Tiago Forte's Blog, page 25

Second Brain Week: Free Workshops from Top Experts and Creators

To celebrate the launch of the 11th edition of Building a Second Brain, our online course on how to take control of the information flow in your life, we’re co-hosting a series of free events in the next couple weeks.

Come join us to learn about digital note-taking, organizing, productivity, knowledge management, and online education from some of the world’s top experts and creators. We’ll update this page as registration links are created, or enter your email address below to be notified as soon as they’re ready:

Digital Note-Taking with Thanh Pham
On Monday, August 10th I’ll join Thanh Pham, the Founder and Managing Director of Asian Efficiency, one of the most respected productivity blogs on the web. We’ll talk about what it means to take digital notes, and how it can help us in an era of information overload. 

Register here for 11am PT on 8/10 to get a calendar invite (we’ll also send out a recording to everyone who registers in case you can’t attend live). 

Teachable Discover workshop: How to Take Digital Notes
On Thursday, August 13th I’m joining Jess Catorc from the Teachable team for a 1-hour workshop and Q&A on how digital notes can help you overcome information overwhelm and harness the power of information abundance. Including how to:



Capture and save the best information you consume each week 
Organize that information in an easily retrievable note-taking system 
Use your notes as fuel for creative expression, driven by a project-first workflow
Use your Second Brain to free your first brain for creative work – your brain is meant to think and create, not store information

Register here for 11am PT on 8/13 to get a calendar invite (we’ll also send out a recording to everyone who registers in case you can’t attend live).

Online Workshop: How to Choose a Digital Notes App as Your Second Brain
On Monday, August 17th I’m teaching a completely new workshop to answer the #1 question we receive from students: which app should I use for my Second Brain? Bringing together insights and lessons from nearly 2,000 students over 3+ years, I’ll present my official recommendations for which one to choose based on your goals, needs, and professional situation.

Register here for 6pm PT on 8/17 to get a calendar invite (we’ll also send out a recording to everyone who registers in case you can’t attend live).

Enrollment for cohort 11 opens at 00:01am PT on the morning of Monday, August 24.

Lunch Hour on Online Education with Chris Sparks
On Tuesday, August 18th I’ll join author, teacher, coach, and former poker pro Chris Sparks for a “lunch hour” conversation on the future of online education. Our first conversation was a big hit but we left many questions unanswered and nuances unexplored. I’ll reveal many of the deepest lessons about what we’ve learned about how to deliver transformational online learning experiences from 10 courses over 7 years.

Register here for 8:45am PT on 8/18 to get a calendar invite (we’ll also send out a recording to everyone who registers in case you can’t attend live).
 
Deep Dive Live Stream with Ali Abdaal

On Wednesday, August 19th I’ll be talking to Ali Abdaal, one of the top YouTubers, writers, and experts on personal productivity and organizing, with nearly 1 million YouTube subscribers. We’ll talk about the principles of knowledge management, and both share our screens to illustrate how we’re applying them to our workflows.

Register here for 10am PT on 8/19 to get a calendar invite (we’ll also send out a recording to everyone who registers in case you can’t attend live).

Webinar with Matt Ragland
On Wednesay, August 19th I’ll be doing a webinar with Matt Ragland, a YouTuber, multi-talented creator, and minimalist bullet journal aficionado for a webinar on our systems for capturing and tracking the most important information in our lives.

Register here for 1pm PT on 8/19 to get a calendar invite (we’ll also send out a recording to everyone who registers in case you can’t attend live).

Q&A with Tiago Forte

Before enrollment comes to a close, I’ll open up the floor on Thursday, August 20 to anyone who has a question on the Building a Second Brain course. What’s included, what changes we’ve made, how the course is delivered, what we’ll be learning – it’s all fair game!

Register here for 10am PT on 8/20 to get a calendar invite (we’ll also send out a recording to everyone who registers in case you can’t attend live).

Enrollment for cohort 11 closes at midnight PT on Monday, August 24.

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The post Second Brain Week: Free Workshops from Top Experts and Creators appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books: How to Distill Ideas to Accelerate Your Learning

In 2016, I read 57 books. I read like I was running out of time.

It felt like an achievement, yet by the end of the year, I could scarcely recall even one useful idea from each book.

That moment was a turning point. I realized very little of the information I was consuming was sticking.

Taking notes on the books I read was a great start, but it wasn’t enough. It did me no good to leave those notes sitting in a software program like a musty filing cabinet in the basement, never to see the light of day again.

I realized if I wanted to benefit from my reading, I needed to engage with the books I read on a much deeper level. I needed to make something out of them. Otherwise, I would continue to passively consume information with no lasting memory of what I learned.

I decided to slow down, carefully choose a much smaller number of books, and save my notes from those books in a system of knowledge management – which I call my “Second Brain.” I decided I would rather deeply absorb the wisdom of a small handful of books than speed-read my way through dozens.

The 14 book summaries I’ve created since then have changed the trajectory of my business and my work. They have attracted more than 125,000 page-views over the last year and, as part of my Praxis membership, support a six-figure annual subscription business:

The Complete Guide to Landing a Book Deal How To Take Smart Notes: 10 Principles to Revolutionize Your Note-Taking and Writing The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Treatment of Trauma Pleasure as an Organizing Principle How Emotions Are Made: The Theory of Constructed Emotion Emergent Strategy: Organizing for Social Justice You Need a Budget: 13 Parallels Between Money and Productivity (members-only) A Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind Trekonomics: The Economics of Post-Scarcity (members-only) Supersizing the Mind: The Science of Cognitive Extension (members-only) The World Beyond Your Head: How Distraction Shapes Who We Are The Inner Game of Work: Focus, Desire, and Working Free (members-only) Strategically Constrained: How to Turn Limitations Into Opportunities (members-only) A Theory of Unlearning: Ecstasis, Anamnesis, Kenosis (members-only)

Creating a book summary requires a surprising amount of creativity. Because the truth is, these are much more than summaries. They are actually reinterpretations. By choosing certain points over others and deciding how they’ll be presented, I am interpreting the book through my own personal lens.

Instead of apologizing for this, I encourage you to embrace it. Like any retelling, your summary is biased, but it can be biased helpfully. It can be biased toward usefulness, toward relevance, and toward actionability.

Blog posts are not miniature books. When you change the length, the whole nature of the text changes. 

A book might build up slowly using stories before getting to the punchline, while a blog post demands that you lead with the main argument. A book might include personal anecdotes from the author, whereas blog post summaries have to be more direct and utilitarian. Books keep revisiting the same points again and again from different angles, whereas a blog post only needs to address each point once.

Authors have to write for the largest possible audience – for the widest range of educational levels, cultural contexts, and common knowledge. They have to assume that their readers know little or nothing about the topic, which is why so many books feel like “a book that should have been a blog post.” The economics of the publishing industry demand mainstream success.

But you are not similarly constrained. You have a particular audience, and you know that audience. You know what they tend to miss, what they need, and what they desire in their heart of hearts. You can therefore afford to be FAR more discerning and opinionated.

In fact, I think you owe it to your readers to be opinionated. They rely on you to tell them what matters about the book – which points are the most original and important. They depend on you to climb the mountain and come back with the most precious gems. You have done the hard work, and now you are paving the way for others to follow in your footsteps.

This isn’t an easy process. Each summary requires 10-20 hours of intellectual labor. But looking back at the last few years, these hours have been some of the most valuable I’ve spent toward building an audience of loyal readers, and ultimately creating the content and courses that fuel my business.

In this article, I will share with you the profound benefits I’ve experienced from summarizing books, what I’ve learned from the experience, and the process I’ve developed to do it as efficiently as possible. Submit your email address below and I’ll send you the full notes as seen in this guide right away.

Let’s dive into each of the benefits of summarizing books, in roughly the order they appear:

Allows me to absorb the book’s lessons on a much deeper levelCreates building blocks for my own thinking and creatingImproves my writing through imitationBuilds my audience of email subscribersConnects me with influential peopleExpands my visibility and credibility in online communities1. Allows me to absorb the book’s lessons on a much deeper level

Summarizing a book is a far deeper level of engagement than passive reading.

The moment I decide to summarize a book, it’s as if my vision suddenly sharpens. I begin to pay closer attention and read with a more critical eye. I’m less willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt. I start to question their statements and conclusions and to examine the supporting evidence.

As I decide what to highlight, which is the very first step of summarizing, I’m practicing my judgment – the skill of deciding what matters and what doesn’t, what’s important and what’s not, and what’s interesting and what isn’t. I’m training my ability to notice what is most relevant and valuable.

When I summarized The Complete Guide to Landing a Book Deal (members-only), for example, it gave me tremendous clarity about the book proposal I was writing at the time. There was so much advice about what to do and what not to do, but it was only when I wrote it out in my own words that I fully absorbed it. Once I did, it was far easier to see which pieces of conventional wisdom I wanted to follow, and which I wanted to disregard.

Summarizing a book requires you to make value judgments at every stage of the process. This forces you to think about the material more deeply and reflect on how you want this new wisdom to be applied to your life.

It would be worth summarizing books even if deeper learning was the only benefit. But it is only the beginning.

2. Creates building blocks for my own thinking and creating

Once I started engaging with books more deeply, I began to notice something: the knowledge I gained from them served as building blocks for my own thinking and creating.

This doesn’t really happen with books that I casually read. I might have a vague idea of how my ideas are connected to something I read a long time ago, but without the summary, retrieving it is too much effort.

I’ve found that with the best ideas from books summarized on my blog, I can directly link to them as specific, concrete sources. I can write something like “As discussed in Emergent Strategy…” and link to my own summary, instead of to an Amazon page and expecting my readers to somehow read an entire book to understand what I’m talking about.

That link leads to another place inside the world of ideas I’m creating. It points to an article written by me, in my own language, with my own framing. I don’t have to interrupt what I’m writing to explain all the backstory, nor do I have to leave my readers behind.

This is how my blog becomes more than the sum of its parts – my posts make up an interconnected web of thinking that others can follow in any direction and read in any order. I can build one idea atop another, which allows me to take my readers along on my journey knowing they can trace my footsteps. Sharing that common knowledge, I’m able to move further and faster in my thinking without having to stop and explain the background again and again.

This way of thinking is less like a passive consumer and more like a researcher. You have a body of research that you are growing and refining over time. You have hypotheses and questions that, if answered, will lead you closer to your research goal. And you are part of a network of collaborators constantly sharing their thinking and building atop one another’s work.

Your book summaries are the building blocks in the edifice of understanding you are constructing.

3. Improves my thinking and writing through imitation

Eventually I noticed something else: When I summarized a book, I inhabited the author’s state of mind.

While summarizing How Emotions Are Made, I started to see people’s emotions through the eyes of a neuroscientist. While summarizing The World Beyond Your Head I suddenly became hyper-aware of how every little distraction was affecting me.

I even noticed that I would start writing and speaking like the author. 10 to 20 hours is a significant amount of time to spend with someone’s thinking. It is more like doing an apprenticeship or taking a class than reading a book.

A classic piece of writing advice is to copy out the writing of your favorite authors, by hand and word for word. This is the writer’s equivalent of imitating an athlete’s movements or a musician’s signature style.

I see summarizing books in the same vein: By imitating the thought patterns and language of the person whose work you are summarizing, you get to inhabit the mind of a master. But it is even better than pure imitation: You are riffing on their words, weaving them in and out of your own explanations.

One of the most wonderful moments is when I encounter the same challenge or obstacle in trying to explain something that the original author encountered. I recognize what they were trying to do and how they thought through their options. Seeing how they ultimately overcame those obstacles provides a far deeper level of insight than only seeing the final result.

And once in a while, I even find a way to explain certain ideas better than they did. It’s like a long-distance collaboration they don’t even know we’re engaged in.

4. Builds my audience of email subscribers

As powerful as email can be as a communications medium, there are significant barriers to getting people to subscribe. They already receive way too many emails and can’t even consume the content they already have. What does yours have to offer that’s too good to miss?

Summarizing books is an excellent way to get on people’s radar. Because they often already have an intention to read one of these books, seeing a summary feels like a timesaver when compared to the time required to read the whole book.

