Chapter 10 The Path of Self-Expression

An idea wants to be shared. And, in the sharing, it becomes more complex, more interesting, and more likely to work for more people.

—adrienne maree brown, writer and activist

For most of history, humanity’s challenge was how to acquire scarce information. There was hardly any good information to be found anywhere. It was locked up in difficult-to-reproduce manuscripts or stuck in the heads of scholars. Access to information was limited, but that wasn’t a problem for most people. Their lives and livelihoods didn’t require much information. Their main contribution was their physical labor, not their ideas.

That has all changed in just the last few decades. Historically, in the blink of an eye. Suddenly, we are all plugged into an infinite stream of data, updated continuously and delivered at light speed via a network of intelligent devices embedded in every corner of our lives.

Not only that, but the very nature of labor has changed. Value has shifted from the output of our muscles to the output of our brains. Our knowledge is now our most important asset and the ability to deploy our attention our most valuable skill. The tools of our trade have become abstract and immaterial: the building blocks of ideas, insights, facts, frameworks, and mental models.

Now our challenge isn’t to acquire more information; as we saw in the exploration of divergence and convergence, it is to find ways to close off the stream so we can get something done. Any change in how we interact with information first requires a change in how we think. In this chapter we’ll explore what it looks like and feels like to make that shift.

Mindset Over Toolset—The Quest for the Perfect App

The majority of this book has been about acquiring a new set of tools in your relationship to information. However, over the years I’ve noticed that it is never a person’s toolset that constrains their potential, it’s their mindset.

You might have arrived at this book because you heard about this new field called personal knowledge management, or maybe when you were trying to find guidance in how to use a cool new notetaking app. Maybe you were drawn in by the promise of new techniques for enhancing your productivity, or perhaps it was the allure of a systematic approach to creativity.

Whatever you are looking for, all these paths eventually lead to the same place, if you are willing to follow: a journey of personal growth. There is no divide between our inner selves and our digital lives: the beliefs and attitudes that shape our thinking in one context inevitably show up in other contexts as well.

Underlying our struggles and challenges with productivity, creativity, and performance is our fundamental relationship to the information in our lives. That relationship was forged during your upbringing as you encountered new experiences, and was influenced by your personality, learning style, relationships, and your genes. You learned to react in a certain way when faced with new ideas. You adopted a default “blueprint” for how you treated incoming information—with anticipation, fear, excitement, self-doubt, or some complex mix of feelings that is unique to you.

That default attitude to information colors every aspect of your life. It is the lens through which you studied for classes and took tests in school. It set the stage for the kinds of jobs and careers you pursued. At this very moment, as you read these words, that default attitude is working in the background. It is telling you what to think about what you’re reading—how to interpret it, how to feel about it, and how it applies to you.

Our attitude toward information profoundly shapes how we see and understand the world and our place in it. Our success in the workforce depends on our ability to make use of information more effectively and to think better, smarter, faster. As society gets ever more complex, this emphasis on personal intelligence is only increasing. The quality of our thinking has become one of the central defining features of our identity, our reputation, and our quality of life. We are constantly advised that we need to know more to be able to achieve our goals and dreams.

What would you say if I told you that isn’t true?

The Fear Our Minds Can’t Do Enough

When it comes to accomplishing our goals, it’s not that innate intelligence isn’t valuable. I’m saying that the greater the burden you place on your biological brain to give you everything you want and need, the more it will struggle under the weight of it all. You’ll feel more stressed, anxious, like there are way too many balls in the air. The more time your brain spends striving to achieve and overcome and solve problems, the less time you have left over for imagining, creating, and simply enjoying the life you’re living. The brain can solve problems, but that isn’t its sole purpose. Your mind was meant for much more.

It is this fundamental attitude toward information that will start to change as you integrate your Second Brain into your life. You will begin to see connections you didn’t know you could make. Ideas about business, psychology, and technology will connect and spawn new revelations you’ve never consciously considered. Lessons from art, philosophy, and history will intermingle to give you epiphanies about how the world works. You will naturally start to combine these ideas to form new perspectives, new theories, and new strategies. You will be filled with a sense of awe at the elegance of the system you’ve created, and how it works in almost mysterious ways to bring to your attention the information you need.

