Something You Should Know - Why Friends Are So Important & The Extraordinary Benefits of Writing Things Down

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

Why do cashiers often ask for your phone number or email address? What if you don’t want to share that information? This episode begins by explaining why they ask and what your response should be. https://www.rd.com/article/this-is-why-stores-ask-for-your-phone-number-at-the-checkout/ Everyone needs at least one friend. That’s according to Lydia Denworth, a science journalist and author of the book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond (https://amzn.to/3N5UebS). Lydia joins me to discuss how important friendship is, how to make friends and how to have better, stronger friendships. Do you have a good system to keep track of all the information you have to deal with? Many of us try to keep track of everything – or most things – in our head. That may not be such a good idea according to Tiago Forte, a leading expert on productivity and author of the book Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential (https://amzn.to/3xuA9WB). Listen as Tiago explains the positive impact of simply writing things down to help you keep track all the things in your life – and it doesn’t require a complicated system in order to get the benefits.  If you’ve ever spent time in an airplane bathroom, you know that the less time you spend in there, the better. But just how gross is it really? And if you have to go in there, what’s the best strategy to minimize germ exposure? Listen as I explain some expert advice. Source: Dr. Charles Gerba author of The Germ Freak’s Guide to Outwitting Colds and Flu (https://amzn.to/3NXx48A). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Helix Sleep is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders AND two free pillows for our listeners at https://helixsleep.com/sysk.  Go to https://Shopify.com/sysk for a FREE fourteen-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features! If you're the type of person who's always thinking about new business ideas or wondering “What’s the next side hustle I should spin up?” — check out the podcast My First Million! Today is made for Thrill! Style, Power, Discovery, Adventure, however you do thrill, Nissan has a vehicle to make it happen at https://nissanusa.com Discover matches all the cash back you’ve earned at the end of your first year! Learn more at https://discover.com/match With Avast One, https://avast.com you can confidently take control of your online world without worrying about viruses, phishing attacks, ransomware, hacking attempts, & other cybercrimes! Download Best Fiends FREE today on the App Store or Google Play! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, why do some stores ask for your phone number or email when you check out? And should you give it to them? Then, the art and science of making and keeping friends. It takes 50 hours of time together before people feel that someone goes from an acquaintance

to being a friend. And it takes a full 200 hours to consider someone a best friend. So if you don't feel that you've become great friends right away, give it time. Also, just how gross are airplane bathrooms? And the importance of writing things down, getting information out of your head and onto a device or piece of paper has extraordinary benefits. There are benefits to your health, to your psychological well-being, to your relationships, that you are more likely to do better at your job, you're more likely to be closer to the

people in your life. It's just the act of writing things down that helps. All this today on Something You Should Know. This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking, Melissa and Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow.

Melissa and Doug, the play is pretend. The skills are real. Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know

with Mike Carruthers. Hey, welcome to Something You Should Know. How many times have you gone through the checkout at a grocery store or a pharmacy or a department store and the cashier asks you for your phone number or maybe your email address. Well, why do they ask that? It's most likely company policy that was put into place to collect information. A company can use your phone number to find your address and then use your address to send special offers or coupons in the mail. They want to do that because the company wants to tailor your shopping experience in hopes of you becoming a return customer.

For some people, it may not seem like a big deal to offer up a phone number, but for other people, it feels like a real intrusion. And if you're not interested in giving out personal information, it is perfectly fine to politely decline. But sometimes the retailers phrase that question that it makes it sound like you have to share the information. And that is never, ever the case. When asked, you can simply say that you prefer not to give out your phone number. No big deal. Another option is to ask why they need it, so you can learn more about the company's policy. You can always decline to join a loyalty reward program or to give out your email address for a digital receipt. These are

all ways retailers gain information about their customers. It's up to you to decide if you want to participate. And that is something you should know. Friendship is such an interesting topic because, well, we all know from personal experience how important friends can be. And there's also a lot of science that says we need friends and relationships in our lives. Yet as important as friends are, it's not always easy to make friends. Friends tend to come and go throughout your lifetime. Some people have a lot of friends and some have hardly any. Lydia Denworth has taken a serious exploration into the world of friendship. Lydia is a science journalist and author of the book Friendship, the Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond.

