Tiago Forte's Blog, page 21

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 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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The post The Forte Labs Customer Journey: Behind the Scenes of a Full-Stack Education Business appeared first on Forte Labs.

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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My Goals for 2021

Drawing from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of my 2020 year-end review, here are my business and personal goals for 2021.

Business GoalsGrow my email newsletter list to 100k

This is an ambitious, but achievable goal based on the results I’ve seen from email-based marketing over the past 18 months. As I’ve written and talked about extensively, email is simply the name of the game when it comes to selling information products. All roads (should) lead to email, because it is the only channel I can control, take with me, and use without paying a gatekeeper.

In 2020 I averaged 86 new subscribers per day, taking into account unsubscribes, and to reach this goal in 2021 I’ll need to approximately double this to an average of 164 per day. That will be a formidable challenge, but I have a list of potential improvements and experiments that I think will give me a shot.

Maintain our focus on our two flagship courses

As much as I love creating new things, I’ve seen time and again over the last couple years how incredibly difficult it is to bootstrap a new course to profitability, and I honestly don’t want to do it again anytime soon. This was one of my motivations behind partnering with Billy Broas on the Keystone Accelerator – it gives us a way to repeatedly choose the most promising course creators and take them to the next level, while keeping the responsibility for their success firmly on their shoulders. We’ll be able to “pick the winners” and either partner with them as affiliates, or ask them to become affiliates for us, or maybe even invest in them.

Our two flagship courses, Building a Second Brain (BASB) and Write of Passage, have found course-market fit and are already successful. But they are also still in their infancy, and will require an enormous amount of attention in the coming years to fulfill their potential. Which is why this year I’m publicly committing to not creating any new programs, no matter how enticing.

Run a live cohort with 2,000 students at once

I’m really excited by the potential for cohort-based courses to scale in size, while retaining the intimacy and community of smaller groups. To me this is the best way to make education more accessible for more people. Instead of just making courses cheaper, which starves creators of a decent living and the funds to further invest in their business, we should seek to make online learning as effective and impactful as possible. If we can make the return-on-investment high enough, then premium prices will be easier to justify, making freelance teaching a sustainable career path that attracts the best teachers.

To do this, we’re going to have to reinvent many of the ways that traditional universities have scaled learning in the physical world. We’ll need teaching assistants who can cater to the individual needs of students, labs that take the theories and apply them experimentally, self-organized study groups where students take the initiative, electives and seminars that students can mix and match into their own majors and minors, etc. The key is that the quality of the student experience has to get better, not worse, as we scale. Just as Harvard is better with 30,000 students then it would be with 1,000, there are ways of using size to our advantage to give everyone more options, more flexibility, and more resources.

We have a backlog of ideas for how to do this that’s miles long, but until recently I couldn’t pursue most of it. Up until just a year ago I was running all aspects of the BASB course by myself, from teaching to customer service to technical troubleshooting. Early this year Will Mannon, our first full-time Course Director, joined the team, and we are now in the process of onboarding our first full-time Director of Course Operations. With each new hire we’re specializing toward what each of us does best, allowing us to pursue more and more interesting avenues for improvement.

Make operational excellence and customer service central pillars of our business

Until now the primary values of our business have been innovation and craftsmanship. We were pioneering a new field and had to move as quickly and decisively as possible. But now that the business is established and growing, I can sense it’s time for a new chapter – to evolve our priorities toward operational excellence and customer service.

These might seem like very distinct areas, but I see them as closely related. For a small, bootstrapped business of half a dozen people, we can’t afford to throw massive human effort at customer service problems. There’s no customer support team or phonebank ready to walk people through tech issues. To have the impact we want, we have to rely on frictionless operations to prevent trouble before it arises, to help customers solve their own problems, and to use content and education to make customer support a value-add instead of a backup plan.

I really admire companies who are world-class in these areas, and am exploring new ways of doing things that would allow us to develop a great reputation for customer service. For example, adopting a support ticketing system called Helpscout, relying more on FAQs and knowledge bases, and using our marketing communications to help get people started on the right foot.

Launch 100 cohort-based courses through the Keystone Course Accelerator

We are nearing the end of the first cohort of our new Keystone Accelerator. It’s been a fantastic experience working alongside the course instructor Billy Broas to teach 30 course creators how to build a reliable, ethical sales funnel for their education businesses.