I am tapping into the existing reputation of a book and its author and curating its best ideas for the many people who are too busy to read it themselves. Instead of asking them to do me a favor (Hey, please read my post!) it feels like I am doing them a favor (Hey, here’s a 15-minute summary instead of a five-hour book!).

For example, the book Supersizing the Mind: The Science of Cognitive Extension (members-only) was one of the most fascinating, but also most grueling books I’ve ever read. It is written like an academic paper, with countless technical explanations, overly detailed examples, and bunny trails into related topics. I knew that the ideas contained within it were critically important for anyone working in the field of knowledge management, but I knew that very few would be able to spend the nearly 20 hours it took me to get through it.

Now I have a concise summary of the book that I can send to a startup founder, software developer, or teacher who can benefit from the most recent advances in the field.

All this boils down to one fact: When you save people time, they are grateful. They want to hear more from you. That’s why they subscribe, tell their friends to subscribe, and share your links on social media – because you provided value upfront.

5. Connects me with influential people

Eventually, I started to gain enough of a public profile that I could reach out to the authors themselves.

Put yourself in the author’s shoes: You’ve published a great book. People have heard of you. Everyone wants to talk to you. How do you prioritize how you spend your time publicizing your book?

You are obviously going to prioritize the people who already invested their time to make your work more accessible to others. You’re going to favor those who have taken the trouble to broadcast your ideas to their own audience.

After publishing my summary of How To Take Smart Notes, I reached out to the author, Sönke Ahrens, and he agreed to a Q&A with my audience. A couple hundred people attended the live call, and the recording has now been watched more than 10 thousand times on YouTube. My book summary ranks higher on Google than the book’s own website!

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Make no mistake: Over time, these kinds of relationships can have a dramatic impact on your career, your business, and your life. These are people you can’t buy access to. They won’t be bribed or flattered. They are people who care about ideas, and the path to their heart is only through ideas.

Just remember that they don’t owe you anything, and you shouldn’t expect anything. Making contact should be considered an extra bonus, since you never know who will be open to connecting.

But if they do respond, these can be incredibly fruitful collaborations for both parties.

6. Expands my visibility and credibility in online communities

An unexpected side effect of writing these book summaries has been the exposure they’ve given me to existing online communities.

The number of communities you can meaningfully participate in will always be severely limited because there are so many. You can’t be everywhere at once, nor should you try.

However, book summaries are unique in their ability to slip into conversations. Because they focus on providing value instead of self-promotion, most community moderators will allow them to be shared. Often, they will be grateful to you for providing a valuable conversation starter, since they are always preoccupied with keeping the community engaged.

Communities are likely to already know about books in their niche, so they’re primed to receive them. Several existing personal finance groups loved reading my summary of the book You Need a Budget. Sometimes, people with large followings or even the original author themselves will share your summary with their audiences, which is a personal introduction to thousands of eager readers.

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Summarizing a book and sharing it with a group of people who have already signaled their interest in it is the opposite of spam. It is a generous, honest, and helpful way of contributing to the knowledge of others.

Those people are far more likely to follow you, subscribe to your services, and give you helpful feedback on your work.

How I Decide Which Books to Summarize

Notice that none of the books I’ve summarized are mega-bestsellers. There would be no point to that, because bestsellers are already well known. They are often available in many formats and summaries already exist online.

Instead of bestsellers, I look for books that are on the fringes of the topics I care about. Ones that my followers aren’t likely to see if it wasn’t for my summary. I look for subjects where I can move the needle, connecting topics or ideas or groups of people that are likely to have answers to each others’ questions.

In my summary of The Body Keeps the Score, for example, I was curious about how recent advances in our understanding of trauma might shed some light on people’s struggles with focus and commitment. I had listened to an interview with Dr. Gabor Maté on the Tim Ferriss podcast and was fascinated when he linked misdiagnosed ADHD to childhood trauma. I wanted to not only explore that connection for myself, but to build a bridge between Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s work and the productivity world where many struggle with attention deficit.

When I summarized adrienne maree brown’s book Pleasure Activism, I wanted to better understand the relationship between productivity and enjoyment. I had noticed that the most effective people profoundly enjoy the work they do, and I wanted to expose my readers to brown’s unashamed embrace of pleasure as an organizing principle.

As a third example, I summarized my favorite ideas from the book Trekonomics, a fun exploration of the economics of the fictional Star Trek universe. In that universe, any product can be fabricated for free, which means the writers had to invent a completely new kind of society not based on the scarcity of goods. I had noticed a common theme across my work dealt with moving from a mindset of scarcity to a mindset of abundance, so I wanted to understand what a post-scarcity world might look like in our own time.

I want to be clear: The process I’m about to describe is NOT for every book you read. As a 10-20 hour endeavor, it should be reserved only for the most important, impactful, life-changing books you encounter. Think of it as the high-pressure power-washing of reading, reserved only for the most extreme jobs.

Generally, I read books that meet as many of these three criteria as possible:

They are interesting and captivate my attentionThey are unique and have something original to sayThey are helpful in addressing the problems that my readers and I are facing

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The books I summarize have to meet an even higher bar. They have to be so interesting, so unique, and so helpful that the time I put into summarizing them will actually save me time in the long run. In other words, books that are such foundational building blocks in my work that by investing the time upfront to summarize them, I’m saving my future self the time of having to explain them over and over.

When you put in the effort to summarize an entire book, you are building a bridge from your audience to a topic they’re unlikely to read about on their own. You are lowering the threshold for how much time someone needs to spend to access its ideas, from hours to minutes.

Bridge-building isn’t easy, but it’s more important than ever. We’re all descending deeper and deeper into our filter bubbles as the algorithms feed us only what we already believe. It seems to be getting harder to discover points of view outside our own. We need ambassadors and translators who are willing to do the work of introducing us to foreign ideas we might never encounter on our own.

Submit your email address below and I’ll send you the full notes as seen in this guide right away.

Step-by-step guidelines for writing your summary

If you’re still reading, you probably have some interest in trying book summarization for yourself. So how do you do it? It’s time for the practical instructions, which I’ve demonstrated with guided videos below.

I follow five steps to go from reading a book to publishing a summary blog post:

Read and highlightExport highlightsProgressively summarizeOutlineWrite

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Step 1: Read and highlight

The first step is to read the book. Most books take five to ten hours to read, which is the single largest investment of time you’ll make. So you want to avoid having to repeat this step more than once.

To enable you to read straight through the book in one pass, you’ll combine reading with highlighting. Highlighting by itself has been shown to be of “low utility” in learning, but in my opinion these findings completely miss the point. Highlighting is not supposed to be an end in itself. It is just the starting point in a much longer process.

Other studies have shown that highlighting results in deeper thinking and better retention. Yue et al say (emphasis mine):

…questioning during highlighting and re-reading should evoke two beneficial activities for

improved retention: deeper processing and retrieval practice, both of which have been repeatedly shown to improve retention (e.g., Craik and Lockhart 1972; Roediger and Karpicke 2006)…it is not highlighting per se that is beneficial; rather, it is how highlighting changes the way students read and think about text that is beneficial.

That last phrase is key: Highlighting is one essential link in a chain of deep engagement with a text. It allows you to read efficiently without constant interruption. It takes barely a few extra seconds to highlight a word or phrase that you’re already reading anyway.

The ease of digital highlighting is the main reason I recommend ebooks. There is something special about paper books, and ebooks have their fair share of flaws. But highlighting is one aspect of ebooks that is far superior: You simply put down your finger, swipe across the text you want to keep, and the text is highlighted.

My preferred platform is Amazon Kindle, because I’ve found the highlighting and export to be very reliable. I also occasionally use Apple Books for ebooks from other sources.

In the 18-minute video below, I demonstrate what ebook highlighting looks like on the Kindle app for iPad as I read the book Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-En-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind (affiliate link):

Watch on YouTube: How to Decide What to Highlight in Ebooks

As I read, I’m constantly asking myself the same three questions that I used to decide what to read in the first place:

Is it unique?Is it helpful?Is it interesting?

These questions serve as a threefold lens allowing me to focus only on the content that is most valuable.

If it’s not unique – something I haven’t heard before or that I’m surprised by – then what’s the point of repeating it? Most content in most books is common knowledge that you can skip over.

If it’s not helpful – a piece of information that equips people with solutions to their problems – then it’s fluff. By compressing a book into only its most actionable, relevant points, you do your readers a great service.

If it’s not interesting – a surprising or insightful idea that catches people’s attention – then it will only dilute the emphasis on the points that are interesting. It doesn’t matter how useful your writing is if it can’t hold people’s attention.

These guidelines might seem straightforward, but it takes practice to apply them consistently. As you read, it’s tempting to indiscriminately highlight an entire paragraph (or page) with a vague notion of “I’m sure something in here is interesting.”

But I encourage you to take an extra moment to ask yourself, “What exactly in this paragraph or page is worth keeping?” Those extra moments of consideration on the front end will save you hours later on.

Here are other helpful highlighting guidelines I’ve discovered over the years:

Do’s:

Do highlight chapter titles and section headings – this ensures your exported notes will preserve the structure of the book.Do highlight lists and summaries already found within the book – this is valuable summarizing work the author has already done for you.Do highlight “popular highlights” (a feature of some ebook services such as Kindle which shows you phrases that many other people have highlighted) – these are phrases that other readers have already told you are helpful in their understanding of the text.

Don’ts:

Don’t highlight entire paragraphs or pages – this will create a lot of work later on to figure out what is actually valuable in those large chunks of text.Don’t highlight entire stories or long examples – they are usually too long, and you can always go back and find them if you need them.Don’t highlight ideas or explanations that you already know, agree with, or could have guessed – focus on what is novel, surprising, and counterintuitive.2. Export highlights

Highlighting is an important first step, reducing the amount of content you’re dealing with by at least 90% (since most ebooks don’t allow you to export more than 10% of the text anyway).

But those highlights do no good sitting in your e-reader. To remix them into something new, you have to take them out of their original context and bring them into an environment you control.

That environment is a digital notes app. I use the popular notes app Evernote (affiliate link), but you can use a wide variety of similar apps like Microsoft OneNote, Bear, Notion, or Roam Research. The important thing is that you have control over the content and can edit it in any way you please.

But first, we have to get our highlights out of the book and into our notes. In the video below, I walk through how to do this for a Kindle ebook using a free tool (Bookcision) and a paid service (Readwise):

Watch on YouTube: How to Export Ebook Highlights to Your Digital Notes

It might feel strange to remove your highlights from their original context and dump them all into a single note. But it’s important to remember that you’re not losing all that context. You’re hiding it just out of sight, so you can focus on the most important ideas.

You can always go back and revisit the original book for any reason, and it only takes minutes. This is another reason I prefer Kindle, because I can open the Kindle app right on my computer and see all my synced highlights, regardless of which device I originally made them on.

3. Progressively summarize

Now that you have a collection of passages you’ve decided are valuable, it’s time to compress them even further into the best of the best content. This is the purpose of my Progressive Summarization method.

Here’s the main idea: Every passage you’ve highlighted and exported has a point. But there are two problems:

It’s not always clear what the main point isYou need some of the surrounding context to understand what the point means

Progressive Summarization solves both problems at once by getting closer and closer to the main point in multiple passes, in a clearly marked way that shows you the necessary context around it. And it does this in the flow of reading so you don’t get interrupted.

Here’s what it looks like:

Watch on YouTube: How to Progressively Summarize a Digital Note

Here’s the wonderful thing about Progressive Summarization: Not only can it be done a little bit at a time over long periods of time — that’s how it should be done.

No one has time to sit down and do multiple passes on the same text all at once. And even if you do, I often find this results in worse summaries, since you can’t see the text objectively after looking at it for so long.

You can and should do one pass at a time, and the text will be waiting for you whenever you get back around to it. I’ve found that the more time goes by between passes, the more objective I can be about what’s truly worth keeping.

Below is a typical timeline for my summary of the book How to Take Smart Notes. I never made it a top priority, never pushed other projects aside to make room for it, and set no deadline for myself.

I ended up spending about 18 hours on the entire process, spread out over seven months. That comes out to only about 45 minutes per week on average. Like the other dozen or so Kindle ebooks I typically have active at any given time, I made progress on it whenever I felt like it and had some extra time.