Hi, Lydia. Hi, Lydia. Hi, Mike. Good to be here. So everyone knows what a friend is, but how do you define it? What exactly is friendship? Well, that's one of the interesting things that this new science of friendship has done is it has provided a little bit clearer definition. And so the kind of three essential things that friendship has to have, and that is that it's a long-lasting, sort of stable relationship. It's positive. It makes people feel good. And it's cooperative and reciprocal. So there's some back and forth.

And we hear that having friends is good for us. How is it good for us? People with more friends live longer, are healthier, are happier. And in other species, the animals best able to make strong positive bonds, like among baboons and macaques, they live longer and they have more and healthier babies. And you can't do better than that in evolutionary terms. So this is what has led us to believe that the kind of cooperative, positive aspects of friendship have been something that have really been an evolutionary advantage and something that, yes, caused the people who were sociable to live longer and then

to pass more genes on to their offspring. So we all meet lots of people. Some of them become friends. Most of them don't. What's going on there? Why is it that most people that we encounter come and go and that's the end of that, but some people stick? There are a couple things that work there. I think there's a chemistry to friendship, just like there is with romance. You know how there are some people you meet and right away you think, oh, you know, we could be friends. I like this person. But then it takes time. So you have to put in the time. There are some things that have always been helpful. I mean, there's similarity often helps people become friends. So, you know, it's not for nothing that I have a lot of middle-aged female friends who have college-aged kids and creative jobs.

We have a lot to talk about, right? But those are not the only kinds of friends I have. And ideally, people will also make friends with people who are not exactly like they are. But it's been true for thousands of years that similarity helps. And proximity makes a big difference. So we do tend to be friends with the people who are nearby and with whom we spend time. And I referred to time, but, you know, you can spend hundreds of hours with someone at work and never really become a friend.

So that is just a piece of it. You have to in that time you spend together, you've got to start to share some emotional experiences, shared interests often come into it, things like that. You had mentioned, and I think most people have heard, that people who have friends tend to live longer, they have better health, they're probably more successful. But do we know why? What's the connection between friendship and health? It turns out that friendship on the one hand and loneliness, the flip side of it, on the other, have a real impact on all kinds of parts of your health. So it gets under the skin is the way biologists talk about it.

For instance, I mean, both things affect your stress levels and your stress responses. And as I'm sure you've heard, if you have sort of chronic unrelieved stress and cortisol is racing through your body all the time, that is going to have downstream bad effects for your health. But more intriguingly, and probably something you haven't heard, is that having more and better friends improves the way your immune system reacts and the gene expression in your immune system. It makes you more resilient in the face of inflammation and viruses. And people who are lonely are more susceptible to inflammation and viruses. And friendship also affects our cognitive health, your risk of dementia, your mental health, your chance of being depressed or

not, and even the rate at which your cells age. Wow. Yeah. I'm not messing around here. Yeah, it's worth having a friend or two. It is. But what about the people who are self-described as loners? In other words, they don't have a lot of friends. They maybe never get married. They live a fairly isolated life because that's their preference. So are they doomed to have poorer health and less longevity? Or are they just fine because that's the way they like it? There's no one way to do friendship, first of all. So I am not at all saying that everyone needs to have lots and lots of friends and be the life of the party. In fact, the the number of friends you have is between zero and one. You need one good friend. You're right. There are introverts out there or people who are loners. Most introverts do have those handful of close friends, even if it's just one or two.

And then there are some people who claim, you know, I like it this way, I like it this way. I believe some of them do. I think most of them actually may be lonelier than they're willing to admit, because there's a little bit of a stigma to saying that you're lonely. And it's also requires making yourself vulnerable to put yourself out there and make friends. And that can be hard for people to do. So I think there might be a little of that going on too. It's my observation, and I don't know if it's true or not, but my observation is that women do friendship better than men. Well, many people agree with you and think that. But what I find interesting, there's a couple of parts of this that I think are interesting. So the stereotype is that women do friendship face to face and men side by side, by which I mean that women talk,

talk, talk, and disclose a lot to each other, share a lot of emotional information. And that's true. And men are more likely to play sports together or do sports, watch sports or sit on bar stools next to each other is what the side by side bit means, go hunting together. And, you know, there's truth to that. But what I find more interesting is that the more recent research that's looked at sort of meta analysis of all the studies that have been done on gender differences and friendship, find that the similarities far outweigh the differences, and that both men and women value friendship quite a bit, and that they care about it, and that they put it in their lives, they respond sort of similarly. And the last thing I'd say about that is that, interestingly, if you look at the history

of friendship, thousands of years, over thousands of years, there was a very long stretch of time where men thought they were the ones who did friendship well, and that women didn't have the capacity for it. And so those were not good times in terms of misogyny and things like that. But I do think what's interesting is that the pendulum has swung. And the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. And there's no biological reason why men are not good at friendship. It may just be a cultural thing that stops them from feeling comfortable revealing their emotions. But they don't have to to be friends. It seems that some people are very good at making friends.

