Tiago Forte's Blog, page 2

Productive Disorder: The Hidden Power of Chaos, Noise, and Randomness

In the early 1700s, Central Europe faced a crisis: the forests were running out.

An explosion in mining, shipbuilding, and early industry had devastated old-growth forests that had stood for many centuries. Meanwhile, the population was exploding as well, creating demands on forests that clearly couldn’t be sustained for long.

The kingdoms of Prussia and Saxony decided to apply the emerging methods of science to the problem, developing what would eventually become known as Scientific Forestry. In order to maximize timber production for the state, forestry officials turned their wild and messy woodlands into outdoor timber factories.

They began by meticulously cataloguing every tree in the forest by species and size. They analyzed growth rates and wood quality to identify the most productive species, settling on Norway spruce to yield the maximum volume of timber per square foot. They then cleared the existing forests and turned them into monocultures – endless rows of evenly spaced, identically sized spruce.

What had once been an impossibly complex tangle of diverse kinds of vegetation – oak, beech, fir, and countless others – became a “planned forest.” It was the biological equivalent of a spreadsheet, with straight rows of trees laid out in a precise geometric grid ready for bureaucratic regulation.

At first, it worked beautifully. Forestry officials could now predict with extreme accuracy the exact yield of every patch of forest. The new plantations produced more lumber, at a faster pace, to a more precise standard. Harvests came in on schedule and in uniform sizes ready for sawmills. Logging boomed and the revenue flowed into state coffers.

But something strange began to happen after the second or third generations of trees were planted. The first generation had flourished in the absence of competition for soil and nutrients, but in the following generations, those same ecosystems collapsed, with dramatic production losses of 20-30%.

In order to make the forest more productive, the underbrush had been cleared of smaller trees, bushes, and shrubs. That underbrush had fertilized the soil with decomposing leaves and wood; without this undergrowth, the soil soon became depleted. The disappearance of fungi, worms, and insects caused pollination and soil aeration to crash.

Pests like the pine looper moth and bark beetle raced through identical strands of trees, encountering no obstacles or predators. Storms damaged vast swathes of the forest, toppling over the shallowly rooted spruces like “bowling pins.”

It turned out in retrospect that the messy diversity of the forest had been the source of its resilience. When stresses such as storms, disease, drought, fragile soil, or severe cold struck, a diverse forest with its full array of different species of trees, birds, insects, and animals was far better able to survive and recover. A windstorm that toppled large, old trees would typically spare smaller ones. An insect attack that threatened oaks might leave lindens and hornbeams unaffected. The rigidity and uniformity of the system meant that failures were not small and contained but systemic. 

By the late 19th and early 20th century, forest plantations had become “a pale shadow of their previous ecological richness.” After all the effort and resources invested, the forests of Central Europe were now producing less timber than the wild forests they had replaced. All these changes culminated in what Germans grimly came to call Waldsterben, or “death of the forest.” 

The supposedly “scientific” management of forests led to ecological problems so severe that multiple generations of restoration ecology have been needed to restore the previous diversity in insects, flora, and fauna. Germany continues to struggle with the lasting effects of monoculture forestry to this day, most recently in 2018 due to the mounting effects of climate change.

This story is recounted in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, and in his book, Scott notes that far from being a unique or isolated incident, scientific forestry was one incidence of a far broader movement, which he dubs Authoritarian High Modernism. 

Across many facets of the modern world, from urban planning to public health, from transportation infrastructure to online social networks, we’ve sought to “rationalize” and “optimize” the messiness and complexity of the world. From the way we organize our cities and homes to how we manage the economy, all the way down to the systems and routines we create for our personal productivity, we’ve tried to impose rational order on complex systems based on a narrow vision of efficiency.

In this piece, I’ll argue that the results of that effort have been disastrous, and it’s time to return those systems to their natural, messy state.

An optimal level of mess

I first read the story of scientific forestry in a blog post by Venkatesh Rao in 2014. It was a paradigm-shifting moment for me. I saw in myself much the same attitude as 18th century German forestry officials – an unquestioned belief in order, reason, and systematic thinking.

I had always believed that anything I wanted to achieve in life was to be found on the other side of “getting organized.” My assumption was that there was one “best” path to achieving any goal, which was to follow a highly specific, structured, step-by-step plan with objectives and metrics. It was the “one true way,” as universal and unquestioned as my childhood religious faith.

Yet, in my early 20s, I began to run up against the limits of my blind faith in order. I began to see more and more examples of how it failed – in my own life, the lives of my friends and peers, and even in the business world and in society. The pitfalls and weaknesses of highly ordered, rationalized systems started to become ever more glaring, especially in a world that seemed to be changing faster and becoming more ambiguous and uncertain.

What if, I began to wonder, the costs of being neat and organized outweighed the benefits? What if there were hidden advantages to being messy, informal, loose, and even chaotic?

Last year, I picked up a book called A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, that finally addressed my longstanding question. Their striking conclusion after studying dozens of disciplines was a strong affirmative yes: that “moderately disorganized people, institutions, and systems frequently turn out to be more efficient, more resilient, more creative, and in general more effective than highly organized ones.”

They argue instead for an attitude toward organization that takes into account its costs, by asking yourself: Will more effort spent organizing be worth what it costs me in time and other resources? They suggest that there is an “optimal level of mess” for any given person and every given situation…and that it is just as common for people to err on the side of overorganization as underorganization.

This assertion is akin to heresy in our productivity-obsessed world. And for me personally, as someone who’s dedicated my career to teaching people how to be more efficient and organized, it felt like the portal to a hidden, subversive world.

The surprising benefits of disorder

This may seem counterintuitive, but you can think of “mess” not as simply the absence of order – like a vacuum of nothingness – but as a phenomenon in its own right, with its own qualities.

You can even conceive of mess as a valuable resource you can draw on or a strategy you can proactively apply when needed.

To understand when and where we might want to employ messes, we need to identify its unique benefits. Abrahamson and Freedman suggest six of them: flexibility, completeness, resonance, invention, efficiency, and robustness.

Messes are flexible in that they can adapt and change more quickly, more dramatically, in a wider variety of situations, and with less effort than would be required by highly ordered, formal systems. 

For example, the messiness of a jazz ensemble enables improvisation, as any musician can shift at any moment to address any other, whereas a symphony orchestra has to play the music as written. Neat systems struggle to fight off randomness, and when randomness inevitably leaks in, the system is thrown off.

Messes are more complete (or comprehensive) since they can comfortably tolerate an exhaustive array of diverse entities. 

Neat systems tend to whittle away at the diversity of their elements (as we saw in 18th-century German forestry). As another example, Thomas Edison tried any and every material in his quest to invent a workable lightbulb with a long-lasting glow, without regard to elegant theories as to why they might work. His approach to experimentation was wide-ranging and messy.

Messes are resonant, as in they facilitate surprising connections between overlapping, heterogenous elements. 

Alexander Fleming happened upon the discovery that led to the invention of the first antibiotic, penicillin, because his lab was notoriously messy. A small, ragged circle of mold had invaded one of his petri dishes, but the staphylococci culture it contained seemed to steer clear of the mold, his first clue that the bacteria couldn’t tolerate it.

Messes facilitate invention by randomly juxtaposing many elements in unexpected, unconventional ways. 

Neatness tends to limit novelty and the unexpected and sweeps them aside as aberrations when they do occur. A sobering example: a major reason modern terrorists are so hard to fight and defeat is because they are constituted by loose, constantly shifting, non-hierarchical, i.e., messy groups.

Messes are efficient, able to accomplish goals with a modest consumption of resources. 

Consider the “productivity” of the wild forests before scientific management took root – they produced immense value for a wide variety of human and non-human species, despite the complete lack of an organizing scheme. Neatness tends to require a constant expenditure of resources just to maintain itself.

Messes are robust in that they tend to weave together and interlace many disparate elements, making them more resistant to destruction, failure, and imitation. 

For example, competitive runners benefit from “inconsistent” workouts that mix up the speed, length, difficulty, frequency, and inclination of their running routines, leading to muscles that are more adaptable. Mixed-breed mutts are often hardier than purebred dogs thanks to the random interweaving of genes from their unlike parents. Neat systems, in contrast, tend to be more brittle and more easily disrupted or copied.

Later in the book, Abrahamson and Freedman introduce a seventh benefit: messes can be fun!

Consider the joy of sorting through antiques and doodads at a flea market, browsing a stack of random magazines, or spelunking through a messy collection of notes and finding something you didn’t even know you were looking for. Messy situations inherently include many qualities we find enlivening and interesting: surprise, delight, exploration, and discovery.

Adding disorder to a system can make it more effective

It’s one thing to believe that messes have some intriguingly positive qualities in theory. It’s quite another to realize those benefits in real life.

Let’s get one level more concrete and look at practical ways we can use the benefits of disorder in our daily lives.

Specifically, let’s see how disorder can make for more creative environments, allow information systems to contain more information, make the human brain smarter, enhance one’s personal productivity, and allow us to make more consistent progress on our projects and goals.

Disorder makes for more creative environments

In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson highlights many surprising examples of how disorder has led to new ideas and inventions throughout history. In his research, he found that innovation is often driven by “the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space.”

Perhaps the most classic model for such a space is the eighteenth-century coffeehouse, which Johnson notes was the hotbed for Enlightenment-era innovations that transformed our world: everything from the science of electricity to the insurance industry to modern democracy itself. 

Sigmund Freud famously hosted an intellectual salon on Wednesday nights in Vienna, where physicians, philosophers, and scientists came together to discuss the emerging field of psychoanalysis. The legendary Homebrew Computer Club in 1970s Silicon Valley was made up of a ragtag group of amateur hobbyists, teenagers, entrepreneurs, and academics, who together somehow sparked the personal computer revolution.

Berkeley psychology professor Charlan Nemeth began investigating the relationship between noise, dissent, and creativity in group environments more than thirty years ago, and her research offers a clue as to why noisy cafes and amateur hobbyist clubs might have fostered so much creativity: she found that “good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error,” ranging from mock juries to corporate boardrooms to academic seminars.

Maybe the best environment for our creativity is not sitting in a minimalist cafe, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, with an all-consuming focus on a tiny screen. Maybe there are times we’d be better served by immersing ourselves in randomness instead.

Disorder makes for more information-rich systems

Steven Johnson, in his book, introduces the field of Descriptive Complexity Theory, a branch of information science that has found that the more randomness in a system, the more information it can hold.

This may seem paradoxical, but imagine the case of two professors: one with a perfectly tidy, neat office with not a paperclip out of place, and one with a messy office full of personal items strewn all over the place. Which one provides you with more information about what kind of person the professor is? Clearly the messy one, since too much neatness and order tends to hide away the idiosyncratic details that distinguish one person from another.

Now imagine a digital notetaking app such as Notion, Obsidian, Tana, or Evernote. You might imagine that perfectly organizing your notes app – with neatly formatted text, seamless folders, comprehensive tags, and uniform headings – might allow you to fully maximize the potential of your knowledge.

But then again…maybe not. Maybe it is the very messiness that we tend to despise that makes our notes personal, intimate, and unique to us. A perfectly organized set of notes could belong to anyone, whereas a messier collection might contain all sorts of hidden clues about your unique desires and interests.

Disorder makes for smarter brains

In a 2007 study on the brain activity of children, neuroscientist Robert Thatcher and his team found that there was a correlation between the IQ of individual children and the amount of time their brains spent in “chaotic mode” (in contrast to “phase lock,” which is a more ordered and focused state of mind).

Every extra millisecond spent in chaos added as much as twenty IQ points, whereas time spent in phase lock was correlated with reduced IQ. Their conclusion is astonishing: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are likely to be.

It turns out that the human brain relies on disorder for its basic functioning at multiple levels, from the processing of raw sensory data to the interplay of abstract ideas. Our brains evolved to navigate a messy world, and perhaps when we insist on organizing its activity, we rob it of that essential ability.

Consider how too much silence in a group dinner can be uncomfortable. Or that kids can knock out homework in a noisy home. Or that jiggling a telescope can help an observer’s eye pick up a faint celestial body. We are designed to thrive in chaos.

Disorder makes for higher productivity

Jane Jacobs, the famous urban planning theorist, noted a similar phenomenon at work in the design of cities. 

She noticed that planners had a tendency to substitute superficial visual order for true functionality. In other words, whether a neighborhood “looked right” became more important than whether it worked for its inhabitants. The assumption seemed to be that if an arrangement was visually pleasing, that automatically meant it would function well.

I see this tendency run amok in the personal productivity space as well: people tend to love visual order, manifesting as pleasing symmetry, clean lines, perfectly squared little boxes, and severe minimalism. Yet all too often, this order and elegance comes at the expense of functionality – Does the thing actually work? Does it work sustainably for the long term? Does it fit how your mind works? Does it provide more value than it requires in upkeep?

It’s far easier to make something superficially pretty than to answer such questions. It’s much easier to compulsively switch to a different app that promises to instantly sweep aside the digital disorder than to figure out what we’re truly trying to accomplish. It’s much easier to organize things than to decide which of those things actually matters.

No doubt some situations call for a more structured approach – think of checklists used by an operating surgeon or an airline pilot. But most of us don’t face such high-stakes situations in our daily lives and would benefit from less formal tools.

Disorder helps you make progress

We normally think of “organizing” a collection of physical, visual, or digital elements, but it also applies to how one structures one’s efforts, including goals and projects.

In Tim Hartford’s book Messy, he found in his research that the top scientists tend to switch topics frequently: “Over the course of their first hundred published papers, the long-lived high-impact researchers switched topics an average of forty-three times.” 

We are normally taught that in order to achieve something great, we have to focus maniacally on a single pursuit. Yet by cultivating a variety of projects at different stages of fruition, leading scientists clearly gain four benefits:

Multiple projects cross-fertilize, with the knowledge gained in one sometimes unlocking key insights in another.Diverse pursuits provide variety that captures our attention, whereas a single-minded pursuit can become monotonous and boring.Each project provides an “escape” from the others, giving you something to turn to when you face an impasse, instead of it becoming a crushing experience.Turning our attention away from a project gives us a chance to process it subconsciously, which some scientists believe is an important key to solving creative problems.

This last benefit was designated by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard as “crop rotation.” One cannot use the same field to grow the same crop indefinitely. Eventually the soil must be refreshed by planting something new or simply giving it a break.

