Tiago Forte's Blog, page 20

Productivity is a Phase: The Four Stages of Personal Growth

I often find that life teaches me the same lesson across multiple areas of my life at the same time. All I have to do is sit back and notice what it’s trying to tell me (and take some notes).

That is happening right now with the idea that “Everything is a season.” It’s not a new idea by any means. It’s captured by old sayings like “This too shall pass” and Bible verses like “There is a time for everything.”

But there’s a few interesting implications of this idea for our modern lives.

I’ve begun to realize that the concept of “personal productivity” is just a season in people’s lives. It is a temporary phase that we each pass through on our way to other things.

Productivity as we know it is largely an entry-level concept. It caters to people just beginning their careers, starting their first professional jobs, or moving to new roles that demand a higher level of personal output.

The reason productivity is just a phase is that it is relatively low leverage. “Leverage” refers to the ability to do more with less, such as using a lever to lift a boulder that you’d never be able to lift on your own strength.

You do need to reach a certain level of proficiency in your personal productivity. But once you do, you can go beyond it to greater sources of leverage. And you must, if you want to fulfill your full potential.

What are those other sources? There are many options.

One tremendous source of leverage is the ability to work with and manage others.

Whether by hiring them, collaborating with them, outsourcing or delegating to them, coaching or advising them, or investing in them. The results that two or more people can produce together will always be far more than anything a single person can do on their own

Another source of leverage is content.

By “content,” I mean any tangible piece of knowledge that can spread and have an impact without you having to be there personally. Content produces leverage by creating value independently of your time and attention. Not just because it can be distributed anywhere in the world via the Internet, but because it can reach an almost unlimited number of people in parallel, at any time of the day or night, almost for free.

I think of every blog post, tweet, YouTube video, and podcast episode as a little evangelist going out into the world on my behalf to spread my message. How big of a salesforce would it take to replicate that kind of reach? How many years would you have to work on your own to reach even 1% of those people?

Another source of leverage is personal growth. This one might be harder to see.

Leverage at its heart is about tapping new sources of power. We can find sources of power that are hidden, underappreciated, or difficult to access.

That power can reside in other people, in institutions, in culture, in art, in social networks, in buildings and physical infrastructure, and in civil society.

But there is one source of power that is accessible to everyone: the inherent power flowing through the human body, heart, mind, and, for lack of a better term, soul.

I don’t know how to explain it, but there is a river of pure energy flowing through each human being. It is the energy we tap into through yoga, therapy, journaling, dreaming, psychedelics, and other healing practices.

If you’re not into metaphysics, think of it as the potential energy stored in your nervous system. Not just the electric impulses firing through your nerves, but the potential for action that a human nervous system holds.

I recently came across a framework that sheds light on how we tap into this source of power.

It’s from Michael Beckwith, the Founder of Agape International Spiritual Center, a trans-denominational religious community headquartered in Los Angeles.

Beckwith’s model describes 4 stages that people move through in their journey of personal growth and empowerment.

In the first stage, life is happening “To me,” as in, I have no control and am at the mercy of the actions of others. This is known as victimhood, and is often dominated by blaming others, a feeling of lack of control, and fear.

In the second stage, life happens “By me.” You start gaining access to your inner powers and become the doer in your life, in control of your thoughts and feelings and directing them to achieve your goals. You take responsibility for your life and gain tools for influencing others and the world.

The transition from stage 1 to stage 2 is an incredibly powerful one. It is the focus of most of my work so far, giving people the skills and tools to set goals, make plans, collect knowledge, and execute effectively.

Stage 2 is also where “productivity” tends to top out. It is the limit of what you can do if YOU have to be the one doing it. As long as you and your capabilities are the bottleneck, what you can achieve will always be limited. And you will always have to be there yourself making sure everything goes as planned.

At some point, stage 2 gets tiresome. You achieve a certain level of success and security, but start to wonder “Is that it?”. You start to look up from the demands of everyday life and gaze toward the horizon. Maybe you start to hunger for something transcendent, something beyond yourself.

The shift I’m most interested in these days is from stage 2 to 3. From “Things happening by me” to things happening “through me.” More succinctly, from “doing” to “being.” This is a much more difficult transition than the previous one, because in many ways it requires the opposite approach.

In stage 3, you let go of the illusion of control and power. You surrender the need to manage every little thing. You start to sense that you are part of a greater whole – a channel for some greater force or will or idea that wants to emerge through you.

It’s a scary experience, because that greater force doesn’t play around. It nudges you in certain directions, pushing and pulling you toward the path of least resistance. And if you continue to resist, those nudges sometimes turn into shoves.

One of my students recently wrote to me and described it beautifully:

“At some point in life, you look around and convince yourself that you’re not great. You haven’t done this, and this, and this that you said you would do or had the opportunity to do. You’re not where you thought you’d be in some aspect of your life.

At this point, there is a fork in the road. You either continue on trying to fill a void with external measures that can never be filled or satisfied, or you veer off and start to look inward for the answers. It usually takes something traumatic and/or life-altering, or you meet someone who guides you, to open your heart and your inner eyes to the truth.

The more you look deep inside yourself and can touch that goodness, the more you connect and touch others. I understood. You have to put on your air mask first, and then help those on the plane around you. You will be unable to help others if you, yourself, cannot breathe.”

