One of the things I’ve found essential to having a second brain is because it helps you understand and articulate these things that are interesting and have meaning for you, revealing yourself at a deeper level in turn.
For example, in observing people over the years on blogs and social media networks, you usually see a pattern of evolution with what they’re sharing.
Initially the person may share something they find as a simple bookmark or link, maybe saying something like “This is amazing!” In effect, the person feels something of importance with what they found and shared big they can’t put it into words.
Next the person may evolve to sharing the article and including a key quote from it. This indicates they are honing in on something that has meaning within the article for them but still may not how best describe it in their own words.
After that, the person may evolve finally evolve to not only quoting multiple aspects of the article but also indicating the meaning of why beside each quote and even giving a summarization about the article as whole, relating how it relates to their work or life in some way.
Now how you can evolve yourself in this way is by progressively summarizing what you read.
At its basics, your just highlighting sentences that seem to stand out to you (but may not initially understand why at first). After that, if you’re reading a PDF, you could start using different colours to represent different levels of importance. And then you may start annotating them with a few words to explain why they have important meaning to you. And over time, you’ll start seeing repeating patterns between these things highlighted that will reveal even more meaning to you.
The beauty of this approach is that this meaning not only bubbles up from what you read, revealing itself to you, but it also reveals who you are deep down inside, your True Self. Over time, like myself, it may pull you in directions you may not have even imagined at first but in time you’ll understand how and why this meaning is weaving itself through your life, revealing a larger tapestry of your Self.