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After you’ve progressively summarized your notes, you’ve gone from 10% of the book to around 1%. That 1% makes up the richest, most insight-dense, most interesting and unique material. It is the core of insight around which the rest of the book revolves.

Instead of losing those nuggets in a sea of examples and explanations, you’ll make them the central pillars of your summary.

4. Outline

The fourth step is when your creativity and voice come to the forefront.

Until now, you’ve worked exclusively with a text that someone else has written. You identified and extracted the best ideas, but now it’s time to rearrange them. This requires a lot more decision-making.

Now is the time to distinguish between ideas that are great versus those that are merely good. Consider questions such as: Which ideas do I want to attach my reputation to? Which ones are worth hours of writing, rewriting, and broadcasting to the world? Which arguments or explanations can my summary improve upon?

What makes it possible to answer these questions is your previous work to compress the book into a small number of insightful nuggets. You can’t make an outline out of huge blocks of text. Bullet points demand conciseness.

In the video below I demonstrate how to use the layers of summarization you applied in the previous step to quickly jump from one main point to the next, so you can pull them into your own outline:

Watch on YouTube: How to Create an Outline with Digital Notes

The outline should be hierarchical, which reflects the hierarchical structure that your final summary will follow:

Main pointSupporting pointSupporting pointSupporting pointMain pointSupporting pointSupporting pointSupporting pointMain pointEtc.

This structure allows your eye to skip quickly from one main point to another to see if they make sense and are in the right order. And if you want to zoom in on any main point, you only have to move your eyes down and to the right.

Outlining is the only step that I strongly recommend you sit down and complete in one sitting. We’ve postponed it for as long as possible, but at this stage it is necessary to load all the main points into your head all at once. Only then can you compare and contrast and interconnect them into one structure in your mind. To avoid having to do that more than once, it’s a good idea to create the outline in one sitting.

5. Write

Now it’s time for the final step: actually writing the summary.

If you’ve done the previous steps, this is also in some ways the easiest part. You’ve already done all the thinking and decision-making required. You’ve decided which parts are the most important, emphasized the most important passages in multiple layers, and put them in an order that makes sense to you.

The final step involves stringing together the pearls of wisdom you’ve painstakingly selected into a beautiful necklace of reason. Because you have all the context you’ll need saved in your notes, you can spread out the writing process over time. If you get interrupted or have to step away for days or even weeks, your notes allow you to pick up right where you left off.

At this stage, all the difficult conceptual and strategic questions have already been decided. Which means I get to focus all my attention on writing – which language to use, metaphors and examples, not being redundant, challenging existing assumptions, etc. The flow is palpable and intoxicating, because I never have to stop to go look something up. I’m not afflicted with FOMO if I have to take out some material, because I can save it in my notes and use it elsewhere.

In this final video, I walk through writing my summary in my own words:

Watch on YouTube: How to Write a Book Summary

Here are my guidelines for the final stage of writing book summaries.

Customize your language to your own audience

You can be more specific and concrete with your words than the original book because you are writing for a much smaller and more focused audience. Use terms that they’ll recognize and relate to.

Leave out parts that are boring, obvious, or too long

Every word in your summary dilutes the emphasis on everything else, so don’t be afraid to leave out even entire chapters if they don’t add value. You are not writing a comprehensive, authoritative summary – you are writing a curated, abridged version of only the parts you find relevant.

Be selective with your examples and metaphors

Examples are important but usually quite long, so be very selective with the ones you include. Even better, add your own examples and metaphors of how you’ve seen the ideas play out in your own work and life.

Don’t include direct quotes unless absolutely necessary

I’ve found that using too many direct quotes interrupts the flow of reading, and turns your writing into a review rather than a summary. Instead, it is far more powerful to fully translate the author’s words into your own. A few short quotes are fine, but keep them to a minimum.

The power of curation

We are living in the midst of an “Infodemic” – a term coined by the World Health Organization as “an excessive amount of information about a problem, which makes it difficult to identify a solution.” Not only in health but in all areas of life, we are drowning in far too much information for any normal person to make sense of.

We all have to become curators of the information we consume. Curation has evolved from a specialized profession to a simple matter of staying informed about your field. But in curating information for ourselves, we also have the opportunity to surface the knowledge we’ve gained for others.

By taking the time to curate and summarize the work of others, you can offer people a way to access ideas they wouldn’t have the time to research themselves. You can lower the bar for how much effort it takes to engage with a new idea, in a way that informs while also being entertaining. More than ever, we need curators who are willing to distill what they know to just the essentials and then deliver that knowledge in engaging and understandable ways.

The work of curators isn’t easy, but that’s why it’s valuable. It requires sensitivity, creativity, and courage. As a curator, your reputation is on the line, which is what makes it a creative act within itself. But we have to go beyond just sharing a link and adding a clever quip. That’s what we do on social media, and it leads to misunderstanding more often than understanding. We need to add an extra layer of value: the context and perspective that comes from deeply engaging with new ideas.

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The 10 Biggest Changes We’re Making to Building a Second Brain

There is one guiding question for our team as we design the Building a Second Brain course:

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

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

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

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

When I created BASB, I was determined to create an experience that left people feeling more empowered, not less. That gave them a sense of future possibilities, instead of past pitfalls.

I decided to deliver the course live via Zoom. Instead of assigning homework for students to somehow find time to complete on their own time, I instituted a “no homework” policy. When the group got too big for me to work directly with every student, I hired Alumni Mentors to coach students through their process.

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

We’ve just released the the full list of improvements we’re making in v11, which I’ll explain in more detail below.

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

1. Restructured curriculum

We make small changes every version, but this time is different. We’ve identified every individual piece of the course experience, and are completely rearranging and redesigning the curriculum based on over 3 years of feedback from students.

[image error]After years of exploring and adding new concepts, the BASB Method is starting to mature into a well-defined process. We are removing unnecessary lessons, moving supplementary material to the Media Library and the discussion forum, and aligning everything behind what really matters: taking action.This means less time preparing and setting things up, and more time working directly with notes. It means the biggest insights come much sooner, get quickly demonstrated via hands-on exercises, and then followed by implementation with our support.

2. Revamped course content

We’re not just rearranging material, we’re recreating it. Most of the videos in the course date from version 5. It’s now time to rerecord the main lessons to fit the new methodology, to apply the feedback we’ve received, and to simplify the message to just the essentials.

3. Mentor-led Student Groups

In cohort 10 we introduced Alumni Mentors – previous graduates of the course who we recruited, trained, and supported in helping students through challenges and obstacles. AMs led Student Groups, which we also introduced for the first time to give people a smaller, more intimate space to collaborate and get feedback.

That experiment was such a phenomenal success that it’s completely reshaped my view of how this program will evolve in the future. I can only connect with so many students, and my definition of success is only one of many. Mentors provide not only a guiding hand, but alternatives to what it means to “build a Second Brain.”

We are moving full speed ahead to make Mentors the central part of the program. We’re recruiting 20 of the highest-caliber alumni we can, doubling the amount of training they receive, paying them for their time, and asking them to each lead a breakout session once per week for the 5 weeks of the course.

Which means that in addition to the 10 live sessions and 8 Premium coaching calls with me, Mentors will be leading 100 breakout sessions on every topic imaginable. There will be workshops on how to build a Second Brain in Notion, Roam, OneNote, and many other tools. Workshops will dive deep on every aspect of knowledge management, delivered by people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

BASB is becoming less like a course and more like a global conference: I deliver the keynote address, but everyone knows the real magic is in the breakout sessions where you can get into the details. Not to mention the afterparties and conversations in the hallways where you get to meet fascinating people.

Each of the Student Groups will meet each week, but you can opt in or out of any group at any time. It will be like Coachella or Burning Man – the point isn’t to “consume” everything. It’s to dive headfirst into one of the most mind-bending and thrilling experiences of your life, and be transformed as a result.

4. Bonus Office Hours

Last cohort I stayed on for 30 minutes after each live session to answer questions, and that ended up being one of the most popular parts. So this time we’re making it official. This adds 5 hours of open Q&A time with me to the course. These calls are also recorded and posted to the curriculum for anyone who can’t attend live.

5. Circle community-building

In the last edition we launched Circle, a next-generation online discussion forum. It has had a profound impact on the community-building aspect of the course. It is far more modern, user-friendly, interactive, and muti-faceted than any other platform out there, and we are making it the home of our student community.

[image error]

For this round, Circle has added two crucial features that will greatly accelerate community-building.We’ve realized that one of the biggest benefits of the program is the people you meet. We’ve seen many friendships, collaborations, and even businesses come out of these cohorts. One day I’m convinced we’ll see a marriage.

The first is direct messaging – you can now privately message anyone in the course, past or future, without needing their email address. We encourage you to schedule extra calls, work on your projects together, and get to know each other beyond the 5 weeks.

The second is Interest Groups – students can now create new “channels” within the community for any topic or interest imaginable, without permission from an admin, and anyone can join them. Here is a small selection of the nearly 100 groups that have been created so far by students:

#Music Producers#Vipassana and BASB#中文 (Chinese students)#Memes#BASB Brasil#Show your system#Android#UX and Product Design#Paper People#investment research6. BASB Knowledge Base

Over time we’ve developed proven answers to many of the most common questions people have in building their Second Brain. Instead of answering them again and again, we’re taking the knowledge management approach and documenting them all in one place.

[image error]
7. Three new Media LibrariesThat place is the BASB Knowledge Base, and it is our “shared brain” for all the most common questions and challenges that our students face. We will share it on day 1, so we can all move as fast as possible toward the unexplored frontier.

We’ve expanded the “Media Library” part of the course, which every student gets access to. It provides a place for us to add valuable but optional content – demos of common capture tools, examples of how to summarize different kinds of content, real-world case studies on the strategies we teach – in a way that doesn’t make the core curriculum too overwhelming.

Since the last cohort we’ve added 3 new libraries: the Capture Library, the Summarization Library, and the Workflow Strategies library. Each one contains short videos, each one demonstrating a technique or example for easy reference.

8. BASB Welcome Week

We’ve added a full week between enrollment closing (on Aug. 24) and the kickoff on Aug. 31. This is to give everyone a chance to get ready, understand how the course itself works, confirm the schedule, and prepare for success.

We’ve also added a new workshop to Welcome Week to help people pick the best note-taking app for their Second Brain. We’ve compiled everything we’ve learned from watching nearly 2,000 graduates go through that process, and have finally come up with a simple framework for making that pivotal decision.

9. Premium Calls

The Premium Edition coaching calls from the last cohort were a smashing success, providing a much smaller, more intimate space for me to work directly with students. So we’re adding more of them. I will be hosting 8 hour-long coaching calls this time, and they will be scheduled on Thursday evenings and Friday mornings so students from any time zone can attend at least one of them each week.

Premium coaching calls are available only to new students joining cohort 11 for the first time, but the recordings will be posted to the Media Library for all past Premium Edition students to watch.

10. Capstone Day

Last time we introduced Student Spotlights – in every takeaway email I highlighted at least one student achievement, such as a new blog post, tweetstorm, website, podcast interview, forum post, etc. We strongly recommend that students not just passively consume the ideas, but actively put them to use and create something new out of the information they have in their notes.

It was such a success that we’re adding a whole new event – Capstone Day. At the end of the program, students will have the chance to present what they’ve created to the whole group. We are constantly amazed at the creativity that comes out of student projects, and are proud to support them.

Those are the 10 biggest changes we’re making. And of course, we’ll continue to do everything that has worked well so far, including onboarding calls with our Course Manager Will Mannon, a two-week implementation period following the end of the live sessions, and a scholarship program that last time provided nearly 70 students with need-based access to the program. More info on that coming soon.

Tiago

P.S. If you like what you’ve read and want to join us , we’re opening enrollment on August 17. We’ve just posted the full schedule on the BASB website. Check it out, and if you can join us, I’d love to see you!

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Introducing Forte Shelter

We are proud to announce Forte Shelter – turnkey, COVID-resistant dwellings and home offices made out of shipping containers and delivered straight to your door.

Forte Shelter is a home-building company based in Redlands, CA founded by my brother Lucas Forte. We are teaming up to produce ADUs as an elegant, affordable housing solution for anyone seeking to add a new dwelling or home office to their property.

