Tiago Forte's Blog, page 30
December 31, 2019
The 10 Paradoxes of Entrepreneurship
You have to be smart to be an entrepreneur, obviously. Modern businesses are complex, and you have to be able to reason effectively if you’re even going to understand how they function. But having a strong intellect is only half the equation. You also have to be able to let go of reason when needed. You have to see that reason is only one way of looking at things, and not a very popular one honestly.
If you decide to start a business, a lot of people will tell you (explicitly or otherwise) to “be reasonable.” To not take such an unnecessary risk, to not go so far outside the norm. It’s a fair piece of advice. But starting a business is inherently not reasonable. It’s never the “common sense” thing to do. It’s not reasonable to think you can create an entire organization from nothing and change the direction of an industry. No “reasonable” person would think that they can get lots of other people to believe in their vision, and invest their time and resources in making it real.
Entrepreneurship doesn’t naturally follow from a logical deductive process. If it did, someone would have already followed that process and started that business. You have to use reason as one of many tools, without letting it use you.
2. Entrepreneurship is hard because it requires an abundance mindset toward the environment, and at the same time, a scarcity mindset toward the business
Successfully starting a business requires an abundance mindset toward the external world. You have to believe, at some level, that opportunities for success are plentiful, or at least available for those who work hard. You have to look at the market and see fruits waiting to be picked. Otherwise it simply wouldn’t be worth the risk.
But at the same time, you have to have a scrappy, survivor-like mentality toward the business itself. You can’t treat your money, time, or mental bandwidth as “abundant” if you’re going to ration and spend them carefully. You have to jealously guard every resource you have at your disposal, because every one represents a little bit of precious runway.
The challenge is knowing when a situation calls for an abundance mentality, and when it requires a scarcity mindset. It’s easy to get stuck in one mode, and not realize when the situation changes and a different approach is needed. Neither mode is inherently better. Each one is a tool that you wield when it’s most effective.
3. Entrepreneurship is hard because it requires extreme vigilance of what competitors are doing, without being too influenced by them
You have to pay some attention to your competitors. If only because their decisions and actions yield useful information about what’s happening in the market. But you can’t be too focused on what competitors are doing, because then all your actions will be only re-actions. Too little, too late.
You need to have a kind of peripheral vision toward your competitors. Like explorers through a shared terrain, who you can borrow from and draft off of, remembering that ultimately you are not looking for exactly the same thing. You need to keep your competitiveness in reserve for when it’s useful, without letting it take on a vindictive life of its own.
4. Entrepreneurship is hard because you have no idea what you’re doing, but at the same time know exactly what you’re doing
Entrepreneurship is fundamentally open-ended. You are always working on some kind of frontier: the frontier of ideas, of what’s “normal,” of what customers are willing to accept. Which means that it can never be fully planned in advance. You need plans, of course. You also need to be fully committed to them if they’re going to teach you anything.
But at the back of your mind, in a private place you may not always show to the people you work with, you have to have some doubts. Like a “doubt room” in the basement of your house, you should occasionally spend some time there and let those doubts have their say. Because if you don’t, they’ll grow and fester and eventually explode as a full-blown crisis of faith.
Holding both total confidence and deep doubt in your mind at once requires something quite similar to self-delusion. There has to be some separation between them if you’re going to stay sane, but it should be more like a foldable partition that you reserve for parties, when you let it all hang out a little.
5. Entrepreneurship is hard because it requires a willingness to go far out of balance, without completely losing control
I don’t know of any way to build a business while staying perfectly in balance at all times. Habits and routines are great, but when that one opportunity you’ve been waiting months for comes knocking, you drop everything and you run with it. And on the long path to building a profitable business, such opportunities will appear almost weekly.
You have to build the capability of going out of balance when needed. To lean in to the turn like a motorcycle racer. This sometimes requires postponing or “stretching” everything from your bodily needs to your relationships to your personal finances to your goals. Not that you have to blindingly sacrifice these things at all times, but they have to be at least a little fluid.
But just as importantly, you have to know how to bring these things back into balance once the opportunity (or crisis) is over. To recover, to heal, to build those reserves back up to a state of readiness. Otherwise when the next one hits, you won’t have any slack in your system. You’ll be brittle and frail.
