Before building a second brain, build a connection with your gut.
How to avoid digitally-enabled mimetic hoarding.
Before you build a second brain, you must feel things in your gut.
Without this connection to your innermost self, your note-taking system will become a digital junkyard. You’ll capture cool ideas, tweets and articles. You may even build a fancy knowledge graph in Roam. But if you don’t have gut feelings about what’s worth keeping, you’ll confuse hoarding for curation, and crucially, you’ll never create anything.
Gut feelings are instinctive, intuitive reactions that don’t require logical rationales. They are distinct from thoughts and beliefs. They are also the foundation of creativity.
Consider Rick Rubin. MTV called him “the most important producer of the last 20 years.” He was on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. He’s insanely prolific, having worked with the biggest artists on the planet (e.g. Jay Z, Johnny Cash, Metallica, Red Hot Chilli Peppers).
But despite his 9 Grammys, Rick claims he doesn’t really play any instruments or produce music:
Anderson Cooper: Do you play instruments?
Rick Rubin: Barely.
Anderson Cooper: Do you know how to work a soundboard?
Rick Rubin: No. I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music.
So why does everyone want to work with him? What is the source of his value to so many artists?
It’s his taste:
Anderson Cooper: You must know something.
Rick Rubin: Well, I know what I like and what I don't like. And I'm decisive about what I like and what I don't like.
Anderson Cooper: So what are you being paid for?
Rick Rubin: The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel has proven helpful for artists.
Taste = gut feelings about aesthetics. When you can intuitively feel what you like and what you don’t like, you have taste. Sure, it might still be bad taste, but it’s your bad taste.
When your taste comes from your thoughts and beliefs, it’s probably someone else’s. This is especially true if you spend a lot of time capturing content online. The internet is a market and everything you click is marketing.
It’s also because thinking isn’t the same as feeling. The Poet EE Cummings reminds us:
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
True art only occurs when you’re nobody-but-yourself. This requires you to fully feel your gut feelings. Whenever you forget this, you’re basically a mediocre LLM, assembling other people’s ideas by running simple scripts on biological hardware. Art isn’t assembly.
So before you build your second brain, build a relationship with your gut. Trust your felt-senses to guide you in discerning what is worth capturing. Get inexplicably emotional when you sit down to create. Feel your gut-feelings. Only then will you be able to create something truly valuable.
Daniel
"Ok bro, but HOW do I do this?"
Like anything worthwhile, gut-literacy is a practice. It will initially require baby-steps.
So here's a fun baby-step: take any content feed and ruthlessly mute/block/dislike things that FEEL off to you.
For example, Spotify Discovery Weekly will algorithmically give you songs based on your past listening habits.
Listen to this every week without reading song names or looking at album art. Then RUTHLESSLY edit the list.
Don’t overthink it. When you have a gut feeling about a song LIKE it or DELETE it. No pondering.
Practice making these small curation decisions instinctively, without the need for a rationale.
Over time you might unearth your actual music taste.
This idea of focusing on the gut before the brain is critical. All the time I am surrounded by coworkers who focus on intellectual activities (the content in their presentation, the knowledge they share) at the expense of emotional ones, and it is incredibly apparent. They contort as they speak, they anxiously scrape their fingernails together, they eagerly interrupt the silence to make things "less awkward". None of these things are _necessarily_ wrong, but often they occur without reflection (which is less than ideal), and so they cannot be fixed over time. If you started with the gut, you simply can't avoid these reflections ("why did I feel that emotion? why did I just say that?"). There is no brain in a vat: the brain cannot be severed from the gut.