Our container homes are multi-functional, which means that in addition to dwellings and home offices, they can also serve as weekend or vacation homes, guest homes for family or visitors, workshops or studios, or rental units to produce extra income.

Enter your email address below to find out more, join a live Q&A, and have the first chance to join our waitlist.

What are container homes?

Container homes are independent, multi-functional dwellings made out of standard shipping containers. When converted into ADUs, or “Accessory Dwelling Units,” they are designed to provide everything a person might need to live and work productively for many years.

How containers change construction

We’ve been building homes in the United States the same way for decades.

To build a conventional home, thousands of individual pieces of building material have to be brought together on site. There they are mechanically assembled one piece at a time, requiring extensive coordination and customization which produces a lot of waste.

This is akin to building an entire factory, which will be used only once and then disassembled. Construction plans are developed across a large team of professionals to never be used again. It is terribly inefficient, expensive, and wasteful, all of which shows up in a cost for the home that is far higher than it needs to be.

Innovation happens slowly in the home-building industry. Changes have to be made throughout the entire supply chain – not only with the builders but with transportation methods, designers, structural engineers, architects, and tradespeople. For this reason, the whole process looks much the same as it did half a century ago.

With container homes, we start with a container as the structural component. These containers are made according to precise standards, and are available in the millions around the world. With this starting point, the rest of the work can proceed much more efficiently, lowering costs while maintaining the highest standards.

Who is behind Forte Shelter?

Forte Shelter is an independent company founded by Lucas Forte and based in Redlands, CA. Lucas has worked on more than 50 homes over 10 years in the construction management industry.

As the Project Manager or Superintendent for projects totaling as much as $10 million in construction costs for a single property, he has broad experience in numerous aspects of the industry:

Roles at multiple highly regarded Southern California developers, both conventional and modular, including Dugally Oberfeld, Dvele, and Connect Homes.Managed teams of up to 50 people on a single construction site, regularly coordinating designers, engineers, building departments, subcontractors, vendors, and in-house personnel.Worked directly with clients including building the personal residences for heads of multinational corporationsManaged construction of hillside foundations, basement foundations in bedrock, and Passivhaus buildsManaged high-speed factory assembly lines in coordination with various modular home builders.

Lucas is applying his knowledge and expertise to produce a new line of container homes as part of Forte Shelter. I am helping him tell his story and recruit the first customers for this new generation of accessory dwelling units.

What are the benefits of container homes?

There are many reasons that container homes are not just up to par with conventional homes, but in some ways actually superior. They are:

Durable: virtually impervious to wind, water, earthquake, fire, pests, and mold due to strong steel constructionTurnkey: all appliances and features arrive ready to be used, with no setup or installation required by the homeownerAffordable: more affordable than conventional homes due to the efficiency of the build processEcological: make use of a widely available resource, with more than 1 million containers abandoned in the U.S. alone, which means the carbon footprint is minimalTransportable: built to move with a stable structure, containers can be transported long distances on flat-bed trucks and no special permits requiredSecure: built out of reinforced steel with welded edges and joints, containers are naturally highly secureEasily serviceable: containers are far simpler than conventional homes, allowing you to easily understand what needs to be repaired and how to do itQuickly assembled: because most of the home is built off-site, the final installation requires a small footprint and is quiet and unobtrusiveThe Forte Shelter Design Philosophy

Forte Shelter is a small, family-owned business with a deep design philosophy at its roots.

This philosophy has emerged from Lucas’ hands-on experience leading crews putting hammer to nail, and can be summarized with the observation that “Design can create or solve all your problems.”

When you have a well-designed home, your home works for you instead of against you. Every detail of construction is thoroughly tested and refined so that the home lasts for decades. Maintenance is minimal and easy to perform. Every aspect of the design works together to enable a lifestyle of balance and simplicity.

The Forte Shelter philosophy is to design construction details and convey instructions in such a way that each tradesman can focus their attention completely on the task at hand. By shielding them from vague instructions and constant changes, we can leverage their skill and artistry while keeping efficiency high and costs low. Lucas has seen time and again how standardization leads to proven, time-tested construction methods that can be relied on and optimized.

Aligned with this philosophy, Forte Shelter uses standard, widely available materials with no lead time. This allows construction to move quickly without waiting on custom parts.

The thought and consideration that goes into the initial design of these container homes has benefits at every subsequent stage. Tradespeople don’t have to reference blueprints as often. The number of steps and layers is minimized. Labor costs are kept in check, errors are reduced, and quality is maintained at every stage.

If you want to learn more, join a live Q&A, and have the first chance to join our waitlist, please enter your email address below.

Disclaimer: Forte Labs, LLC is not legally affiliated with Forte Shelter and does not inspect, authorize, or otherwise control any of Forte Shelter’s products or services.

Frequently asked questions

What is the price?
To be announced. Please join our email list to be the first to know.

 Where do we sell and ship to?

We are currently only serving customers in the continental U.S.

Do I have to own or lease land where this will be installed? 
Yes.

How long does it take to build?
12 weeks. 

Do I have to pay for delivery?
Yes. Transport cost is generally $4-8 per mile.

How do I get the local permitting?
Permits are not always required, but we can provide CA state-approved plans for your container home. You are responsible for the permitting process. Permitted projects will have additional costs for inspections, certifications, etc.

Is there a warranty?
Yes, we offer a 2-year warranty.

How many square feet is the unit?
160 square feet (8’ x 20’).

How tall are the units? 
9’6” tall.

How wide are the units?
8’4” wide.

Does Forte Shelter have any certifications? 
We are a California-licensed general building contractor, #1000576.

What is the final weight of the unit once complete? 
Each container weighs 12,000–15,000 lbs. 

What does it take to move it? 
Flat-bed truck, and a crane in certain situations.

Is the unit certified or inspected by third parties? 
We can arrange state inspections if desired.

What utilities are needed?
Water, electricity, and waste.

Are appliances and furniture provided? 
We provide electric appliances, a wall-mounted desk, bathroom fixtures, flat screen TV, and Nest Hub smart display with Google Assistant. Full list of features to be announced.

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Introducing Building a Second Brain 11: Idea Inception

I recently rewatched Inception, the blockbuster film directed by Christopher Nolan.

The film takes place in a world where “dream sharing” technology has been developed by the military for training purposes.

By hooking a group of people up to a special device and putting them to sleep at the same time, a team of dream invaders can enter a “subject’s” dream together.

Usually this technology is used to steal secrets – the details of an impending business deal, or valuable trade secrets.

But there is another way to use it. It’s called inception.

Inception is when an idea is placed in someone’s mind through a dream, in such a way that they think it’s their own.

The lead character Dominick Cobb, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, explains why it’s so difficult:

“If you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination. You need the simplest version of the idea – the one that will grow naturally in the subject’s mind. A subtle art.”

Inception is also a risky, dangerous feat. His colleague Arthur, who is more down-to-earth and responsible, doesn’t even believe it’s possible:

“The subject’s mind can always trace the genesis of the idea. True inspiration is impossible to fake.”

In one of the most remarkable scenes in recent film history, Cobb sits at a quaint Paris cafe with Ariadne, an architecture student he’s recruited to design the dream worlds they’ll be inhabiting. He explains how dream-sharing works with a demonstration.

Here’s the complete 4-minute scene on YouTube (the exact quote below starts at 0:57):

Here’s the key dialogue:

COBB: Our dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake we realize things were strange.

ARIADNE: But all the textures of real life – the stone, the fabric… cars… people… your mind can’t create all this.

COBB: It does. Every time you dream. Let me ask you a question: You never remember the beginning of your dreams, do you? You just turn up in the middle of what’s going on.

ARIADNE: I guess.

COBB: So… how did we end up at this restaurant?”

That last question sends chills down my spine every time I watch it.

Think about every idea or inspiration you’ve ever had – where did it come from? Can you pinpoint the exact moment it arrived? Or the exact source? Yet you also have the feeling that it came from somewhere, don’t you?

In dreams, you always get dropped right into the middle of the dream. The beginning feels like it’s there, but you can never quite remember it.

I think the same is true in our own lives. Think about it: How did you end up with this job, or career, or business? How did you end up with this routine, in this house, in this neighborhood? How did you end up with your particular beliefs and interests and goals? How did the very thoughts you’re thinking at this very moment arise?

It’s hard to say exactly, isn’t it?

The story follows Ariadne as she learns the art of dream architecture.

She learns how to create small details that fool the mind into believing the dream is real. How to create pathways that loop back onto themselves so the dreamer never reaches a dead-end. How to place useful objects they will need, like cars and tools, into the dream so they’ll be available later.

This kind of technology may seem like a far-flung fantasy or science fiction, but it is in fact more real than ever. Although we can’t quite hack our dreams yet, we can reengineer almost every other aspect of our waking existence.

With modern technology, we can architect the flows of information we surround ourselves with. We can change the walls and the floors and every detail of our mental environment.

Why would we want to do that? Because creativity is inception.

We need new ideas on a constant basis. We need new information to make sense of our environment, to adapt and respond, and to have breakthroughs in the challenges we face.

Yet these ideas can’t just be given to us. We can’t just search for them on Google or read them in a book. Our mind won’t accept wholesale an idea from the outside. It has to believe the idea is its own.

In the film, the subconscious mind of the subject – a mogul named Fischer – is equipped with “dream defense training.” His mind has been conditioned to protect itself with subconscious projections, which take the form of armed gunmen who attack any outsider.

Our minds also have such self-protective conditioning.

They take the form of doubts – I’m not smart enough, not original enough, not dedicated enough.

They take the form of self-criticism – I’m such a screw up, such a loser.

They take the form of cynicism – the world is out to get me. There’s no use, so why even try?

They take the form of relentless “shoulds” – I should work on that side project, and really ought to start that business I’ve been talking about forever.

Our brain does not want to accept new ideas that challenge what we currently believe. It will warp and twist itself into every kind of shape to avoid it.

Our brain does not want to accept new possibilities for what life could be like. We don’t want to hope, because then we run the risk of being disappointed.

As Mal, Cobb’s ex-wife and subconscious tormenter, says, “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”

In the film as in real life, there is an adventure awaiting for anyone willing to change their minds.

Every time Cobb’s team gets stuck, they have one way forward: go deeper. They create another dream within the dream, descending to an even deeper, more subconscious layer. This gives them more time and more influence, but requires a new level of skill to navigate.

The very same is true in the real world.

In every moment, we have the choice to go deeper. To not accept our reality as given. To shift our attention to a more fundamental layer where we have more influence. As in the film, the ideas we discover there can bubble up to higher levels of consciousness and profoundly shape our future.

We don’t have to accept the reality we are faced with when we wake up each morning. Everything we see around us was decided by someone at some point, which means it’s all subject to change.

Reality is just information. Information flowing in through your senses. Information circulating between different lobes of your brain. Information is something we now have control over. We can collect it, distill it into knowledge and even wisdom, and then deploy what we know toward any goal we desire.

Would you believe that process could be made predictable, reliable, and even enjoyable? Could you imagine if knowledge management was just one more of the countless skills you’ve mastered in your life, like riding a bike or tying your shoes?

True inspiration may be impossible to fake, but it can be cultivated on purpose. We may feel like we’ve been dropped right into the middle of a life that we didn’t choose, but it is still subject to change.

Every change starts with an inception – an encounter with an idea from the outside, that we integrate so deep into our thinking that it becomes our own.

Join the Architects

In a few weeks we kick off the eleventh edition of our online course Building a Second Brain. Enrollment will be open from August 17 to 24, and the course will run for 5 weeks from August 31 to September 30.

My nickname for this cohort is “The Architects.”

Together we will learn the subtle art of idea inception. I will teach you the magic of how to shape the flows of information streaming past you. You’ll join more than 1,000 brilliant people from around the world in mastering the skill of knowledge management.

Knowledge is the master key to the reality we see around us. Like an underlying software code, there is a C.O.D.E. to unlocking the power of knowledge – Capture, Organize, Distill, and Express. These four skills are absolutely critical for navigating a world defined by the abundance of information.

Sign up below to follow the journey of how we are architecting every last detail of the learning environment to maximize the success of our students.

Over the next month, I’ll share with you the main improvements we’ve made, answers to the most frequently asked questions, and some of the results that past graduates have achieved. Plus the complete schedule and invitations to free workshops we’ll be hosting in the coming weeks.

