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You Are the Secret Sauce
On Joan Westenberg, Ben Hunt, second brains, arks, and what actually matters
Matt Zeigler
July 22, 2025
Joan Westenberg shared a post about how she, “Erased 10,000 Notes, 7 Years of Ideas, and Every Thought I Tried to Save.”
Maybe it’s because I’m a touch over 7-years into capturing my reflections on Cultish Creative, and maybe it’s because I’m already on the record as thinking a second brain isn’t all that useful.
What definitely resonated with me though was - the act of writing the stuff down only matters to the extent it’s un-burdening us and making us feel sharper in a genuine way.
I can’t press delete on mine because it would be more stressful than relieving - my Personal Archive has become part of my thinking/collaborating/networking process, not a burden separate from it. But that doesn’t undermine the importance of the relief factor. Accumulation as a mental weight is real - productivity as an end and not as a means to an end is as dangerous as social media, smartphone, and drug addiction.
All of it comes back to this: what is what you’re doing in service to?
My friend Ben Hunt writes about building an “Ark of Story” - the idea that raw materials alone don’t mean much, but materials transformed through consciousness create stories worth preserving.
Westenberg has a “WHAT” file. Hunt has an “Ark.” I’ve got a “Personal Archive.” All of us have some form of intentional curation we’re focused on. All of us have an awareness of mindless accumulation we’re rebelling against.
This is why I lean into capturing reflections, kind of like a more advanced journaling technique, as opposed to just scrapbooking quotes and ideas. I know the stories I want to keep - the ones I may evolve towards or away from, but that deserve a snapshot of my real-time thinking and feeling.
When they’re preserved in a way that makes me feel good about it, maybe I can help make others feel good about it too.
Westenberg, Hunt, and - it feels weird lumping me into this but I’m this far so ok, me too, we’re not all struggling with this for nothing. We’re trying to tell you something too. We’re making and protecting and teaching, as Ben would say, towards a future we want to live in.
Never forget - you are the secret sauce. Nothing else is the secret. Nobody else makes it for you.
If YOU are going to capture something, don’t edit YOU out of it.
h/t Phillip Temmel at Creativerly for sending me the Joan Westenberg post
Ps. it’s so interesting, how the personal and social/societal stack here and now, two quotes I want to hang onto as this marinates in my head:
My new system is, simply, no system at all. I write what I think. I delete what I don’t need. I don’t capture everything. I don’t try to. I read what I feel like. I think in conversation, in movement, in context. I don’t build a second brain. I inhabit the first. Drawing on something DHH (37Signals) told me a couple of years ago, I’ve started keeping a single note called WHAT where I write down a handful of things I have to remember. The important bits will find their way back.
I don’t want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.
Now we collect the stories of human sacrifice and love and peace that surpasses all understanding, the stories that are as nameless and ineffable as the black abyss but are as radiant as the Son sun itself — stories like Brooke Harber texting her father “I love you” as the floodwaters rose, not out of fear of death but as the essence of her being, not from the perspective of a parent’s loss but of a child’s love — and we collect them ALL, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of new stories from your mother, your grandfather, your children … you.
Now we train an AI on those tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of stories of human sacrifice and love and peace that surpasses all understanding. We create an avatar of those stories, an avatar that becomes the Ark.
Now we build an Ark of story.
Now we build an Ark of love.
Now we build an Ark of sentient peace that surpasses all understanding, an Ark to withstand any Flood, any effort by the wickedness of Man to corrupt it.
Now.