One day during my Junior year of high school I was wandering around my basement in a melancholy. A video from Ali Abdaal popped up in my recommended. It was a review of an online cohort course called Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. Ali described the main learnings he took away from the course including mindsets and workflows. Out of the entire video, two things intrigued me most. First, he explained that by building a second brain, a digital, externalized, central repository for the ideas that resonate with you and the resources from which they come from, you can make your past self work for you. Your past work becomes the building block of future projects allowing your knowledge to experience a beautiful compounding effect. It's like having a personal butler for your brain. Second, he described building a second brain like a game, a game in learning the best way to capture, organize, distill, and express knowledge in the way that makes most sense to you. By the time I finished the video I was standing completely still, jaw open. What Ali was describing was a game. If there was one thing I knew then, it's that I love games. This led me down my path in PKM today and eventually to discovering Obsidian and creating what I and John call [[Conceptual Notemaking]]. We will go much further into conceptual notemaking during the second part of the course but here it is in sum. Conceptual notemaking is a form [[Notemaking]]--a term coined by fellow PKMer Nick Milo--which involves taking notes in ones own words. It uses concepts as the fundamental unit of knowledge management. Instead of notetaking predominantly through sequential format on exactly what the professor says, you take notes on individual concepts and *link them together.* This brings us to one of the most important points of this course. If you take nothing else, take this. > **There are no rigid disciplines in the universe, only concepts.** Biology, Anthropology, Statistics, History, Phycology (the study of Algae, not joking), etc. They are disciplines that all take highly related concepts and connect them together. But there's nothing stopping you from connecting a note from Biology to one on History. For example, a note on how the historical Royal English practice of incest led to the famous "long chin" because inbreeding has a higher chance of negative recessive traits revealing themselves. Conceptual notemaking helps fight the three insidious effects from being a Cookie Cutter Student mentioned earlier. 1. It makes you more engaged in your learning. You add your own unique personality, background, flare, spunk, whatever you want into your notes. Your knowledge is unique compared to other students. You add your own unique sauce to your burger. 2. It lessons the need for incessant studying. The brain doesn't learn by siloing information into rigid folders. It learns through connecting new information to past. Emulating this process using conceptual notemaking means you learn the material better the first time. 3. [[With a second brain you never have to start from scratch allowing you to take advantage of inspiration 1|You never have to start from scratch again]]. Your notes will start to connect class to class, semester to semester. Instead of starting with a blank slate each semester, your knowledge will compound on itself. Through adopting conceptual notemaking into my life, I wake up every day with a wonder and curiosity for what new things I will learn. My video game addiction is no longer an issue. **Real life has become the most fun game imaginable.** Check out [[Why Obsidian]]? to learn what makes Obsidian my app of choice for doing this. ```ad-question color: 0, 9, 255 I encourage you to answer the reflection questions below. ``` How much do you re-use and incorporate past learnings into your present semesters or quarters in school? What classes are you taking right now and what connections between them can you think of on the spot?