, childhood memories, sensations, intuitions: everything starts knocking at the doors of your awareness and reclaiming a load of attention, distracting you from what really matters.
They just pile up, like dirty clothes in the toilet. You want to have them washed, but there’s no time for the laundry. Tomorrow. Maybe.
Similarly, the final result will be a messy Second Brain.
If we take the case of Obsidian, with its fascinating graph view, hundreds of small dots will be staring at you every day, asking for a reason to stay there.
The thing is that a tool created for deep work and introspection becomes a commonplace of memories and intuitions that, rather than building up your understanding, are cluttering your mind.
The time you should spend to ponder these thoughts carefully goes into collecting them and postponing a careful analysis of their content. Because once it’s written, it demands your attention.
And if too many things demand your attention, we know very well what’s going to happen.
You are following the perfect receipt for a great deal of mental exhaustion known as FOMI.
The kind of suffering you are imposing on yourself
I have already discussed the threat of FOMI (Fear Of Missing Information) in another article, but to be brief, I want you to be aware that our brains like the dopamine that comes from new stimuli.
And this works with information thirst as well. Once it gets used to a certain amount of data-per-second (e.g., watching the news every day for one hour), it will start craving more information and more frequently.
You will start feeling compelled to keep absorbing new information like a sponge, because, who knows, there might be something essential for your success hidden in some pieces of content, be it articles, blog posts, TV news, etc.
In reality, our brain doesn’t really appreciate being submerged by continuous information and having to deal with multitasking. And after a certain threshold, it is so overwhelmed and you’re so exhausted that you literally melt like ice cream in a warm summer afternoon, and the systems blacks out.
There’s a better way to grow with your notes
One way to slow down this process and resist the “collector syndrome” is to change your approach to note-taking.
It all boils down to two main drastic solutions:
==Have a niche mindset==
It’s great to have interlinks between topics and notes, it’s a real manifestation of the intricate human web of knowledge, but in my opinion, this leads you to creating a personal Wikipedia, while your real focus should be structuring around major themes to create and add value to the world community.
This starts by grouping your interests into buckets of information that can exist independently from each other.
For instance, some of the main knowledge buckets for me are content creation, social startups, ecology, spirituality, blockchain technology, visual art, etc.
If something doesn’t belong to your key categories, it’s probably better not to include, or to write about it somewhere else.
Shift your mindset to become a curator-creator
When you’ve identified your primary interests and begun collecting material, don’t leave it moldy for years.
You have to do only two things: nurture it, and publish it.
Let me be more clear about the mindsets you have to adopt:
1. Curator: you love what you are curious about, and you’re so fond of it that you collect and edit all different sources, ideas, and thoughts in a way that makes sense to you. This basket grows and goes around with you. You can dialogue with it about diverging ideas, test new insights, and prove it against your reality.
2. Creator: it would be a pity not to let the world know about your discoveries. There’s value in what you have done so far, so publish it! It takes a lot of storytelling and excitement to create a compelling and engaging piece of content, but the results are marvelous.
Your greatest investment
Growing your Second Brain can be the best investment you could make for your future self.
Yet, with such a powerful tool, come great responsibilities and challenges.
After at least 15 or 20 years of school education, note-taking has become an end in itself for most of us, with no meaning other than storing information because “you never know.”
It takes a great deal of courage and self awareness to start challenging these learned habits and shift your mindset from being a simple collector to embracing your potential and becoming a curator-creator.
But believe me, it’s worth the price!
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