Tiago Forte's Blog, page 15

Book Update #8: Turning Up The Heat 3 Weeks to Launch

In 21 short days, the 4-year project of bringing Building a Second Brain to life will come to a conclusion. 

We will find out once and for all how much potential this idea has to enter the mainstream conversation around what it means to be productive and creative in today’s world.

We have confirmed about 5,000 pre-orders so far. But I estimate the true total is quite a bit higher if we count those who didn’t submit their receipt to us. This is an outstanding outcome already and starts to put us in the running for the most important bestseller lists at The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Thank you to all of you who have stepped up and made a pre-order. Your commitment to making this book a success means everything to me. 

And it’s not over yet! We have a new version of the website, including a treasure trove of pre-order bonuses based on how many books you pre-order. 

In this update, you’ll hear about new international publishing deals (and why they’re so meaningful to me), my latest interviews about Building a Second Brain, our first London meetup, and a special request for you.    

New international publishing deals

I recently announced international publishing deals in several new countries, including Italy, the Czech Republic, and Brazil. These countries join Taiwan, China, the UK, and several others I’ve not officially announced. This means the book will launch in at least 10 countries and languages, a stunning development that is unusual for a first-time author writing about a new topic. Very promising!

The Brazil deal was especially meaningful for me. My mother is Brazilian, from São Paulo, and I spent many summer and winter breaks there from the time I was a toddler. Portuguese was the language my mother spoke to me as she rocked me in her arms, and it lives in a special place inside of me, like a language of the heart.

My grandfather Nehemias Verotti Vassão was a journalist in São Paulo and spent decades writing for Quatro Rodas, a prominent automotive magazine. He had left his small, sleepy inland town to get an education and enter a creative, knowledge-based line of work in the big city. And that decision reverberates across the generations of our family. We had the opportunity to receive an education, travel to other countries, and enjoy a high standard of living because of his courage.

I remember hearing stories of his escapades covering the release of new car designs for the magazine. He would go undercover and sneak into closed racetracks where they were being tested, trying to find some secret details or perhaps take a surreptitious photo of the new model. 

He was once shot at by guards as he tried to flee. His example demonstrated to me that journalism was more than sitting at a desk and reading. It was a process of engaging deeply with the real world and going where few others dared to go. I often think about my own writing in terms of reporting “from the field” on underappreciated frontiers of personal development.

Nehemias passed away a decade ago, but I feel so proud to be able to see my book available in Portuguese in the bookstores he would have walked past on his way to work. Brazil is a country with tremendous problems but also tremendous potential, and I am certain that having a Second Brain will unlock that potential for many.

 

Book press tour

We’ve also begun releasing the first interviews as part of the press tour for the book:

Propane Fitness Podcast: I talked about how Second Brains are especially relevant to coaches, trainers, and others who bill hourly but have trouble scaling their businessesThe Louis & Kyle Show: I shared why we are all content creators now and what that means for our careersDISCO’s Live Learning Empire Series: I recapped my journey of building a business around “live learning”Creative Elements: I talked about how to listen to signals from your environment to tell you what to do next in life and at work

I’d appreciate it if you shared any of these on social media or with anyone you think might benefit.

I’m currently in London filming multiple interviews with YouTubers, creators, and other experts in the field of productivity and knowledge management. We’ll be releasing those soon, but in the meantime, you can watch a sneak peek on Ali Abdaal’s vlog of our visit to his studio:

First meetup in London

We also hosted the first ever BASB Meetup in London last week. Over 40 people joined us, the largest turnout we’ve ever had for an in-person meetup anywhere. 

You can join the newly created BASB London Facebook group if you’d like to be invited to future meetups in London.

My vision is to have hundreds of city-specific meetups all over the world, organized and run by volunteers, where people can connect with other Second Brain enthusiasts. 

You can join the official BASB group, and we’ll notify you when we create a group in a new city.

A special request

I have a special request for you in the final weeks before my book is released: Would you share it with your network and ask them to consider pre-ordering? 

Whether you have a following on social media, a YouTube channel, an email newsletter, or just a few Facebook friends, every single pre-order makes such a difference in the lead-up to launch day on June 14. That’s because every pre-order from mid-November all the way to the release date is counted as part of the sales number for launch week, which means this is our single best chance to get noticed by the media gatekeepers that decide what people see. 

Not only will pre-orderers be the first to receive their copy, they will also get immediate access (upon submission of a receipt) to a 3-hour virtual masterclass I taught recently on how to implement the Second Brain methodology. This is a unique chance to not only get a book, but guidance from me on how to implement it.

We’re also offering access to our 5-week intensive Building a Second Brain course with the purchase of 50 hardcover books, which should cost around $980 depending on where you live. That’s a 30%+ discount on the usual price of the course. We can help you donate any extra copies you don’t need to a school, charity, or community group.

However much you’re able to do, I thank you for being here, for reading and listening, and for being part of the movement we are building to unlock the potential of people’s knowledge.

Pre-order Building a Second Brain

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Divergence and Convergence: The Two Fundamental Stages of the Creative Process

Imagine you sit down to work at your computer determined to really get things done.

You brew a strong cup of coffee, turn off your phone, put on your favorite playlist, and resolve to not get up before you’ve made real progress on your most important tasks.

Even if you already know what your top priority is, the questions start arriving: How should I approach it? Is it time to do more research, or use the information I already have? Should I explore new options, or choose among those I already have? Should I widen my horizons, or narrow my focus?

These questions are paramount in the environment of information overload we now find ourselves in. In a world of endless content, endless advice, and endless options, how do we know when it’s time to stop taking in new information and start putting it to use?

One of the most powerful ways of understanding the creative process – the steps by which we turn our inputs into outputs – is known as “divergence and convergence.” First popularized by the Design Thinking movement in the 1990s, these terms describe the two fundamental stages of the creative process. 

“Divergence” refers to opening up your senses and taking in new sources of information from the outside world, such as at the start of a new project. “Convergence” refers to shutting off sources of distraction and narrowing your focus to arrive at an end result.

