Tiago Forte's Blog, page 17

The 4 Identities of a Teacher: Reporter, Expert, Mentor, Role Model

One of the most invisible but important trends I’m seeing play out in the world today is the trend of everyone becoming a teacher.

Managers are teachers to their reports. Marketers educate their customers about their solution. Analysts train their clients in how to interpret the data. Engineers teach their organizations how to think in terms of first principles.

We’ve long understood that in today’s world, everyone has become a lifelong learner. What I think is less appreciated is that many of us therefore have to become lifelong teachers.

Being a teacher used to be limited to a specific, full-time, long-term profession that educated people during a single, limited period of their lives. That profession is needed more than ever, but at the same time, teaching has transcended a single profession.

No matter what you do in your work or life, there are people around you who could benefit tremendously from what you know. Whether that includes your employees and colleagues, followers and customers, or simply your children, I believe it’s important for us to embrace this new identity.

One of the most helpful frameworks I’ve ever encountered for understanding what it means to be a teacher is from Brendon Burchard, who runs a training program for entrepreneurial teachers called Experts Academy.

I’ve adapted it with some modifications of my own, summarized in the article below. I hope it helps you understand that as a teacher, your identity will evolve through four distinct phases, all of which have value, and all of which allow you to make an impact no matter how much (or how little) you know.

Every teacher naturally moves through four stages or identities over time:

ReporterExpertMentorRole model

Each one of these stages is important and valuable. There is always more knowledge to acquire, but whether you teach as a profession or as part of your career or business,  every step has something precious to teach you now.

The First Identity: Reporter

When you first start reading about and researching a subject, you probably don’t know much about it. That’s the reason you started looking into it in the first place – you knew little and wanted to know more.

At this point it can feel like you don’t have much to offer, when in fact you do: you have the naivete and innocence of a beginner. Your mind is like a blank slate, free of unspoken assumptions and unquestioned traditions.

At this first stage, your credibility comes from your lack of experience. You are a reporter, chasing leads, asking questions, and reporting your findings “live from the field.”

Think about an investigative journalist exploring a niche subculture or an emerging underground trend. We don’t expect them to be experts in that arena. How could they be? Their authority and contribution comes from their willingness to face the unknown and give us the play by play of everything they learn, discover, and are surprised by.

I sometimes see online creators who are “waiting” until they have enough knowledge and expertise to begin creating content and sharing their message. But in doing so, they are entirely missing out on this first stage, which will soon pass. Being a beginner is an incredibly valuable stage for a teacher.

Instead of treating “learning” as an initial step that you have to get through before becoming an expert with something to offer, treat the process of learning as a subject in itself – an experience that is worth reporting on in real time. There are insights and revelations you have in the midst of learning something for the first time that you won’t remember after the fact.

You can act as an open-minded observer who is seeing a subject through the eyes of a novice, and allow others to look through that lens and discover it alongside you. Not only is this a much more fun and collaborative approach to learning, but this reporting can bring you the attention, respect, and resources you need to get to the later stages.

As Burchard notes, Napoleon Hill essentially does the work of a reporter in his best-selling book Think and Grow Rich. Hill interviewed wealthy, famous people like Andrew Carnegie and synthesized their advice about success into useful takeaways that “regular” people could use. People continue buying the book to this day because of the value of that distilled wisdom.

Before I was considered a “productivity expert” in my own right, I spent a long time reporting on the ideas of others. I summarized best-selling books, taught the most influential productivity methods in my own words, and curated the best productivity tips and techniques for those who didn’t have as much time to explore them.

Knowing that I was in an early, curatorial stage of my career gave me the confidence to report on the ideas of others, compare and contrast their approaches, and hold off on offering my own advice until I had considered all the advice that already exists.

The Second Identity: Expert

Eventually, your time as a reporter will end. You will acquire enough knowledge and experience that you’ll inevitably begin to develop your own taste and form your own opinions about your subject.

This can’t be avoided or postponed. It happens naturally as a side effect of the time you are spending in your field of choice. You will come to know all its facets, the ins and outs, and the pros and cons of all the positions one might take.

At this second stage, your source of credibility switches from your impartiality, to your partiality. You no longer offer all the ways someone could approach your field; you begin to recommend what you think are the best ways, based on the experience you’ve accumulated immersing yourself in the details.

The word “expert” conjures up images of extremely specialized, complex technical knowledge, but consider all the practical skills that you’ve probably developed expertise in through producing tangible results in the real world.

Burchard suggests, “You may know how to get promoted, sew a blanket, get a great deal on a car, write a song, produce a movie, create a blog, get out of debt, lose some weight, improve your marriage, lead others, deal with criticism, give birth to a child, manage employees, ace an exam, find an agent, overcome fear, care for a sick loved one, give a good speech, buy a house, find the perfect clothing style, resume a normal life after a serious illness, or nearly anything you can think of.”

If you have struggled through something and survived, what did you learn from that experience that others might be able to use to lessen their own struggle? If you’ve experienced a turning point, a tragedy, or a triumph, that life lesson could be invaluable for others in their moment of greatest need. Never forget that expertise can come from books, or it can come from life experience, and the latter tends to be more useful for the everyday problems people are facing.

I’ve spent most of the past decade building up my reputation as a productivity expert. I’ve written many thousands of words about my ideas on this blog, been interviewed dozens of times, and will soon be publishing my own book. My confidence in my expertise comes not from a degree or institution, but from seeing the practical results it has helped people produce over the years.

The Third Identity: Mentor

Beyond serving as a reporter and an expert, a teacher can also become a mentor.

The problem with expertise is that it takes a lot of time and energy to maintain. You have to work to constantly stay at the leading edge of your field, updating your knowledge and keeping up to speed on the latest developments. That’s sustainable for a while, but eventually you’ll want to ease up on the gas pedal a little and turn your attention to capitalizing on the knowledge you’ve already attained.

It’s time to become a leader.

The crisis we are often faced with when we consider moving into a mentorship or leadership position is, how can we lead others when we ourselves are no longer at the very leading edge of our field? How can I lead a software company when my own software development skills are rusty? How can I lead a real estate agency when I haven’t personally closed a sale in years? How can I lead a science laboratory when my own experimental skills have atrophied? How can I run for local office when I’m not completely up to speed on all the latest issues?

You do it by serving as a mentor to others. You shift your emphasis from accumulating detailed technical knowledge to building teams to accumulate such knowledge. You redirect your attention from maximizing your own growth to investing in the growth of others. You use some of the surplus attention and resources you have access to to support talented young people who just need a break.

In other words, leadership as a teacher means turning your attention to the more holistic, subjective, tacit forms of knowledge needed to lead others, such as how to communicate effectively, how to inspire greatness in others, how to coach people through challenges, how to be self-aware and understand your own blind spots, and how to convey a vision that others are willing to follow.

Being a mentor has some distinct differences and advantages over being an expert:

You teach through who you are and what you do, not just what you say.You model behaviors that others can mimic without necessarily understanding all the reasoning behind them.The skills and knowledge of a mentor don’t change nearly as quickly, so you can offer them to more people over a longer period of time.You gain more leverage and more impact by building teams (or organizations) that embody what you know in forms that can extend your reach and outlive you.

Being a mentor isn’t something you can choose exactly. It is an identity that other people choose for you. They make you into a mentor when they want to learn something more tacit and implicit than can be transmitted via a lecture. Generally you wake up one day and find out that someone has made you their mentor. The only choice is whether to embrace that identity.

Serving as a mentor is a much more expansive, personal relationship than that of a teacher. Most people don’t have someone in their life that calls forth the best in them. Most people don’t have a coach or advisor pushing them to grow as a person. You can be that kind of person for them.

The Fourth Identity: Role Model

While mentorship is powerful, it is limited to people you know and can influence directly, which makes it hard to scale. Eventually, if you want to continue expanding your reach and your impact without working harder and longer, you’ll be faced with the possibility of taking on the fourth identity of a teacher: as a role model.

What does it look like to teach others without ever having to interact with them directly? Or even know who they are?

Consider someone like Chris Hadfield, who retired from a 35-year career as a pilot and astronaut almost a decade ago. As the first Canadian astronaut to perform extravehicular activity in space, he flew two Space Shuttle missions and served as commander of the International Space Station (ISS). He was responsible for a team that ran dozens of scientific experiments dealing with the impact of low gravity on human biology, among many other missions.

Hadfield is probably no longer an expert on all the latest scientific, technological, and political issues in space exploration, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a teacher. I would argue that he is at the peak of his teaching career. His life embodies the timeless, universal qualities that make astronauts role models: character, courage, selflessness, curiosity, generosity, and a pioneer spirit.

Hadfield has modeled what it means to be an astronaut by chronicling life on board the space station, taking pictures of the Earth and posting them on various social media platforms. Back on Earth, he is a frequent guest on television news and talk shows, helping spread awareness of the importance (and fun) of space travel.

While he probably can’t teach the most advanced courses on orbital dynamics, the stories and lessons that came out of Hadfield’s storied career will undoubtedly influence a generation of space explorers in ways that scientific knowledge could never do on its own. And that kind of teaching scales easily – for example, via Hadfield’s online course on space exploration on the MasterClass platform.

Role models are in many ways our most powerful form of teaching, because modeling is a medium of instruction that is far more scalable than any classroom. You can serve as a role model for hundreds, thousands, even millions of people at once. Role models transcend time and place – just look at the ways people like Nelson Mandela, Florence Nightingale, Martin Luther King Jr., and Margaret Hamilton continue to inspire people with their courage and selfless dignity long after their death.

Being a role model is a tremendous responsibility. People are looking to you to understand what it means to live a fulfilling, inspired life. They are in some sense modeling their life after yours, not just acquiring a narrow kind of expertise, which can be thrilling but also intimidating.

If you decide to accept the identity of a role model, people will sometimes put you up on a pedestal, mythologize your past, or treat your assertions as sacred doctrine. It comes with the territory. You’ll have incredible influence on others. It is your duty to use it wisely and humanely.

To be a role model is to teach primarily through your way of being in the world. People follow what you do more than what you say, which makes it possible to teach by example, as a living, breathing manifestation of what it means to have fully internalized a particular kind of expertise into your life. You may need to step back from the frontier of your field, but that’s okay, because by this point your network will be so extensive and influential that an endless stream of opportunities flows toward you from every direction. And by stepping back, you give young, ambitious upstarts the chance to shine.

When it comes to great leaders, you don’t need much of their time. With the greatest leaders, you don’t need any of their time. Imagine how far your message and your wisdom could spread, in time and space, if your method of instruction was how you lived your life.

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The post The 4 Identities of a Teacher: Reporter, Expert, Mentor, Role Model appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Yoga of Eating: Food as a Source of Information

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every fad diet and nutrition philosophy has one problem in common: they all ask you to mistrust the signals coming from your body, and to instead place your trust in an external authority. 

Even if the diet succeeds, you’ve lost faith in what your own body is telling you.

The choice of which food to eat is one of the most fundamental decisions we make. Food is our fuel, our locus of community, our nutrient source, and our primary interface with the natural world.

Yet all of our attitudes toward food can be traced back to one fundamental assumption: that we cannot trust our desires.

What if our cravings and urges for food are actually telling us something important?

We crave sugar because our body is telling us it needs comfort in the face of a challenging day. We crave processed foods because our body is telling us it can’t process the emotions it is experiencing. We crave rich foods as a form of self-care in the face of unsustainable demands on our spirit.

What if there was a different way? What if there was a way of eating that didn’t rely on strict rules, didn’t vilify any particular food, and put you more in touch with your desires instead of denying them?

Instead of using the rational mind and its sophisticated nutritional knowledge to overrule a stupid body which craves foods that are bad for it, what if we trusted that our body knows what food it needs, and listened to what it is telling us, even if that contradicts received wisdom about nutrition? 

This seems like a radical approach to food. Even more radical than the most restrictive, complex diet regimen. I’m supposed to simply trust my body to tell me what to eat? 

In his book The Yoga of Eating (affiliate link), author Charles Eisenstein tells the story of a personal experiment he conducted – to trust his body’s desires and to see where they led. It was an experiment to treat eating as a spiritual path, and offers an alternative approach to diet that doesn’t depend on finding which of hundreds of conflicting nutritional philosophies is correct.

This article is a summary of the parts of his story I found most interesting and helpful.

Food is a source of information

Food is a source of information about our environment, a complex biochemical language developed over millions of years of coevolution.

Eating is a special, even sacred time in which we are literally absorbing new elements into our system. There is tremendous information encoded in that food, from the exact conditions in which the ingredients were grown, to the people who prepared it, to the packaging and processing it underwent to find its way to your plate, to your own physiology and state of mind at the moment you eat it.

When you chew food slowly, fully absorbing its flavors and textures, you are more attuned to the information it carries. Your need for sensory fulfillment is more easily satisfied, leading you to enjoy simpler food, and less of it.

When you pay attention to the food you eat, your diet improves not because you exerted more willpower, but because you found the inherent delight contained in simple foods prepared with care. 

By this action, what am I saying “yes” to?

To decide what to eat without willpower but also without judgment, ask yourself, “By this action, what am I saying ‘yes’ to?

Treating food as information, every bite you eat connects you to everything that happened to bring that food into existence.

For example, suppose you eat a banana from a South American plantation, located on destroyed rainforest wrestled violently from indigenous tribes, who now labor at the plantation at starvation wages, using pesticides that pollute the ecosystem, shipped thousands of miles using polluting oil-fueled ships, by a company that puts small independent growers out of business through corrupt practices.

