Second Brain Summit: Building Better Pattern Recognition – the Meta-Habits of Learning
If you want to be a life-long learner, it pays off to learn how to learn effectively. The great news is: Your Second Brain helps you with that.
In this session, former professional poker player turned executive coach Chris shares his best practices for:
Discerning signal from noise
Accelerating mastery in new areas
Retaining knowledge with the help of your Second Brain
Making learning feel more effortless
Video recording above; resources mentioned, and conversation transcript below.
Resources mentioned:
Conversation Transcript
Note: transcript is slightly edited for clarity.
Chris (00:01): Thank you, Julia. It's such an honor to be here. Second Brain has made such an impact on me, and I'm really excited to try to pay it forward, to encourage more people to take the leap, to put these habits, these systems into place that will just dramatically accelerate everything they want to do in their career.
Julia (00:27): Amazing. Let's start with talking about your Second Brain journey. How did you hear about a Second Brain? How did you get started with it, and with the whole concept of knowledge management?
Chris (00:46): Yeah, I was actually in the very first cohort of Building a Second Brain. I've been following Tiago's writing, and had the pleasure of meeting him in person and just getting a sense for his passion for the topic and the amount of effort that he'd put into making something as esoteric as knowledge management approachable. And it was really a red pill for me, that if I could change my experience of learning and make what I learned easier to access and to utilize in different forms, it would make everything that I want to do easier. It was like waking up to this superpower that I didn't even know that I had. And the beautiful thing about that superpower is that it just gets stronger and stronger over time, that our learning continues to compound. So I was taking the class that was a total inflection point for me in my career, that just—everything afterwards started to accelerate.
Julia (02:07): And what would you say has changed for you since you started working with a Second Brain and implementing those sorts of systems in your life? What has it maybe opened up for you?
Chris (02:26): I think an interesting thing that a lot of people don't realize when they—When they think about something like Building a Second Brain, they're picturing having this pile of notes. And it's like, "Wouldn't life be great with all of these notes?" But the really sneaky change that happens is that it changes your experience of reality. I would say specifically around your experience of learning. But you start to realize that everything you experience is an opportunity to learn. And it takes you from a more passive kind of, like, leaning back with your arms folded like, "What have you done for me lately?" into a leaning forward, "What's happening right now? What is relevant to my goals? What can I take from this thing that I'm learning and apply it to my projects, or remix it into a form that I can create content from?"
And so it just made me feel much more engaged and active with what I was doing, what I was reading, what I was listening to. And it's had a lot of really interesting impacts from there. As you mentioned, Julia, my day-to-day mission is maximizing the performance of CEOs, of top investors, and a lot of that happens within a conversation. And we're having conversations all the time. We're always having the opportunity to learn from other people. But if we aren't active in the way that we have these conversations, if we don't take notes, if we don't think in terms of next actions, we could easily have the same conversations over and over.
So, one simple example, the concept of progressive summarization that comes up in Building a Second Brain, thinking about, "Okay. I'm having a conversation, and as I'm having the conversation I'm taking some notes." If I'm in person, I'll actually record the conversation, turn that into a transcript, and use that as a basis for taking some notes. But then I summarize it. I think, "What are the key takeaways from this conversation? What are the things that each of us are going to do next time?" And when I have conversations with a client, not only do we start to build a really nice history together, where I understand deeply where they're coming from and where they're working on, but we keep coming back to these important takeaways, these important action items, and building on top of them, so that each conversation lays the foundation for the next.
That's just this one simple example of something that I was already doing. But a subtle change to the way—my approach to it, my system, my process for it allowed it to create this artifact that had compounding value, that each experience led to better experiences in the future.
Julia (05:35): Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And we're also doing that internally at Forte Labs, where I'm now the marketing manager and I'm trying to document as much as I can of what I'm doing. For example, for the summit, for organizing the summit, I documented everything from the email I initially sent you, maybe to reach out, to the email I sent you to follow up, and remind you of our session today, to the emails I'm sending out to our guests and attendees, and the steps I'm going through. So just having—documenting all that work, I know that, like, organizing the summit again, for example, next year will be so much easier because I have all this built up knowledge I can now draw from, and I have all these artifacts that I can reuse. So from a team perspective, that's extremely important, especially if somebody else next year should be organizing the summit.
So for you and how you work with your team, or how your clients will work with their team, how does having a second brain play in there? In making teamwork better, in a way?
Chris (06:47): Something that I talk about often with my clients is turning everything that you do into a process. Assume that everything you're doing is something you're going to be doing in some form again, and externalizing those steps of that process into your second brain turns it into a living document. Every time that you touch it, it gets a little bit better.