I invite you to become part of the Architects and find out what’s possible when you have the world of ideas at your fingertips.

Tiago

The post Introducing Building a Second Brain 11: Idea Inception appeared first on Forte Labs.

Feminine Energy: What Productivity is Missing

There is no perfect algorithm that will tell you how to maximize your time for the things you most care about. You need to rely on your intuition.

You need self-awareness to know what is truly important and understand what is actually stopping you from getting something done. But this perspective is often missing because productivity thought leaders focus on the technical and often ignore the intangible underlying feelings, fears, and desires.

Productivity is not about optimizing every aspect of your life or being well-versed on the latest and most flashy new app. The point of productivity is to do what brings you pleasure and to have more freedom.

We aren’t machines. We are humans.

To be productive, we all need to balance the logical, technical side with the emotional, intuitive side. These can be understood as masculine and feminine energies. I define masculine-energy as associated with logic, order, and the technical, whereas feminine energy is associated with intuition, self-awareness, and creativity.

Another way we can think about this is using the left-side and right-side of the brain. Most productivity advice lies on the masculine side, but you need the yin and yang balance between both these energies. No matter where on the gender spectrum you fall, we all can tap into our masculine and feminine energies.

Throughout history and cultures, we’ve divided many things along the gender spectrum.

The urban theory book The Sphinx in the City discusses the split between city and nature. The author Elizabeth Wilson discusses how nature is seen as female (“mother nature”) while cities are an attempt for man to instill order and control the chaos of nature.

In man’s attempt to control and build utopias, they destroy what is most intoxicating about cities: the randomness, the ambiguity, the serendipity. This is what happens when we try to over-architect our productivity systems. We lose the magical and mystical. We crowd out the very space that allows for flow, magic, and creativity to arise.

Wilson writes, “…Urban life is actually based on this perpetual struggle between rigid routinised order and pleasurable anarchy, the male-female dichotomy.” Our productivity systems have this same struggle. But rather than fighting for the masculine order and logical side to win, we need to appreciate and find the balance with feminine-based productivity.

I think masculine-based productivity is the dominant framework because most productivity thought leaders are men, and the tech community is at the center of developing and promoting productivity approaches.

Also, logical/technical approaches are easier to define. It’s easier to sell a course on “How to develop your task management system” versus “How to tap into your intuition.” There are plenty of women productivity thought leaders and feminine-centered approaches, but often they aren’t categorized under “productivity” but fall instead under organizing or self-care.

I’m also not saying that your gender determines how you work. I know plenty of women-identifying people who are super logical and technical, and I know plenty of male-identifying people who are self-aware and trust their intuition. When we can recognize our default tendency, we can tap into the other side of the spectrum to enhance what we are trying to achieve.

As an artist, I had to work hard to develop my structured, action-oriented muscles when I got my first project management job. When I first met my future husband Tiago, he recommended I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done. We then went on to create Forte Labs.

Over the years, as he’s helped me become more organized and get more done, I’ve helped him get more in tune with his emotions and body. We are each other’s yin and yang. You can see Tiago’s progression through his blog posts, starting with technical how-to’s and over time leading to subjects like healing from trauma.

My provocation is for you to think about where on the spectrum you fall and work towards balancing your logical technical side with your intuitive, emotional, creative side. If you struggle with structure and taking action, tap into some masculine-centered approaches. If you struggle with trusting your intuition and creativity, tap into some female-centered approaches.

The feminine-centered approaches are foundational to productivity because they help you figure out where you want to go and what is stopping you.

Masculine-Centered Approaches
Feminine-Centered Approaches


Task manager
Journaling


Databases
Morning Pages


Time-tracking
Meditation


Tagging
Drawing


Sprints
Rituals


OKRs
Visioning


Self-control
Body awareness

The goal of balancing these two sides is not just to maximize your time, but to give you maximum pleasure in life.

If your productivity system feels oppressive and you can’t keep up with maintaining it, it’s too rigid. If you aren’t clear on what truly matters to you, then it doesn’t matter how productive you are. If you don’t allow for some chaotic randomness to arise in your life, you might miss out on some genius insights. If you can’t determine your priorities without someone else telling you, then you need to learn how to trust your intuition. If you are too hard on yourself for not getting as much done as you would like, you need to work on letting go and having more playfulness.

Balancing your female and male energies will liberate you and your time to focus on the things that truly matter for a joyous life.

To hear more from Lauren on productivity, public health, urban design, and more, subscribe to her newsletter or follow her on Twitter @TheLaurenValdez

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The post Feminine Energy: What Productivity is Missing appeared first on Forte Labs.

Time Budgeting: What I’ve Learned from Doing 364 Weekly Reviews

I rage quit my consulting job in June of 2013.

I had had enough of the consulting world. Enough of the overwork and burnout, enough of the lack of guidance and support, and enough of working on other people’s goals instead of my own.

A couple weeks later, on my first day newly unemployed, I woke up in my tiny apartment with a terrifying thought: "I’m all on my own."

For the first time I could remember, there was no company or school or community that was my default “place to go” each day. It felt like being lost in a dark forest where no one would ever find me. Like being plunged into ice cold water far out to sea, far from any solid land to stand on.

That was the moment I decided I needed structure if I was going to make it. I needed a routine that would carry me through the day and tell me what to do and when.

I was pacing around my tiny apartment and pondering this problem when a blue-and-orange book cover on my bookshelf caught my eye. It was the original edition of Getting Things Done, the classic book on personal productivity by David Allen. I had read it a couple months before, and even ran a book club with my colleagues to discuss its teachings.

I flipped open to my highlights, and quickly found this quote: “The Weekly Review is the master key to your productivity.”

Those are powerful, hard-to-ignore words.

I decided that day that my Weekly Review would be the cornerstone of my life. It has been the steady rudder keeping me on course through the howling winds of unemployment, the raging storms of a freelancing career, and eventually, the Category 5 hurricane known as entrepreneurship.

My Weekly Review has evolved dramatically in the 7 years since then. At times it has been long and elaborate, taking several hours. At other times, it has been short and concise, taking only minutes. It is like a living organism, evolving to meet my needs in each chapter of my life.

Every discipline has a “basic move” at its core. Chefs have basic knife skills. Tennis has the forearm swing. Martial arts have the straight punch.

These moves are basic, but have infinite depth. You can improve them endlessly, but never quite perfect them. They are the building blocks that must be mastered before you can ascend to higher forms.

Like the famous “wax on, wax off” of Karate Kid fame, you have to humble yourself with these foundational moves before you can advance.

The Weekly Review is the “basic move” of personal productivity. It is the foundational building block out of which all other workflows are built. It keeps the most important system of all – you – running smoothly.

I’ve shared exactly the Weekly Review process I follow each week, in The One-Touch Guide to Doing a Weekly Review. It includes narrated videos of me completing each of the 5 essential steps in real time:

Email
Calendar
Desktop/Downloads
Notes
Tasks

But lying beneath the checklists, there are universal principles. Principles that apply regardless of which app you use, which platform you’re on, or even whether you use software at all.

Those principles snapped into view for me when I read the personal finance book You Need a Budget by Jesse Mecham (here’s my members-only summary). Managing money has striking parallels to managing time, and shares many of the very same principles.

Here are the 6 most powerful principles of time budgeting I’ve learned from completing my own Weekly Review approximately 364 times over the last 7 years.

Move quickly, touch lightly
Age your tasks
Change the plan frequently
Manage what exists
Make tradeoffs visible
Play with the rules

Move quickly, touch lightly

Several years after my previous job, I worked briefly with a small consulting firm founded by a mentor of mine. They built technology solutions for large companies, solving their business problems with customized software.

At the time, I took on every new task the same way: by throwing everything I had at it. I’d dive in headfirst, putting in unlimited hours, even forgetting to eat and sleep, until it was done.

I considered this a superpower, and performed it with pride. It had served me well in the first years of my career. But increasingly, my mentor saw, it was holding me back. I was getting sucked into each new thing as if it was my sole mission in life, and in the process neglecting other, potentially more fruitful opportunities.

My mentor’s refrain for me became, “Move quickly, touch lightly.” She wanted me to be more strategic, more opportunistic. As a small firm we had to keep multiple projects in flight, and all the clients happy. We couldn’t afford to put all our eggs in one basket. We needed to stay agile and flexible as the market quickly shifted around us.

This is the opposite of most productivity advice about “deep work.” Deep focus is the god of personal productivity.

Yes, it is important to learn how to focus deeply – you’re never going to get the plane off the ground without a “heavy lift” of focus. But sometimes focus is a false god.

Once you’re in the air, you need something different. More like a “cruise control mode,” making small adjustments to the controls while allowing your systems to do most of the work for you. Otherwise, you’re going to exhaust yourself before you’ve gotten to the really interesting destinations.

The principle of “moving quickly and touching lightly” manifests itself in many different ways.

It means clearing your email inbox without getting sucked into taking action on every single email as I describe in my article One-Touch to Inbox Zero.

At each stage of my Weekly Review, I’m not taking action. I’m only deciding which action needs to be taken. A subtle, but all-important difference. If you stick to deciding only what needs to be done, without doing it yet, there’s no way your review can take more than 30-45 minutes.

To move quickly and touch lightly is to move at the speed of change. It means to keep multiple balls in the air and multiple plates spinning, because you never know which of them will pay off. And crucially, using external systems to track those balls and those plates, not your own brain.

It is impossible to move quickly or touch lightly if your mind is burdened with inane details.

It means constantly asking “What is the minimum I can do?” and “How long can I wait before acting?” You keep your options open, build up reserves of energy and knowledge and trust, and when that one golden opportunity opens up, only then do you strike at it with everything you have.

Age your tasks

There is an important idea in personal finance, that you should “age” your money.

Aging your money means that you want as much time as possible to pass from the day a dollar enters your checking account, to that dollar being spent.

The “age” of your money is important because it represents your buffer between income and expenses. If you only have one week of buffer (i.e. your age of money is only 7 days), it means that if you get fired tomorrow, you’ll only have one week before you start going hungry. Your age of money is your real-time financial reserve, measured in terms of time.

The same principle applies to your To Do list. Just as you age our money, you should age your to do’s. In other words, you want as much time as possible to pass from the time a task gets added to your To Do list, to it being completed.

This idea feels deeply counter-intuitive to most people. Shouldn’t we try to execute our tasks as soon as possible? If you want to be efficient, yes. But if you want to be strategic, no. What are the chances that the task landing in front of you this very moment is the most important thing you could be doing right now? Practically nil.

You have to remember that tasks don’t inherently matter – only the results they produce do. If you could produce the exact same results by completing only half as many tasks, wouldn’t you? That would mean you’re achieving the same outputs with half the inputs. You’re realizing the same return with half the investment. By that measure, you’ve become twice as productive by doing half as much work!

Any given task is avoidable. Rarely does an entire project or goal revolve around a single task. There are always many ways to skin a cat. You have to use your creativity not just to complete each task as efficiently as possible, but to question whether it’s really necessary in the first place.

The key mental shift that is necessary here is to reframe a task from an obligation to an option. If tasks are all obligations, you want to keep your To Do list as lean as possible. Every item that gets added to it feels like another burden added to an already backbreaking workload.

But if you think of your tasks as options, that changes everything. Suddenly, you want as many as possible. More options means more choices.

Framing your tasks as potential options means that the larger your To Do list grows, the more freedom you have. Your freedom to do what you feel like doing, to do what aligns with your energy and motivation. You gain the ability to step back from the minute-to-minute demands, look for patterns across your full range of tasks, and choose groups of to do’s that are strategically aligned with each other.

This is how you work half as much and produce twice the results. It is how you kill two birds (or even three) with one stone. What is the task that makes two other tasks unnecessary?

But you can’t do any of this if you’re completing every task just as it arrives. You have to age your tasks.

Change the plan frequently

A To Do list is a plan. It is a plan of action, designed to achieve certain results within a certain timeframe.

Most people take one of two approaches to making this plan: they either meticulously prioritize their To Do list, and then stick to it religiously no matter what happens; or they throw caution to the wind and make no plan of any kind, spending their days reacting to one emergency after another.