It’s just a banana, right? Yet if you’re honest with yourself, there is no way to avoid the implication that you become part of that entire chain of events by consuming it. Any way you look at it – from an informational lens, a nutritive lens, an economic lens, a sociopolitical lens, a metaphysical lens – you will arrive at the same conclusion. 

By eating that banana, you ever so slightly reinforce this state of affairs. You say “yes” to the world that produced those effects and those systems. Is it any wonder that so many of us experience chronic pain, illness, or a sense of alienation traced back to our food systems? 

When anonymous strangers grow, process, ship, and prepare our food, is it any wonder we often feel consumed by loneliness and estranged from others?

One principle: pay attention

The only principle of the Yoga of Eating is to give your food your full attention:

Before all meals, observe a brief moment of silence (or if you prefer, say a prayer) to center your attentionSlow down when eating, reserving a part of your awareness to see that each bite is fully chewed and swallowedEvery day, take one meal in silence, without distractions of any kind. If this is too difficult, start with 5 minutes of a mealAt every meal, let the first bite you take from each dish be with perfect attentivenessDuring lulls in the conversation, or when someone else is talking, patiently experience the pleasure of each mouthful

When you use these practices for attentive eating, even once a day or less, you begin a habit of completely chewing your food and receiving what it is telling you. And not by exerting more willpower, but by the sheer pleasure of the sensations themselves.

By paying attention to what you eat, you let your body know what it is getting. In turn, you can hear the body’s responses to the food it is receiving – is this satisfying or not? Is this meeting a need or not? When is enough enough?

You may find it takes time to develop greater sensitivity to the foods you eat. Many modern foods have powerful flavors that overwhelm and numb our palettes, demanding an even more intense flavor the next time. Our chewing becomes lazy and incomplete, since these flavors are obvious and immediate. Additives and processing confuse the body by offering tastes that don’t correspond to the food’s nutritive qualities.

You might be surprised to discover that some foods you thought you liked really don’t taste very good at all. Some foods you will find you are consuming only for the bodily effects they have – squashing a feeling of tiredness, assuaging a threatening fear, numbing an uncomfortable pain. Once you’ve identified those needs, you can look for other ways to satisfy them.

As you learn to listen to your body, it will naturally guide you toward the diet that is right for you. You will discover that certain foods complement your emotional state, the time of day, the weather, or other foods. Feel free to try certain foods out for a while to see if they fit. If you have mistrusted or ignored your body’s signals for years, don’t expect instant sensitivity to its needs.

Willpower is a temporary phenomenon

Any discussion of food quickly turns into a discussion of willpower.

We assume that in order to eat food that nourishes us, and to avoid the temptations of unhealthy foods, we must exert as much willpower as possible.

But everything we know about willpower tells us that it is severely limited. Willpower gets depleted, like a muscle, and that same muscle is being used to make all the other decisions and resist all the other temptations we are faced with in our lives.

Any diet (or other habit) based solely on willpower is bound to fail. There simply isn’t enough of it. 

We are told instead to rely on “systems.” Habit trackers, reminders, accountability mechanisms, coaches, rearranging our environment. But all of these are external mechanisms that bring us right back to the original problem: anything that teaches us to ignore our inner intuition ultimately robs us of our power. And without standing in our power, we are all the more vulnerable to external voices telling us what is best for us.

Often we use our self-discipline to tell our inner voice to shut up, preferring to trust in an external authority for what to eat. But another definition of self-discipline is “self-remembering.” It is about reminding ourselves of what is important to us and who we really are, and making a small adjustment that realigns us with our values.

When used in this way – to remember oneself, to come back into alignment – willpower is natural and energizing. Whereas when we are fighting ourselves, it is an ordeal. This kind of self-discipline comes naturally when we integrate into our present awareness the full experience of food.

Eating supports a certain way of life

Any given food supports a certain lifestyle.

Monks in a monastery will often fast or eat only the simplest, most plain foods not just because that is the tradition, but because the needs of the body are minimal. Eating a lot would only interfere with the work of the mind and spirit.

On the other hand, if you are living “in the world” – pursuing a career or raising a family, for example – you will need a different kind of fuel. A more nutrient-dense diet will support that lifestyle better.

Neither one is inherently superior. Each diet is aligned with a different way of being in the world.

There might be seasons of your life that call for a dramatically different diet. If you are going through a major life transition, you might be attracted to very simple plant foods and fasting. If you are building a company or launching a major new project, you might need strong, earthy flavors and proteins. 

Don’t be afraid to let go of a diet that is no longer serving you as your life changes.

Eating to be good

One reason strict diets appeal to us is that they make us feel good, worthy, and deserving. We love to sacrifice because it feels like we can earn the things we need through hard work.

But sacrifice is not inherently necessary, and it too can become a habit. We can learn to impulsively withhold from ourselves whatever it is we want or need, assuming that the greater our desire, the worse it must be for us. Our willpower becomes a weapon we wield against ourselves in a futile attempt to coerce ourselves into needing less.

When we ignore what our body is telling us, we cultivate in ourselves the skill of self-denial. The skill of saying no to what we need. But no matter how skilled we become, those needs don’t go away. They fester and they mutate, emerging in increasingly urgent and obsessive ways.

The result is an even deeper division, with cravings moving deeper and deeper the longer they are submerged. The tension builds, and the cravings and aversions become more intense. The body speaks its needs louder and louder, even as it does its best with what it has.

How can we be surprised when we emerge from this experiment joyless, aimless, looking for someone else to tell us what we should want?

The illness seeks the medicine

It’s so easy to judge our diet choices and shame ourselves for not following our best intentions.

But the Yoga of Eating isn’t about self-judgment. The choices you made in the past were the best you could do with the knowledge you had available to you. In fact, your body has always taken care of you, choosing foods that helped you to navigate the disappointments, grief, and trauma of life. 

You can thank your body for how far it’s taken you. It has received whatever you gave it, and did the best it could possibly do to turn it into energy, comfort, and strength. Your body loves you, in a sense. It always makes the best possible use of the nutrients it has access to.

Shame is the glue that holds unhealthy habits in place. And the opposite of shame is gratitude. Which means that, paradoxically, the moment you can view your body with total gratitude, you are in the best possible place from which to begin making a change. 

Let go of the diets of the past that you thought you needed to survive, receive love, and gain respect. Thank your past self for everything it’s done to keep you alive. Even the rolls of fat and the high cholesterol can be viewed as resources your body has stored up for the crises it thought it would face. 

How can we blame ourselves or anyone else for seeking to dull the sensations of a very painful world? How can we feel guilty for doing anything we can to address the feeling of wrongness in our experience of life? Food may have been our medicine, allowing us to continue functioning in a harsh environment.

But like any medicine, it eventually stops working. The quality of the underlying pain comes to the surface sooner or later. Then and only then is it time to give it up. Not because it’s bad or wrong, but because it no longer has the intended effects. 

Consider that the soul is wise, and always seeks out the right medicine for its condition. It might be television, social media, alcohol, drugs, toxic relationships, or conflict with others. If we view each of these as neither right or wrong, but as temporary palliatives, we can see that the medicine is always changing, always in flux. 

Rather than take away our medicine, we can instead change the conditions that make the medicine necessary. That change is, in fact, constantly happening. It is left to us to simply recognize it.

Underneath everything you do is a sweet, innocent being doing its best to cope with the confusing world it’s been thrust into. The pain we feel is our ally, because through its refusal to go away it continuously compels us to try to heal ourselves again and again.

When you understand every action, of yourself and others, as the touchingly naive response of an innocent child to a world gone incomprehensibly wrong, you will see glory in every person. You will realize that we each possess a divine and radiant beauty.

Food is an expression of Mother Nature’s unconditional love and generosity. Food is an expression of our appetite for life – the most primitive reminder that the world is good, that the world will provide. We consume too much not because we enjoy food too much, but because we enjoy it too little.

If you could completely extinguish your desire, it would only be because your desire is weak. Your resistance to external authority is your greatest expression of self-love, defending your essential goodness and wholeness in the face of a world trying to convince you otherwise.

The Yoga of Productivity

Everything that Charles Eisenstein learned in regards to food also applies to productivity.

We constantly mistrust ourselves and our desires for what to work on. We assume our natural inclinations toward work are lazy and will lead us astray if we give in to them. Any avoidance or aversion to a task we treat as shameful procrastination, to be rooted out and exterminated with copious amounts of coffee.

Like food, our work is an essential part of how we interact with the world. In information terms, it represents our contribution to society, our role in the community, the basis of our reputation and respect from the tribe. It’s easy to lose sight of this with knowledge work that can be so remote, abstract, and disconnected from the people we ultimately serve, but work is an act of service to someone somewhere.

As with food, we live in a time of plentiful productivity advice, ideologies, frameworks, and strategies vying for our attention. Each one promises salvation if we only believe enough and never stray from the doctrine. 

Yet once again, all these philosophies have one thing in common: they ask you to disregard the natural impulses arising from within your body, trusting instead in an outside source of authority. Even if the productivity technique succeeds, it is at the cost of your trust in yourself.

The Yoga of Productivity is to bring union to all the parts of yourself that you bring to your work. To trust that you are inherently good and worthy, and that your inner intuition ultimately knows what it needs and what is best for you. Every impulse – every bit of resistance, every moment of self-doubt, every minute of procrastination, every irrational deviation from the plan – is an important signal from your inner self.

A common objection to this line of thinking is, “Well if I followed my desires, my life would go completely off track.” 

Yes, maybe it would. But the life that is going off track is only one version of your life. You might find yourself pursuing different kinds of projects and goals. You might discover that you want to change roles or companies. You may even discover that you’ve chosen a career or business that isn’t compatible with your deepest self.

Those consequences might seem jarring, but it’s nothing compared to the alternative: finally succeeding in all your goals and all your ambitions, only to find out you have no idea who you are or what you want. Many seem to define professional success as the ability to force themselves to do what they don’t want to do, again and again for years on end. I wouldn’t wish that kind of success on my worst enemy. 

What would it look like to apply each of the principles of The Yoga of Eating we looked at above, but to productivity?

As with any kind of change, it begins and ends with paying attention. Each time you sit down to work, take a minute and close your eyes. Feel a sense of awareness permeating every part of your body. Ask yourself, “What does my body want to work on right now?”

Instead of pretending you have no choice for what to work on, and forcing yourself to do it, open yourself up to all the options at your disposal. It is actually very rare that there is only one, single task available to you at any given time. 

Ask yourself, “What are all the ways I could create value right now, and which of them is most in alignment with my emotional state, my natural curiosity, and my heartfelt purpose in this moment?” 

Repeat this 60-second ritual every time you switch to a new kind of task. Check in with yourself and sense if there is any particular kind of work that your body is craving right now. 

I find that depending on the time of day, how hungry or tired I am, the weather and temperature, and what’s going on in my surroundings and in my life, I may be drawn to quieter, more focused work, or collaborative activity, or repetitive rote work, or more imaginative and open-ended work.

I’m often surprised that all I need is to pause for a minute, or get a drink of water, or take a short walk, and my mood shifts enough that a task that seemed impossible suddenly becomes much more palatable.

If these questions don’t lead you anywhere, start by simply trying to detect what you are feeling now, and giving it the most precise name you can think of. Ask yourself, “What is the truth or need this feeling is pointing to in this moment?” 

If you are feeling overwhelmed, what is that feeling telling you you need to come back into balance? If you are feeling the need to procrastinate, what do you need to gain clarity on to feel a sense of agency? If you feel resistance to a project or a client, what is that resistance pointing to that isn’t in alignment with who you are?

Learning to listen to yourself

The yogic approach to eating and to productivity have one thing in common: they ask you to listen to what the voice of intuition inside is telling you.

You may think that your body hates all kinds of work equally, but as your awareness grows, you’ll discover that isn’t true at all. Your body’s attraction or aversion to a particular kind of task is extremely sensitive and dynamic, varying wildly even within the span of a few minutes or hours.

You might discover that certain kinds of tasks you thought you loved performing don’t bring much long-term satisfaction. Other kinds of tasks that felt like torture and seemed to take forever, once you approach them with curiosity, surprisingly turn out to require only minutes. You will uncover many facets of your motivation, coming to realize that sometimes you can change one variable in your work environment and a whole new pathway for progress you weren’t seeing will open up to you.

As you learn to listen to your body, it will naturally guide you toward the tasks, projects, strategies, and approaches that align best with your deepest self. Certain seasons of your life may require very different approaches to how you work. There are times when you do need to be checking your email constantly, reacting to the needs of the people around you, and iterating at a rapid pace. Other times deep focus is more appropriate, calling for you to go into isolation and think through ideas carefully.

Don’t be afraid to let go of a productivity tip, habit, technique, or tool as your life naturally changes. Release them with gratitude like a beloved child heading off to school. Don’t believe the lie that self-sacrifice is the only way to perform. You will end up sacrificing the very curiosity and enthusiasm for life that makes achievements worth having.

Notice that every request you agree to, every decision you approve, and every commitment you make in your work reinforces the current state of affairs. If there is a certain kind of work you no longer want to do, every minute spent doing it makes it more likely to recur in the future. Every time you say yes to a request that your heart is saying no to, you increase the odds that kind of request will come your way again.

Remember that all parts of yourself are connected, and all are necessary to keep you healthy and safe. Pursuing this path means you are deciding to treat your work not just as a means of making a living, but as a path of personal growth within itself. 

