They usually started with an index which would be regularly updated so the author could later easily find valuable information they had recorded. Creators of commonplace books range from English philosopher John Locke to modern day writers such a Ryan Holiday. A second brain is a commonplace book for the digital age, it is a personal knowledge management system that you use to capture all your important notes and thoughts so they can be later retrieved.Ĭommonplace books have a long history of being used by the world’s greatest minds to record vital information, quotes, notes, and thoughts that can be later retrieved.
This is exactly what I was inspired to do after reading Tiago Forte’s excellent book Building a Second Brain. For the record I use OneNote, but any note taking app with a powerful search functionality works. My book highlights would be easy to retrieve and available to me with only a quick search and I wouldn’t have to remember the particular book the information was originally found in.
But I tried that, and it turns out that Aristotle had a lot to say about friendship and finding the specific bit of information I was looking for needed more than a quick search.īut what if after having read a book, I had taken the time to copy my highlights and notes from my Kindle and into my notetaking system. Some might say, ‘just do a Google search’. This involved me having to look through several possible books I’d read in the last 12 months. Eventually, mostly due to luck I rediscovered my highlights in Massimo Pigiliucci’s book How to be a Stoic. Unfortunately, I could not remember the details of what those categories were and where I had read about them. I knew I had read somewhere that he had divided friendship into three categories. Recently I attempted to recall the three tiers of friendship named by Aristotle.
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