But there is a middle ground: to use your plan as a guide to real-time decision making.

It’s Monday morning, and you might make a plan for what you want to accomplish this week. But that is only a forecast or prediction. It doesn’t take into account the actual weather when that day arrives.

Instead of resisting change and trying to execute the plan as designed, you should get good at adapting the plan. Expect that the plan will change, and design it in the first place so that it’s as easy to change as possible.

Implicit in this approach is that there is no such thing as failure, only reprioritization. Reprioritization isn’t something to be avoided – it is something you should welcome.

There’s another parallel to personal budgeting here. When you make your budget at the beginning of the month, there’s no way for you to possibly know every expense that will pop up during the month. There are always unwelcome surprises – a flat tire, a kid’s last-minute school project, an emergency visit from the plumber.

That’s just life. Things don’t go according to plan. But there’s no problem in rerouting funds from one category to cover these surprise expenses. That’s that the budget is for! It’s not there to force you to stick to the original plan in the face of new information. It’s designed to enable real-time changes in your budgeting priorities, not prevent them.

The same is true of your To Do list. If you don’t get to the 3 most important tasks you identified for today, what does that mean? You can choose to interpret it not as a reflection of you – your character, motivation, or dedication – but as merely a signal from your environment.

The environment is telling you that the plan was not in accordance with reality. Which means your thinking was not in accordance with reality. Which means you have an opportunity to change your thinking to better match the facts.

Manage what exists

It is tempting when it comes to our To Do list to focus our attention on an imaginary future.

We can so easily get caught up in future plans, in grand visions, in theoretical scenarios about what could/should/would happen. But if you treat productivity as a way to improve your relationship with reality, it becomes very clear that we have to focus our attention instead on “managing what exists.”

Instead of all the tasks you will or should do, how about the ones you’ve already started but not finished? How about following up on that thread you started, wrapping up the final stages of the last project you worked on, or gathering the random papers sitting on your desk right now?

The truth is, the future doesn’t exist. At least not yet. It might turn out one way or another. But your control over that future is rooted in the here and now. If you can’t manage the work-in-process that exists now, what makes you think you will be successful in managing the work yet to come?

Managing what exists doesn’t seem as exciting as envisioning a fanciful future. It involves a lot of gathering, collecting, reviewing, processing, prioritizing...not exactly most people’s idea of an exhilarating time.

But when you commit to managing the work that already exists, a curious thing happens. The part of your mind that was occupied just keeping track of that work gets freed up. The stress and anxiety of not quite knowing how much is actually on your plate is relieved. Paradoxically, shifting the time horizon of your planning closer to the present creates the space you need to imagine the future you want to create.

When you manage what exists now, your mental map of the world gets just a little more accurate. You see more clearly how that action you took weeks ago produced the situation you have now. You see how certain decisions led to a certain outcome. You close the feedback loop between the past and the present, which makes your predictions about the future that much more accurate.

Make tradeoffs visible

A key feature of the Weekly Review is that it makes the tradeoffs we are making visible.

In personal budgeting, the key moment is when you move funds from one category to another. A few months ago we went over our “Shopping” budget, and I had to move funds from “Home down payment” to cover it. The pain of that moment – the twinge of loss as our dream of owning a home got pushed a tiny bit further into the future – is what caused us to change our behavior.

The purpose of a budget is not to constrain us – it is to make the consequences of our financial decisions clearly visible. We need to be faced with the tradeoffs that our choices are forcing upon us. Otherwise, those tradeoffs get made silently and unconsciously in the background, leading us inexorably toward a future we may not necessarily want.

The same is true of productivity. The key moments are those when we decide to do one task over another. The constraints of time, energy, and resources force us to make those decisions, and thank goodness they do.

Because in such moments, we discover what truly matters. We realize that we have priorities and values that matter deeply to us. Often they only become clear in moments of crisis, when one thing needs to be sacrificed for another to succeed. Without tradeoffs, we would take on everything, say yes to everything, never having to face the choices that define who we are.

What is critical is that you see that tradeoff being made. You need to know where the money is coming from that went to pay for those school supplies. You need to know what it will cost you – not just in financial terms but in terms of opportunity cost – if you decide to go out for that nice dinner tonight.

Likewise, it is critical to see the tradeoffs you are making with your priorities. What won’t get done because you made a certain decision about what to work on next? What is it costing you? Are you willing to pay those costs?

Play with the rules

One of the unmistakable signs of mastery in any craft is “playing with the rules.”

When you’re a beginner, it takes a long time to learn the rules in the first place. You might spend months or even years learning your scales on the piano, making free throws on the basketball court, or rigging a sailboat.

But once you’ve mastered these rules, you start to see that no rule is absolute. Every rule is one manifestation of an underlying principle. And principles always have more than one way they can be manifested.

And that’s how we get someone like Dick Fosbury, who upended decades of tradition by doing the high jump backwards instead of forwards in the 1968 Olympics. He understood that the goal was only to get over the bar, and invented a new way to do so that ended up revolutionizing the sport.

It is easy to see all these productivity systems and rules as rigid obligations. To think that the goal is strict conformity. In the beginning they might seem that way. But as your practice evolves, the nature of these rules starts to change.

They become like a carpenter’s tools, able to craft any experience, state of mind, or result that you want. You start to see that you can discard some of them, reinvent others, and make up completely new rules to suit your goals.

Watching the videos of me completing my Weekly Review, some people commented that I seemed to be able to identify each next action within seconds. That’s no accident. It’s the result of deliberate practice, through which I’ve developed a series of rules for myself.

For example, I have rules that I’m NOT allowed to:

Keep tasks in my head – I have to write them down as soon as I notice them (known as the “Capture Habit”)
Create tasks that don’t have a “physical next action” (i.e. they can’t be “thinking about,” “deciding,” or “considering”)
Create tasks to “read” or “watch” things (those should be saved in Instapaper, my Read Later app)
Create tasks that take less than two minutes to complete (the “2-Minute Rule”)
Put more than 10 tasks on my “Today list” (since I know that my long-term average is 8 tasks completed per day, and much more than that just overwhelms me)
Mark a task as “high priority” if I can’t take action on it (for example, if I’m waiting on someone else to take an action first)
Create a task without adding the critical piece of information required to take action on it (such as a phone number, email address, or link)
Do light, easy tasks in the morning (which is reserved for deep work)

These rules work for me, but they may or may not work for you. When you learn to play with the rules, the Weekly Review becomes a personalized, tremendously rewarding activity. Because no single aspect of it is absolutely required, you are free to customize it as your heart desires.

What happens if I drop this item from my checklist? What goes wrong in my world if I do? What if I substitute it with a different action? What happens if I change the order? What happens if I combine two of them? How often does each item need to be performed to be effective? Which parts are essential and which are optional? What can be automated or outsourced?

These are the questions of an experimenter, of a scientist. Your subject is your own psychology, and it is a lifelong quest to understand it.

I often see people on an endless search for the “perfect” productivity system. A mythical app that will somehow organize every bit of information, decide all their priorities, and just “tell them what to do.”

But I hope that after reading this, you understand why that’s not only impossible, it’s not even desirable.

There is at least as much creativity in deciding what your work is, as in doing it. There is as much power in setting intentions, as in executing on them. Instead of giving over control of our lives to our systems, we need to use those systems to make decisions faster, more intuitively, and more decisively.

It is our calling to create the constraints that our systems lack. They will never completely do it for us. There will always be a need for our priorities, for our desires. Luckily, the process of creating those constraints is itself a wonderful quest to understand ourselves more deeply.

It is easy to see all these productivity systems and rules as rigid obligations. To think that the goal is strict conformity. In the beginning they might seem that way. But as your practice evolves, the nature of these rules starts to change.

They become like a carpenter’s tools, able to craft any experience, state of mind, or result that you want. You start to see that you can discard some of them, reinvent others, and make up completely new rules to suit your goals.

Watching the videos of me completing my Weekly Review, some people commented that I seemed to be able to identify each next action within seconds. That’s no accident. It’s the result of deliberate practice, through which I’ve developed a series of rules for myself.

For example, I have rules that I’m NOT allowed to:

Keep tasks in my head – I have to write them down as soon as I notice them (known as the “Capture Habit”)
Create tasks that don’t have a “physical next action” (i.e. they can’t be “thinking about,” “deciding,” or “considering”)
Create tasks to “read” or “watch” things (those should be saved in Instapaper, my Read Later app)
Create tasks that take less than two minutes to complete (the “2-Minute Rule”)
Put more than 10 tasks on my “Today list” (since I know that my long-term average is 8 tasks completed per day, and much more than that just overwhelms me)
Mark a task as “high priority” if I can’t take action on it (for example, if I’m waiting on someone else to take an action first)
Create a task without adding the critical piece of information required to take action on it (such as a phone number, email address, or link)
Do light, easy tasks in the morning (which is reserved for deep work)

These rules work for me, but they may or may not work for you. When you learn to play with the rules, the Weekly Review becomes a personalized, tremendously rewarding activity. Because no single aspect of it is absolutely required, you are free to customize it as your heart desires.

What happens if I drop this item from my checklist? What goes wrong in my world if I do? What if I substitute it with a different action? What happens if I change the order? What happens if I combine two of them? How often does each item need to be performed to be effective? Which parts are essential and which are optional? What can be automated or outsourced?

These are the questions of an experimenter, of a scientist. Your subject is your own psychology, and it is a lifelong quest to understand it.

I often see people on an endless search for the “perfect” productivity system. A mythical app that will somehow organize every bit of information, decide all their priorities, and just “tell them what to do.”

But I hope that after reading this, you understand why that’s not only impossible, it’s not even desirable.

There is at least as much creativity in deciding what your work is, as in doing it. There is as much power in setting intentions, as in executing on them. Instead of giving over control of our lives to our systems, we need to use those systems to make decisions faster, more intuitively, and more decisively.

It is our calling to create the constraints that our systems lack. They will never completely do it for us. There will always be a need for our priorities, for our desires. Luckily, the process of creating those constraints is itself a wonderful quest to understand ourselves more deeply.

Subscribe below to receive free weekly emails with our best new content, or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Or become a Praxis member to receive instant access to our full collection of members-only posts.

The post Time Budgeting: What I’ve Learned from Doing 364 Weekly Reviews appeared first on Forte Labs.

Wayne Lacson Forte: On My Way To Me [Documentary Film]

I am unbelievably excited to share with you my first ever documentary film!

For more than a year, I’ve been working on a documentary short about my dad, Wayne Forte. He is a lifelong painter who has been one of the main influences on my ideas about productivity, creativity, and using art for personal growth.

It all started in March of 2019, when he had an exhibition of 30 years of his religious artwork at an art gallery in Hollywood. I was living in Mexico City at the time, but knew that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I decided to fly home knowing that it was unlikely to happen again anytime soon.

From there, it slowly became a project.

If I’m traveling all that way, I thought, I might as well make a short video of the opening night with my smartphone to share with those who couldn’t make it.

And if I’m taking the trouble to film one event, I might as well film a few other interviews while I’m in town and make it into a longer video about my dad’s career as an artist.

I usually advise people to “scale down” their projects – to make them smaller and shorter so that they have a better chance of finishing. But once in a while, an opportunity comes along that is so great you just have to scale UP the project to something bigger and bolder.

I realized that by making this into a video project, I could fulfill a few different goals at once. There’s nothing I love more than killing two or three birds with one stone.

Goal #1: I had long wanted to learn more about making high-quality videos for my business. I’ve watched for years as YouTube has become a cultural phenomenon, smartphone cameras have become professional quality, and video editing software has gotten more and more user-friendly, and have wanted to be a part of the video revolution.

Goal #2: At the same time, I had a personal motivation. My dad had had a cancer scare a couple of years before, and although he is fully recovered, it shocked me with the realization that he wouldn’t be around forever. I had a desire to document his stories and memories for the benefit of my kids who might not have the chance to know him like I did.

Goal #3: I even had a creative motivation! I knew that much of my thinking about the nature of work had its roots in his approach to art, creativity, and life in general. I wanted to better understand how he managed to live a life of creative inspiration while also raising four kids.

With all these motivations at play, and with quite a bit of nervousness, I decided to take on making a short documentary film.

At first glance, this was an absolutely ridiculous project for a novice to commit to.