This agricultural metaphor brings us back full circle to James C. Scott’s ideas in Seeing Like a State, where he makes an intriguing observation: “The rule seems to be that the more rigid and exclusive is the specialist’s boundary, and the stricter the control within it, the more disorder rages around it.”

In other words, you can’t really ever eliminate disorder; you can only move it around. So perhaps the greatest cost of creating a highly organized environment is that everything just outside its borders – which includes the rest of your life, your body, your family, other people, the natural environment, and human society generally– becomes flooded with externalities for the sake of that perfect system.

Practical takeaways for your productivity

So what does all this mean for our personal approach to order and organization?

Here are some actionable takeaways I can offer based on the findings and examples above:

1. Don’t feel guilty about putting off organizing

The authors of A Perfect Mess note that there’s an advantage in putting off organizing: it’s more efficient to organize a larger batch of items all at once than to do it a little at a time. 

This is known as “batch processing,” and I tend to save it for my weekly, monthly, and annual reviews, when paradoxically, the more stuff that has piled up, the better!

Don’t feel guilty about postponing your organizing to a later date, or only doing it occasionally, because in the meantime, you’re benefitting from all the advantages of mess I highlighted above.

2. Notice and embrace the odd, eccentric ways you tend to organize

Many people say they don’t have time to get organized, but in reality, they are constantly engaging in a wide variety of ingenious organizing strategies. Our propensity to seek shortcuts, find the path of least resistance, and expend as little time and energy as possible to achieve an outcome are some of the most reliable ways to find little tips and tricks that may seem eccentric or odd but work for us.

Abrahamson and Freedman present multiple examples of how most people, since they aren’t aware of the ways they naturally stay organized, tend to misjudge how a technology system might help them. They assume that the laid back, informal methods they already use are suboptimal and that they need a piece of software that only adds a lot of burdensome formality.

3. Satisfice instead of maximize

One of the subtle implications of the ideas in this piece is that we don’t ever truly have control. If we try to fully organize our surroundings, we fall into the traps and pitfalls noted above. If we instead accept the messiness, then we don’t have full control over it either.

What’s left then is to accept the reality: that we are all careening through a chaotic void, with at most brief moments of stability and fleeting periods of agency. Instead of trying to order and control our lives, we can use this inherent randomness as an excuse to satisfice, which has long been recognized as an essential ingredient for happiness.

As Nicholas Nassim Taleb puts it, “Having some randomness in your life can actually increase happiness: it forces you to satisfice, instead of maximize. Research shows that those who live under self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.”

Living in the balance

It’s all a balance, all masculine and feminine, yin and yang. When the benefits of order start running out, it’s time to switch to disorder. And vice versa – when disorder starts careening out of control, try adding a little structure to the problem. 

There are no “right” ways that work universally in all situations; only tools that work better or worse depending on the job.

It’s not that order, reason, and efficiency are bad – it’s that they are sometimes extolled as inherent virtues when, in fact, their opposites can be just as valuable and useful.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

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My Time in Eastern Ukraine: A Story of Beauty, Community, and Hope

I spent 2 years serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Eastern Ukraine from 2009 to 2011. I lived in the town of Kupyansk, a couple hours outside Kharkiv, near the Russian border. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, teaching me so much about myself and life and the people and culture of Ukraine.

Kupyansk is now on the frontlines of the Russian invasion. The streets I walked every day have been decimated, the bridge into town destroyed, and my old students scattered across Ukraine and abroad, or sucked into the vortex of fighting.

When I landed in Kyiv in September of 2009 to begin my service, the country was at peace. It was a fledgling democracy, having gained its independence in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At 18 years old, the country was young, which meant naive and unsure of itself, but also deeply hopeful and optimistic about its future.

The word “Ukraine” means “borderlands,” and the land has indeed always been at the crossroads of many frontiers: between East and West, between Russia and Europe, between the Slavic world and the Latin and Germanic worlds, between Orthodox Christianity and Western Christendom. The sweeping, flat, fertile plains that make it an agricultural breadbasket have always beckoned to conquering armies from every direction to try their luck.

This identity of being in-between, of being at the periphery, gives Ukrainians many of their gifts, from their warmhearted hospitality and multicultural mindset, to their peacefulness and spirit of international cooperation. It makes them humble, grateful, creative, and bold. 

It’s also led to tremendous suffering. The Holodomor, the Soviet Union’s equivalent to the Holocaust, killed between 3.5 and 5 million people in a directed genocide and forced collectivization from 1932-33. The Crimean Tatars, a Muslim people who populated the Black Sea shore for many centuries, were forcibly removed from their homes by Stalin in 1944, loaded aboard sealed-off cattle trains, and transferred almost 3,200 kilometres to the barren, remote reaches of Uzbekistan. It’s hard to imagine such tragedies happening anywhere else but the edges of a “great” empire.

I had wanted to serve in the Peace Corps since I was a teenager when a friend of my parents had told me the stories of his service in the 70s. It sounded like the perfect scenario to me: lots of time in an exotic foreign location, immersed in a new culture, learning a new language, and serving people in need. This combined most of my main interests at the time, and I leapt at the opportunity.

When I arrived, I was so determined to put all my energy into serving and teaching that I decided I wasn’t going to write about my experience while I was there, which I now consider a grave mistake. I had been blogging about my travels in South America for about a year at that point, but still saw writing as an optional indulgence, not an essential way to document and understand my life, as I do today.

I did, however, make a video out of all the short clips I took on my iPhone 3G during my time there. It was my attempt to capture the spirit of my experience there – to commemorate the memories of the most exhilarating, and also most challenging, two years of my life.

14 years later, that video is also a record of what life in Eastern Ukraine was like before the wars. It feels like a snapshot of the final days of a beautiful experiment in Ukrainian independence, now undermined by the Russian invasions of 2014 and 2022.

I’ve decided to share it publicly as a small testament to what was lost. As one more piece of evidence that Ukraine once thrived, that Ukrainians know what kind of country they want to build, and could build it again if given the chance by the wider world.

In the US, we have a president and administration who have essentially switched sides, from this innocent nation struggling to defend its freedom and its rights, to Putin’s Russia, an aggressor toward so many countries on its borders and beyond. It’s the most evil act I’ve ever seen from my country, a betrayal of everything we claim to stand for, and I’m ashamed to have anything to do with it.

My hope is one day Ukraine will have independence, peace, and stability again. It deserves it, its people deserve it, and the world will benefit from it being secure, autonomous, and self-determined, not a vassal state under the thumb of Moscow like it’s been for so much of history.

If you want to help me donate directly to Ukrainian relief organizations, my book is now available in Ukrainian (Запасний мозок) and Russian (Создай свой «второй мозг»!). Here are direct links you can use to purchase it in various formats:

In Ukrainian in Ukraine: on Rozetka and YakabooIn Russian in Ukraine: on ZakupkaIn Russian in Russia: on Ozon and YandexAs an ebook in Russian everywhere: on Litres

I’m donating 100% of my royalties from both languages to non-profits and relief organizations in Ukraine forever, totaling $10,000 USD so far. And of course, I encourage you to donate directly if you’re able. Now that they’ve been abandoned by their main champion, the U.S., they need it more than ever.

In many ways, the origins of my work with Second Brains, digital organization, and productivity can be traced back to my time in Ukraine. It was the first time I taught “life skills” such as how to define goals, make project plans, gather resources, and execute on a timeline. There is a direct link between the community service program I created during my service, known as Projects Bring Change, to the central role of projects in all my teaching.

I hope this is one small way I can return the blessings that Ukraine and her people gave to me, and perhaps teach another generation of Ukrainians what it means to succeed with their goals in this uncertain and volatile time.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post My Time in Eastern Ukraine: A Story of Beauty, Community, and Hope appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Death of Goals

I’ve suspected for years that the traditional concept of “goal-setting” was on its last legs. 

Every time I bring up “SMART goals,” I can see the light go out in my students’ eyes. An unmistakable feeling of dread and aversion fills the room, and the decline in energy and enthusiasm is palpable. They know they should set goals that way, but they don’t want to.

The SMART framework was developed 44 years ago by a director of corporate planning at an electric and natural gas utility – not exactly a paragon of modern business in the information age.

I knew traditional goals were an outdated relic of a bygone era, but I hadn’t figured out what to replace them with. After all, they seem like such a load-bearing pillar of modern society: you set an objective, you make a plan, and then you follow the steps to get there. 

What other approach could there even be?

I recently came across a book that proposes an intriguing answer, one that I’m confident is much better suited to our more unpredictable, dynamic world. It is based on extensive research in the field of Artificial Intelligence but its lessons apply broadly to any domain. 

It’s called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, by Kenneth O. O. Stanley and Joel Lehman. In this piece, I’ll summarize the book’s most interesting and useful points.

The fatal flaw in goal-setting

The concept of “goal-setting” has dominated our thinking about ambition, achievement, and progress for decades. 

It’s akin to a secular article of faith: the unquestionable “right way” to build, invent, discover, innovate, or create anything, from the smallest personal project to the grandest feats of civilization.

There are undoubtedly some advantages to traditional goal-setting, which explain why it’s stuck around for so long: it’s easy to understand, predictable, appeals to common sense, and offers comfort against the harsh uncertainty of reality.

But Stanley and Lehman ask a profound question in their book: What if that traditional approach to goal-setting is hindering progress on many fronts? What if it degrades our creativity, blocks us from serendipitous discovery, and dampens what makes us most interesting and unique?

They note that goal-setting works perfectly fine for modest pursuits. If you’re trying to improve efficiency on a production line by 5%, or finish a kitchen remodel, by all means, set a goal and follow the obvious steps to reach it.

The problem arises when we try to scale up this modest strategy to greater achievements – those that involve true ambition, novel invention, innovative breakthroughs, or pushing the frontier.

These are the kinds of pursuits in which goals lose their power, and can actually become counterproductive and lead you in the opposite direction of progress.

To understand why, it’s helpful to think of achievement not as creating something completely new from scratch, but as searching a space of possibilities.

Imagine yourself walking through a vast hall containing all possible inventions, each one floating in midair like a shimmering possibility. 

As you explore the hall, you start to notice that there is a structure to the space – inventions that are similar to each other are found in the same area, while inventions that are distinct are located far apart from each other. Some parts of the hall are dead-ends, leading nowhere, while others are full of potential, with pathways leading in multiple directions.

Now imagine you’re trying to invent a new kind of computer. The question is, why can’t you just go straight to the “best” computer design in the whole room? Presumably, it would entail a level of performance millions of times beyond our current designs, using technology that is unimaginable to modern science.

Well, when you put it that way, the answer is obvious: you have to proceed through each of the intermediate stages of technology to get to that level. Each invention builds on a previous generation, and you don’t get to skip steps.

Now we can identify what makes our task so challenging: those intermediate steps are not at all predictable. In fact, they often seem bizarre, nonsensical, or completely counter-intuitive until after you’ve taken them.

This isn’t a theoretical example: one of the crucial stepping stones to modern computers in the 1940s was vacuum tubes, which are devices that channel electric current through a vacuum. Yet the potential uses of vacuum tubes were so unexpected that it took over 100 years from their invention until someone realized they could be used in computing.

This might seem like an exceptional example, but it’s closer to the rule:

The Wright Brothers invented the first airplanes by reusing bicycle technology, a seemingly unrelated stepping stone.Microwave technology was first invented for magnetron power tubes that drove military radar, until Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon, noticed it melted a chocolate bar in his pocket.In 1879, Constantin Fahlberg, working on coal tar derivatives, accidentally tasted a sweet residue on his hand—leading to the discovery of saccharin, the first artificial sweetener.Wilhelm Röntgen was experimenting with cathode rays when he noticed an unknown form of radiation that passed through solid objects, thereby leading to x-rays.In 1956, engineer Wilson Greatbatch installed the wrong type of resistor into a heart rhythm recorder circuit, accidentally inventing the modern pacemaker.

For each of these landmark accomplishments, fixating too intently on their original goal would paradoxically have blinded their inventors to the world-changing discoveries lying just outside their expectations.

For the most interesting, exciting, impactful achievements, goals are a false compass, distracting you from the highest potential directions. They induce a narrow tunnel vision, eliminating the serendipitous discovery, unorthodox creativity, and breakthrough innovation that are most valuable.

In other words, the best path through the vast hall of possibilities is not a straight one; it’s a twisty turny wild ride of daring leaps and hairpin pivots that would seem positively crazy to any outside observer.

Professor Amar Bhide presents evidence for this in his book Origin and Evolution of New Businesses: 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable.

Other examples from recent history also confirm the pitfalls of goals:

If you focus too much on raising student test scores, you may end up worsening the quality of their education by encouraging rote memorization.If you optimize too much for making as much money as possible and therefore decide to take the highest-paying job, it may lead you away from becoming a millionaire in the long run.Fixating too much on reducing alcohol and drug abuse among young people at all costs might inadvertently lead to the abuse of even more dangerous drugs.Paying citizens to turn in venomous snakes may lead to them breeding snakes as a money-making endeavor (which happened in British-ruled India).Paying executives higher bonuses for higher earnings might lead to short-term profits but a long-term disaster when the firm collapses due to excessive risk-taking.

In all these examples, optimizing a certain measure of success in the short term, which makes it look like you’re moving in the right direction, is in fact leading you away from the long-term objective!

The same principle even applies at the level of individuals and their careers, for example:

John Grisham first trained and practiced as a criminal defense attorney for ten years. The trigger for his career change was a particular testimony that he overheard one day from a young rape victim. Somehow that testimony made him realize that he should and could write, and he began waking early in the morning before work to gradually complete his first novel, A Time to Kill.Harland David “Colonel” Sanders (the founder of KFC) cooked for his family as a six-year-old after his father’s death, but would not make a living out of it until he was 40. In between, he tried his luck at piloting a steamboat, selling insurance, and even farming. But the opportunity for success didn’t arrive until he owned a gas station, where he began cooking chicken for his customers.

Building a great career or business might not qualify as a civilizational-scale achievement, but even at this relatively modest scale, objectives can trick us into settling for the known and the predictable instead of the far grander space of possibilities available to us.

An alternative to aimless wandering

The most common objection to this attack on objectives is that, if we don’t have goals, then we’ll be left to “wander around aimlessly.” 

