Tiago Forte gives an excellent and extensive overview of his work on Building A Second Brain in the video above but what I found the most revealing was the latter part talking about the benefits of it (starting around the 1:33:00 minute mark in the video), particularly these two quotes.
In order for you to self-develop, you need free time.
You need an open space to explore yourself, to explore your psyche, to explore your emotions, your relationships.
It’s interesting because earlier in the video, he indicated how there was some economic impedances to achieving this but near the end he indicated how professionals (who are obviously financially well off) seem to be the main people lacking in mental bandwidth to develop themselves nowadays because they have no free time.
Therefore to me, the primary impedance isn’t so much a lack of economic resources but rather a lack of mental resources. Self-development requires time and space which in turn gives you the ability to focus your attention and increase your awareness.
The number one problem with this though is that our current conventional way of working takes most of our time and space. And today, as many people will attest, it’s even worse than it used to be. For example, my wife as a school teacher has said her workload has increased dramatically compared to before the pandemic. Yet she knows of other teachers whose workloads have increased even more than hers, whereby sometimes they have to work till 9PM in the evening before they can return to their families and deal with their responsibilities at home.
Therefore, one of the quickest ways to increase our mental resources would be to stop working conventionally and start working more “productively” (as per the way Tiago sees it using a “second brain”) which is almost counter-intuitive to how people conventionally approach their work. In doing so though, our life’s work naturally arises and emerges from our ongoing learning and self-development, with the potentiality of who we are being released like a building tsunami in the process.
