Tiago Forte's Blog, page 21

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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Welcome to Renaissance 2.0

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in my high school U.S. History class.

We watched in horror as the aftermath of the twin towers’ collapse unfolded on live TV. I was in my third year, and at 16 years old thought I was just beginning to understand the world and my place in it. And then in one fell swoop, that world unraveled and was replaced with a new one.

Sitting in that classroom with my textbook open in front of me, I had the palpable sense that the engines of history were restarting. The history described in its pages had suddenly come to life as a living and breathing presence in our lives.

I had waited patiently all year as we moved through the eras of U.S. history, from pre-colonial times all the way to the 20th century. I could hardly wait for us to reach our own time. I naively thought that with all the background history covered, we would finally be able to make sense of the current events we were living through.

But of course, that day never came. To my dismay, we concluded our curriculum sometime in the 1970s. That was all that the final exam would be covering. Seemingly oblivious to the revolution playing out every day on our TV screens, we spent the rest of the year studying the events of history as if nothing had changed.

I remember that feeling of confusion and dismay because it never really went away. In fact it has only grown. Throughout my life, things have just gotten weirder, more unpredictable, and more confusing. The more I’ve learned about what’s happening in the world, the less I understand how the past unfolded into our present.

Joining the Post-Rationalists

Fast forward to 2012. I’d just arrived in San Francisco after two years serving in the Peace Corps, ready to finally start my professional career in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Once again, I innocently assumed that someone, somewhere must have the answers to explain what I was witnessing: the rise of machine learning, the spread of automated self-driving cars, the disruption of every industry by software. Everything around me was in flux. And no one seemed to have any answers to explain where it was all going.

One evening while browsing the question-and-answer site Quora, I came across a link to a blog post called A Brief History of the Corporation, on an obscure blog called Ribbonfarm.

Within a few paragraphs, I was riveted. I sat up straight in bed and pored over this alternative version of the last few centuries of economic history. It was exactly what I had always been looking for – a lens on history that was irreverent, counter-intuitive, penetrating, and most importantly of all, that I could do something about.

The blog post traces a progression of economic eras, using the history of the British East India Company as a model to understand how the world has changed since industrialization. It ended in our own era, arguing that the scarcest resource, and thus the greatest source of economic value, is now perspective.

I finally had a way to make sense of my place in history. I knew it wasn’t necessarily correct, but it was useful. It was a view of history that seemed to include my own beliefs and opinions, my own ideas, my own perspective. And not only include it, but value it as a precious resource.

Discovering Ribbonfarm would end up being more pivotal than the college I went to, the degree I earned, the city I lived in, or the job I had. Because that blog post was my very first introduction to an online community that I eventually learned was called “the Post-rationalists.”

They defined themselves as “post-” because many of them had come out of an earlier online community called “the Rationalists.” Especially a well-known site called LessWrong, where people debated the finer points of what it meant to be a rational, critically thinking human being.

The Post-Rationalist Exodus was led by people dissatisfied by the overly logical approach to life that they found on Rationalist forums. They wanted to talk about and value other aspects of human experience – feelings, intuition, magic, mystery, the subjective and metaphysical. They still believed in reason, but saw “cognitive biases” not as problems to be eradicated, but as mysteries to be explored.

Here is a famous map of the Rationalist universe, including the Post-rationalist offshoots at upper right. It shows how certain blogs, Twitter and Tumblr accounts, Facebook groups, Meetup groups, businesses, and even real cities cluster into groups across the “virtual landscape” of the Internet. This map can be used to navigate through a mid-life crisis, loss of religion, or intellectual quest, much like Frodo used his map of Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings to find his way to Mordor:

Via the Slate Star Codex blog

It is very difficult to overstate the impact on my life of being involved with the Ribbonfarm community, and Post-rationalists more generally.

Venkatesh Rao, the editor-in-chief and primary writer of Ribbonfarm, became a mentor-at-a-distance, despite the fact we’ve only met in person briefly a couple times. The series of guest posts I contributed as a writer-in-residence, drawing on feedback from fellow contributors, became the foundation of my own writing on my blog.

Members of the Post-rationalist community became my first readers, and later, the first customers of my online courses. To this day, many if not most of my best ideas on productivity, learning, human behavior, and history continue to flow from Ribbonfarm and associated communities. It’s a wellspring of creativity and insight that you would never know existed if you only saw the public discussions on the open Internet.

I’ve never talked much about my participation in this online community, because it never really seemed to matter much. It was all just a lot of highly obscure, nerdy Internet culture for quirky introverts who spent too much time online.

But something has changed in the last year, catalyzed by COVID, U.S. politics, and the continued explosion of all things digital. This virtual geography has become as influential and important as the physical geography of our planet.

Venkatesh sent out an email this week via his paid newsletter, Breaking Smart, that explains what’s going on. I’ll summarize some of the main points below, with my own interpretation and commentary.

The First Schism

The First Schism in modern history was the Industrial Revolution.

Over the last few centuries, something new called “the economy” split off from community life. Work had always been inseparable from the community where it took place. The only economies were household economies, with family members producing much of what they needed themselves. Industrialization for the first time created a “business world” with “workplaces” dedicated to labor.

It was much easier to perform a specialized skill, get paid in money, and then buy everything else you needed from others, versus trying to run a completely self-contained household economy. Consuming thus became central to how we participated in society – the “consumerized” society that we all live in now was born.

Now we are in the midst of the Second Schism, driven by the inexorable rise of the Internet. The concept of “community” is again being unbundled. This time, it is the “necessary” and “optional” parts of community that are splitting apart, like a giant iceberg cracking in two.

The energy and time we once spent in “optional” community interaction – chatting with the neighbors, attending church services, joining local clubs, going to the movies, volunteering – has forked off and largely gone virtual. It has morphed into a vast network of online “scenes” where people gather to talk, play, create, collaborate, and share their experiences.