If we treat the self as holistic, we see that every part affects every other part. Which means any recurring obstacle in your productivity – a persistent problem with focusing, a tendency to leave things unfinished, difficulty setting boundaries with coworkers – is a symptom of a deeper underlying part of yourself that you haven’t yet learned to accept, understand, and love.

All parts of yourself are connected, all parts affect all the others, and all are worthy of love and acceptance. At the heart of our struggle with our desires is self-division. After all, the self cannot fight itself unless it is split in two.

The choice of whether to face those warring parts, forgive them, and integrate them back into the fold of your self-love is yours and yours alone.

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The post The Yoga of Eating: Food as a Source of Information appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Yoga of Eating: Food as a Source of Psychospiritual Information

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every fad diet and nutrition philosophy has one problem in common: they all ask you to mistrust the signals coming from your body, and to instead place your trust in an external authority. 

Even if the diet succeeds, you’ve lost faith in what your own body is telling you.

The choice of which food to eat is one of the most fundamental decisions we make. Food is our fuel, our locus of community, our nutrient source, and our primary interface with the natural world.

Yet all of our attitudes toward food can be traced back to one fundamental assumption: that we cannot trust our desires.

What if our cravings and urges for food are actually telling us something important?

We crave sugar because our body is telling us it needs comfort in the face of a challenging day. We crave processed foods because our body is telling us it can’t process the emotions it is experiencing. We crave rich foods as a form of self-care in the face of unsustainable demands on our spirit.

What if there was a different way? What if there was a way of eating that didn’t rely on strict rules, didn’t vilify any particular food, and put you more in touch with your desires instead of denying them?

Instead of using the rational mind and its sophisticated nutritional knowledge to overrule a stupid body which craves foods that are bad for it, what if we trusted that our body knows what food it needs, and listened to what it is telling us, even if that contradicts received wisdom about nutrition? 

This seems like a radical approach to food. Even more radical than the most restrictive, complex diet regimen. I’m supposed to simply trust my body to tell me what to eat? 

In his book The Yoga of Eating (affiliate link), author Charles Eisenstein tells the story of a personal experiment he conducted – to trust his body’s desires and to see where they led. It was an experiment to treat eating as a spiritual path, and offers an alternative approach to diet that doesn’t depend on finding which of hundreds of conflicting nutritional philosophies is correct.

This article is a summary of the parts of his story I found most interesting and helpful.

Food is a source of information

Food is a source of information about our environment, a complex biochemical language developed over millions of years of coevolution.

Eating is a special, even sacred time in which we are literally absorbing new elements into our system. There is tremendous information encoded in that food, from the exact conditions in which the ingredients were grown, to the people who prepared it, to the packaging and processing it underwent to find its way to your plate, to your own physiology and state of mind at the moment you eat it.

When you chew food slowly, fully absorbing its flavors and textures, you are more attuned to the information it carries. Your need for sensory fulfillment is more easily satisfied, leading you to enjoy simpler food, and less of it. When you have no clear message from your body, information on nutrition can be helpful to guide you as well.

Your diet will improve not because you exerted more willpower, but because you found the inherent delight contained in simple foods prepared with care. 

By this action, what am I saying “yes” to?

To decide what to eat without willpower but also without judgment, ask yourself, “By this action, what am I saying ‘yes’ to?

Treating food as information, every bite you eat connects you to everything that happened to bring that food into existence.

For example, suppose you eat a banana from a South American plantation, located on destroyed rainforest wrestled violently from indigenous tribes, who now labor at the plantation at starvation wages, using pesticides that pollute the ecosystem, shipped thousands of miles using polluting oil-fueled ships, by a company that puts small independent growers out of business through corrupt practices.

It’s just a banana, right? Yet if you’re honest with yourself, there is no way to avoid the implication that you become part of that entire chain of events by consuming it. Any way you look at it – from an informational lens, a nutritive lens, an economic lens, a sociopolitical lens, a metaphysical lens – you will arrive at the same conclusion. 

By eating that banana, you ever so slightly reinforce this state of affairs. You say “yes” to the world that produced those effects and those systems. Is it any wonder that so many of us experience chronic pain, illness, or a sense of alienation traced back to our food systems? 

When anonymous strangers grow, process, ship, and prepare our food, is it any wonder we often feel consumed by loneliness and estranged from others?

One principle: pay attention

The only principle of the Yoga of Eating is to give your food your full attention:

Before all meals, observe a brief moment of silence (or if you prefer, say a prayer) to center your attentionSlow down when eating, reserving a part of your awareness to see that each bite is fully chewed and swallowedEvery day, take one meal in silence, without distractions of any kind. If this is too difficult, start with 5 minutes of a mealAt every meal, let the first bite you take from each dish be with perfect attentivenessDuring lulls in the conversation, or when someone else is talking, patiently experience the pleasure of each mouthful

When you use these practices for attentive eating, even once a day or less, you begin a habit of completely chewing your food and receiving what it is telling you. And not by exerting more willpower, but by the sheer pleasure of the sensations themselves.

By paying attention to what you eat, you let your body know what it is getting. In turn, you can hear the body’s responses to the food it is receiving – is this satisfying or not? Is this meeting a need or not? When is enough enough?

You may find it takes time to develop greater sensitivity to the foods you eat. Many modern foods have powerful flavors that overwhelm and numb our palettes, demanding an even more intense flavor the next time. Our chewing becomes lazy and incomplete, since these flavors are obvious and immediate. Additives and processing confuse the body by offering tastes that don’t correspond to the food’s nutritive qualities.

You might be surprised to discover that some foods you thought you liked really don’t taste very good at all. Some foods you will find you are consuming only for the bodily effects they have – squashing a feeling of tiredness, assuaging a threatening fear, numbing an uncomfortable pain. Once you’ve identified those needs, you can look for other ways to satisfy them.

As you learn to listen to your body, it will naturally guide you toward the diet that is right for you. You will discover that certain foods complement your emotional state, the time of day, the weather, or other foods. Feel free to try certain foods out for a while to see if they fit. If you have mistrusted or ignored your body’s signals for years, don’t expect instant sensitivity to its needs.

Willpower is a temporary phenomenon

Any discussion of food quickly turns into a discussion of willpower.

We assume that in order to eat food that nourishes us, and to avoid the temptations of unhealthy foods, we must exert as much willpower as possible.

But everything we know about willpower tells us that it is severely limited. Willpower gets depleted, like a muscle, and that same muscle is being used to make all the other decisions and resist all the other temptations we are faced with in our lives.

Any diet (or other habit) based solely on willpower is bound to fail. There simply isn’t enough of it. 

We are told instead to rely on “systems.” Habit trackers, reminders, accountability mechanisms, coaches, rearranging our environment. But all of these are external mechanisms that bring us right back to the original problem: anything that teaches us to ignore our inner intuition ultimately robs us of our power. And without standing in our power, we are all the more vulnerable to external voices telling us what is best for us.

Often we use our self-discipline to tell our inner voice to shut up, preferring to trust in an external authority for what to eat. But another definition of self-discipline is “self-remembering.” It is about reminding ourselves of what is important to us and who we really are, and making a small adjustment that realigns us with our values.

When used in this way – to remember oneself, to come back into alignment – willpower is natural and energizing. Whereas when we are fighting ourselves, it is an ordeal. This kind of self-discipline comes naturally when we integrate into our present awareness the full experience of food.

Eating supports a certain way of life

Any given food supports a certain lifestyle.

Monks in a monastery will often fast or eat only the simplest, most plain foods not just because that is the tradition, but because the needs of the body are minimal. Eating a lot would only interfere with the work of the mind and spirit.

On the other hand, if you are living “in the world” – pursuing a career or raising a family, for example – you will need a different kind of fuel. A more nutrient-dense diet will support that lifestyle better.

Neither one is inherently superior. Each diet is aligned with a different way of being in the world.

There might be seasons of your life that call for a dramatically different diet. If you are going through a major life transition, you might be attracted to very simple plant foods and fasting. If you are building a company or launching a major new project, you might need strong, earthy flavors and proteins. 

Don’t be afraid to let go of a diet that is no longer serving you as your life changes.

Eating to be good

One reason strict diets appeal to us is that they make us feel good, worthy, and deserving. We love to sacrifice because it feels like we can earn the things we need through hard work.

But sacrifice is not inherently necessary, and it too can become a habit. We can learn to impulsively withhold from ourselves whatever it is we want or need, assuming that the greater our desire, the worse it must be for us. Our willpower becomes a weapon we wield against ourselves in a futile attempt to coerce ourselves into needing less.

When we ignore what our body is telling us, we cultivate in ourselves the skill of self-denial. The skill of saying no to what we need. But no matter how skilled we become, those needs don’t go away. They fester and they mutate, emerging in increasingly urgent and obsessive ways.

The result is an even deeper division, with cravings moving deeper and deeper the longer they are submerged. The tension builds, and the cravings and aversions become more intense. The body speaks its needs louder and louder, even as it does its best with what it has.

How can we be surprised when we emerge from this experiment joyless, aimless, looking for someone else to tell us what we should want?

The illness seeks the medicine

It’s so easy to judge our diet choices and shame ourselves for not following our best intentions.

But the Yoga of Eating isn’t about self-judgment. The choices you made in the past were the best you could do with the knowledge you had available to you. In fact, your body has always taken care of you, choosing foods that helped you to navigate the disappointments, grief, and trauma of life. 

You can thank your body for how far it’s taken you. It has received whatever you gave it, and did the best it could possibly do to turn it into energy, comfort, and strength. Your body loves you, in a sense. It always makes the best possible use of the nutrients it has access to.

Shame is the glue that holds unhealthy habits in place. And the opposite of shame is gratitude. Which means that, paradoxically, the moment you can view your body with total gratitude, you are in the best possible place from which to begin making a change. 

Let go of the diets of the past that you thought you needed to survive, receive love, and gain respect. Thank your past self for everything it’s done to keep you alive. Even the rolls of fat and the high cholesterol can be viewed as resources your body has stored up for the crises it thought it would face. 

How can we blame ourselves or anyone else for seeking to dull the sensations of a very painful world? How can we feel guilty for doing anything we can to address the feeling of wrongness in our experience of life? Food may have been our medicine, allowing us to continue functioning in a harsh environment.

But like any medicine, it eventually stops working. The quality of the underlying pain comes to the surface sooner or later. Then and only then is it time to give it up. Not because it’s bad or wrong, but because it no longer has the intended effects. 

Consider that the soul is wise, and always seeks out the right medicine for its condition. It might be television, social media, alcohol, drugs, toxic relationships, or conflict with others. If we view each of these as neither right or wrong, but as temporary palliatives, we can see that the medicine is always changing, always in flux. 

Rather than take away our medicine, we can instead change the conditions that make the medicine necessary. That change is, in fact, constantly happening. It is left to us to simply recognize it.

Underneath everything you do is a sweet, innocent being doing its best to cope with the confusing world it’s been thrust into. The pain we feel is our ally, because through its refusal to go away it continuously compels us to try to heal ourselves again and again.

When you understand every action, of yourself and others, as the touchingly naive response of an innocent child to a world gone incomprehensibly wrong, you will see glory in every person. You will realize that we each possess a divine and radiant beauty.

Food is an expression of Mother Nature’s unconditional love and generosity. Food is an expression of our appetite for life – the most primitive reminder that the world is good, that the world will provide. We consume too much not because we enjoy food too much, but because we enjoy it too little.

If you could completely extinguish your desire, it would only be because your desire is weak. Your resistance to external authority is your greatest expression of self-love, defending your essential goodness and wholeness in the face of a world trying to convince you otherwise.

The Yoga of Productivity

Everything that Charles Eisenstein learned in regards to food also applies to productivity.

We constantly mistrust ourselves and our desires for what to work on. We assume our natural inclinations toward work are lazy and will lead us astray if we give in to them. Any avoidance or aversion to a task we treat as shameful procrastination, to be rooted out and exterminated with copious amounts of coffee.

Like food, our work is an essential part of how we interact with the world. In information terms, it represents our contribution to society, our role in the community, the basis of our reputation and respect from the tribe. It’s easy to lose sight of this with knowledge work that can be so remote, abstract, and disconnected from the people we ultimately serve, but work is an act of service to someone somewhere.

As with food, we live in a time of plentiful productivity advice, ideologies, frameworks, and strategies vying for our attention. Each one promises salvation if we only believe enough and never stray from the doctrine. 

Yet once again, all these philosophies have one thing in common: they ask you to disregard the natural impulses arising from within your body, trusting instead in an outside source of authority. Even if the productivity technique succeeds, it is at the cost of your trust in yourself.

The Yoga of Productivity is to bring union to all the parts of yourself that you bring to your work. To trust that you are inherently good and worthy, and that your inner intuition ultimately knows what it needs and what is best for you. Every impulse – every bit of resistance, every moment of self-doubt, every minute of procrastination, every irrational deviation from the plan – is an important signal from your inner self.

A common objection to this line of thinking is, “Well if I followed my desires, my life would go completely off track.” 

Yes, maybe it would. But the life that is going off track is only one version of your life. You might find yourself pursuing different kinds of projects and goals. You might discover that you want to change roles or companies. You may even discover that you’ve chosen a career or business that isn’t compatible with your deepest self.

Those consequences might seem jarring, but it’s nothing compared to the alternative: finally succeeding in all your goals and all your ambitions, only to find out you have no idea who you are or what you want. Many seem to define professional success as the ability to force themselves to do what they don’t want to do, again and again for years on end. I wouldn’t wish that kind of success on my worst enemy. 