So at Forcing Function, our team externalizes everything into Notion. That this is our company's second brain. And, you know, one part of that second brain is the SOPs. All of the things that we are doing on a regular basis to deliver value to our clients, to create content, to open-source our knowledge to the world, are turned into steps that anyone in the team could follow, so that we're not dependent on any particular person.
And again, the nice thing is that by having these processes as references, as we create a newsletter, as we design a module for our class Team Performance Training, that every time we run through it, we identify one small thing that we could do to improve that process, to streamline it, to make it even better. And thus, by having this place that we are externalizing, we ensure that we make continuous improvement over time. I'd say, like it starts with at first, get the very, very crappy version out of your head, onto the page. Once it's on the page. you can start to manipulate it. You can start to move it. You can start to own it.
And then it's just the habit of every time you touch it, make it a little bit better. Tiago talks about this often. This doesn't need to be this big heavy lift. It's making just a small change in the approach that you do things. And it's amazing with the way the compound interest works, is these small changes when you zoom out over the five years that we've been operating Forcing Function, a lot of things that once were very ad hoc and manual, and we're just kind of like scrambling, plugging wires in between the scenes, it feels very relaxed. And, like small changes continue to improve over time, to being on the other side, it's like, "Wow! You just have your act together, you're so relaxed." It's like, "Well, it didn't happen overnight." It's been just this continuous progress of improving coming from our second brain.
Julia (09:24): Yeah. And how do you ensure that this keeps happening, and that you keep improving? Do you have a specific, like, process for that? For kind of revisiting certain processes, or do you do, for example, certain reflections, and reviews, so that this happens?
Chris (09:47): Yeah, two things. One concept that is really critical in terms of management and delegation is ownership. Each process has one person who owns it, who has responsibility for improving it, and makes sure that is an accurate reflection of reality. So by having this person own it, you know who is responsible for continuing to improve that process. I like to think that improvement in anything is proportional to the tightness of your feedback loops, which is just a fancy way of saying you measure how things are going. Based on that measurement, you make a change. And that change changes the measurement. And you're trying to loop through this faster and faster.
So we have a concept at Forcing Function called the Improvement Loop, which is you plan, you take action and you experiment, you reflect. Then you plan, experiment, you reflect. And so you have these bookends of planning and reflection before you do anything.
Let's imagine you're leading a webinar like this one. Before the webinar, what's your outline? Okay, how can we make sure this webinar goes well? What do we need to have in place? If this webinar didn't go well, what's the reason? Let's prevent that. And then afterwards: How did that go well? What will we change for next time? Is there something we can do to improve that process, so it becomes even better?
So every client call, every class module that we teach, beforehand we're planning it out, doing what we can to make it better. But most importantly, immediately afterwards, we have that post-mortem. What can we change about this process so it becomes even better next time?
Julia (11:27): Yeah, I can see that happening for us as well, because it's almost impossible to—I mean, you could, you certainly should plan ahead. But it's impossible to plan for everything that might happen. There are so many things that you can't plan for, that you only know them through experience. Through going through the thing. For example, for me, I've already learned so much since the first day on Monday of our summit, and running our sessions. So already, for the last, for example, like two days, I've already made kind of like improvements in my little daily workflow that I'm going through. And it can, those situations, I think, can really happen very fast. Yeah. Agreed.
Let's talk about the concept of discerning the signal from noise when learning. And I would love to hear more about that.
Chris (12:31): Sure. So we think a lot about learning at Forcing Function. I think if you have one skill, it would be the ability to learn, and there are lots of best practices which are time-tested, science-approved on ways to accelerate your learning. Whether that's just acquiring the right knowledge so that your beliefs are in line with reality, or acquiring the skills, the tools in your tool belt, so that you can do anything.
It's this belief that I have that we can achieve anything, that the only thing that separates us from achieving the most ambitious goal that we can think of is becoming a person capable of achieving that goal. So all we need are the knowledge and the skills, and we can do anything. So it's really important to pay attention to the way that we acquire knowledge, the way that we acquire skills. Can we make sure we're acquiring the right knowledge? Can we acquire skills that are most useful in a faster way?
So when I talk about signal and noise, it's just the acknowledgement that the vast majority of things in the world are noise. They are irrelevant to our top goals. So, knowing a lot of things that might exist on social media or the news, for example, it might make us feel smarter. We might have something witty to say at a cocktail party. But what are we actually doing differently with that knowledge? So when I'm thinking about the difference between signal and noise, it's thinking about what is relevant.
And a really good rule of thumb is that if it's not relevant in one year, it's not relevant now. So try and think about increasing the time scale that we're thinking in terms of knowledge, is that we're building concepts, not opinions.