I have no experience of the fourth stage, but I’ve heard others try to describe it. Things no longer happen “through” you, they happen as you, because there is no distinction between you and them. Ideas of separation lose their power. The absurdity, paradox, and hilariousness of life move front and center. The greater force takes the driver’s seat of your life, and you give it up willingly.

I’m told that in that fourth, infinite place you feel that you are one with everything and everyone. Your ego and identity dissolve. Not into nothingness, but into unity. Every religion and spiritual path has tried to describe this place of annihilation and unity. But every language has failed to capture it.

It is these third and fourth stages that represent the frontier of personal growth. You have to put your intellect and reason aside to tread this path. The usual approach of goals, objectives, and problem-solving no longer work. Trying to fix or solve the challenges you find here will only prolong them.

The way forward is to absorb, accept, and transcend the blockages you find within yourself. Because any problem you see on the outside is just a part of yourself that you haven’t yet learned to love. There are no problems in nature. We are the ones who create the problems.

The price you pay to be part of something greater than yourself is you give up control over what that bigger thing is. You submit yourself to the will of the universe (or god, or destiny, or entropy) and trust that you will find your place within it.

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Teachable Workshop: How to Take Digital Notes with Tiago Forte

I recently taught this workshop on How to Take Digital Notes, hosted by Teachable, the online learning platform I use for my courses.

This is an introductory workshop for people just getting into this crazy world of Second Brains, personal knowledge management, and digital notetaking.

I presented some of the core concepts you’ll need to know as you embark on your brain-building journey, along with real-life examples of how they are applied in my own notes.

Here are some of the main takeaways I covered:

How to Capture and save the best information you consume each weekHow to Organize that information in an easily retrievable note-taking systemHow to Distill your notes into their key componentsHow to use your notes as fuel for creative Expression, driven by a project-first workflowHow having a Second Brain frees your first brain for creative work

Here’s what some of the live attendees had to say:

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My interview with David Duncan, Author of The Secret Lives of Customers

I recently joined David Duncan to discuss his new book The Secret Lives of Customers which teaches the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework using the intriguing format of a detective story. 

The basic premise is that consumers “hire” a product (or service) to perform a certain “job” for them.

I’ve used JTBD in my own business to figure out what exactly my customers are hiring my courses to do for them. Without that understanding, I would be left making random improvements and hoping something sticks.

I’ve long wanted to introduce my audience to this concept. It is a universally useful lens that changes how you see business. But there isn’t really an authoritative text I could point to. This is why I was very happy to hear that David wrote one.

In our conversation, David answers your questions about how JTBD might apply to you and your work. See below for the video recording and for more details on David’s work, visit here.

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Why I’m Investing in Maven

I’m proud to announce my investment in Maven, the first platform to specifically enable creators to deliver live, online, community-driven educational programs to people all over the world.

Online education is exploding. Udemy reported a 260% increase in its annual recurring revenue in the first six months of 2020. Coursera raised $130 million in new financing at a valuation of $2.5 billion in July. Thinkific reported a 221% surge in new course creation in the first weeks of the pandemic, which leveled off at 115% to 263% (depending on the country) in the ensuing months.

Cohort-Based Courses, or CBCs, are a new kind of online course in which a group of learners (known as a “cohort”) join together and move through a curriculum at the same pace. The instructor provides guidance and feedback over video calls and other channels, while students share what they’re discovering in real time and encourage each other to keep going.

I recently shared my thoughts on why I believe Cohort-Based Courses (known as CBCs) are the next big wave in online education. They leverage the unique properties of the Internet – that it is two-way, interactive, and open-ended. Instead of buying a static, off-the-shelf product to consume in isolation, students get to be part of an interactive, personalized peer-to-peer learning experience.

I created my own CBC in late 2016, though I wouldn’t have known to call it that until much later. It is called Building a Second Brain, and teaches people how to capitalize on the full potential of their knowledge through the practice of digital notetaking.

It’s now been 4 years since my first tiny cohort of 30 people, and over 3,000 people from around the world have completed the course since then. It has far surpassed anything I ever expected or hoped when I first started out.

But here’s the thing: as certain as I am that CBCs are the future, I’m equally certain that the path I followed isn’t the best one. I had to spend years hacking together all kinds of different systems since there wasn’t any existing platform for what I was doing. I had to hire someone to write custom code to get existing tools to work the way I needed them to. I burned out and almost gave up several times before I was finally able to hire a full-time team, a major responsibility that many creators can’t afford or won’t want to take on.

The early days of CBCs are coming to a close, and that’s a good thing. The wild frontier is turning into a frontier town, where intrepid travelers can at least stock up on supplies and get something to eat. We’re leaving the era of solopreneurs managing everything from growing their audience, to driving sales, to troubleshooting tech problems, to creating original material, to delivering live experiences all by themselves. There are far too many roles to play and hats to wear for one person to do it on their own. Especially as competition heats up and venture-backed companies start pouring money into the industry.

I couldn’t be more excited to see the best practices developed by us and many other pioneering course creators embedded into the all-in-one platform that Maven is building. It’s going to unlock the potential of CBCs for all the talented teachers with valuable expertise who don’t have technical skills and unlimited amounts of free time. By doing so, it will unleash the power of community-driven learning to make a transformative impact on students’ lives.

