Chapter 7 Express—Show Your Work

Verum ipsum factum (“We only know what we make”)

—Giambattista Vico, Italian philosopher

In June 1947, a baby girl named Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California.

Known in her early years as simply “Estelle,” she was raised by a single, widowed mother who worked domestic jobs to make ends meet. Painfully shy and introverted from a young age, Estelle became an easy target for bullying at school, which led her to believe she was “ugly and stupid, clumsy, socially hopeless.”1 Her shyness combined with mild dyslexia made schoolwork difficult.

In response, Estelle turned inward to her own imagination and outward to the Pasadena Central Library, where she would spend countless hours reading fairy tales and horse stories, and later, the fantasy and science-fiction novels that would eventually inspire her to become a writer.

Despite the odds stacked against her, this young woman would eventually become one of the most successful and influential science-fiction writers of her generation, winning multiple Hugo and Nebula awards (the genre’s highest honors) and in 1995 becoming the first sci-fi writer to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

But Estelle wasn’t always so successful. Her teachers at Garfield Elementary School evaluated her earliest writing harshly, with comments like “Hyperbolic” and “You’re not even trying” scribbled in the margins.2 An elementary school teacher once asked, “Why include the science fiction touch? I think the story would be more universal if you kept to the human, earthly touch.” The teacher reported to her mother that “She has the understanding, but doesn’t apply it. She needs to learn self-discipline.”

When she was twelve years old, Estelle watched the 1954 film Devil Girl From Mars, a sensationalist B movie that was so terrible it convinced Estelle that she could write something better. She recalls, “Until I began writing my own stories, I never found quite what I was looking for… In desperation, I made up my own.”

As the possibility of becoming a professional writer slowly dawned on her, Estelle began her transformation into “Octavia,” whom she thought of as her powerful, assertive alter ego. Octavia took on a series of temporary or part-time jobs after graduating from high school: clerical, factory, warehouse, laundry, and food preparation gigs—anything that wasn’t too mentally taxing, and that allowed her to maintain her routine of waking before dawn each morning to write.

The emerging Octavia made three rules for herself:

  1. Don’t leave your home without a notebook, paper scraps, something to write with.
  2. Don’t walk into the world without your eyes and ears focused and open.
  3. Don’t make excuses about what you don’t have or what you would do if you did, use that energy to “find a way, make a way.”

Thus began a lifelong relationship with her commonplace books. Butler would scrape together twenty-five cents to buy small Mead memo pads, and in those pages she took notes on every aspect of her life: grocery and clothes shopping lists, last-minute to-dos, wishes and intentions, and calculations of her remaining funds for rent, food, and utilities. She meticulously tracked her daily writing goals and page counts, lists of her failings and desired personal qualities, her wishes and dreams for the future, and contracts she would sign with herself each day for how many words she committed to write.

Of course, Butler also gathered material for her fantastic stories: lyrics to songs she’d heard on the radio, an idea for a character’s name or motivation, a new topic to research, details of news stories—everything she needed to build the worlds her stories would take place in. She studied dozens of topics—anthropology, English, journalism, and speech. She traveled to the Amazon and Incan ruins in Peru to get a firsthand taste of biodiversity and civilizational collapse. Like a journalist, Butler had a love for cold, hard facts to imbue her stories with a sense of authenticity and concreteness: “The greater your ignorance the more verifiably accurate must be your facts,” she once remarked.

One of Butler’s novels, The Parable of the Sower, hit the New York Times bestseller list for the first time in 2020,3 fulfilling one of Butler’s life goals fourteen years after her death. The book portrays a postapocalyptic future in the aftermath of runaway climate disasters, in which small communities must band together in order to survive. These eerily prescient forecasts resonated with readers as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, as our own time began to seem similarly bleak and uncertain. The radical reimagination of what life could look like in the midst of a crisis was no longer idle speculation—it had become a daily preoccupation for people around the world. Butler has been called a prophet for her ability to forecast the future, but she always said that her work came from simply imagining, “If this goes on… it extrapolates from current technology, current ecological conditions, current social conditions, current practices of any sort. It offers good possibilities—as well as warnings.”

Butler knew that science fiction was more than entertainment. It was a transformative way of viewing the future. As one of the first Black women to gain recognition in the sci-fi genre, Butler explored ideas and themes that had been previously ignored: the potential consequences of environmental collapse due to climate change, corporate greed and the growing gap between the wealthy and poor, gender fluidity and the “othering” of marginalized groups, and criticism of the hierarchical nature of society, among other themes.