Together, these two stages form the backbone of creative work going back millennia. In any field, we move like a pendulum back and forth between these two states of mind. Once you learn to see the pattern in your own work, you’ll understand how to flow with the tide of information rather than swim against it.

Let me introduce you to this simple framework and provide suggestions on how you can purposefully design your environment to support each state of mind.

Divergence

Every creative endeavor begins with an act of divergence.

From the moment you decide to write that article, design that webpage, host that event, or launch that fundraising campaign, you begin to widen the scope of your attention. With the new project as a lens on the world, you inevitably begin to notice new insights and examples that might be relevant to it.

This early stage is divergent – it is about expanding the range of possibilities you’re open to, considering as many options as possible, exposing yourself to new ideas, and exploring potential pathways without committing to any single one.

Imagine an interior designer getting ready to decorate a room. He might walk through fabric stores letting his eyes roam over the patterns, waiting for one to jump out and grab his attention. He might casually flip through design magazines looking for something that suits his needs. He might talk to his client and hear about their background, lifestyle, and desires for the room.

This isn’t the time to make final decisions, filter down options, or fit within a budget. It’s the time to wander, to roam, to let the forces of curiosity and serendipity guide you to unexpected places. This is a divergent state of mind because the range of information we are considering is increasing – it is diverging from the starting point.

Divergence is the classic image that often comes to mind when we think about creativity: the artist splashing paint haphazardly across the canvas, the dancer improvising across an empty dance floor, or the writer filling a wastepaper basket with crumpled up drafts.

But divergence is not the whole story. 

Convergence 

There is another, equally important state of mind we all must master if we want to see our creative efforts bear fruit. It’s called convergence, and requires the exact opposite approach.

Convergence is about coming to conclusions, making decisive decisions, choosing between trade offs, and prioritizing what is essential versus what is “nice to have.” You are purposefully narrowing the range of possibilities you are considering, so that you can converge on a final product (such as a document, a deliverable, or other outcome).

Imagine that same interior designer deciding it’s time to converge on a final design. He starts to discard options and make hard choices. He might pack up all but the final patterns the client has approved of, put away most of the magazine clippings he used as inspiration, finalize the budget, and start ordering the products he needs.

Convergence is where most creative people struggle, because in order to pursue one path, you have to say no to all the others, no matter how interesting or juicy they may be. There is a kind of creative grief in throwing away material that we spent time and energy to find. As lovers of ideas, we are often loath to see that scintillating dialogue cut from the script, or that fascinating slide from the deck, or that tantalizing feature from the product.

But convergence is essential if we ever want to finish anything. All the extraneous parts only dilute and distract from the essential ones. We need the self-awareness to know when reducing our degrees of freedom actually gives us the freedom to bring something real to life. 

The truth is, until we produce a tangible artifact that can be shared with others, we have nothing to show for our efforts except a lot of messy work-in-process that may or may not be of value.

Know your modes

Divergence and convergence are so fundamental to the creative process, we can see it in action across every creative field:

Writers diverge by collecting raw material for the story they want to tell, sketching out potential characters, and researching historical facts. They converge by making outlines, laying out plot points, and writing a first draft.Engineers diverge by researching possible solutions, testing the boundaries of the problem, or tinkering with new tools. They converge by deciding on a particular approach, designing the implementation details, and beginning to build.Designers diverge by collecting samples and patterns, talking to users to understand their needs, or sketching possible solutions. They converge by deciding on a problem to solve, building wireframes, or translating their designs into graphics files.Photographers diverge by taking spontaneous photos of things they find interesting, juxtaposing different kinds of photos together, or experimenting with new lighting or framing techniques. They converge by choosing the shots for a collection, archiving unused images, and printing their favorites.

Once you understand what divergence and convergence look like in your own work, you can use this simple framework to tell you which state of mind you should be in at any particular point.

For a given project you’re working on, ask yourself: Should I be in divergence mode right now, or convergence mode? In other words, is it time to expand your horizons and take in new information, or is it time to hunker down and synthesize the information you already have?

If you decide it’s time for divergence mode, you can purposefully create an environment to support that kind of thinking. Open the doors and windows; put on energetic music; work in a lively cafe; ask others to brainstorm with you; try out new approaches or perspectives; explore new content you find online – whatever will help expose you to new inputs and challenge your assumptions.

Here are other ways you can purposefully diverge:

Stroll through a library or bookstore to see what books catch your eyeDive down “internet rabbit holes” by browsing online communities for unusual ideasWatch movies or documentaries on provocative topicsSubscribe to email newsletters, YouTube channels, or podcasts outside your usual listening habitsPeruse your notes on various topics even if they don’t seem directly related to the topic at hand
Peruse your notes on various topics even if they don’t seem directly related to the topic at handGrab a drink or coffee with a friend from another field who might have a different way of looking at a problem you’re facingWalk around a new neighborhood or city and absorb the sights, sounds, and smells you encounter

Most of all, you have to be open to the surprising and unexpected to make divergence successful. This stage is necessarily spontaneous, messy, and chaotic. Which means you have to be in a more relaxed and receptive state of mind. You can’t fully plan or organize what you’re doing in divergence mode, so don’t even try! Embrace the chaos and see just how wild and unorthodox your imagination can be (while capturing any tidbits you encounter along the way for later review).

When it’s time for convergence mode, take the opposite approach: Find a quiet, secluded corner to work in; put on rhythmic music without lyrics; turn off notifications on all devices; and aggressively ignore distractions – whatever will help you avoid tangents and propel you forward to the finish line.

Here are some other ways you can purposefully converge:

Decide on a particular deliverable you will produce by a certain time, and ignore any information that’s not strictly necessary until thenSet a deadline and promise to deliver a draft to someone who will hold you accountableMake an outline with the step-by-step sequence of points you want to coverChunk related tasks within your project into clear groups to tackle one at a timePrioritize your tasks from most to least important, or by nearest term to longest termGive yourself defined periods of time to make progress (known as “time-boxing”)Stop researching and focus on summarizing the notes you’ve already captured

The purpose of convergence is to arrive at a concrete deliverable that you can share with others within an established timeframe. To succeed, you’ll need to take steps to proactively defend your focus and push back on any demand for your attention. 