But this book points out that there is another option – there is a way to intelligently explore a search space without the benefit (or drawbacks) of objectives.

The key, the authors tell us, is to “Loosen your requirements for what exactly you’re going to achieve; in other words, you can achieve something great, as long as you are willing to stop demanding what that greatness should be.”

This is such a radical assertion because it flies in the face of the first (and arguably most important) criterion of SMART goal-setting: to be as specific as possible. The demand for specificity is based on the assumption that you can and should control the outcome and that your control is facilitated by zeroing in on the precise details you envision.

Stanley and Lehman would describe this approach as “trying to drag a preconceived vision of the future into the present,” and as “doomed to fail.” 

Their philosophy is better understood as “treasure-hunting.”

Imagine you are part of a treasure-hunting team searching a remote island for lost pirate treasure. You have no treasure maps, but you do know for certain that the island is littered with lots of buried caches.

Your goal is not to arrive at any specific destination on the island, because again, there is no map and no X marking the spot! So any point you arbitrarily choose is likely to contain nothing. Instead, the better search strategy is to pursue novelty, i.e. to try and find places on the island that you haven’t been to before, or even better, that no one has been to before.

There’s far more likely to be a treasure in that hidden underwater cave that no one has even noticed than in the middle of the largest clearing in the middle of the island. That obvious fact points the way to the authors’ recommendation for what we should be optimizing for instead of goals.

How to succeed in a goal-less world

The elimination of objectives might seem like an intriguing idea at this point, but we need some principle to guide our efforts, don’t we?

The authors make six recommendations for what to do instead of setting goals:

Optimize for novelty and interestingnessFollow your gut instinct about which direction is most promisingHold your plans lightly and be open to changing directionPay attention to the pastDouble down on what makes you uniqueCollect stepping stones#1 – Optimize for novelty and interestingness

Stanley and Lehman argue that instead of targeting a specific destination, we should optimize for novelty and interestingness. 

Ideas that are novel and interesting have the tendency to lead to even more novel, even more interesting ideas, in a divergent, branching space of increasing possibilities.

This is deeper than simply trying random things because a novelty-driven search tends to produce behaviors in a certain order: from simple to more complex. This is because as soon as the simple options have been tried, and you keep pursuing novelty, then the only ones left to try are complex!

Eventually, doing something genuinely novel always requires learning about the world, which is why novelty search is inherently about accumulating information (whereas the pursuit of fixed objectives often requires you to ignore new information in service of reaching the goal more efficiently).

As the philosopher Alfred Whitehead put it, “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than it be true.”

#2 – Follow your gut instinct about which direction is most promising

If the structure of the space of possibilities is unpredictable and irrational, that means we have to rely on non-rational means of detecting it: inspiration, elegance, potential to stimulate further creativity, thought-provoking construction, challenge to the status quo, analogy to nature, beauty, simplicity, and imagination, for example.

Our gut – otherwise known as our intuition, instinct, subconscious, or emotions – has access to vastly more information than our conscious minds can consider, which means it can sometimes sense the shape of the network of possibilities in pre-conscious ways.

#3 – Hold your plans lightly and be open to changing direction

A third strategy is to hold your plans lightly and be open to changing directions since we never know when the prerequisites to a breakthrough will fall into place and suddenly make it possible.

Stanley and Lehman write, “To arrive somewhere remarkable we must be willing to hold many paths open without knowing where they might lead.” 

It takes a high degree of open-mindedness to “hold many paths open” in one’s mind without getting overwhelmed or discouraged. It means we have to find a way to explore paths in parallel, or opportunistically, rather than focusing all our resources on one all-important goal, as traditional thinking suggests.

#4 – Pay attention to the past

Fourth, the authors recommend special attention and sensitivity to the past, because the past is what defines what is novel. 

It’s much easier to know what happened in the past, and then escape it, rather than trying to arrive at a specific and unknown future. This might require studying the past, documenting the past, finding out what others have tried and how and why it failed, which goes against modern society’s bias toward the future.

#5 – Double down on what makes you unique

Fifth, a goal-less world frees us to double down on what makes us unique. There is no longer a singular destination that we’re all trying to arrive at, which also means there is no right path or wrong path. 

There are only more or less interesting paths, and one of the best ways of finding a new and interesting path is to look at what qualities, quirks, interests, biases, obsessions, or beliefs most set you apart from others.

Count Basie, who was a respected name in jazz during the birth of rock and roll, described how new musical styles really come about: “If you’re going to come up with a new direction or a really new way to do something, you’ll do it by just playing your stuff and letting it ride. The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.”

#6 – Collect stepping stones

Interestingness can be thought of as a network of stepping stones, each connecting to the next in surprising and unconventional ways. As you move through this network, you will come across stepping stones that seem promising, but it’s not clear how, why, or even when – it might be a stepping stone that you can only use years from now when the circumstances are right.

The answer is to keep a collection of those stepping stones in the meantime. We’re talking about information here – ideas, stories, metaphors, anecdotes, facts, theories, frameworks, hypotheses, experiments – which means this can be as simple as taking good notes for the long term.

This is, by the way, a wonderful and accurate way of describing what we’re doing when we build a “Second Brain.” Although I often emphasize the importance of keeping a list of currently active projects – the “P” in PARA – many of the notes you save won’t be directly related to a project, at least not immediately.

That doesn’t matter. As long as you keep an ever-growing collection of inherently intriguing stepping stones, over time the possibility space in which you reside can only expand. You’ll start to see more and more connections from the stepping stones in your collection to new projects, inventions, breakthroughs, people, places, conversations, and on and on.

This also explains why it doesn’t matter all that much whether your notes are comprehensive, or perfectly organized. It doesn’t matter if a given note completely captures the message of a given article, book, podcast, or course. All that matters is that it exists, so you can stumble across it in the future and be provoked to wonder if this is a stepping stone worth following at that moment.

Your main problem will start to become how to choose where to spend your limited time and attention in the face of such a staggering number of exciting possibilities branching out in all directions. But at least that’s the best possible problem to have.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post The Death of Goals appeared first on Forte Labs.

Tiago’s 2025 Projects, Questions, and Intentions

I recently published my 2024 Year-In-Review looking back over the events and lessons from last year.

Now it’s time to look forward – to the goals, plans, and intentions my team and I are committing to for 2025.

The theme I’ve chosen for this year is The Year of Profitability, as our financial results were clearly the biggest weakness last year. Among other things, this means we are:

Making profitability the main filter we use to decide which projects to take onSplitting our efforts approximately 50/50 between creating new products and improving our existing onesKeeping the team lean and expenses low, with no new hires this yearReturning to live cohort courses, but in a way that’s more sustainable for meContinuing to invest in the Second Brain Membership as our flagship program, and having all roads lead to it from across our ecosystem

I recently sat down with our CFO to identify three numbers that will be our guiding lights this year:

To break even on a monthly basis, we need to make $67,000 per monthTo reach a 30% net margin, we need to make $105,000 per monthTo limit our labor costs to 40% of our revenue, we need to make $115,000 per month

Rather than waiting until the end of the year to check on these numbers, I’m going to be keeping a close eye on them every month.

With these criteria in mind, here are the main projects we’ve decided to move forward with.

2025 ProjectsLaunch an official BASB Notion template

After years of requests, we’ve decided to finally create an official Second Brain Notion template! Notion has continued to prove itself as the preeminent knowledge management platform in the world and is the only one to have truly broken out into the mainstream culture.

We are gathering early feedback from our Second Brain members as well as outside Notion experts to come up with a template that is simple and maintains your focus on what matters, which is putting your ideas to use.

Write the Annual Review book

I sold the proposal for my next book in April 2024, and have spent the 9 months since intensively researching every aspect of year-end reviews. I’ve collected and reviewed hundreds of sources, from historical precedents for this practice going back thousands of years, to psychology studies proving the value of self-reflection, to surprising stats indicating that setting New Year’s Resolutions is actually very effective…as long as you do it a certain way.

I officially concluded the “research” portion of the book in early February, and am now working on the manuscript, which needs to be more or less finished by summer 2025, with rounds of editing continuing into the fall. 

If all goes according to plan, I’ll open preorders for my new book next spring, and it will be released around November 2026. From everything I’ve researched and discovered so far, this practice is going to change many lives, and I can’t wait to publish the definitive guide for it.

If you don’t want to wait so long, check out the self-paced edition of my Annual Review program, which includes many of the ideas and techniques that will be featured in the book.   

Produce more implementation-focused YouTube videos

Although our YouTube channel is technically an ongoing “area of responsibility” rather than a one-time project, we are making some changes to how we make videos this year.

Specifically, I’m noticing that the rapid proliferation of AI is starting to commodify many kinds of content. Now that you can hit “auto-summarize” and get a step-by-step summary of a video in seconds, without even having to watch it, the value of the typical “listicle-style” video is declining. We’re going to switch to more implementation-centric, “coaching” style videos, as I think viewers will increasingly want to know the “how,” not just the “what.”

We will also be publishing a range of annual-review-related videos this year to start building interest and momentum for the release of my book in a little less than two years.

Launch our own app and upgrade the Second Brain Membership

It’s been so gratifying to watch the Second Brain Membership flower over the last year since we launched it to the public in spring 2024. Up until then, it had been a private community only for alumni of our cohorts, which meant that it went completely dark for months at a time.

Once we decided to stop offering live cohorts, it made sense to turn that community into an always-on program that runs all year long.

This year I’m excited to share that we are upgrading to Circle Plus, which will enable a range of new features in our community for communication, collaboration, and engagement. The one I’m most excited about is that we are getting our own app! That means instead of asking people to “join our Circle community” (who the heck knows what that means?!) our call to action will be to “Download our app” on Apple’s App Store or the Google Play store.

This move will make the Second Brain community a more prominent and accessible part of our members’ digital lives – a place they can go to whenever they have something to share or something they want to learn.

Debut an official BASB certification

My book Building a Second Brain continues to sell around 10,000 copies each month worldwide, which has produced a constant stream of inquiries and requests for coaching, consulting, or contract work related to Personal Knowledge Management, from individuals to large companies. But as a tiny team, we’re not set up to service those needs.

That’s why we’ve decided this year to pursue creating an official BASB certification, which will qualify graduates of our courses in the knowledge and skills needed to help others build a Second Brain. I’m hoping this will kick off a thriving marketplace of practitioners and service providers as an extension of our products and books.

Create a new AI cohort-based course

Since early 2023 I’ve been contemplating whether and how I could teach a course on AI. The need was overwhelming and clear, but where I had much more doubt was as to my role. 

What knowledge or perspective did I uniquely have to offer in the rapidly evolving AI space? What kinds of skills could I teach people that would remain relevant beyond the next model release? How could I leverage my background, experience, network, and skills into a program that was impactful while also being sustainable?

I’ve wrestled with these kinds of questions a lot over the last couple of years, and although the pace of innovation hasn’t slowed down, I’m finally starting to catch glimpses of some answers.

My point of view on AI is that it is not primarily a technological challenge – it is a historical, cultural, psychological, ontological, epistemological, societal, educational, governmental, intra and interpersonal, economic, and ultimately spiritual revolution that is going to change everything about our world.

I believe that adapting to AI isn’t just a matter of learning some tactics and tools – it will require a deep and fundamental reimagining of who we are, what our purpose is as humans, what it means to live a productive and fulfilling life, and how we conceive of our place in the universe. In other words, it is a holistic, overarching transformation, not a narrow technical one.

Taking on that perspective, I can begin to see how my way of thinking can help people. I can draw on my knowledge of history to surface lessons from past technological revolutions, my facility with moving between cultures to borrow ideas and ways of being, and my propensity to think holistically and in terms of principles to give people firm guidance amidst a roiling sea of change.

I don’t know exactly what this new course will look like, but I do know it will seek to give people fundamental training in the mindset and skills they need to thrive in the AI era. More to come soon!

Host an Annual Review immersive

For the last 7 years, we’ve taught a live virtual program guiding people through completing a year-end review. In 2025, we’re taking that program on the road! Toward the end of the year, we’ll invite a small group of people to our new hometown, Valle de Bravo, Mexico, to participate in a multi-day, immersive experience.

The details are still to be determined, but I intend to make it the most impactful, transformational experience possible, bringing together everything I’ve learned and discovered about how to make this yearly ritual a paradigm-shifting milestone in people’s lives.

We will also of course continue to offer the online program so as many people as possible have a chance to get support in their review process.

If you want to stay updated on any of these projects, subscribe to our newsletter below:

Open questions

Here are the open questions I’m holding for this year:

1. How can I make irreversible decisions to preserve my willpower?

As I wrote in my 2024 year-in-review, I was astounded at how the single decision to move our family to Mexico led to multiple other intentions seemingly naturally falling into place. I can still hardly believe it, and I want to continue looking for other examples where such a principle might also hold.

Instead of having to create a whole project to individually pursue each goal I have, what are other moment-in-time decisions I can make or actions I can take that allow me to feed two (or more) birds with one scone?

2. What experiences do I want to have with Caio and Delia over the next 10–15 years, while they’re small?

One of the most surprising aspects of becoming a parent is that from the moment the kids are born, you are presented with a complete timeline of their lives, and therefore yours.

You know at approximately what age they’ll begin walking, talking, and going to school. You know when they’ll be in each grade, what kinds of travel and experiences they’ll be ready for, and when they’ll start having friends and wanting to hang out with them instead of you. 

You know when they’re likely to leave home, which means suddenly you can predict the window in which you’ll probably spend 90% of all the time you will ever spend with them, which is before the age of 18.

My kids are 2 and 4, which means they’ll finish elementary school in 2031/2033, middle school in 2034/2036, high school in 2038/2040, and college in 2042/2044. I’ll be 46 when Caio finishes elementary school in 2031, 53 when he finishes high school in 2038, and 57 when he graduates from college in 2042. 

I don’t know why, but these dates completely blow my mind! 2042 is only 17 years away – I remember 17 years ago like it was yesterday! I graduated college myself that year, which means I am already halfway between my own college graduation and my son’s. 

Human lifespans keep getting longer, but the window of time we have to spend most intensively with our kids stays the same. Which means that, as a percentage of our lives, our time with our kids is actually shrinking in a way. “Childrearing” is therefore increasingly no longer a lifelong activity, but a discrete stage of life preceded and followed by many other stages.