6. Entrepreneurship is hard because it requires being rigid where others are flexible, and flexible where others are rigid
Most people are naturally rigid in some areas, and flexible in others. They might be open-minded when it comes to their choice of food, but rigid when it comes to their religion. Mostly these come as defaults, as part of their upbringing and belief system.
But as an entrepreneur, you have to decide where you’re going to be rigid and where you’re going to be flexible. You have to approach your market with a set of beliefs that in some way violate or contradict or undermine the existing beliefs in your market. This naturally means that you insist, you take a firm stand, on areas that incumbent companies may let slide. Maybe you’re in payroll processing and customer service isn’t taken very seriously – it’s “flexible.” Taking a strong stand on that might ruffle all kinds of feathers.
But you also have to sometimes be flexible where others are rigid. Maybe you’re in legal services and you realize that educational pedigree is no longer as important as it used to be, and you relax your hiring standards. This also might encounter resistance as you threaten people’s pride! To take these stances you have to have a center and the center must hold. There has to be an immoveable place of conviction at the center of your being, that is not swayed by the opinions of others.
7. Entrepreneurship is hard because you have to not believe in tradeoffs, yet be constantly making them
Entrepreneurs have a skeptical eye toward supposed “tradeoffs”: statements that follow the format “To have more of X, you have to have less of Y.” That’s because every tradeoff is based on a long series of assumptions. And if just one of those assumptions changes, the tradeoff can collapse like a house of cards.
The auto manufacturing industry for decades was based on the assumption that it took many hours to change the “dies” of a machine in the factory (such as changing a drilling tool to a shaping tool). The entire industry was built around that assumption: from the way workers’ shifts were scheduled, to the way factory floors were laid out, to the lower pricing for larger batches of products. Instead of optimizing around this constraint, Toyota attacked it: they systematically lowered the time needed to change machine dies until it was less than 10 minutes. In doing so, they revolutionized the industry.
You can’t take tradeoffs too seriously, yet as an entrepreneur you also have to constantly make them. You have to pick your battles – perhaps you’re reinventing data science visualization, but that means you might need to conform to conventional accounting practices in the meantime. The energy required to destroy an assumption is in limited supply…for now.
8. Entrepreneurship is hard because it requires caring deeply what others think about your product, while not caring at all what they think about you
There is a certain egolessness demanded of entrepreneurs. You simply can’t afford to make it about you all the time. You’re not that important. If you insist on being offended all the time, you are inserting yourself into the feedback loop between your users and your product. You are distorting the flow of learning to serve your own purposes.
And yet, at the same time, you can’t completely discount and write off what everyone says. You have to be obsessed, in fact, with what they say about your product. To hook your reward centers deep into their experience of the product, so that you feel their pain as your pain and their joy as your joy. It’s an extreme form of empathy I think, directed and focused like a laser on the intersection between what they need and what you can provide.
9. Entrepreneurship is hard because it requires you to be highly ambitious, yet not preoccupied with the inevitable failures it brings
You obviously have to be highly ambitious to be an entrepreneur. You have to have a vision big enough to justify its terrible cost.
But the more ambitious you are, the bigger the chasm you’re going to have to cross. The bigger your vision, the more time you’re going to have to spend in not-that-vision. This is totally obvious and yet paradoxical: the more you want to be right, the more you’re going to have to get used to being wrong. The more successful you want to be, the more you’re going to have to get used to being unsuccessful. To get good at error-correction, you need to become intimately familiar with error.
All this means that you’re going to have a lot of failures. You must learn how to reframe those failures as valuable lessons, which sometimes feels like bending an iron rod into an origami flower. But it can be done, because the meaning of those failures is completely up to you. The failures are real, but what they are telling you is not real, it’s made up.
10. Entrepreneurship is hard because you have to always do what you say you’re going to do, and also consistently say you’ll do impossible things
The edifice of entrepreneurship rests on a foundation of integrity. You absolutely have to be the very embodiment of your word, because at the end of the day that is all you have. Your word has to be so powerful that it has its own agency: you said it, and thus it will happen. Your word can bend reality to its will, and to build the business you envision, it must.