It comes easily to them where other people can't seem to figure it out. What's going on there? Making friends and maintaining being a good friend, it is a skill. And it's a skill that hopefully we learn when you're young. And that but that we keep perfecting. Some of us are better at it than others. Some of us are more naturally sociable. It a little bit has to do with your sense of social threat and of social anxiety. And unfortunately, one thing that happens is that loneliness acts rather like a physiological warning signal. It's like hunger and thirst. It's telling your body that

you need to connect. But sometimes what happens is the response is almost a feeling in your brain of being threatened. And then if that becomes really severe, the first thing that can go is your social skills so that the people who need most to connect are the least able to do it. And this is true, by the way, if of even people who are normally socially skilled, if you put them in a lab in a university study, and induce loneliness in them, their social skills will become poorer. And it is possible, by the way, to do that to, to make people feel lonely. And so what that's telling us, you know, I hope that's not too disheartening for people. I think what's useful is to recognize that there's this pattern and to say, oh, you know, so maybe if that is a listener out there feeling that that's

them, to recognize that this might be what's happening and to sort of take a breath and a step back and try to analyze, you know, think a little more about how their behavior might be affecting how people respond to them. Well, it's always interested me that, you know, friends are so important and yet there's no like direct way to get one. You know, the worst way to get a friend is to go up to somebody and say, hey, will you be my friend? Because that's not the way you do it. It's much more of a slow evolution of, you know, you start as strangers, you become acquaintances, and then it evolves into friendship and then you're friends. Well, yes and no. So I actually have come to believe that there are some, there are some basics to being a good friend that have to do with the definition of friendship that we talked about at the beginning. So if a friend is somebody who is a long lasting, really, it's a long lasting relationship, a positive one and a cooperative one, what that translates to in terms of how people can be good friends is to be reliable, to be positive,

and to be helpful. And so often, we maybe do some pieces of that, but not all of it. You know, you can think about when was the last time I did something to make my friend feel good? Did I say something nice? Also, just listening goes an awfully long way. And very, a lot of us are not all that good at that. We spend a lot of the time that we're listening, just waiting until it's our turn to talk again, you know, and making sure that you are holding up your end of a relationship. And so there are a lot of friendships out there that get a little bit lopsided, where one person is doing all the hosting or all the calling. And sometimes that's a sign that the other person's not so interested. But sometimes

it's just that people are a bit oblivious and self centered. And so be helpful, be positive, and be a reliable, steady presence in people's lives. Try that and show up to that's my other major, major thing about showing up. And that can mean just saying happy birthday. It can mean showing up at an event. It can mean a whole lot of things. Show up in every sense of the word. Yeah. We're talking about friendship and the importance of friends in your life. My guest is Lydia Denworth. She's author of the book Friendship, the Evolution, Biology and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy

the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine and snacks and free fast streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit FlyPorter.com and actually enjoy economy. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe.

So, Lydia, doesn't it seem that friendship comes a lot easier when you're a child than when you're an adult? When you're a kid, you're at school, you're surrounded by a bunch of other kids, you kind of need to forge relationships, and so friends become friends. When you're an adult, it just seems harder. A couple of things are happening there. One is, or there are a couple of interesting things, I think, about how we look at this across the lifespan. So children and college-age students as well, I mean, you are never in your life going to be surrounded by as many people the same age as you with whom you have a lot of time together to sort of build bonds. And that really helps people to become friends. And friendship is a critical part of development for young children and adolescents. And the adolescent brain is just primed to be social. That's why they're so obsessed with being with their friends all the time.