And this is really important, because things that are very noisy can feel productive, learning this. But first there's an opportunity cost of that. If we're learning things of low value, that's time that we could spend learning things of higher value, and if we're going to learn something, let's learn the important things. But more perniciously, that if we are learning the wrong things or learning from the wrong places, that this gives us a sense of overconfidence that we haven't earned, we feel like we know a lot about something, but we've just really borrowed the opinion of someone else. We haven't really reasoned it through ourselves. So once something has gone through this original filter of, "Is this going to be relevant one year from now?," it's thinking about, "All right, what is relevant to our goals? What is something that I can use?" The more likely we are to use it, the more likely we are to retain it.
The two habits that I find very useful for increasing your signal-to-noise ratio—First, I like to think about separating content discovery from consumption. Tiago has an amazing article on Read-It-Later apps. That is a big part of the class, and was a huge shift in the way that I consume information. I don't consume anything at the moment that I find it. Someone tells me about a great movie, podcast, article, or book. I never read it right away. I add it to a list, and I come back to this list regularly and say, "What on this list is the best thing for me to read right now, given what's going on with me, given what I'm working on, what could have the most impact?" And creating a little bit of separation allows me to make much better choices.
So, personally, I use an app called Instapaper for all of my online reading, and when I see something that's like, "Hey, this is interesting," I just click a button and it adds it to the list. And then once a week I'm looking at, hey, maybe I saved thirty, forty, fifty articles this week, and I'll try to read the best five of those. And that's all it is. You're trying to increase the average quality of what you learn.
The nice thing, too, about those apps is that it makes it very, very easy to save highlights for later, add to your second brain. Instapaper has some really nice integrations with Evernote. I like Readwise. There's a lot of different things you can use to take the things that you're reading and immediately turn them into source material to build on your own ideas, to start to create a body of knowledge rather than isolated facts.
The last thing is just avoid the feeds. I don't spend much time with social media, but sometimes it's useful to dip your toe into the stream. Well, what I do is I have all of my feeds hidden where—I like to say, like, "Computers should speak only when spoken to." I don't want to know what the algorithm has for me. I want my learning to be directed from myself.
So when I go into Twitter, for example, I'll go to Twitter and I'll go into one of my lists that has been curated. Someone, okay, "Here are all the people who are really knowledgeable about investing," or when I was studying comedy I'd have a feed of comedians, or right now I am training up for a bike race, so I have a feed of cyclists. "Okay, I'm going in there." It's very topic-specific. I'm going in there with an intention. Or I just use the search function directly. What are people saying right now about blank? But thinking about it in terms of, rather than, "I'm getting served," there's this just like a giant buffet that I'm going to gorge on. It's more like, "Okay, what is my intention? What am I specifically looking to learn right now?" That subtle shift has a really big difference that increases that signal-to-noise ratio.
Julia (19:02): Amazing. So what I'm hearing is most of what's out there is noise, and we should ignore it. So we should be very selective of what we are consuming, and that we shouldn't be consuming something right away. We should, we're saving it in ReadLater, so we can consume it at a time that's convenient for us, not the algorithm. Right? And when we're dipping our toes into the social media feeds, we can be more intentional about it by curating those feeds to fit our needs, or certain interests.
So applying this concept of discerning signal from the noise to how you learned poker, how did that look? How, when you picked up that incredible skill, how did you decide what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and how did that take you up a level of your profession there?
Chris (20:06): There's a lot of noise in every field, and poker is no exception. Especially a lot of what people share publicly is a bit deceptive. People are a bit averse to sharing their actual strategies. So, in poker particularly, it's really important to go to the source.
When I was very, very early, I would read the books, and there were video training sites, and I would watch those. But I realized that all of the best stuff was happening behind the curtain, and that in order to access the best strategies, I needed to talk to the top players directly, either by having them as a coach or by befriending them, getting into communities, having community conversations offline. So a lot of times, the things that go into a book are the highest signal value. Think about, like, the number of filters that something has gone through in order to be published. That's why papers, although dry—or textbooks—are very, very high signal-to-noise, because they've had to go through this peer-review process. Versus something like an article where someone's putting out one article a day, or a tweet that someone was in the shower, and it's like, "Hey. What about this thing?" It's generally going to be a little bit higher noise ratio.
But in poker, I learned that it was more important to have accurate strategies, rather than well-reasoned, well-thought-out strategies. And so this was a little bit more of, I needed to be willing to negotiate the extra noise that was coming in, in order for accuracy. That's an important consideration. For me, the biggest thing that I think accelerated my trajectory as a poker player was teaching poker. I was fortunate enough to coach over a hundred players who—Let's say they were already in the top one percent of players, and they wanted to join me in the top .001 percent. And having to explain things, the way that I do things, my thought process really made it a lot more accessible to me. Starting to realize, like, what are the things that I do that make me different? What are the things that allow me to be successful? That it was excavating these gaps in my own knowledge that allowed me to start to fill them, to become more of a complete player.