The 12th cohort of our Building a Second Brain course is welcoming over 1,500 students this week (and we do them twice per year). By comparison, Harvard accepted a 2021 incoming freshman class of 1,700 undergrads. In other words, in 4 years we’ve reached nearly the scale of the country’s most prestigious university, and at a small fraction of the cost. I believe we are well on our way to matching the quality of an Ivy League education as well.

Many people have realized that we need to “scale” education to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving workforce. But traditional institutions are incentivized to accept as few applicants as possible, and self-paced courses lack the accountability that most learners need to succeed.

Education isn’t and will never be perfectly scaleable. It inherently has friction, because learning is always accompanied by resistance. We have to feel the resistance of our mindset shifting and new muscles developing to know that we are changing. CBCs are the perfect blend of the scalability of the Internet combined with the intensity of human interaction. I believe they represent our best hope of educating the millions of people we need to tackle the challenges we face as individuals, as companies, and as a society.

I’m betting on Maven because I’ve been watching them closely for the past year, and I believe they’re perfectly positioned to capitalize on the CBC wave. Wes Kao (Creator of the altMBA, the gold standard in online professional development) consulted with us on two of our flagship courses last summer, and I got to experience firsthand her insights into community-building, curriculum design, business strategy, and communication. I’ve been following Gagan Biyani (Co-Founder and former President of Udemy) closely as he’s patiently explored the space, and I think he’ll be able to build on his previous impressive accomplishments in online education. Gagan and Wes are joined by Shreyans Bhansali, whose previous company Socratic was acquired by Google, for a true founding dream team.

Maven is supplying the pickaxes and shovels that will make life on the frontier not only survivable, but profitable and enjoyable. They are democratizing the opportunity to reach anyone, anywhere with the knowledge and expertise you have to offer. If you’d like to hear more about what they’re building, subscribe below:

The Maven team is offering a free Cohort-Based Course on how to create a Cohort-Based Course, with applications closing on May 8, 2021. If you want to jump into this new wave with both feet, apply here to be a part of the inaugural cohort (application takes about 10 minutes to complete).

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

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The 9 Biggest Myths and Misconceptions about Building a Second Brain

A “Second Brain” is a trusted system that lives outside your head and helps you organize your digital world, cultivate your best ideas, and dramatically expand your creative output.

By creating your own Second Brain, you can make use of the time you’re already spending reading, listening, watching, and communicating to create a valuable asset that grows and compounds over time.

These are the most common myths and misconceptions about this process I’ve noticed from teaching more than 3,000 people in my online course Building a Second Brain. You can also listen to this article in audio form via the second season of the Building a Second Brain Podcast.

1. “I haven’t built a Second Brain yet”

A Second Brain isn’t a thing you either have or don’t have – like the latest iPad or a college degree. It isn’t something to be acquired and installed in one swoop like a kitchen appliance.

A better analogy might be your personal finance system – a distributed collection of accounts, withdrawals, deposits, payments, institutions, documents, and even people like your accountant or CPA. We all have such a system for managing our personal finances. You may not be happy with it, but you do have one.

In your personal finance system, there are certain activities that are always happening, such as earning, spending, saving, and investing. These activities take different forms at different times. You may direct more money or attention to some of them than others at any given time. But the performance of your personal finance system depends on how well it can perform these four functions.

Likewise, your Second Brain is a system for personal knowledge management (a field known as PKM). It is a distributed system made up of apps, devices, websites, social media platforms, cloud and storage drives, organizations, and people like your colleagues or collaborators. You can’t point to one single element and say “That is my Second Brain.” Even the notetaking app you use is only one element.

So when people tell me “I haven’t yet built a Second Brain” it doesn’t make sense. Somewhere in your life, in some form, there are certain activities happening all the time to allow you to make sense of information. You are constantly capturing, organizing, distilling, and expressing information in many different ways.

In today’s world, we all have Second Brains – ways we process and interpret the swirl of information around us. This system will always be there, in the same way that you don’t stop getting bills if you stop opening the mail. But once you notice it, you can truly start to build a system around it. And that system will be essential for producing the career, business, and life you want.

2. “A Second Brain means tediously overhauling and restructuring my entire digital life”

Some people think of a Second Brain as a precisely engineered, tightly integrated piece of technology, like a car engine, where every component plays a critical part. If one thing is missing or misaligned, the car will fail to start – or blow up in your face.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth. A Second Brain is adaptive, like a living organism – messy, organic, and highly adaptable. Just like your first brain, a Second Brain has natural “plasticity,” with many ways of accomplishing any given task. When one part of your system is missing, another part can adapt and evolve to make up for it.

In the 4 steps of my CODE framework – Capture, Organize, Distill, Express – any incremental improvement immediately makes a difference, whether or not the other parts of the system are already in place. You don’t have to wait for each of the pieces to work in perfect harmony to start producing value.

For example, once you start capturing your thoughts and ideas as notes, you’ll immediately notice greater peace of mind from not carrying everything in your head… even if you never do anything with those notes.

If you exclusively focus on organizing, you’ll improve your ability to locate the information you already have, even if you don’t end up sharing it with anyone.