What would it look like to apply each of the principles of The Yoga of Eating we looked at above, but to productivity?

As with any kind of change, it begins and ends with paying attention. Each time you sit down to work, take a minute and close your eyes. Feel a sense of awareness permeating every part of your body. Ask yourself, “What does my body want to work on right now?”

Instead of pretending you have no choice for what to work on, and forcing yourself to do it, open yourself up to all the options at your disposal. It is actually very rare that there is only one, single task available to you at any given time. 

Ask yourself, “What are all the ways I could create value right now, and which of them is most in alignment with my emotional state, my natural curiosity, and my heartfelt purpose in this moment?” 

Repeat this 60-second ritual every time you switch to a new kind of task. Check in with yourself and sense if there is any particular kind of work that your body is craving right now. 

I find that depending on the time of day, how hungry or tired I am, the weather and temperature, and what’s going on in my surroundings and in my life, I may be drawn to quieter, more focused work, or collaborative activity, or repetitive rote work, or more imaginative and open-ended work.

I’m often surprised that all I need is to pause for a minute, or get a drink of water, or take a short walk, and my mood shifts enough that a task that seemed impossible suddenly becomes much more palatable.

If these questions don’t lead you anywhere, start by simply trying to detect what you are feeling now, and giving it the most precise name you can think of. Ask yourself, “What is the truth or need this feeling is pointing to in this moment?” 

If you are feeling overwhelmed, what is that feeling telling you you need to come back into balance? If you are feeling the need to procrastinate, what do you need to gain clarity on to feel a sense of agency? If you feel resistance to a project or a client, what is that resistance pointing to that isn’t in alignment with who you are?

Learning to listen to yourself

The yogic approach to eating and to productivity have one thing in common: they ask you to listen to what the voice of intuition inside is telling you.

You may think that your body hates all kinds of work equally, but as your awareness grows, you’ll discover that isn’t true at all. Your body’s attraction or aversion to a particular kind of task is extremely sensitive and dynamic, varying wildly even within the span of a few minutes or hours.

You might discover that certain kinds of tasks you thought you loved performing don’t bring much long-term satisfaction. Other kinds of tasks that felt like torture and seemed to take forever, once you approach them with curiosity, surprisingly turn out to require only minutes. You will uncover many facets of your motivation, coming to realize that sometimes you can change one variable in your work environment and a whole new pathway for progress you weren’t seeing will open up to you.

As you learn to listen to your body, it will naturally guide you toward the tasks, projects, strategies, and approaches that align best with your deepest self. Certain seasons of your life may require very different approaches to how you work. There are times when you do need to be checking your email constantly, reacting to the needs of the people around you, and iterating at a rapid pace. Other times deep focus is more appropriate, calling for you to go into isolation and think through ideas carefully.

Don’t be afraid to let go of a productivity tip, habit, technique, or tool as your life naturally changes. Release them with gratitude like a beloved child heading off to school. Don’t believe the lie that self-sacrifice is the only way to perform. You will end up sacrificing the very curiosity and enthusiasm for life that makes achievements worth having.

Notice that every request you agree to, every decision you approve, and every commitment you make in your work reinforces the current state of affairs. If there is a certain kind of work you no longer want to do, every minute spent doing it makes it more likely to recur in the future. Every time you say yes to a request that your heart is saying no to, you increase the odds that kind of request will come your way again.

Remember that all parts of yourself are connected, and all are necessary to keep you healthy and safe. Pursuing this path means you are deciding to treat your work not just as a means of making a living, but as a path of personal growth within itself. 

If we treat the self as holistic, we see that every part affects every other part. Which means any recurring obstacle in your productivity – a persistent problem with focusing, a tendency to leave things unfinished, difficulty setting boundaries with coworkers – is a symptom of a deeper underlying part of yourself that you haven’t yet learned to accept, understand, and love.

All parts of yourself are connected, all parts affect all the others, and all are worthy of love and acceptance. At the heart of our struggle with our desires is self-division. After all, the self cannot fight itself unless it is split in two.

The choice of whether to face those warring parts, forgive them, and integrate them back into the fold of your self-love is yours and yours alone.

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The post The Yoga of Eating: Food as a Source of Psychospiritual Information appeared first on Forte Labs.

Tiago’s 2021 Year in Review

2021 was the hardest year of my life.

It all started, as so many things these days do, in 2020. Our entire lives changed within the span of a few months that year, from moving back to the U.S. from Mexico City in March, to buying and moving into our first home in May, to welcoming our son Caio in October.

On top of all this personal change, the business exploded in 2020 as online education rose to meet the challenges of the COVID pandemic and lockdown. We expanded our marketing, hiring, and operations to meet the demand, thankful that we were spared the impact that hit so many other businesses.

I thought we handled all of this very well in 2020. Little did I know, all this change was building up like a deep underwater swell. In 2021, that hidden swell became a tsunami wave.

Looking back, the common factor in everything that felt challenging this year was chronic sleep deprivation. For the first few months after his birth, Caio slept like an angel. With the help of the miraculous Snoo, an intelligent bassinet that rocks babies to sleep based on their movement and sounds, we floated peacefully in the calm before the storm.

Around February of 2021, the Snoo stopped working, and our lives were thrown into chaos. Caio started needing multiple attempts to go to sleep, and then awoke several times throughout the night. At around 5 or 6am, he would wake up for good, which meant at least one of us had to be up and about.

Even with the help of books like The Happy Sleeper (affiliate link), which I summarized for quick reference, and plentiful advice from our moms who together raised 9 children, we struggled all year to get enough sleep. This chronic lack of sleep in turn took a toll on every aspect of our life – Lauren and I made worse decisions about what to eat, skipped exercise because we were too tired, felt more reactive and temperamental at work, and were less patient and understanding with each other.

I found that sleep deprivation is cumulative. It builds up and compounds so that 2 months of insufficient sleep is more than two times worse than 1 month. It’s like being jetlagged, or drunk – a pervasive cognitive tax that makes everything seem more dramatic, more threatening, and more overwhelming. Sleep scarcity makes everything else also seem scarce.

Instead of taking things easy and giving ourselves more time, we hit the gas pedal on the business even harder. From the moment I signed a book deal in April 2020, it has felt we are on a fixed timeline marching toward publication. 2021 was the pivotal year to finish the manuscript, build our team, design and launch the promotional campaign, and open the earliest pre-orders for the book. None of that was going to wait, and I didn’t feel like I could either.

This meant that the months of peak sleep deprivation coincided with the period when I needed to do my best thinking to finish the book manuscript. On many days I struggled to get through even just one page. The result was too many days spent in survival mode this year. Too much time when I felt my time horizon shortened, from months or weeks to days or hours.

I often found myself ignoring everything that wasn’t needed to get through the day. I ignored the consequences of my short-term decisions, whether that meant letting the laundry or dishes pile up, ignoring household maintenance, or ordering takeout for the fifth time in a week. Living in survival mode is like spiraling into debt. Each day adds to the pile of future problems you know you’re going to have to face

It doesn’t matter, because you know you won’t be around to experience those future consequences if you don’t make it through the next few hours.

In last year’s review, I wrote: “It’s become very clear to me that becoming a ‘family man’ is a decision. It doesn’t happen automatically just because you have a kid. It’s a distinct identity shift that I think has to be by choice. My intention for this year-end review is to lay the foundation for my shift from a work-obsessed to a family-centric life, with my son and wife at the center of my universe. I want everything else in my life to be in service of them, simply because nothing else matters as much as them.”

Oh how naive I was.

The truth is that it’s taken me a full year since the birth of our son to even begin to truly understand how he’s changed our lives forever. If I’m honest with myself, a lot of the reason the year was so hard is that we didn’t make the lifestyle changes needed to accommodate him.

For example, it’s now clear that we are going to be waking up at 6 or 7am for the foreseeable future, which means we need to go to bed much earlier, around 9pm instead of our usual 11pm bedtime. We put Caio to bed at 7pm every night, and we got in the habit of treating 7-11pm as “our time.” When in reality we have only a couple hours after he falls asleep before it’s time to begin our own bedtime routine.

There are so many other changes that we only began to integrate in 2021. Travel is far more complicated than before and even short trips require a lot of preparation and planning. The daily routine of feedings, naps, and walks is paramount, and disrupting it is hardly ever worth it. We lived relatively carefree and adaptable lives before Caio arrived, but now I’m learning that a rigid routine is a gift to all of our circadian rhythms.

Despite all these challenges, 2021 was also the best year of my life. Paradoxical, I know.

Having kids is like taking a massive fisheye lens to your life. Everything gets exaggerated, for better or worse. The good parts become amazing. The not-so-good parts become truly awful. Very little is left unchanged or untouched. The small moments – the first time he laughed, the first time he flipped over on his own, the first time he crawled – impart an almost incalculable joy at the most unexpected times. So many everyday moments feel infused with meaning, as I remember my own childhood and share in the delights of his discovery of the world.

Let’s begin this year’s review by revisiting the goals I set in the last one.

2021 goals revisited

Grow my email newsletter list to 100k

A year ago I wrote, “In 2020 I averaged 86 new subscribers per day, taking into account unsubscribes, and to reach this goal in 2021 I’ll need to approximately double this to an average of 164 per day.”

What actually happened? We grew the email list from 39,909 to 54,880 subscribers, or a 37.5% increase. That comes out to an average 42 new subscribers per day, net of unsubscribes. Instead of doubling our growth rate, we halved it!

Obviously this isn’t what I wanted, but I also understand why it happened. I was barely able to give email growth any attention this year, and the fact that it did even this well is a testament to the power of evergreen content. We’ve just made our first full-time hire focused completely on audience growth, and I expect we’ll turn this around in 2022.

Maintain our focus on our two flagship courses

A year ago I committed to focusing on our two flagship courses, Building a Second Brain and Write of Passage, and to not create any new courses or products. We did that successfully, and experienced tremendous growth and innovation as a result.

The two online programs I helped launch in 2020, The Art of Accomplishment (taught by Joe Hudson) and the Keystone Course Accelerator (taught by Billy Broas), held their second cohorts this year with incredible results. I’m beginning to see these 4 programs as a larger ecosystem, amounting to something like a complete education for anyone seeking to develop and share their ideas online:

First people take Building a Second Brain, learning how to master their knowledge workflow and develop new ideas over timeSecond, they take Write of Passage (taught by David Perell) to learn how to express their thinking and expertise in writing for a public audienceThird, if they want to go deeper into the personal growth that always represents the true bottleneck on entrepreneurial growth and creative self-expression, they take The Art of AccomplishmentFourth, if they want to follow in our footsteps and make an impact on others through their ideas, products, or services, they take the Keystone Course Accelerator and learn how to effectively market and scale their course, coaching, or information product

Altogether, these 4 programs represent about 22 weeks of instruction, and cost somewhere between $20,000–30,000 depending on the pricing tier and add-ons selected. In other words, it is comparable to a single semester at an elite university in terms of time commitment and cost. While offering, I would argue, vastly greater benefits for the investment versus what any university can offer.

I currently have no intention of centralizing these courses into a single curriculum or formally linking our offerings together. Every student is on their own unique learning journey, and it may only partially intersect with ours. And each instructor has to be free to evolve their course in the direction they see fit. I’m sharing this mostly as an observation, that individual courses that have individually found an audience can be combined into something much greater than the sum of their parts.

Launch 100 cohort-based courses through the Keystone Course Accelerator

After two successful cohorts of Keystone, it’s become very clear that the ideal target market for this program isn’t fledgling course creators. You have to have a product that’s already working before it makes sense to scale it. Billy has pivoted towards existing, mature course instructors who are ready to invest in creating a marketing flywheel, so this goal ended up being ill-conceived.

Going forward, it won’t be so much about bringing new courses into existence as much as magnifying the impact existing courses are having. Keystone remains my top recommendation for anyone seeking to follow in my footsteps and scale an online education business.

Run a live cohort with 2,000 students at once

We very nearly did this, with cohort 12 of Building a Second Brain counting more than 1,600 new students and returning alumni combined. From that first small cohort of 30 people, we’ve now taught more than 5,000 learners from more than 100 countries how to build a Second Brain.

I wrote last year, “…we’re going to have to reinvent many of the ways that traditional universities have scaled learning in the physical world. We’ll need teaching assistants who can cater to the individual needs of students, labs that take the theories and apply them experimentally, self-organized study groups where students take the initiative, electives and seminars that students can mix and match into their own majors and minors, etc. The key is that the quality of the student experience has to get better, not worse, as we scale.”

Yeah, no kidding.

We made a huge number of changes and improvements to cohort 12 and 13 this year, which you can read about in depth here. At the same time, I’ve realized that we’re relying on the cohort to do too many things at once. Every 6 months we have to simultaneously:

Iterate on the learning design and student experienceImprove the core material based on past feedbackReactivate the community, which lies mostly dormant between cohortsRecruit and train new course staff and a new group of alumni mentorsPlan and relaunch a whole new marketing campaign to communicate all these changes

Trying to do so much for each cohort makes them chaotic and stressful. Our desire to make the biggest possible improvements conflicts with our need to reuse and capitalize on existing assets. There is little continuity in staffing between cohorts, because we can’t afford to keep people employed for such long periods without new revenue, which means we have to retrain them every time.

All this has led me to conclude that it’s time to develop a new educational offering. We are envisioning a subscription-based, private learning community that makes the experience of building a Second Brain into a longer term, slower and steadier, more self-guided path. While pairing it with a community and roster of coaches to make sure that people get the feedback and accountability they need to be successful. We’ll share more about that soon.