The world is never going to hold back and leave you be. It’s up to you to protect your boundaries and say no to everyone else for a time, so you can say yes to your own goals and dreams.

End with the beginning in mind

The truth is, no creative work is ever truly finished.

There will always be more you can add, refine or improve. When I say “final product” or “deliverable,” I don’t mean that this is the end all, be all of your life’s work. It’s just one iteration in a long line of iterations. The final product of one round of convergence can be used to gather outside feedback, which then becomes the starting point for the next round of divergence. 

We share the fruits of our labor not because they are final or perfect, but because they are incomplete and imperfect. Sharing your work before it’s finished is an invitation for others to contribute their own ideas to yours. Our ideas are always in flux, always changing. If nothing is ever truly finished, then there’s no reason to wait to share it with people and allow them to be part of your journey.

Thank you to Michael Dean, Rachel Joy, Sanjay Srivastava, Micki McGee, Isabel Hazan, Marcus Wiegert, Oscar Lagrosen, and Julia Saxena for their feedback and suggestions on this piece.

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How Building a Second Brain Became a Thriving Cohort-Based Course | Creative Elements Podcast

I recently joined Jay Clouse, Founder of Creative Companion, on the Creative Elements podcast to talk about how Building a Second Brain went from a public rant to a thriving cohort-based course. 

We discussed:

What drove the growth of BASBThe classic email marketing mistake I made early onWhy I decided to write a bookThe future of cohort-based coursesThe meaning behind the name Building a Second Brain

The show is available on all platforms, but here are some quick links:

Apple podcastSpotifyCreative Elements

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Why Every Coach Needs to Build a Second Brain. Now | Propane Fitness Podcast

I was interviewed on the Propane Fitness podcast which helps coaches and trainers build their online fitness business.

We covered: 

What is personal knowledge management?My journey from a content creator to coach and thought leaderThe biggest mistakes coaches make when moving onlineWhy cohort-based courses are a great fit for coaches and trainersShould you mourn unneeded knowledge?Why forgetting is the most important skill we haveAnd much more

This is not only relevant for the fitness niche but any coach in any niche. 

Listen to the podcast here: 

Propane FitnessSpotifyAmazon

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12 Steps to Build a Second Brain

How do you establish the habits of personal knowledge management in your life?

Here are twelve practical steps you can take right now to get your Second Brain started:

1. Decide what you want to capture

Think about your Second Brain as an intimate commonplace book or journal. What do you most want to capture, learn, explore, or share? Identify two to three kinds of content you already value to get started with.

For an extended intro to capturing and taking digital notes, check out this workshop covering how to capture and save the best information you consume each week.

2. Choose your notes app

If you don’t use a digital notes app, get started with one now. But I know that choosing your notes app can feel overwhelming and paralyzing. 

My recommendation is to choose an app based on your notetaking style since notetaking is a highly personal process based on intuition and feeling.

In this video, I introduce you to 4 notetaking styles and the best apps for each.

3. Choose a capture tool

I recommend starting with a read later app such as Instapaper or Pocket to begin saving any article or other piece of online content you’re interested in for later consumption. 

Believe me, this one step will change the way you think about consuming content forever.

4. Get set up with PARA

Set up the four folders of PARA (Projects; Areas; Resources; Archives) and, with a focus on actionability, create a dedicated folder (or tag) for each of your currently active projects. 

Focus on capturing notes related to those projects from this point forward.

Check out this blog post for an intro to the PARA system.

5. Get inspired by identifying your twelve favorite problems

Make a list of some of your favorite problems, save the list as a note, and revisit it any time you need ideas for what to capture. Use these open-ended questions as a filter to decide which content is worth keeping.

6. Automatically capture your ebook highlights

Set up an integration to automatically send highlights from your reading apps (such as a read later or ebook app) to your digital notes. Tools like Readwise or IFTTT make this easy.

7. Practice Progressive Summarization

Summarize a group of notes related to a project you’re currently working on using multiple layers of highlighting to see how it affects the way you interact with those notes.

Click here for an intro to Progressive Summarization. 

8. Experiment with just one Intermediate Packet

Choose a project that might be vague, sprawling, or simply hard, and pick just one piece of it to work on—an Intermediate Packet. Maybe it is a business proposal, a chart, a run of show for an event, or key topics for a meeting with your boss. (Check this blog post for more examples of Intermediate Packets.)

Break the project down into smaller pieces, make a first pass at one of the pieces, and share it with at least one person to get feedback.

9. Make progress on one deliverable

Choose a project deliverable you’re responsible for and use any of the workflow and express techniques outlined here. See if you can make decisive progress on it using only the notes in your Second Brain.

These techniques are designed to help you execute your projects more effectively. They are standardized procedures to move faster, save your progress, and produce work of higher quality.

10. Schedule a Weekly Review

Put a weekly recurring meeting with yourself on your calendar to begin establishing the habit of conducting a Weekly Review. 

To start, just clear your notes inbox and decide on your priorities for the week. From there, you can add other steps as your confidence grows.

Click here to access my One-Touch Guide to doing a Weekly Review. 

11. Assess your notetaking proficiency

Evaluate your current notetaking practices and areas for potential improvement using our free Productivity Potential Quiz.

12. Join the PKM community

On Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack, Medium, or your platform(s) of choice, follow and subscribe to thought leaders and join communities who are creating content related to personal knowledge management (#PKM), #SecondBrain, #BASB, or #toolsforthought. 

I invite you to join our free Facebook and Slack communities. 

Share your journey as you’re building your Second Brain. There’s nothing more effective for adopting new behaviors than surrounding yourself with people who already have them.

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Why I’m Becoming an Official Advisor to Maven

A year ago I announced my investment in Maven, the first platform to enable creators to deliver live, online, community-driven educational programs to learners all over the world. 

Today I’m officially announcing that I am becoming an advisor to the company. Whether you are creating your very first online course or making the shift to live instruction, Maven is my official recommendation for where to start building. 