And one thing I think parents could do differently is, is to recognize, though, that friendship is a skill. And it's something that kids can get better at. And they don't just automatically come into the world knowing how to do it. And, you know, we often are delivering messages about achievement to kids, but never really explicitly or rarely talking about what it is to be a good friend, how to think about that. I mean, maybe we insert or we try sometimes to insert ourselves in their social lives, and they don't like it very much. And so I'm not really talking about that. I'm just saying that having that conversation about what it means to

be a good friend would be doing your children a very good service because as we established with the health, if you are someone who can have good friends through your life, you will live longer and be healthier and happier because of it. But what happens in adulthood is that, you know, we get busier, we have less time. And I think that we often expect it to be as as to feel as effortless as it felt when we were kids. And of course, it's not as you say, you do have to put in the effort. But and you have to be motivated and you have to be willing to make yourself vulnerable. If let's say you move to a new city, and you're trying to meet people, you've got to get out there. And a lot of adults find that hard to do. But it's important. And I

hope that understanding that it takes time to actually somebody counted. It takes 50 hours of time together before people feel that someone goes from an acquaintance to being a friend. And it takes a full 200 hours to consider someone a best friend. So I hope that's not daunting. Instead, it's just a clear-eyed sense of, you know, if you don't feel that you've become great friends right away, give it time. Well, but it also seems that once you're an adult, it's harder to make friends because the people you try to make friends with, well, they've already got their friends. So to break into that circle is a lot harder than when you're a kid and we're all kind of at the same level and it's kind of a level playing field.

This is true. And if people are finding that, they'll have to look elsewhere, I guess, is part of what happens. But there are, I guarantee, because I hear from many of them, there are adults all over the country and the world looking to make friends. And so if the people you come across have a tight little group and don't have time or space for new people, then go looking elsewhere. Go, you know, if you are into hiking, for instance, go join a hiking club. If you, I did an interview with some people in Las Vegas, and apparently Las Vegas is famously unfriendly. I don't know if you knew that, but I didn't know that. But there they have a vibrant craft bar scene and they have friendship groups that have sprung up around craft beer.

And so, you know, there's something for everyone out there. And you're more likely to make friends with people when you're sort of naturally doing something together that has brought everyone there and not just as you said sort of saying oh here let's make friends that's a hard way to do it so people have friends and then people often have a best friend and so how does how does a person move from the group of friends to the the the top spot the best friend spot well they are usually the person that you've put in a lot of time with, but also the person that you really trust and feel knows you and is there for you. And I think of it as it's not just me. Psychologists have used this, this sort of framework to talk about friendship for a long time. You can think of concentric circles. And we all have, if you put yourself at the center, the tightest circle around you, your inner circle of people you rely on the most, sometimes people describe it as the people you can't imagine life without. Most of us have only about an average of four people in that circle. And they're divided and they're split among family

and friends. How much depends on the person. So somebody with a whole lot of siblings that they're very close to and, you know, might have all family in there and someone who has very little family will have all friends. Next one is 10 to 15 people that are the first people you would invite to your birthday party. And it goes out from there with extended family and colleagues and neighbors. And really, when we think about how we prioritize our time, we put most time into the people in that closest inner circle because those are the people we're really going to have to turn to in a crisis or when we need them. And friendship and strong bonds like this really are about sort of protecting us from the stresses of day-to-day life. They were, from an evolutionary perspective, about helping to ward off predators or help people find food, things like that, you know, very fundamental things. And so while there aren't lions in most of our day-to-day lives anymore, literally there are plenty of figurative lions out there. And so while there aren't lions in most of our day-to-day lives anymore, literally, there are plenty of figurative lions out there. And that's what those people are for. Usually, you're going to turn to the people in that inner circle. And then the other ones go

out. So your best friend should be right there in that tight inner circle with you, someone that you feel you can count on. Friends have a tendency to come and go. And I know it stresses people out when they've had a friend that all of a sudden isn't around much anymore, or doesn't seem very available anymore. But it also seems pretty natural too, that people come in and out of our lives. You are exactly right about that. And this is something that I talk about a lot, and I get asked about a lot, because it is very painful when friendships end. And or when it feels, especially if it's in an unreciprocated way, where, you know, one is pulling away. But it is quite natural that

in those circles that we have, we can think of it as a social convoy that travels with you through life, but its makeup does change over time. So while it is important that your close bonds are people that you have sort of a longstanding tie with, there can be some shifting in there. So, you know, somebody new comes in, but then you get to know them really well over the course of a decade or something like that. Or it doesn't have to be a decade. I said 200 hours. You can do that in a much shorter period of time.