All of this makes me want to be very intentional about how we spend those childhood years. I know I want to expose them to as many sports, musical instruments, forms of art, cultural experiences, social situations, spiritually transcendent moments, etc., as I possibly can. 

I want to immerse them long-term in at least two cultures – Mexico and Brazil – so they feel deeply rooted and connected to that aspect of their heritage. I know I want to go on many great adventures with them, having precious moments of depth and intimacy, discovering their limits, inventing new things, seeking new frontiers, and tasting everything life has to offer.

I feel far more commitment and determination around these intentions than any business goal, honestly, which leads me to conclude that all my decisions in the business need to be geared to creating the right conditions for what I consider these much more important moments with my family.

3. What does my jealousy of other people tell me is missing in my life?

One of my favorite indicators of what is missing from my life is what makes me jealous of others.

These days I feel an intense jealousy toward highly fit, middle-aged dads. I don’t know how they do it. It’s not primarily the outward markers of abs and a slim figure I’m jealous of, but the internal sense of dignity and self-respect they must feel when they look in the mirror. That is what I’m after, and exercise is going to be the main focus for my personal goals this year.

I’ve already noticed that my attitude toward exercise has to be different living in a rural town versus a dense suburb. It’s not about how many times I can hit the gym, or how many intensive exercise classes I attend. It’s about taking advantage of built-in opportunities to move, from hiking in the mountains we’re surrounded by, to meeting up with other dads in the afternoon for paddleball, to fitting in quick bodyweight workouts whenever I can.

4. What would it look like to pivot BASB toward AI?

When generative AI first exploded into the mainstream a few years ago, I assumed it was the end of the Second Brain methodology I had spent years developing. If anyone could sign up for an AI chatbot that “knew” the entire Internet, why would they spend the time and effort to curate and build their own personal knowledge base?

But as time passes, I’m beginning to think that maybe AI is not a replacement for the Second Brain, but its true fulfillment. 

People still need to read, take notes, learn, and express themselves even with the aid of AI tools. The “context” you bring to any interaction with AI matters more than ever. There are still many reasons it’s worth storing your favorite ideas, stories, insights, and memories in a private place that only you control.

Maybe, just possibly, AI is going to make the process of building a Second Brain much easier and more accessible to more people, which means the demand for my work might go up instead of down. Maybe I was early to the rise of intelligent software, and am now poised to take advantage of my reputation and experience and teach people how to use it.

This line of thinking is sparking a lot of new ideas for me, which I will be exploring in the coming year.

Here are other open questions I don’t even have the beginnings of an answer to, but I notice fill me with a sense of curiosity and wonder:

How can I integrate more anger work into my life and work?How could I explore and understand my relationship to food this year?What is the bottleneck in my thinking or behavior that is leading to poor financial results in the business?What is the business that gives me more of the life I want now?How can we bring service into our family life?What is a hobby I can be passionate about, that’s hands-on, that I can do with Caio in Valle?What is the kind of work that our new home and lifestyle are best suited to?How can I balance book-writing with all the new initiatives and projects I want to take on this yearHow can we have other people generate new ideas using their energy and enthusiasm, instead of continuing to rely on meWhat role does the blog play now that I’m not writing as much, and our web traffic is decliningHow do we make our community bottom-up instead of top-down?What would it look like to make Forte Labs a platform for others?How can I be the kind of leader and manager who inspires people to greatness without me needing to be there?How I want to spend 2025

As the years pass, I’m increasingly finding that it’s more useful to define exactly how I want to spend my days, as a substitute for goals. Goals have the tendency to require a lot of suffering and sacrifice in the short term, which paradoxically means the more ambitious they are, the worse my life becomes!

As I turn 40 in a few months, I’m not interested in sacrificing current pleasure in order to arrive at a far-off destination anymore. I did that in my 20s so that I would have the life I have now! 

Here are the ways I’ve decided I want to spend my time in 2025, to bring me the happiness, peace, and joy I’ve worked so hard for:

Visiting various gardens, parks, and museums around Valle with the kids—being outside or exploring new places with Lauren and the kids, combining quality family time with exploration, discovery, learning, and fun in a physical setting.Playing with the kids at home—being physical and wrestling with them, especially in contrast to watching TV.Spending time in person, in deeply immersive and intentional spaces, with fellow entrepreneurs and creators I know and trust and want to get to know better—helping me feel seen and accepted and connecting on a more personal level, rather than only through my work.Meeting and connecting with people who are passionate about the same ideas and possibilities, like at my conference, meetups, or elsewhere—I feel like such people are “on the same wavelength” and resonate with how I see the world.Deep reading and writing for many hours at a time with no other commitments for the day—getting to this level of flow is one of the most deeply gratifying experiences, soothing my soul while also making me proud of the progress I’ve made.Working on long-term, large-scale, highly novel creative projects—these make me feel like I’m not wasting my time with a bunch of trivial, forgettable projects, but something that matters and that expands who I am and what I’m capable of.Immersing myself in unusual, novel, complex environments that fully absorb my senses, pull me into the present, and teach me things about myself and the world. For example, museums, new countries and cities, nature, and even online—these environments make me feel embodied and expansive, versus stuck in rumination in my head.In deep, intimate conversations with people I find interesting, receptive, and self-aware—whether dinners with other couples, coffees with new acquaintances, or spontaneous encounters with strangers in public—these conversations feel profound, curiosity-provoking, moving, like I’m discovering someone else while also discovering aspects of myself at the same time.

If anything I’ve written here resonates with you and you see a way we could work together, don’t hesitate to reach out at hello@fortelabs.com.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post Tiago’s 2025 Projects, Questions, and Intentions appeared first on Forte Labs.

Tiago’s 2024 Year-in-Review

As I write these words, I am crossing the Drake Passage, one of the most remote places on Earth.

We are crossing from Ushuaia at the southern tip of South America to the spit of land known as the Antarctic Peninsula. It is a barren, featureless expanse that isn’t part of any continent or ocean. Currents circle the globe uninterrupted here, driving enormous waves that can reach 40 feet high. 

This is a liminal space if there ever was one, and I feel the echoes throughout history of all the great navigators and explorers who risked their lives to traverse it. At the same time, I’m doing it on a luxury cruise, exquisitely outfitted for every conceivable comfort, creating a strange tension within me between pain and pleasure, past and present, outer and inner discovery.

I’m taking this opportunity to do my annual review, an introspective ritual I’ve practiced for over 15 years. As I close my eyes and allow my emotions to come to the surface, the main one I feel is fear. 

Not toward the 20-foot swells, howling wind, or frozen icebergs starting to loom silently around us. I’m afraid to begin this yearly ritual of looking inside and telling the truth to myself. I’ve done annual reviews so many times before, proclaimed their value to so many others, and now, committed to spending several years of my life writing a book on the subject.

I feel fear about whether I’ll do it right, whether I’ll discover something worthy, whether I’ll make it genuine or too performative, and whether I’ll be so focused on creating value for others that I forget to create value for myself.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to go deep enough, won’t uncover my true self, won’t see the hard truths I need to see, and most of all, won’t receive the benefits I’ve been so loudly promising to others, which would make me a fraud.

At the same time, I also feel tremendous gratitude. To be here on this once-in-a-lifetime cruise. To have achieved everything I’ve achieved while still young enough to enjoy it. To have the privilege of contemplating my life and work so deeply and with so many degrees of freedom. To have so many sources of information, so many people to draw on, and so many ways to see and be seen.

Fear and gratitude, the polar opposites of emotion, are my guiding lights through this passage, both the literal one and the metaphorical one I’m about to undertake in parallel.

A crossroads at 40

I sense that I am at a crossroads in my life as I turn 40 in May.

I revisited my “Life Goals” recently, a document that represented my first foray into the world of goal-setting. I started it when I was 20, after reading my first self-help book and deciding I needed to start writing down my goals.

What strikes me looking at it now is that every goal had an assigned “by when” date, and not a single one of those dates was later than 2025. I simply couldn’t imagine life after 40 as a 20-year-old. That seemed practically like old age at the time.

I’ve spent the last 15 years whittling away at that list of “life goals.” It’s been a north star, constantly reminding me of who I said I wanted to become. And I can see now that that list is finished. Not because I achieved everything on it, but because my idea of what it means to live a good life has changed.

I know now that achievements themselves don’t bring fulfillment or happiness. You have to have them, because pursuing goals gives your life direction, purpose, challenge, and stakes. But ultimately, the goal of any goal is to feel a certain way. 

Emotions are what we are really after, I believe, and these days I’m putting the specific things I want to feel front and center:

To recapture a childlike sense of innocence, of unapologetic joy, at the sheer wonder of existence.To find a new direction and purpose for my business and career that fills me with energy and enthusiasm every day while generating its own financial fuel.To understand and love myself more deeply, and to live from that place every day in a pure, unfiltered expression of my inherent nature.To emerge as a more faithful and loving husband, a more caring and present father, a more courageous and skilled entrepreneur, and a more open and committed friend.To feel a profound sense of alignment, determination, clarity, and confidence in the next era of my life and work.To gain newfound freedom and empowerment towards my body and health.

The first thing I do every year as I begin my review is to choose a motto, slogan, theme, or catchphrase, to guide the review itself. This year that motto is “Begin again.”

As I turn 40, it feels like I’m beginning the second half of my life. Statistically, as I reach the approximate halfway point of my biological existence. But also ontologically, as I retire my previous approach to goal-setting and embrace a new philosophy of unfolding into the truest expression of who I’m meant to be.

2024 Wins

Let’s start with the wins!

Book sales

My book Building a Second Brain has been the brightest spot in the business, surpassing 320,000 sales this year in 14 countries and languages so far. It continues to sell about 10,000 copies per month worldwide, which is an incredible pace for any book to sustain and bodes well for the future. 

If we can maintain this pace, we should reach 500,000 copies sold in around 18 months.. I’m crossing my fingers that it reaches that milestone!

We also launched the book in Spanish, and I did a week-long promotional tour in Mexico, which led directly to us finding the town we ended up moving to later in the year. So that’s a pretty unexpected win!

My second traditionally published book, The PARA Method, also continues to sell decently, reaching 25,000 copies sold to date, or 1,400 copies per month on average.

Second Brain Membership

We successfully launched the Second Brain Membership publicly last spring, which I’m very proud of. Previously it had been a private community only for alumni of our live cohorts, but as we retired those, I realized it was time for a perennial, ongoing community where anyone learning about PKM from any source could find a vibrant network of peers to explore alongside.

We now offer weekly and monthly events, ranging from guided weekly reviews with our facilitators, to Q&As with me, to guest workshops on a variety of relevant topics. This year we also launched a 12-month “curriculum” where we’ll tackle one core PKM concept each month, which I’m already seeing the impact of.

We have about 550 active members and are making $22,000 per month in subscriptions. This membership is now our flagship offering within the Second Brain ecosystem, and we have some very exciting new features we plan on adding to it in 2025.

Wholesome Weekend #2

We hosted the second annual retreat of the entrepreneurial mastermind I started in 2023, which was one of the absolute highlights of the year for me. There is nothing like spending immersive quality time with a close circle of dear friends and respected peers all generously sharing their expertise across book-writing, YouTube, strategy, AI, online education, and many other fields.

I plan on continuing these retreats indefinitely, as they are deeply meaningful and enlivening. Bringing interesting people together for moments of connection and intimacy feels close to my true purpose, which is all the more surprising since I’ve always seen myself as an introvert.

The first in-person Second Brain Summit

This was a longtime dream of mine and resulted in so many memorable moments, conversations, and new relationships I will treasure for a long time to come. I wrote about the experience in depth in Reflections on Our First In-Person Second Brain Summit, including pictures and a highlight video.

The financial model for a large-scale conference didn’t work out for us, and in general, doesn’t really fit with our business selling education and information products. I think in the future we will likely stick to virtual summits, and perhaps branch out into immersive, in-person “intensives” that bring together much smaller groups for training and personal development instead.

YouTube growth

Our YouTube channel grew by 6,000 subscribers in 2024, to 288,000 total. This was 36% less growth than we saw in 2023, and I’m scaling back my ambitions here as a result. For a while, I thought we had a chance of becoming one of those “hypergrowth” channels that grow to millions of subscribers within a year or two, but the reality is I’m not willing or interested in obsessing over YouTube to the degree that requires. 

The channel is already big enough to do what I need it to do—distribute my ideas to new audiences, test which ones have the most promise, and cultivate readers for my future books.

The newsletter

We added 22,000 subscribers to our newsletter last year, which was 39% less than in 2023. The newsletter has almost completely flatlined in its growth, which is honestly incredible to me given that our entire content strategy is centered on directing people to sign up for it. 

Many other creators I’ve talked to are seeing similar trends, and I think we’re clearly going through a major upheaval in how online attention flows, driven largely by AI. This is definitely one of the reasons our finances weakened this year, and I don’t know quite what to do about it yet.

The Annual Review program

I taught a live course on how to do an annual review for the 7th time in December and January, this time radically expanding it from a 3-day workshop to a 6-week intensive program. I had just spent the previous 6 months deeply immersed in researching the topic for my book, and this was an incredible chance to test all the new ideas and techniques I’d developed on real live humans.

We welcomed 150 students from all over the world to this cohort, and the effects were transformational, beyond my wildest dreams, which has completely reinvigorated my motivation to turn all that material into the definitive book on the subject. That book will be my main focus for 2025, and I can’t wait to share it with the world.

The Annual Review program is now available as a self-paced edition if you want to make 2025 your most intentional year yet.

Here are a few other pictures of my favorite work-related moments in 2024:

Personal milestones and moving to Mexico

This was the first year of my 12-year career that I felt I maintained work-life balance. 

I didn’t overwork, didn’t extend myself, and didn’t sacrifice my present happiness for a future outcome. I can confidently say I’ve found my natural rhythm and learned how to protect the things that truly matter, like my peace of mind and family time. I did a great job respecting my boundaries, preserving my energy, following my needs and wants, honoring my talents and gifts, and giving myself permission to spend my days in joy.

A big reason for this was our move to Mexico, which I’m realizing with each passing month completely transformed the trajectory of our lives.