Maven is enabling a new generation of educational programs known as CBCs – or Cohort-Based Courses. These represent a new kind of online course in which a group of learners (known as a “cohort”) come together and move through a curriculum at the same pace. The instructor provides guidance and feedback over video calls and other communication platforms, while students share what they’re discovering in real time and give each other feedback and encouragement.

CBCs skyrocketed to prominence over the last couple years as people moved online for education, connection, and community. As I wrote in The Future of Education is Community, this new wave isn’t replacing what came before. Each successive wave of online education over the last 15 years has built upon previous ones, and this one is no exception.

Cohort-based courses take a university-style education and make it vastly more affordable and accessible to people regardless of where they live or their formal qualifications. They add powerful accountability and feedback not only from instructors, but peers and previous graduates as well. This is a fundamentally community-centric, social approach to learning. 

I created my own CBC, Building a Second Brain, in late 2016. Since then, I’ve taught over 5,000 people how to create a system of knowledge management (a “Second Brain”) for themselves. And how to use that system to capitalize on the full potential of their knowledge through the practice of digital notetaking.

The growth and impact of our course has far surpassed anything I ever expected when I first started out. In a couple months, my book by the same name will be released in 10 countries and languages. Everything written inside has been developed, tested, and refined within the community that has formed around our alumni.

As proud as I am of what my team and I have built, it’s clear that our industry is entering a new phase. We’re leaving the era of solo teachers managing everything on their own – from growing their audience, to driving sales, to troubleshooting tech problems, to creating original content, to delivering live instruction. There are far too many roles to play and hats to wear for one person to do it on their own. Especially as competition heats up and large companies start pouring money into the space, there are now two viable paths: You can either hire a team, or leverage your efforts with an all-in-one platform like Maven.

I’m seeing more and more demand for CBC-related content from teachers who want to jump into the field. But my focus is the subject matter of Personal Knowledge Management and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Working with Maven not only as an advisor, but as a guest instructor in their accelerator will allow me and my team to pour our knowledge into an organization that is perfectly equipped to share it further. That way we can share the most valuable insights we are learning in real time without distracting from our main priority of helping people everywhere create a Second Brain. 

I’ve never been an official advisor to any company or platform before. But something has changed: the path I’ve followed to creating my course is no longer the best one. I had to hack together different platforms, customize and tweak them endlessly, and hire a full staff to run it all. These are major endeavors that many course creators don’t want to take on or can’t afford, and they shouldn’t have to.

Maven is changing all that – finally we have a single, unified platform specifically designed to enable live, cohort-based programs. For anyone getting started today, I recommend skipping the mess of trying to hack together your own solution, and using Maven instead.

Case Study: A New Wave of Course Creators

Until now, most CBCs have been taught by big-name influencers with massive existing followings. They’ve often had teams of people working under them to manage marketing, operations, customer service, and instructional design.

But I believe we’re about to witness a sea change in the kinds of people who create these courses. As an example, take Angelica Tonatzin, the creator and instructor of Sacred Birth Energy: A 5-Week Online Pregnancy Circle. 

In early 2020, my wife Lauren signed up for Angelica’s program, where she became part of a group of 6 women at various stages of pregnancy. They met every Sunday for 90 minutes, and Angelica would lead them through a series of prompts and self-reflection exercises designed to bring them into closer connection with their bodies and their intuition. Lauren describes it as “the best course I’ve ever taken,” and two years later she still keeps in touch with her fellow participants as they share pictures of their growing kids.

From Angelica’s perspective, this format allowed her unique knowledge and skills to shine: her patience, empathy, curiosity, and ability to hold space for other women. She says, “I was more the facilitator, which made it easier. One of my strengths is tuning into the energy of the room to help them tune into their own wisdom and their own answers.”

She didn’t need a huge following or online presence – 4 of the women found her through prior experience with her coaching or word of mouth, while a fifth came through her Instagram following of 2,600 people. She shared with me, “You don’t need a huge following if you’re able to touch the right niche and the people who want what you have.”

She didn’t need complex operations – the course was simply a weekly Zoom call and an email sharing some reflection prompts. 

She didn’t need a lot of polished pre-recorded content – in her words, “They can go and get information anywhere, but there’s not too many spaces where they can tune into their own answers. And that’s a big part of pregnancy, learning to trust yourself.”

She didn’t need to do a lot of market research – her starting point was her own pregnancy experience and creating something she herself would have wanted. 

Each of the participants paid $597 for a 6-week program. This represented an incredible value for a reasonable price, and on Angelica’s side, amounted to $3,000 in revenue, a substantial amount for someone with no team and little overhead. As a new mother herself, this arrangement allows her to offer what she knows on her timeline and schedule. Teaching a live course allows Angelica to earn a living with her knowledge by teaching a small group, versus having to find a babysitter and schedule individual coaching calls with each person. 

Angelica’s biggest challenges are the marketing and operations needed to sustain her business. And this is where the importance of a platform like Maven comes in. On the backend, it provides a consistent interface specifically designed to support a live program, such as a customer relationship management system so you can track your students from interested to purchased to course completed, a content management system so all of your course materials can be in one place, and a community platform where students can interact and engage each other. On the frontend, it provides exposure to an audience already familiar with such programs who are looking for an expert to learn from.

If we’re going to unlock the potential of CBCs, we need to open the doors to talented teachers with valuable expertise who don’t necessarily have technical skills or unlimited amounts of free time. We need to automate the more mechanical, rote tasks of course management so that the instructor’s human skills can shine more brightly. Angelica’s story shows how CBCs could enable an entirely new kind of career path for teachers: autonomous, flexible, sustainable, and with some dedication, well paying.

By doing so, we will unleash the power of community-driven learning to make a transformative impact on students’ lives. Maven is supplying the tools that will make it possible to teach online without the hassle and headache that was required in the past. They are democratizing the opportunity to reach anyone, anywhere with the knowledge and expertise you have to offer.

The Maven team runs a free 3-week accelerator to help qualified instructors build their first Cohort-Based Course. I am joining as a guest instructor and will be sharing behind-the-scenes details of how we built our own course (and education business in general) that I’ve never made public before.  