Make operational excellence and customer service central pillars of our business

The truth is, the systems and people needed to scale to our current size are quite far beyond what I can manage or even understand.

I’ve gone from teaching and managing everything myself, to leading a team of over 40 people, including our own team and a group of freelance coaches and volunteer moderators. To navigate that growth, I’ve relied heavily on our Director of Course Operations Monica Rysavy, who joined early in the year, and on Course Director Steven Zen, who joined in September just before cohort 13.

We now have a centralized database of student records in Airtable that combines and integrates student data from over a dozen separate sources, including things like Zoom attendance, Teachable transactions, Circle submissions, and ConvertKit email engagement metrics, among others. We have a unified profile for each student that takes our course that shows us their choices and behavior across all the different platforms we use to deliver our program. We’re just at the beginning of what this database will allow us to do in the future.

A year ago I wrote, “To have the impact we want, we have to rely on frictionless operations to prevent trouble before it arises, to help customers solve their own problems, and to use content and education to make customer support a value-add instead of a backup plan.”

We’ve built the systems to deliver on the first part of that promise, and next year I want to use it to make our customer service the best in the industry.

Redesign BASB brand identity and apply it to new website

We barely got this done before the end of the year, but I’m proud to say we now have a beautiful, comprehensive, deeply thoughtful visual identity for all things Second Brain! You can read all about it here: The New Building a Second Brain: Brand Reveal.

I previously wrote about this project, “My goal isn’t simply to have a pretty looking website. It is to unify the customer experience across all the different platforms and formats we use to deliver our education. A reader of the Building a Second Brain book should be able to finish reading, decide they want to go deeper, and sign up for the course without any friction or confusion. Branding is really about creating a world for people to inhabit, and making it as easy as possible to move within it toward what they’re seeking.”

We absolutely delivered on that goal, in partnership with designer Maya P. Lim, and I’m certain the new brand we created will powerfully support our efforts for years to come.

Hire Director of Content

Last time I wrote, “…after years of slow, organic growth based on my individual efforts and word of mouth, I believe we have all the major pieces to create a truly global, transformational media platform for teaching people how to work smarter in the 21st century.”

Along with Monica, we made three other key hires this year to support that vision: Marc Koenig as our first Director of Content in charge of all our content creation and distribution, Steven Zen as our new Course Director, and Julia Saxena as our first Marketing Manager focused on marketing and audience growth.

Back then it was only a wish, but with the dream team we’ve put together this year it now feels like an imminent reality. It’s difficult for me to overstate how much trust I have in this group of people to blow through our wildest ambitions. We have the benefit of drawing on an incredible community of people who already know what we do and believe in our mission, which has made it possible for a small, bootstrapped startup like us to recruit world-class talent.

Grow YouTube following to 50k subscribers

Not everything went so according to plan, and that applies primarily to my video ambitions.

Last year I wrote: “I’m going to make a major effort in the second half of 2021 to post more videos and grow my YouTube following. This will be partly the responsibility of the Managing Editor mentioned above, because the post-production process of downloading, editing, preparing, and uploading videos is one of the main bottlenecks to my current output. A second piece of this is the home studio we’re building in our garage, which will give me a space to set up the equipment without having to constantly take it down. And third, I’m going to look for a video editor that I can outsource editing to.”

I set a big goal for 2021 – multiplying our YouTube following by more than double, from less than 20k to 50k subscribers. The interesting thing about goals is that the level of ambition you set your sights on right at the beginning determines the very first steps that you have to take to be able to reach them.

For example, if you set a goal to sell 100 chocolate bars, you’d probably just start making phone calls and walking door to door in your neighborhood. You know that you easily have 100 chocolate bar buyers in your personal network, so there’s no need to build anything bigger.

But if you decide you’re going to sell 1 million chocolate bars, that’s an entirely different picture. Suddenly, it makes sense to start by building systems: striking a bulk deal with a local distributor, creating your own promotional assets, publishing a website, writing promotional copy, hiring a sales force, etc. It might be months before you sell even one chocolate bar.

Which means that paradoxically, the bigger your goal, the longer it will be before you make any visible progress on it. Now this is a very dangerous situation, because it is SO EASY to fool yourself into believing that you are responsibly planning and preparing, when in fact you are procrastinating on taking the most important action. On the surface, these two paths look the same, but they lead to entirely different places.

There are a few principles I use to make sure that my “planning and preparation” is not procrastination in disguise.

First, I always try the DIY route first to make sure I understand what’s involved in the new endeavor. I produced all my own YouTube videos for the past few years, 109 in total, doing everything from filming to editing to audio to uploading. That included my own complete mini-documentary, which I debuted last year, to make sure I truly understood everything involved in making in-depth videos. All these efforts led to a decent audience of 20k subscribers, which I felt was enough to give me a lay of the land.

Second, I always try to involve others as collaborators, feedback-givers, and accountability partners. Working completely on my own, it’s far too easy to keep postponing hard decisions and repeatedly miss the same blindspots. I knew that I needed personal accountability to get to the next level of video creation, which is one of the main reasons I hired our first Director of Content this year.

Marc made several visits to our home in Long Beach in 2021, including two of them to coincide with the remodel of our garage into a home studio, and a consulting engagement with studio design expert Kevin Shen to set up all the new cameras, lighting, and sound gear. All in, we invested over $100k in our home studio to make it the ideal venue for shooting live video with minimal fuss (including about $65k for the remodel itself, $10k on furniture and interior design, $15k on equipment, and $10k on consulting). We’ve also recruited two experienced freelance video editors who we’ll be working with on our post-production starting early next year.

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This has all taken FAR longer than I expected: 5 months to remodel the garage, 3 months to recruit and onboard Marc, 2 months to set up and figure out how to use the AV equipment, and another 2 months to find a video editor. The amount of documentation and practice I’ve had to do to operate all this equipment has been staggering. To give you an example, we now have an over 100-point checklist we run through as a team before every live class session of our course, in order to ensure every little setting is right.

We’ve made tremendous progress, and our live Zoom setup now rivals platforms like MasterClass. Here’s an example:

But a side effect of focusing on the needs of the course was that we didn’t publish a single new YouTube video in 2020, except for a few informal interviews and updates. We are creating a system that should soon be capable of pumping out a steady stream of super high-quality, engaging, educational videos, which I hope to unveil for you soon.

Hire a personal trainer and work with them 90 times in 2021

I hired a personal trainer in early February, and mostly stuck to a schedule of two weekly hour-long workouts for the entire year. Minus a couple trips and sick days, I worked out with him 74 times this year. This is definitely the most consistently I’ve ever exercised in my life, and I’m the strongest I’ve ever been.

One thing I’ve learned is that exercise by itself isn’t enough to maintain excellent health. I also gained the most weight ever, due to a poor diet and neglecting smaller bouts of exercise (such as jogging) on my off-days. This is an interesting side effect of outsourcing my willpower to a professional: I felt less motivated to exercise on my own, knowing that the next “gym day” was right around the corner.

I recently spoke with a friend who described the 3 pillars of health: excercise, diet, and sleep. I plan on continuing to work with my trainer in 2022, and turning my attention to improving the other two pillars of diet and sleep.

A few other goals were abandoned or put on pause, mostly due to my lack of interest or inability to give them enough attention:

Launch a second group of Praxis FellowsEstablish Growth Board for Forte LabsComplete “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” exercisesRecord my first music albumMeditate every day for 30 minutes

And we reached a few milestones this year that weren’t part of my official goals, but were rewarding nonetheless:

Our first 7-figure course launchReleased Season 2 of the Building a Second Brain podcast (which has now had over 300k downloads total)Made my first 3 angel investments in promising edtech startups, including Maven, SchoolHouse, and CircleBought our first minivan, a Toyota Sienna, to transport our growing familyHeld our first team retreat in Escondido, CAGot our first dog, an English Lab puppy named XimenaReceived over 2,000 pre-orders for my book Building a Second Brain (I previously estimated 4-5,000, which I learned was an overestimate)Hosted my first in-person meetup since the start of the pandemic, in San FranciscoSigned our first three international book deals (in the United Kingdom and India, with the others to be announced soon)The combined Building a Second Brain and Write of Passage team

My top lessons learned

Don’t underestimate the difficulty of moving atoms versus bits

I had to learn multiple times this year that any project taking place in the physical world is far more complicated, risky, expensive, error prone, and lengthy than those that take place digitally.

Not only with our studio remodel, but with the first two homes being built by my brother Lucas’ company Forte Shelter, I saw time and again that the physical world is a much less forgiving place. As I consider other projects that require moving atoms, not just bits, I’m tempering my expectations and preparing myself to spend more time and money than I expect.

People can do the jobs I delegate to them far faster, more deeply, and with more joy and enthusiasm

We crossed a threshold this year as we hired our first full-time course staff beyond a Course Manager. That seemed to unlock a new layer of the business, where for the first time, each person could afford to focus completely on one aspect of the product.

It’s been amazing to see just how deep we can go in areas like operations, marketing, curriculum design, mentor training, live streaming production, graphic design, and others when we have the collective bandwidth. I’ve seen our team begin to explore possibilities that I never would have thought of, much less been able to execute on.

Along with that, I’ve begun to let go of the feeling of total responsibility for every tiny little detail of the course. It’s not my responsibility to bear alone anymore. I don’t have enough caring to spread across all the people and all the needs that the course now encompasses. I get to borrow the caring of my team as a kind of extension of my heart, not just my mind.

The most surprising thing I’ve noticed is how different people are, and that a job I can barely tolerate, someone else can usually do with enthusiasm (or at least less aversion). This is a remarkable thing about humans working in groups: there is a fit between certain tasks and people’s minds, and my job as a leader is to create an environment where that fit can be identified quickly.

You cannot spark the entrepreneurial spirit in someone else – that is 100% their responsibility and only they can choose that path

Over the past couple years I’ve made a number of attempts to “help people become entrepreneurs.” I assumed self-employment was the best path for everyone, that I was uniquely lucky to have found it, and therefore I had the responsibility to show others the way.

I still want to share how I did it, if they want to follow it, but I’ve also learned that I absolutely cannot take responsibility for that inner spark of entrepreneurial drive that they must have if they’re going to succeed. If I try, I end up robbing them of their agency and setting them up for failure with too high of expectations.

Going forward, I’m broadening my definition of “entrepreneurship” to include any kind of self-started, creative, challenging endeavor, whether that is an actual business or side gig, an ambitious project at work, raising a family, or creating a life you are proud of. That wider definition allows me to share what I know without feeling on the hook for the specific business outcomes people produce, which no one can guarantee.

The community we’ve created is a vibrant and deeply heartfelt one

One of the few public events Lauren and I went to this year was a comedy show by Hasan Minhaj at the Microsoft Theatre in downtown LA. It was a jarring experience being part of such a huge crowd after so many months of avoiding groups of any size.

The show was sold out, and the theatre was packed with 7,000 raving fans who had all come together to see Minhaj perform. His style of comedy isn’t to tell jokes so much as it is to tell stories. Those stories are funny, but also vulnerable, heartfelt, meaningful, and relatable.

It reminded me, if I dare say so, of myself. This is what I do in my courses – tell stories that can be funny, but at their best are also heartfelt and meaningful. Stories are such a powerful means of teaching because they don’t rely on outside authority for their credibility. They are judged to be true or not true, useful or not useful, based on how they resonate with the listener. When you feel the truth of a story inside you, you don’t need to be convinced or persuaded to learn from it.

It was powerful to see a reflection of my own experience in Minhaj’s performance, but then I heard a voice in my head say, “Yes but he’s reaching a far bigger audience than you.” But then I turned around in my chair, looked at the vast number of people sitting in that theatre, and realized that the number of people who have taken my course isn’t so far off.

Feeling the collective energy of so many people, all aligned behind one cause, it hit me in the gut how powerful of a community we’ve built over the last 5 years. It’s easy to forget when it’s abstracted behind metrics and subscriber counts, but we’ve gathered one of the most formidable groups on the planet committed to capitalizing on the full potential of their knowledge.

Two questions have kept running through my head since that day: “What can 5,000 smart, dedicated people accomplish in the world?” And another, even more powerful question: “What can 5,000 smart, dedicated people not accomplish in the world?”

Ask “What is the unique role I can play?”

As the business has prospered and we’ve built up our reputation, a question I increasingly find myself asking is “What is the unique role I can play?”

I no longer want to do anything that anyone else can do just as well or better. I no longer want to waste my time replicating the past or future efforts of others, trying to excel in areas where I’m not excellent, and playing defense instead of offense.

As I look at the field I’ve found myself in – the emerging niche of personal knowledge management within the broader productivity ecosystem – it’s so clear to me what my purpose is within it. My role is not to develop or refine the technology or tools. It’s not to push the state of the art in advanced knowledge management frameworks or concepts.

There is really only one thing I feel uniquely equipped to lead – the popularization of PKM from a tiny niche into the broader mainstream culture. On a scale of 1-10, my job is to get people from level 0 to level 1 in their knowledge management skills, because once they are there, they will have the tools and the motivation to find all the other answers they need. So many others are doing such incredible work at levels 2-10, but with my story and my skills I am an ambassador that invites foreign travelers into this strange and magical land.

This is, honestly, a relief. I don’t need to stay on the absolute cutting edge of rapidly evolving technology. I don’t need to track all the new ideas and concepts emerging from the field. There is far too much going on for any one person or even company to keep track of. Instead, I get to pursue what I enjoy and use the Second Brain I’ve already created to live the life I want to live. And by doing so, I have the chance to be a role model for others. To teach by example, through who I am and what I do, not just by what I say.