But simultaneously, you have to constantly be promising impossible things. That your business will grow by a certain percentage, that the market will expand by so many points, that such and such contract will be signed. These events are not within the realm of what you can achieve by yourself. To be interesting, the reach of your promises has to exceed their grasp.
And this brings us back to the first paradox. Human agency does not quite exist within the domain of reason. It defies the cold logic of causality. It uses logic to explain and to argue, but if you get to the very source of it, there’s no fundamental reason that anything it wants should happen.
Except for one: because you said so.
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My 26 Favorite Essays of 2019
As part of my year-end review, I always review my favorite reading of the year. These usually tend to be “long-form” online essays diving deep into interesting ideas.
Revisiting my notes on these articles serves three functions:
Helps me absorb their ideas more deeply
Serves as a reminder to think about how I can use their ideas as building blocks in upcoming projects
Reveals clues about where the next year’s learning may take me
This year I’ve decided to write a review of each of the most important essays I discovered in 2019. Each one includes a short summary of what it’s about, the main idea I took away from it for my own work and life, and a link to my full notes if any.
They are presented in no particular order.
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December 17, 2019
Opensourced: Increasing The Output of The World’s Creative Professionals
I recently spoke with Ian Lenny via videoconference for his series showcasing interviews with entrepreneurs, experts, high performers, and thinkers. We talked about my Building a Second Brain methodology, and what I’ve learned about the most effective ways for people to build one for themselves.
Watch or listen below, or visit the episode webpage for a full transcript.
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Decoding Superhuman Podcast: Distributed Cognition with Tiago Forte
I recently spoke with Boomer Anderson on his podcast Decoding Superhuman, about my ideas on productivity and knowledge management. Including:
[2:18] Why I moved to Mexico City
[5:19] My influences in developing productivity theories
[9:14] Benefits of network effect and momentum on productivity
[17:14] The guy who doesn’t like Cal Newport
[27:56] Organizing the endless flow of ideas
[34:05] Michael Hyatt’s tagging is broken
[38:00] The PARA system
[44:01] What is the MESA method?
[52:58] What does the future of work look like?
[56:17] Tiago answers the Superhuman 6
Listen below or visit the episode website here.
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Interview with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder of Roam
This is a one-hour interview, discussion, demonstration, and debate between Conor White-Sullivan, founder of “note-taking tool for networked thought” Roam, and myself. We’ve exchanged many messages on Twitter and other platforms about our differing approaches to knowledge management and note-taking. In this in-depth conversation, we talk about Conor’s background and what led him to dedicate himself to created Roam, the principles and insights that underlie the product’s design, and his opinions on privacy, security, networks, connecting ideas, and many other topics.
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December 9, 2019
Superorganizers: Inside the Mind of a Productivity Master
In this very thorough and in-depth interview, I walked Dan Shipper through every tiny detail of how I manage my daily productivity.
Dan runs the Superorganizers blog and newsletter, where he investigates how the smartest people in the world organize knowledge to do their best work.
He left no stone unturned, and even took the extra step of collecting screenshots and summarizing what I said in his own (much clearer) words. The result? A comprehensive written summary of how I work.
It’s gotten an incredible response even from people who have followed me for some time.
Click here to visit the Superorganizers blog for the full article.
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December 5, 2019
Notion as a Second Brain Tour
I’m very excited and proud to announce that I’ll be co-organizing a series of free meetups in cooperation with Notion, the up-and-coming productivity and knowledge management software.
We’ll be hosting events in the following 6 cities to start, with possibly more to come later next year (click each link to register):
Mexico City (12/4)
Sao Paulo (12/11)
Los Angeles (12/30)
Manila (1/7)
Singapore (2/4)
Kuala Lumpur (2/12)
Here’s a copy of the full description:
Notion and productivity leader Tiago Forte are teaming up for a world tour, bringing together our communities around “Building a Second Brain.” Join us and fellow productivity enthusiasts in your city to learn new skills and strategies for everything from learning faster to forming better habits!
About the tour
Notion is taking the productivity world by storm with its promise of a powerful, easy-to-use knowledge base for all. At these events, Tiago Forte will explain how to use Notion to build a “Second Brain” – a trusted, digital archive of your most valuable knowledge and expertise.
