π± π§ Building a Second Brain - How Online Creators Never Run Out of Things to Say
There's this misconception that great writers sit down to write and words just fall into the page. They finish their writing session, hit Publish and a perfect blog post/book/copy goes into the world.
They receive praise and acclaim from others and life is perfect like that.
That couldn't be further away from the truth. For sake of brevity, I'm going to specifically target content creation on the internet in the form of blog posts and articles. I'm going to show you how the sausage get's made. Buckle up!
How Content Creators have an Endless Stream of Good Ideas
One thing great online creators have in common is their note-taking skills.
Most tend to be very religious in their note-taking style, and know they can't create stuff if they don't have a bank of ideas to pull from.
This bank of ideas should also help them think through, filter, and edit ideas. This is what is called a Second Brain.
This second brain shouldn't just be a collection of notes, but a living beast, that constantly challenges how you think, and improves your ideas. One way it's been done is by using the Zettelkasten method.
In summary, it's treating each note as a separate Thought. It must be in your own words and be addressable. That way you can find your notes by their addresses and know they have a single Unit of Thought.
When all your notes become Units of Thoughts relations between them (using their addresses) become arguments.
The genius of this idea is that you can connect one note to infinitely many more.
Another brilliant part of this whole schema is the addresses in the notes.
That means you can capture thoughts on the fly and know you'll find them when you need them.
All Written Work is a collection of Byproducts
What are byproducts?
Every time you're working on a project, other ideas that do not fit the current project will arise. Those are byproducts, and having a way to store them quickly with a way to find them later is what Second Brains are good at doing.
The Zettelkasten uses special addresses, but if you are using a writing software that allows for searching notes, that will do as well.
I've written about my personal Second Brain using Obsidian here.
Repurposing Work
After you gather enough thoughts into a longer form article, then you can jump to the next level of content creation: Repurposing.
A long article can become a Twitter thread, which can become a script for a long video, which can in turn become short clips.
Repurposing work means you can reutilize the same information in multiple ways to engage different kinds of audiences. Some people might like consuming content as video, others as podcasts, and others as long articles.
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