Ever since I began using a second brain to store all my notes in a centralized location, my intention was to always keep it private. Many of my notes are messy, and written in a way where only I would understand the context. However, when I began reading [[The Notebook]] by [[Roland Allen]], I was inspired to adjust course. This quote in the book particularly stood out: > Stackhouse was no poet, no artist, and his literary tastes were unsophisticated. But he wrote for himself, not posterity, and he valued the notebook enough to fill more than three hundred pages, and to invite friends and family to make their notes in it too. His observations might be of consequence to no-one but himself, but isn’t it a happy thought that such documents can survive for centuries, intimate memorials to their owners’ preoccupations – unremarkable, hardly read, yet every one unique? I'd love for my digital notes to have a life of their own. Yes, they are messy, personal, and written for myself. But if I'm going to spend my entire life capturing ideas and learning about cool stuff, doesn't it make sense for these notes to be **shared**? Even if none of my notes aren't useful to anybody but myself, something just *feels right* having them available for others to stumble upon, even if it's after I'm gone. With that being said, I'm setting some ground rules and requirements for this. 1. The public second brain must have a clean look, with simple formatting, and minimal distractions 2. I will always have a way to mark certain notes as private, so not everything will be published 3. I'll do my best to create links and MoCs for easy navigation between related notes in [[My Zettelkasten system]] If you're interested, check out my note explaining [[How I publish my second brain and Obsidian notes]] for the technical details.