A quick review of Building a Second Brain

The most anticipated read of the summer for people who obsess about finding better ways to organize their notes and thoughts dropped Tuesday and I have been spending all of my time, minus my day job, devouring it.

This is a hugely important book if you want to get control over the waves of information washing through your life. It is not however a step-by-step guide to reaching some sort of information promised land, where every bit and fact and utterance is neatly organized for instant retrieval. Instead, it covers how to structure your knowledge so it can reliably inform your future self. More principles than instructions in an IKEA box.

I could run down what the book covers, processing all the hundreds of highlights I took while I was reading it, but others will be doing that in posts and YouTube videos, long-form articles and the like. I want to focus on a simple takeaway for you:

I wish I had a way to send this book back into my personal past so I could have built, nurtured, and nourished a Second Brain starting 10, 20, 30 years ago. If you are in your 20s, 30s or 40s, get this book now. You will thank your present self.