Cohort-based courses (called CBCs) are a relatively new way to teach online courses, in which an instructor leads a group through a curriculum and provides live feedback and support on their progress. It solves a lot of the drawbacks of “self-paced” courses which are often difficult for people to complete on their own. I believe it represents the first generation of online learning that is truly made for the Internet. It is going to completely revolutionize the kinds of results that people are able to achieve.

To that end, I’m setting a goal to help launch 100 new online education businesses into the world over the next year, using the cohort model we’ve pioneered and the Keystone Funnel that Billy Broas has developed from his more than 10 years of experience in the industry. Sign up here if you’d like to hear more about future cohorts of the accelerator.

Redesign BASB brand identity and apply it to new website

Until now I’ve managed the BASB branding myself. I’m pretty good at quickly whipping up a logo, banner, social media image, or slide, but there are limits to this “bottom-up” approach to branding.

In July I’ll begin working with an experienced designer on a completely revamped brand identity for BASB. After 4 years, I have a tremendous amount of data and anecdotes on everything that such an endeavor requires: who we’re serving, what their needs are, how we’re different from alternatives, what we believe in, what we’re not. I’m very excited to pour all this knowledge into a more holistic, more integrated, more strategic brand.

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

Hire Head of Content

In just the last couple months it’s become very clear to me that I need someone to help me manage my content. Somehow, a little blog that I started on Medium in 2014 with a post on meditation has grown into a full-fledged media company: a website that receives a million visitors a year, a newsletter that goes out to more than 40,000 subscribers every week, a Twitter following in the tens of thousands, a YouTube channel with 15,000 subscribers, and community groups on Facebook and Slack with almost 10,000 members. It’s almost impossible for me to wrap my head around.

The most amazing thing about all this is that there isn’t anyone dedicated full time to managing it all. I produce most of the content of course, but do only the most minimal promotion: usually just a single mention in my weekly newsletter plus a one-time share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Slack. My assistant Betheny helps me with some of the workflow, such as turning Google Docs drafts into WordPress posts, and I have an editor that occasionally reviews those drafts. But besides that, our online properties go largely unmanaged. We’ve not even begun to touch low-hanging fruit like following an editorial calendar, using consistent colors and branding, SEO optimization, reposting and repurposing older content, paid ads, etc.

I was really inspired by episode 215 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast from Pat Flynn, in which he interviewed his Managing Editor Janna Maron. I had never considered that successful blogs would have something like a Managing Editor, but hearing her describe what she does I could instantly see how valuable it is. She brought rigor and predictability to his content creation efforts. This included creating an editorial calendar with a monthly theme so the various channels complemented each other, scheduling posts far in advance and improving the cross-promotion around them, managing the workflow of taking a new idea all the way to a published piece of content so Pat could focus on creating, and pushing the whole team to meet deadlines, among other strategic efforts. Janna’s wisdom and experience in the publishing industry were apparent in her calm, confident approach to online publishing.

In a few months I’ll start looking for someone who has experience scaling an online media brand. It will be an extremely wide-ranging role, covering all the different kinds of content we’re creating and both operational and creative aspects. But after years of slow, organic growth based on my individual efforts and word of mouth, I believe we have all the major pieces to create a truly global, transformational media platform for teaching people how to work smarter in the 21st century.

GROW YOUTUBE FOLLOWING TO 50K

2020 was the year I discovered YouTube as a business asset. I’d been casually posting videos for years, but this year I hit some sort of critical mass and started rapidly gaining subscribers, from about 3,000 at the start of the year to 15,000 now. According to a year-end report from YouTube, my 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. Despite the fact that I invested far, far more time and attention into the blog over a far longer period. The potential of YouTube for audience growth and attention is simply unparalleled in modern times.

We also saw the power of YouTube when we launched our first ever affiliate partner program, in which we worked with other online creators to promote the launch of BASB 11. A couple YouTubers had especially mind-blowing results, which made me realize that the YouTube audience is one of our most promising channels. They are already comfortable consuming content online, are curious and self-motivated, but often want something more structured and coherent than YouTube videos. As David recently put it, “The YouTube generation now has money.” And they are using it to invest in themselves.

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

I think this is actually a pretty conservative goal given what I’ve heard from successful YouTubers: that gaining the first 1,000 subscribers is the hardest part, followed by the first 10,000. I’m already past the most difficult hump and, given what I’ve seen the YouTube algorithm is capable of, going from 15,000 to 50,000 should be mostly a matter of posting videos regularly. What I’m certain of after the events of this year is that YouTube is an absolute monster of a platform, probably as big as all the others combined. Anyone serious about online content in 2021 would be foolish not to make it part of their strategy considering how easy video-making has become.