Butler pioneered Afrofuturism, a genre that cast African Americans as protagonists who embrace radical change in order to survive. Her stories allowed her readers to visualize futures in which marginalized people are heroes, not victims. Through her writing, she expanded our vision of the future to include the untold stories of the disenfranchised, the outcast, and the unconventional.

How do we know so much about even the tiniest details of Butler’s life? Because she kept it all—journals, commonplace books, speeches, library call slips, essay and story drafts, school notes, calendars, and datebooks as well as assorted odds and ends like school progress reports, bus passes, yearbooks, and contracts. This collection contained 9,062 items and filled 386 boxes when it was donated to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, after Butler’s passing.4

How could a painfully shy little girl become a world-renowned, award-winning writer? How could an impoverished and overworked young woman emerge as a powerful prophet of the future? In her own words: “My mother was a maid, my father shined shoes, and I wanted to write science fiction, who was I kidding?”

Butler did it by drawing on her life experience: “The painful, horrifying, the unpleasant things that happen, affect my work more strongly than the pleasant ones. They’re more memorable and more likely to goad me into writing interesting stories.”

She used her notes and her writing to confront her demons: “The biggest obstacle I had to overcome was my own fear and self-doubt—fear that maybe my work really wasn’t good enough, maybe I wasn’t smart enough; maybe the people telling me I couldn’t make it were right.”

She used every bit of insight and detail she could muster from both her daily life and the books she immersed herself in: “Use what you have; even if it seems meager, it may be magic in your hands.” Butler found a way to express her voice and her ideas even when her circumstances made it seem impossible.

The myth of the writer sitting down before a completely blank page, or the artist at a completely blank canvas, is just that—a myth. Professional creatives constantly draw on outside sources of inspiration—their own experiences and observations, lessons gleaned from successes and failures alike, and the ideas of others. If there is a secret to creativity, it is that it emerges from everyday efforts to gather and organize our influences.

How to Protect Your Most Precious Resource

As knowledge workers, attention is our most scarce and precious resource.

The creative process is fueled by attention at every step. It is the lens that allows us to make sense of what’s happening, to notice what resources we have at our disposal, and to see the contribution we can make. The ability to intentionally and strategically allocate our attention is a competitive advantage in a distracted world. We have to jealously guard it like a valuable treasure.

You have twenty-four hours in a day, but how many of those hours include your highest-quality attention? Some days are so frenetic and fragmented that you might not have any at all. Attention can be cultivated but also destroyed—by distractions, interruptions, and environments that don’t protect it. The challenge we face in building a Second Brain is how to establish a system for personal knowledge that frees up attention, instead of taking more of it.

We’ve been taught that it’s important to work “with the end in mind.” We are told that it is our responsibility to deliver results, whether that is a finished product on store shelves, a speech delivered at an event, or a published technical document.

This is generally good advice, but there is a flaw in focusing only on the final results: all the intermediate work—the notes, the drafts, the outlines, the feedback—tends to be underappreciated and undervalued. The precious attention we invested in producing that in-between work gets thrown away, never to be used again. Because we manage most of our “work-in-process” in our head, as soon as we finish the project and step away from our desks, all that valuable knowledge we worked so hard to acquire dissolves from our memory like a sandcastle washed away by the ocean waves.

If we consider the focused application of our attention to be our greatest asset as knowledge workers, we can no longer afford to let that intermediate work disappear. If we consider how precious little time we have to produce something extraordinary in our careers, it becomes imperative that we recycle that knowledge back into a system where it can become useful again.

What are the knowledge assets you’re creating today that will be most reusable in the future? What are the building blocks that will move forward your projects tomorrow? How can you package up what you know in a form that you’ll be able to revisit it again and again no matter what endeavors you take on in the future?

The final stage of the creative process, Express, is about refusing to wait until you have everything perfectly ready before you share what you know. It is about expressing your ideas earlier, more frequently, and in smaller chunks to test what works and gather feedback from others. That feedback in turn gets drawn in to your Second Brain, where it becomes the starting point for the next iteration of your work.

Intermediate Packets: The Power of Thinking Small

The idea of dividing our work into smaller units isn’t new. You’ve probably heard this advice a hundred times: if you’re stuck on a task, break it down into smaller steps.