My wife and I have long struggled to keep our household clean and organized. Every year it was a sore spot, as we seemed to drown under an ever-accumulating pile of unwanted junk, house projects, and chores. It felt hopeless, like we would never find a way to turn it around. And I noticed so many negative impacts on our health, happiness, and family harmony.

We decided to move to Mexico in April 2024 and did so in August. Now that we’ve been here almost 6 months, it’s shocking to me how many of our values and intentions naturally fell into place as a result:

We live in a smaller, simpler house with far fewer possessions, which makes it much easier to keep them organized.We can afford full-time help here (which costs about $140 per week, a standard rate), which means we have someone spending 40 hours every week doing all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and watching the kids when needed.We seem to do much better as renters, with a responsive, handy landlord right down the street who can fix almost anything himself and knows all the local vendors and service providers.We’ve had the intention to spend more time in nature and visit more interesting places with the kids, and that’s also happened naturally as we explored our new mountain town and the surrounding forests.We’ve long wanted to eat more home-cooked meals, and our “muchacha” now cooks all our meals and cleans up afterward. She used to work in a restaurant, and every day I’m blown away by the thoughtfulness and nutritiousness of her cooking.We’ve wanted to be more social and spend more time with friends, and living in Mexico and its hyperactive social scene pretty much takes care of that entirely.We’ve wanted to be more mindful and present with each other as a family and spend less time on screens, which is facilitated by weekly power outages that mean we all have to entertain each other.

It’s just astonishing to me that a single decision, which we didn’t even have on our radar when 2024 began, would completely change our lives just 8 months later. 

Yet in a way, we had also spent years laying the groundwork for it: through our previous experience living in Mexico in 2019, our long-time study of Spanish, pivoting the business to asynchronous products, and getting really clear with ourselves about what wasn’t working about our life in Long Beach, so that when the right opportunity arose, we were ready for it.

This isn’t to say that everything is perfect. Far from it! In a way, resolving one series of problems with our dramatic move just created a whole new set of problems, which is how life goes:

Vigorous exercise is more difficult in our small town since there aren’t convenient gyms or group classes, and running on mountain trails feels iffy.We are much further away from our friends and family back home, which means we’ll see them less often, which is painful.Our personal income and lifestyle have started to be constrained by the business’ weakness, which has made it difficult to afford to maintain two households at the same time.Living in Mexico, doing everything in Spanish, and in a small town brings an array of challenges, from navigating Mexican bureaucracy, to figuring out how to find essential products and services when nothing is listed online, to acclimating ourselves and our kids to a new school and social environment.Leaving Long Beach after 4.5 years, it was painful to admit to ourselves that we hadn’t succeeded in creating a strong community of friends there. Partly because so much of our social calendar was taken up with family commitments, but also because we just didn’t make an effort corresponding to our values.2024 Disappointments

Just as important as celebrating the wins is commemorating the disappointments. I want to absorb whatever lessons these harsh experiences were trying to teach me, rather than sweeping them under the rug. There is no teacher like failure.

The business finances

It was a strange paradox of a year for Forte Labs. 

We reached some huge milestones – $10 million in lifetime revenue and $3 million in lifetime profit – but at the same time, it was the worst year ever for the business financially. We lost $230,000 for the year, a negative 20% profit margin, which was the first time we’ve been in the red in 11 years in business.

As I reflect on why this happened, the proximate causes are clear:

We hosted our first in-person conference, but overestimated how many people would attend and underestimated how much it would cost, and therefore lost about $270,000 on the event.Several of our major projects didn’t pan out, such as an initiative to offer B2B corporate training, selling a “certification” to consultants and coaches based on our IP, and launching our self-paced courses in Spanish and Portuguese.I waited too long to shrink the team after it became clear the business would continue to decline in the wake of ending our live cohorts 18 months ago.Our top-of-funnel audience growth via the blog, the newsletter, and YouTube decelerated and plateaued, for a variety of reasons, some of them under my control and some not.Our main lines of business now – self-paced courses, subscription membership, sponsorships, and books – are slow-moving sources of revenue that are spread out over time, rather than making money upfront and all at once like we’re used to with cohorts.

It’s hard to admit these missteps and oversights to myself. As I wrote them out in my notebook, I felt a series of uncomfortable emotions welling up inside me, bringing tears to my eyes: grief, disappointment, guilt, helplessness. It was painful to realize that I’ve somewhat lost faith in myself over the last couple of years of declining fortunes in the business.

Will I ever be able to come up with a hit product like the BASB cohorts again? Will I be able to create something people truly want? Am I capable of finding the right path and figuring out the next chapter?

I think what makes these questions painful isn’t the uncertainty or external consequences they entail, but the break in connection with myself they reveal. Not trusting myself means I can’t trust the journey, can’t trust my experience, can’t trust my future. It contracts the long time horizon that I normally like to focus on into a foreshortened present, fixated on survival.

Yet, now that I’ve written these words, and let a few hours pass gazing at monumental agglomerations of snow and ice out on the deck of our ship, I can already begin to see a few ways of reframing this “story.”

First, I can see that I took a lot of risks and made a lot of investments last year:

I risked hosting a full-fledged conference when that wasn’t something Internet creators normally do. I expect those relationships to bear fruit for years to come.I risked selling the proposal for a book when the idea was only amorphous and half-formed, on a timeless practice that will only gain relevance as AI sweeps the world.I risked bringing my most respected peers together for a weekend mastermind retreat in Sonoma, which wasn’t designed to make money but will also bear fruit for years to come.I risked moving my family to Mexico and changing every aspect of our lives in pursuit of a more grounded, culturally connected future for them.

Second, I can see that 2024 was a grand experiment. I was testing the hypothesis that I could run the business without thinking about profitability at all. None of my decisions about which projects to take on were based on their ability to make money.

Framed as an experiment, I can say that the results were exceedingly clear: not prioritizing profitability reliably leads to a lack of profitability! In a funny way, it’s reassuring to know that. And now I can feel grateful that we have the financial reserves to conduct such an experiment without running the business off a cliff.

Third, our financial results indicate in unmistakable terms that the current business model, which was so perfectly suited to the pandemic era, is no longer working. Times have changed, the digital landscape has evolved, and the evidence couldn’t be clearer that we need to evolve with it.

In particular, it’s become very clear that growing an audience isn’t the panacea it once was. Over the last five years, our follower count across all platforms has grown 46x, from 13,000 in March 2020 to 624,000 today. It’s long been an unquestioned article of faith among online entrepreneurs that if you grow a sizable following, the money will naturally come, which is why a majority of my time has always been spent growing that following. But that maxim is breaking down now – it’s entirely possible to have legions of followers, but no corresponding business on the backend.

All this means that the main theme in the business for me right now is “searching”: searching for a new direction, for a new true north, for a winning product and strategy, and for a new identity in the aftermath of the BASB era. 2024 was a year of retrenchment, of retreat, of hibernation, of creating a solid foundation among our existing lines of business, and now I know it’s time to emerge from the winter.

I’ve also published a video sharing 7 insights from 2024 that reshaped how I think about business, life, and growth:

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post Tiago’s 2024 Year-in-Review appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Analog Productivity System: Journaling for Every Season of Life

I’m thrilled to share a special guest post by my wife, Lauren Valdez. Lauren approaches productivity in a way that’s refreshingly different from my digital-first philosophy. She’s deeply rooted in the tactile and intentional, favoring physical tools like journals over digital systems. 

Journaling has been her cornerstone for reflection, decision-making, and creativity. I’m excited for her to share her journaling practice with you, not as a “how-to,” but as an inspiring example of how to customize systems that resonate with your life and values. Over to Lauren!

For a decade, I bounced between task managers like a serial dater afraid of commitment. Asana to Things, Todoist back to Things, Apple Reminders… Each new app promised to fix my life, but left me more overwhelmed than before. My digital task lists grew into monsters that paralyzed me with anxiety, so I would dump them and start again.

Then my husband Tiago hit me with a truth bomb: ‘I think the problem is you, not the tool.’

Damn him for being right. What I really needed wasn’t another sleek productivity app – I needed a way to face the mess in my head.

I needed a simpler, more intentional way to manage not just my tasks, but my emotions. I needed a way to manage my anxiety that gets in the way of starting a task. I needed a way to simplify overwhelming amounts of information. I needed to find pleasure in my productivity system, rather than it feeling like a burden. 

That’s when I turned to pen and paper.

Lauren’s Journaling Practice: Intentionality, Flexibility, and Joy

Journaling isn’t just something I do—it’s a way I make sense of life and stay true to my values. My journals help me slow down, reflect on highs and lows, and make more intentional decisions. They’re my tools for staying present and navigating life with purpose.

Here’s a look at how I use journaling, organized around the rhythms of daily, weekly, monthly, and annual reviews. Each journal has a unique purpose, and together, they form a system that’s messy, intuitive, and deeply personal.

1. Morning Pages: Daily Reflection (3–5x per Week, 15–30 Minutes)

I use a cheap school notebook for this nearly daily practice inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Morning Pages are simple: write three pages by hand about whatever is on your mind. It’s messy, unfiltered, and deeply cathartic.

This practice is my brain dump—a space to clear my head of thoughts, reflections, and feelings. I often write about what happened the day before, including funny things my kids said or little moments we didn’t photograph but I want to remember. I also confront my anxieties, writing out absurd thoughts and reframing them as though I were compassionately giving advice to a friend with the same worries. Some days, I plan my day or draft ideas for work. Other days, big emotions surface, and I rage write–raging my complaints or my pains on the page. It’s my space to get things I would never say aloud out of my head and let them go. It’s always a surprise.

At the end of the year, I reread these pages. It’s humbling and inspiring to see how much I’ve grown, and I rediscover moments of joy and resilience I’d forgotten. When I skip this practice, my day is often less intentional and more chaotic—but that’s okay too.

2. Bullet Journal: Task Management and Notes (3–5x per Week, 15 Minutes)

It’s funny that the feature that makes digital tasks managers so great – quick capture, it the reason I can’t use them. I’m a people pleaser who defaults to saying yes. When I’m quickly capturing tasks, I’m not intentional about what I want to do. My digital lists eventually became so bloated that I spent more time organizing the lists than taking action. It was hard to find, organize, and prioritize what really mattered. I also an indecisive Libra; the more tasks on my list, the more paralyzed I become trying to figure out what to work on.  On top of that, I didn’t have consistent habits for maintaining those systems—like daily or weekly reviews—to keep things up to date.

Eventually, I discovered Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal system for managing my tasks and notes by hand in a paper notebook. I plan out my day and write out my tasks for the day by hand. I also carry my notebook around and take handwritten notes in meetings and even take notes on books I am reading by hand. 

What I love about the bullet journal system is how it makes me feel more deliberate about what I say yes to in my life. 

My #1 productivity principle is: what is simple is sustainable. Writing tasks by hand keeps things simple. It also makes me pause and think. If I don’t want to bother rewriting a task, I have to ask myself, “Does this really matter?” That moment of hesitation often helps me let go of things that don’t align with my priorities.

On most days, I average only about three tasks, and that’s enough. I don’t always do exactly what I set out to do, but I always update my bullet journal with what I actually did and see that all the tasks I used to not track digitally like doing laundry, going to yoga, and cooking dinner are big tasks that need to be celebrated too. There is also something that feels so good about crossing off a task physically with a pen. 

Ryder writes in his book, “Everything on your list has to fight for its life to stay there. More accurately, each item needs to fight for the opportunity to become part of your life.” That principle has transformed how I manage my time and energy.

Even though my bullet journal is primarily for tasks, it’s also where I take notes and plan projects. I create messy, functional spreads to brainstorm ideas, plan trips, or track habits like my sleep. Writing by hand takes longer than using an app, but it saves me time in the long run. Digital tools can be distracting—if I open my phone to track a habit, there’s a 90% chance I’ll get sucked into notifications and forget why I picked it up in the first place. By staying analog, I avoid that entirely.

You’ll notice my bullet journal isn’t cute or Instagram-worthy. For me, it’s about processing and getting things out quickly. The messiness is the beauty.

Above: I managed a mini hallway and living room remodel just using my bullet journal, planning my ideas, tracking the budget, and staying on top of the vendors. 

3. Weekly Review Journal: Reflecting on the Week (1x per Week, 45 Minutes)

For a decade, I struggled to maintain a weekly review practice. I knew it was important, but it always felt like a chore. Reviewing my week on a Sunday felt boring, and by Monday or Friday, I rarely had the time or motivation to sit down and do it.

That changed this past year when I found a weekly review system that I actually enjoy. My second productivity principle is, what is pleasurable is motivating. By making my weekly review pleasurable, it’s become a ritual I look forward to.

Most Sunday evenings, after the kids are asleep, I take out my weekly review journal. First, I flip through my phone’s photos from the week and pick 2–4 favorites to print using my sticker printer. Then, I go through my bullet journal to jog my memory and write a one-page summary of the week. I capture funny quotes from my kids, moments of joy, and even the harder things I experienced.

Life moves so fast, that I’m surprised by how much I forgot by Sunday. Sometimes I sit down feeling like I didn’t do enough or that the week was full of challenges. But as I reflect and write, my perspective shifts. I start to see how much I accomplished and am reminded of how beautiful life is, even in the hard moments.

My favorite part of this practice is how much I revisit this journal. Unlike a traditional scrapbook that might sit on a shelf, this journal becomes a living document I flip through regularly. Each page tells the story of a week, creating a wonderful summary of the year as a whole.

This ritual started because I failed to make a scrapbook as part of my 2023/2024 annual review. I had printed over 100 photos, bought stickers, stencils, and gel pens, and spent hours trying to create something perfect. But I bit off more than I could chew, and the project felt overwhelming.

That failure inspired this simpler practice—small, consistent reflections captured in real time. My weekly review journal is messy and imperfect, but it’s become one of my favorite ways to savor life and stay grounded.

The journal itself is nothing fancy—just an affordable notebook from Amazon. It holds up well to photos and marker pens, and my sticker printer makes it easy to capture memories. The photo quality isn’t great, but it gets the job done.

4. My Spell Book: Manifesting Goals and Intentions (Monthly & Annually)

Okay this is where I get a bit woo and may lose some of yall, but this practice is how I make something like goal-setting fun and playful. I like to call this my Spell Book because it feels magical! It’s where I reflect on what I’ve accomplished and write out my hopes, dreams, and visions for the future.