But I do think that people need to ask themselves whether the people that are close to them are serving them, are making them feel good, are helpful helpful and there when they need them and are reliable. And if they're not, if they're just one piece of that, like maybe somebody with whom you have a lot of shared history, but that you find draining or demanding. I hear those words come up a lot. Maybe that relationship, at least that person maybe doesn't belong in your innermost circle. Do spouses count as friends or is that just a whole different category? It depends who you ask. It also probably depends who you marry. It depends who you marry. But there was a study in Jacksonville, Florida. They asked a whole thousands of people if they consider their spouse their best friend,

and about 60% said yes, they did. And then they did the same study in Mexico City, and almost no one said yes, they did. And I don't think that that is a statement on the state of marriage in Mexico. I hope not. I think what it is about is culturally whether we use that phrase to describe our spouse. What I say and what I think the science of friendship shows is that it's the quality of a relationship that matters more than anything. And that distinction then blurs the lines actually between family, friends and romantic partners and spouses. And so for me, if we say, if someone is telling me that their spouse is their best friend, I understand that as a value added piece of information, because now they're telling me something about the quality, about the texture

of their relationship. And you would like to think that most of us have that. And certainly in the West, that's something we aspire to in Western cultures. We imagine it that way. But it is, alas, not always true. And otherwise, the divorce rate would not be as high as someone tells me that her sister is her best friend, then I know that that means that they talk all the time, that they're very close, that they are very involved in each other's lives. And other siblings are not that way. And that's okay. What matters is that you've got somebody. Well, it's so interesting that friendship is so important for humans. And for some people, it comes very easy. And for some people, it's so interesting that friendship is so important for humans. And for some people it comes very easy, and for some people it doesn't. And it's interesting to get real insight into the whole topic.

Lydia Denworth has been my guest. She is a science journalist, contributing editor at Scientific American, and author of the book, Friendship, the Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life's Fundamental Bond. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Lydia. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly.

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Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Most of us have a lot of things to keep track of. We have jobs to do, errands, meetings, phone calls to return, and some people try to keep track of all of that in their head. Most of us likely write down at least some of the things we need to do. And I know a lot of people think that they don't have a very good system, wish they had a better system. After all, we live in the information age, and keeping track of all that information can be difficult.

So what is the best solution? Is there one good way to keep track of all that information can be difficult. So what is the best solution? Is there one good way to keep track of things? If you've ever struggled to remember something you were sure you would remember, but now you can't, you're going to want to listen to my guest, Tiago Forte. He is one of the world's foremost authorities on productivity, and he's author of the book Building a Second Brain, a proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. Hey, Tiago, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks, Michael. Really happy to be here. So from talking to people, do you sense that people are pretty good,

that they feel pretty good about the systems they have, that the way they keep track of things, that they've kind of got it all together or they feel out of control? You know, actually, funny you say that. I think most people actually are doing better than they think. They tend to feel, there's this feeling of overwhelm, of stress, of anxiety, indecision, FOMO, all these things. And often people come to me thinking there must be some perfect, you know, solution to this. And often what I, what I tend to point them to is how these little informal behaviors,

you know, even something like emailing something to yourself, writing, you know, a line down on a notepad, These kind of little reminders that we set for ourselves are quite helpful, quite effective. But I think there is this kind of pervasive feeling of discontent in people's relationship to information. Something I learned a long time ago, and I know you talk about this too, is the power of writing something down. That just writing it down, even if you never look at it again, helps you remember it. Somehow there's a magic to it. And writing things down does more than I think people think it does. It does. I was actually surprised myself when I really got into the research where the simple act of writing things down, your thoughts, your feelings, your worries, your plans for the future, things you're trying to figure out, problems you're trying to solve.

You know, we're externalizing what's happening inside to the outside when we write things down. There are benefits to your health, to your psychological well-being, to your relationships, to your, there's been results that you are more likely to do better at your job. You're more likely to stay in school. You're more likely to be closer to the people in your life. And the most shocking thing is those benefits happen whether you ever share it or not. It's just the act of writing things down that helps. What's wrong with just trying to keep things in your head? Because I suspect a lot of people do that. We all do it to some extent, but some people write some things down. But we've all got things in our head. What's wrong with using the keep it in your head system? Largely, there's nothing wrong with