And if you merely improved your distillation process, you’d be better at getting straight to the point in your emails and conversations – even if you don’t touch the other parts of CODE at all.

Your Second Brain is less fragile than you think. Even if you don’t perfectly maintain every aspect of it with mechanic-like diligence, it will still be there as a repository for your best ideas and inspirations. And the efforts you do make will pay immediate dividends.

3. “A Second Brain is just a bunch of random ‘life hacks’ for knowledge work”

While a Second Brain doesn’t require you to perfectly coordinate every aspect to create value, does that mean it’s nothing more than a random collection of disconnected “tips and tricks”?

Unlike a Top 10 Productivity Tips listicle, when you build a Second Brain deliberately, each technique and tool builds on and extends the others. That way, when you practice them together, you have a system that is greater than the sum of its parts.

For example, it’s much easier to:

Organize your notes using the PARA method if you’ve already been selective about what you capture in the first placeDistill and summarize notes with Progressive Summarization if they’ve already been designated as part of a “Project”Quickly assemble pieces of work “just -in-time” (paywalled series) if they’ve already been distilled down to their most essential points

Each step of the CODE process feeds into the next, so when you sit down to create something new, most of the hard work has already been completed. You’re already naturally refining your thinking in the small, in-between moments of your day, so when it’s time to bring it together, you’ve just got to assemble the parts.

While there’s a vast universe of productivity and notetaking tips out there, you don’t have to learn all the possibilities. Just learn the core essentials to take a raw idea through the creative process so it can have an impact on the world outside your head… all thanks to the Second Brain system you’ve also built “outside of your head.”

4. “Building a Second Brain is just self-help for notetaking nerds”

A little harsh, but… on the surface, guilty as charged. Self-improvement is all about seeking ways to become more effective and do more with less – and a Second Brain will definitely aid you in that effort.

But what if instead of trying to optimize you – forcing yourself to get smarter, faster, or more disciplined – you worked on optimizing a system outside of yourself, so that it produces results no matter how motivated you feel?

The more powerful technology becomes, the less sense it makes to try and succeed based solely on our own efforts. It’s like trying to dig a ditch with your bare hands, when there’s a shovel sitting unused nearby. Or more accurately, a giant earth-moving machine.

So in a way, building a Second Brain is the opposite of self-improvement. It’s about outsourcing as much thinking and remembering as possible to the intelligent machines we’re already surrounded by, so we can spend our time thinking about whatever the hell we feel like. We are liberating ourselves from the neverending details that clutter our minds and freeing up time to pursue a higher purpose.

Ultimately what we are seeking is a better world – a world with more innovative products, more creative content, more impactful programs, and more effective organizations. If we can remove ourselves as the bottleneck and allow external systems to work on our behalf, we will be vastly more effective without straining the capabilities of our mind.

5. “A Second Brain requires me to have technical skills”

Until recently, you would have been right: knowledge management has historically been a highly technical affair.

In the past, if you wanted to manage or make sense of large volumes of information you’d need to be a trained software engineer, data scientist, or librarian. PKM required particular skills, knowledge of complex syntax, and walking a technical tightrope to avoid the risk of messing up database records for others.

Technology makes the biggest difference when it ceases to be a specialist tool, and crosses the chasm to become accessible to the world of generalists. The category of software known as “tools for thought” is currently in the middle of that transition. Technology has finally become accessible, user-friendly, and affordable enough that we can take responsibility for knowledge management in our own lives.

Just like your biological brain, a Second Brain isn’t specialized for one particular kind of data or a particular profession: it’s a general purpose intelligence. A Second Brain can handle any kind of information, for any purpose, to produce any kind of result. It can be used equally well by a scientist, teacher, engineer, designer, or entrepreneur. It can adapt to any situation we find ourselves in. 

Thanks to more accessible, simplified tech, your Second Brain can integrate all the items that used to require different systems for different parts of your life. Previously, you’d need a unique system for work projects, another for personal affairs, one to manage the household, and another for taking notes on books you read – but today, your Second Brain can centralize these streams into one flow. It is a funnel for corralling the countless sources of information towards one purpose: to have an impact in the real world.

6. “There is a ‘right way’ to build a Second Brain”

There are as many ways to build a Second Brain as there are kinds of people building them.

There’s no point in implementing a system that’s so complicated you never actually make it part of your routines. The “right” system is the one you stick with and is so easy to use, that it’s simpler to use it than not to.

Every creative professional has to decide for themselves what their Second Brain is and how it will work. You can’t copy someone else’s exact morning routines and creative habits and then expect to produce the same results. Your habits are unique to you and the unique makeup of your mind.

Some people prefer formal PKM approaches, with checklists, templates, and strict rules. Others are more open-ended and free-form, allowing for improvisation and meandering paths. It’s a spectrum: your job is to find the spot on that spectrum where you’re most comfortable and capable.

This is why it’s important to experience many models, examples, and case studies of different people’s Second Brains. Examine professionals from your field, other fields, from our time, and from the past. There’s no one way it has to look – only a multitude of options and possibilities to choose from.