These scenes include Minecraft players, anime fans, productivity geeks, Apple fanboys/girls, Twitch streamers, Fortnite players, Beliebers (Justin Beiber groupies), The Office fans…to name just a few out of literally countless niches and clubs.

These groups interact and hang out together in Facebook Groups, Slack channels, Discord servers, Twitter feeds, Clubhouse rooms, virtual worlds like Roblox, and countless other places online. But they transcend any particular channel – they are true communities that persist even as social media platforms come and go.

The “necessary” parts of community that were left behind by this Second Schism now exist only as a severely reduced, basic life support system. This includes the most basic kinds of in-person human interaction we need to survive – the brief “thank you” to your meal delivery driver, the smile and nod to your neighbor from behind a mask, the smile to the local barista as you pick up your curbside order.

COVID hasn’t caused so much as revealed just how threadbare “offline” community has become in the digital age.

Sceneification

This migration of community to online scenes could be called “sceneification”, and it has been happening in some form for decades. Early versions took the form of “fan clubs” around hobbies (sports clubs, chess clubs, computer clubs), books (Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Game of Thrones), movies (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the Marvel Universe), and TV shows (Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead). Before that, we had music scenes around certain singers and bands (Elvis Presley, Queen, Nirvana) that could reach nationwide or even international scale.

But it was the rise of the consumer Internet in the 1990s, and especially the popularization of the social web starting around 2007, that allowed scenes to break free of the limits of local geography and time zones. No longer did interest groups have to find enough members willing to drive to a specific place at a specific time. They could self-organize online and become massive networks with incredible buying power, socializing power, and even political power.

Online scenes now attract most of our discretionary attention and social energy. They stream into our living rooms from unknown locations in cyberspace to every Internet-connected device.

Even when we meet people in person, the conversation cannot help but wander to the latest Netflix show, social media controversy, or trending meme. Virtual events are now as real as anything that happens in the physical world. Increasingly, we have to designate courses and meetings as “offline” or “in-person” because the default is virtual.

While there are still physical spaces like churches, mosques, temples, sports stadiums, concert halls, and comic-book stores, these spaces are no longer the centers of our community and cultural life. They survive as the skeletons of a previous era of our civilization.

It’s tempting to cast judgment on this situation. It feels sad and perhaps wrong when compared to an idealized vision of how communities looked in previous eras. Virtual environments still don’t have anywhere near the fidelity and intimacy of traditional gatherings – the smell of food wafting in from the kitchen, the subtle body language, the overheard snippets of conversation – which can make them feel exhausting, rather than enlivening.

But there is tremendous power in recognizing how the world is changing without judgment. It isn’t necessarily good or bad – it just is. Even if you are determined to change it, it helps to start by acknowledging what is happening.

A century ago, during the First Schism, our great grandparents discovered that it was easier to live and work in a city, where they could access everything and everyone they needed, versus living in a small town in the country. The wrenching, decades-long process of urbanization triggered as many worries and fears about the impending threat to our humanity as the Internet does today.

We are likewise now discovering that it is easier to find and hang out with people who have similar interests, tastes, and goals online than in the physical world. It is no accident that, in the COVID era, many people are reversing the trend of urbanization and moving to larger dwellings far from cities. We can now access everything and everyone we need online.

We are all citizens of the Internet now

We’ve all noticed the decline of our local, in-person communities. But if that’s all you’re seeing, you’re only seeing half the picture.

There is a cultural renaissance thriving online. It rivals anything seen in the first Renaissance hundreds of years ago in its imaginativeness, diversity, and scale. In the 15th century, only a small number of elite artists and musicians, with rich families as patrons, could afford to contribute to the flowering of civilization. Now anyone can fire up a Patreon and crowdfund their own art.

And not only art – vast swaths of what we broadly call “culture” have migrated online. Musicians deprived of concert revenue are making intimate documentaries. Sports events are playing out in empty stadiums and being streamed online. Every hobby or interest has a corresponding subreddit and legions of YouTube channels with endless advice and discussion. And religion now takes place just as much in private Whatsapp prayer threads as in houses of worship.

In the 20th century Marshall McLuhan taught us that “the medium is the message.” Now we are learning that “the medium is the community” as well. Choose where you hang out online, and by extension you’ll be choosing your friends, your influences, your beliefs, and your future.

I’ve seen sceneification powerfully shape my own life in recent years.

Many of my friends I’ve found through my participation in various online scenes, such as productivity geeks, the Quantified Self movement, enthusiasts for “tools for thought,” and the Post-Rationalists. I found my business partner through these networks, as well as my employees and customers. When I need feedback on a blog post, or help on a project, I reach out to these communities where I know people share my values.

A couple years ago when my wife and I moved to Mexico City, a single tweet led to us finding several of our closest friends within a matter of weeks. And any time we visit a new city, I know I can meet up with people from the online scenes I’m a part of.

This virtual scenescape is no longer just for ubernerds and Internet junkies. It’s breaking out into the real world before our very eyes. The New Yorker recently wrote about the Rationalists, putting a spotlight on an online community that has started to exert its influence in the non-virtual world. It’s like the cartoons in Roger Rabbitt are leaping off the page to take their place among us.

We’ve seen it during COVID, as so many people who never spent much time online suddenly have to get all or most of their socializing needs met virtually. We saw it in the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January, when an insurrection planned primarily online turned into an occupation of the U.S. seat of government. And we saw it with the GameStop rally, where a single small community (out of thousands) on the content-sharing site Reddit was able to coordinate their efforts to roil the stock market for two weeks, triggering billions in losses for hedge funds and Congressional hearings.

What has changed in just the last year is that if you don’t know about the virtual scenescape, or don’t know how to navigate it effectively, you’re increasingly going to be left behind. You’re going to have fewer options, fewer ways of understanding how the world works, fewer sources of leverage, and fewer enriching relationships based on something other than physical proximity. You’re going to look at the world and only see civilization crumbling, stripped of its basic humanity.