it in most areas of life, right? That's, I mean, that's just, that's what we do as humans. Like you said, that's kind of our, our default, you know, solution to keeping track of information. What I would say is for some people at some point in their life, they run up against a situation where that is not enough. And it tends to happen when they're starting something, they're starting a business or they're getting a new job, or maybe they're getting promoted to a new role that has higher demands, or they're trying to learn a new hobby or start a side gig or create a product. Like there's something new, right? There's

something new that's happening that makes them realize, oh, wait a minute. What got me here is not going to get me to the next place. My go-to solution of keeping things in mind is simply not enough. And you just look at the symptoms. It's the ones we were talking about. You know, this is happening when you can't sleep at night, when it starts to affect your ability to focus and be present, when things start falling through the cracks, things you said you were going to do, you were going to act on just don't happen, when people can't rely on you. There's a clear set of symptoms that happen when you're simply facing a challenge in life

that is not up to the task of memorizing stuff. So taking the assumption that it is better to write it down than try to keep it in your head as true, then how do you write it down? What's the best system to do it? So a few things. First, you can do it on paper or you can do it digitally, right? That's kind of a simple choice. I think there's benefits to both and or you can do it digitally right that's that's kind of a simple choice um i think there's benefits to both and actually you can do both my my advice tends to be if the things you're writing down have any have any kind of utility they have any practical purpose it's much better to do it in a piece of software because then you get all the benefits that we were discussing of writing things down all the benefits of externalizing your thoughts and ideas.

But then there's this whole other realm of benefits that technology provides. The ability to search, the ability to organize that information, the ability to edit it and annotate it, the ability to sync it between devices. So something you wrote down on your phone, you can access on your computer. The ability to share it, right? All of these things are much more difficult, if not impossible, when your ideas are limited only to physical paper. One of the problems I think people have is when you try to start writing things down, you have a lot of things written down. How do you not drown in all these notes you've taken and all these thoughts you've had,

whether it's digital or on paper? How do you separate what's worth holding onto and what's not? It's a real challenge. This challenge is basically why I started doing this work. It's why I started my company. Was at the time, there was this software program called Evernote,

which is the one that I used that was really taking off around the launch of the first iPhone. And it made it super easy to capture. And that's the term I use to capture information. You could clip websites, you could save images, you could write down text, links, bookmarks, all these things. But then very soon, me and many others ran right up against what you just described. Oh, wow, I've saved, you know, 500 pieces of content. What do I do with this next? But there is a step-by-step process to organize, make sense, distill, and ultimately use that information you've captured to create the outcomes and to achieve the goals you want in life.

So run me through that as briefly as you can, just to get a sense of what that is like. Yeah. You know, the system is really a methodology. It's four steps, which are the letters of code, C-O-D-E, which by the way, are not specific to any piece of software. It's completely agnostic. It's not even specific to software in general, actually. You could do the same with paper. And the four steps are simply, you have to capture. You have to capture the information in a place outside your head to be able to do anything with it. Second, you need to organize it. And to answer your previous question, the most powerful way that I've found of organizing it is by project, is to identify what are the specific projects you're working on,

the specific things you're trying to make happen in life. And then to break down your notes into those, into those groups. So give me an example of, of what you mean by projects. Let's let's look at what people tend to do. Otherwise they tend to organize by topic and subtopic, right? So let's say you find an interesting article on the internet about, you know, how to become more resilient in your day-to-day life. Most people would save that if they save it at all and put it in a folder or a notebook called something like psychology, right? Oh, as if it's a library, let me just put this in the psychology category. Here's the problem with that. Psychology is way, way too broad of a subject to be useful

in the future when you come back around to retrieve and use this information, right? Imagine in your day-to-day work, how much free time do you have on a day-to-day level? Not much, right? And so you're not going to have time when you have, you know, 15 minutes between meetings to go back and search through dozens or maybe hundreds of notes on the subject of psychology. So what I would say is, what are you trying to accomplish in your life or in your work or in your business that this note on how to become more resilient will be useful, right? Maybe there's a talk, a speech that you're giving in front of a large group.

Maybe there's a medical problem that you're trying to overcome that requires resilience. Put it in a place where the next time you're trying to resolve that problem or that situation, that's the very first place you're gonna look. That's an example of a project which is kind of very broadly defined as anything that you're trying to accomplish in life. Well, what do you do, though? I save a lot of things that are

just interesting. They don't go anywhere. They're not part of a project. They're just kind of, oh, that might be interesting. I'll look at that later. Of course, I never do. But it's just something that catches your eye. I wouldn't know where to put it. Yeah, I mean, it's a fantastic point. A couple of things I would say. First is often you can just, it's helpful to just make your best guess at where you might use it, right?