Every profession and creative medium has its own version of “intermediate steps” on the way to full-fledged final works. For example:

Each of these terms is the equivalent of a “rough draft” you create as part of the process of making something new.

Here’s what most people miss: it’s not enough to simply divide tasks into smaller pieces—you then need a system for managing those pieces. Otherwise, you’re just creating a lot of extra work for yourself trying to keep track of them.

That system is your Second Brain, and the small pieces of work-in-process it contains I call “Intermediate Packets.” Intermediate Packets are the concrete, individual building blocks that make up your work.I For example, a set of notes from a team meeting, a list of relevant research findings, a brainstorm with collaborators, a slide deck analyzing the market, or a list of action items from a conference call. Any note can potentially be used as an Intermediate Packet in some larger project or goal.

Think of a salesperson planning a new campaign for a health-branded energy drink. Sales might seem like the kind of job that is least related to “knowledge management.” Isn’t it all about making calls, having meetings, sending pitches, and closing deals?

If we take a closer look, there are many building blocks such a sales job relies on. The company brochure, the sales prospectus, the cold-calling scripts, the list of warm leads, notes from past calls with an important distributor—these are the assets that a salesperson depends on for their performance.

Like LEGO blocks, the more pieces you have, the easier it is to build something interesting. Imagine that instead of starting your next project with a blank slate, you started with a set of building blocks—research findings, web clippings, PDF highlights, book notes, back-of-the-envelope sketches—that represent your long-term effort to make sense of your field, your industry, and the world at large.

Our time and attention are scarce, and it’s time we treated the things we invest in—reports, deliverables, plans, pieces of writing, graphics, slides—as knowledge assets that can be reused instead of reproducing them from scratch. Reusing Intermediate Packets of work frees up our attention for higher-order, more creative thinking. Thinking small is the best way to elevate your horizons and expand your ambitions.

There are five kinds of Intermediate Packets you can create and reuse in your work:

If you’re reading how-to articles in your free time, you can save the best tips in your notes and turn them into distilled notes for when it’s time to put them to use. If you’re writing an essay and decide to cut a paragraph, you can save those outtakes in case you ever write a follow-up. If you are in product development and create a detailed set of requirements, you can save that work-in-process as a template for future products. If you’re a management consultant, you can save the slides you presented to an executive team as a final deliverable, and reuse them for similar presentations. If you’re a lab scientist and a colleague designs the perfect lab protocol, you can reuse and improve that document for your own use (with their permission, of course).

You should always cite your sources and give credit where credit is due. A scientist doesn’t obscure her sources—she points to them so others can retrace her footsteps. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and it’s smart to build on the thinking they’ve done rather than try to reinvent the wheel.

Making the shift to working in terms of Intermediate Packets unlocks several very powerful benefits.

First, you’ll become interruption-proof because you are focusing only on one small packet at a time, instead of trying to load up the entire project into your mind at once. You become less vulnerable to interruptions, because you’re not trying to manage all the work-in-process in your head.

Second, you’ll be able to make progress in any span of time. Instead of waiting until you have multiple uninterrupted hours—which, let’s face it, is rare and getting rarer—you can look at how many minutes you have free and choose to work on an IP that you can get done within that time, even if it’s tiny. Big projects and goals become less intimidating because you can just keep breaking them down into smaller and smaller pieces, until they fit right into the gaps in your day.

Third, Intermediate Packets increase the quality of your work by allowing you to collect feedback more often. Instead of laboring for weeks in isolation, only to present your results to your boss or client and find out you went in the wrong direction, you craft just one small building block at a time and get outside input before moving forward. You’ll find that people give much better feedback if they’re included early, and the work is clearly in progress.

Fourth, and best of all, eventually you’ll have so many IPs at your disposal that you can execute entire projects just by assembling previously created IPs. This is a magical experience that will completely change how you view productivity. The idea of starting anything from scratch will become foreign to you—why not draw on the wealth of assets you’ve invested in in the past? People will marvel at how you’re able to deliver at such a high standard so consistently. They’ll wonder how you find the time to do so much careful thinking, when in fact you’re not working harder or longer—all you’re doing is drawing on a growing library of Intermediate Packets stored in your Second Brain. If they are truly valuable assets, then they deserve to be managed, just like any other asset you possess.