I increasingly see my work not just as instruction on how to improve your productivity or capitalize on your knowledge. It’s really about showing people what it means to be part of this online renaissance and its virtual communities. Or as my business partner David Perell puts it, how to be a “naturalized citizen of the Internet.”

Because in order to be part of it, you have to get off the sidelines and engage. What helped me really feel part of the Postrationalist community wasn’t reading a blog – it was when I formed relationships. I spent time with people whose ideas resonated with me. I volunteered my time on collaborative projects and contributed my ideas to the collective hivemind.

Amidst all the talk about “becoming an online creator” and “building an audience,” we’ve lost sight of the essential role of community. You don’t have to and shouldn’t go it alone. Who you go on a journey with is just as important as your destination.

I see so many people going online and shouting into the void in the 50,000-person stadium that is the open Internet. They publish their ideas and work on the most public feeds, which are the least valuable and the least generous. You have to find a smaller niche where you can show up as a human being, develop a reputation as a giver and not a taker, and build a critical mass of trust that will encourage people to pay attention to what you’re working on and give you the benefit of the doubt.

Relatively few people will ever successfully build a platform and make their living as an online creator. That path isn’t for everyone. But that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy most of the fruits that online scenes offer. You can find a sense of belonging among a small community of peers you trust and respect, without needing to be famous. And if you do one day decide to build an audience, that community will be the perfect testing ground and stepping stone from which to launch your endeavors.

The basic survival kit

There is a “basic survival kit” you need to navigate the underworld of virtual scenes.

Online communities tend to be fire hoses of information, so you need to know how to manage large volumes of information so that it empowers you instead of overwhelming you. You need to have a certain level of productivity in your work so you have the surplus time and attention needed to explore the virtual world. You need to know how to express your thoughts in formats that are shareable online, such as writing, graphics, and videos. These are the skills I describe in my post on The Digital Productivity Pyramid and teach in my course Building a Second Brain.

But most of all, you need to find some fellow travelers. People with curious minds, open hearts, who are up to interesting things in the world. After all, we don’t want everything we create online to stay online.

That is what really changes your life – when you change your own social environment. We are the sum of the 5 people we spend the most time with. The Internet makes it possible to pick who those people are for the first time.

 

Thank you to Alexandra Zamora, Colin Cox, Kyle Eschenroeder, Russell Michalak, Norman Tran, and Ross Griffin for their feedback and suggestions on this piece.

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The post Welcome to Renaissance 2.0 appeared first on Forte Labs.

Paranoid Productivity

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Inner Limits: Why You’re Not Getting More Out of Journaling

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The Future of Education is Community: The Rise of Cohort-Based Courses

We are in the midst of the fourth wave of online education.

Known as “Cohort-Based Courses,” or CBCs, this is the first truly Internet-native form of learning. It is the first to tap into the essential nature of the Internet: that it is open-ended and interactive.

To truly understand why this is such a big deal, you have to understand the previous waves that brought us to this point.

First Wave: The MOOCs

The modern era of online education kicked off around 2008 with the launch of the first MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).

Pioneered by elite universities like Harvard and MIT through the EdX platform, and Stanford through Udacity, they brought courses already taught offline into an online environment. The main challenge they had to overcome was “How to get content online,” and they solved it by converting traditional course materials into digital form and delivering them over the Internet.

MOOCs launched with great fanfare and breathless press coverage. TIME dubbed 2012 “The Year of the MOOC,” pointing to examples like Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, a MOOC taught by Sebastian Thrun which had over 160,000 students enrolled.

The goal of MOOCs was to reach students who wouldn’t otherwise have access to university-level education. They seemed to offer people around the world the chance to learn on the Web for the first time.

But by 2013, the early hype of MOOCs was already fading. It started to become clear that they weren’t a silver bullet for the challenge of democratized learning. The problem was that the people who tended to successfully complete MOOCs were the same highly educated people who already had a college degree. And even then, completion rates were very low.

A comprehensive study by two MIT researchers found that between 2013 and 2018, completion rates for MOOCs steadily declined, to an average of 3% in 2018. Faced with these findings, the original MOOC pioneers shifted their focus to helping academic institutions move their programs online. In order to democratize education, it would take more than simply making educational content freely available online.

Second Wave: The Marketplaces

The second wave – the Marketplaces – began to take shape around 2010.

It was led by for-profit companies like Udemy and Skillshare, who sought to answer a new question: “How can we make money with online courses?” While large universities had large pools of funding to subsidize free, open-access courses, the industry was limited by a lack of commercialization.

The marketplaces offered a platform where anyone could create any course they wanted. For the first time, an independent instructor (not just professors with PhDs) could create a course and offer it for sale around the world without having to build their own delivery platform.

Because these instructors weren’t usually world-famous experts backed by prestigious universities, they needed exposure. The marketplaces provided exposure by centralizing the courses of thousands of instructors under one roof and driving traffic to them. The marketplace took care of finding students and referring them to the courses they might be interested in, in exchange for a percentage of the sale.

I joined Skillshare in 2013 with my first course, and was amazed to discover just how easy it was to get started. I saw other instructors teaching thousands of students and making hundreds of thousands of dollars teaching what they knew, like software programming, arts and crafts, and digital illustration. It felt like a revolution, opening up the possibility that independent teaching could be a viable profession.

But once again, problems with the marketplace model came to the surface within just a few years. The companies that owned these platforms began to use their control to their advantage, offering deep discounts (sometimes 90% or more) to improve their growth and revenue numbers. Instructors had no control over their own pricing, and could only watch as each new discount brought in less and less committed students for a fraction of the usual price.

The breakout stars of this second wave began to realize that they were giving up far too much: a sizable percentage of their earnings, control over pricing and the student experience, and most importantly of all, the direct relationship with their students. Without the email addresses and payment details of their customers, they were always at the mercy of whatever the marketplaces decided.