You may not know. You may truly have no idea, but even kind of doing like a guess, like a hypothesis, possibly this is going to be useful in this area of my life can be useful because then you're just slightly more likely to come back and revisit that thing versus what I think is the case for most people, which is they never come back to it. And by the way, you can also do this for future projects right you can have folders for each of your current projects but maybe someday far in the future you can imagine something that you might want to use this for you can create a folder right when it comes to software there's no limit in how many categories you can create there's no limit in

how much information can be saved so you could start gathering material for a project that's not going to happen for 5 10 15 years and when you get to that future time, it'll be ready and waiting for you. Okay, so we've got through the first two, the C and the O, capture and organize. And then what? Then we sort of have to turn the corner and stop gathering things from the outside world and from our thoughts and start using it. And so to do that, I advise people to distill. That's the D, which simply means to highlight, to summarize, to identify. In all this information I've captured, and there could be a lot of it, how do I distill the main points? What are the main points, takeaways, conclusions, arguments that this piece of content is making?

And to highlight those in yellow, just like you would, you know, in school, in your textbook or in your notebook. And this is something that many modern note-taking apps support. And then finally, the reason you do that, the reason distillation is important, is once things are made kind of small and easy to digest, you're perfectly prepared to express. And when I say express, I mean to communicate something, your voice, your story, your message, your expertise or knowledge to someone or something that matters to you. It could be your spouse or it could be your team or it could be your company or the world, right? Everyone has to kind of choose their own level of self-expression. But one thing I do know is communicating a message is so much more powerful when you have

supporting material, right? When you have evidence, you have research, you have stories and anecdotes. It's really difficult to create a powerful anything when you don't have anything to back it up. And so to me, the ultimate purpose of note-taking and knowledge management is self-expression. So can you take an example and run it through those four steps, the C-O-D-E, just a real life example to show that it works? Sure. Yeah, that's a good idea. I just heard from a woman who had a great example of this. You know, she works, she has a daughter and she has a dog. So very full life. Oh, and a husband also. Very full life, a lot of things going on. But she told me this story via email where she said,

you know, the school was coming out with a whole new set of COVID policies that they needed to make sense of. It was, I think, two or three pages of different regulations and rules and exceptions to those rules. And so she said she took it through code. She captured it. So she pulled out and captured just the parts that were most kind of important or relevant into a separate document. She organized them. She kind of just moved them around on the page into different sections, like what we need to do, what we need to know, what we need to, you know, be aware of in case of an outbreak. And then, you know, you could stop there. That's kind of for her own purposes. But then the part that I love is how she took that further. She distilled those notes, that document by bolding and highlighting it was like a half page summary of the new COVID policy. She shared it with the parent group from her school. And she said the reactions were just

amazing. You know, something so simple as that, the, the, the other parents were like, wow, I, you know, I've been procrastinating on reading through this for days. Thank you so much. Another parent was amazed. How did you do this? How were you able to, you know, to put together such a succinct summary? So that, you know, that's kind of a mundane example, but I think it shows how even something as simple as, you know, an email you receive from your kid's school can be an opportunity for using code. And so where do you think the line is? Because if I got that two-page document, I probably wouldn't think to do that because it seems like that's something I should just keep in my head or just keep the two-page document. I don't need to highlight and go through. So where's the line, do you think, between this needs to be put through the system or this just needs to stay in the back

of your head? Yeah, I think it really depends. I mean, most things should not be put through so many steps, right? Please. I mean, I sometimes see people kind of overdo this and think, you know, every single email and text messages and tweet that I get, I have to systematically process in this way that really couldn't be further from the case most things uh that need to be written down you can just keep that place where you you know wrote it down in some notebook or some journal or some desk drawer it's a relatively small percentage of the content that you consume that deserves any further treatment.

And I would say it's the information you're going to use. You know, the information you're going to use in your writing, the information you're going to use in your business, the information that actually needs to go out and have an impact. So I want to get you to comment on something because my sense when I hear people talk about writing things down and analyzing it and putting it through the system, that there's a certain type of person that this is good for. And I'm not one of them because I feel like I'm not that organized. I think of people like you as being very organized. You've got everything in its place.