Drawing on his extensive blogging and online course, Building a Second Brain, Tiago will demonstrate how to apply timeless principles of knowledge management to the Notion software. You’ll come away with a reliable pathway for outsourcing your memory, expanding your creativity, and managing your life using technology.
The “Building a Second Brain” methodology starts with a simple idea: you can outsource your memory to computers, leaving your mind free to imagine and create new things. Once you have your most valuable knowledge saved in a trusted place, you’re free to cultivate and grow it. The methodology demonstrates how to cultivate one’s knowledge step by step following the four steps of CODE – Capturing, Organizing, Distilling, and Expressing your ideas so that they grow in value over time. For more information, visit Tiago’s website or watch Notion Office Hours: Building a Second Brain.
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December 2, 2019
Making Knowledge Work Visible
In my time as a reader and writer, I’ve discovered something I didn’t expect: reading multiple books at the same time, or writing multiple essays at the same time, increases not only the quantity of books I read, but also the quality of the essays I write.
As a young reader, I would always read one book at a time. I would start a book, and keep reading it until I had finished it. Very rarely, I would decide to stop reading a book before I had finished it.
I started reading multiple books in parallel while studying at St. John’s College, my alma mater and a Great Books school, where almost all of the school work involves reading books. Reading in parallel dramatically increased the number of books I was able to read in a given time period. I found myself reading at least 100 books a year (including my own personal reading). By reading multiple books at the same time, I was able to discover more quickly if I didn’t want to finish a book, and switch to a new book. Or if I simply needed a break from one book, I could move to another before coming back to the first with fresh eyes. Most importantly, I found myself enjoying reading (even) more, which resulted in me reading more. Since graduating, I’ve maintained the habit of reading in parallel, and consistently read 50+ books per year.
Of course, sheer quantity isn’t everything. What you read matters too, and even if you’re reading excellent books, it’s easy to misunderstand them without careful study.
Still, I found something even more surprising: reading multiple books at the same time also improved the quality of my reading. The program of study at St. John’s is carefully designed. One of the intentions is to juxtapose similar authors and topics at the same time in ways that facilitate understanding.
Partially, this is chronological: for example, you read the Torah before proceeding to read the New Testament and then various Christian theological writers. But you also read across topics in meaningful ways. For example, for my mathematics class, I studied Leibniz’ discovery of calculus at the same time that I was reading his metaphysical works in the main seminar class.
This all affords a kind of reading which Mortimer Adler, author of How to Read A Book, calls syntopical reading, or comparative reading, which aims at a broad, synthetic view of a topic across authors, books, and cultures.
Like most college students, I was also required to write multiple essays at the same time. I was also a prolific writer. One professor said that she would ask for 5 pages and I would hand in 10; that she would ask for oneone essay and get two. In the same way as with reading, I discovered that writing multiple essays at the same time made it easier to increase the overall quantity and quality of my writing.
Since graduating from St. John’s, the biggest influence on how I go about reading and writing has been a pair of online courses: Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain (BASB) and David Perell’s Write of Passage (WoP).
Both of these courses borrow key insights from the Theory of Constraints (TOC) and Lean/Just-in-Time Manufacturing. In TOC, small batch sizes, processed in parallel, paradoxically improves the quantity and quality of throughput. This is an extremely counterintuitive finding in manufacturing, the original testbed for TOC, and in some ways it is no less surprising in knowledge work.
The courses gave me a system for reliably producing interesting ideas, and for distributing those in writing. This means that my current intellectual life is increasingly dominated by two forms of knowledge work: reading books, and writing blog posts. From a systems perspective, these can be seen as input and output respectively.
However, having implemented these systems, I discovered a new problem. I had more blog post ideas than I could possibly write. I had a hard time deciding which ones to work on, and began collecting a large number of half-finished drafts of blog posts. Similarly, swimming in an abundance of reading options, I started new books more often than I finished them.
Both problems had a similar flavor: flow problems. How could I be sure I wasn’t abusing massive parallelism, and aimlessly multi-tasking? How could I prioritize what’s most important to focus on?
I found a solution in two key insights from just-in-time productivity: making work visible, and implementing work-in-progress (WIP) limits. I believe Tiago overlooked these ideas when adapting the best principles of TOC and JIT Manufacturing to personal productivity. In this post, I’ll review how kanban, work-in-progress limits, and a lean/agile approach can help knowledge workers produce even more with higher quality.