And this is a real key—Learning for learning’s sake, if you want to upscale yourself, if you want to become wiser, smarter, is to look for opportunities to share that knowledge, to teach it to others. That is a real, real accelerant.
Julia (23:00): Wow. I'm a big fan of that, of the concept of teaching to learn. I would also call it "learning in public." And I think a lot of people don't realize that they can do that at any stage. Really. Even if you just pick up a completely new topic, as soon as you've read a little bit about it, you probably already know more about that topic than ninety-nine percent of the population. And that's already when you can start sharing what you've just learned, just on Twitter or social media, or in a community, or somewhere else. And you're completely right when you're saying this really exposes your gaps in your knowledge, and helps you get more clear on what is it, actually, if you have to put it in your own words again, and publish that.
Chris (23:51): Really, I'd love to share a little bit more about my second brain for poker. I think you guys might find it interesting.
Julia (23:58): Totally.
Chris (23:59): So a lot of my trajectory was playing online poker, where I had the opportunity to essentially have access to every online poker hand ever played, and I worked with a number of people over—years back. This was like a decade ago, before people were doing this—in order to create an actual second brain, a heads-up display of all the statistics that were relevant about all the players, so I can know how often they were taking certain actions. And I color-coded this display so that if someone had a stat that was a few standard deviations away from the mean, it would really jump out to me, or I would have it really dig in. It's like, how do they play in this exact situation? Having access to that was a huge advantage. All the data was just sitting there, but taking that extra step of how can I have this accessible and in a form that's actionable to me?
It's always something we want to be thinking about, in terms of a second brain. What is the final use case? Again, we're not trying to just accumulate a pile of notes. We're trying to create these little superpowers for ourselves to make what we want to do easier to do. And that was a huge accelerant for me in my career.
Recently I moved into the physical world. You know, post-this pandemic, the world is going back into the real world, and I'm playing a lot more poker in person, so I don't have the luxury of all my statistics all on my database. But I still am looking for that competitive edge, and a lot of this comes down to my player-specific notes and reads.
So I play with a lot of the same players every week, and after every time we play together, I'm taking notes. So, how do they play in certain ways? What are their tells? What are things that I know that are emotional triggers? And I'm keeping a log of every player, so that over time I'm building a really detailed picture of them. And before every time I play with them, I review these notes, and this helps me come up with a plan of action.
It's also something that I do, very important, every session is, I ask myself, "Hey, what's one thing that I can do for next time?" Or before the session, "What's one thing that I really want to focus on this session?" The simple act of having this little line and spreadsheet that I have to fill in, and say, "What's my intention for the session today?" creates this moment of reflection that I am going to be more active learning during the session. I'm gonna be paying attention to this specific thing. This is an opportunity for me to improve.
And then afterwards, I say, "How did that go? What could I do better next time?" And I just want to emphasize that this process orientation that we're teaching, treating everything as something that we can get a little bit better each time, has amazing effects. Where in poker in particular, I went from being a pretty average player to starting to apply the system of, "I'm going to get a little bit better every time I sit down," becoming one of the top twenty players in about a year and a half. There were other things at play, but this speed of improvement, this iteration cycle, will allow you to move much, much faster. I cannot emphasize that enough.
Julia (27:18): That's really impressive. And that nicely carries over to my next question. What would you say is kind of like the best strategy to really accelerate that mastery in a skill? There's this number floating around, like, something—You need ten thousand hours to get really good at something, and to really master something. Then there's this other TED talk that talks about, "Well in twenty hours we already get to like the eighty percent mark." But how do you—What would you tell someone who's picking up a new skill?
Chris (27:56): First, the most important thing is to focus, first, on the foundations, on the fundamentals. So what are the things that in order to do this you're building off of? And it's really good when you're getting—Especially when you're getting into something new, is to talk to people who've gone through this process of learning before. Say, like, what are the—What's the place that I need to start? What does everything build from? What do I need to know and really internalize first, before I can move on to these advanced concepts?
We see this in studies of learning time and time again, that we move fastest when we master one concept before moving on to the next. So when you're learning, order of operations is really important. Focus on the foundations and master those before you move on to anything else. I'll give an example of chess. When people learn chess for example, another game that's very popular right now, everyone immediately wants to go towards memorizing openings or tactics. Trying to find, like, the really sexy moves.
But you have to take chess down to its basics. You think about just things like a pawn and a king versus a king, and you start to learn the foundations of pressure and positioning and controlling the board. And once you master those foundational things you can start to layer on top, you start to add in more pieces because the advanced concepts won't land. You'll just be trying to memorize things you don't actually understand until you have those foundational concepts.