The top instructors began leaving the marketplaces, taking their rapidly growing audiences with them. This exodus sparked the third wave: the Toolkits.

Third Wave: The Toolkits

The top instructors from the previous wave had started to make significant amounts of money teaching online. They wanted to build real businesses on their own terms, not on platforms where they had no say. This required them to control their distribution, pricing, and customer relationships.

The Toolkits – led by companies like Thinkific, Kajabi, and Teachable – started to take the lead around 2014 to allow instructors to do just that. These new platforms recognized that the power had shifted to the instructors, who had the original content, the passion for teaching it, and the loyal followers who wanted it. This led them to adopt an “instructor-friendly” approach, treating the course creators as their most important customers, in sharp contrast with the marketplaces, who treated them as mere suppliers.

Instead of standing between instructors and their students, the toolkits shared all email addresses and payment details. Instead of inundating customers with endless cross-promotions, they left the marketing up to each individual instructor. Instead of imposing their own payment systems, they allowed multiple payment options, including monthly payment plans and third-party options like PayPal.

The toolkits allowed course creators to “rent the infrastructure” needed to accept payments, manage student enrollments, host videos and other materials, and communicate with students. Instead of having to hack together a makeshift WordPress site and a buggy plugin, customizing the HTML yourself and troubleshooting as you went along, you could be up and running in hours. As the technology for delivering online courses was increasingly commoditized, the toolkits made it possible to build your own “white-labeled” school, including everything you needed to manage the student experience under one roof (and it was a roof that was completely under the instructor’s control).

This created demand for a new class of user-friendly marketing tools like Leadpages and ConvertKit (affiliate link) to enable these small businesses to capture leads and build their email list. Along with the continued explosion of social media, instructors finally had the tools to directly communicate and sell to their audiences without permission from a gatekeeper.

Some of the biggest names in the emerging movement of “online creators” moved their offerings to their own white-labeled virtual schools. People like Pat Flynn and Amy Porterfield pioneered the path of making a living by building virtual products (such as courses, ebooks, podcasts, subscriptions, events, and content) and selling them directly to their own audience. Teaching online courses became not just a narrow career track, but part of a whole portfolio of digital products and services that an online personality might offer their audience.

I joined Teachable in 2015, moving my previous courses to my own school, Forte Academy. There were so many new skills to learn and tools to master – sales copywriting, basic webpage design, how to use email marketing software, among many others. But having access to user-friendly, off-the-shelf tools had finally made it possible for me to control my professional destiny.

The limitations of the toolkit model eventually started to reveal themselves around 2017. As empowering as this third wave was, it demanded too much of instructors. Not just familiarity with multiple kinds of technology, but the marketing skills to attract a continuous stream of customers. Burdened by so many responsibilities, instructors had barely any attention left over for the basic quality of the student experience. The completion rates of these “self-paced courses” weren’t much better than the MOOCs that preceded them.

Primed by hype-driven marketing promising transformational results, customers enthusiastically bought tons of courses, only to get busy and watch them collect digital dust. It became clear that self-paced courses demanded too much of the learner: too much time, too much energy, and too much dedication. Relatively few people could muster the self-discipline to make their way through numerous modules of videos, reading, exercises, and quizzes all by themselves.

The failed promises of self-paced courses soured people to the whole idea and gave the industry a scammy reputation.

In response to this, online learning evolved once again. The first three waves had solved the instructors’ problems: how to get content online, how to make money, and how to own an audience. Now the pendulum finally shifted to the students’ problem: how to reliably achieve the results they were promised.

Fourth Wave: The Cohorts

The fourth wave has taken on the name “Cohort-Based Courses,” referring to a group of learners who join an online course together and then move through it at the same pace. The instructor provides structure and guidance, but much of the learning happens peer-to-peer, as students share what they’re discovering in real time and encourage each other to keep going.

Some cohort-based programs (such as Marie Forleo’s B School) embraced the “flipped classroom” model, where pre-recorded content is consumed on students’ own time, and the live classroom is reserved for things that can only happen in real time, like coaching, interacting, asking questions, and sharing breakthroughs. Others (like Seth Godin’s AltMBA) did away with pre-recorded content altogether, opting to focus completely on project-based work executed over a series of short sprints.

I created my own CBC in late 2016, though I wouldn’t have known to call it that until much later. It was called Building a Second Brain (BASB), and taught people how to capitalize on the full potential of their knowledge and expertise, through the practical medium of notetaking.

I designed my course from the bottom up to solve each of the challenges I’d seen students encounter in earlier waves of online learning. I wanted to be able to interact with my students as a coach and a mentor and hold them accountable to the highest version of themselves, so I delivered it live via the emerging Zoom platform. I wanted to work with smart, ambitious professionals doing important work in the world, so I charged a premium price that demanded real commitment. And I wanted a lot of the value of the program to arise bottom-up, out of interactions between students, so I used breakout rooms and a discussion forum for all classwork and exercises.

It’s now been 4 years since that first tiny cohort of 30 people, and over 3,000 people from around the world have completed my course. The outcomes and results they’ve produced have far surpassed anything I ever expected or hoped from an online program. Sign up below if you’d like to learn more about the next cohort.

In some ways, cohorts aren’t new at all. This is how we learned from grade school to grad school – alongside our peers, with real-time interaction, under the guidance of a teacher. We learned in cohorts because everyone happened to be in the same room at the same time anyway. But this educational format wasn’t easy to deliver online until recently. The popularization of Zoom, riding on the back of ever-expanding high-speed Internet access, made large group video-conferencing frictionless and reliable for the first time.

Cohorts can now come together from dozens of countries, meet any time of the day or night, focus on niche topics that relatively few people are interested in, and adapt the curriculum on the fly. Everything is virtual and digital, which means it is malleable. Since it all has to be recreated anyway, you might as well make changes while you’re at it. This results in a rate of improvement for CBCs that looks more like updates to a software program than a university class.

