006 - Why build a second brain in the first place?

On newsletter 005, I walked you through the structure of a second brain.

Let's take a step back so we can take 3 forward.

Why build a second brain in the first place and how will this effort actually pay out in the future?

Building anything is an investment in the future, and a lot of people don't see the return in building a second brain — whether by intimidation in face of the task, or out of ignorance of the benefits.

The outcome is this: you will have a place, all yours unless you decide to share, to organise all your thoughts, plans, projects, and virtually anything that makes you who you are, as well as who you want to become.

Long before Notion or Obsidian were a thing, people kept journals and agendas (and they still do) to obtain clarity in order to make better decisions, process feelings, and keep a log for future generations. We know a lot of our history thanks to these individuals who logged their lives and daily activities, feelings, and seemingly useless thoughts.

Now, we can crank it up a notch and build an extension to our very own way of thinking.

Our daily lives are full of good and bad feelings, happenings, and thoughts. These — whether good or bad, are "jammers" for action. We can't certainly accomplish anything good while feeling bad, unless we transform that feeling into something else.

Systemphoria is a feeling that I describe as the transformation of a chaotic mindset into an organised lump that eventually leads you to where you need to go.

Systemphoria clears your cognition of positive and negative jammers, so that you can proceed with a more calculated approach.

When feeling extremely down, you don't see the opportunities that arise, when feeling extremely happy, you might also not see the real meaning behind what's going around you.

Building a second brain allows you to gauge the temperature of these feelings, (somewhat) retake control of what you have to do, and clear your cognition of things you don't need to be constantly remembering because now you have a system to search it for.

This opens up space for other types of thinking and problem solving, which you'd be otherwise too jammed up to have access to. No, it's not dumbing your brain down. There's just too much we all need to know and remember, and you're not a machine, but your second brain is.

Your LifeOS, when built smartly, can give you back some of that cognition and open space — and time too — to actually do and live. I see a lot of people close to me that spend way too much time looking for things and information.

These small, seemingly fathomable moments can amount to hours, days, even, that you lost trying to remember or looking for things that could otherwise have been stored in an easily searchable system, and thus, found in seconds.

From a quote, from notes taken from a book you read, to the last time you cut your hair, with whom and how much you paid, its result and whether you liked it or not, to the last time you've watered your plants (and which), to what you have in your wardrobe and the looks you've matched (so when you're lazy you don't have to think too long to look good).

I confess this sort of optimisation isn't for everyone because it requires discipline, and of course there's the matter of learning whatever app you choose to build your second brain in.

And I also see how people could be intimidated by its upkeep. But, you also need to eat when you have hunger and sleep when you're tired.

Therefore, why shouldn't your second brain also not require maintenance?

Everything requires maintenance to be good. Anything that isn't maintained, soon reverts to chaos. A building that is left abandoned will soon be overrun with nature. A garden that isn't well kept will soon be full of weeds and then eventually dies.

The amount of time you spend building a second brain (specially if based on someone else's structure) and maintaining it is infinitely smaller than what you'd spend looking for that information, wondering about what your next task in a project is or trying to recall things you saw, read or heard.

When built with all features, a second brain can help you instil better habits, study books, your courses, languages, and truly, be more efficient when doing a sport, organise your schedule, put projects together...

It takes time to get used to used, but it's exactly past the first friction that you gain the full investment of your time.

Everyone should build a second brain. There isn't a single human in this world that could possibly not benefit from building a LifeOS, simply because we are all the same in the following aspects:

• We all have basic needs that need to be met

• We all have brains that are prone to failure

• We all want to feel in control of our lives

• We all have feelings that need tending to, from frustration to happiness

• We all go through ups and downs

• We all want to achieve something, whether big, small or banal

Everything can be measured and organised. When you spend enough time building your digital brain, you will soon find that everything can be measured. Have you ever thought how some olympic sports are graded? Have you ever watched a surfing competition and wondered how they actually measure, despite all the random conditions on the ocean and weather?

If they can grade surf, you can organise your life.

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