7. “If I create a Second Brain, it will kill my creativity”

If you’re highly creative, you may feel a strong internal resistance to overly prescriptive methodologies and techniques. You don’t want the inspiration coursing through your mind to be stifled in those sacred moments of flow.

It’s important to tap into the power of your creative imagination. But for most people, the big limiter in their life is not a lack of imagination. They have plenty of ideas for how the future could be different. Their limitation is the ability to turn those ideas into reality. Too many of our best ideas die on the vine, never tasting even a fraction of their potential.

Paradoxically, creativity depends on routine. If you examine the lives of successful artists, musicians, comedians, or writers, they all depend completely on the consistency of their habits. They can’t wait for inspiration to strike, but rather, get up and go to work just like any other professional.

Morning habits, exercise habits, journaling habits, reading habits, writing habits, notetaking habits – when creatives practice these habits to the extent that they become automatic, they free up attention to ensure that when inspiration does strike, they have the bandwidth to run after new ideas.

But how can we create systems and habits in a highly unpredictable environment where each day or week might look completely different from the last?

I developed much of my own Second Brain in my 20s, while traveling and living abroad in several different countries. Moving from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the Colombian coast to the far reaches of Eastern Ukraine, everything about my environment and routines changed dramatically.

But there was one thing that stayed the same: my digital world. Across different cities, countries, and jobs, the content saved in the cloud followed me. Despite the flurry of my constantly changing life, there was a layer of reality I could rely on: the virtual reality I could access anywhere.

Thanks to that reality, I was able to start a travel blog to share stories of my adventures abroad. I published my first ebook to raise money for a youth leadership program, and helped dozens of young Ukrainians finish college and take on leadership positions at prominent companies and non-profits. Seeing a vision in my head make it out into the world and have a direct impact on people’s lives changed my life forever. 

True creativity is being able not just to imagine interesting futures, but bring them to life through a consistent practice. That’s the kind of creativity I want to see more of in the world. And it depends on a proven process to sculpt your knowledge into reality.

8. “Second Brains are for people who aren’t actually out in the world doing the hard work”

This is probably the biggest failure of existing approaches to knowledge management: They’re hopelessly academic and don’t stand a chance once you make “contact with reality.”

Most information management techniques start with theory and academic research. They develop models for how information could work (in theory), and then work backwards to determine what practices might work in people’s day-to-day lives.

Seeing this flawed approach over and over, I made sure to do the opposite: I started by closely observing high-performers working on real-world challenges. I examined how they read, listen, take notes, and organize their priorities under pressure. Most of all, I looked for the shortcuts that people take when they’re deep in the trenches, which often end up being the most innovative breakthroughs.

We need theories and research. They allow us to uncover new aspects of information management we have yet to discover. But I find every time I start with a framework in mind, then try to invent a technique based off of it, that technique ends up too complicated for practical work, and fails. Instead, I observe what people are already doing that works, and help them double down on those techniques.

The great methodologies are born in the trenches of modern work. And they’re ruthlessly practical, because there isn’t time for anything else.

9. “Maintaining a Second Brain will force me to sit in front of a computer all day”

We now spend over 11 hours per day consuming media on our electronic devices.

Many internet pundits seem to believe this indicates a crisis. They preach the gospel of “digital abstinence” and try to convince us there’s something inherently bad about the ubiquity of technology.

Here’s the reality: We can choose how we spend our time on our devices. We get to decide who we are when we go online. Technology is neutral – it expands who we already are and what we’re already doing. And it’s not realistic to pretend we’re going to shun all tech and retreat from the Internet. It’s here to stay.

But with that comes a responsibility to spend our time online consciously. We can choose to direct our attention to the urgent, the sensational, and the shallow. Or we can craft our digital environment for learning, experimenting, collaborating, and making things.

The Internet can be a source of endless distraction, or a source of endless wisdom. It gives us access to the worst of humanity, and the very best of humanity: amazing art, moving entertainment, insightful writing, subtle teachings, and friendships that would never have formed otherwise.

CODE gives us a default set of habits for how we interact with information, online and offline. It encourages us to capture the best ideas we encounter, to organize those ideas around the projects and goals that matter to us, and to distill the ideas we already have, instead of endlessly collecting more.

All these steps are preparation for the most difficult, but also most valuable action you can take in the connected world we live in: to step away from the computer and share your message with the world.

When you make the shift from consumer to creator, your entire posture toward the world changes. Your standards for what information you allow to fill your mind skyrockets, because you need the best to produce the best. 

The overwhelming complexity and uncertainty of everything you could possibly be doing becomes a calm patience for the concrete thing you are actually working on. 

And once you experience that, you can move powerfully in the world and make a difference in your own life and the lives of others.

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Building a Second Brain: The Executive Edition

The Executive Edition of our online course Building a Second Brain is designed for entrepreneurs, executives, and leaders who want to hire Tiago as their personal coach, dive headfirst into the deep end, and build their Second Brain at an accelerated pace.

Spots at this tier are limited, providing a more private, intimate space where we can speak frankly about what it looks like to build knowledge management systems not just for our own personal use, but to create teams and organizations that have a positive impact on the world.

The Executive Edition includes everything from both the Essential and Premium Edition, plus 4 additional features:

60-minute 1:1 coaching session with Tiago

During or after the 5-week cohort, you’ll schedule a 1-on-1 call with Tiago to work through your biggest roadblock, challenge, or goal, drawing on Second Brain techniques.

