I’ve never been the kind of person to write about my thoughts—no blog posts, no Twitter threads, not even a casual Facebook update. Part of it is perfectionism; part of it is self-doubt. I often wonder, Does this thought really have value for anyone else? That mindset has kept me from expressing myself for a long time.
Recently, I read Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, where he talks about the importance of expressing your thoughts. He explains how sharing ideas helps them evolve and how—even if you think your thoughts aren’t groundbreaking—they could be helpful to at least one person. That idea, along with my desire to break out of my perfectionist tendencies, led me to start this blog.
I don’t want to take it too seriously—just a space to share things I find interesting, whether that’s everyday mundane moments, the latest tech trends, my thoughts on a book or movie, or anything else that sparks curiosity.
To start, I’d like to share a few ideas from Building a Second Brain that resonated with me the most and why they mattered to me.
Capturing vs. Collecting
Even before reading the book, I was already saving interesting things digitally in my notes app of choice. I used Notion and a handy Chrome extension called “Save to Notion” to capture articles, insights, and anything I thought might be useful later. The act of capturing felt comforting—the idea that I could revisit these notes whenever I needed was reassuring. But in reality, I was just hoarding information. I wasn’t actually using any of it.
Tiago introduces the CODE method: Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express. I was doing the first two well, but I completely neglected the last two steps. That was a wake-up call. It made me realize that capturing for the sake of capturing isn’t enough. The key is to curate the information, not just collect it. We live in an age of information overload, and deciding what to let into our second brain is just as important as saving it.
Capturing for Action
One of the biggest shifts for me was learning to capture with a purpose. Tiago suggests capturing things that you:
- Find personally meaningful
- Might use for a future project
- Find surprising or thought-provoking
- Can immediately take action on
That last one—capturing for action—was a game-changer. I used to save full Wikipedia articles or entire blog posts, but I never distilled them down into something useful. Tiago’s technique of progressive summarization—highlighting key parts, refining them, and eventually rewriting them in your own words—completely changed how I approach note-taking.
Expressing as a Form of Self-Discovery
What resonated with me most in Building a Second Brain was the idea that expressing your thoughts isn’t just about sharing knowledge—it’s also about self-discovery. Writing forces you to clarify your thoughts. It helps you see patterns in what interests you, what you keep coming back to, and ultimately, what truly matters to you.
That’s why I’m here, writing this first post. Not because I have all the answers, but because I want to start asking better questions. Because I want to see where my thoughts lead when I stop keeping them locked away in my notes and start letting them evolve out in the open.
So, here’s to breaking the perfectionist mindset. Here’s to sharing, learning, and growing—one post at a time.