What triggers you in another person is what you don’t allow yourself to feel

On a more personal note, I’m learning a lot about an idea called “projection”: that anything that irritates, aggravates, or triggers you about someone else is usually just a part of yourself that you haven’t yet learned to accept and love, which is being “projected” onto the other person like a mirror.

I’m often triggered when others present themselves as victims. Their helplessness feels threatening to me because I haven’t learned to completely embrace my own sense of helplessness, which is a normal and natural part of being human. The consequence of that is I fear any situation where I feel not capable, or uncertain of how to make progress, or simply too tired to give it my all. Which means that I miss out on a lot of opportunities for growth and enjoyment in domains where I’m not already experienced, and have difficulty accepting help from others or even recognizing when help is offered.

Lauren and I recently took part in a weekend couple’s retreat facilitated by a mentor of mine, Joe Hudson. One of the main themes of the retreat was that anything that triggers you about your partner can be seen as a chance to “own a projection.” Instead of treating triggers as something to be avoided and feared, we can welcome them as opportunities for growth. In long-term relationships especially, recurring triggers are like reminders of a part of ourselves we’ve rejected, which we have the chance to forgive and welcome back into the fold of our self-love.

There’s one more thing I’ve noticed through the process of owning my projections: everything you do to avoid an emotion is what invites it. You don’t want to feel rejected by others, so you hedge your statements and hold back from full commitment, which is what ends up getting you rejected. You don’t want to feel like you have power over others, so you avoid stating your wants or insisting on your boundaries, which ends up making you passive aggressive, a far more insidious and hurtful form of power. And by “you,” I mean “I.”

Working out regularly is not enough to be healthy – diet and sleep are the other essential parts of the equation

I often run an experiment to try and determine, in an area of my life that isn’t currently my focus, what is the absolute minimum I can do? It’s a much more fun and interesting experiment than the far more common “What is the most I can do?”

I ran that experiment with my health this year, in the midst of all the other new projects and responsibilities I took on. I hired a personal trainer to work with me twice a week to “outsource” my exercise to an external accountability partner, and signed up for a healthy meal delivery service called Methodology (which I highly recommend) to automate our eating.

The results of my experiment were clear: my health needs more attention than that. I learned that weight-lifting twice a week isn’t enough, no matter how hard I push myself during those sessions. I also need regular cardio and yoga or stretching to feel good. And while we love meal delivery, there is simply no substitute for home-cooked meals.

We’re making changes in the new year to pay more attention to all three of these main pillars of our health, and thinking about them as a family instead of only individually.

Your capacity may theoretically be unlimited, but the more important question is, “Do you want to make the tradeoffs necessary to expand your capacity?”

One of my fundamental, most deeply held beliefs is that human capacity is inherently unlimited. I don’t know where I got this belief, but I think it is part of the core engine of motivation that fuels my research, writing, teaching, and growth.

After the most punishing year in memory, I’m revisiting this belief and adding some caveats. I still believe that human potential is unbounded, subject only to the limits of physics (barely). But an important question that I want to ask myself next time I take on so much growth and change in a short amount of time is, “Do I want to make the necessary tradeoffs?”

Am I willing to have my limits tested and pushed? Am I interested in letting go of assumptions and limiting beliefs at the necessary pace? Am I able to depend on other people to the extent necessary? Do I want to take on the additional risk? Do I want to create the systems and routines in my life that will be needed to support that level of capacity? Am I willing to change how I think, how I work, how I lead, and how I delegate at the scale of the goals I’ve set for myself?

The crux of these questions is that they have to be tradeoffs I want to make, not just ones I am capable of or willing to make, which is the filter I used in the past. The main driver of my goals and ambitions is shifting from my needs, which are already more than fulfilled, to my wants, which are far more powerful and able to be shared by so many others. To tap into that greater source of power, I have to be completely aligned with my wants, my desire, and my source of pleasure in all areas of my life.

Boundaries don’t have to be policed or enforced; they exist because you said so

Another theme we explored in our couple’s retreat is boundaries. I thought I knew what they were – militarized psychological borders patrolled by heavily armed guards day and night, warding off the constant threat of invasion.

In one exercise, Lauren and I practiced saying “no” to each other over and over again. I found my “no” was hard and severe, like a wall of ice. This was because I believed subconsciously that the strength of the boundary was equal to my ferocity in protecting it. I found that at the moment of saying “no,” I dissociated a little and withdrew my love for a moment. Which left me with the unspoken impression that in order to protect my needs, I had to withdraw love from the people who matter most to me. It’s no wonder I’ve felt reluctant to enforce my boundaries.

As we iterated on our “no” over and over and over again, I discovered to my surprise that there were many flavors of “no.” I could say “no” softly, even affectionately, without withdrawing my affection for the person for even a moment, and it was just as strong. The power of that “no” came from its honesty, not its ruthlessness. I got in touch with the intensity of the self-love that lies behind every “no.” I saw that saying no is a radical act of self-care. And found that when I model such self-care for myself, the people around me feel permissioned to practice it for themselves.

Another word for “boundaries” is “needs.” Needs are your birthright. You don’t have to explain them, don’t have to justify them, and don’t have to earn them. You deserve your needs for the same reason you deserve to live.

Favorite problems

I always like to frame my explorations as open-ended questions, which I call my “favorite problems.” This year, I’m adding the following questions to my list:

What does the simple version of this look like?What is my want?In this moment, how can I value presence over prep?What can 5,000 smart, dedicated people not accomplish?What is the unique role I can play?Do I want to make the tradeoffs necessary to expand my capacity?Thank you for reading! We wish you a happy end of year and a fruitful 2022! 

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The post Tiago’s 2021 Year in Review appeared first on Forte Labs.

The New Building a Second Brain: Brand Reveal

When I started my professional career, I had only the most vague sense of how visual aesthetics related to business.

I knew there were brands that I was inherently attracted to, such as Apple. And I had a fairly good sense for what was beautiful, from a childhood spent in museums and art galleries with my artist father. But no one would have accused me of having good taste.

I had the good fortune of landing at a small, boutique consulting firm in San Francisco, which employed a couple world-class designers. I watched from the sidelines as they redesigned our company branding from scratch. The firm also operated a coworking and event space in downtown, and I would often stay late at the office to help manage them. 

The events and workshops related to design always caught my attention. I was introduced to a fantastical world of deep patterns and subtle curvatures and visual “systems” designed to evoke very specific kinds of experiences in the minds of humans. 

I began to see that design was a kind of subterranean layer of reality, communicating in pre-verbal ways to subconscious parts of our brains that are not completely logical. I saw that great design differentiated the best ideas, products, and companies. And that you could intentionally pursue and invest in good design as a strategic asset that was difficult for others to copy.

My father, who once attended fashion school before switching to painting, always told us that “Fashion is what you say about yourself before you open your mouth.” I can’t say I took that advice when it came to my own wardrobe choices. But when applied to companies, I realized that a brand is what a company says about itself before it’s said anything. In a world where we are skeptical of everything, design is an expensive signal that’s hard to completely fake. 

When I started Building a Second Brain, I knew I wanted it to be visually distinctive from the very beginning. I wanted to distance myself as much as possible from the scammy world of online marketing from which most courses come, which is fixated on “performance” at the expense of anything beautiful, elegant, or timeless.

From my experience working alongside professional designers, I also knew that design is incredibly expensive. Not just in terms of money, but also time, attention, caring, and feedback. I couldn’t afford to make that investment in the beginning, so I turned to pre-made templates for slides and logos found on websites like Creative Market. 

And I bided my time until I could afford to create a brand that I was proud to stake my reputation on.

In January, it will be 5 years since the first cohort of the Building a Second Brain course. Somehow, we’ve delivered 13 cohorts to more than 5,000 graduates from more than 100 countries. It has all gone so much further than anything I ever expected. 

And yet I have this feeling once again of standing on a precipice of something much bigger. In August 2022, the Building a Second Brain book comes out, to be published in multiple countries by the world’s most respected publishing houses. The number of people who have easy access to these ideas will increase by an order of magnitude or more, and we will see if creating a Second Brain is something that appeals beyond our tiny niche.

Early this year as I made progress on the manuscript, I decided it was finally time for us to create a brand that would resonate beyond our existing community. I knew that our roots in the software and technology industry that had carried us so far would soon become a hindrance, limiting the reach of our message. I felt it was time to zoom out from the implementation details and craft a visual message that could transcend any particular software, industry, or time period.

I hired a world-class designer named Maya Lim, and we got to work. We closely examined the current branding to pick out what worked, and what didn’t. We studied existing brands in traditional education, self-help, and online learning to identify what set BASB apart. We pored through the feedback surveys from the last few cohorts of the course, looking for common patterns.

Our goal became to double down on the most unique and powerful elements of our existing culture, discard or deemphasize the parts that no longer worked, and paint a visual picture of a future where everyone has the opportunity to acquire the skills that we teach.

Looking at the current logo, which I had designed for about $150 on 99Designs, there were a number of significant issues that we wanted to address:

The software look and feel appealed strongly to techies and infovores who eagerly try out new products, but we wanted to broaden its appeal in preparation for the book release.The current logo felt friendly and approachable, but didn’t convey the premium experience we deliver or a sense of authority in the emerging PKM space.It was filtering out people who rely on a strong sense of credibility before trying new things, who don’t have the time or inclination to consume a lot of content before making a commitment.

More technically, there were aspects of the logo that would break down as we began to extend the branding to different use cases and mediums:

Over a period of about 4 months, Maya incorporated all of these observations and decisions into our new visual identity, which I know will serve as a vehicle for spreading our message to millions of people in the years to come.

We’ve created a dedicated Brand Guide for Building a Second Brain, so anyone who wants to write about, talk about, or create content about our work can access everything they need in one convenient place. It includes a fair use guide, complete brand guidelines, high-quality logos and other visual assets, and a media kit with my headshots, bio, and important links. 

Over time we’ll continue to update and add to this guide as new assets become available:

Building a Second Brain Brand Guide

Let me share it with you!

We decided to create two versions of the logo. The solid logo version (on the right) is the everyday, more versatile version because it is very accessible at small sizes. The circuit logo (on the left) version is reserved for high-drama, hero moments, where the logo is presented in large sizes and the circuit lines help tell our story on their own.

For situations requiring a symbol or icon” we also created a stand-alone B logo. The B can stand for “Building” or “Brain” and uses shapes reminiscent of the two hemispheres of the brain, while also suggesting movement and change.

Design rationale

Circuit language

Maya created a new visual language dubbed “Circuit,” which starts with the logo and extends across all the touchpoints. We wanted to abstract away the details of specific software programs, and focus on the bigger picture ideas that apply universally to many different kinds of people.

Circuit-like shapes are a clear reference to technology, but also incorporate movement, fluidity, connectivity, systems, structures, and networks. They are strong links, but also flexible in routing information to wherever it needs to go. They exist at many scales, from chemical bonds to neural circuits to urban transportation networks to the fractal complexity of galaxies.

Acronym

Building a Second Brain is a relatively long name, so we decided to double down on the “BASB” acronym that many people already use, both internally and externally, as a shorthand. Like GTD before us, our goal is to create a compact idea that can find its way efficiently through many networks, both technological and social. 

The dot separators reinforce the circuit language system and show that “BASB” shouldn’t be pronounced as a word. We have a version of the logo with the full name below for audiences that aren’t familiar with the acronym. Over time, we hope to build enough brand equity that the four letters can stand on their own.

Approachability

The practice of knowledge management can sometimes be intimidating, so we wanted the logo to signal that we present it in a humane, approachable way. Soft curves in the letters and a lowercase title are meant to convey a soft touch. Parallel lines are strong but also suggest guidance and intentionality.

Accessibility

One of my biggest goals for the book is that it reach every person on the planet who wants to create a system of knowledge management. Every decision related to the book has been made to maximize reach and accessibility, and the logo is no different.

Maya conducted accessibility testing with our color palette to provide combinations below that achieve high accessibility ratings when set in text (according to the Web Content Accessibility Guides at w3.org).

Our key attributes

To guide the overall branding effort, we chose three words to represent the “soul” or essence of the brand we wanted to create:

Structured

Structures provide a strong, stable foundation for building anything. We believe that a structured system enables creativity, rather than restricting it. When needed, structures can (and should) be broken—but never in a way that is thoughtlessly random. We appreciate logic behind everything that we build.

Accessible

Information touches all of our lives. We believe that anyone can manage and harness information in ways that empower their lives. Our content is easy to understand and visually welcoming. We are friendly and fun. Although our roots are in technology, we also have a warm, human side. Our approachability signals that our products and services are relevant to audiences much broader than infovores and techies.

Quiet determination (my favorite)

Noise is distracting. We believe that the energy of quiet determination helps when creating a system to achieve focus and clarity. Although we are confident and authoritative, we are always humble. We never shout, but we aren’t afraid to be bold.

Colors

We chose to stick with green as a general palette, both to honor our origins in the Evernote ecosystem, and to signal wisdom and growth. But we also wanted to differentiate ourselves from Evernote’s branding and to create more subtlety and options for the many ways we’ll be using the logo. 

We ultimately decided on primary colors of Deep Teal (representing calm and concentration), Pale Gray (authority and sophistication), White (clarity and optimism), and Parchment (harkening back to the wide open possibilities of the paper notetaking from which our work descends).