If you want to jump into this new wave with both feet, apply here to be a part of the next cohort (the application takes about 10 minutes to complete):

Apply for the Maven Course Accelerator

They are also hiring for a range of early roles, which you can find details on here.

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Build A Second Brain To Maximize Productivity and Creativity | The Louis & Kyle Show

I recently was interviewed on the Louis & Kyle Show about…you guessed it…Building a Second Brain. Here’s what we covered: 

Why we’re all content creators The downside of becoming too organized The underlying process of any creative endeavor What we can learn from kids about learning The ultimate purpose of productivity and what it means to me

Listen or watch our interesting and insightful chat here: 

Youtube Apple PodcastSpotify The Louis & Kyle Show

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The Untethered Soul: The Roadmap of My Personal Growth – Part 4

Michael Singer’s thinking and writing have provoked four fundamental mindset shifts in my life. 

First, I began to view everything as information. 

I was already biased toward this view with my work, but reading The Untethered Soul helped me apply it not just to quotes from books or academic papers, but to all the data streaming in from the world through my senses.

Seeing everything as mere information is powerful because it depersonalizes life experiences. I gradually learned to stop taking everything personally, as if I was the center of the universe and everything negative that happened in the world was a direct affront to me. It’s not about me – it’s just data.

If I run out of money and can’t pay the rent this month – that’s data. If I receive a threatening legal letter – useful data. If I can’t get out of bed in the morning because I’m dreading my work today – valuable data. The separation from self that I was learning on a somatic level through meditation began to seep into my intellectual life as well.

Once an experience could be broken down into information, I could capture it and get it off my mind so I could sleep at night. I could organize and distill it into observations, lessons, theories, and frameworks so that no failure or mistake went to waste. And most meaningfully of all, I could share my life experiences with other people so they didn’t have to go through the same pain as I had.

The ability to tell my story and share my truth has changed everything for me. It means that there is a reason for the ways I’ve suffered. There is a higher purpose at work in the seeming randomness of my life. My purpose is to be a channel for the data flowing through my life, and to extract from it as much meaning, fulfillment, and joy as I can before the information that makes up who I am returns to the primordial entropy of the universe.

If everything around me is made of information, then I must be too. All the time, the boundaries of the self are being tested and renegotiated, torn apart and reconstituted, by the flux of events small and large, at all levels. The “self” that I feel inside is an informational construct that has been built piece by piece. 

Which means it is invincible – information cannot be destroyed, only transformed. It means I am fluid – the information that makes up “me” is constantly shifting, with modules of code getting swapped in and out. And most of all, it means I can direct my own evolution – every book I read, course I take, and interview I listen to shapes the body of information that constitutes my identity.

Second, as a consequence of the first shift, I began to see everything that limits me as an opportunity for growth. 

As Singer writes, “Your views, your opinions, your preferences, your concepts, your goals, and your beliefs are all ways of bringing the infinite universe down to the finite where you can feel a sense of control.” Which means that if your reality feels threatening, that doesn’t say anything about reality. It says something about your limited mental model of reality.

When we confuse our mental model with reality itself, we struggle day and night to make the world fit our model. Anything that doesn’t fit, we call wrong, bad, or unfair. But to go beyond the limits of our mental model, we have to take the risk of not believing it. Our choice is to either resist reality, or change our model of it. 

There is a point when you begin to accept that your mental model of the world is limited, and it’s time to change it. And then there is a point where you can actually start to enjoy your model being challenged. Every pain, every loss, every conflict, every unmet expectation, and every crisis can become an intervention in your own addiction to control. 

Singer proposes an experiment to help you find the limits of your mental model. If you want to know where your walls are, just start walking toward them. Maybe you have a fear of speaking in public. In third grade you raised your hand to answer the teacher’s question, and everyone laughed at you. They forgot about it within seconds, but not you. That impression stayed with you. It is one of your walls.

If you don’t believe it is a wall, try walking through it. Let’s say something happens that activates the old fear. Your manager asks you to deliver a presentation at the upcoming all-hands meeting. The closer you get to that wall, the more you will have the urge to pull back. That’s what we do with walls – we avoid running into them. But because we avoid them, they lock us inside their perimeter. They become a prison. Since we are not willing to approach them, we cannot see what is beyond them.

Life is a constant spiritual battle, and life in the modern world is no exception. There are so few pockets of certainty and stability left anywhere. Technology and the Internet have upended all our institutions, all our plans, all our sacred and protected realities. There is no authority shielding you from the storms of change anymore. 

There is a way for us to meet the moment and transform some of this change into a change for good. You can think of yourself as a great athlete, training yourself to immediately relax through your edges every time they are hit. 

Once you learn how to do this, then it’s all over. You know you will always be free, because the worst that life can do to you is push you to your edges. You’ve already decided you want to go past them. You end up loving your edges and your limits because they always point the way to your freedom. All you have to do is relax and lean into them.

 

Third, and most profoundly, I am learning to trust life to bring me what I need.

Time and again, the natural flow of life collides with my walls and tries to tear them down. Not because there is a will or intention behind it, but simply because my flawed mental model is constantly bumping up against the reality it is trying to describe. Instead of defending that reality, I try to allow reality to correct and improve it. I do this because I know that every time I defend myself, I am really defending my walls. When I decide that I am going to face reality, just as it is, no matter what it takes, I am free. 

Singer closes with an observation that I’ve adopted as my own: that the only thing we really want from life is to feel enthusiasm, joy, and love. If we can feel those things all the time, then who cares what happens outside? If you can always feel excited about the experience of each moment, then it doesn’t make any difference what the next moment brings.

There is tremendous, almost indescribable joy, beauty, love, and peace living within us already. Sometimes I get a small glimpse of it and it is breathtaking. The worst that life can throw at me is welcome, because the worst that life can throw at me is the best means to unlock those forces inside me. 

And fourth, I’ve embraced the idea implicit in Singer’s work, though he never states it directly, that reality is enough.

