Which materials to prepare for your twin's brain

They are the part of your knowledge that already exists outside your head. What you have written to explain your work, what you have taught and what you have said in public. Your twin uses them to answer in your words when someone asks what you do, how you work or what your service includes.

They are not the only thing in its brain. The rules you decide by come out of the capture sessions and live in your Book of Criteria. Materials cover something else: what you know and how you explain it. With good materials, your twin has somewhere to draw an answer from. Without them, it has to pass the question on to you.

Four kinds. The table sets out what the platform accepts, with a tip for each.

Two practical details. Slide decks are not uploaded as they are: export them to PDF and upload them that way. And if a PDF is a photograph of a paper document, look for the original or type it out again, because no text comes out of an image.

The platform reads it and draws separate ideas from it, each with where it came from. You review them and approve the ones that represent you. What you do not approve does not go into your twin.

If a material cannot be read, the platform says so instead of treating it as done. This happens with scanned PDFs and with pages that ask for a password.

That step matters more than it seems. A document from five years ago may say something you no longer think, or a price you no longer charge. Approving idea by idea makes you read your own material with today's eyes. Level 1 only needs one material read and one idea approved, but a useful brain asks for a good deal more.

With what you are asked most. If your twin were to see a prospective client tomorrow, these are the questions it would almost certainly get:

• 1. What you do and for whom.
• 2. What working with you is like, step by step.
• 3. What your service includes and what it does not.
• 4. How long it takes and what the client needs to get started.
• 5. What results you have seen in similar cases, told without anyone's details.

Find a material for each one. If it does not exist, write it: a page per question is enough. That short document is worth more than a whole book uploaded unreviewed, because it answers exactly what is going to be asked.

Then come the background materials: your articles, your courses, your talks. They give depth to the answers and examples to explain with.

A tidy brain is easier to review and answers better. Four habits help:

• One subject per document, with a title that says what it is about. "How I work with a new client" is clear. "Assorted notes" is not.
• A date on anything that expires. A rate or an offer with no date ends up quoted when it no longer applies.
• Your words before a brochure's. Your twin is going to speak the way the material is written.
• Short and specific first. Leave whole books and courses for when the essentials are already approved.

Three things.

Your clients' personal data. A report with names, a signed contract or a conversation with someone is not material for your twin. The GDPR asks that personal data be limited to what is necessary for its purpose, and explaining your method does not require knowing who your client was. Tell the case without names or details that would let anyone be recognised.

Works that are not yours. A book by another author, or the handbook of a course you attended, has rights of its own. The Spanish Intellectual Property Act reserves the exploitation of a work to its author. Upload what you have written yourself, or what you are allowed to use.

What no longer holds. Old rates, services you have stopped offering, opinions you have changed. If you upload it, your twin may end up explaining it as if it still stood.

Whenever something your twin explains changes: a price, a new service, a different way of working. And, even if nothing changes, every so often. ISO 30401, on knowledge management systems, treats knowledge as something that is maintained, reviewed and improved. The same goes for your brain.

A good sign that a material is missing is the questions your twin could not answer. Each one reaches you as a task, and it nearly always points to something you had never written down. "What your digital twin does when it doesn't know something" explains what to do with them.

That is captured in conversation. How you decide, where you draw the line, what you would do with a difficult case. That is what the six capture sessions are for, and the rules in your Book of Criteria come out of them. "What a Book of Criteria is, and why every rule has a source" explains what it is and how it is approved.

Materials and rules complete each other. The first give your twin what to say. The second, how to decide.

• Today: you upload text documents, PDFs with text, links to public pages and recordings, and the platform draws ideas that you approve one by one.
• Today: each approved idea keeps where it came from, and nothing goes into your twin without your approval.
• Today: you can export your whole brain, with your original materials, whenever you like.
• In development: reading long recordings in full. Today the first three minutes of each one are read.