If you have ever set out to create a project, you have dared to put something into existence that never existed before.

That’s magic.

Creating something from nothing is one of the greatest powers we possess as humans.

Whether it’s sending out a newsletter, cooking a meal, hosting a dinner party, or bringing humans into the world, that’s creation.

It’s easy to forget all the things we accomplish and my monthly and annual review rituals are how I remind myself of how magical I am.

Some might call this goal-setting, but that term doesn’t resonate with me. Traditional goal-setting has often felt rigid and intimidating—like I’m setting myself up for failure if I don’t achieve something exactly as planned.

Instead, my Spell Book is about flowing with life’s cycles. My cousin introduced me to moon rituals, and they completely transformed how I approach reflection and intention-setting. Now, every new moon feels like a mini New Year’s celebration for me. We often associate rituals with religion. But a ritual is just a rite, practice, or consistent series of steps. There is something that makes me more motivated to perform a ritual where I light candles and put on a reflective playlist. I feel more enlivened practicing my new moon ritual, rather than a monthly review. The former feels spiritual, a practice I honor for myself, while the latter feels like something I’m supposed to do.

Here’s how it works: I use the new moon to reflect on the past moon cycle. I ask myself questions like, What were the highs and lows? What lessons did I learn? What do I want to let go of? Then, I set an intention for the next moon cycle—something I want to create, embody, or grow into.

On the full moon, I revisit my intention and recalibrate if needed. This practice reframes goals for me, turning them into a cyclical, embodied process. Instead of feeling like I’ve failed if I don’t meet a rigid target, I’m reminded that life ebbs and flows. Each moon cycle is an opportunity to start fresh.

This journal also serves as the home for my annual and birthday reflections. When I sit down for my birthday review, I flip through the past year’s moon reflections. It’s amazing how easy it is to see patterns, growth, and recurring themes. What used to feel overwhelming—looking back on an entire year—now feels manageable and even joyful.

I love choosing a special notebook for my Spell Book. Right now, I’m using one I found on Etsy, and I had it engraved to make it feel even more personal. The journal is both functional and beautiful, and that adds to the sense of ceremony and ritual I bring to this practice.

For me, this isn’t just about setting goals—it’s about connecting with myself, aligning with my values, and embracing the natural rhythms of life.

Big Picture ThoughtsJournal AND Digital

Journaling works for me because it matches how I process life. That doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned digital tools entirely—I still use my second brain systems like my calendar, Evernote, and Notion. These tools are indispensable for managing complex projects or tracking long-term details.

When something important comes up in my journals, it often transitions to my digital tools. Conversely, when my digital tools feel too overwhelming or disconnected, I come back to pen and paper. Writing by hand grounds me, especially when fear or paralysis sets in. Journaling helps me clarify what I’m doing and regain my momentum.

Systems Change as You Change

Over the years, my systems have evolved with me. Early in my career, when I was focused on execution, digital tools helped me manage a high volume of tasks and details. As my responsibilities shifted to leadership and decision-making, I needed a different approach. That’s when my moon rituals became essential—they gave me space to think strategically and navigate tough conversations.

Motherhood was another turning point. During my postpartum years, my brain often felt fractured, like a horcrux split into pieces. Journaling became my lifeline. It gave me uninterrupted time to process my thoughts, and my morning pages habit finally stuck.

And now, I’m moving into a space where I am journaling less and using more embodied practices like meditation to clear the gunk or move me past my fears. 

If you’ve tried and failed to start a journaling practice, it might not have been the right season of life for you. That’s okay. Systems aren’t static—they should adapt to your needs as they change.

Making Time and Saving Time

People often ask how I make time for all of this. The truth is, these practices bring me so much relief and joy that I crave them. I look forward to journaling, so I naturally make time for it.

Journaling also saves me time. Without it, I’d waste hours working on the wrong things, burning myself out, or spiraling in fear and anxiety. There have been countless moments when I was completely stuck on a project. After just 15 minutes of journaling, the answer became clear, and I eliminated 80% of what felt overwhelming.

I also keep things simple. I don’t try to make my journals pretty or perfect. If anything, the messiness ensures privacy—it discourages nosy people from reading what I write. Logistically, most of my journaling happens after the kids are asleep. Sometimes that means waking up early or skipping TV at night, but the payoff is worth it.

Staying Flexible

I’ve learned that I fail at any system that’s too rigid. Life isn’t predictable, and my journaling practice reflects that. There are weeks when I journal a lot and weeks when I barely touch my notebooks. Sometimes I miss my weekly reviews for two or three weeks. That’s okay. There’s no one “right” way to do this.

Make it Simple and Pleasurable

If you want journaling to become a habit, start small and keep it simple. Maybe set a 15-minute timer or decide to journal only when you’re traveling. Experiment until you find something that sticks.

And make it pleasurable! Invest in beautiful notebooks and pens that inspire you. Take your journal on a hike and reflect during a break. Treat yourself to a journaling date with a lavender latte at your favorite café. When you associate journaling with joy, it becomes less of a task and more of a ritual you look forward to.

Journaling has been my companion through the seasons of life—helping me reflect, navigate challenges, and celebrate the moments that matter. Whether you’re drawn to pen and paper or prefer a digital system, what matters most is finding a practice that feels true to you. 

Start small, experiment, and let your journaling evolve with you. It doesn’t need to be perfect or pretty—just something that helps you stay connected to yourself and your values.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post The Analog Productivity System: Journaling for Every Season of Life appeared first on Forte Labs.

Rediscover Your Year: A Cheat Sheet for Reflecting with the Help of Tech

At the end of each year, I sit down to reflect on my milestones and memories—big and small—that shaped the past 12 months. It’s become one of my favorite rituals to celebrate progress and set the stage for what’s next.

Thankfully, technology can do a lot of the heavy lifting, making this process easier and more fun. If apps are already tracking so much of our lives, why not turn that data into a tool for reflection?

Here are some of my favorite shortcuts to use technology as a mirror for self-reflection and self-understanding:

Social MediaInstagram Highlights or Stories Archive: Check what you’ve shared publicly or privately saved as StoriesFacebook Memories: Review your “On This Day” feature for posts, comments, and photos from the yearX Bookmarks or Top Posts: Look for posts you bookmarked or those that received the most engagement (via analytics)Productivity & NotetakingNotion, Evernote, Obsidian, or other notetaking apps: Search your notes for key tags, projects, or frequent topicsDaily Journaling Apps (e.g., Day One or Reflectly ): Review your daily or weekly entries to find personal highs, lows, or repeated themesTask manager or project management apps: Look back through projects completed, milestones reached, challenges overcomeCalendar apps: Look through past events, meetings, special dates, etc.CommunicationsWhatsApp or Text Messages: Scroll through photos, links, or memorable exchanges from key conversationsEmails: Use search terms like “thank you,” “congratulations,” or “milestone” to surface important exchangesFinanceBank Statements or Budgeting Apps (such as YNAB ): Look at major purchases or investments, which often signify big life events or changesAmazon Orders or Receipts: Review purchases that reflect memorable moments (e.g., items bought for vacations, hobbies, or special occasions)Health & FitnessStep-Tracking Apps (e.g., Apple Health or Fitbit): Review your best months, longest walks, or exercise streaksMeditation Apps (e.g., Calm or Headspace ): Look at your most meditated days or longest streaksDiet Tracking Apps (e.g., MyFitnessPal ): Spot trends or standout meals you might have recordedWriting & CreativityDrafts or Google Docs: Look for essays, brainstorms, or personal reflections you started but maybe didn’t finishArt/Design/Drawing Apps (e.g., Procreate, Adobe Express): Find completed or in-progress creative worksTravelGoogle Maps: Check your timeline, showing you where you’ve been the past yearAirline or Hotel Loyalty Accounts: Review your flight or hotel history to recall travels or tripsTrip Planning Apps (e.g., TripIt , Hopper ): See itineraries or trips you had on your calendarLearningOnline Course Platforms (e.g., Coursera , Udemy , Maven ): Check what courses you started or completedLanguage Apps (e.g., Duolingo ): Reflect on your language-learning streaks or new skillsContentMusic: Check your Spotify Wrapped playlist or “Liked Songs” playlistYouTube videos: Review your watch history, or “Liked videos” playlistNetflix and other streaming services: Review your watch historyBooks: Review your ratings on Goodreads or the books you’ve read on your KindlePhoto apps: Look through your “favorited” album on your smartphone; or photos/videos you’ve shared via text message (which tend to be the best ones) 

A lot of these depend on which apps you currently use and how you use them, but I always find many meaningful tidbits that I’d completely forgotten about.

Want to see how all this comes together? Check out my annual reviews here for inspiration and ideas on how to craft your own.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post Rediscover Your Year: A Cheat Sheet for Reflecting with the Help of Tech appeared first on Forte Labs.

A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part IV – My 7 Principles for Personal Development)

It has been only by writing this series of essays that I’ve come to realize that I have a set of principles I follow for my personal development. They might not be right for everyone, but they’ve certainly served me well.

#1. Go deeper than the surface level

I’ve repeatedly found that the real fruits of any personal development program or experience lie below the surface. There is always an introductory “light” version, which can be useful if you’re just looking for a taste. But don’t expect that to produce real transformation. 

I often notice that people who are “into” personal development will keep shopping around for different practices and gurus, only dipping their toes in the water before moving on to something else. This gives them the impression that they’ve “tried everything” and “nothing works,” when in fact, they’ve only inoculated themselves to a wide variety of powerful medicines.

For example, the Landmark Forum weekend seminar was impactful for me, but it was nothing compared to the half-dozen other courses from the same organization I went on to complete afterward. A single class can never compete with the impact of a full curriculum. 

The best way I’ve found to go beyond the surface is to take on a position of service or leadership (which are the same thing). It was only when I joined Landmark’s leadership training program and saw what it takes behind the scenes to produce transformation in others that the teachings truly sank in.

I’ve attended and participated in a variety of other programs and courses that didn’t even merit a mention in this series, simply because I didn’t go deep with them. Therefore they never had a chance to make their mark and become a part of who I am.

#2. Commit for a set period of time

Related to the above, it’s important to dedicate a substantial period of time to a given practice. I’ve compressed a seemingly large number of experiences into my story, but in reality, I almost never pursued more than one growth practice at a time or even one right after another. It takes time to integrate.

For example, after taking Joe Hudson’s weekend Tide Turners seminar in 2018, it took a full year before I felt ready to enroll in his more intensive week-long Groundbreakers program in 2019, and then another year before I participated in his online program The Art of Accomplishment Masterclass, and then another year before my wife and I joined a couple’s retreat he led in 2021. That’s four years of participating in and absorbing one person’s teachings, during which I didn’t pursue any other personal growth practice.

My typical rule of thumb is to have one big personal growth experience each year, as a kind of “spiritual rejuvenation” to ensure I’m remaining connected to my deepest self and that I’m not ignoring too many uncomfortable truths about myself. I know it’s time for my annual tuneup when life starts getting dull and loses its color, indicating that I’m starting to lose touch with my emotions and sense of wonder.

Committing to one practice for a set period and allowing one to settle before seeking another also ensures I’m not just seeking an endless series of dopamine hits in place of real change, or using courses as a way to distract from the necessary inner work. There is truly no rush, and the truth is, you can arrive at many of the same breakthroughs via multiple paths. It’s more important to go deep in one of them than to keep shopping around looking for the “perfect” option.

#3. Find a teacher, peers, and a structured environment

I’ve found far better results when I had a teacher, and a group of people undergoing the experience alongside me. This provides a strong source of accountability to ensure I keep showing up for others who depend on me. But just as importantly, I believe there is a mechanism buried deeply in our psyches that makes change much easier when done in groups.

We are a social species, and many aspects of all three levels – mind, heart, and body – are geared specifically to learn from other people. Doing anything in isolation is inherently foreign and unnatural for us, especially if it’s a confronting or scary experience like changing our most deeply rooted beliefs and ways of being. 

Other people give us outside perspectives to help shine light on our blindspots and give us comfort and encouragement at moments of fear. It’s also simply more fun and meaningful to undertake a challenge with others, and I’ve made some of my deepest friendships in adulthood as a result. 

Even Vipassana meditation retreats, which ostensibly are all about finding your own internal realizations in complete silence, benefit tremendously from the shared nature of the experience. There are also daily recorded teachings from the founder Goenka as well as a daily Q&A with the meditation teacher, which provide context and a sense of assurance.

This is why, whenever possible, I try to join a course, program, retreat, or group coaching experience, rather than only reading or researching a subject. 

#4. Occasionally go “off the reservation”

In contrast to the principle above, it’s crucial to occasionally go “off the reservation” and put yourself in an environment that is not planned and structured for you. If your breakthroughs depend on a perfectly ordered, predictable environment, then what good are they?

The true test of whether you’ve changed is diving headfirst into unstructured environments, such as when I attended Burning Man with almost no preparation. It forced me to adapt, and improvise, drawing on all the tools and lessons I now had at my disposal.

Another wonderful venue for this is travel, which inherently throws all kinds of surprising and uncomfortable scenarios at you. Although I haven’t included it here, I consider international travel and living abroad for longer periods a core part of my personal growth and do it regularly.

I firmly believe the ultimate goal of any structured program, skilled teacher, or new growth practice is to outgrow it. I don’t want to keep piling on one daily practice after another until my whole day is taken up in preparing to live my life, rather than living it. I see each new technique as a temporary season – like a metamorphosis I’m undergoing, until I eventually emerge from my cocoon as different from my previous self as a butterfly from a caterpillar, free to flutter off and live a full, vibrant life free of structures and rules.

#5. Share your stories in real time

This one is probably obvious by now, but I believe strongly in sharing your stories – not just at the end of the road when you’ve had all the insights and breakthroughs, but at each step of the journey.

This has numerous irreplaceable benefits:

Helping you integrate and fully internalize what you’re learning by turning it into a narrative on the page and in your mindAllowing you to more effectively connect and cross-reference insights across experiences and at different levels of mind, heart, and bodyDocumenting what you’ve experienced so you can revisit, recollect, and even reinterpret it in the futureGiving other people in your life the chance to learn from and maybe even participate in a new experience they wouldn’t have otherwise (which if they do, gives you a lot of interesting things to talk about and relate over)

I’ve found that the best time to share your stories isn’t even at the “conclusion” of a single experience. You never know when a given chapter of your growth journey will end, and by the time it does, the most fundamental insights you had when you were a beginner are likely to be forgotten.

