The Importance of Knowing How Your Brain Works

The brain is such a mysterious thing. It can produce amazing things like the Mona Lisa, and it can figure out complex problems like the theory of relativity. But it can also be bad at other things like containing and holding information. Well, that can’t be any more true for me. If you told me to remember the number 5 because your life depends on it, there is a good chance I will forget it. You might think I am just an idiot, but the brain is just not meant for holding and containing information.

Like many others, I rely on a note-taking app to hold and contain information. Any notes I take during meetings, I'll write it down. Thoughts I have when I am on a walk, I'll write it down. However, I began to notice that my note-taking app wasn't optimized for me. I felt like I wasn’t utilizing my note-taking app, and because of that, I ended up not using it and only used it for planning projects. Well, I took a deep dive into that.

Let's first start with why I take notes. Before I discovered the concept of a second brain, I started to notice I couldn't remember anything. I was bad at containing information, especially numbers. I wanted to fix this and this is how I discovered the second brain. But after a year or two of using Notion (the software I use as a second brain), I found that I wasn’t using it because it felt clunky. Then I watched a video by Tiago Forte and Nick Milo that made me rethink my second brain. They made me rethink how my brain works, and then it hit me. The way I use Notion is the way someone else uses it. It’s not how I should use it.

I then dived into how my brain worked and what I was doing. Initially, I organized my notes and used my second brain by dividing them into topics and then separating them by dates or projects. Then, I would divide it into sections. I realized that dividing it by dates or numbers didn’t help me remember anything. I couldn’t find anything because I could not remember what I did during those days. But I remembered projects and topics. I decided to organize my notes by topics and projects. From the second day, I noticed huge improvements. I would remember where I wrote down notes, and I knew where to check and look. Even if I couldn’t remember where I wrote my notes, I knew where to look. This also provided clarity. The clarity didn’t come from remembering everything and knowing where to go, but from knowing that I could find whatever I needed, regardless of where it was. Knowing this method works best for me, I went back and changed my second brain to this structure.

Now, my main page contains important pages and commonly used pages. From there, I would expand on the pages if needed. If not, I would use it to create notes and manage projects. This has helped tremendously when it comes to writing notes and getting my thoughts down.

One important tip I learned from watching people create their second brain is that you need to understand how you operate. People can give you everything you need to create the perfect second brain, but if it doesn't work for the way you think. It's all useless. I have been using the idea of a second brain for years, but because I didn't make it work for me, I couldn't use it properly. I believe you can create the optimal second brain, after knowing how you consume information. If you want to create the perfect second brain for you, consider how your brain works because your second brain should work for you. Trust me, it's worth it.