Building a Second Brain

A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential

By: Tiago Forte

Narrated by: André Santana, Tiago Forte

Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

“One of my favorite books of the year. It completely reshaped how I think about information and how and why I take notes.” —Daniel Pink, bestselling author of Drive

A revolutionary approach to enhancing productivity, creating flow, and vastly increasing your ability to capture, remember, and benefit from the unprecedented amount of information all around us.

For the first time in history, we have instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge. There has never been a better time to learn, to contribute, and to improve ourselves. Yet, rather than feeling empowered, we are often left feeling overwhelmed by this constant influx of information. The very knowledge that was supposed to set us free has instead led to the paralyzing stress of believing we’ll never know or remember enough.

Now, this eye-opening and accessible guide shows how you can easily create your own personal system for knowledge management, otherwise known as a Second Brain. As a trusted and organized digital repository of your most valued ideas, notes, and creative work synced across all your devices and platforms, a Second Brain gives you the confidence to tackle your most important projects and ambitious goals.

Discover the full potential of your ideas and translate what you know into more powerful, more meaningful improvements in your work and life by Building a Second Brain.

©2022 Tiago Forte. All rights reserved. (P)2022 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

I'll re-review in a year

The energy and optimism of this book is great. System seen doable. I hope my review on a year show that it affected my positively.

Great advice and resources.

Will read again once my second brain is growing. I used to do many of these suggestions, but aging and stress makes one forget as we develop bad habits.

GTD for notetaking?

This book will not tell you anything that you don’t already know. It is a reminder of how important it is to take notes. It does give me some insight on how to develop a note into an idea. I guess the course will teach you how to develop the note.

Life-changing!

Tiago stands on the shoulders of David Allen (Getting Things Done), takes the concept into the tech age, and brings a clean structure that goes way beyond GTD.

Packed with actionable ideas

A great guide to improving quality of life. Annoying voice, made slightly better by speeding up

Great practical note systems

Overall, I really enjoyed this book but there was also something slightly hollow about it. The testimonials were good but not one resonated with me as they felt kind of broad. Nonetheless, I would still recommend to friends and family,

Breakthrough System

This book is narrated quite well as it is engaging. I highly recommend this books as it teaches steps and ways easily actionable for everyone who's interested in building a second brain. I also purchase a hardcopy of this book as it is truly a gem 💎 Kudos to Mr. Tiago Forte 👍

I think that this will be transformative

I cannot possibly count how many times I have researched something, then come back to the topic several years later, and then have to redo the research necessary to execute. The idea of making a digital system that can hold and link the various pieces of information as a personal database could be transformational for me moving forward.

Loved it

Once I get as much going as I plan to with what I’ve understood so far, I’ll listen again to polish the whole thing up.

Good takeaways, meh writing style

Overall, the takeaways are great, but the book could be 3 times shorter. Also, a lot of motivational speeches as fillers.

The instructions provided in this book seem great for starting a second brain. The ideas are well structured and comprehensible. However, I have disliked two things about the style of writing: 1) there is a lot of filler passages and even chapters. As opposed to for example Your Brain at Work book, there’s few valuable takeaways which could be explained in one chapter. The rest is motivational speech about how each of us is a unique snowflake. 2) A lot of the motivational speeches also left me with a feeling “after using this advice, you’ll have your time under control and become a fully optimized human being”. Which, in my opinion, is BS (read 4000 weeks) .