Launch second group of Praxis fellows

We are in the midst of working with the first group of Praxis Fellows, and are learning a lot about how the process works. I’m discovering that I know a lot more about how to publish effective how-to productivity writing than I realized, mostly because so much of it is implicit in the way I think.

In 2021 I’ll roll everything we’ve learned into a second group of Fellows, with the same goal: to provide a platform for the most interesting up-and-coming voices in the productivity space. I know the next generation of thought leaders are out there, and I want to be a part of accelerating their journey.

Establish Growth Board for Forte Labs

This is an idea I’ve been thinking about for some time. I first encountered it in Eric Ries’ book The Startup Way, the lesser known sequel to his best-selling book The Lean Startup. In the book Ries describes a new structure he’s developed, called a Growth Board, that does for “intrapreneurs” within organizations what a Board of Directors would typically do for a startup. Made up of senior executives, outside advisors, subject matter experts, and internal advocates, it advises teams inventing new things on how to push forward their product, holds them accountable to improving their metrics, and makes the decision to give them further funding if they show signs of product-market fit.

Although Ries developed this model to promote innovation inside large companies such as General Electric and Dropbox, I think it could apply equally well to bootstrapped online businesses. A Growth Board is essentially a group of advisors who make up a semi-formal advisory board that meets regularly, and is charged with the responsibility of holding the company’s leadership accountable to their values, priorities, and goals.

One of the downsides of running a bootstrapped business is that it’s very difficult to get good advice. We don’t have investors, which many would consider a huge blessing, but that also means we lose out on the guidance that the best investors give their portfolio companies. There’s not a lot of incentive to share knowledge between course creators, who are also potential competitors. As a small, bootstrapped business, we are seeking sustainable growth, which means most of the advice for tech startups on how to achieve “hypergrowth” doesn’t really apply to us.

My business partner David and I have our own external mentors and advisors, but since we pursue those relationships independently it’s difficult for them to get a good picture of what’s going on with our business. I’ve noticed that I can easily neglect to mention a part of the business that I know is struggling, and no one would ever know. There’s no opportunity for advisors to triangulate potential problems and opportunities from the outside, and to compare and cross-reference their perspectives.

In 2021 I’d like to form a Growth Board for Forte Labs, made up of perhaps 3-5 highly trusted advisors. We’ll meet regularly, openly share our goals and priorities, and ask them to hold us accountable to what we’ve said is important.

Personal GoalsHire a personal trainer and work with them 90 times in 2021

I worked with a personal trainer all of 2019, and got in the best shape of my life because of it. The gym was a 5-minute walk from our apartment in Mexico City, which helped it fit perfectly into my day just before lunch. Last year, I let my exercise routine completely fall apart as we moved to Southern California and all the gyms were closed due to the lockdown. But I can’t blame COVID for everything: mostly I just didn’t feel like working out and used the new environment as an excuse.

In 2021 I’ve started working 1-on-1 with a personal trainer again. It is an area of my life that I feel completely comfortable outsourcing, because I know the power of accountability. I’ve found a trainer who is a trained kinesiologist and will work with me on body mechanics and form, not just strength. I’m trying out framing it as “90 times” (twice a week for 45 weeks) so that every time I go I’m completing more than 1% of my goal. I think this will be more motivating than “Twice per week.”

Maintain the slower schedule I’ve established during paternity leave in 2021

I really enjoyed the more flexible, slower pace I established during paternity leave the last few months of 2020. I am dramatically happier, not to mention more productive and creative, when I have only one call per day. Earlier this year I was averaging 3-4 on many days, which is a major drag on my ability to follow my creative impulses. In 2021 I want to maintain this schedule as much as possible, scheduling no more than one call per day and finishing work around 2pm to be able to spend time with Caio and Lauren.

Record my first music album

I like learning a new skill every year. I find that it helps keep me in beginner’s mind, introduces me to new subjects, and also it’s just plain fun! The key I’ve found is to make it into a concrete project with a clear output that others can see. Last year I made my first documentary film, and this year I’m going to record my first music album.