So thinking about the thing you're trying to achieve, what is that base? And how can you master that first? I say, the first step usually is to talk with someone who's gone through this process first, and say, "Hey, where do you wish you'd got started? What do you think is the most important part?"
And I think something that a lot of people miss—It seems obvious when you say it out loud—It's like, why are you learning this? Why is this knowledge important? Why is this skill important? And I try to think about being very specific with the desired outcome. I have an example that I share in Experiment Without Limits about wanting to learn stand-up comedy. And you know, my whole goal was to, so I could be funnier in daily life and start to learn some of the mechanisms of humor. But the problem with something like that, that's very abstract, is how do I know if I'm making progress? Are people just laughing more at my jokes? And so I needed to pick a specific training objective of, "I want to be able to tell a whole stand-up routine on stage."
I was at the Comedy Cellar in New York. Seven minutes. Let me tell you, when you're on stage it feels like an eternity. It was, "I want to be able to make it through a seven-minute routine and have enough things to say." And so once I was able to work backwards from, "Okay, I need a seven minutes routine. I need to build seven minutes of material, I need to start writing lots of jokes and figuring out what are the important parts." All of my learning was tied back to this objective of, "What do I need to know to be on stage for seven minutes and not make a complete fool out of myself?"
And it really focused. And again, coming back to signal-from-noise, there's a lot of things that I could have justified as studying comedy. I could have sat there on Netflix for a few weeks, and just watched all the stand-ups and said, "Hey, I'm learning what all the masters do in comedy." It's like, hey, is this the best thing that I could be doing, to not embarrass myself on stage? Probably not. Let's find something else. So, having that clear objective in mind, this is a really good way to accelerate mastery.
The final thing that I would share is this concept of feedback loops, I said in the beginning, and it's worth saying again, the progress of our learning, the speed of acquiring mastery comes back to these tightness of feedback loops. So I think of shipping anything, whether you're shipping a product, or you're creating a course, or writing a book. It's a race to feedback. So how can you be getting feedback along the way on what Tiago calls intermediate packets? These small pieces, these deliverables of having something to ship and having people to tell you, "Hey, these are the parts that were really interesting." "This was like, this is working really well, and like, maybe you want to think about this a little bit more. Maybe you want to work on this. That joke wasn't very good." You know the parts to work on, and getting this feedback allows you to accelerate that.
So those are the three things that I would say in terms of mastery. Start with the foundations. Know what your objective, your outcome is, and then build in some feedback.
Julia (21:31): That's great. And yeah, it's also very impressive that you're now also learning stand-up comedy. This is so—
Chris (32:49): Why not?
Julia (32:50): Why not? Yeah. I think a lot of people are horrified by standing on stage and having to try to make people laugh. That is really impressive. Can you talk a bit more about how you leverage your second brain to, for example, learn, stand-up comedy, and help you retain certain things? For example, when you are up there on stage, I can imagine you would need to have memorized a lot of things, so that you don't freeze and don't run out of things to say. It's like, how would you help your—How does the second brain help you do that?
Chris (33:32): There's no other way to say it but to reference it. You know, knowledge that you don't know where it is, that you can't access it, has no purpose. So make the things that you know easier to access. Tiago talks about this in terms of capture and retrieval. So the first place is just to make sure that you're capturing things that might be relevant later. But then, when you need something, you're like, "Hey, I wish I knew this thing. I bet I wrote about this sometime. I know we talked about this." Can you make that a little bit easier to find next time? And that's just like in the saving process trying to think about what is the future situation where this could be useful. Can you make that so that it's accessible? And then just committing to this habit of, hey, I'm about to do a thing. I bet I've thought about this before. What have I saved?
A really key takeaway for me from Building a Second Brain is the best idea for you right now is an idea you've already had. You just need to be able to find it, right? You just need to find a way to surface this. So especially in our digital world, I'm trying to make things that I can easily find later digitally, and there's no better function than the search function. So I want to make it so that when I'm looking for something specific, say today I led a class on prioritization, well, if I search for "priorities," that a whole bunch of interesting things that will come up that I can start to build a talk around. "Oh, I remember reading this and like, oh, I said that one time. That's a really good one-liner. I can put it in here." And I start to build out, "Here are all the things that I can work from." I'm never starting from this blank page.
And that all starts with, I have these things, but that I'm able to access them. Right? This—When people think "retention," they think "memory." But that's the beautiful thing about having a second brain is, I don't need to remember anything because I know when I need it I can find it. And there's just a wonderful confidence and trust that comes from that.