Maybe you don’t see yourself as a writer, creator, or expert. I certainly didn’t when I first started taking notes on my health problems. Once you start seeing even your biggest ambitions in terms of the smaller chunks of information they are made up of, you’ll begin to realize that any experience or passing insight can be valuable. Your fears, doubts, mistakes, missteps, failures, and self-criticism—it’s all just information to be taken in, processed, and made sense of. All of it is part of a larger, ever-evolving whole.

A participant in one of my courses named Amelia recently told me that starting to build her Second Brain had caused her to make a 180-degree change in her relationship to the Internet. She had seen it as “sensationalistic and offensive” and, as a result, hadn’t wanted to engage with the online world at all. Once she had a place where she could curate the best of the Internet while ignoring everything that didn’t serve her, she told me she began to see it in a completely new light. Amelia is a skilled leadership coach who runs a clinic teaching leaders how to manage their nervous systems to improve their well-being and effectiveness. Imagine how many more people she can reach with her expertise now that she sees the Internet as a source of wisdom and connection, not just noise.

How does such a dramatic change happen? Amelia didn’t necessarily learn a new fact that she didn’t know before. She took on a new perspective. She chose to look at the world through a different lens—the lens of appreciation and abundance. We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can choose the lens we look through. This is the basic choice we have in creating our own experience—which aspects to nourish or starve, using only the magnifying power of our attention.

As you build a Second Brain, your biological brain will inevitably change. It will start to adapt to the presence of this new technological appendage, treating it as an extension of itself. Your mind will become calmer, knowing that every idea is being tracked. It will become more focused, knowing it can put thoughts on hold and access them later. I often hear that people start to feel a tremendous sense of conviction—for their goals, their dreams, and the things they want to change or influence in the world—because they know they have a powerful system behind them amplifying every move they make.

Giving Your First Brain a New Job

Instead of trying to optimize your mind so that it can manage every tiny detail of your life, it’s time to fire your biological brain from that job and give it a new one: as the CEO of your life, orchestrating and managing the process of turning information into results. We’re asking your biological brain to hand over the job of remembering to an external system, and by doing so, freeing it to absorb and integrate new knowledge in more creative ways.

Your Second Brain is always on, has perfect memory, and can scale to any size. The more you outsource and delegate the jobs of capturing, organizing, and distilling to technology, the more time and energy you’ll have available for the self-expression that only you can do.

Once your biology is no longer the bottleneck on your potential, you’ll be free to expand the flow of information as much as you want without drowning in it. You’ll be more balanced and peaceful, knowing you can step away from that flow at any time because it’s all being stored safely outside your head. You will be more trusting, because you’ve learned to trust a system outside yourself. It will be incredibly humbling and reassuring, in fact, that you are not solely responsible for all the remembering that needs to happen in your life. You will be more open-minded, willing to consider more unorthodox, more challenging, more unfinished ideas, because you have a plentiful supply of alternatives to choose from. You’ll want to expose yourself to more diverse perspectives, from more people, without necessarily committing to any single one. You’ll become a curator of perspectives, free to pick and choose the beliefs and concepts that serve you best in any given situation.

Delegating a job you’ve been doing for a long time is always intimidating. The voice of fear creeps up in the back of your mind: “Will there be anything left for me to do?” “Will I still be valued and needed?” We are taught that it’s better to have a secure role than risk being replaced. That it’s safer to keep your head down and not make a fuss rather than strive for something better. Emptying ourselves of our jumble of thoughts requires courage, because without our thoughts as distractions, we are left to sit with uncomfortable questions about our future and our purpose.

That is why building a Second Brain is a journey of personal growth. As your information environment changes, the way your mind operates starts to be transformed. You leave behind one identity and step into another—an identity as the orchestrator and conductor of your life, not its passenger. Any shift in identity can feel confronting and scary. You don’t know exactly who you will be and what it will be like on the other side, but if you persevere through the transition, there is always a new horizon of hope, possibility, and freedom waiting for you on the other side.

