Create a 2nd brain!

When coaching individuals and teams preparing for grant interviews a key tool I use is the development of an expected questions library. Avenues of questioning can always be predicted from the assessment criteria so it’s important that interviewees are succinct and compelling in their answers to these. This is useful because it not only enables you to come across as a more convincing interviewee but also removes cognitive load, freeing up energy to save for unexpected, or atypical questions later on.

There is another point in time where some sort of library, or repository can be useful, and that’s when developing the proposal idea in the first place. Grant ideas take time to fully develop, I think of it as marinating, setting our conscious and subconscious mind to exploring what we could do and allowing all our prior experience, ideas and serendipitous noticing of relevant input to contribute to a stronger proposal. If we sit down and expect to come up with the ultimate idea in a few hours we simply don’t produce as strong a proposal. We might have a flash of inspiration, which constitutes the driving force of the proposal, but those ideas still tend to need a little honing to ensure they come across as convincingly as possible and are part of a well thought through and enunciated plan.

So when does this second type of library contribute? It is at the planning & pre/early writing stage, but in order to have a library to draw on, it must have been developed over the preceding months, and possibly even years. This library should consist of all the ideas that pop into your head during the day, I bet you have all sorts of random thoughts about possible research avenues, or approaches, or new methods, or experiments, or wouldn’t it be it be great if… moments. Start capturing those, because I also bet you have so much other stuff going on flashes of inspiration like that disappear as soon as the next thought comes along! Taylor Swift, the singer/song writer, (regardless of what you think of her music, or even if you’ve heard of her!) is famous for being incredibly prolific. One of the habits she credits with enabling her to produce so many songs, and songs which, by sales metrics, are extremely well received, is the habit of keeping a 2^nd brain. In her case the notes app on her phone is her 2^nd brain. Every time an idea for a song, or a random lyric pops into her head she quickly jots it down in her notes app, no editing, no filtering, just writes it down and then carries on with her day. Then when she’s working on a song, or an album i.e. focused on producing something, she can either skim read back through recent notes for inspiration, or search them for a particular lyric, she might recall only part of, or search by certain words.

Taylor Swift isn’t the inventor of this technique of course, in modern times Richard Branson and Bill Gates are also famous for it, and for them aper notebooks are preferred, not digital apps, as it was of course for Marie Curie, Ernest Hemingway and Leonardo Da Vinci!

This week why not start the practice of creating a 2^nd brain, set up a notes app on your phone, preferably a cloud based app (try the app Notion, or a document within Dropbox, or a Google doc) so you can access exactly the same repository from whatever device happens to be closest to you. Or, if you’re more creative when using physical paper (and most of us are!) why not invest in a small physical notebook and carry it everywhere. Into that note system simply dump all the various research related ideas that come to you whenever they do and you’ll soon build a repository which will make your next grant application stronger and/or spark new ideas that might not otherwise have come to you!