I played piano for years as a kid, mostly pop songs using a few simple chords. Between the new digital piano I got recently, now that we have a permanent living situation, and the home studio we’re building in the garage, I’ll have no further excuses not to return to this passion. I also noticed that a lot of the equipment I acquired for podcasting and video-making, such as the Shure sm7b microphone, are perfectly suited for music recording. I experimented a lot with pre-recorded beats and loops in Apple Garageband back in the day, and I’m hoping to combine that with my piano playing to self-publish a few songs on Soundcloud.

Meditate every day in 2021 for 30 minutes

In 2020 I maintained the longest stretch of meditation of my life – 30 minutes per day for about 6 months in the middle of the year. 30 minutes was a much harder challenge than 10 or 15 minutes. You can’t just slouch your way through 30 minutes. You can’t just grin and bear it and wait for the time to pass, because then it will feel like forever.

Somehow, 30 minutes crosses some kind of internal psychological threshold where suddenly I have to push other activities aside, and make tradeoffs. I found that the best time was at about 9:30pm – not so late that I would be tired and fall asleep, and not so early that it conflicted with other plans. Once the baby arrived in October this habit was obliterated, but I want to resurrect it in 2021. The benefits I experienced after a few months were so profound – more calm and peace of mind, more moments of joy in my everyday life, clearer decision-making at work – that I know those minutes will be some of the best ones I spend.

COMPLETE “DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN” EXERCISES

I’ve wanted to learn how to draw for some time, and that goal appeared in my last couple annual reviews. I think the problem was that “Learn to draw” was too vague, and I never quite knew how to get started. I’m going to revisit this goal and make it smaller and more concrete: to complete the drawing exercises in the influential book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, a well-known drawing tutorial I first heard about in the book Creativity, Inc. I tried using the paper version last year but could never keep track of it, so this time I’m going to download the ebook version so I can complete the exercises right on the same iPad.

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My Interview with Nathan Barry on The Art of Newsletters

I recently sat down with Nathan Barry, Founder of the email marketing platform ConvertKit, for a super in-depth discussion about my philosophy and strategy for building an audience via a weekly email newsletter.

You can watch the 80-minute interview on YouTube or listen to it as a podcast.

I switched from Mailchimp to ConvertKit in August of 2019, and have seen explosive growth in my email list since then, from 5,000 to 40,000 subscribers. That growth has fueled every aspect of my business, connected me with tons of fascinating people, and played a pivotal role in landing a book deal with a major publisher.

I believe in ConvertKit so strongly that I’ve become an affiliate partner of theirs. Their platform is designed specifically for small, independent creators, has an incredible set of features to help you track your subscribers’ interests, and a customer support team that always amazes me with their care and responsiveness. Their learning material and knowledge base are also excellent sources of learning how to use the platform.

If you like what you hear and want to follow my approach to building an audience that believes in you and your work, use the link below to sign up for an account:

Sign up for ConvertKit

Here’s some of the topics we discussed:

How to get your first 10 newsletter subscribers

The best time to send your newsletter

How many subscribers you should have before launching a course

How a newsletter can be a good complement to publishing a book

How I’m using the revenue from my online business to help my family build businesses offline

Fears about sharing too much in a newsletter

Why we live in an age where people want to follow real humans with real problems that aren’t afraid to be vulnerable

Visit Nathan’s website for show notes and a full transcript of the interview. 

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Introducing the VIEW Workshop

I’m incredibly proud to introduce a brand new course we’ve been working on for the last few months.

It’s called the VIEW Workshop, and its purpose is to teach authentic communication. It trains people in how to create life-changing conversations.

Not just to have such conversations whenever they happen to show up. But to be the active agent who causes such conversations in any situation you find yourself in.

The workshop is taught by Joe Hudson, an executive coach, venture capitalist, and teacher based in Silicon Valley. Joe has trained over 1,000 people across the country in his VIEW methodology, including executives and teams at Apple, Alphabet, SpaceX, HP, Automatic, Task Rabbit, and Hand in Hand Parenting, among many others. He’s also become a dear friend and mentor to me.

VIEW has been one of the most powerful catalysts not only in the growth of my business, but in the fundamental quality of my life. Since my first experience with it, I’ve been determined to bring Joe’s work online so that more people in more places can have access to it.

We’ve finally done that, using a radically innovative online learning format that combines the best of self-paced courses with the best of cohort-based learning.