The secondary colors are Bright Cyan (energy and excitement), Moss (timelessness and growth), Gold (inspiration and sparks of creativity), and Graphite (engineering and functionality)

Here are the colors in general proportion to how they’ll be used:

Typeface

Our culture is highly textual, a legacy of the reading, writing, and notetaking that is such a core part of everything we do. To that end, we chose a simple, practical, direct typeface called Poppins.

Poppins is freely available as a Google Web Font, which means anyone can download and use it online or offline, free of any licenses or restrictions. It conveys warmth, friendliness, and practicality, but also modernness through its geometric lines. With its tall x-height and large counter spaces, it is also highly legible at small sizes and in both digital and print contexts.

Creative gallery

The elements above form not only a new brand, but a visual language that we will use in the coming years to create a universe of BASB products, experiences, services, and content.

The gallery below serves as a sneak peek into the possibilities that future may hold.

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The post The New Building a Second Brain: Brand Reveal appeared first on Forte Labs.

Tiago’s Favorite Second Brain Quotes

“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.” —Gustav Flaubert

“We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.” —Sir Thomas Browne

“The ability to ‘fantasize’ is the ability to survive. It’s wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it…The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane…We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain.” —Ray Bradbury

“All around us the fundamentals of life are crying out to be shaped, or created.” —Joseph Beuys

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.” —Carl Sandburg

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” —Franz Kafka

“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page.” —Georges Perec

“Every map is a guide to finding the desirable and navigating the dangerous.” —Rebecca Solnit

“A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.” —Reif Larsen

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” —Winston Churchill

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” —Lewis Carroll

“In order to make things happen you have to make things”. —Richard Curtis

“Look, what thy [[memory]] cannot contain
Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find
Those children nurs’d, delivered from thy brain,
To take a new acquaintance of thy mind …”

—Shakespeare

“The only way that we can live is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn.” —C. JoyBell C.

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” —Pablo Picasso

“When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.” —Ursula K. Le Guin

“Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over. For only by universally combining what we know, by comparing every truth with every other, do we fully assimilate our own knowledge and get it into our power. We can think over only what we know, and so we should learn something; but we know only what we have thought out.” —Arthur Schopenhauer

“To capture what you experience and sort it out . . . you must set up a file. . . . Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape.” —C. Wright Mills

“The biggest issue for digitally oriented people is that the ease of capturing and storing has generated a write-only syndrome: all they’re doing is capturing information—not actually accessing and using it intelligently. Some consciousness needs to be applied to keep one’s potentially huge digital library functional, versus a black hole of data easily dumped in there with a couple of keystrokes. ‘I don’t need to organize my stuff, because the search feature can find it sufficiently’ is, from what I’ve experienced, quite suboptimal as an approach. We need to have a way to overview our mass of collected information with some form of effective categorization.” —David Allen

“I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s.” —William Blake

“There are no interruptions—there are only mismanaged inputs.” —David Allen

“Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.” —Buddha

“When you’re not sure where you’re going or what’s really important to you, you’ll never know when enough is enough.” —David Allen

“Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.” —Jonathan Kozol

“It’s the smartest individuals who realize they are only randomly in their “smarts” and inspired. They’re the ones who intelligently build in systems and processes to take advantage of the brilliance that often simply lies sleeping behind the dullness required to deal with the brutish world we inhabit.” —David Allen

“Your mind is designed to have ideas, based upon pattern detection, but it isn’t designed to remember much of anything! The creative thrust of your ‘GTD-ing’ shifts from implementing the most effective way of dealing with the inputs and inherent demands of your day-to-day world to optimally taking advantage of self-created contexts and triggers to produce creative ideas, perspectives, and actions that wouldn’t normally occur.” —David Allen

“You want to be adding value as you think about projects and situations, not creating stress by simply reminding yourself they exist and you need to do something about them.” —David Allen

“At the seashore, between the land of atoms and the sea of bits, we are now facing the challenge of reconciling our dual citizenship in the physical and digital worlds.” —Hiroshi Ishii

“Documents are, quite simply, talking things. They are bits of the material world – clay, stone, animal skin, plant fiber, sand – that we’ve imbued with the ability to speak.” —David M. Levy

“1000 docs in system
100 documents contain the word ‘computing’
“Computing” used 10 different ways.

100,000 docs in system
7,100 documents contain the word ‘computing’
‘Computing’ used in 84 different ways.”
– The Challenge of Commercial Document Retrieval by David Blair

“Chance favors the connected mind.” —Steven Johnson

“When you finish your novel […] put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year or more is ideal – but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.” —Zadie Smith

“There is a gaping opportunity to consolidate our myriad marginalia into an even more robust commonplace book. One searchable, always accessible, easily shared and embedded amongst the digital text we consume.” —Craig Mod

“Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.” —Vannevar Bush

“Your knowledge is a wellspring from which to draw for others, not a treasure to hoard for yourself.” —Captain Jean-Luc Picard

“No two writers are the same, like snowflakes and fingerprints. No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. An editor’s goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique about them.” —John Mcafee

“On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.” —Clay Shirky

“Creative products are always shiny and new; the creative process is ancient and unchanging.” —Silvano Arieti

“I suspect anyway that the important things we learn we never remember because they become a part of us, we absorb them…we don’t absorb multiplication tables.” —William Alexander Percy

“The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.” —Jill Walker Rettberg

“Knowledge is only a rumour until it lives in the muscle.” —Tribe from Papua New Guinea

“The role of accidents in the theory of science is not disputed, If you employ evolutionary models, accidents assume a most important role. Without them, nothing happens, no progress is made. Without variation in the given material of ideas, there are no possibilities of examining and selecting novelties.” —Niklas Luhmann

“I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” —John Adams

“[Studies] show that although people who create complex folders indeed rely on these structures for retrieval, such preparatory behaviors are less efficient than opportunistic methods and do not improve retrieval success. In contrast, opportunistic behaviors such as search, scanning, and sorting promote faster and equally successful retrieval.” —Ofer Bergman and Steve Whittaker

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated…As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness….No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” —John Donne

“What’s missing now is not someone to hunt stories down, but rather to weave them into a narrative. What’s missing is not the information, but the expertise to connect the dots and cut through the noise to find the meaningful and the important. ” —Chris Saad

“Understanding – like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors – is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling. And the main goal of helping children learn is to find ways to show them that great road which has no final destination, and that manner of traveling in which the journey itself is the reward.” —Alan Kay

“It’s important to know that any creative work is never complete. In some senses, we have to just abandon it. We have to let it go.” —Unknown

“Principles are higher than techniques. Principles produce techniques in an instant.” —Ido Portal

You pile up volumes of notes and then figure out what you are going to do with them, not the other way around.” —John Mcfee

“It is time to make life your own personal learning lab. You should start taking notes on little interactions you have as well as the big breakthroughs. Look for lessons in every moment and every relationship and record them in a journal. I remember learning the value of this from my journalism teacher in high school. Decades later, I would see it in practice with my friends Tony Robbins and Jack Canfield, two of the most diligent and productive note takers I have ever met in my life…Personally, I’m almost obsessive about the practice of journaling new lessons to teach my audience. Every book I buy has countless notes in the margins reminding me of important concepts I can teach or make my own. I take copious notes at every seminar I attend, and always look for a unique teachable point of view. The identity of a teacher is a huge part of who I have decided to be in life. Ask anyone about me and they will tell you I’m always writing down new ideas and practicing new frameworks. Becoming an expert is not a one-time affair; it’s a lifelong practice.”  —Brendon Burchard

“The habit of journalizing becomes a life-long lesson in the art of composition, an informal schooling for authorship. And were the process of preparing their works for publication faithfully detailed by distinguished writers, it would appear how large were their indebtedness to their diary and commonplaces. How carefully should we peruse [[Shakespeare]]’s notes used in compiling his plays—what was his, what another’s—showing how these were fashioned into the shapely whole we read, how Milton composed, Montaigne, Goethe: by what happy strokes of thought, flashes of wit, apt figures, fit quotations snatched from vast fields of learning, their rich pages were wrought forth! This were to give the keys of great authorship!” —Amos Bronson Alcott

“The sign of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Tradesmen have their ‘waste book’ (scrawl-book, composition book I think in German), in which they enter from day to day everything they buy and sell, everything all mixed up without any order to it, from there it is transferred to the day-book, where everything appears in more systematic fashion … This deserves to be imitated by scholars. First a book where I write down everything as I see it or as my thoughts put it before me, later this can be transcribed into another, where the materials are more distinguished and ordered.” —Georg Lichtenberg

“The faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory.” —Chinese proverb

“…every literary man should have a written chaos such as this: notebook containing sottiseries, adrersa, excerpta, pugillares, commentaria… the store-house out of which fine literature of every kind may come, as the sun, moon, and stars issued out of chaos.” —Unknown priest, making a suggestion to Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, who kept a Zibaldone with no fewer than 4,526 pages

“Notes… do not make contemporary physics easier, they make it possible.” —Neil Levy

“Everything not saved will be lost.” —Nintendo “Quit Screen” message

“Now, create a folder with the winning idea, and start filling it with content. Is there an article in the newspaper that relates to your project? Cut it out and file it. Have you written a draft of narration or dialogue? Print it out and file it. Thought of some great questions to ask your first interview subject? Jot them down on a scrap of paper and file that too. As you continue through this workbook, you will also gather research for your project, brainstorm a potential story structure, generate a draft fundraising proposal, sketch out a shooting script, compile an electronic press kit, and more. Keep the folder handy throughout the lifespan of your project.” —Ken Burns

“Absorb ideas from every source, frequently starting where the last person left off.” —Thomas Edison

“A good idea is never lost. Even though its originator or possessor may die without publicizing it, it will someday be reborn in the mind of another.” —Thomas Edison

“Knowledge not applied is like a seed not planted.” —Unknown

“The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.” —James Richardson

“Knowledge is distinctly human. No other species has it. Knowledge comes from the knowledge loop. We learn something, we use that to create something new and we share that with the world. We reap the collective benefit of the knowledge loop but we participate in it freely as individuals.” —Albert Wenger

“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. —Heraclitus

“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.” —D.W. Winnicott

“Art of the people, hands of God.” —Carlos Fuentes

“Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation.” —Katie Cannon

“It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists. I am free because I remember.” –Chandra, quoting the tenth-century philosopher Abhinavagupta

“Humans became behaviourally modern the moment they committed to storing abstract information outside their brains.” —Lyn Wadley, as quoted in Mark Moffett’s ‘The Human Swarm’

“One cannot think without writing.” —Niklas Luhmann

“Every intellectual endeavour starts with a note.” —Sonke Ahrens

“Whatever good things we build end up building us.” —Jim Rohn

“When we use machines to achieve whatever it is we desire, we cannot have what we desire until we have finished with the machine, until we can rid ourselves of the mechanical means of reaching our intended outcome. The goal of technology is therefore to eliminate itself, to become silent, invisible, carefree.” —James Carse

“The right information at the right time is deadlier than any weapon.” —Martin Connells, Westworld

“First, search widely. Then, eliminate ruthlessly. Finally, work obsessively on what remains.” —James Clear

“The Internet is a world of abundance, and there is a new power that matters: the ability to make sense of that abundance, to index it, to find needles in the proverbial haystack.” —Ben Thompson

“Especially in technology, we need to learn frontier skill sets constantly. We need to become lifelong learners, because if you master something, and then two years later there’s a new platform and a whole new ecosystem of startups, you just have to do it over and over again.” —Andrew Chen

“The greatest contribution that management has made in the 20th Century was to increase the productivity of manual working fifty fold. The greatest contribution that needs to be made in the 21st Century is to similarly increase the productivity of knowledge working fifty fold”. —Peter Drucker

“Creativity started with the notebooks’ sketches and jottings, and only later resulted in a pure, powerful idea. The one characteristic that all of these creatives shared— whether they were painters, actors, or scientists— was how often they put their early thoughts and inklings out into the world, in sketches, dashed-off phrases and observations, bits of dialogue, and quick prototypes. Instead of arriving in one giant leap, great creations emerged by zigs and zags as their creators engaged over and over again with these externalized images.” —R. Keith Sawyer

“The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.” —Jonathan Lethem

“We cannot become complacent with knowledge and just store it away. It has a shelf life and needs to be used, tested, and experienced.” —Harold Jarche

“Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.” —Dr. Bessel A. Van der Kolk

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” —T. S. Eliot

“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.” —Lao Tzu

“We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.” —Michel de Montaigne

“Knowledge, general in nature and unorganized, is not power; it is only potential power – the material out of which real power may be developed. Any modern library contains an unorganized record of all the knowledge of value to which the present stage of civilization is heir, but this knowledge is not power because it is not organized.” —Napoleon Hill

“Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.“ —Stephen King

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not just be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” —Leigh Whittaker

“Almost all the thoughts I have on any subject are the result of writing in my diary and journals, then questioning myself and working through alternate ways of thinking about it, and finally returning to the subject days or months later with a clear head and updated thoughts, seeing how they’ve changed or not over time.” —Derek Sivers

“Our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of ‘the web as conversation’ and on to something more timeless, integrative, iterative, something less personal and less self-assertive, something more solitary yet more connected.” —Mike Caulfield

“Everything is deeply Intertwingled.” —Ted Nelson

“Your life is a symphony, not a note.” —Seth Godin

“He listens well who takes notes.” —Dante

“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% taking really good notes.” —Thomas Edison

“You must use your mind to get things off your mind.” —David Allen

“To be right, write … notes are only useful if you remember where you put them.” —Yves Farges

“Good memory is not comparable to a worn out pen tip.” —Chinese proverb

“Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.” —Tim Ferriss

“The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.” —Lee Iacocca

“All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.” —Friedrich Nietzsche

“Your life is your spiritual path. Don’t be quick to abandon it for bigger and better experiences. You are getting exactly the experiences you need to grow. If your growth seems to be slow or uneventful for you, it is because you have not fully embraced the situations and relationships at hand. To know the self is to allow everything, to embrace the totality of who we are—all that we think and feel, all that we fear, all that we love. —Paul Ferrini, found on a sign on the laundry house at Kalani, Big Island, Hawaii

“Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments, flabbergasted to be in each other’s presence.” —Timothy “Speed” Levitch, Waking Life

“The world we want is one where many worlds fit.” —Zapatistas

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” —Octavia Butler, Parable of the Trickster

“The problem is not that we all have these different views of things, it is that we each consider our views the only reality. We forget that life is truly a matter of perspective. We delude ourselves by believing that our experience is absolute, fixed. The truth is that everything, including us, is changing all the time. Nothing is static, nothing is permanent. To believe otherwise because you see it as that way is to delude yourself. Delusion is ignorance.” — Being Black, my Windcall Retreat, Black Zen teacher Angel Kyodo Williams

“…An idea wants to be shared. And, in the sharing, it becomes more complex, more interesting, and more likely to work for more people.” —adrienne maree brown

“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” —Toni Cade Bambara

“History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories—triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectically—has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.” —Grace Lee Boggs

“The cloud is our extended [self].” –Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable

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Forte Labs Operating Principles

These are our 10 operating principles at Forte Labs.