I had made a few short, casual videos for YouTube, but never anything of this scale and complexity. I didn’t have any special equipment, didn’t know how to use professional editing software, and didn’t understand the first thing about lighting or sound.

But I did have a few tricks up my sleeve: my Second Brain, a system of digital note-taking that I teach in my course Building a Second Brain. As well as all the other productivity techniques and project management tools I had developed over the years. I was curious to see if I could execute this project with quick, light touches alongside my usual work.

It took me 16 months, more than 100 hours of work, and 30 hours of total footage from 4 countries, all compressed down to just 46 minutes…but I did it.

On June 7, my dad’s 70th birthday, I screened the first cut virtually for my family. We met at a coordinated time, watched it together, and then had a wonderful conversation on Zoom about our shared memories, how we experienced them differently, and how much we had experienced together.

It was truly one of the most special and meaningful moments with my family I can remember.

On July 11, 2020, I hosted a virtual film premiere for my audience using YouTube’s Premiere feature, which allowed me to organize a coordinated viewing that anyone could watch on any device from any location, while maintaining some of the shared experience of watching it together.

I’ll soon be sharing a lot about what I learned from the experience. From the gear and software I ended up using, to what I learned about interviewing, to how I planned and managed every aspect of the process using digital notes, to my philosophical insights into the rapidly evolving nature of filmmaking (hint: smartphone cameras as social revolution, reality distortion fields for all, and the world-building potential of multi-media).

But for now, I just want to share the film with you! And of course, get your feedback so I can make it better. This film isn’t just about my dad’s personal memories. It contains some powerful insights into:

What it concretely means to live a life driven by creativity, while upholding your responsibilities and paying the billsHow to maintain numerous interests and hobbies while also going deep into one of themHow a life-long artist thinks about the stages of his artistic career (which all of us now have to do as creatives)What painting has to teach us about other forms of modern creativityHow to work in a way that produces tangible, sellable artifacts as a byproductHow art can be used to explore deep themes of identity, agency, truth, and personal growth

My dad has been an artist since he was 5 years old. Although he often says he uses only 16th century technology in his paintings, in many ways I think he has been living in the future.

Being an “artist” was once an extremely rare kind of lifestyle. But today, all of us are creatives in one sense or another. All of us need to dig deep into sources of creative inspiration on a regular basis. We have a lot to learn from the artistic fields that have been doing that for centuries.

This is also an experiment in how to create a sense of community in the midst of all the crises and change we are facing in the world. I was curious to see whether we could recreate the same anticipation and excitement normally found at a red carpet event, in a virtual screening with people from around the world.

I hope you’ll watch the film, and feel free to share it with anyone who you think might be interested.

Subscribe below to receive free weekly emails with our best new content, or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Or become a Praxis member to receive instant access to our full collection of members-only posts.

The post Wayne Lacson Forte: On My Way To Me [Documentary Film] appeared first on Forte Labs.

Virtual Film Premiere – Wayne Lacson Forte: On My Way To Me

I’m unbelievably excited to unveil my first ever virtual film premiere!

For more than a year I’ve been working on a documentary short film about my dad, Wayne Forte. He is a lifelong painter who has been one of the main influences on my ideas about productivity, creativity, and using art for personal growth.

It all started in March of last year, when he had an exhibition of 30 years of his work at an art gallery in Hollywood. I was living in Mexico City at the time, but knew that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I decided to fly home knowing that it was unlikely to happen again anytime soon.

From there, it slowly became a project.

If I’m going to travel all that way, I thought, I might as well make a short video with my smartphone to share with those who couldn’t make it.

If I’m going to film it, I thought, might as well put some effort into it and do it right.

And finally, if I’m going to film this one event, might as well film some other interviews while I’m in town and make it into a longer video about my dad’s career as an artist.

I usually advise people to “scale down” their projects – to make them smaller and shorter so that they have a better chance of finishing. But once in awhile, an opportunity comes along that is so great you just have to scale UP the project to something bigger and bolder.

I realized that by making this into a video project, I could fulfill a few different goals at once. There’s nothing I love more than killing two or three birds with one stone.

Goal #1: I had long wanted to learn more about making high-quality videos for my business. I’ve watched for years as YouTube has become a cultural phenomenon, smartphone cameras have become professional quality, and video editing software has gotten more and more user-friendly, and have wanted to be a part of the video revolution.

Goal #2: At the same time, I had a personal motivation. My dad had had a cancer scare a couple years before, and although he was fully recovered, it had shocked me with the realization that he wouldn’t be around forever. I had a desire to document his stories and memories for the benefit of my kids who might not have the chance to know him like I did.

Goal #3: I even had a creative motivation! I knew that much of my thinking about the nature of work had its roots in his approach to art, creativity, and life in general. I wanted to better understand how he managed to live a life of creative inspiration while also raising four kids.

With all these motivations at play, and with quite a bit of nervousness, I decided to take on making a short documentary film.

At first glance, this was an absolutely ridiculous project for a novice to commit to.

I had made a few short, casual videos for YouTube, but never anything of this scale and complexity. I didn’t have any special equipment, didn’t know how to use professional editing software, and didn’t understand the first thing about lighting or sound.

But I did have a few tricks up my sleeve: my Second Brain, a system of digital note-taking that I teach in my course Building a Second Brain. As well as all the other productivity techniques and project management tools I had developed over the years. I was curious to see if I could execute this project with quick, light touches alongside my usual work.

After compressing 16 months, more than 100 hours of work, and 30 hours of total footage from 4 countries down to just 46 minutes…I did it.

On June 7, my dad’s 70th birthday, I screened the first cut virtually for my family. We met at a coordinated time, watched it together, and then had a wonderful conversation on Zoom about our shared memories, how we experienced them differently, and how much we had experienced together.

It was truly one of the most special and meaningful moments with my family I can remember.

I have A LOT to share about what I learned from the experience. From the gear and software I ended up using, to what I learned about interviewing, to how I planned and managed every aspect of the process using digital notes, to my philosophical insights into the rapidly evolving nature of filmmaking (hint: smartphone cameras as social revolution, reality distortion fields for all, and the world-building potential of multi-media).

But first, I want to share the film itself with you! And of course, get your feedback so I can make it better. Sign up below to get an invite for the virtual premiere, taking place on Saturday, July 11 at 1pm PT.

If you’re thinking, “Is Tiago inviting us to watch a glorified home video?” the answer is…yes.

But there’s more to it than that. I’m inviting all of you because this film isn’t just about my dad’s personal memories. It contains some powerful insights into:

What it concretely means to live a life driven by creativity, while upholding your responsibilities and paying the bills
How to maintain numerous interests and hobbies while also going deep into one of them
How a life-long artist thinks about the stages of his artistic career (which all of us now have to do as creatives)
What painting has to teach us about other forms of modern creativity
How to work in a way that produces tangible, sellable artifacts as a byproduct
How art can be used to explore deep themes of identity, agency, truth, and personal growth

My dad has been an artist since he was 5 years old. Although he often says he uses only 16th century technology in his paintings, in many ways I think he has been living in the future.

Being an “artist” was once an extremely rare kind of lifestyle. But today, all of us are creatives in one sense or another. All of us need to dig deep into sources of creative inspiration on a regular basis. We have a lot to learn from the artistic fields that have been doing that for centuries.

This is also an experiment in how to create a sense of community in the midst of all the crises and change we are facing. I’m curious whether we can recreate the same anticipation and excitement normally found at a red carpet event, in a virtual screening with people from around the world.

The film is scheduled using YouTube’s Premieres feature, and will start playing automatically on Saturday, July 11 at 1:15pm Pacific time. I’ve scheduled it 15 minutes after the hour so you have time to get your video setup ready. You’ll be able to watch it on any YouTube player, such as a desktop browser, mobile app, or Apple TV.

After the film finishes playing at 2pm PT, I’ll host a 60-minute Zoom call with me and Wayne, where you can ask any questions you have about the subject of the film or the process of making it. The invite I’ll send you will contain the registration link for that as well. 

Here’s the schedule:

Film screening: 1:15-2pm PT
Live Q&A with me and Wayne Forte: 2-3pm PT

Enter your email address above and I’ll send you an invite and instructions for how to watch the video. All you need to do is click the link I’ll send you and have the page open, and the video will begin playing at the scheduled time. 

If you can’t make it at that time, don’t worry! After the premiere, the link will automatically turn into a normal YouTube video you can watch anytime.

I hope you’ll join me for this event, and feel free to invite anyone who you think might be interested.

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The post Virtual Film Premiere – Wayne Lacson Forte: On My Way To Me appeared first on Forte Labs.

Tiago’s Mid-Year Review 2020

This is the first year I decided to do a thorough mid-year review.

It’s usually enough for me to review my goals once a year, at the beginning of the year, and then spend the next 12 months powering through them. But the first 6 months of this year brought tremendous, unexpected changes for us.

We got pregnant with our first child at the beginning of January, moved back home to Southern California from Mexico City abruptly due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March, and at the end of May bought our first home.

Like a line of dominoes, each change seemed to usher in the next in quick succession, and I’ve felt a need to process a large backlog of changes. This was also the first year I shared my goals for the year publicly, and wanted to close the loop and check in on those. Having them out in the open has helped me tremendously to stay on track, so I think I’ll continue that tradition.

Goals Review

1. WRITE AND PUBLISH BUILDING A SECOND BRAIN BOOK BY JUNE 1, 2020, WITH 100,000 COPIES SOLD BY END OF 2020

After more than a year of work, I got the book deal, which was a huge victory and relief. It’s happening, sooner or later. Finalizing the contract has taken longer than expected, and now I see that the whole process is going to take MUCH longer than expected.

The book won’t be published and on store shelves for another 2 years, which means my goal of 100,000 copies sold isn’t for 2020, but for 2022! This is a great example of how every goal relies on a certain set of assumptions about reality, and that when reality changes, the goal has to change. But I’m actually glad this gives us plenty of time to improve our courses, build the email list, and prepare the team for the onslaught of attention the book will (hopefully) bring.

Despite barely starting to work on the manuscript, I’ve already seen some benefits from clearing my weekday mornings for writing over the past couple months. I had to lean on the team more and remove myself as the bottleneck in as many decisions as possible. This boiled down to spending more time orienting/training them during weekly standing meetings, and constantly pushing for every commonly repeated task to be turned into an SOP or checklist or memo. These changes will continue to serve us as it allows everyone to make decisions faster and with less friction.

2. PRODUCE AN AMATEUR DOCUMENTARY ON WAYNE FORTE, HIS WORK, AND HIS LIFE, AND SCREEN IT IN A PRIVATE THEATRE WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS FOR HIS 70TH BIRTHDAY, BY JUNE 30, 2020

After a crazy last-minute push (thanks to a public deadline) I screened the first cut of my film for about a dozen members of my family a few weeks ago on my dad’s 70th birthday. The reception was fantastic and motivated me to get to work on the second cut, which I’ll screen for my subscribers using YouTube Instant Premiere on July 11. You’ll get the invite if you’re subscribed to my weekly newsletter.

I’ve learned so much from the process of making this film, which I plan on writing up as a blog post after the public screening. I also plan on doing an online workshop on how to create personal documentaries using widely available equipment and software, which is now possible for a tiny fraction of the cost once required.

I wasn’t able to screen the film in a theatre like I originally wanted. But I’m astounded by the prescience of what I wrote in January in light of recent events: “I believe amateur documentary filmmaking could be one of the most powerful sources of social change in our generation. With the proliferation of powerful smartphone cameras, easy-to-use editing software, and social media networks, that possibility is more feasible than ever. The only remaining constraints are our courage, our willingness to learn, and our ability to get ourselves organized and in action.”

I sound like I’m describing the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality to a T. The first wave of smartphone videos have been short clips captured in the heat of the moment. I think the next wave will be short films made up of multiple pieces of footage, at higher quality, edited together to tell more complex stories that inspire people to action, not just outrage. I’m excited to contribute to the rise of personal documentaries as an individual, creative storytelling technique.

3. PRAXIS REACHES 2,000 PAYING MEMBERS BY JUNE 30, 2020

I haven’t been able to give Praxis the attention it deserves, due to the growth in most other areas of the business. Which is why I decided to join the Everything bundle, an online publication in which multiple writers join forces and combine their publishing behind one paywall.