An Overview of Kanban and WIP Limits
Kanban (which in Japanese means “visual signal” or “card”) was created to solve problems of flow in manufacturing. Kanban has made its way into productivity software like Trello and Notion.
Kanban is a physical or digital board that visualizes work. In its simplest form, it has three columns – Ready, Doing, and Done – with cards (which can be post-it notes, index cards, or digital) in each column to track work.
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Simple Kanban Board from Making Work Visible by Dominica DeGrandis
You can adapt this most basic form to the specific needs of your team, as well as the type of work being done. You can add or subtract columns, and make use of more advanced features, like color-coding, swimlanes, and time estimates.
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A Customized Kanban Board from Personal Kanban – Mapping Work, Navigating Life by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry
Regardless of the specific form used, by visualizing the work, you and your team can see the big picture: what work is being done, what isn’t, where bottlenecks are, and what you should do next.
It’s easy to track and manage the flow of knowledge work with a whiteboard, sticky notes, and dry-erase markers, or with software tools like Trello and Notion. Simply making the work visible with these methods will help you do what’s most important.
However, in lean manufacturing and strategy, visualizing the work is just the first step of successful kanban usage. The next step is to install work-in-progress (WIP) limits.
Work-in-progress is all the work that you or your team have started, but not yet finished. For our purposes, that’s a book that you’re halfway through reading, or a blog post that you have a first draft of but haven’t published yet.
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Unfinished Business by aehdeschaine (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Therefore, WIP limits limit the amount of work that can be in process at any time. Rather than starting a new book or blog post every time you feel like it, you try to not do too much at once.
This approximates the focus that comes from, for example, reading only one book at a time. WIP limits afford the focus that comes from processing a limited number of items at a time, and the higher quantity of output that comes from processing in parallel.
WIP limits are usually arbitrary to start: you might limit yourself to reading three books at a time, or to writing two blog posts at a time.
Over time, you can adapt as you understand more about how you work. If you find blog posts tend to go stale in your drafts folder, try lowering your writing WIP limit. If you find you are plowing through books, try raising your reading WIP limit. The most important thing is to limit how much work you’re doing, so that you can finish what you start.
Here are the WIP limits I’m currently using.
Reading WIP Limits
For reading, I am trying to read no more than four books at a time. One of those books is an audiobook. I love audiobooks, but the amount of time I have available to listen to them varies widely. I like having a go-to audiobook to turn to for driving and other similar occasions.
The remaining books can be in any medium (print, ebook, PDF), but should fit into a specific category: a book for pleasure (usually a novel or biography); a useful piece of non-fiction that is relevant to my work or interests; and a book that has lasting benefit, which helps further my character development or meditation practice.
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These categories follow Aristotle’s three kinds of friends, a choice that is partially playful – books are a kind of friend, no? – but also practical for me.
When reading these books, I also try to reduce the “batch size,” by ending reading sessions by finishing chapters or sections of whatever book I’m reading. As others have found, it’s easier to pick up a book when you’re starting a new chapter or section.
Writing WIP Limits
For writing, I have a backlog of ideas, posts that I am actively writing, and completed posts.
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I use a WIP limit of one post for each of the four categories that I am trying to explore with my writing:
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In addition to status and category, I also keep track of several other details, like venue (which blog I intend to publish a given post to); any co-authors a post may have; and reviewers, who I want to send drafts to for feedback.
Of course, I still might write a blog post about an unrelated topic. Or I might think of a post that ultimately proves to be a dead end. But overall, I find that I’m writing more posts, with higher quality and more focus.
Conclusion
WIP limits aren’t for everyone. I shudder to imagine Visakan Veerasamy, for example, one of my favorite internet writers, implementing WIP limits like these. His whole style, I think, benefits from a kind of mood-first productivity.
For myself, I found that WIP limits have helped me to get the best of both worlds – higher throughput from parallel input/output, and the focus that comes from limits. I’ve also found that by experimenting with applying strategy concepts like kanban and work-in-process limits to my personal productivity systems, I’ve developed the intuition needed to apply those ideas to larger scale settings, like the workplace.
