The first iPhone came out in 2007 with 4GB of storage.
The most recent model now has 2000GB of storage (a 500x increase).
The first iPhone didn’t have an App Store, no search bar, no videos and no access to mobile data.
Now the iPhone is the gateway to frontier technologies and engrained in every part of communication, entertainment, finance and much much more.
My goal is to elevate my personal capability from a 2007 iPhone to a 2026 iPhone by building a second brain. It’s essentially a way to collect and organise the information you care about across ALL aspects of your life. The brain will work for you surfacing insights, sharpening decisions and making you better at whatever you’re doing through its key abilities below:
- It’s deeply personalised.
A normal AI gives you the internet’s average answer, but the internet is full of unverified information, recycled opinions and content written to sell you something. A second brain answers from your own books, your own lessons, the people you know and the goals you’re working towards. You could say that makes it narrow, but the AI still knows everything it knew before, it simply gives more weight to sources you have verified and trust. The more you put in, the more it knows you, and the more useful every answer becomes. - It doesn’t forget.
40% of what we learn is forgotten in 20 minutes and 66% is forgotten after a day. And useful ideas that we encounter today may not be called into action for months. But not anymore. The brain allows you to internalise 100% of learnings in all facets of your life forever. - It shows you what your biases hide.
We all remember the ideas that agree with us and quietly forget the ones that don’t. A second brain has no such preference. If you curate the context correctly it will show you new perspectives, you would have skipped over. - You have 100% control.
Technology we use for hours a day has hypnotic algorithms that brainwash us into corners of the internet. A second brain works the other way around, nothing enters it unless you actively choose to put it there, and nothing stays that you want gone. In a world where AI can produce an abundance of output in a fraction of the time of a human, the skill of selecting exactly what is worth keeping will be what differentiates us from machines. Ultimately, the second brain is a curation of your own personal taste reflecting what you value.
If you maximise the context provided to your second brain, or lord forbid your second brain falls into the wrong hands, reality can become very dystopian very fast. In tracking a huge amount of information and outsourcing thinking maybe I’ll lose some of my human authenticity or maybe the brain will take care of remembering and organising, freeing me up to be more present, follow my curiosity, be more prolific and focus on the things that create the most meaning.
Either way, I refuse to use a 4GB iPhone forever so I’m upgrading. If you want to upgrade as well, let me know, I would love to help other people build their second brain.
And all this AI and tech is great in all but don’t forget to touch grass, overpay for a decadent pastry, feel the sun and jester with friends.