#1 – We are in business to serve

We are in business to serve, and our financial success comes as a side effect of the positive impact we make on people’s lives.

#2 – Our word is our bond

We are accountable for our word – whether it is something we say we’ll do, remember, or follow up on. Without our word, we have nothing.

#3 – Write things down

We know that human memory is fallible. Instead of trying to “keep that in mind,” we capture anything important in a trusted place that we know will be reviewed.

#4 – We underpromise and overdeliver

We don’t exaggerate claims or make promises we can’t deliver on. We use humble, conservative, truthful language that accurately reflects what we do and what we deliver. 

#5 – Our performance depends on systems

Our job isn’t just to do the work; it is to build, maintain, and improve systems that do the work. We build systems, procedures, templates, and checklists that document what we know and ensure it is executed reliably over time.

#6 – Minimize waste

Waste is a sign that we aren’t thinking through what we’re trying to accomplish. We are stewards of the time, attention, and resources of our customers, and we take care to use them responsibly.

#7 – Problems are gifts

Problems are gifts that inspire us to action. A problem tells us that one of our systems or procedures needs to be improved. We don’t want mistakes, but when one occurs, we take action to prevent it from happening again.

#8 – Seek leverage

We seek every opportunity to increase our leverage, which improves our ability to produce greater results with less effort. Leverage allows us to make an impact far beyond our size.

#9 – Get feedback early and often

We draw on the intelligence and wisdom of our network whenever possible. We prefer to run small experiments that can be tested quickly, and then expand based on the results.

#10 – Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast

We don’t allow urgency to define our priorities. We move deliberately and take the time we need when doing our work. We are not fire fighters. We are fire prevention specialists. 

We don’t solve problems when they arise; we work on systems in order to prevent problems from happening in the first place.

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Becoming Superhuman: Unlock Your Productive Potential with Email

We’re supposed to hate email and everything it represents.

But I have a confession to make.

I love email.

(Scandalous, I know.)

When it comes to email, I always think about the alternative: What would I do if there was no email at all?

Write letters? Telegrams?

Or most terrifying of all… get on the phone and call someone?!?!

Email makes it possible to be in direct contact with almost anyone in the world, at any time day or night, on any device. It requires no skills – other than reading and writing. And best of all… it’s free.

Email is the last bastion of free, open communication online.

But while email can make our communication more efficient and flexible, it’s also what some call a “Progress Trap” – a tool so effective and powerful that it grew beyond its inventors’ original intentions, and – in the process – created many new problems we have to deal with.

The very first email was sent in late 1971. This makes email 50 years old. It’s had an amazing run, but it’s time to reimagine and reinvent our approach to this medium.

After I started Forte Labs and became self-employed, solving email overwhelm was my first priority. I realized that if I didn’t solve the email problem once and for all, I would never get to more sophisticated, advanced forms of productivity.

So I studied. I experimented. And I read everything I could find to tackle the email problem… until eventually, I settled on a system.

Once I had tested the system extensively, I was ready to share more. So I wrote a blog post on my new method: One-Touch to Inbox Zero: How I Spend 17 Minutes Per Day on Email.

To this very day, this post is one of my most popular: I regularly receive messages from people who say it’s transformed their entire approach to online communication.

Without me knowing it – elsewhere on the web – my article was being read by the founding team of a startup called Superhuman.

Rahul Vohra, one of the top experts on email software in Silicon Valley, was working hard to crack the email code. And he decided to borrow some of the principles I described in my article to design Superhuman’s new email client.

Some of these principles included:

Treat your email as a receiving area only (not a to-do list, content management system, or project management tool)Pick & commit to your 4 essential “downstream systems” (a read later app, a calendar app, a notes app, and a task manager)Start at your oldest email and process one at a time (never skipping an email and never going backward)Make your goal to decide where each email actually belongs (hint: not in your inbox!), then forward it to one of your four “downstream systems”And many more ideas (such as why you should never “delete” an email – and what to do instead)

Want to dig into my most up-to-date thinking on all of these principles?

Good news: Superhuman recently interviewed me and summarized my approach to Inbox Zero – including 4 steps you can take to transition to this method.

Read it here:

Unlock Your Productive Potential with Email

 

By the way – all these years later, Superhuman has become one of the most popular and influential email client apps, offering a “premium” user experience with helpful defaults that guide people toward more productive habits with their email.

Instead of having to change your behavior through sheer force of will, fighting the design of Gmail, which is designed to accommodate the needs of billions of people, Superhuman asserts an opinion about how email should be handled.

I love our exchange of ideas because I hope it’s something we see more of in the future: conceptual thinkers and productivity coaches informing the design of software based on what they understand about people’s psychology and behavior.

The popularity of Getting Things Done (GTD) shaped a generation of to-do list apps, which adopted its use of terms like “inbox,” “next action,” “someday/maybe,” and “projects and areas.” Having a shared framework for a skill like email management similarly allows software creators to focus on what they do best – performance and design.

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Book Update #5: Our first international book deal – the United Kingdom & India

We’ve just signed our first international book deal to publish Building a Second Brain….in the United Kingdom!

The initial wave of pre-orders in the United States has turned publishing heads around the world, and my literary agency has reported a surge in interest and enthusiasm for BASB in multiple countries.

We’ve signed with Profile, whose UK catalogue includes such bestsellers as:

Atul Gawande’s  The Checklist Manifesto Ryan Holiday’s  The Daily Stoic Julia Cameron’s  The Artist’s Way Robert Greene’s  The 48 Laws of Power

(I’m incredibly honored to be in the company of these greats).

Once again, I want to send a signal to our new partners and to all the international publishers who are watching closely to see how this book performs outside the U.S.

If you are located in the United Kingdom, I humbly ask you to consider pre-ordering my book below:

Pre-order on Amazon UK Pre-order from Waterstones

 

This deal means we will have far better distribution in the UK (and Commonwealth countries), in more formats, and with better shipping options versus having to order from U.S. booksellers.

We’ll announce which Commonwealth countries will receive distribution as soon as we know, but for now I can confirm that this includes… INDIA!

Historically I’ve had more customers of my ebooks from India than anywhere else, even the U.S.

I know there are so many people in India who are eager to dig deeper in the digital economy – and it moves me deeply to be able to make these ideas available locally. You can pre-order on Amazon India using the link below:

Pre-order on Amazon India

We are focusing our initial efforts on Amazon as they’re usually earliest to open pre-orders. But as soon as more retail outlets become available, I’ll share them with you via this newsletter and the new Building a Second Brain website.

As a reminder: All pre-orders made before Nov. 30, 2021, in any country and any format, qualify for our first pre-order bonus: a virtual workshop covering the entire Building a Second Brain Method in 3 jam-packed hours. Submit your proof of purchase here to get the details and reserve your spot.

Thank you for being patient, for believing in and trusting me, and for jumping into action when it matters most. I am completely dedicated to making Second Brains available to every person on the planet who wants one.

Tiago

P.S. I’ve created a series with all book-related updates in chronological order and in one place. You can use it to get caught up on the latest news, and hopefully to learn from my successes and mistakes alike as I learn in public.

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Book Update #4: You showed up – book sales are taking off!

Last week I asked you to be among the very first people to pre-order my new book Building a Second Brain….and boy did you deliver!

The book quickly climbed the bestseller charts in the early morning hours last Tuesday, hitting the #1 spot in all 3 of its categories on Amazon.

We peaked at #65 across the entire Kindle store, which means for a brief moment it was the 65th best-selling ebook in the world! It was so thrilling to wake up and see that “Best Seller” badge in the corner.

Cracking the Top 100 in the Kindle Store is a stupendous achievement. Almost unheard of for pre-orders of a book 9 months out from the release date. We’re already receiving a flurry of interest from foreign publishers, potential distributors, and corporate buyers alike based on these results alone.

I don’t actually know how many pre-orders were made since only the publisher has access to the backend details. But my very rough estimation is that there were approximately between 4,000–5,000 in just the first week!

Which means…we are already halfway to our goal of 10,000! I honestly can’t believe it. It took a couple days to fully sink in. I was driving home from the gym on Thursday afternoon and all the anticipation from so many months of work, wondering whether people would respond to this first launch, hit me all at once in an overwhelming wave of relief and gratitude.

Thank you so much for stepping forward and taking such massive, decisive action at this pivotal moment. It means everything to me.

And if you haven’t secured your own copy, our first and best pre-order bonus is available only for pre-orders made in the next week (up until Nov. 30): an invite to join the first-ever virtual workshop in which I’ll teach the entire Building a Second Brain Method in just 3 hours. 

It’s taken 5 years, 12 cohorts, and countless iterations on this material for me to feel confident I know what the essential parts of Building a Second Brain are. Only now that the manuscript is locked and loaded can I distill what normally takes 5 weeks of intense, live cohort learning into a single 3-hour workshop.

Today we’re unveiling the new buildingasecondbrain.com website, which includes links to everywhere you can buy the book (including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Indiebound). We’ll add others as they become available.

 

All you have to do is pre-order the book (in any format and from any sales outlet) before Nov. 30, 2021, and follow these step-by-step instructions for how to submit your proof of purchase and reserve your bonus:

Pre-order and reserve your bonus

We’ve received a lot of questions about pre-orders, and I’d like to address the most common ones.

Frequently Asked Questions1. I PRE-ORDERED IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND MY ORDER WAS CANCELLED. WHAT GIVES?

All pre-orders made through Amazon UK were cancelled this week. I had no advance warning of this, and I’m sorry for the confusion. This happened due to some imminent, very exciting news that I will share as soon as it’s official.

If you miss the Nov. 30 deadline to get access to the virtual BASB workshop, don’t worry – your pre-order will still qualify for access to the workshop recording when it’s eventually released. And in the coming months we will release a wide range of pre-order bonuses for purchases from 1 to 1,000 books, and any pre-order will qualify.

2. WHY CAN’T I PRE-ORDER THE BOOK IN MY COUNTRY?

Our ultimate goal is to make this book available in every country in the world we can. I’m determined to make that happen, but it will take time.

The publishing industry is a vast, complex network of relationships, distribution and sales channels, contractual agreements, and licensing rights. Each publisher purchases rights to a certain country or region, and then is only allowed to sell it in that region.

The reason we opened pre-orders so early, primarily in the U.S., and focused on Amazon is to climb the bestseller lists, make a splash, and use the momentum from that initial wave in negotiations with foreign publishers, which are ongoing.

By purchasing the U.S. Kindle or hardcover versions from any retailer, you are adding to that snowball of momentum and giving weight to my literary agency’s negotiations on my behalf.

Basically, we are focusing our efforts on the biggest book market in the world, the United States, to prove to publishers and distributors around the world that there is existing demand for this book. As soon as we have a way to distribute the book in your country, we will.

3. WHY CAN’T I PRE-ORDER THE BOOK THROUGH MY PREFERRED RETAIL OUTLET?

We are also determined to make this book available in every possible channel we can. From online book sites to corporate chains to small independent shops.

I know many of you prefer to buy through a small, local, and/or independent bookstore, and I fully support that. Currently it is available for sale through Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Indiebound. Other outlets take more time to begin making pre-orders available, but I will keep updating the BASB website as others come online.

For our purposes, all sales of the book through any channel and in any format matter. So I’ve decided that we will honor any and all pre-order incentives (subject to deadlines and quantity limits) regardless of where you purchase the book.

4. WILL YOU BE RELEASING AN AUDIOBOOK VERSION?

We are also committed to translating the book into every format available, including audiobook. But I want to record the audiobook myself, with my own voice, so that will also take some time.

It also depends on the sales momentum of the ebook and hardcover versions. Showing signs of success there will help us secure better terms and distribution rights for the audiobook as well.

In summary…

Thank you for making this sales spike happen – and for keeping it going!

You’re helping us bring the Second Brain movement to as many people as possible – in an accessible format for everyone.

More updates soon,

Tiago

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The post Book Update #4: You showed up – book sales are taking off! appeared first on Forte Labs.