The Shift from Scarcity to Abundance

How do you know when you’ve begun making the shift to this new identity I’ve described? The biggest shift that starts to occur as soon as you start creating a Second Brain is the shift from viewing the world through the lens of scarcity to seeing it through the lens of abundance.

I see so many people trying to operate in this new world under the assumptions of the past—that information is scarce, and therefore we need to acquire and consume and hoard as much of it as possible. We’ve been conditioned to view information through a consumerist lens: that more is better, without limit. Through the lens of scarcity, we constantly crave more, more, more information, a response to the fear of not having enough.1 We’ve been taught that information must be jealously guarded, because someone could use it against us or steal our ideas. That our value and self-worth come from what we know and can recite on command.

As we saw in the chapter on Capturing, the inclination to amass information can become an end in itself. It is all too easy to default to collecting more and more content without regard to whether it is useful or beneficial to us. This is indiscriminate consumption of information, treating every meme and random post on social media as if it was just as important as the most profound piece of wisdom. It is driven by fear—the fear of missing out on some crucial fact, idea, or story that everyone is talking about. The paradox of hoarding is that no matter how much we collect and accumulate, it’s never enough. The lens of scarcity also tells us that the information we already have must not be very valuable, compelling us to keep searching externally for what’s missing inside.

The opposite of a Scarcity Mindset is an Abundance Mindset. This is a way of looking at the world as full of valuable and helpful things—ideas, insights, tools, collaborations, opportunities. An Abundance Mindset tells us that there is an endless amount of incredibly powerful knowledge everywhere we look—in the content we consume, in our social network, in our bodies and intuitions, and in our own minds. It also tells us that we don’t need to consume or understand all of it, or even much of it. All we need is a few seeds of wisdom, and the seeds we most need tend to continually find us again and again. You don’t need to go out and hunt down insights. All you have to do is listen to what life is repeatedly trying to tell you. Life tends to surface exactly what we need to know, whether we like it or not. Like a compassionate but unyielding teacher, reality doesn’t bend or cave to our will. It patiently teaches us in what ways our thinking is not accurate, and those lessons tend to show up across our lives again and again.

Making the shift to a mindset of abundance is about letting go of the things we thought we needed to survive but that no longer serve us. It means giving up low-value work that gives us a false sense of security but that doesn’t call forth our highest selves. It’s about letting go of low-value information that seems important, but that doesn’t make us better people. It’s about putting down the protective shield of fear that tells us we need to protect ourselves from the opinions of others, because that same shield is keeping us from receiving the gifts they want to give us.

The Shift from Obligation to Service

There is a second shift that occurs when you begin to use your Second Brain not only for remembering, but for connecting and creating. You will transition from doing things primarily out of obligation or pressure to doing things from a spirit of service.

I believe most people have a natural desire within them to serve others. They want to teach, to mentor, to help, to contribute. The desire to give back is a fundamental part of what makes us human.

I also notice that many people put that desire on hold. They are waiting for a future time when they will have “enough” time, bandwidth, expertise, or resources. That day seems to get continuously postponed as they get new jobs, start new careers, have kids, and simply try to keep up with the demands of life.

You are under no obligation to help others. Sometimes it’s all you can do to take care of yourself. Still, I’ve noticed time and again a phenomenon that happens as people collect more and more knowledge in their Second Brain. That inner desire to serve slowly comes to the surface. Faced with the evidence of everything they already know, suddenly there’s no longer any reason to wait.

The purpose of knowledge is to be shared. What’s the point of knowing something if it doesn’t positively impact anyone, not even yourself? Learning shouldn’t be about hoarding stockpiles of knowledge like gold coins. Knowledge is the only resource that gets better and more valuable the more it multiplies. If I share a new way of thinking about your health, or finances, or business, or spirituality, that knowledge isn’t less valuable to me. It’s more valuable! Now we can speak the same language, coordinate our efforts, and share our progress in applying it. Knowledge becomes more powerful as it spreads.