And I'm not quite that organized that I would do this. But that just may be my perception. So I'd like to get your thoughts. You know, I think in the past, that was the case. That was exactly the case because it really wasn't easy. You know, it really took a lot of effort saying that in the pre-digital world to, I don't know, buy a filing system and have one of those label makers and, you know, hanging file folders and all this stuff. It just took a tremendous amount

of effort because the physical world is just full of friction. But this is where I think the digital world is starting to change things. You know, something like digital note-taking. In the past, you know, it was probably a very, very rare activity. But these days, look at, you know, look at your phone. Most people I ask to take out their phone and open up their notes app have notes. They have something in Apple Notes or the Android equivalent, or they have Evernote or Notion or Microsoft OneNote or Google Keep, you know, we now are surrounded by these essentially digital notes apps.

And so if you're putting in the effort at all to write anything down in these apps, right, which I think many people are these days, then all I'm saying is some of that information, a small percentage can be further refined and built up and turned into something new. And I'd say people who don't naturally organize or aren't naturally organized and don't enjoy it, which I think is perfectly fine, I would really recommend looking at the informality of it. It really does not have to be this formal rules-based system. It is just these casual, jot down a note in Apple Notes, stick it in a folder for a project you're working on, right? Write down some copy and paste some text from an email into a notes app, bold, and maybe

highlight some of the key points. It's these little behaviors that really make the difference, not necessarily having to have this completely comprehensive, whole, you know, all encompassing system that is, is what I, you know, advise people to do. See, that's, that's a really good answer to that question because I have notes in my notes app on my phone and I don't go there very often. I don't use it very often and I don't get rid of the things I write down. Typically they're just sitting there, but there they are if I ever need them. And so you're right. I do use those apps, even though I don't have to go around and get people to download a new piece of software, right. Or to adopt this whole other behavior in their already busy lives, which I'm just not interested in doing. I'm really just interested in what are people actually doing

already now today? And then what are these little tweaks, these little strategic changes that may lead up to something that you could call a system, but that don't have to, that are inherently beneficial, that help you right there in the moment with things that you're already doing and already pursuing. So when you write things down, now you've put them in a place and they're more likely to play a role in your life somewhere down the road. But what is the, which is a benefit, but what is the benefit to your brain now that you've unloaded that out of your brain and basically cleared some brain space? You feel more peace of mind. It's easier to sleep at night.

It's easier to be present and focused in conversation because they're not trying to, you know, mentally juggle the things they're trying to keep track of. They feel more confident that what they're working on at any given time is the right thing to be working on. I mean, now let's look at the external benefits, the quality of your work. This is one of the clearest benefits. You know, so much of the advice out there is to do better work, right? How many gurus and experts tell us you need to, you know, do work that's so good they can't ignore you. Do work that's so good that, you know, it enhances your reputation. Well, how do you do that?

I always wondered, how do you just try harder? And it's not about trying harder. It's about having better source material. It's about drawing on more interesting examples and analogies and metaphors and looking at what other people have done and borrowing what's worked for them. It's doing better research. It's reading more deeply and more widely. I think this is a seriously underappreciated aspect of doing better work in general is just doing better research. Yeah. And I guess the trick is to really figure out what system,

big or small, is going to work for you to capture this information so you can have it for later. Tiago Forte has been my guest. The name of his book is Building a Second Brain, a proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Tiago. Thanks for sharing this. Thank you so much. I just recently took a cross-country airplane trip. First one in quite a while, actually.

And as most people do on long airplane trips, I use the airplane bathroom. And you've probably heard that airplane bathrooms are a bit germy. And according to Dr. Charles Gerba, who's also known as Dr. Germ, airplane bathrooms are actually the germiest of all public bathrooms. That's because there's usually only one toilet for about every 50 people, and it's really hard to wash your hands in that tiny little bathroom. But wait, it gets even worse. You know that when you flush the toilet in the airplane bathroom, that kind of volcanic flush? Well, it spews particles into the air that coats the floor, the walls, and you and anything else in that tiny little space. If you do have to use the airplane bathroom, you should use paper toilet covers.

Then, armed with a paper towel, close the lid before you flush. Wash your hands as thoroughly as you can and then use another paper towel on the doorknob to get out. And that is something you should know. Hey, we really need your help to spread the word about this podcast. The best way to do it is to just tell someone you know to give this show a listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10

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