Instead of teaching the same tired curriculum for decades, a CBC can turn on a dime and incorporate the very latest advancements in the field it is teaching. Instead of paying $100,000 for a degree that doesn’t even qualify you for an entry-level job, you can pay $1,000 for training that was updated yesterday. As more and more industries are rocked by advancing technology, the adaptability of education is becoming ever more important.

What sets cohort-based courses apart

There are 4 elements that distinguish cohort-based online courses from earlier waves:

CommunityAccountabilityInteractionImpact

Let’s examine each of them.

Community

If you look at how human beings learn, it almost always happens in community. An apprentice watches the master demonstrate the subtlety of their craft. A group discussion explores a question from many different perspectives. The players on a basketball team push each others’ limits to new levels of performance. Even with solitary skills like writing, coming together in writing groups to give each other feedback is a critical part of improvement.

Online forums have been a part of courses since the very first MOOCs, but it would be a stretch to call most of them “communities.” The forum was often just a customer support channel or a list of resources, and many of them were noted for being ghost towns where almost no one participated. Without being able to see each other, hear each other, and share the same experience, fellow students weren’t much more than anonymous icons on a website.

The intensive environment of a cohort is like a pressure cooker for friendships – they can happen in a fraction of the usual time. And not just friendships, but all kinds of relationships: students find mentors, collaborators, thought partners, coaches, advisors, and even clients, employers, or romantic partners. With people showing up live on video under their real names, these relationships can transcend the boundaries of the course and extend out into the “real” world.

Community is an amorphous thing. It can’t be fully planned or predicted. It often takes the form of inside jokes, nicknames, origin stories, and unspoken values. But we can intentionally create the conditions for community to emerge. We can appreciate and elevate those moments and eventually, a true community will emerge.

Accountability

Cohort-based learning reinvents in a virtual environment the many layers of social accountability and support found in traditional schools: guidance counselors, study groups, teaching assistants, face-to-face class meetings, student portfolios, and final projects.

These forms of accountability support students through the hardest parts of learning, and simultaneously create a culture of high expectations for everyone involved. They are crucial in helping students from a wide variety of backgrounds to successfully complete the program they signed up for. This balance of encouragement and challenge leads to dramatically higher completion rates than we’ve come to expect in online education. Industry-wide numbers are hard to come by, but anecdotally it’s not unusual for the top CBCs to have completion rates of 70-90%, and our most recent cohort had a Net Promoter Score that rivaled the most popular brands in the world.

True accountability comes from being in relationship. It is the relationships we value which prompt us to show up for our soccer team, come prepared to the meeting, or make it to our friend’s birthday party after work. Those relationships can only be formed through direct, meaningful interaction with people we respect. And they tend to happen most naturally under challenging circumstances, with everyone rallying behind a shared goal.

Cohorts naturally provide a strong form of accountability by virtue of being ephemeral. The video calls may be recorded, but they don’t capture the essence of the live experience. This creates a kind of helpful scarcity, where students have to show up while it’s happening or else it’s gone. This also happens to make CBCs strongly resistant to online piracy. Someone can upload your course materials to a torrent site, but the magic of the experience isn’t contained in them. And it very quickly goes out of date anyway.

Interaction

The live interaction that is only possible via video calls brings many more aspects of our humanity into the learning experience: vulnerable sharing, amusement and surprise, irreverence and wit, laughing and crying, victory and disappointment. These things cannot be conveyed through pre-produced content or a chat-based forum. They emerge spontaneously in an environment where we feel the safety necessary to look into our soul, admit hard truths to ourselves, and step out of our comfort zone.

Live group video creates an environment where many different kinds of interaction can overlap and intersect. Instructors can broadcast one-to-many lectures to present key concepts. Breakout rooms allow students to split off and focus on particular problems or subtopics. Individual students can be brought “on stage” to receive feedback and coaching from the instructors or teaching assistants. Special guests that would never be able to show up in person can call in and share their expertise. And the chat is a lively backchannel full of interesting links, recommended resources, follow-up questions, and affirmation. 

The learning experience that is emerging resembles a video game or a virtual world as much as it does a university classroom. Polls, interactive whiteboards, and emoji reactions enable many-to-many communication that can keep hundreds (or even thousands) of people engaged at once. Students find each other on Twitter, Clubhouse, Slack, and Discord, forming a network that transcends any particular platform. The technology that has for so long been front and center in the delivery of online courses is finally starting to fade into the background. Which is allowing the excitement, the joy, and the fun of learning to shine through more strongly than ever.

Impact

There are certain kinds of content that are more easily consumed on our own, such as background reading and how-to instructions. But that content isn’t where the greatest value of education lies. You can always look it up on demand with a Google search.

The true value of education lies in its ability to transform people. It is transformational learning that cohort-based courses are ideally suited for. Learning that shifts people’s identities so much in such a short period of time that they barely recognize themselves on the other side of it.

This level of transformation only happens deep inside communities of practice, where we can feel the safety (and also the sting) of personal accountability. We need the visceral experience of pushing and striving against all odds to overcome a difficult challenge together.

Whether they know it or not, online learners are looking for a rite of passage. This is the opposite of the frictionless convenience we’ve come to expect online. As we all spend ever more of our time on the Internet, there is a tremendous hunger for deeper, more meaningful experiences that stay with us far longer than the latest Instagram story.

The business of education

The structure and accountability of cohort-based courses allows them to do something that was never possible before: demonstrate consistently strong student outcomes. This opens up a world of possibilities: from offering skills that can be used to land well-paying jobs (like coding bootcamps), to offering ISAs (Income Share Agreements) that allow students to pay for the course only after they find paid work (a model popularized by Lambda School).