There are problems in the world that you are uniquely equipped to solve. Problems in society like poverty, injustice, and crime. Problems in the economy like inequality, educational deficits, and workers’ rights. Problems in organizations like retention, culture, and growth. Problems in the lives of people around you that your product or service or expertise could solve, helping them communicate, learn, or work more effectively. As Ryder Carroll says in The Bullet Journal Method, “Your singular perspective may patch some small hole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity.”

There are people who will be reached only if they are reached by you. People who have no other source for the kind of guidance you can provide. People who don’t know where to look for solutions to problems they might not even know they have. You can be that person for them. You can pay forward some of the immense care that has been poured into you by a lifetime of parents, teachers, and mentors. With mere words, you can open doors to unimaginable horizons for the people around you.

Your Second Brain starts as a system to support you and your goals, but from there it can just as easily be used to support others and their dreams. You have everything you need to give back and be a force for good in the world. It all starts with knowledge, and you have at your disposal an embarrassment of riches.

The Shift from Consuming to Creating

The practice of building a Second Brain is more than the sum of capturing facts, theories, and the opinions of others. At its core, it is about cultivating self-awareness and self-knowledge. When you encounter an idea that resonates with you, it is because that idea reflects back to you something that is already within you. Every external idea is like a mirror, surfacing within us the truths and the stories that want to be told.

In a 1966 book,I the British-Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi made an observation that has since become known as “Polanyi’s Paradox.” It can be summarized as “We know more than we can say.”

Polanyi observed that there are many tasks we can easily perform as humans that we can’t fully explain. For example, driving a car or recognizing a face. We can try to describe how we do these things, but our explanations always fall far short. That’s because we are relying on tacit knowledge, which is impossible to describe in exact detail. We possess that knowledge, but it resides in our subconscious and muscle memory where language cannot reach.

This problem—known as “self-ignorance”—has been a major roadblock in the development of artificial intelligence and other computer systems. Because we cannot describe how we know what we know, it can’t be programmed into software.

The curse of computer scientists is our blessing, because this tacit knowledge represents the final frontier on which humans outperform machines. The jobs and endeavors that rely on tacit knowledge will be the last ones to be automated.

As you build your Second Brain, you will collect many facts and figures, but they are just a means to an end: discovering the tacit knowledge that lives within you. It’s in there, but you need external hooks to pull it out and into your conscious awareness. If we know more than we can say, then we need a system for continuously offloading the vast wealth of knowledge we’ve gained from real life experience.

You know things about how the world works that you can’t fully put into words. You understand human nature at a deep intuitive level. You see patterns and connections in your field that no other machine or human can see. Life has given you a set of experiences that provide you with a unique lens on the world. Through that lens you can perceive truths that can have a profoundly positive impact on you and others.

We are constantly told that we should be true to ourselves and pursue our deepest desires, but what if you don’t know what your goals and desires are? What if you have no idea what your “life purpose” is or should be? Self-direction is impossible without self-knowledge. How can you know what you want if you don’t know who you are?

The process of knowing yourself can seem mystical, but I see it as eminently practical. It starts with noticing what resonates with you. Noticing what seems to call out to you in the external world and gives you a sense of déjà vu. There is a universe of thoughts and ideas and emotions within you. Over time, you can uncover new layers of yourself and new facets of your identity. You search outside yourself to search within yourself, knowing that everything you find has always been a part of you.

Our Fundamental Need for Self-Expression

In Chapter 1, I told the story of my unexplained medical condition and how it led me to start organizing information digitally.

There was a period a few years into that journey when I was at my lowest point. I had seemingly exhausted every avenue that modern medicine could offer me. The doctors were suggesting that it must be all in my head because their diagnostics couldn’t find anything wrong. I was in more pain than ever before, waking up with so much tension in my neck that it felt like a vise clutching me by the throat.

I started withdrawing from my friends and social circles because I was so consumed by the pain I was experiencing. My attention was so focused on the pain in my body that I found it difficult to hold a conversation. I started spending more and more time by myself, on the Internet, where I could communicate and connect without speech. My view of life darkened as I slowly spiraled into depression and despair. It felt for a time like I had no future. How could I date or make friends without being able to speak? What kind of job could I hold down with unpredictable, chronic pain? What kind of future could I look forward to as my symptoms continued to worsen, without any treatment or even diagnosis on the horizon?

