alt Hacker NewsIt’s interesting to me that it says that in some versions of second brain:
“Second brain grows, but first brain doesn’t get smarter.”
Something I remember Tiago Forte said, which turned me off of his partículas brand of a second brain, is that his goal is to “remember nothing”, and have the second brain surface exactly the context necessary at the moment, which he would proceed to read and ingest.
That sounds terrible to me :) it’s like “we don’t need to remember things if we can google them”.
I much prefer this author’s vision of using the second brain to strengthen the first brain.
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Thanks!
I've been growing my knowledge base for many years, with great results.
And you really need all that much to start taking notes.
No techniques, no workflows, just the the simplest setup would do.
"Second Brain", however, brings excitement to people's minds.
But in reality it just doesn't work. It makes great sales, though.
Well, we know that it's impossible to remember everything. Humans are absolutely terrible at accurately recalling things that they observed even a few minutes in the past.
But we also can't remember nothing and just dump _everything_ into the second brain, otherwise we'd have no map, no context, no way to even know how to look for what we need in the moment. It would be like taking a random teenager off the street, handing them an electronics engineering textbook, and asking them to build a power supply on the spot.
So there is definitely a spectrum. Everyone seems to disagree on the optimal point on the spectrum and that is almost certainly because it varies greatly from person to person.
My personal experience has been that simply writing extremely detailed notes in the first place makes the information "sticky" in my brain, and greatly increases the likelihood that I won't even _need_ to directly reference the notes in the future. Fun little catch-22 there.