No, the best time to share is in real time, right at the frontier of your own progress. 

For example, in 2019, I delivered a talk at a conference called Refactor Camp based on adrienne maree brown’s book Pleasure Activism. This was at the very beginning of my exploration of somatic, body-centric personal development, and in retrospect, I didn’t know what I was talking about. I had very little personal experience to speak from, so this talk was less about my expertise as it was about my curiosity, my open questions, my first tantalizing insights, and most of all, an invitation for other people in my network to surface potential next steps for me.

When you open-source your growth journey in real time, you’ll find that all sorts of people who are on a similar journey will be drawn to you. They’ll become your confidants, your partners, and your friends. Putting your story into narrative form can also be tremendously healing in its own right, as I’ve done with my father’s story in documentary form.

#6. Move toward where you feel shame

Looking back on the formative personal development milestones of my adult life, it all seems so neat and tidy, as if I sat down and planned it in advance. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was almost no point at which it didn’t feel chaotic, random, and accidental.

I now believe that personal growth isn’t really something you have to go out and pursue like wild game. It is constantly present all around you, and happening whether you like it or not. There is nothing more natural for humans than to grow and change, and life tends to conspire to give you exactly the experiences you need to grow (a lesson I learned from Michael Singer).

However, in our modern world of constantly multiplying optionality, you sometimes have to choose to pursue one path over another, if only for the sake of time management. In that case, the best rule of thumb I’ve found is to move toward whichever part of your life is most associated with shame. The feeling of shame is a signal that a part of you hasn’t been seen, accepted, embraced, and loved, and until it is, it will continue broadcasting pain. The longer you ignore it, the worse that pain will become and the more it will spread to other aspects of your life.

The reason I say “move toward” is that you don’t have to make a full frontal attack on that area, and probably shouldn’t. This isn’t about forcing yourself or dominating yourself. It’s about learning new ways to love yourself. 

If there’s an aspect of your life that feels too overwhelmingly shameful to approach or think about or feel at all, then that probably means you’re not ready to. Instead, pick an area that feels shameful but one you have some curiosity or openness about. And you can start at whichever level you’re most comfortable with – mind, heart, or body. For me, that usually means reading books and articles, which allows me to start gaining intellectual familiarity and a basic understanding before diving into my feelings or my gut.

#7. Seek variety and diversity

As this series illustrates, it’s important to me to seek a wide variety of different “modalities” – to gain exposure to different ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and practicing personal development. 

A lesson I took away from my religious upbringing is that no one has an exclusive monopoly on the truth. No one religion, or philosophy, or teacher has it all figured out. They each perceive one facet of the truth, and their blindspots have to be filled in by others.

By mixing and matching my approach to personal development, I protect myself against some of the worst abuses and pitfalls of metaphysics– the cult leaders who abuse their authority, the pseudo-science that dismisses logic and reason, the fundamentalist tendency to conform “perfectly” to one philosophy and denigrate all the others, and most subtle but important of all, the risk of confusing the map with the territory and mistaking my perception of reality with reality itself. 

This life is too complex and wondrous to be easily encapsulated into a single perspective. This universe is too big and mysterious to be explained by any one mental model. This reality is too wondrous to ever be fully understood, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part IV – My 7 Principles for Personal Development) appeared first on Forte Labs.

A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part III – Awakening My Body)

In Part II, I told the story of how I opened my heart. This next chapter is about going further inward and downward – into the realm of the body and gut.

It all started when I was 22 and began to feel a nagging pain and tension in the back of my throat. That small discomfort eventually turned into a searing pain throughout the right side of my neck, accompanied by an inability to control my voice – to speak, to sing, or to laugh without a lot of effort. 

The social and psychological effects were even worse than the physical ones – I was so wrapped up and preoccupied with my voice dysfunction I found it impossible to naturally interact and connect with others, leading to intense feelings of isolation bordering on despair.

While I’d love to be able to say that my quest for self-knowledge was fueled by nothing but my insatiable thirst for truth, the reality is much simpler: it was pain that launched me on my journey. I turned inward because I had no other choice.

After several years of seeing a variety of medical specialists, undergoing countless tests and scans, and trying everything including powerful medication with severe side effects, I had almost given up hope of ever finding a remedy. That was when I turned to alternative, esoteric forms of personal development to find some relief from my suffering (you can read more about my journey through psychosomatic illness here).

By 2022, I’d explored Vipassana meditation, Landmark’s educational programs, psychedelics, and Joe Hudson’s coaching, and gained some incredible tools for turning my pain into something positive. 

But my quest began with the most fundamental sensations arising from within my body, and that is where it had to eventually return. Today my journey has led me full circle, back to where it all began: the realm of the body.

Discovering the root of my pain

It was in this third chapter of my story when I began to really get at the root of my chronic pain: that I had disconnected and dissociated from my body at a young age in order to survive painful experiences, treating the signals it was sending me as annoyances, distractions, or signs of weakness. 

The models for emotional expression I saw in my parents gave me the impression that there were certain “bad” emotions that should be avoided and ignored for the sake of family harmony. Conflict and disagreement in particular were swept under the rug.

I was always a sensitive, introverted child, and being thrust into the rowdy, rough-and-tumble world of school forced me to create a hard external shell to retreat into. I thought I had to be tough, to show I was a “real man,” and that meant first and foremost not succumbing to my own needs for comfort.

If I had to go to the bathroom, I would hold it for as long as I possibly could in an attempt to show my body who was in charge. If I was sick I refused to take medicine, because I didn’t want to feel weak and dependent. I purposefully wouldn’t put on a jacket when I was cold, or I’d refuse to eat when I was hungry, in order to “toughen myself up.”

Later in life, this compulsion toward self-numbing and self-punishment manifested itself in other ways. I began to develop a taste for danger as I became an adult, because it gave me a thrill that allowed me to feel excited and alive. I was attracted to places that offered acute risk, such as when I lived and volunteered in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, or worked in rural parts of northern Colombian (near FARC territory), or joined the Peace Corps in Eastern Ukraine. Somehow, I felt more at home and at ease living in these risky places because at least I felt alive.

As I started my career and business, this impulse to suppress my needs and wants at first felt like a terrific superpower. I could power through 12-hour days without a problem, work straight through the weekend, and ignore my needs for rest, recovery, and social connection seemingly forever. My ability to dominate my body caused me to receive a lot of praise, further cementing it as a core part of my identity.

But as the years passed and I entered my 30s, my dysfunctional relationship with my body began to break down. I could no longer physically push it the way I had throughout my 20s. Even if I could have, I didn’t want to have to do that anymore. While I’d gotten married and become a dad, that same relentless drive to push harder and move faster continued almost unabated. 

Yet I no longer knew what I was striving so hard for. What was so important that I had to sacrifice my present life to achieve?

Ayahuasca as somatic medicine

That sense of unease and weariness slowly grew throughout my mid-30s, finally breaking through the surface when I took part in my first ayahuasca ceremony in late 2023, which I wrote about in A Journey Between Worlds: The Story of My Ayahuasca Experience. 

I had experimented with various psychedelic substances in small ways before, but this was something different altogether: three potent ceremonies over three days, in the most conducive and supportive environment possible, and with a much earthier and more primal substance that was found in nature, not created in a lab. 

This was the first time I did healing work centered directly in the body, rather than using my mind or my heart as portals of entry. The mind loves to come up with theories, explanations, stories, interpretations, and justifications, and as valuable as those things are, I’ve come to believe that unless those ideas find their way into the tissues of the body, they will always remain merely intellectual playthings. The body speaks in a much more primitive language – the language of bodily fluids, physical urges, and visceral contraction and release.

I’ve learned that trauma isn’t primarily intellectual. What happened to you remains literally embedded in your nervous system, in your muscles and fascia, and even in the way your metabolism functions, your lungs breathe, and your posture holds you. Trauma shapes how you interpret your bodily sensations at the most fundamental level, thereby giving your everyday experience its default emotional state. Your body has hidden memories, storing fragments of your past all over your body, not just in your brain.

This is one reason trauma is so hard to heal from – it literally stays lodged in the tissues of the body, which continue to send the same urgent signals of panic no matter how many insights you think you’ve had.

Ayahuasca is known for the vomiting that often accompanies it, and I found that far from being an unfortunate side effect, it was an essential part of the healing experience. Vomiting is our body’s most visceral way of rejecting something that isn’t good for it, and that applies as much to ideas and stories as it does to poisonous substances. 

Instead of wrestling intellectually with an idea or a memory or a past traumatic event for hours, I found it was easier to just let go and allow the body to do what it needed to do. The change in mindset quickly followed.

For some, what their body needed to do was grieve, and their grief came out in spectacularly physical ways like wailing and prostrating and weeping. For others, it meant expressing fear, and they did so, with shuddering and shaking and shouting. 

For me, it meant reconciling with my younger self, and accepting that he had disconnected from his body and dissociated from the present as a way to escape the feelings he didn’t know how to process. I saw clearly who I had to become in order to survive, hardening myself and shutting down certain parts in order to make it through. 

I forgave that small boy, and thanked him, and in doing so, forgave myself, who is still that same boy. At the same time, I saw how these patterns of self-denial and emotional repression hadn’t started with me; they could be traced back through multiple generations of tough, resilient immigrants, passed on to me as my intergenerational inheritance. I saw that I could acknowledge the achievements of my ancestors, while also healing their pain using the full array of tools I had gained via the mind, the heart, and the body.

As I passed through all these experiences, and as the three-day retreat wound down, an awe-inspiring vision slowly began to fill me. I saw that there was an underlying theme to my life that transcended my writing, my teaching, and even my career: I am someone who creates bridges between worlds. Every time I say or write those words I feel emotion welling up from inside me.

Building a Second Brain was about connecting the right and left sides of the brain – making structure more creative and creativity more structured – but that was just one instance of a much larger theme. 

I’ve always built bridges: between the U.S. and Mexico and Brazil, between Christianity and secular culture, between liberals and conservatives, between the masculine and feminine, and between the body and mind. 

My ability to migrate between contexts and to see the good in every perspective, inherited from generations of my immigrant ancestors who roamed from one country and continent to another, is in fact my core superpower: to bridge the divide between and within people and transform the pain of separation into a source of connection.

My intuition tells me that the next chapter of my career and life will continue to be about embracing that inherent nature, and building bridges once again.

Fascial therapy as bodily restructuring

As part of my somatic explorations, I’ve seen a skilled fascial therapist (also sometimes known as a “bodyworker”) in Los Angeles regularly over the last few years. 

I’m always astounded that, within a couple hours, she can reliably locate and release emotions that have been trapped in my body, without me needing to do much except allow the accompanying thoughts, realizations, memories, and physical sensations to arise and flow through me without too much resistance.

I’ve come to understand that these sessions are changing me at a structural level, even though I have almost no understanding of what she’s doing. It isn’t primarily an intellectual process nor an emotional one. By releasing bodily tension directly, she is unwinding the underlying physiological sources of tension in my relationships, my decisions, my thoughts, and my goals. 

Often, as soon as she releases an underlying stiffness in my body, that part of my life immediately becomes more fluid as well. It’s not that I receive the exact answer to a problem I’m facing; it’s more that I regain the flexibility to consider the full range of possible options that my tension has been keeping me from seeing.

I’ve had to let go of the assumption that personal growth must always be wrenching, painful and confronting. Sometimes it does, but other times it requires nothing more than lying on a table and allowing things to come to the surface.

The somatic, bodily plane of my existence is the current frontier of my personal growth, and the one I’m most excited and intrigued by now. I think it was important that I started with the mind, since that was my “home base” and the entry point I was ready for in the beginning. It was also critical that I addressed the heart next, because I needed to learn how to allow my emotions to arise and use them to connect with others.

But these days, I am finding that the body offers some profound and tangible benefits:

Healing at the somatic level often happens faster and more efficiently than at the heart and mind levels, because I can integrate new ideas directly without having to change my beliefs or mental constructs first.Once you learn to listen to it, the body is very decisive and self-confident, issuing its wisdom in single-word responses, utterly primal and unshakeable in its conviction (this capability translates to much more effective decision-making in business and other areas of life).Body-based work is often more fun and dynamic, because it involves movement and play (this also makes it easier to integrate into your “normal” life in the form of morning routines, exercise, yoga, or meditation).Somatic work is more “agnostic” and content neutral – it doesn’t impose any particular doctrine or dogma on you, and there is nothing you have to believe (or even necessarily understand) to receive its benefits.You don’t have to learn new skills to participate in somatic healing – you just allow your own body to do what it already knows how to do.You don’t need more information for somatic work – the body and brain already possess a tremendous amount of information, and usually just need a higher level of connectivity to make sense of it.

My body-based explorations are only beginning, but have taken on a few other tantalizingly promising forms:

A more feminine approach to productivity, work, ambition, and effort, largely inspired by my wife Lauren and her understanding of nature’s cycles.Parenting, which is all about being present and embodied with children, since that is their default state (see my conversation with Joe Hudson on this topic here).Hosting in-person experiences such as entrepreneurial masterminds and our first Second Brain Summit , which in the past would have felt too overstimulating and overwhelming.Most recently, I’ve found that even inherently abstract topics, like my relationship with money , can be approached from a somatic perspective, allowing me to integrate new ways of thinking more quickly and at a deeper level.I’ve had a couple brief but powerful experiences with breathwork, and have been shocked how quickly and deeply I can go using nothing but my breath. I plan on exploring this avenue more in the future.

The aspect of somatic work I most appreciate is that it has given me a deep sense of certainty, rooted viscerally in my body, that I am okay. I can feel that everything will turn out alright, and that I can trust the journey of my life as it unfolds, without impatience or judgment.

The mind and the heart are wonderful, but they are also fickle creatures, fluttering around like hummingbirds reacting to every slight puff of wind. My body is like the earth, solid and monumental, unperturbed by the daily emotional weather, reminding me that I don’t have to be either.

I take great comfort these days in the constant reminders that I am an animal, an idea I would have previously felt aversion toward. I am a mammal like any other, and lying below all my abstract hopes and fears and worries and dreams is the biological reality of my skin and bones and guts and bowels.