Julia (35:36): Yeah, I can very much relate to having that confidence and trust in the second brain. And that's a, kind of like this way of organizing a second brain, this is a part that we spend a lot of time on in the course, to make sure that the resources, the insights, ideas that we say are put in a place in our second brain where they will be the most relevant. For example, if your current goal is to get really great at stand-up comedy, then you would want everything, all the resources related to that easily accessible, maybe in a project in your project folder. Right there. Whereas something that you might have saved on poker, and you're already pretty good at that, might go down to your resource folders, because it's not—You don't need it anymore, like, at your fingertips right now. So, totally.
Chris (36:36): Yeah. And I would echo that again, this concept of not thinking of this as a heavy lift, that you need to solve all of this overnight, but more just a slight shift in the way that you save things that are interesting, and that you find them later so that you can utilize them. And I always just try to think about it as like, how can I make it a little bit easier for myself the next time?
Julia (37:03): Yeah, let's talk about those heavy lifts versus slow burns, as Tiago puts it. So, a heavy lift is something that we need a lot of energy to do. It seems like a big mountain to climb for us. It seems like, oh, we need to put our heads down for hours to get this done. Whereas the slow burns, being something that feels almost effortless, that we're doing kind of like on the side, here and there. How can you make learning more of a slow burn and more effortless?
Chris (37:39): The belief that I have, maybe a little bit controversial, is that our free will is pretty limited. That we will tend to do what our environment allows us to do. This has been talked about recently as you rise or fall to the level of your systems. So if you don't have good systems, or knowledge management in place, it's going to be very difficult or a little bit more effortful to achieve these learning outcomes. But at the same time, on the other hand, if you have a system that makes your learning easier over time that surfaces these important concepts and ideas to yourself, things will get easier over time. So I'm always thinking in a behavioral context of, "How can I make my environment more supportive of what I want to do?" In this case, how can I make my environment remind me, give me opportunities to learn the things that are important to me?"
So I think about something simple like, "Hey, I would like to get into better shape." Well, how can you have your environment remind you of that goal? Maybe you have things to work out from that are going to be in view. Maybe you start subscribing to newsletters or buying books that remind you that, Hey, this is important. Start reinforcing this as a belief. You join a circle, a community of other people who are looking to better themselves in this way, and they start to reinforce and give you ideas. I'm always trying to think, what—It's not what I want, but what I want to want. Talk about meta-learning, it's like the meta-layer here is, I can create an environment that supports anything that I want to do. So what do I want to do? And then what is the environment that supports that?
And for me, because I prioritize learning so much, because I think it's our superpower, I try to create environment things that make it easier for me to learn. So that's always a good thing to be thinking about in terms of habits. What makes it easier for you? Can you have more of that? What makes it harder for you? Can you have less of that? It sounds simple, but you can really approach everything you want to do from that perspective of making what you want to do easier to do, what you want to do harder to do.
One other thing that I will mention is there's a really intuitive aspect to this, which I like to refer to as "optimizing for interestingness." It's often—There's a lot of pressure from culture, from society, that we need to be learning, we need to be doing certain things, but I tend to believe over the long run we already know what we need to do. And so when I'm thinking about, of all the things I could do, of all the things that I could learn, I choose whatever is most interesting to me, and that over time this is like a nice intersection of what's high impact, what's enjoyable, what creates long-term returns, or the things that I find interesting.
And because, remembering our process, we're regularly planning what we should do, reflecting. How did that go? Is this leading me towards my goals or not? We're continually iterating, and optimizing calibrating our intuition towards the things we find most interesting are the things that are going to be most useful, most enjoyable. So if what you're learning is not interesting to you, ditch it. Like, there's so—Like, the amount of things that we can do in this world is completely endless. I would say, like, a lot of times the things that we should be doing are the things that maybe we feel a little bit guilty about. It's like, "Oh, this isn't related to my career." Well, maybe it could be. Maybe it starts off with a little experiment of just going deeper on the things that most interest us. And because it's so hard to know how all the things that we learn over time are going to shape us, the only thing that I know is like, "Hey, Why not—If learning can be fun, why not make it fun? Why not learn the things that are fun for me to learn and just trust that process?"
Julia (41:44): Yeah, I think we can hardly go wrong with following what's fun for us. And going down what leads us down rabbit holes. For sure.
All right. I'd love to take some questions from our wonderful audience, so I'm looking into the Q&A tab here. And Dallas is asking, could you talk a bit more about the strategies for pattern recognition? What is pattern recognition? Why is this important for us?
Chris (42:18): Yeah. So this—I will first say that I think a lot of the skills that I bring from poker is this pattern recognition, this recognition that when we are in similar situations, we tend to take similar actions. So if you see how someone behaves in a certain situation, you can likely predict how they're going to behave when that situation repeats. We apply that to ourselves. If we behave a certain way in a certain context, in a certain environment, we expect that if that context for that environment doesn't change, we're going to behave in the same way. So is this behavior that we want to repeat? Let's create this environment again. This is behavior that we don't want to repeat? Well, what can we change about the environment so that we make a different choice?