It was around this time that I made two discoveries that changed, and saved, my life. The first was meditation and mindfulness. I began to meditate and discovered a whole realm of spirituality and introspection that I never knew existed. I learned, to my astonishment, that I am not my thoughts. That my thoughts were the constant background chatter of my subconscious mind, and that I could choose whether to “believe” what they were telling me. Meditation gave me more relief from my symptoms than anything the doctors could prescribe. My pain became my teacher, showing me what needed my attention.

As I started having deep, profoundly moving experiences in meditation, I wanted to share what I was learning with others. This led me to my second great discovery: writing in public.II I started a blog, and my very first blog post was about my experience at a Vipassana meditation retreat in Northern California. I still had trouble speaking, so writing became my refuge. On my blog, I could share anything I wanted to, in as much detail as I wanted. I was in control, with no limits on my ability to express myself.

I discovered something through that experience: that self-expression is a fundamental human need. Self-expression is as vital to our survival as food or shelter. We must be able to share the stories of our lives—from the small moments of what happened today at school to our grandest theories of what life is about.

Your Turn: The Courage to Share

I’ve spoken with so many people about their stories, and I’ve noticed time and again how many of them have beautiful, moving, powerful things to share. They have unique experiences that have revealed to them deep wisdom, yet they almost always undervalue those stories and experiences. They think maybe one day they’ll get around to sharing them. I’m here to tell you that there is no reason to wait. The world is desperate to hear what you know. You can change lives by sharing yourself with others.

It takes courage and vulnerability to stand up and deliver your message. It takes going against the grain, refusing to be quiet and hidden in the face of fear. Finding your voice and speaking your truth is a radical act of self-worth: Who are you to speak up? Who says you have anything to offer? Who are you to demand people’s attention and take up their time?

The only way to discover the answer to these questions is by speaking and seeing what comes out. Some of what you say might not resonate with others or provide value to them, but occasionally, you will strike on something—a way of seeing, a perspective, a story—that blows people’s minds and visibly transforms how they see the world. It could be someone you’re having coffee with, a client or customer, or your online followers. In those moments, the vast chasm that separates us as humans is bridged. For a brief moment, you get to feel in your bones that we are all in this together. We are all part of a vast tattered fabric of humanity, and your highest calling is simply to play your part in it.

With the power of a Second Brain behind you, you can do and be anything you want. Everything is just information, and you are a master at flowing and shaping it toward whatever future you desire.

Final Thoughts: You Can Do This

There is no single right way to build a Second Brain. Your system can look like chaos to others, but if it brings you progress and delight, then it’s the right one.

You may start with one project and slowly move on to more ambitious or complex ones as your skills develop. Or you may find yourself using your Second Brain in completely unexpected ways that you hadn’t envisioned.

As your needs change, give yourself the freedom to discard or take on whichever parts serve you. This isn’t a “take it or leave it” ideology where you must accept all of it or none of it. If any part doesn’t make sense or doesn’t resonate with you, put it aside. Mix and match the tools and techniques you’ve learned in this book to suit your needs. This is how you ensure your Second Brain remains a lifelong companion through the seasons of your life.

Wherever you are at this moment—just starting a practice to consistently take notes, or finding ways to more effectively organize and resurface your best thinking, or generating more original and impactful work—you can always fall back on the four steps of CODE:

If at any point you feel overwhelmed, take a step back and focus on what is immediately necessary: your most important projects and priorities. Scale back to only the notes you need to move those priorities forward. Instead of trying to architect your entire Second Brain system from scratch up front, focus on moving one project at a time through each step from capturing to expressing. When you do so, you’ll find that the steps are much easier and more flexible than you imagined.