Intermediate Packets are really a new lens through which you can perceive the atomic units that make up everything you do. By “thinking small,” you can focus on creating just one IP each time you sit down to work, without worrying about how viable it is or whether it will be used in the exact way you envisioned. This lens reframes creativity as an ongoing, continual cycle of delivering value in small bits, rather than a massive all-consuming endeavor that weighs on you for months.

Assembling Building Blocks: The Secret to Frictionless Output

Every time you make a sketch, design a slide, record a short video on your phone, or post on social media, you are undertaking a small creative act that produces a tangible by-product. Consider the different kinds of documents and other content that you probably regularly produce as part of your normal routines:

While you can sit down to purposefully create an IP, it is far more powerful to simply notice the IPs that you have already produced and then to take an extra moment to save them in your Second Brain.

Let’s look at an example: planning a large conference. If it’s a brand-new event, or you’ve never organized a conference before, it might seem like you have to produce everything from scratch. However, if you break down that mega-project into concrete chunks, suddenly the components that you’ll need become clear:

These are some of the building blocks that you’ll need to be able to run the conference. You could put them all on your to-do list and make them yourself, but there’s a different, much faster, and more effective approach. Ask yourself: How could you acquire or assemble each of these components, instead of having to make them yourself?

The conference agenda could easily be modeled on an agenda from a different conference, with the topics and speaker names switched out. You could start compiling a list of potential breakout sessions, adding any topic suggested by others that strikes you as interesting. You might have a checklist for delivering effective keynotes left over from a live event you’ve organized in the past. Emails can draw on an archive of examples you’ve saved from other conferences you’ve attended. Screenshots of conference websites you admire are the best possible starting point for designing your own.

Our creativity thrives on examples. When we have a template to fill in, our ideas are channeled into useful forms instead of splattered around haphazardly. There are best practices and plentiful models for almost anything you might want to make.

Most professionals I work with already have and use Intermediate Packets—that’s the point! Your Second Brain is the repository of things you are already creating and using anyway. All we are doing is adding a little bit of structure and intentionality to how we use them: capturing them in one place, such as a digital notes app, so we can find them with a search; organizing them according to our projects, areas, and resources, so we have a dedicated place for each important aspect of our lives; and distilling them down to their most essential points, so they can be quickly accessed and retrieved.

Once we’ve completed these initial steps, expression transforms from a gut-wrenching, agonizing feat to a straightforward assembly of existing packets of work.

Over time, your ability to quickly tap these creative assets and combine them into something new will make all the difference in your career trajectory, business growth, and even quality of life. In the short term, it might not matter. You might be able to scramble and put together a particular document right when you need it, but there will be a slowly accumulating, invisible cost. The cost of not being quite sure whether you have what you need. The stress of wondering whether you’ve already completed a task before. There is a cost to your sleep, your peace of mind, and your time with family when the full burden of constantly coming up with good ideas rests solely on your fickle biological brain.

How to Resurface and Reuse Your Past Work

The Express step is where we practice and hone our ability to retrieve what we need, when we need it. It’s the step where we build the confidence that our Second Brain is working for us.

Let’s take a closer look at the process of retrieval: How can you find and retrieve Intermediate Packets when you need them?

This isn’t a trivial question, because the connection between IPs we’ve saved in the past and future projects is often quite unpredictable. A concert poster on the side of a building you snapped a photo of might inform the shapes in a logo you’re designing. A song overheard on the subway might influence a jingle you’re writing for your child’s school play. An idea about persuasion you read in a book might become a central pillar in a health campaign you are organizing for your company.

These are some of the most valuable connections—when an idea crosses the boundaries between subjects. They can’t be planned or predicted. They can emerge only when many kinds of ideas in different shapes and sizes are mixed together.

This inherent unpredictability means that there is no single, perfectly reliable retrieval system for the ideas contained in your notes. Instead, there are four methods for retrieval that overlap and complement one another. Together they are more powerful than any computer yet more flexible than any human mind. You can step through them in order until you find what you’re looking for.

Those four retrieval methods are:

  1. Search
  2. Browsing
  3. Tags
  4. Serendipity

Retrieval Method #1: Search

The search function in your notes app is incredibly powerful. The same technology that has revolutionized how we navigate the web via search engines is also useful for navigating our private knowledge collections.