If you’re experiencing flow problems like the ones I describe in your reading and writing, or some other aspect of your knowledge work, consider making the work visible and installing WIP limits.
Of course, you’ll need to find WIP limits that work for you – this will be a process of experimentation that likely results in limits that are specific to your needs and constraints.
Whatever WIP limits you install, you’ll find that your system has higher throughput, with improvements in both quantity and quality.
More Resources
Lean LEGO – The red brick cancer
Personal Kanban – Mapping Work, Navigating Life by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry (notes)
Making Work Visible by Dominica DeGrandis (notes)
Venkatesh Rao’s Now Reading page
Notion Office Hours with Marie Poulin: Tiago Forte’s writing workflow
Thanks to James Stuber, David Howell, and Cory Foy for their helpful contributions to this post, as well as to Ben Mosior and Cat Swetel for recommending I learn more about kanban in the first place.
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November 27, 2019
Black Friday Promotion: Last Chance to Join Building a Second Brain
My favorite scene in all the Harry Potter books is when Harry uses a “Pensieve.”
A Pensieve is a large, enchanted dish into which wizards can pour their memories, so that they can later be “re-lived” in full detail:
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(Here’s a 5-minute clip from the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in which Harry plunges into one of these preserved memories)
Dumbledore explains why he finds the Pensieve so useful:
“Very useful, if like me, you find your mind a wee bit stretched . It allows me to see once more things I’ve already seen. You see, Harry, I’ve searched and searched for something, some small detail… Every time I get close to an answer, it slips away! It’s maddening .”
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Can you relate to Dumbledore’s frustration? I sure can.
It’s so frustrating to feel like your mind is crammed with too much information, and somehow at the same time, to not be able to find that one important detail when you need it most.
Dumbledore explains how the Pensieve works:
“One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind , pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links , you understand, when they are in this form.”
A magical device that perfectly preserves any thought or memory, forever and in full detail, so you can revisit and reflect on it at your leisure…
Now wouldn’t that be nice?
Have you ever felt like your brain would burst if you tried to cram one. more. thing. into it? Have you ever found yourself unable to think clearly because of that constant mental noise? Or unable to solve a problem you knew you were capable of solving, if only your mind was free of clutter?
Imagine if any time you found yourself with too many “excess thoughts” you could just “pour them” into a trusted place outside your head. And know with certainty that they would be perfectly preserved, forever, so that you could relive them anytime you wanted.
But did you notice the second part of Dumbledore’s explanation?
Not only is the Pensieve useful for gaining relief from excess thoughts, it can also be used to “spot patterns and links.” It is a powerful tool for insight.
In other words, after you experience the relief of offloading your thoughts, you can use what you’ve collected to think more clearly and communicate more persuasively.
The Pensieve is a perfect metaphor for the environment of information overload we all live in today. We have too many thoughts and ideas and not enough time to properly think about them. But we can’t just ignore the incoming flow, because we also have a desperate need to understand patterns and connections to produce results in our work.
Think of how much more you could get done if you had a “helper” at your side, relieving some of the burden of remembering all the information you need to do your job. And imagine if this helper was also a thought partner, surfacing relevant ideas right when they were most useful.
What would a modern-day Pensieve look like? One that uses technology, not magic?
I call it a “Second Brain,” and helping people create one for themselves is the purpose of my course Building a Second Brain. Like the Pensieve, it works as an extension of your memory, saving the ideas overflowing from your mind and preserving them for future retrieval.
Also like the Pensieve, a Second Brain doesn’t just give you relief. It also gives you power – the power to understand how your ideas fit together and how the past has shaped the present and future.
Next month is the third anniversary of the launch of Building a Second Brain. Since then, more than 1,200 students have taken the course, tens of thousands have read the blog posts, I’ve been interviewed on more than 30 podcasts, and I’ll soon kick off a world tour in partnership with the up-and-coming productivity app Notion.
Every day I hear a new story about how these ideas have changed the way people work. Every day I hear more about the impact that having a Second Brain has on their daily lives.
But the truth is, we are just getting started.