We apply this to learning. I'm always trying to approach the things that I'm learning from different angles, from different sources. This could be looking across time, that everything is cyclical, you know, 'cause history—If it doesn't repeat, it certainly rhymes. So what's happening right now probably has its historical equivalent, or at least some historical context. So what's happening right now is going to be very noisy, and it's hard to suss out, "Hey, what's actually going on?" Then we'll say, "What's going on? Has something similar happened before?" Where the actors involved change, but human nature doesn't change.
So I try to discern the pattern based on what's happening, and then I can have a better sense of extrapolating where things are going from here. I don't get as stuck in the noise. Another thing, just tactically, is if I'm trying to learn a specific skill or study even a particular point in—Person in history, or a particular time in history, of getting multiple perspectives. I read from different authors. I take it in different mediums. I don't just mean like, you know, I read books, and I listen to audio, because, like, I'll try to engage with that. Let's say—One time period I was studying was, you know, turn of the century US. So reading different biographies of people who were involved in that day, reading different articles. But then, you know, I go to a museum, and I engage with some of those artifacts, or I go to a place that has maintained some of that vibe that—The original buildings, that sort of thing. Just having different ways of engaging, different angles of attack, of looking at the same problem. Because I think a lot of it is really just having these different perspectives.
And in terms of pattern recognition, it's very interesting, when you have multiple sources you can see, hey, what do these sources agree on? Well, the more points of equivalence that you have, the more confidence, the more conviction that you have. It's like, hey, they're really onto something here. Maybe this is correct. You can update your beliefs until, it's, "Hey, I'm a little more confident here." But it's also very interesting to see where people differ in their perspective, because then you start to observe that gap. It's like, what are the unacknowledged (or as Tiago would say, the invalidated assumptions) that aren't being said here? And that's where the really interesting learning comes, is the question that's not being asked, the thing that's not being said. How are two people who have access to the same information coming up with two different conclusions? That's where the real learning takes place, and you start to think for yourself rather than taking opinions wholesale.
Julia (45:57): Yeah, absolutely. I can see that if you're only focused on one source of information that you can kind of, like, go into like a pigeonhole there and only follow this one philosophy, even though there might be so many other other angles on the topic. That was actually another question from our audience. How would you—How do you decide what is truly a good source of information? That, one that you can trust. How do you make that decision?
Chris (46:29): Great question. I think I would start by saying every time that you learn something, every time you read, or you listen to something, or you talk to someone, the mental habit afterwards is, "How much credit do I give that?" Like, is this person sharing something that's objective? Do they have the experience to justify what they shared, to back that up? And the more credible something is, I'm like, "Okay, how can I talk to more people like this, or read more books like this?" If I'm like, "Oh, that wasn't really all that useful, or it feels like there's a lot of bias, or it didn't quite land, well, how do I have less of that in the future?” I think that that's just the kind of, the critical skill is afterwards, "Hey, was that useful? Can I get more of that?" "Was that not so useful? Can I get less?"
I would also mention that having filters in place is really cool—is very, very powerful. So as you start to identify, "Hey, what are the commonalities of good sources?" you can start to create rules around them.
So I'll share a couple of my rules, just for, you know, applications sake. One of them is that I don't read any books that are between two hundred and three hundred pages. That's a very weird rule. Why would I do that? Well, just like a lot of songs are four minutes because they need to play on the radio, a lot of books are supposed to be around two hundred pages. So you see, particularly in nonfiction self-help books, they stuff a lot of extra examples to try to get it up to two hundred pages, and those are usually books that, hey, I could just listen to a podcast with the author or read an article and I'll get eighty to ninety percent of what I would have got from reading the whole book.
So it's that interesting kind of gap, of hey, if it's over three hundred pages, it's likely to be on average a better use of time. Like, some of the highest impact books I've read are like fifty pages, or like a thousand pages, and it's interesting how the things that are in the middle tend to be lower value. Another interesting one is, I don't read any articles that take less than ten minutes to read. That's a lot of things on the Internet, believe it or not. Why is that? Again, something that is longer, people are less likely to read. But if it gets sent to me anyways, it gets recommended, that's a really strong signal that in this information age where people are so time-scarce, they managed to sit through this sixty-minute article and still say, "Hey, this is amazing, here are some thoughts that I had on it," wow. That's a really powerful signal. Okay, maybe I should invest sixty minutes.
And it's this big shift that I made coming from Building a Second Brain. I used to be the person who tracked every book that I read. I even tracked how many articles that I read. And that way at the end of the year I could say, "I read seventy books this year. I read one thousand, nine hundred, and fifty articles this year." (That was my total from one year.) And, like, aren't I smart? Aren't I great?