Returning to that biological reality gives me peace. It roots me in the here and now. It compels me to seek out nature, one of the main reasons we decided to move to the mountains of Mexico recently. I am finding tremendous joy in coming home to my body after all these years of wandering in the wilderness of the mind like a prodigal son returning to his family after years of searching for something that he always had.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

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A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part II – Feeling My Heart)

In Part I, I recounted the first chapter in my personal growth journey, which was all about my mind and intellect and reframing the narratives that defined my life.

As transformational as that period was for me, around 2018 I once again began to sense that something was missing. 

I had gained a variety of tools to shift my perspectives from an intellectual point of view, but there was still a vibrancy and “juice” missing from my life.

My then-girlfriend Lauren and I decided to uproot ourselves and move to Mexico City partly to try and recapture a feeling of excitement and adventure that our work-oriented lives in the Bay Area had increasingly failed to provide. We felt stuck and bored like our seemingly impressive careers were failing to give us what we truly wanted.

But it wasn’t merely a change of scenery that would give me the feeling of aliveness I was searching for. Yet again, it was an inner change that was needed, not an outer one. The next chapter of my story was all about opening up my heart and the channels of emotion that had long been frozen inside of me, under the supervision of guides and teachers who had already done so themselves.

Burning Man – my first experience with psychedelics

In July 2018, I received a last-minute invitation to Burning Man, an eclectic week-long festival that takes place every year in the desert of Northern California. 

Burning Man is a legendary institution in the Bay Area. I’d heard about it for years, but never had the funds nor the contacts to go. With only a couple of days’ notice and a set of equipment and supplies that was barely adequate for the harsh conditions, I hitched a ride out of town to the desert.

Burning Man was disorienting for me right from the start. As the first morning dawned, I found myself on an endless white plain devoid of geographical (and cultural) reference points. I was completely unprepared, not just in practical terms but emotionally and psychologically. I had been in a period of obsessive, narrow-minded focus as the early cohorts of my Building a Second Brain course found traction. Rather than free me up, that success locked me down. I desperately clutched at what felt like a thin lifeline of success after years of struggle.

Black Rock City, as the sprawling tent city is known, was a fanciful dreamscape. On every side, I saw sculptures and contraptions of every shape and size: a 5-story tall crystal-encrusted gramophone, a ferris wheel full of skeletons, a giant artificial tree of leaves embedded with LEDs pulsing in rhythmic patterns, a spiraling ambulatory staircase full of old pictures. 

The camps weren’t mere habitations but works of art in themselves: giant carnival big tops criss-crossed with hammocks, geodesic domes full of foam toys, insulated yurts, and a full-size 747 fuselage someone had managed to tow out into the desert. And most dazzling of all were the people, dressed as sultans arrayed in their finery, as dinosaurs, bunnies, ballerinas, wizards, or in many cases, simply naked.

I didn’t know where to go or what to do in the sprawling tent city, not realizing that most people slept during the heat of the day and went out during the cooler nights. I hardly knew anyone even at the camp I was staying with, and thus was ignorant of the customs and traditions that give Burning Man its logic. I felt threatened and confronted by the wildly unorthodox clothing, art, music, sculptures, sounds, and even ways of speaking and behaving I faced on every side, with no source of familiarity or comfort to be found anywhere. It felt like culture shock but magnified tenfold.

In A Productivity Expert Goes to Burning Man I recounted how a profound experience with LSD on the final night of the festival was the turning point for me. 

Some of my campmates had found me huddled at the foot of The Man – the giant 80-foot statue at the center of the city that gets burned as a final ritual – consumed with loneliness and fear. They took me back to camp, we each took a tab of LSD, and soon afterward headed to Camp Mystic, an encampment of interconnected structures, artwork, venues, and workshops all designed for one purpose: to explore the state of consciousness afforded by this magical substance.

I spent the next 10 hours exploring Camp Mystic and the rest of Black Rock City beyond, immersed in an intensity of belonging, connection, beauty, and harmony like I’d never experienced in my life. Wandering under the stars, whole chapters of my life were rewritten, ancient interpretations and meanings dissolving and being remade. Forgotten memories exploded into my mind from nowhere, seeking the attention and forgiveness they needed to be complete. As I watched the sunrise, I was awed by the beauty and perfection of the universe, every strand converging and finding a connection in me, the sole interpreter and witness of my experience.

I recently attended a talk by Dr. Brad Jacobs, a physician and integrative medicine practitioner based in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was about how and why “peak experiences” are so powerful for personal growth. He defines such experiences as “moments of full immersion” that often create “intense joy, creativity and clarity, and where you feel a deep connection to yourself and the world around you.” They include near-death encounters, vocational challenges like those faced by first responders, extreme sports like skydiving, or deeply immersive ones such as spiritual awakenings or journeys with psychedelic medicine.

Dr. Jacobs’ explanation for why these experiences can change us so profoundly helped me finally understand how being part of something like Burning Man, which on the surface can seem so fanciful and even self-indulgent, can inspire inner change. It’s because they:

Overwhelm the sensesCall you to the present momentRelax fixation to prior beliefsSuspend your belief prediction modelFertilize cognitive and psychological flexibility

In other words, an intense or immersive experience pulls you strongly into the present moment, and then forces your mind to relax its grip as the sole filter on your reality. When you see and hear things you’ve never encountered before, you can no longer pretend that you have everything figured out and under control. Out of necessity, your mental model of reality has to loosen a bit to let this new information in, and in that moment of cognitive flexibility lies enormous potential to change fundamental beliefs and assumptions about many aspects of one’s life.

I believe that’s exactly what happened in my time at Burning Man, and there were three lasting changes it inspired in me.

First, the experience gave me a potent sense of peace within the vastness of the universe, a deep appreciation for the hilarity and absurdity of my existence, and an unexplainable certainty that everything is just the way it should be. I hadn’t had that feeling of “being at home in the universe” since my Christian childhood faith.

Second, I felt an immense, almost oceanic desire rising within me to help others and alleviate their suffering. I’d been so focused on my own survival for so long, far past the point where it was necessary, and now saw a new kind of purpose taking hold in me – to pass along the gift, to help others heal in the ways I’d been healed, to make a difference with this miracle of a life I’d been given.

And third, Burning Man was the first time I saw myself as being part of a global movement of human transformation. I encountered so many people contributing to it in their own way: energy and bodywork practitioners, fire-dancers, orgasmic meditators, Chinese and Eastern medicine practitioners, yoga and meditation teachers, therapists, artists, and writers. I attended workshops on Bitcoin, polyamory, and chocolate as a healing medium, my first exposure to these concepts that persist as interests to this day. I saw that this was work the spiritual traditions of the world had started thousands of years ago, and that we all now have a part to play in. I saw I wasn’t alone in my seeking.

That week in the desert was brief but felt like a microcosm of my life – a confused and clueless young man dropped into a threatening and incomprehensible world, only to be shown a door to a deeper underlying reality that made it all make sense.

Joe Hudson and The Art of Accomplishment

As wonderful as my Burning Man experience was, I struggled to integrate that newfound sense of aliveness and awe into my normal, day-to-day life. The high I’d experienced out in the desert gradually faded as I returned to the routine of my workweek.

As I’d done before, I began looking for a structured program and a teacher who could help me awaken and embody the new “self” I’d discovered. While attending a meetup in San Francisco, I heard someone speak whose words immediately resonated with me: Joe Hudson, a former venture capitalist and current executive coach. Little did I know, Joe would be my guide for the next chapter, which was all about learning to access my emotions.

I had built a new intellectual foundation, opening my mind to new possibilities and acquiring a set of practical skills I could draw on whenever I faced discouragement. It was now time to go deeper, from the head to the heart.

After hearing Joe speak, and with the encouragement of a friend who’d already taken it, I signed up for his introductory weekend course. I captured my experience there in Tide Turners: A Workshop on Using Business to Fuel Spiritual Awakening (this program has now evolved into the online-only Connection Course).

From that weekend workshop, I learned:

That vulnerability is a sign you’ve found your growth edge – that edge is different for every person and in every situation, can’t be planned or predicted in advance, and shifts moment to moment as a conversation unfolds. I discovered that I have the option of unlocking vulnerability in any interaction, simply by asking the question that lies at the edge of my comfort zone in the moment.The incredible power of open-ended, “How/What” questions to help people access their innate intelligence and resolve their own problems – instead of giving advice or proposing solutions, which usually just engenders resistance, I could invite them to tell the truth to themselves in a spirit of curiosity and self-love.How important it is to be impartial – to refrain from leading the conversation to a predetermined outcome of your choosing – and instead to be with people in their struggle, assume they know what’s best for them, really listen to what they’re saying, and reflect back to them the genius they already possess.“Joy is the matriarch of all emotions – she won’t enter a house where her children are not welcome” – this is a favorite and often-repeated quote of Joe’s, and its lesson is a north star for personal development. If you cut off access to any emotion – fear, disappointment, grief, anger – you also lose joy in the process. This observation functions as an accountability mechanism, reminding me that if I’m not feeling joy at any given time, it’s because I’ve lost one of her children along the way.

Joe’s guiding philosophy deeply resonated with me: that the most “worldly” experiences, such as in business, can fuel profound spiritual awakenings. That was also my first encounter with VIEW, an approach to having reliably deeper, more meaningful conversations that forms a cornerstone of Joe’s work, and now mine.

I would go on to take Joe’s more intensive week-long program the following year, in 2019, which I recounted in Groundbreakers: My Journey Healing Trauma, Unleashing Anger, and Awakening the Vagus Nerve (this program is still available only in person).

In many ways, Groundbreakers was the culmination of everything I had learned up to that point, like the final thesis for my master’s degree in applied self-development. It represented a leap from the world of the mind – with its sophisticated yet limited narratives, theories, models, and frameworks – to the world of the heart and its felt emotions.

During Groundbreakers, I worked through what felt like a lifetime of repressed emotions stuck in various parts of my body, from grief at the things I didn’t receive from my parents as a child, to a fear of failure that had been lurking in the back of my mind and unconsciously distorting my behavior for years. 

Most powerfully of all, I realized that I had shut down my anger as a child out of fear of my father’s reaction, to the point I was barely able to feel it at all anymore. On top of that, I actually felt proud of my inability to feel anger, as if it made me a better person, while under the surface that anger wreaked havoc on my inner life in its attempt to be heard. I discovered that anger is a form of surrender, and without it, all the other emotions remain throttled.

Here are some of the other lessons I took away from Groundbreakers:

Recognizing my internal dialogue and what it is trying to accomplish – I formed a new relationship with the “voice in my head,” seeing through the ways it uses guilt, shame, criticism, and self-doubt in an attempt to give me what I need, and found far more productive ways of doing so without beating myself up.Anger can be a transformative source of vulnerability and determination – I completely changed my understanding of what anger even is, from a regrettable source of pain and conflict to an essential component of living a vibrant life. I’ve since found that anger is the clearest signal I have of what I want and what truly matters to me, and the most unstoppable form of determination to go after that with everything I am.Self-love as the engine of personal growth – I had always judged myself harshly as not being good enough, or worthy enough, which had been my main motivation to learn and grow up to this point. But as that self-judgment ran out as a source of fuel, I reversed it and found that total and unconditional self-acceptance and self-love is a far more powerful one.Healing is deeper and faster when it happens on multiple levels – Joe’s work combines multiple forms of healing work, demonstrating how effective it is to cross-reference approaches at the mind, heart, and gut level.My heart as the bottleneck

Returning to normal life after Groundbreakers, I saw an immediate and dramatic impact on my work. 

My Building a Second Brain course had reached the point where it was ready for a larger stage and a wider audience, but I had felt stuck and fearful without fully realizing why. When I cleared my emotional channels and connected with my deepest seated desires, I was surprised to find within myself the kind of leader I didn’t know I needed. 

I realized that my style of leadership wasn’t about stoically charging forward in the face of implacable opposition like I’d been taught. It was actually about feeling every emotion – and I mean every emotion – much more deeply and viscerally as potent sources of information. I began to see that I could lead with authenticity and vulnerability, bringing others into the heart of my work instead of going it alone.

The newfound feeling of anger I had tapped into soon turned into a feeling of unbelievable clarity and determination. I got in touch with my anger at an unjust world that leaves too many people without options. I felt my anger that all the best knowledge and resources are reserved for the most privileged. I found my anger that people are suffering for lack of information that already exists and is already proven to work. 

With the determination to right these wrongs as my fuel, a few months later I sat down in our new apartment in Mexico City to begin writing the proposal for my book Building a Second Brain. Three and a half years later, that book was released to the world, and as of this writing has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide in 25 languages.

It still amazes me to see how getting in touch with my emotions was crucial to becoming the kind of person who could write the book that wanted to be written. It’s about a seemingly technical subject – personal knowledge management – and yet just beneath the surface, it’s really about people’s inner lives and all the beliefs, stories, fears, and worries about information that plague them. It was only when I tapped into the depth and breadth of my own feelings and learned to express them fluidly without shutting down or dissociating, that I was able to tell my own story and the story of my work in a way that resonated and moved people.  

What I learned in this second chapter of my journey is that it is my heart’s capacity, not my brain’s capacity, that is the bottleneck to the change I want to see in myself and the world. 

Which means I don’t have to get smarter or more precise in my thinking to make progress. I can decide to get more connected, more present, and more expressive instead. Every time I’m faced with a decision and am tempted to do more research or acquire more insights, I’ve learned that I can instead close my eyes and listen to the still, small voice inside, which has access to a subterranean current of deep wisdom that is so much more vast, yet also somehow so much simpler, than anything my mind can access on its own. I still consider this a miracle every time.

Exploring the world of the heart opened up vast new possibilities for me. My relationships deepened, my courage and conviction strengthened, and my work became a pure expression of my creativity. I became my own best friend, unconditionally loving myself no matter what happened. I began to live for the moment to moment joy of it, not just to reach a far off destination.

And yet as my heart has unfolded, I’ve increasingly sensed that there are still deeper layers, and still deeper sensations to explore. The heart is just one organ after all, and we have 77 others. Next I’ll share the story of my current explorations at the new frontier of my growth: the somatic.

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The post A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing (Part II – Feeling My Heart) appeared first on Forte Labs.