What tipped me over the edge was that my subscribers would receive a wider range of excellent content on the topics I know they care about – productivity, organizing, effectiveness, strategy – without me having to change anything. I believe many more people will be exposed to my ideas through our combined platform, and those who only want my content can continue to subscribe only to Praxis. It’s a win-win with more options for everyone.

Ultimately, I just want to focus on creating the best content I can create. Dan and Nathan are committed to building a media company for the future, with all the work that entails, so I figured it made more sense to join them rather than continue postponing improvements to Praxis as I’ve been doing for a while.

We’re up to just over 1,200 members, which is a great milestone. It will be hard to count now given that many new subscribers will actually be Everything subscribers, but the ultimate goal is fulfilled: expose more people to my work who can benefit from it while maintaining a revenue stream that allows me to continue investing the time needed.

4. FORTE LABS CONTENT IS LICENSED TO 5 ORGANIZATIONS, PRODUCING $5K PER MONTH IN REVENUE, BY DECEMBER 31, 2020

We ended up not pursuing any licensing deals so far this year. There were a few potential leads, but they were so speculative that we ended up investing all our attention in the public-facing online courses. For The Art of Accomplishment, our new group coaching program, we have a 9-person team from the same company joining one of our cohorts for the first time. It will be an excellent opportunity to test if we can add teams to our existing, public courses, rather than having to create a separate, private learning environment that doesn’t benefit from the ideas and energy of a larger group.

Once the book is out, that should also provide a boost to licensing deals. In fact, the foreign publishing deals we’re pursuing for the book could be seen as fulfilling the intention of this goal. Books are far easier to translate and license than courses.

5. ENROLL 1,000 NEW STUDENTS IN BASB COURSE BY DECEMBER 31, 2020

We had more than 800 students in cohort 10 of BASB, which was incredible. There was so much palpable energy and so much enthusiasm around the course, like nothing I’ve experienced so far. I thrive on that energy and it was unbelievably fulfilling to see so much of it channeled through our newly recruited Alumni Mentors, as well as the course staff, who carried so much of the burden and went so above and beyond what I expected. I saw that my stepping back and doing less allowed others to arise as leaders. It didn’t look how I expected, but that’s ok. It’s not only ok, it’s critical to the future of this work finding its way to a broader audience.

Of those 800 students, 345 were new students. Which means we have a formidable goal in front of us, especially since we are only running two cohorts this year. To fulfill this goal, we are aiming for 655 new students in the next cohort in a couple months. It’s not impossible, but combined with the 50% price increase, it’s a daunting challenge. If we get anywhere near it, it will be an absolute blowout launch. We should easily have well over 1,000 students in the cohort total (including returning alumni), which is almost impossible to wrap my head around. What does it even mean for 1,000 people from around the world to come together to learn this new way of learning and working? I’m dying to find out.

6. REACH 25K SUBSCRIBERS TO FORTE LABS NEWSLETTER BY DECEMBER 31, 2020

Growing our email list was my top marketing goal for 2020, and I’m proud to say we’re well ahead of schedule. Growth in new subscriptions rapidly picked up from the beginning of the year, and is now at around 2,800 per month. That means we’ve just passed 23,000 subscribers, and should be around 40-50,000 by the end of the year, depending on how growth accelerates. It’s so gratifying to have made the investments in the newsletter that I made last year, and to see it bear fruit so fast and decisively.

I’m going to continue doing everything I’m doing, and knocking out email-improvement projects whenever I can. At some point we’ll want to level up our email game by implementing advanced strategies and potentially working with a consultant who specializes in this. But for now I think there’s a lot of growth potential just in continuing to stay consistent and producing the best content I can.

7. ENROLL 1,000 PEOPLE IN WRITE OF PASSAGE, AND RELIABLY DELIVER A TRANSFORMATIONAL EXPERIENCE FOR THEIR WRITING AND CAREER, BY DECEMBER 31, 2020

Write of Passage has continued to grow tremendously. It is in its rapid iteration phase, with 3 cohorts planned this year. The growth of that community has injected a lot of energy and ambition into the BASB community, and seeing David’s meteoric success has prompted me to look for other high-potential course creators. I’ve worked with Joe Hudson over the past few months on a new group coaching program called The Art of Accomplishment, which is my second in-depth collaboration to bootstrap a new program with another instructor.

I’m ready to retire Write of Passage growth as a goal of mine, since it doesn’t really need me and there’s not much I have on my plate related to it. I do have a goal to improve the cross-promotion of our courses, but not exactly sure what form that will take yet. Will revisit this at the end of the year.

8. VISIT 3 NEW CITIES/REGIONS OF MEXICO WITH LAUREN BY DECEMBER 31, 2020

This one was derailed by COVID, as we chose to leave Mexico in late March after the U.S. State Dept. warned Americans abroad that they might not be able to enter for some time. I’m really glad we made the choice to return, since the situation in Mexico has become truly horrible. Overall, I feel very fortunate that our lives in general haven’t been impacted much by the pandemic. Most of our work takes place virtually or is location-independent, and I feel more fortunate than ever for that fact.

9. BUY A HOME FOR OUR FAMILY, IN LONG BEACH OR NEARBY, BY DECEMBER 31, 2020

The unexpected turn of events took us in a new direction which I’m very happy and grateful for. We spent a couple months living in an Airbnb after returning from Mexico, and a few weeks ago bought a home in Long Beach, close to both our families. We are expecting our first child, a son, in early October, and couldn’t be more excited to receive him in the beautiful home we are putting together now.

It’s been a lot of change in a short period, going from intrepid digital nomads to responsible suburban homeowners, but it’s a change I’m ready for. After 7 years (this month!) of self-employment, of putting everything I have into the growth of my business, I’m ready to take my foot off the brake a little and explore what a more relaxed lifestyle might look like. I honestly have no idea so it is indeed an exploration.

10. TO BE DECIDED

This TBD slot was filled with the The Art of Accomplishment program I’m running with Joe, which kicked off last Friday. It’s been a whirlwind getting it designed and planned, but it’s been extremely satisfying to not occupy the project/course manager role for once. I’m still learning the balance between letting things go and intervening when it really matters, but it’s done wonders for my well-being to not be at the center of all the action. It also dramatically opens up the possibilities for the kinds of joint ventures we can do in the future.

It was pretty amazing to ask something big of my audience – their commitment and trust in a brand new program at a much higher price point than we’ve ever charged – and to see them respond so forcefully. We’ve sold out all the spots in the inaugural cohort, and last week kicked off a completely new kind of online learning experience that is deeper, more personal, and I hope more impactful than anything we’ve done before (or anyone has done before).

7-Year Mindmap Review

At the end of 2018, I did a brainstorm about what I wanted my life to look like in 7 years. It’s insane to me that 21% of those 7 years has already passed. I feel like I made this just yesterday!

It took the form of a mindmap, with “7 years” at the center and each major branch representing one area or facet of my life. I used the MindNode app on my iPad, printed it out as a large poster, and posted it in our apartment as a reminder of my long-term vision.

Click the image to view in a larger size

I decided to revisit the mindmap and see what had changed about my future aspirations. I bolded the words and phrases that most resonated with me:

PurposeExperiences with the kids to explore our inner selvesFoundation that funds promising new projects for the worldNatureA deep connection to natureMaking a contribution to climate sustainabilityCommunityA close circle of deep friends who we share our lives and deepest selves withMore experience with psychedelics for healingTo be part of a community of seekersHealth and wellnessYoga and stretchingHigh-intensity functional exerciseStimulating vagus nerveLearning and growthNew relationship with my throat painPresence and awarenessSolid daily routine of exercise, stretching, meditation, journalingDaily experience of oneness and love for all beingsHomelifeDedicated workspace supporting focus and mindfulnessMost meals cooked by us and eaten togetherBedroom free of devices and distractionsBusiness and workCoaching a small group of world-class creatorsGrowth Board of strategic advisorsArt and creativityPlaying piano oftenDrawing as a hobbyFamilyFrequent visits to uncles/aunts/cousins on both sidesEveryone in my family supported and growingDeep connection to our families in Brazil, Mexico, PhilippinesFinancesPersonal budgets in check with our long-term prioritiesDiversified income through real estateAngel investments or fellowship for promising creators

I always look for an unexplainable “resonance” as a sign that my intuition is telling me to pay more attention to something. In this list, I noticed that changes in my life circumstances have made certain parts of my life recede into the background, such as the ones about traveling or having diverse cultural experiences (which are made difficult by the COVID lockdown).

Instead, I was more attracted to themes related to spending time with children, family and friends (who we now live close to), regular exercise, and cooking at home (now that we have a full-size kitchen), and more right-brain activities like playing the piano and drawing.

In general, I’m a little bit shocked to find that I’m much less motivated by life goals than in the past. Throughout my 20s and early 30s, my list of goals was my north star. But I think the events of the past few months, combined with changes in my personal life, have reminded me of the preciousness of the basic things in life, and the people to share them with.

I’m also thinking a lot more about how I want to give back. I’ve watched the events of the first half of the year alternating between hope and heartbreak, depending on the day. I’m working on a new project that will allow us to make a contribution to the incredible movement for social justice we’re seeing play out on the streets of the United States. More on that next week.

In the meantime, I’m asking some questions of my team, to learn more about what we stand for and what we believe in, in a time where beliefs desperately need to be turned into action. These are the questions I’m sending them, drawn from a book called Reboot I’ve been slowly reading over the last few months:

How would our organization respond were we to hear all the things that are being said, regardless if they are being said with words or deeds?What does it mean to be a leader at our organization?How would we feel if our children were to work for the company we’ve created or the team we lead?How has the unsorted baggage of what has happened to us shaped who we are as leaders?When our employees and colleagues leave our sides and our company, what do we want them to say about our time together?What do we believe to be true about the world?What do we, as a community of people working toward a common goal, believe the world needs?Regardless of the myths we are telling ourselves, what kind of company or organization are we truly building?

Perhaps the biggest insight from my own personal journaling has been that my #1 job is to empower leadership among my team. Their leadership is what will enable us to have the impact we want to have, while enabling me to lead the kind of life I want to lead. I’m hoping these questions will push us to look at ourselves more honestly, and to ask what kind of people we want to be in the face of all the changes rocking the world.

New Favorite Problems

Instead of a list of new goals, I found that the main output of my mid-year review was questions.

In my Building a Second Brain course, I have students generate a list of their “favorite problems” – open-ended, generative problems framed as questions that can drive their learning across many projects over many years.

Here are the questions that are most alive for me for the second half of 2020:

What future am I saying yes to with my actions?What does it look like to be a channel?What if I didn’t succeed? (What if I didn’t keep track of everything? What if I didn’t follow through? What if I let things slip through the cracks? What if I let things fail?)What does excellence look like in a business that is all about prototyping, iteration, and publishing early?How can I give up my need for control?How can I make cooking and eating healthy a source of inspiration and creativity?What is the source of my dissatisfaction toward the depth of relationships in my life?How do I keep my heart open always?Who would I be without the myths I’ve told about myself?How is my way of being more powerful than what I do or say?

The clear pattern for me is the shift toward a more “normal,” more family-centered life as we welcome our new son in a few months. I can feel things shifting within me, the priorities and values reorienting around a new true north.

I’ve long heard about founders selling their companies and then plunging straight into a great unknown, ranging from depression to wandering the globe. Their identities get so tied to their company that once they step away, they don’t really know who they are.

I had always assumed that would never happen to me, because I’m never going to sell my company. Yet I find myself in a similar situation now, simply because work can no longer occupy the same place in my life that it has until now. It can’t be the anchor of my identity in the same way it has been.

I feel both a sadness and a bittersweet happiness at that thought. I’ve enjoyed that identity. It’s been a wild ride. But at the same time, I’m a little tired of it. It isn’t everything I am, or want to be. There’s a wider experience of life that I’m hungry for, that isn’t about pushing and pushing at all times and at all costs.

I’m just beginning to get my fingers around the wider edges of this new identity. Just beginning to get a sense of how it works. But I’m doing my best to welcome that discomfort with open arms.

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The post Tiago’s Mid-Year Review 2020 appeared first on Forte Labs.