264: Building A Second Brain, Melvin Varghese, Ph.D.

Do you love learning new things but struggle to retain the information you’d like to remember for later use? This problem is an ever-present obstacle in my nerdy quest to accumulate knowledge. The good news? I’ve found something that works for me, and I’m sharing it in today’s show. Join me to learn more.

This is a solo episode about building a second brain. You may or may not have heard of this concept, but it has revolutionized my life. As I stick to my commitment of setting aside two hours every day to learn new things, I find that I can grow as a business owner, gain knowledge and expertise, become more proficient in offering valuable products and services, and improve my physical and mental health. The problem is that I can’t always remember everything I read, hear, and think. That’s where the magic of the second brain comes in to help. Let’s dive in.

You’ll Learn:

●     How note-taking helps me remember things and stay organized

●     How I was introduced to the “second brain concept” through the work of Ali Abdaal, a physician in England

●     The basics of the second brain: Instead of feeling pressure to store accumulated knowledge in my brain, I can store it online in a digital brain

●     How the second brain principles of productivity were developed by world-renowned productivity expert Tiago Forte, who has a free 10-part podcast on the topic (see Resources)

●     Ten Principles in Building a Second Brain:

○     Borrowed creativity

○     The capture habit

○     Idea recycling

○     Projects over categories

○     Slow burns

○     Start with abundance

○     Intermediate packets

○     You only know what you make

○     Make things easier for your future self

○     Keep your ideas moving

●     “The key is not to just consume content, but to personalize and recycle it.”

Resources mentioned:

Ali Abdaal

Forte Labs 

Find the 10-part podcast series on Building a Second Brain at Forte Labs

Apps and tools recommended by Melvin:

For live transcription of Mastermind groups: Otter

For pulling highlights from Kindle books: Readwise 

For capturing snippets of podcasts: Airr 

For pulling highlights from blog posts: Instapaper 

To use a central repository for information: Notion or Evernote or Roam Research.com  

Transcript:

Melvin:

Hey friends, welcome to session 264 of Selling the Couch, I hope that you are having a wonderful day. So today's episode is a solo one. And I wanted to start this episode by sharing a story or rather a scenario. As you may have figured out based on these podcasts episodes, I’m a little bit of a nerd when it comes to learning new things. And in fact, as Selling the Couch has grown and as I've really worked hard to create a schedule that's conducive to both doing things as well as ample time learning.

What I have actually tried to do is set aside two hours each afternoon to simply learn. And these days, I'm learning about podcasting, because, as you know, I'm a podcaster, and the world of podcasting is constantly growing. And so I think a lot about how to grow the STC podcast. I also have a course called Healthcasters, which helps you create and launch a successful podcast. And I'm learning a lot about online courses as well, because Healthcasters is an online course, and I'm constantly trying to figure out how to tweak things and all of those different things.

Then I actually have my second online course that's coming out in the future, with hopefully three to four more in the pipeline. And it's a course that's actually focused on helping you create, plan, launch and scale a successful online course. I know that most of us are really nerdy, and we're probably nerds just walking around as therapists.

I imagine, for you, if you're like me, which I imagine you are, you read through a lot of clinical stuff, a lot of business books, you go to a lot of trainings and conferences, and maybe you watch YouTube videos or live streams, or you listen to podcasts, or you read blog posts, or watch webinars, or however, the many ways that you can consume content. And I do this in the same way as you do so that I can grow as a business owner, I can get proficient when I offer products and services and gain knowledge and expertise that way, or just to improve my own physical or mental health.

Now I have a little bit of a confession which is; when I go to these things, generally I try to take notes, just because I find that taking notes and actively engaging with that material helps me to remember things a lot better. So I might jot down some notes at a conference or a training on some paper, or a Word document, or I might even - if I've got my laptop near me, I'll pull up the Notes app on my Mac, and just take some notes there.

Sometimes I use Evernote, or something like that to summarize a blog post that I want to incorporate into a future podcast episode or something for an online course or if I'm providing direct services, just something that I can reference later. Other times, I might even just put it in like a Google Drive document.

So here's the confession part in this episode; I try to take a lot of pride in just being organized, I find that just being organized makes business a lot easier, and my mental health just a lot better. But honestly, how I take notes and more specifically how I connect my past, current and future learning is not really very organized and in fact, I would say it's almost chaotic. And if I'm just being completely honest, there are times where I've taken notes in the past that I keep thinking, “Okay, I'm going to remember this and I got a reference this for something for the future,” and then I actually never do that, and it’s okay, I guess in some scenarios.

But to me, one is I’m just being honest, I don't have like the greatest memory where I can access all of this, like accumulated knowledge at the drop of a hat, and so I have to kind of take notes and in order to just remember things. I think, personally for me, and this is just something I've realized as a business owner, having a great way to take notes, and being able to access these notes when needed is really important. Because as healthcare professionals and business owners, we're knowledge workers, people seek our services based on our knowledge and expertise. We're also knowledge shares. So in other words, we accumulate this shared knowledge and we share it through various free mediums and through paid products and services.

So for example, let's say you go to a brain spotting training and you read an article later on brain spotting. And then later, you might listen to a podcast interview on somebody that has built a successful practice based on brain spotting. How do you take all of that knowledge? So how do you connect your past knowledge, your current knowledge and your future knowledge, so that you can make it easier to access this knowledge for your future self in however you want to use it, whether it's to incorporate it into a therapy session, or let's say you end up doing consults on brain spotting, or you want to plan some future content, or maybe you want to do some sort of a webinar or something just to explain, or even just create a simple video just explain to potential clients what brain spotting is.

But how do you do that? How do you take that knowledge and store it in an organized way so that you can access it when you need it? As I shared kind of at the beginning, this is something I've been thinking a lot about, especially now that I'm six years into my small business journey, I've crossed the five year mark, and I think one of the most important lessons I've learned as a small business owner, and as an online creator is that you have to optimize your environment and schedule for learning.

I came across this YouTube video in late 2020, from Ali Abdol, who when it was all about something called the second brain. Ali is actually a physician based in Cambridge, England, and he has over a million subscribers and the channel is a great one to check out, especially if you're interested in tech and productivity and learning and all of these different things. And I've been fortunate to actually meet Ali and we actually got on a zoom call fairly recently and it was just really nice just to be able to connect with him and just learn about some of the things that he's doing in the world.

And the...