Search has the benefit of costing almost nothing in terms of time and effort. Just by saving your notes in a central place, you enable software to search their full contents in seconds. You can run multiple searches in quick succession, running down rabbit trails through your knowledge garden as you try out different variations of terms.

This quick, iterative approach to searching is where notes apps shine—you don’t have to open and close individual notes one at a time as in traditional word processing. In a sense, every note in your Second Brain is already “open,” and you can view or interact with its contents with a mere click or tap.

Search should be the first retrieval method you turn to. It is most useful when you already know more or less what you’re looking for, when you don’t have notes saved in a preexisting folder, or when you’re looking for text, but as with every tool, it has its limitations. If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, don’t have a preexisting folder to look through, or are interested in images or graphics, it’s time to turn to browsing.

Retrieval Method #2: Browsing

If you’ve followed the PARA system outlined in Chapter 5 to organize your notes, you already have a series of dedicated folders for each of your active projects, areas of responsibility, resources, and archives.

Each of these folders is a dedicated environment designed specifically for focusing on that domain of your life. Each one can contain a wide range of content, from brief notes dashed off during a phone call to polished Intermediate Packets that you’ve already used in past projects. When the time comes to take action, you’ll be able to enter the appropriate workspace and know that everything found there is relevant to the task at hand.

As powerful as search can be, studies5 have found that in many situations people strongly prefer to navigate their file systems manually, scanning for the information they’re looking for. Manual navigation gives people control over how they navigate, with folders and file names providing small contextual clues about where to look next.6 Browsing allows us to gradually home in on the information we are looking for, starting with the general and getting more and more specific. This kind of browsing uses older parts of the brain that developed to navigate physical environments, and thus comes to us more naturally.II

There are a variety of features offered by notes apps that make it easy to browse your hierarchy of folders. Some apps allow you to “sort” a list of notes by different criteria, such as date created. This gives you an interactive timeline of your ideas from newest to oldest. Other apps allow you to show only images and web clippings, enabling rapid visual scanning to see if anything catches your eye. Most notes apps allow you to open multiple windows and compare their contents side by side so you can look for patterns and move content between them.

Once again, there are limitations to what you can find by browsing folders. Sometimes you know a project is coming and can start saving things to a project folder in advance, but sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it’s very clear which area of your business a note is related to, but often you have no idea where to put it. Many notes end up being useful in completely unexpected ways. We want to encourage that kind of serendipity, not fight it!

It is for the unforeseen and the unexpected that tags really shine.

Retrieval Method #3: Tags

Tags are like small labels you can apply to certain notes regardless of where they are located. Once they are tagged, you can perform a search and see all those notes together in one place. The main weakness of folders is that ideas can get siloed from each other, making it hard to spark interesting connections. Tags can overcome this limitation by infusing your Second Brain with connections, making it easier to see cross-disciplinary themes and patterns that defy simple categorization.

For example, maybe you work in customer service and notice that the same questions from customers keep coming up again and again. You might decide to write a Frequently Asked Questions page and add it to your company website. That is a project, but not one that you previously recognized and started gathering materials for. You might have various notes that you want to draw on to design this page, but don’t want to move them from the project, area, and resource folders where they’re currently located.

It’s time for tags. You could take fifteen minutes and perform a series of searches for terms relevant to the FAQs you’ll be writing. For any useful note you find, apply a tag called “FAQ” while leaving it right where you found it. Once you’ve found enough material to work with, you can perform a single search—for the “FAQ” tag—and instantly see all the notes you’ve tagged collected in one place. Now you are free to review them more closely, highlight any specific points you want to use, and move those points into an outline to guide your writing.

I don’t recommend using tags as your primary organizational system. It takes far too much energy to apply tags to every single note compared to the ease of searching with keywords or browsing your folders. However, tags can come in handy in specific situations when the two previous retrieval methods aren’t up to the task, and you want to spontaneously gather, connect, and synthesize groups of notes on the fly.III

Retrieval Method #4: Serendipity

The fourth retrieval method is the most mysterious but, in many ways, the most powerful. Beyond searching, browsing, and tagging, there is a frontier of possibility that simply cannot be planned or predicted by human minds. There are moments when it feels like the stars align and a connection between ideas jumps out at you like a bolt of lightning from a blue sky. These are the moments creatives live for.

There is no way to plan for them, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create the ideal conditions for them to arise. This is the main reason we put all sorts of different kinds of material, on many subjects and in diverse formats, all jumbled together in our Second Brain. We are creating a soup of creative DNA to maximize the chance that new life emerges.