5 small group coaching sessions with Tiago

You’ll meet with Tiago and a small group of other Executive Edition participants each week of the course to dive deeper into the week’s lesson in a private, more intimate environment. These calls will be recorded and made available for on-demand replays for the Exec Edition only.

Priority Support

You’ll have a direct line to our staff for anything you need, from navigating the course materials to troubleshooting tech problems and anything else we can help you with.

Lifetime Praxis membership

You’ll receive a lifetime membership to the Praxis blog, including paywalled content, members-only workshops and events, and the first look at my new projects.

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Building a Second Brain Podcast Season 2: The 9 Biggest Myths and Misconceptions

Introducing Season 2 of the Building a Second Brain podcast!

Available on: Spotify, Libsyn, and Apple Podcasts.

In this season I talk about 9 of the biggest myths and misconceptions that people have about Second Brains, and what it means to create one for themselves. 

Based on years of experience teaching, writing, and coaching people on this subject, I identify some of the most common beliefs and assumptions holding people back, and then breaking those assumptions down one piece at a time.

These episodes were recorded with David Perell, host of the North Star Podcast, as part of the launch of cohort 12 of my Building a Second Brain online course. Enrollment is open until April 28, 2021. 

Check out the full details and join here: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com.

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The 8 Biggest Improvements in Building a Second Brain 12

Every 6 months my team and I sit down to design the next cohort of Building a Second Brain (BASB).

We look at everything: feedback from students from the last cohort, ideas for improvements saved in our notes, new apps and features that have been released, and our long-term plans for making this the best course on PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) in the world.

Throughout that process, we have one guiding question:

How can we make a course that is  impossible  to fail?

So many courses make a big promise of everything you will do and achieve…as long as you perfectly complete every lesson.

I remember taking these courses. The feeling of disappointment as I slowly dropped off time after time, always blaming myself and my lack of self-discipline for my failure. I don’t think I ever finished a self-paced course.

It seemed to work for everyone else, but why not me? Why couldn’t I be one of the glowing testimonials I saw on the sales page?

When I created BASB, I was determined to create an experience that left people feeling more empowered, not less.

I decided to deliver the course live via Zoom. Instead of assigning homework for students to somehow find time to complete on their own, I led them through milestones live.

When the group got too big for me to work directly with every student, I hired Alumni Mentors to coach students through their process.

This approach is probably not as efficient or scalable, but it is radically more effective at delivering the promises we’ve made.

We’ve just released the full list of improvements we’re making in version 12, which I’ll explain in more detail below.

Every single one of these changes is laser-focused on one target: making students win.

1. New studio-quality videos

For the last 11 cohorts, every video lesson was just me sitting at my computer talking. The content was iterating and changing so fast, I could never justify investing in super high production values.

That’s all changed now. The lessons have been proven enough that we are beginning the process of producing new lesson videos combining live teaching, visual metaphors, and motion graphics, paired with studio-quality audio.

We’ll share the first two videos as part of cohort 12, with MUCH more to come.

We’ve simplified the core units, moved supplementary material to the Second Brain Vault and the discussion forum, and refocused everything around what really matters: taking action.

2. Beginner and advanced tracks

For cohort 12, we are splitting the curriculum into “Beginner” and “Advanced” tracks.

New students taking the course for the first time will be encouraged to focus on the need-to-know essentials in the Beginner track (though they will have the option of joining Advanced if they want to).

Returning students will have the option of joining a faster-paced, more intensive Advanced track that builds on what they already know.

Alumni Mentor groups and Circle spaces will also be designated as Beginner or Advanced, allowing everyone to choose the level of engagement that makes the most sense for them.

3. Expanded Alumni Mentor program

In cohort 12, Alumni Mentors are becoming the backbone of this program. They are previous graduates of the course who we’ve recruited, hired, and trained to coach students through challenges and obstacles.

We will have 30 Mentors (supported by 6 Senior Mentors) from a wide variety of backgrounds leading their own breakout sessions each week, focusing on specific aspects of PKM, specific tools, and specific use cases.

You’ll be able to join as many or as few of them as you want to give you a smaller, more intimate setting in which to ask questions and get feedback.

BASB is quickly becoming less a course and more like a global conference: I deliver the keynote address, but everyone knows the real magic is in the breakout sessions where you can get into the details.

4. Feedback Pods

We are also offering an even smaller, more intimate way for you to connect with your fellow students.

Feedback Pods are small groups of students who opt in to become learning partners for each other, meeting weekly to share what they’ve discovered, get feedback on their classwork, and maybe even make new friends.

Feedback Pods are completely optional and organized by time zone, so you can join at a time that’s convenient for you.

5. Redesigned discussion forum

We are revamping our community discussion forum on the Circle platform, recentering discussions around Beginner and Advanced tracks and the most-used notetaking apps.

This will ensure channels remain active and engaged while allowing you to ignore the chatter that doesn’t apply to you. Certain Mentors will also be primarily active on Circle to make sure you get your questions answered.

6. Friday Happy Hour

We’ve realized that one of the biggest benefits of a live program like this one is the people you meet. We’ve seen so many friendships, collaborations, and even businesses come out of these cohorts.

