Overview
Growing up, The Legend of Zelda was my favorite video game. If you’ve played any of the Zelda games, you probably know about the Triforce of Wisdom. Rescuing it is the goal of most of the games.
If there really was a Triforce of Wisdom, what would it be like? I think it would be made up of three things: your physical brain, your notes, and your AI brain.
When you augment your physical brain with your notes and AI, you can 10x your productivity. In this article, we’ll look at where each of these three brains should be leveraged best. Make sure to use the box below to download a three-brains cheatsheet and AI prompting guide!
Your Physical Brain
Your physical brain is your core thinking engine, best used for judgment and creativity. Everything about you – your education, mistakes, learnings, and experience – makes you unique and valuable.
Having solid foundational knowledge about your field – whatever field you’re in – is crucial. Key processes, people, and facts – they all help guide you. For anything you need to know at a moment’s notice, it’s worth using your physical brain. Think about doctors and emergency response teams – every second matters.
But as powerful as our physical brains are, they aren’t designed for storing everything or processing huge amounts of data all at once. They act more like the CPU and RAM in a computer. They were designed for processing and critical thinking, but with smaller loads of information.
Some people don’t think they’re cut out for critical thinking. If that’s you, here’s some good news – it’s a muscle you can build! [Reference research/article]
Your Notes
Writing things down is such an undervalued skill. You shouldn’t write everything down (like an entire college class lecture), but you should write down quite a bit – to help you capture, trigger, remember, and organize. Thousands of thoughts enter our brains every day, but most of them vanish into the ether. Make sure to write down the most valuable ones.
It’s not just enough to write them down though – make sure to review and reflect on them. Why else do so many people like to journal and keep a diary? It’s often like a conversation with yourself as you’re going through different phases of life.
Another great way to leverage notes is making cheatsheets and checklists. For in-depth facts that are a little tougher to remember, notes work great. While your physical brain is like RAM, think of your notes like your hard drive – able to quickly access information, even when you’re offline.
I do a lot of trainings and presentations, and I can’t just stop to look something up. In my notes, I keep my outline, references, and trigger words so I’ll remember the key points to make. Outlines and cheatsheets – not full narratives – are invaluable to augment our brains on the fly.
Your AI Brain
Leveraging AI is an amplification engine. If your human brain is like a local computer CPU, think of AI as your CPU in the cloud – with all the resources of the internet available to query. It’s lightning fast, extremely scalable, and can help you interpret complex concepts.
AI works well for so many use cases – research, summarization, analysis, finding bespoke details, creating content, coding, and wide-scale automation, just to name a few. It’s giving us the ability to multiply our output in much less time. Effective prompting is one of the best skills you can build in order to get the most out of AI tools.
Some other great ways to leverage AI are coaching, rehearsing, and challenging your thinking – this is where most people miss out, because they’re just using it as a glorified search engine. I’ve used AI to prepare for job interviews and refine my talking points. You can also teach AI to think like you do – going through a similar logic process and communication style.
But AI is not a magic bullet. It can’t do everything, and in some cases it can do more harm than good. We’re already starting to see “brain rot” – where people are delegating too much to AI and losing the valuable skills that help them use it best. Or worse yet, they’re missing out on the opportunity to LEARN new and valuable skills. When AI tells you how it reasoned – and if it doesn’t, make sure to ask – pay attention! There’s probably something worth writing in your Notes Brain!
And lastly, just like AI is best for augmenting your brain, it’s also best for augmenting purpose-built software. Legacy software applications are built to efficiently perform specific commands. AI is best for helping to scope, build, test, and augment those commands, not replace them. Replacing good software with AI usually means wasting exponentially more computing power and opening up more risks of hallucinations.
Summary
To conquer the Zelda games, you have to problem solve and use a variety of resources. That’s probably why they were so appealing to me. Before the internet and AI were widespread, we could only really use our physical brains and our notes – the triforce was incomplete. Now with AI powering our third brain, we can do more than ever.
Even in a world more and more driven by AI, there’s so much value in using your brain and your notes effectively. Use the tips above to get the most out of each to help you get your work done efficiently and continuously learn. Otherwise, how else is AI supposed learn how to do things right?
What approaches have you found useful as you leverage your three brains? Let us know in the comments below!
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