Serendipity takes a few different forms when it comes to retrieval.

First, while using the previous retrieval methods, it is a good idea to keep your focus a little broad. Don’t begin and end your search with only the specific folder that matches your criteria. Make sure to look through related categories, such as similar projects, relevant areas, and different kinds of resources.

When starting a project, I’ll often look at five or six PARA folders just in case they contain something useful. Since you’ve carefully curated the contents of these folders, you won’t be faced with too much material in any given one. If you’re using Progressive Summarization to distill your notes, as explained in Chapter 6, you can focus only on the highlighted passages and review notes far faster than having to read every word. It usually takes me less than thirty seconds on average to review a highlighted note, which means I can set aside just ten minutes and review twenty of them or more.

Second, serendipity is amplified by visual patterns. This is why I strongly suggest saving not only text notes but images as well (which is difficult to do in other kinds of software such as word processors). Our brains are naturally attuned to visuals. We intuitively absorb colors and shapes in the blink of an eye, using far less energy than it takes to read words. Some digital notes apps allow you to display only the images saved in your notes, which is a powerful way of activating the more intuitive, visual parts of your brain.

Third, sharing our ideas with others introduces a major element of serendipity. When you present an idea to another person, their reaction is inherently unpredictable. They will often be completely uninterested in an aspect you think is utterly fascinating; they aren’t necessarily right or wrong, but you can use that feedback either way. The reverse can also happen. You might think something is obvious, while they find it mind-blowing. That is also useful feedback. Others might point out aspects of an idea you never considered, suggest looking at sources you never knew existed, or contribute their own ideas to make it better. All these forms of feedback are ways of drawing on not only your first and Second Brains, but the brains of others as well.

Three Stages of Expressing: What Does It Look Like to Show Our Work?

In Chapter 3, I explained how people tend to move through three distinct stages as they grow their Second Brain and refine their knowledge management skills—remembering, connecting, and creating.

Let’s look at examples of how each of these can play out using case studies from former students of mine.

Remember: Retrieve an Idea Exactly When It’s Needed

Benigno is a father and business consultant in the Philippines, and one of his goals for building a Second Brain was to better understand the emerging cryptocurrency trend. He had tried other organizing methods before but found that the information he collected was always difficult to access. Time and again, he would “keep reading and bookmarking, then forget about it.”

Benigno came across an article on an innovative new kind of cryptocurrency and took a few minutes to save some excerpts from it in his notes. When a few of his friends became interested in the topic, he took eight minutes to progressively summarize the best excerpts before sharing the summarized article with them. The time that he had spent reading and understanding a complex subject paid off in time savings for his friends, while also giving them a new interest to connect over.

In Benigno’s words, “I instinctively knew that just sending a long article to friends usually doesn’t do anything, but because the text I am sending has been highlighted they can do a quick scan of it. Also I now have material for a future article I have been planning… all thanks to CODE.”

You don’t need to invent a new theory or write the next great novel to derive value from your Second Brain. Within days of capturing ideas that resonate with you, you’ll start to notice opportunities to share them with others to their benefit.

Connect: Use Notes to Tell a Bigger Story

Patrick is a church pastor in Colorado, and he uses his Second Brain to help him design memorial services, which for him are a deeply creative experience about honoring life.

His goal with creating a memorial service is to “tell the story of someone’s life in a way that honors and makes meaning in retrospect about how their life unfolded.” In the past, this entailed a heavy lift. But by seeing his services through the lens of his Second Brain, Patrick realized that his job was simply to gather and connect some of the themes and stories he heard in a way that was meaningful to the deceased person’s loved ones.

Patrick used this realization to change his creative process. He began recording his conversations using an automatic transcription app on his smartphone, allowing him to be fully present with grieving families knowing he had every word captured. He saved all the transcripts from his conversations, plus obituaries, photos, and other related documents into the PARA project folder for each memorial, so he could see it all in one place. Instead of spending five to seven hours at the end of all his interviews to distill everything he had heard, he began spending fifteen minutes after each interview to highlight only the parts that resonated.

In Patrick’s words: “Using my first brain only for what it is best at is freedom. Freedom to be present and not multitasking as I sit with grieving people hearing stories of their loved ones. Freedom to know I have everything recorded. Freedom to know that when I go to pull the memorial together, 80 percent of the work is already done.”IV

Creative expression isn’t always about self-promotion or advancing our own career. Some of our most beautiful, creative acts are ones in which we connect the dots for others in ways they wouldn’t be able to do themselves.