I recently wrote about Renaissance 2.0, the creative revolution we’re currently witnessing on the Internet, and how it’s such a vibrant social and cultural scene. I’ve realized that in order to become part of it, it’s not enough to read some blogs. You have to meet people and form relationships.

We’ve added an informal social event on Friday nights to specifically enable this kind of relationship-building. We’ll have prompts, icebreakers, and games to help you find your tribe in our networked era.

7. Student Directory

We now have over 3,000 graduates of this course, spread across a stunning diversity of countries, professions, organizations, and cultures.

To enable alumni to find and meet each other even if they’re not part of the same cohort, we are leveling up our Student Directory and making it a permanent part of the program.

With your permission, we’ll add your approximate location, professional background, and interests to a central directory that can be searched. And then you can direct message any other graduate through Circle without needing to know their email address.

8. Digital workbooks

We’re turning our PDF workbook into an online, interactive workbook!

We’ve identified the 8 key milestones on the path to building a Second Brain, and will be sharing templates for completing them all in one place in a workbook that is designed to work with notetaking apps.

Those are the 8 biggest changes we’re making. And of course, we’ll continue to do everything that has worked well so far.

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Building a Second Brain 12: The Belters

Over the last few weeks I’ve been obsessively binge-watching the sci-fi TV series The Expanse.

It’s set in the year 2350, when the solar system has been settled and is divided into warring factions.

The Earth is still the greatest economic power, its industries unrivaled. But Earth’s society has grown stagnant, losing its sense of ambition and vitality over the centuries.

Mars is a young society determined to terraform their planet and create a “New Earth.” They are united in their disdain for the Earthers, and how they’ve wasted the abundance of their home planet.

And there is an emerging power: the scattered settlements in the Asteroid Belt, known as “The Belt.” Originally started as mining colonies, the “Belters” have slowly developed their own language, culture, and even physiology.

Raised their entire lives in low gravity environments, they cannot withstand the crushing gravity of Mars or Earth. They are permanently exiled from the very places where humans first evolved.

The Belters have always been at the mercy of their planetary overlords. But that is starting to change. Ships are pushing deeper and deeper into the outer solar system and even beyond. 

The demand for raw materials is skyrocketing, which is shifting the balance of power.

Anything is possible.

I don’t want to give anything away, but here’s a quick 90-second trailer for season 1 to give you a feel for the universe of The Expanse (WARNING: graphic language and content):

As I’ve been watching The Expanse, something has resonated deeply with me. A few nights ago as I finished season 2, it hit me: the economics and politics of the 24th century are already with us today.

The stagnant Earthers represent the old 20th century economy that is rapidly decaying in our own time. Bureaucratic government institutions are failing us. The media is stuck in the Industrial Age. Outdated industries are struggling to keep up with the pace of change.

The Belt represents the new economy that is emerging before our eyes. An economy driven by technology, the Internet, and creativity. 

The Belters have always lived in the shadow of Earth and its armada. They’ve always been treated as second class citizens. Their desires and dreams dismissed by the powers that be.

But Belters represent the future. They control the basic resources that will be needed to explore the outer solar system. They are pioneering a new way of life free of the gravitational constraints of the past.

Belters are the gateway to humanity’s future in the stars.

Likewise, the new, Internet-enabled economy is still in its infancy. Many of the technological tools we’ve invented are still quite primitive, requiring some effort to master. 

But make no mistake: technology will change everything. No industry will be unchanged and no part of our lives untouched.

Just like the Belters, we are also miners, but of raw information. We drill down to the source to make sense of what’s happening in the world on our own terms. And we are also developing our own language, our own culture, and our own approach to productivity, learning, collaboration, business, and life itself.

Just like the Belters, we are living at the frontier. We are inventing a new way of life – how to leverage technology and the Internet to live more fulfilling, vibrant lives.

Join the Belters

Today we are officially announcing cohort 12 of Building a Second Brain (BASB), my flagship online course on how to save your best ideas, organize your knowledge, and use it to dramatically expand your creative output.

On the surface, the course is about organizing your digital life and improving your productivity as a creative professional. But it’s so much more than that.

It is really about what it means to be a native citizen of the Internet. It is about how to unleash the full power of the digital tools at your fingertips. It is about learning to use technology to capitalize on the full potential of your ideas. 

And by doing so, taking control of your destiny.

On April 19th we will open enrollment for the new cohort, which will run from May 5 to June 4, 2021. I’ve dubbed them “The Belters” to remind us that we are the underdogs…for now.

Over 5 weeks I will teach you the fundamentals of CODE, the method I’ve developed for consistently turning the information you consume into creative output. And as a side effect, drastically reducing the constant worry that there’s some little detail falling through the cracks.

Right now is the best time to equip yourself with a system for knowledge management, which I call a “Second Brain.” Because let me tell you: the volume of information coming your way today is just a trickle compared to what’s coming.

Subscribe below and I’ll send you a series of short emails over the next few weeks. They will include everything you need to know, such as the full schedule, the curriculum, pricing, answers to common questions, and reminders of important dates.

There’s a lot more to the story of The Expanse, and many more parallels for understanding our own time. I’ll use that story to illustrate that the same principles of creativity that worked thousands of years ago, and that work today, will also persist far into the future.

