Are self help books helpful?

There are two kinds of “self help” books.

The first kind is the horoscope of the literary world. It’s generic. It makes big promises but if you fail it’s because you didn’t believe or commit hard enough. It exists to make the authors money. I avoid this kind of self help book.

The second kind of self help book is when one person write a book hoping to help another person learn a skill of some kind. It’s more concrete, with actual steps and techniques to try that don’t involve picturing, focusing or manifesting. It makes promises, but they are usually smaller and more specific.

Getting Things Done by David Allen is a great example of the second kind of self help book, and it gets a lot of things right:

• It outlines a reduced scope (productivity)
• It includes specific steps you can take that involve actual physical things (file folders! This guy loves file folders)
• It makes (slightly more) modest promises — Allen promises “Stress Free Productivity” — he doesn’t promise success or riches or fame. He just says you’ll be able to, well, get things done. And it won’t stress you out so much.

Within the second type of self help book there are three types of authors:

1. “I did this and now I’ll show you how I did it myself”
2. “I did this and I created a community and together we created some patterns we think will work for a lot of people and I’m going to show you how we did it.”
3. “I’m an academic and I studied this subject and, using science, have created a methodology that I believe works for most people.”

Let’s look at habit formation where there are perfect example of these three types of books. “Mini Habits” by Stephen Guise goes through how he has achieved some stuff personally, and it’s a pretty good book. “Atomic Habits” by James Clear covers the same subject, but with a little more breadth because he involved other people and tried various things with his community. Finally we have “Tiny Habits” by BJ Fogg — Fogg is the founder and Director of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab at, you guessed it, Stanford. Unlike the other two books Tiny Habits builds out a theoretical framework for habit change that is supported by experiments performed during his research.

When I look at self help books I tend to prefer number 3, number 2 is okay, and number 1 is typically the least useful.

FINALLY we get to the actual book in question — Building a Second Brain. Tiago Forte falls into category number 2 — he’s not an academic, but he also has spent some time studying this subject. He starts with his own story of diagnosing and treating his own disease that doctors couldn’t figure out (uh oh, looks like type 1 author), but then goes into detail about how he spent years writing about the subject, building a community, teaching classes and now he’s collected what has worked best for him and his students into the book (phew! Type 2 author).

So what is the subject? What promises does Tiago make? And does it appear he can fulfill them?

What Building a Second Brain Promises

The promise is right on the cover: “A proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.”

In the introduction he goes more into detail and makes some fairly big promises. He promises you’ll be able to:

• Find anything you’ve learned, touched, or thought about int he past within seconds
• Organize your knowledge and use it to move your projects and goals forward more consistently
• Improve your thinking (basically)
• Turn work “off” and relax …

Not to spoil my review but, does his proven system allow you to do that?

Here’s where we get to one fairly fundamental problem. My perception is that his system will help you with bullet two above, bullet one seems far-fetched for most people, bullet number three is a definite maybe and bullet number four … I think more is involved. But he promises all this if you use the system.

And that’s what’s hard about this. I can’t do something today and go “Ah yes, I feel better already!” unlike, say, “getting things done” where you’ll feel better after one afternoon of implementing some of David Allen’s ideas.

Instead you need to create a system, integrate it with your entire digital life — you need to change a LOT to get the benefits promised, and I think that makes it a lot harder to judge. It’s creeping into “Maybe if you just committed harder if would’ve worked” territory, and I don’t love that. So let’s talk a little about the system.

What is this “proven method?”

This is one area where I’m a fan of the book — the “proven method” is fairly simple as a concept. Basically he said with every piece of information you receive you should follow the CODE method, which stands for:

• Collect
• Organize
• Distill
• Express

Collect

This is the step that, in my opinion, requires the most work. If you read something interesting, or hear something interesting, or see something interesting or THINK something interesting, he wants ALL of that to flow into a digital note taking app of some kind.

He emphasizes reducing friction. For example, if you read eBooks you can set up your eBook app to automatically send highlighted sections to your note app of choice. Then later you can categorize them (more on that in a second). He says you should have a voice memo on your phone that automatically transcribes your voice memos and ships them to your note app as well. Your camera should automatically upload to notes. Your “read later” app should do that. Highlights on the web. Etc. etc. etc.

My point is, this is a LOT of set up! And for some people (like me) who prefer to have “the perfect system” before getting to work, it’s pretty daunting. To his credit, he offers some tips for “starting small” later, but that’s near the end of the book and starting the book off on this note made it feel like it was overwhelming. I wish he’d had a more focused introduction to the ideas, maybe asking you to focus on one project and focus on one source of knowledge (or type of knowledge) that you wish to collect in relation to that project — just to see if that felt like you were making progress. Compared to this first hurdle, his second one feels relatively minor.

Organize

Once you’ve collected everything you need to organize it. Here he makes one of my favorite observations — knowledge should be organized based on ACTIONABILITY, not based on some kind of arbitrary categorization.

To do this he recommends you organize your content using the PARA method (he mentions that he loves four letter acronyms). PARA stands for:

• Projects
• Areas
• Resources
• Archive

These categories are organized according to descending actionability. So as you file away a piece of information you ask yourself these questions:

1. Is this related to a project I’m currently working on? If no ….
2. Is this related to an ongoing area of my life? (he basically says projects are temporary, like remodeling a kitchen, whereas areas are ongoing, like Fatherhood). If no ….
3. Is this related to a resource — a topic or interest that could be useful in the future? If no ….
4. Just dump it! Why are you trying to remember it??

The “Archive” is just for items that had been part of one of the previous three categories, but is no longer active.