Well, I'm not trying to finish books. I'm not trying to read articles. I'm trying to spend time with ideas. And my goal is to increase the average quality of time that I spend with those ideas by reading high average quality sources. So I stopped tracking how many books and articles that I read, and more track the amount of time that I spent with good stuff, and hey, was the stuff that I read good or not? Can I improve that?
And so it's interesting to realize that, hey, it can be a lot more productive to read one really good sixty-minute article than ten six-minute articles. It feels more productive to read the ten articles. But what are you trying to achieve?
So those are a couple rules that I would share. I mean, again, I didn't pull them out of a hat. It was, as I read more and more, it was like, "Hey. The things that aren't very good, what do they have in common?" "Oh, they were short." "They were books that you see in an airport." Okay. Some of them might be good, but on average, the thing that I'm going to read is not in that. So I'm just going to cut those out, because the list of things that I could read is endless. Might as well spend more time on the things that are going to be good.
Julia (50:51): Wow! That was so critical, what you just said. Seriously that—Yeah. Just being able to brag about a certain number of books read, or articles read, doesn't mean anything in itself. It's all about what you do with what you learned from those information sources.
Let's take one more question. From Paula. Paula is a college student, and she says, "I get so confused with how to integrate my tools. Obsidian, Notion, Google Calendar, and so on." But, she said, she finds herself spending so much time kind of like building that structure of the second brain, or building that infrastructure, that she loses time to actually use that knowledge and use it to put it into long-term memory, to make use of it. Any tips for that?
Chris (51:48): This is very common, and particularly people who are in this room, I think, are susceptible to falling into this optimization trap of trying to find the perfect tool, trying to create the perfect system, when—I hate to break it to you. Like, there is no perfect tool. There is no perfect system. I'm pretty tool-agnostic. Like, I think Tiago talks about this as well. The course started off focused on Evernote, and there's specific courses on each of these wonderful tools. I've taken a course on Obsidian, I've taken a course on Notion. There's a lot of wonderful tools out there. But the truth is that the tool doesn't matter. It's how you use the tool. So I would come back to what are you trying to achieve? And what is the best tool for that? And thinking less about trying to create this perfect system that you're going to use for all of eternity, because you won't. It's going to break. Your priorities are gonna change, your goals are gonna change. But how can you make something that is adaptable, that's simple, that's lightweight, that allows you to get the most use out of it without having to continually maintain it?
So this is just kind of a long-winded way of saying, like, take some of the pressure off. Think less in terms of trying to design something that's amazing and more about this habit of learning. So as a student, or someone listening, as a founder, as a creator, what are the situations where a second brain would be useful to you? And what are small steps that you can take to start to make those situations easier, so that you have what you need on hand? Think about writing a paper. What are the things that you need to write the paper? What is the easiest, most accessible place that you can store those things? I think that's a really, really big time-saver for a lot of people here, is to worry less about mastering the tool and more thinking about, "How can I use this tool better?"
Julia (54:11): Great answer. I think we have time for one more question. Let's see. So, Maxwell wants to know, "How do you become intentional in all cases?" Or, how do you aim to act more intentionally in, like, your learning or maybe almost like everything you do?
Chris (54:35): I mean, that's the million dollar question. I think so much of life comes back to being intentional. Something that I like to talk about a lot is that all improvement begins with awareness. So, something I've talked about today, if you're aware of what's working, how can you double down on that? How can you do more of that? If you're aware of the things that aren't working, what's something you can try in order to change that? But it always begins with being aware of what's going on. And any time that I try to do something, whether it's playing high-stakes poker, or teaching a class, or trading, or talking with a client I try to come back to, "Why am I here? Why am I in this room? What is my intention?" As I'm talking to you today, the same thing is true. My intention is to just give you a sense of the possibility that this is definitely something that you can do, but it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take a little bit of work, but it's not a one-time "boom," it's a small change in the way that you approach things, the way that you learn, the way that you develop yourself, the way that you grow as a person.
And I come back to that before I sit with a client. I say, "Hey, what would make this coaching session successful?" When I come into giving a talk like this one, what do I want them to walk away from? When I play poker, what is the skill that I'm learning from? What am I paying particular attention to?
And there's a funny thing about attention. Think about turning it into a laser. The more specific that we put our attention on, the more focused our attention becomes. So if you want to be more present, if you want to be more intentional, be specific. Really zero in on, "What is this thing that I'm working on right now? Why am I in this room? What am I trying to learn? What am I trying to come away from this with?" And the funny thing about that is that it shifts your context. It shifts your experience. It shifts your consciousness. How I started all of this, in line with attentionality, is, "What can you do to make your experience of learning, your experience of reality, a little bit more active?" That if you become a more active learner, a lot of other things take care of themselves.