Create: Complete Projects and Accomplish Goals Stress-Free

Rebecca is a professor of educational psychology at a university in Florida, and she uses her digital notes to create programs and presentations as part of her teaching.

Before building her Second Brain, Rebecca would wait until she had a large block of time available to put together her ideas for a talk. As a busy professional and mother, those large uninterrupted blocks of time seemed scarcer than ever.

Her digital notes gave her another way of making progress. In the weeks leading up to an event, on days she felt inspired, Rebecca began dropping short notes into her notes inbox with ideas of things she might want to include. By the time she sat down to write the outline, she realized she already had all the Intermediate Packets—metaphors, research facts, stories, diagrams—she needed at her fingertips. All she had to do was string together the notes and existing IPs she had already captured.

In Rebecca’s words: “I’m able to look at my priorities—my priorities for my work, my priorities for my family, my marriage, etc.—and then only focus in the moment on those projects that are on my plate now.”

Whatever you are responsible for creating—whether it is documents or presentations or decisions or outcomes—your Second Brain is a vital repository of all the bits and pieces you’ll want in front of you when you sit down to focus. It is a creative environment you can step into at any time, in any place, when it’s time to make things happen.

Creativity Is Inherently Collaborative

A common myth of creativity is that of the solitary artist, working in total isolation. We are implicitly told that we must shut ourselves off from the influence of others and flesh out our masterpiece by the sweat of our brow.

In my experience, this isn’t how creativity works at all. It doesn’t matter what medium you work in; sooner or later you must work with others. If you’re a musician, you’ll need a sound engineer to mix the record. If you’re an actor, you’ll need a director who believes in you. Even writing a book, which may suggest images of a lonely cabin deep in the woods, is an intensively social exercise. A book is created out of a dance between an author and their editor.

Reframing your work in terms of Intermediate Packets isn’t just about doing the same old stuff in smaller chunks. That doesn’t unlock your true potential. The transformation comes from the fact that smaller chunks are inherently more shareable and collaborative.

It is much easier to show someone a small thing, and ask for their thoughts on it, rather than the entire opus you’re creating. It’s less confronting to hear criticism on one small aspect of your work, at an early stage when you still have time to correct it, than getting a negative reaction after months of effort. You can use each little piece of intermediate feedback to refine what you’re making—to make it more focused, more appealing, more succinct, or easier to understand.

The fundamental difficulty of creative work is that we are often too close to it to see it objectively. Getting feedback is really about borrowing someone else’s eyes to see what only a novice can see. It’s about stepping outside your subjective point of view and noticing what’s missing from what you’ve made.

Once you understand how incredibly valuable feedback is, you start to crave as much of it as you can find. You start looking for every opportunity to share your outputs and gain some clarity on how other people are likely to receive it. These moments are so important that you will begin changing how you work in order to get feedback as early and often as possible, because you know it is much easier to gather and synthesize the thoughts of others than to come up with an endless series of brilliant thoughts on your own. You will begin to see yourself as the curator of the collective thinking of your network, rather than the sole originator of ideas.

There are certain notes in your Second Brain that are disproportionately valuable, that you will find yourself returning to again and again. These are the cornerstones of your work on which everything else is built, but you can’t usually know which notes are cornerstones up front. You discover them by sharing your ideas with others, and seeing which ones resonate with them. It is by sharing our ideas with other people that we discover which ones represent our most valuable expertise.

Everything Is a Remix

The CODE Method is based on an important aspect of creativity: that it is always a remix of existing parts. We all stand on the shoulders of our predecessors. No one creates anything out of a pure void.

Kitbashing is a practice used in making small-scale models for action movies like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. To stay within time and budget, model makers buy prefabricated commercial kits and recombine them into new models for their sets. Instead of fabricating new pieces from scratch, these premade parts—from models of World War II flak cannons, US Navy battleships, fighter planes, T-34 tanks, and submarines—can be used to add texture and fine detail to special effects scenes in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost it would normally take.