You can also simplify things by focusing on just one stage of building your Second Brain. Think about where you are now and where you want to be in the near future:

As you begin your journey, here are twelve practical steps you can take right now to get your Second Brain started. Each one of them is a starting point to begin establishing the habits of personal knowledge management in your life:

  1. Decide what you want to capture. Think about your Second Brain as an intimate commonplace book or journal. What do you most want to capture, learn, explore, or share? Identify two to three kinds of content that you already value to get started with.
  2. Choose your notes app. If you don’t use a digital notes app, get started with one now. See Chapter 3 and use the free guide at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources for up-to-date comparisons and recommendations.
  3. Choose a capture tool. I recommend starting with a read later app to begin saving any article or other piece of online content you’re interested in for later consumption. Believe me, this one step will change the way you think about consuming content forever.
  4. Get set up with PARA. Set up the four folders of PARA (Projects; Areas; Resources; Archives) and, with a focus on actionability, create a dedicated folder (or tag) for each of your currently active projects. Focus on capturing notes related to those projects from this point forward.
  5. Get inspired by identifying your twelve favorite problems. Make a list of some of your favorite problems, save the list as a note, and revisit it any time you need ideas for what to capture. Use these open-ended questions as a filter to decide which content is worth keeping.
  6. Automatically capture your ebook highlights. Set up a free integration to automatically send highlights from your reading apps (such as a read later or ebook app) to your digital notes (see my recommendations at Buildingasecondbrain.com/resources).
  7. Practice Progressive Summarization. Summarize a group of notes related to a project you’re currently working on using multiple layers of highlighting to see how it affects the way you interact with those notes.
  8. Experiment with just one Intermediate Packet. Choose a project that might be vague, sprawling, or simply hard, and pick just one piece of it to work on—an Intermediate Packet. Maybe it is a business proposal, a chart, a run of show for an event, or key topics for a meeting with your boss. Break the project down into smaller pieces, make a first pass at one of the pieces, and share it with at least one person to get feedback.
  9. Make progress on one deliverable. Choose a project deliverable you’re responsible for and, using the Express techniques of Archipelago of Ideas, Hemingway Bridge, and Dial Down the Scope, see if you can make decisive progress on it using only the notes in your Second Brain.
  10. Schedule a Weekly Review. Put a weekly recurring meeting with yourself on your calendar to begin establishing the habit of conducting a Weekly Review. To start, just clear your notes inbox and decide on your priorities for the week. From there, you can add other steps as your confidence grows.
  11. Assess your notetaking proficiency. Evaluate your current notetaking practices and areas for potential improvement using our free assessment tool at Buildingasecondbrain.com/quiz.
  12. Join the PKM community. On Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack, Medium, or your platform(s) of choice, follow and subscribe to thought leaders and join communities who are creating content related to personal knowledge management (#PKM), #SecondBrain, #BASB, or #toolsforthought. Share your top takeaways from this book or anything else you’ve realized or discovered. There’s nothing more effective for adopting new behaviors than surrounding yourself with people who already have them.

While building a Second Brain is a project—something you can commit to and achieve within a reasonable period of time—using your Second Brain is a lifelong practice. I recommend you revisit Building a Second Brain at various points over time. I guarantee you’ll notice things you missed the first time.

Whether you focus on implementing one aspect of the CODE Method, make a full commitment to the entire process, or something in between, you are taking on a new relationship with the information in your life. You are developing a new relationship to your own attention and energy. You are committing to a new identity in which you are in charge of the information swirling around you, even if you don’t always know what it means.

As you embark on the lifelong path of personal knowledge management, remember that you’ve achieved success before. There have been practices that you’d never heard of before, that are now integral parts of your life. There have been habits and skills that seemed impossible to master, that you now can’t imagine living without. There have been new technologies that you swore you would never embrace that you now use every day. This is the same—what seems unfamiliar and strange now will eventually feel completely natural.

If I could leave you with one last bit of advice, it is to chase what excites you. When you are captivated and obsessed by a story, an idea, or a new possibility, don’t just let that moment pass as if it doesn’t matter. Those are the moments that are truly precious, and that no technology can produce for you. Run after your obsessions with everything you have.

Just be sure to take notes along the way.

  1. I. The Tacit Dimension, by Michael Polanyi
  2. II. I came to appreciate the incredible power of writing in public through my partnership with David Perell, who teaches people how to do it via his online writing school Write of Passage, which you can learn more about at writeofpassage.school.