This physical universe is enough. It is meaningful enough, vivid enough, interesting enough, varied enough. There is more than enough of everything we want and need available in just the concrete reality we can see, hear, touch, and feel.

One of the most inspiring implications of Singer’s work for me is that it dispenses with the need for religion, while retaining the meaningfulness and sense of purpose that religion used to have a monopoly on. We don’t need to invent authoritarian mythological beings or alternate worlds of heaven or hell. We don’t need stories to reassure us of what happens to us after we die. We don’t need systems of judgment or penance or sin or redemption. We don’t need to personify the universe through the lens of our human drama for it to make sense. 

The universe we have is enough. It has no mind of its own, no personality, no goals or purpose, no standards of truth or morality. It has a relationship with each of us, because we are part of it, but it doesn’t care about us. All these possibilities feel incredibly threatening to the religious worldview, but they don’t have to be. We could decide that there is enough information in this universe already, and that we’re going to spend our time working with the data that we’re sure exists, rather than creating more.

I’m not sure why that possibility – of a strictly secular, materialist worldview that is still imbued with meaning – is so inspiring to me. It feels more egalitarian – it’s no longer about who was born into the right beliefs, or who curried the most favor with the right divine entity. It is about who pays the most attention, and is the most willing to change, and is fundamentally the most open to discovering something about the reality they emerged into. 

A secular, materialist universe would demand much more of us as humans. We wouldn’t be able to outsource our ethical reasoning to a moralistic framework created thousands of years ago. Or at least, we’d understand that all moral frameworks are circumstantial and temporary, made for one era but not others. It can be terrifying to embrace a relativist mindset when all you’ve known is the One True Path.

On the individual level, we would have the privilege and the responsibility of developing our own beliefs, instead of adopting wholesale the beliefs of others. We would be able to run experiments about what it means to live a good life, and to test whether they really work, and assemble a mix of beliefs from different sources. Each person would be free to craft their own belief system as a singular creative act. 

More practically, this worldview helps me to accept the flow of life’s momentum. There are no secret underlying forces at work, no narrative that explains why things happen the way they do. There is no purpose to the universe, much less a purpose for my life. Which means there’s no point in stressing out about “finding” it. 

Singer writes:

There is so much evidence that life does quite well on its own. The planets stay in orbit, tiny seeds grow into giant trees, weather patterns have kept forests across the globe watered for millions of years, and a single fertilized cell grows into a beautiful baby. We are not doing any of these things as conscious acts of will; they are all being done by the incomprehensible perfection of life itself. All these amazing events, and countless more, are being carried out by forces of life that have been around for billions of years—the very same forces of life that we are consciously pitting our will against on a daily basis. If the natural unfolding of the process of life can create and take care of the entire universe, is it really reasonable for us to assume that nothing good will happen unless we force it to?

He continues elsewhere:

What would happen if we respected the flow of life and used our free will to participate in what’s unfolding, instead of fighting it? What would be the quality of the life that unfolds? Would it just be random events with no order or meaning, or would the same perfection of order and meaning that manifests in the rest of the universe manifest in the everyday life around us?

There is no way to prove that the universe we see is all that exists. No more than any religion can prove its version of events. Thus it lies beyond faith, but also beyond science. It is a choice about one’s orientation toward life. 

I’m trying on this perspective for now, knowing that not only can I change my mind in the future, but that is the whole point. 

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The Untethered Soul: The Roadmap of My Personal Growth – Part 3

Imagine that one day you notice a thorn in your side. 

You may not even know how it got there. But it hurts quite a bit every time something touches it. You decide to build a “pain protection machine” to mitigate the pain. It is a metal exoskeleton that wraps your torso in titanium so nothing can get close to it.

This exoskeleton is quite heavy though. So you create hydraulic legs that extend down to the ground, with wheels to allow you to easily roll the device anywhere. Now that you have this structure, you make it more comfortable, with a built-in LCD display for watching your favorite shows, a headrest in case you get tired, and a dozen cupholders and electrical outlets. 

You’ve made it so sophisticated and comfortable that you never have to leave it!

Your protective device might become so fancy that you begin to receive recognition and respect for it. People praise how thoughtful and diligent you’ve been to construct it, and even begin asking for your help in building one for themselves. You might build a whole reputation and career around how impressive and sophisticated your mechanism of self-protection is.

You tell yourself, “I have solved my thorn problem. I am a free being, and can go anywhere and do whatever I want. This thorn used to run my life, and now it doesn’t run anything.”

The truth is, the thorn completely runs your entire life. It affects all your decisions, including where you go, whom you interact with, and what actions you take. It determines where you’re allowed to work, what house you live in, and what kind of bed you sleep in at night. You may feel that because you’ve minimized the pain of the problem, you’ve solved the problem. But it is not solved. All you did was devote your life to it.

The thorn is a trauma or wound – a “samskara.” And as humans we have a lot more than one thorn. We have sensitivities about loneliness, about rejection, about failure, about our physical appearance, about our mental abilities. We are walking around with many sharp thorns pushed right up against the most sensitive parts of our heart.

People will do anything to not feel those thorns. They will turn to drugs and alcohol, video games and porn, social media and Netflix. They will enter relationships to lessen the pain of their thorns, and work at jobs that promise them they will never have to confront those painful parts of themselves.

But there is always another choice for what to do about these thorns: you can pull them out. 

You can look deep within yourself and decide you don’t want the most fearful parts of yourself running your life. And you must, because any behavior based upon avoiding pain ultimately becomes a doorway back to the pain itself. It will keep getting worse and worse until you face it.

You want to talk to people because you find them interesting, not because you’re lonely. You want to have relationships with people because you genuinely like them, not because you need them to like you. You want to love because you truly love, not because you need a distraction from your inner problems.

To free yourself from your thorns, you simply stop protecting them. As long as you’re doing something to avoid feeling them, they aren’t given the chance to work themselves out. Everyday life experiences that confront you are the very ones that will eventually push your thorns out. 

All you have to do is keep your heart open and permit the pain to come up and pass through. This is the beginning and end of the entire path – you surrender yourself to emptying yourself. When your baggage gets hit, let go right then and there. It won’t be easier if you explore it or play with it, hoping to take the edge off.