I was at a crossroads in my career when I walked into a house on the edge of Alamo Square in San Francisco for a weekend workshop several years ago. I had hired a team but couldn’t figure out how to grow the revenue to pay for them. I had a breakout product but no idea how to make it into a viable business.

And the stress and anxiety of my work was hemorrhaging into my personal life, causing me to toss and turn through the night and neglect my health and closest friendships.

Intrigued yet always skeptical, I settled into my chair in a large circle of 20 or so other participants to see what this experience had to offer me.

Over the next two days, we were introduced to the VIEW framework, which stands for four words that distill Joe’s 25 years of personal, spiritual, and business experience into an easy-to-remember list: Vulnerability, Impartiality, Empathy, and Wonder.

This wasn’t your typical workshop. There were no textbooks, no curriculum, no slides, no tests, no whiteboard, no grades, and no workbook. The medium of instruction was conversation, and the subject was the quality of our inner lives.

Instead of looking outside for answers, we were asked to look inside to our own experience. With our conversation partners acting as mirrors to reveal the wisdom shrouded within.

I quickly plunged into a learning environment very different than any other I’d experienced. There was no goal to strive after, except the goal of feeling more connected and loved. There were no problems to solve, except the problem of why I insisted on treating everything as a problem.

My logical mind, so used to being in charge and running the show, slowly faded into the background. There was nothing for it to analyze or critique. Other sources of intelligence that I so often ignored – my intuition, empathy, and compassion – rose to the surface to speak their truths.

I learned so much about Vulnerability. I discovered that I put a tremendous amount of energy into not “giving anything away,” trying my hardest to hide my emotions and stay impassive in conversations. But that just makes me come across as withdrawn and uninterested, if not outright hostile. Then when people react negatively to this coldness, my story that people aren’t interested in me or what I’m doing is confirmed. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

I discovered the power of Impartiality – the art of asking a question without looking for a particular answer. To truly know and believe that the person before me is the best one to answer their own questions, instead of thinking I know the right answer for them. I saw the cost of my own arrogance in treating so many relationships as problems to manage, instead of gifts to be enjoyed. And breathed a sigh of relief as I saw that I didn’t have to do that anymore.

My partner and I explored the nature of Empathy together. I realized that I had no idea what this terribly overused word really meant. We practiced empathy the way you would practice writing cursive or shooting hoops. I was delighted to learn that it was a muscle that could be exercised and strengthened just like any other. And that the more I exercised it for others, the more gently I could treat myself.

And we practiced what it was like to have conversations in a state of Wonder. To see the human being across from us as a precious gem – the most complex and intricate organism in the known universe. Not to try and change them, or influence them, or persuade them, but just to try and understand how their mind works. To bask in the joy of simple co-existence. It was a completely novel way of being for me.

At its heart, VIEW is a checklist for treating ourselves and others with unconditional love. It is for those of us who are smart, who love order and structure and strategies. But who are ready to experience something beyond being right and knowing all the answers. VIEW is a bridge between the analytical and intuitive minds, treating both as equally valuable, equally good, equally needed, like all parts of ourselves.

The more we practice unconditional love, the more our heart’s capacity grows. And it is our heart’s capacity – not our intellectual capacity – that is the bottleneck to the change we want to see in our lives and in the world.

VIEW is a method, but more importantly, it is a state of mind.

To have conversations “in VIEW” means to have them in a state of vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder. It is a state that you can train yourself to recognize, and train yourself to drop into anytime. It’s always a choice to do so. But if you do, it is like an alternate reality where the impossible becomes possible.

You find yourself able to express things you never thought you could. The love you have for others comes right to the surface and becomes so tangible you can almost touch it. You are freed up to speak hard truths and gentle affections alike, which somehow frees the other person to do the same.

Whether you are coaching a client, mentoring a direct report, collaborating with a colleague, or working through a disagreement with your partner, what would be possible if you could see past the surface to the heart of what they’re trying to express?

What would be possible if you knew you could shift their perspective and lead them to a breakthrough in whatever challenge they’re facing? And not by giving them advice or imposing your point of view, but by helping them access their own wisdom using nothing but the power of questions.

If you’d like to hear more about the VIEW Workshop, please subscribe below. I’ll introduce you to what we have planned in a series of short emails over the next couple weeks, including more about my personal breakthroughs with VIEW, demo videos of what a VIEW conversation looks like, and an opportunity to join Joe and I in a live Q&A.

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The post Introducing the VIEW Workshop appeared first on Forte Labs.