As quality standards shoot up, the ceiling of how much online educators can charge is also rising. This in turn gives them the resources to invest in the experience: to hire designers to create recognizable brands, train coaches to give targeted feedback, work with technical experts to customize the web interface, and incentivize marketers to reach new audiences.

Course creators can now afford to organize virtual or even in-person events, such as regional chapters for students to get to know each other in person. They can hire a teaching staff, so that the course goes beyond their personal brand and idiosyncrasies. This virtuous cycle of investment is transforming online courses from casual hobbies into real businesses that can promise and deliver on a tangible outcome again and again.

It’s important to realize that each new wave in the history of online education doesn’t extinguish the previous one. It builds on it. EdX (in the first wave) now counts 33 million students taking more than 3,000 courses. Udemy (second wave) generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year. Teachable (third wave) was just acquired by Hotmart for a rumored quarter billion dollars. In some cases, courses created in earlier waves have reinvented themselves and become part of later waves. For example, Professor David Malan’s computer science course at Harvard, CS50, which has taken on many aspects of live classes delivered via Zoom.

Each new wave adds a new layer of possibility and value to the previous ones. In the same way that the Web is built on layers of hardware, firmware, software, and websites, each wave of online education uses the capabilities developed in previous eras and bundles them into a new experience. Each additional layer expands the scope of things we can do, the people we can reach, and the outcomes we can deliver.

But it is very clear that the frontier of innovation has moved, and the model of sitting in front of a computer watching videos by yourself is no longer the best we can do. Pre-recorded, self-paced content will always have a role to play, but for the transformational education that people are seeking to cope with a quickly changing world, cohort-based courses will be essential.

A new era of democratized learning

The earliest MOOCs promised to make a world-class education available to anyone who wanted it, in any corner of the world.

It’s taken longer than expected, but I believe we are finally on the cusp of being able to deliver on that promise. Some have criticized the expense and exclusivity of cohort-based courses. They’ve been called elitist and overpriced. But I think this new kind of education will make online learning far more open, accessible, and democratic than ever before.

How is that?

First, because it costs money to teach, and it is only when teachers can make a decent living that we will attract the best ones for the long term. When teachers have financial security, they can offer discounts and scholarships to the most deserving students. Without a physical classroom, no one has to spend any money on travel, lodging, or facilities.

Second, because CBCs are unbundling the best parts of the university experience while maintaining (or even improving) their quality. You no longer need a PhD to teach, nor high test scores to gain admission as a student. Instead of expanding traditional universities, with all the bureaucracy, formality, and overhead costs that weigh them down, we can recreate the magic of education in a virtual environment where everyone can pick and choose the parts they’re most interested in.

But most of all, cohort-based courses will democratize online education because they provide the structure and accountability that people need to succeed in their learning. The most underprivileged students are also the ones most in need of that support, and the live interaction that cohorts offer is a far more personalized, responsive, and humane way of providing it.

We’ve spent over two decades figuring out the logistics of how to reliably deliver online courses that change people’s lives. We finally have a business model that is profitable and sustainable, and an audience that is hungry for transformational education.

Now it’s time to bring together everything we’ve learned and all the tools we’ve created to focus all our attention on one question: How do we reliably produce a transformational positive impact on our students?

Thank you to Billy Broas, Dr. Monica Rysavy, Will Mannon, Nasos Papadopoulos, Aditi Parekh, Armchair Traveller, Roshan Mishra, Bhavani Ravi, Chance McAllister, Parth Goyanka, Spencer Kier, Adia Sowho, and Todd Beane for their feedback and suggestions on this piece.

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The post The Future of Education is Community: The Rise of Cohort-Based Courses appeared first on Forte Labs.

Superhumans at Work Podcast: Tap Into the Power of Your Second Brain

I was recently interviewed on the Superhumans at Work podcast, which is produced by the team at Mindvalley, one of the largest online education platforms in the world with over 300 employees.

I spoke with host Jason Marc Campbell and a few hundred live attendees on how to Tap Into The Power Of Your Second Brain, drawing on lessons from my online course Building a Second Brain including:

The mind-blowing idea of a second brainThe proven C.O.D.E productivity frameworkThe best way to organize your notesThe big debate: paper notes vs digital notesHow to make technology work for you

Visit the episode webpage below for the recording and show notes:

Listen to the episode

Or you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Stitcher.

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The post Superhumans at Work Podcast: Tap Into the Power of Your Second Brain appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Forte Labs Customer Journey: Behind the Scenes of a Full-Stack Education Business

In 2017 I published an article about my quest to be a “full-stack freelancer.”

Instead of having only one highly specialized skill to offer – such as copywriting, coding, graphic design, or photography – I wanted to build a portfolio of income streams. In order to do that, I knew that I needed to invest my time in creating products that could stand on their own and serve people without me needing to be there all the time.

By the time I was able to make a living as a full-stack freelancer in 2018, I was already starting to experience the downside: feeling isolated and alone working on my own so much of the time. I also saw that while I could make a fine living for myself, the scale and impact of each individual thing I was doing was limited as long as my time and attention were split in so many directions.

In 2019 I made my first move to expand from a solo freelancer career to a full-fledged education business. I partnered with David Perell to create Write of Passage, an online course on how to get started writing online. It was meant to be a one-time collaboration, but since then it’s grown into a long-term partnership. We each hired a full-time assistant to free up our time for creative work. We jointly hired our first Course Manager, who would focus exclusively on delivering our two courses. And recently we hired a Director of Course Operations to help us continue streamlining and scaling them.

I now think of what we are building as a “Full-Stack Education Company.” Instead of delivering education through a single channel, such as in-person classes or books, we provide a full spectrum of educational content and experiences that mirror and reinforce each other. We educate our customers at every stage of our “funnel,” not just the few who make it to the bottom.

As an education business, we can’t and don’t want to do marketing like other kinds of businesses. We want to do what we do best – provide value, educate, and facilitate mindset shifts for people even before they step foot in our courses. Our marketing has itself become a form of education, providing people value at every step of their journey with us.

