I'm incredibly excited to announce my next book!

It will be the definitive guide to what I believe is the most undervalued tool for personal (and professional) growth...

A year-end review to reflect on what you've learned, how you've changed, and what's to come.

I don't have a title or publishing date yet. But please do send me any interesting ideas or sources you come across around this topic.

What to Capture in Your Second Brain? My 4 Criteria

The biggest pitfall I see people falling into when they begin capturing digital notes is saving too much.

If you keep everything you find mildly interesting, you run the risk of overwhelming your future self with tons of irrelevant information.

Over the years, I've become extremely picky with what I save. I apply the following four criteria to decide exactly which nuggets of knowledge are worth keeping:

1. Does it inspire me? Inspiration is a rare and precious experience. Essential for doing your best work but impossible to call up on demand. You can google the answer to a question, but you can’t "google a feeling." By keeping a collection of inspiring quotes, photos, ideas, and stories you can evoke a sense of inspiration more regularly.
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2. Is it useful? Keep information that might come in handy in the future and would be difficult to obtain again, such as a statistic, a reference, a research finding, or a helpful diagram.
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3. Is it personal? Your own thoughts, reflections, memories, and mementos are some of the most valuable kinds of information to keep. No one else has access to the wisdom you’ve personally gained from a lifetime of conversations, mistakes, victories, and lessons learned.
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4. Is it surprising? If you’re not surprised by a piece of information, then you already know it at some level. So why take note of it? Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into your existing understanding, and thus has the potential to change how you think.

Now, how do YOU decide what to capture in your Second Brain? Hit reply and share your personal criteria. I'm curious to see them!

How to Create More & Consume Less in 2024

The act of "creating" is essential for everyone, not just YouTubers, bloggers, and influencers.

Think about it...none of the content you consume (social media posts, books, videos, games) can go on your resume. Only the things you create and accomplish can.

In this video, I’ll show you how to kickstart your creative journey using the Curation Method and give you my best strategies for overcoming any initial hurdles.

Navigating Online Criticism: How Making an AI-Generated Children's Book Offended the Internet

One of our recent YouTube videos was by far the most controversial piece of content we’ve ever published. It’s about my wife creating a storybook for our kids using ChatGPT.

The comments we received have taught me two things:

1. The general population is much less excited about and more fearful of AI than the bubble we’re in.
2. AI taking over creative tasks is much more controversial than it taking over productivity tasks that people didn’t want to do anyway.

Lauren wrote a great blog post on her Substack about how she navigated the criticism.

Book Recommendation: The Infernal Machine by Steven Johnson

Serial best-selling author Steven Johnson, who will speak at the Second Brain Summit in October, just released his new book today.

The Infernal Machine is an engrossing account of the epic struggle between the anarchist movement and the emerging surveillance state that stretches around the world and between two centuries—from Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite and the assassination of Czar Alexander II to New York City in the shadow of World War I.

Johnson reveals a mostly forgotten period of political conviction, scientific discovery, assassination plots, bombings, undercover operations, and innovative sleuthing.