The real transformation begins when you use your problems as agents for growth, instead of avoiding them. Then you’ll realize that life is actually trying to help you. Life is surrounding you with people and situations that stimulate growth.

A walkway between work and life

The most surprising thing I learned while reading The Surrender Experiment was that Singer wasn’t just the author of a string of books about spirituality. He had also founded a software company called the Medical Manager Corporation, which eventually became a $300 million a year business with twenty-three hundred employees.

In his book, he tells the story of strolling into a Radio Shack one day in the early 1980s, and stumbling upon one of the first personal computers widely available for consumers, the TRS-80. It came with just 16k of memory, a twelve-inch monitor, and a standard cassette recorder for storage. The computer instantly called out to him, and he took it home with barely a notion of how he would use it.

From the very beginning, Singer described his relationship to the machine as a deeply spiritual one:

My mind became very quiet the moment I sat down at the machine. It was very much like entering meditation. The energy would rise up and focus beautifully at the point between my eyebrows, and a peace would come over me.

Singer’s life philosophy is to surrender himself to whatever life throws at him, and in this case, life presented a request from a local doctor’s office to create a software program to manage their patient records. 

He said yes, and he and a colleague began teaching themselves how to build software. Seeing the project as a gift that life had given them, they committed to the highest level of craftsmanship without worrying about monetization or a business model:

From the very beginning of my programming career, my heart demanded that every line of code had to be the absolute best I could do. It didn’t matter what I was being paid; everything had to be perfect…My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself—because it was.

The product they created, known as the Medical Manager, would be acquired years later by WebMD for $5 billion dollars. At one point, the product was used by 25% of all private medical practices in the U.S. In 2000, the software was added to the permanent collection on information technology at the Smithsonian Museum of American History for its role in shaping the medical software industry.

Throughout this incredible trajectory, Singer managed his company as CEO without leaving the woods of Alachua or putting aside his spiritual pursuits. 

I was moved by Singer’s account of how running his business was just as much a part of his spiritual journey as anything else. This was the middle way between the “worldly” and the “spiritual” that I had unknowingly been seeking:

It was around that time when I noticed that my mental concepts separating worldly and spiritual had finally dissolved. Everything began to appear as the miraculous perfection of the flow of life…life experiences, including running a business at this level, were doing as much to free me spiritually as my years of solitary meditation.

As I was reading The Surrender Experiment, I came upon a photograph of a wooden walkway that Singer and his team had built through the marshlands. It connected his home on the grounds of the Temple with the corporate headquarters they had built nearby, allowing him to walk within minutes between his home and office.

This photo captivated me instantly. I couldn’t look away from it. It was so preposterous – a spiritual temple connected directly to a tech company office – that it seemed like some sort of cosmic joke. It challenged something inside me, and after some reflection I understood what it was.

I always saw the domain of business and work as completely separate from anything personal or metaphysical. Business was supposed to be about concrete, practical problem-solving performed by serious professionals who never allowed their personal thoughts or feelings to intrude on their work. This simple walkway represented the opposite: a bridge between the worlds.

On my second day on the grounds of the Temple, I made a point to visit the wooden walkway. It was utterly unremarkable, a simple three-way bridge connecting Singer’s home, the Temple, and a building that had been the company’s first office. 

I sat at the intersection for a good hour, meditating and thinking. What would such a bridge look like in my own life? Could I also create a business that aligned with my personal growth? Could I even use the business as a means to producing more of the transcendent experiences I was seeking? Could work be a way of freeing myself, not just making a living?

The psyche in fear

Our minds and bodies evolved in an environment full of constant mortal threats. But over the centuries the march of civilization has eliminated most of those threats from our everyday lives.

In response, the protective instincts that once shielded our bodies have adapted toward defending us psychologically. Our major struggles are now with our inner fears, insecurities, and self-destructive behavior patterns. We defend our self-concept as if our lives depended on it. 

Since it’s not socially acceptable to run into the woods and hide like a deer, we hide inside. We withdraw, close down, and pull back behind a protective shield. You protect your ego – the part that feels it needs protection even though no physical attack is taking place.

But if you continue to protect yourself, you will never be free. It’s that simple. Because you’re scared, you’ve locked yourself in a fortress and sealed all the doors and windows. Now it’s dark and you want to feel the sunlight, but you can’t. It’s impossible.

All your habits and idiosyncrasies will stay the same. You won’t grow or change. This is how life becomes stagnant and colorless. People will say things like, “You know we don’t talk about that subject around your father.” There are all these rules about things that can’t happen, because if they did, it would cause disturbance inside. Living this way allows very little joy, spontaneity, or excitement for life.

If you really want to grow, you have to do the opposite. Real spiritual growth happens when there is only one of you inside. There’s not a part that’s scared and another part that’s protecting the part that’s scared. All parts are unified and whole. When there is no part of yourself you’re unwilling to see, the mind is no longer divided against itself. Everything you feel inside is just something you feel inside. It’s not you; it’s what you feel.

In order to experience this state of awareness, you must let your entire psyche surface. Right now, your psyche is fragmented into tiny pieces that are frozen within you. Your psyche fragmented itself to keep the parts from feeling each other. But you’ve decided you are ready to feel the pain – you are willing to pay that price for your freedom. Every little fragmented piece must come into the light of your awareness and be permitted to pass through. 

Everywhere you go there’s something or someone trying to disturb you. Why not let them have it? If you don’t want the part of you that’s disturbed, then don’t protect it. 

The reward for not protecting your psyche is liberation – you are free to walk through this world without a problem on your mind. You are just having fun experiencing whatever happens next.

Addicted to control

As I walked away from the Temple for the last time, got in my car, and drove away, I felt an intense disturbance inside me.

I was face to face with the core of my psyche: the need for certainty and control. It was like facing the final boss on the last level of a video game. Looming before me out of the dark mist was the addiction, the thorn, that I could see was running my life.