Adam Savage, host of the popular MythBusters television show and a skilled model maker, noted that because these pieces are so versatile, “There were some kits to which you would return repeatedly.” As part of the team at Industrial Light & Magic, the studio behind many special effects films, he relied on a particular kit that found its way into almost every model the team ever built.7

Don’t take the work of others wholesale; borrow aspects or parts of their work. The shape of a banner on a web page, the layout of a slide, the style of a song—these are like the ingredients you put in a blender before hitting the button and mixing it into your own recipe. Of course, cite all your sources and influences, even if you don’t strictly have to. Giving credit where credit is due doesn’t lessen the value of your contribution—it increases it. Having a Second Brain where all your sources are clearly documented will make it much easier to track them down and include those citations in the finished version.

I remember the first time someone referred to what I do as “your work.” It dawned on me that I had a body of work that stood on its own, that had an identity distinct from mine. This is a turning point in the life of any creative professional—when you begin to think of “your work” as something separate from yourself.

Reframing your productivity in terms of Intermediate Packets is a major step toward this turning point. Instead of thinking of your job in terms of tasks, which always require you to be there, personally, doing everything yourself, you will start to think in terms of assets and building blocks that you can assemble.

As the potential of your intellectual assets becomes apparent, you’ll start to look for any way to spend your time creating such assets and avoid one-off tasks whenever possible. You will start to seek out ways of acquiring or outsourcing the creation of these assets to others, instead of assuming you have to build them all yourself. These changes will enable you to get things done at a pace that is far beyond what mere “productivity tips” can ever achieve.

Even if you’re not writing a book now, or creating a presentation now, or developing a new framework now, that doesn’t mean you never will. Every little digital artifact you create—the emails, the meeting notes, the project plans, the templates, the examples—is part of the ongoing evolution of your body of work. They are like the neurons in an intelligent organism that is growing, evolving, reaching for higher levels of consciousness with each new experience it has.

Your Turn: You Only Know What You Make

My favorite quote about creativity is from the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico: Verum ipsum factum. Translated to English, it means “We only know what we make.”

To truly “know” something, it’s not enough to read about it in a book. Ideas are merely thoughts until you put them into action. Thoughts are fleeting, quickly fading as time passes. To truly make an idea stick, you have to engage with it. You have to get your hands dirty and apply that knowledge to a practical problem. We learn by making concrete things—before we feel ready, before we have it completely figured out, and before we know where it’s going.

It is when you begin expressing your ideas and turning your knowledge into action that life really begins to change. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to show your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately in your career or business, thinking several steps beyond what you’re consuming to consider its ultimate potential.

It’s not necessarily about becoming a professional artist, online influencer, or business mogul: it’s about taking ownership of your work, your ideas, and your potential to contribute in whatever arena you find yourself in. It doesn’t matter how impressive or grand your output is, or how many people see it. It could be just between your family or friends, among your colleagues and team, with your neighbors or schoolmates—what matters is that you are finding your voice and insisting that what you have to say matters. You have to value your ideas enough to share them. You have to believe that the smallest idea has the potential to change people’s lives. If you don’t believe that now, start with the smallest project you can think of to begin to prove to yourself that your ideas can make a difference.

You might realize you have lots of notes on eating healthy and decide to experiment with your own take on a classic recipe. You might see the notes from courses you’ve taken to improve your project management skills and decide to put them together into a presentation for your coworkers. You could draw on the insights and life experiences you’ve written about in your notes to write a blog post or record a YouTube video to help people who are facing a similar challenge.

All of these are acts of self-expression enabling you to begin unlocking your full creative potential.

  1. I. Intermediate Packets are abbreviated as IPs, a lucky coincidence that is appropriate, because they are absolutely your Intellectual Property. You created them, you own them, and you have the right to use them again and again in any future project.
  2. II. Barbara Tversky, a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College in New York, notes that “We are far better and more experienced at spatial thinking than at abstract thinking. Abstract thought can be difficult in and of itself, but fortunately it can often be mapped onto spatial thought in one way or another. That way, spatial thinking can substitute for and scaffold abstract thought.”
  3. III. Tagging for personal knowledge management is a subject unto itself. While not necessary to get started, I’ve written a free bonus chapter on tags you can download at buildingasecondbrain.com/bonuschapter.
  4. IV. One of my favorite rules of thumb is to “Only start projects that are already 80 percent done.” That might seem like a paradox, but committing to finish projects only when I’ve already done most of the work to capture, organize, and distill the relevant material means I never run the risk of starting something I can’t finish.