Join the Belters and let’s explore this universe together. 

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Why I’m Investing in Circle

When I created my first online course in 2013, online learning was a lonely affair.

Platforms like Skillshare and Udemy were exploding in popularity. But the vast majority of courses at that time were one-way: information flowed only from the instructor to the students.

There was no expectation that a student would get to know their peers. No chance that students might actually contribute to each others’ learning. A course was just a vehicle for delivering the knowledge in the instructor’s head to students.

In the fall of 2016 I took a writing course called The Art of Longform, to learn how to write deep, insightful essays for my blog. It was delivered live and in real time, via a new platform I’d never heard of called Zoom.

Within the first couple class sessions, I was hooked. I quickly realized that reliable, high-quality, group video calling would completely transform what was possible in online learning.

I spent the next couple months creating the first version of an online course I called Building a Second Brain, to teach the obscure but increasingly important skill of Personal Knowledge Management. I recruited a small group of friends and former colleagues to be part of the first beta group, which I called a “cohort.”

Over four years later, the concept of “cohort-based learning” has caught fire. As I recently explained in a brief history of the four waves of online education, online programs delivered live are upending the industry and revolutionizing the impact that independent instructors can have on their students.

I believe that the defining factor of the new generation of online courses is community.

No longer are we expected to sit alone at our computers for hours on end, absorbing data like robots. No longer are we supposed to somehow find the time and motivation to check off every lesson, for weeks and weeks on end. No longer are we just the passive, unquestioning recipients of someone else’s opinions.

We are returning to what has made education tick for countless generations: learning together, in community, in real time, with everyone contributing. Community provides what content alone lacks: coaching, feedback, encouragement, and peer-to-peer learning that only comes from seeing and being seen.

The technology of online instruction has finally become simple and user-friendly enough that we can focus on the experience of learning. And the experience everyone is looking for is the experience of transforming together.

A brief history of discussion forums

As powerful as Zoom is for real-time communication, it doesn’t allow everyone to participate. There is always just one person speaking at any given time, and everyone else is a spectator.

I’ve tried many times over the years to create an online space where students could communicate “many to many.” Where their self-expression wouldn’t be limited by the constraints of time and space.

The first community group I launched was on Facebook in 2014. I wanted a place for instructors on the learning platform Skillshare (where my course was hosted) to be able to come together and share what was working for them.

The discussions were incredibly open and honest. Every one of us was trying to figure out what it meant to be a freelance teacher, and the sense of fellowship we found in that private Facebook group was invaluable.

But as the group grew in size, it quickly descended into a morass of self-promotion, daily deals, and spam. I couldn’t keep up with the responsibilities of moderation, and the group fell apart. I needed more control and better moderation tools to be able to keep the community healthy.

A couple years later I tried again on Discourse, an open-source discussion platform used by many organizations who want to control the community experience. We set up and customized a forum for students of my course, designing every aspect to suit their needs.

But once again, we eventually ran into major challenges. As much as I love the open-source philosophy, our Discourse forum required way too much effort to set up and maintain. I had to hire a technical consultant on a monthly basis just to install updates, troubleshoot problems, and answer our questions.

While the platform was powerful, it was too open-ended and technical for me and my small team. We could customize anything we wanted, but that abundance of options meant that we didn’t feel comfortable doing so.

On top of that, the Discourse user experience felt a couple generations behind what people were used to. Bulky buttons, outdated visual design, a lack of responsiveness, and siloed pages made every minute spent there into a chore. We had swung to the opposite end of the spectrum, and realized we needed a curated, user-friendly interface like people were used to on social media.

As 2020 began I knew we needed a community platform we could fully control, but that didn’t require technical expertise. That was private, but also fostered lively discussions. That had a great user experience, but didn’t force us to give away our customers’ data to a social media giant.

That was the moment we were introduced to Circle. 

Founded by CEO Sid Yadav and other former employees of the online learning company Teachable, it promised to give independent creators like us the benefits of community without the headaches. I’d been talking to Sid for months about his ideas on the emerging movement of online communities. I knew that he and his team had thought deeply about both the problems and the opportunities.

Circle is now the primary platform behind our flagship courses Building a Second Brain and Write of Passage, serving thousands of students every year. The live class sessons are delivered via Zoom and the content lives on Teachable, but everything else – discussions, questions & answers, student feedback, interest groups, assignments, and much more happens on the Building a Second Brain Circle community.

Circle recently raised a second round of funding at a valuation of over $40 million. I’m proud to have joined the round as an angel investor alongside other prominent creators on the platform, like Anne-Laure Le Cunff, David Perell, and Nat Eliason.

Until very recently, there were few options available to online creators who wanted to gather a community around their work, without demanding so much time that it interferes with their work. As the creator movement takes off and more and more people realize that they can connect with like-minded people and make friends through the Internet, the platforms these communities are built on will be ever more important.

If you’re interested in starting your own discussion space, whether for a private book club, an online course, a paid community subscription, or just a place to connect over shared interests, I highly recommend you consider building it on Circle.

You can see a short walkthrough of how the platform works by clicking the button below, and even join a live demo if you’re ready to go:

See Circle in action

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