I like this way of organizing notes, honestly. It makes sense, it’s easy, and I like the definitive decision tree — there’s no question of “Will this piece of information be more useful in a project or area?” It just goes in a project first, if not an area, if not a resource. Nice and simple.

Distill

This section is useful but also kind of confounding to me. In it he makes the case that you should try and copy down about 10% of any work that you consume. From that 10%, you should bold 10-20%, then highlight 10-20% of the bolded, then use the highlighted stuff to create a bullet list of main points.

This seems useful, but it also seems kind of … reductive. If you do the math he seems to be making the point that around .25% of what you consume is really worth remembering and referring back to. If we use that math on his 240 page book then he believes … you should remember about half a page of content from his book. That would be considerably less than this blog post about his book, but maybe he has a point. Most people will remember CODE. They’ll remember PARA. That’s about half a page there.

I guess this is my second fundamental disagreement with his philosophy. My first disagreement was that the “collect” phase is too much work to start with — there needs to be a more staged way to roll it out. But that’s more of a critique and less a disagreement.

But I disagree with him here. See, the promise of the book is that you’ll be able to “Find anything you’ve learned, touched, or thought about int he past within seconds.” That would imply that, when you read a book, you’ve learned everything there is to learn from it. All that it could possibly teach you is now summarized within your “Second brain.”

But GOOD books don’t work like that! As I read books I mark them up and I’ve noticed that, if a few years pass between readings, I mark entirely different areas. Different points stand out. I understand certain things better, and maybe other things don’t seem quite so revelatory.

But even if I’m not re-reading the whole book, I find it very useful to go back to a book even when I’m just looking for one quote. Because when I find that one quote (underlined and with a star in the margin) I read around it. I’ll look at the paragraphs before and after and, often, other parts will stand out more to me as I’ve let the author’s point sink in. For example, I was writing a blog post about Elon Musk and remembered a quote from “High Flyers” I wanted to include about strengths actually being weaknesses. The quote I starred says:

“Every strength can be a weakness; blind spots matter eventually; success after success can lead to arrogance; and ‘bad luck’ happens, but often what a person does when things go wrong is the determining factor.”

Which is a fantastic and applicable quote, but when I went to write my blog post I didn’t use it! I read around it and instead paraphrased a story and used a different quote, and wound up making a stronger point.

Now, if I had used Forte’s system I would’ve had my quote, and used it, and wouldn’t have come to a deeper understanding of the subject by rereading the entire context of the quote with a new understanding.

I guess that’s my main disagreement with Forte — and I view it as pretty fundamental. Even if this isn’t his intent, I think his methodology leads people to view creative works as mines with nuggets of wisdom that have to be found and extracted and, once that’s done, the mine itself is exhausted.

The idea of a second brain doesn’t make any sense if the knowledge available to you in a specific work isn’t static. If you CAN get more out of a book on a second read then the “second brain” actually becomes detrimental because implicit in the idea is the promise that you’ll “remember everything.” Why read a book again? Why refer to the book itself? You went through all this work so that you WOULDN’T have to do that.

But I am firmly of the opinion that knowledge available to you in a work changes over time — even if the work stays the same. It’s not that I think the idea of a second brain is bad, I just don’t think it’s the cure-all that Tiago implies.

Express

Oh man, here I am writing a blog post, expressing my understanding of Tiago’s book. Express is a concept I am whole-heartedly behind. I’ll let the man himself explain:

“A common challenge for people who are curious and love to learn is that we can fall into the habit of continuously force-feeding ourselves more and more information, but never actually take the next step and apply it … I’m here to tell you that that is no way to live your life. Information becomes knowledge — personal, embodied, verified — only when you put it to use. You gain confidence in what you know only when you know that it works. Until you do, it’s just a theory.”

Forte goes on to say that you should spend more time creating than consuming! I don’t know if that’s possible with how the “distill” step works, but I think it’s an admirable aim. No notes, this is great.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately Tiago falls into a trap that a lot of self-help books do: thinking their subject is the solution to everything. I honestly think it’s almost unavoidable because you have to be passionate about a subject to write a book, and if you’re passionate you naturally elevate the importance of your subject. So I don’t hold that against him at all. I expect it.

I do wish it was a little more targeted, though. Looking back at the promises above I think there’s one that this book can definitely fulfill:

Organize your knowledge and use it to move your projects and goals forward more consistently.

I think it helps that this is a promise that’s largely devoid of superlatives, but also I think that’s the best use case for his methodology. At one point he brings up a famous choreographer who would fill a box with inspiration for a project they were working on. He talked about the director of “The Godfather” who created a binder with all their inspiration for the movie, filled with notes from multiple readings of the book it’s based on.

I think collecting my information about specific projects and efforts in one place makes a ton of sense and will be very helpful. I’ve picked up a notion subscription and I’ll make folders and workspaces based on the PARA methodology.

But I don’t think this one tool will allow me to “Remember everything, achieve anything.” I don’t think it will allow me to “Find anything you’ve learned, touched, or thought about in the past within seconds.” And I don’t want it to! The act of reviewing notes, glancing through books, rewatching lectures or talks … all of them allows me to pull additional meaning from things that I’ve already consumed in the past.

So I will change some of what I do. I’ll be more deliberate in collecting and organizing my thoughts. I’ll continue to distill and express, as I’ve done for ages with a blog. I think if those things sound useful to you, you should read the book and get some tips. And it can definitely help “organize your knowledge and use it to move your projects and goals forward more consistently” because that’s, you know, a reasonable outcome. But don’t expect to find anything you’ve learned, touched, or thought about within seconds. That’s just … not even something I want. I’ve thought, learned and touched some really stupid things.