Our goal isn’t to maximize revenue for any single channel, or even revenue in general. Our goal is to give people as many options as possible, meet them where they are, and guide them to the fastest, most efficient solution to their problem. They are free to choose the à la carte menu and select just the exact content they want, or they can opt for the all-you-can-eat buffet and work with us directly via one of our live cohorts.

In this article I want to lay out the typical customer journey for followers and customers of Forte Labs – a map of how people progress from first encountering my ideas to adopting them in their own lives. I’ll share how I think about each step of this journey from the perspective of a modern education business.

Step One: Social media, podcasts, YouTube

Most people find me through short-form content, primarily social media, podcasts, and YouTube. 

I maintain official accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, where I cross-post any new content I’ve made, new product launches and announcements, and other interesting observations or resources. I’m by far most active on Twitter, where I mix personal observations with business announcements in equal measure. Twitter allows me to reach a large number of people with bite-sized ideas in a way that requires little effort on my part. Over the last month, for example, my 355 tweets received 2.87 million impressions, which generated 68,700 profile visits and 816 new followers.

The main content I post on social networks has always been links to my blog posts. Once people land on those blog posts, they find email subscription forms to start receiving my weekly email newsletter. These are the people who are determined to take action on their problems, whether through their own effort or hiring me to help them.

Podcasts serve a similar function: they are excellent at helping new people find me, but I always try to direct people back to my website if they want to hear more from me. This is true of both other people’s podcasts (I’ve been on over 30 of them), and my own (which has received almost 100,000 downloads in its first year). The power of podcasts is that they give me exposure to a completely new audience with relatively little effort. It really only takes an hour of my time and the host takes care of everything else.

I’ve used YouTube in a similar way as social media, but I think over the long term that will change. YouTube is an absolute juggernaut of a platform, at least an order of magnitude bigger and wider than any other. The audiences that YouTubers are building are just astounding because the algorithm makes discovery seamless and scalable. In 2020, my YouTube channel drew 403,568 new views, for 50,311 hours of total watch time in 2020. This is already 60% more consumption time than my blog, which drew about 31,000 hours of reading time.

Videos are complex and expensive to produce, requiring a lot of planning, design, and post-production. So far I’ve posted mostly a small number of walkthrough videos and Zoom interviews that I was already recording anyway. But at some point I’m going to invest in a workflow and team that allows me to regularly produce high-quality videos designed specifically for YouTube. That will be an important part of expanding the Building a Second Brain audience into the mainstream.

My attitude toward social media is that it is an excellent source of new followers, but not a good place to build an audience. Because at any moment my access to those followers can be revoked, for any reason or no reason. At every opportunity, I refer my social media followers to my website and newsletter, which I know I will always control. 

Step Two: Blog and Books

After first encountering me through short-form content on social media, many people eventually end up on my Praxis blog. My social feeds are where a visitor catches a glimpse of my personality and random thoughts. The blog is where they get to see the inner workings of my mind.

Writing is the most natural form of creative expression for me, which is why I’ve done it since I was a teenager. My current blog started in 2014 as I began to build an audience, and remains my primary way of drawing in subscribers, developing and testing ideas, building trust, and refining the thinking that goes into my courses.

The type of content that readers encounter on my blog is mostly “evergreen long-form insight.” I prefer to spend as much time as possible developing content that is “evergreen,” meaning it will be as valuable and interesting in 5-10 years as it is right now. And much of my writing is “long-form,” meaning it is in-depth and substantial. It demands significant investment from my readers, but also rewards them with deeper understanding.

My blog received about 528,000 unique visitors over the last 12 months, growing slowly but steadily. They come not only from my own social media accounts, but content of mine shared by others through social media or newsletters, mentions in online publications or traditional media, search engine results, and word of mouth. I don’t do SEO (search engine optimization) of any kind, but at some point I plan on investing in it to broaden and expand the audience for my writing.

About every year or so I publish an ebook compilation of my best blog posts of the year on Amazon Kindle, now going on 4 volumes since 2017. Going through the process of compiling, editing, and updating a full year of my writing forces me to reflect on my intellectual journey, and helps me package and compress my ideas for the benefit of readers that may never have heard of me previously. Having my writing on the largest publishing platform in the world also opens up new ways for people to discover me: by seeing my books recommended to readers of similar books, or receiving a gifted ebook from a friend.

These ebooks are purchased by people who want to dive straight into the deep end of my ideas and take it all in at once. You wouldn’t think anyone would want to buy the same content already available on a blog as an ebook, but it turns out the format of reading is almost as important as the content: it’s much easier to read in a dedicated reading environment than on an infinitely scrolling webpage. You can buy essentially my entire body of written work for about $40, which is the cost of my 4-part Praxis series. Such distribution has never before been possible for writers.

Over the last 4 years, I’ve sold 1,622 ebooks, for a sales total of $17,245. Combined with 6,937 free downloads (I usually offer each new book for free for a week when it’s first published), this comes out to more than 8,000 people who have downloaded my books. Not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but considering that these readers often become my most committed, loyal customers, I consider ebooks an important part of the customer journey. 

It’s also gratifying to see that many book purchasers are located in India (my largest market, with even more sales than the U.S.), Brazil, and Mexico, and likely wouldn’t be able to afford my premium course.

Step Three: Newsletter

If someone reads my writing and likes it enough, they’ll subscribe to the Forte Labs Newsletter. This is an invitation for me to send more valuable content directly to them every week.

If my blog is the beating heart of my business, then the newsletter is the circulatory system. Very few of the people who stumble upon my blog would come back again if I didn’t proactively notify them about new things I’ve published.

The key breakthrough that I’ve had around email newsletters in the past couple years is understanding the power of consistency. I continue to be astonished just how effective it is to show up, at the same time and place, every week, month in and month out. I guess it’s true what they say, that 90% of success is just showing up. 