I had left my consulting job because I wanted to feel in control of my time, my priorities, and my future. That initially gave me a rush of freedom, but before I knew it, I was saddled with the even more burdensome expectations of demanding clients. My need for financial security led me to create a new product without feedback or collaboration with anyone. It failed, and soon my finances were in freefall. My desperate search for control had led me to a place where I felt completely out of control.

I had turned to more profitable corporate training in response, but that was exactly the environment of conformity I’d fled from in the first place. I felt like an addict returning for a fix again and again, no amount of the substance ever truly satisfying my endless appetite. The more I worked to control my environment and shield myself from the demands of others, the more out of control and subject to their demands I felt.

Sitting in my rental car pondering all of this, I opened my worn copy of The Untethered Soul sitting on the passenger seat next to me, turned to a random page, and read these words as if written for me:

Your mind has very little control over this world. It is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It cannot control the weather and other natural forces. Nor can it control all people, places, and things around you…Just relieve your mind of the job of making sure that everyone and everything will be the way you need them to be so that you can feel better inside…The truth is, everything will be okay as soon as you are okay with everything. And that’s the only time everything will be okay.

I had been meditating regularly for a couple years at this point, but reading these words awoke something in me. I felt a sense of separation within, and suddenly I could see the “human” I was watching as separate from “me” to a new degree. It was like looking through a camera over my own shoulder, as though I was playing a character in a video game. 

With that shift in perspective, I suddenly felt a tremendous wave of compassion for my own mind. It was smart and capable, but not at all up to the task I had given it: fixing every problem, controlling every situation, predicting every event. I could sense its tiredness and its weariness.

My past had taught me that I must control my environment or it would hurt me. It was either control things, or be controlled. But now I saw that trying to control what happened to me was not my mind’s highest calling. The mind can solve problems, but it is meant for so much more.

I decided I wasn’t going to live this way anymore. I decided to trust that life was inherently good, inherently full of opportunity and luck, inherently in my favor. I decided that I would allow reality to teach me what it had to teach me, no matter how painful it was or how much I wanted to resist. 

And that choice has made all the difference.

To be continued…

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Book Update #7: Reflections on a New Season

My book Building a Second Brain comes out in 60 days. Cohort 14 of our course started a week ago with over 1,300 students enrolled. Our team of over 30 staff and collaborators is humming along like a well-oiled productivity machine. 

On every front, we’re seeing unbelievable momentum and excitement for our work. Yet I find myself in the garage studio tonight unable to sleep. 

It started this morning, the moment I woke and noticed something seemed…different. It felt like a tide had turned, like a season had passed. I somehow woke up a different person than when I went to bed. 

The difference crystallized for me when I turned to my writing projects later in the day. I’d set them aside for many months as I focused on getting the manuscript finished and course launched. Now, I saw them in a new light. To my surprise, all my half-written drafts seemed so pointless. They were all fussy, pedantic explorations of obscure questions that my past self thought were so important. From my current vantage point, they looked trivial.

I realized in a flash that I am now in a new chapter of my life. I’m not sure when the page turned exactly, but the old chapter is finished. I feel a surge of remorse at all the unrealized goals and dreams I left behind there. But I know that what’s being asked of me now is to rise to a new level of self-expression and to step out onto a new stage – the world stage. 

 

Even after all this time, there are still ways I’m hiding. There are ways I’m holding back who I am out of fear. I avoid speaking hard truths to people I know need to hear them out of fear they’ll be offended. I avoid meeting influential leaders out of fear I’ll say something stupid, look foolish, and lose my chance to make an impression. I avoid delivering my message in plain language because I’m afraid someone will point out some missed nuance. After all these years of working in public, I find there are still levels upon levels of self-expression beyond what I currently know. 

I can see clearly that “details” are my security blanket. Finding them, recording them, organizing them, tracking them, using them to protect me from uncertainty. Like a pig wallowing in mud, I’ve long wallowed in my precious details. Part of what this next season is asking of me is to let go of details. To not worry about them so much. To not try to control them so tightly. To ignore them sometimes and go right to the heart of the matter before I’ve figured it out perfectly. 

Perfection – that old friend and enemy. It’s the name of the station flashing by the train window as I pull away. It’s time to let go of my last finger grip on any illusion of perfection that still remains. Soon there will be people all over the world reading my book, in languages I didn’t write in and countries I will never visit. Many of them won’t finish it, many won’t understand it, and many won’t find value in it. And there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I am trusting my life’s work to a vast network that doesn’t care about me and that I can’t influence. At the peak of my success I am most out of control – a perfectionist’s nightmare. 

It strikes me that the ultimate trajectory of this book is now out of my hands. Don’t get me wrong – there’s still TONS of interviews to record, events to speak at, and promotions to run. The marketing campaign has barely begun and will unfold over many months. But most of that is already pre-determined. The manuscript is finished, the talking points outlined. Once a baby is born, it’s halfway to being grown up, its essential nature already set. I am merely at the service of a second brain meme that has already gone beyond me and taken on a life of its own. 

I feel like I am standing at the precipice of the unknown, staring into the darkness. For more than 3 years, this book has defined my waking moments. It was a pre-defined commitment I had locked into place, and thrown away the key. For several years before that, developing the course was the driving force. But now, the degrees of freedom are opening up. The variables are unknown and at play. The relentless convergence of the last 5 years is finally giving way to divergence, like a narrow mountain pass giving way to a verdant valley. 

For the first time in a long time, I have the chance to ask myself the ancient questions: Who do I want to be? How do I want to live? What activities do I want to fill my days? Who do I want to spend those days with? What matters enough to devote my one precious life to, given that every day is a devotion? This much freedom is almost overwhelming. The muscle of obligation has grown a bit too strong, has been exercised a bit too much. It’s time to give up some of that raw strength in favor of fluidity once more.

I know who I am in the face of adversity, but how about in the face of abundance? Will I rise to the occasion of not having to struggle for survival? Will I be able to let go of the compromises I’ve had to make to get this far? The compromises to my health, my hobbies, my close friendships, and my carefree enjoyment of days with nothing on my mind? Who is the self that will emerge from this experience, and will I like them?

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