I’ve been collecting email addresses since 2015, but up until 2018 had only grown to about 5,000 subscribers. I would only send things to that list very infrequently, usually when I had something to announce. Which meant the list was “cold” – most subscribers didn’t remember who I was or why they had signed up. And when they did hear from me, it was when I had something to sell! Not a good look.

The turning point came in August 2018, when I really committed to making the newsletter a regular thing under the influence of my now business partner David Perell, who was passionately committed to his own. David and I both switched to ConvertKit (affiliate link), which is far easier to use than what we were using before (Mailchimp and Substack), while also being more intuitive and flexible, and specially designed to serve online creators.

I started sending an update 1-2 times a month with my thoughts on whatever I was thinking about, working on, learning, or interested in. Sometimes that included new content I was sharing, but often I’d have to write something the day of to be able to stick to my schedule. Now it’s extremely precise: it goes out every Tuesday at 6am PT, come hell or high water. I have a pipeline of around 5-8 pieces of content in development at any given time, so I never wake up on Tuesday morning with nothing to share. There’s nothing more important in my business than reliably delivering exceptional value through my newsletter.

Although the delivery schedule is precise, the contents of those newsletter issues are very fluid. I share my personal thoughts, updates on my projects, questions and topics I’m wondering about, and any mistakes or milestones I’ve experienced. The people who take the time to read my newsletter are very committed, and I try to share as much of my journey as possible.

From a subscriber base of 5,000 when I switched to ConvertKit in August 2018, I now count over 41,000 subscribers, growing at a rate of about 2,500 per month. These numbers are still kind of astonishing to me. The average newspaper in the U.S. has 26,000 subscribers, which means I have the attention of almost two newspapers’ worth of people every week. I don’t know of any other way a single creator can meaningfully communicate with so many people with so little effort.

Considering that my “average revenue per subscriber” is about $25 through online courses alone, this also represents a fantastic business. 2,500 new subscribers per month equals about $62,000 worth of potential revenue being created each month just through my newsletter alone. And that potential revenue is cumulative, since many people stick around and become repeat customers.

Step Four: Community

At this stage, people have had substantial experience with my ideas, and often want to start getting to know other people on the same wavelength. There’s a few different ways for them to do that.

The first is the Building a Second Brain Facebook group, which currently has about 6,000 members. The group is fairly active, and I’m very gratified to see that almost every post has numerous helpful replies. Facebook actively refers people to join the group, and I think many of them are people who wouldn’t otherwise come across my work.

The second community forum is our Slack, with about 4,000 members. If the Facebook group is the public square, then Slack is a series of semi-private discussion groups. Dozens of user-created channels focus on Notion, or my PARA method, or on personal growth, or other specific niches. It is very useful to have a community platform where anyone can join and create an ongoing discussion on any topic they choose without requiring any involvement on our end. 

And finally, we have a monthly subscription for members-only content on Praxis. For $10 per month or $100 per year, Praxsters (as I call them) get access to exclusive content and special events, such as Q&As with me. There are currently about 2,000 active Praxis members.

Step Five: Online Courses

I’m most known for my online course Building a Second Brain (BASB), in which I teach people how to create a system of knowledge management to save their best ideas and insights in a trusted system outside their head. 

I’ve been teaching it since early 2017, when I launched my first “cohort” of 30 students. Instead of pre-recording all the videos and leaving students to consume them on their own, I decided from the very beginning to take a completely different approach: to deliver it live, in real time, via Zoom. That way I could interact with my students, give them feedback on their work, and hold them accountable to showing up and following through.

Little did I know that this new learning format was the start of a whole new wave in online education, which is now known as “Cohort-Based Courses.” It turns out, a lot of people have become disillusioned with “self-paced” courses, which have dismal completion rates. They don’t provide any of the accountability or interaction that is so important for learning. Cohort-based courses fill in the pieces that the previous generation of courses was missing.

The most recent eleventh cohort of BASB took place in September 2020 and had over 1,000 participants from over 70 countries. We have a team of almost 50 people total involved in launching and delivering the program, including Forte Labs employees and outside contractors, returning students who we hire and train as “Alumni Mentors,” and promotional partners who help us get the word out. It’s been an extraordinary run that’s already gone far beyond anything I ever imagined, and I think we are just at the beginning.

The Building a Second Brain course is our flagship offering and the deepest level of engagement. It is for those willing and able to work directly with me not just on learning some interesting new things, but developing a powerful tool and a practice of personal knowledge management. It’s a serious investment of money and time, but that high barrier to entry ensures we have only the most serious, motivated students in each group. That in turn accelerates how fast we can move, raises the bar of excellence for both us and them, and amplifies the peer learning that is just as powerful as anything I can provide.

The course might be the ultimate step, but it’s not the last one. Many graduates come out of it with life-changing results and a completely new relationship to the information in their lives. Many of them spread the word to their friends and colleagues, share about their experience online, and even come back as Alumni Mentors to support others through the course. They attract the next wave of new followers, who begin their own journey through the world we’ve created. 

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Bacon-Wrapped Business: Buying and Selling Online Courses

In this interview, I spoke with Brad Costanzo, the host of the Bacon-Wrapped Business podcast. 

This was a two-way interview. We spent the first 35 minutes talking about Building a Second Brain, the methodology I teach for personal knowledge management. I summarized some of the main ideas and shared some good ways of getting started with it.

In the second half of the interview, starting at minute 36, we turned the tables and I interviewed Brad on his experience buying and selling online courses. Brad has been on all sides of the acquisition process: creating his own course and selling it, acquiring a course from someone else, and in turn selling that course to someone else. We discuss:

How to buy and sell educational productsWhat makes an online education company valuable and sellableOut-of-the-box ways to do creative deals and monetize your knowledgeWatch the interview below or visit the website for links to your favorite podcast player.

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