With the official launch of our online school Forte Academy, we are doubling down on online, cohort-based courses as the very best way to learn in the 21st century. Following our 8 pillars of education, we are creating a powerful model for online learning that prioritizes community, accountability, actionability, and feedback.
The question guiding our efforts is, “How can we design an online course that is impossible to fail?”
This question has inspired tons of new ideas and possibilities. We are considering everything from templates and guides, to new case studies and live demonstrations, to new forms of support such as coaches and accountability partners.
We will be debuting a new, completely revamped version 10 of the Building a Second Brain course in a few months. It will include numerous improvements based on everything we’ve learned over the past three years. But in order to make these improvements, we need to temporarily close the course to new students.
On Dec. 6 at midnight Pacific time, we will shut down new enrollments until Spring 2020.
When enrollment opens again, there will be a few major changes:
The price of the course will increase from $499 and $699 to $799 and $1,199, for the Standard and Premium Editions respectively, which will allow us to invest in every aspect of the learning experience
The course will no longer be available in a self-paced version – only as a live cohort offered two times per year in the Spring and Fall, to ensure we can offer full support and accountability to each and every student
Each live cohort will be extended from 4 to 6 weeks to allow more time for students to integrate what they’re learning, managed by a new full-time Course Manager
We are launching a scholarship program for disadvantaged students with demonstrated need, by application
By increasing the price, giving all students accountability and a schedule, limiting the number of times we offer the course each year, and hiring our first full-time staff, we will be able to dramatically elevate the value we offer. This will ensure as many students as possible complete the program and gain the benefits of a Second Brain for themselves. And by offering a scholarship program, we will be able to continue to serve students with demonstrated need.
A final note on the Pensieve: according to Wizarding World, “Pensieves are rare, because only the most advanced wizards ever use them, and because the majority of wizardkind is afraid of doing so.”
I’d say the same is true of Second Brains – it is only the smartest, most ambitious, most advanced knowledge workers who invest the time to make sure all their reading and learning doesn’t go to waste. But unlike using the Pensieve, there’s nothing to fear when we undertake the process of building one together.
One last chance to purchase at the current price
I’ve never done a Black Friday deal, because I’m not a big believer in impulse purchases. But I know that many of you have been following the evolution of this course for a long time, and I want to give you one last chance to jump on the Second Brain train at the current price.
When you purchase between now and Dec. 6, you’ll have lifetime access not only to the current version of the course (released just last month with numerous new features), but also to every future update, AND all future live cohorts. It’s like an all-access pass that never expires, that you only have to pay for once.
We are now at the cusp of not only a new year, but a new decade. As I see all the offers and promotions flying around this week, most of them for products that will start losing value the moment they arrive, my question for you is “What better investment in the next decade of your life could you make besides upgrading your ability to make use of what you know?” These are the last 30 days of the decade – what else do you plan on spending them on?
Enter your email below if you’d like to hear more about this Black Friday offer. I’ll send you one email per day from my series 7 Lessons BEFORE You Build a Second Brain, my recommendations for how to get the most value out of the experience, and reminders about the two events below. There might even be some extra bonuses 
November 26, 2019
Introducing Forte Academy
Since 2013, we’ve helped thousands of students hone their professional skills through our courses in productivity and personal effectiveness. We’ve seen them gain knowledge, master new skills, and take on new perspectives that have had a profound impact not only on their careers, but on their quality of life.
Now we are kicking things up a notch, with the official launch of Forte Academy, an online school for professional development in the 21st century. We are combining our courses into an integrated curriculum for modern knowledge work. This will allow us to radically improve the student experience, making it more consistent, rigorous, and impactful.
The Opportunity
Technology has reached a critical threshold: many of the most powerful tools available no longer require technical expertise to be used effectively. With the explosion of information available online, anyone with a computer and the willingness to learn can build a website, design a database, make illustrations, publish a blog, or deliver their services remotely to anyone in the world.
To be able to harness these incredible new capabilities, certain skills and knowledge are required: best practices, mental frameworks, daily habits, rules of thumb, tacit skills, and empowering beliefs are just as important as the tools themselves. But this “tacit” knowledge is scarce, confined to a few technology hotspots and exclusive professions.
Those who know how to effectively consume, organize, interpret, and share their knowledge will be best prepared to take advantage of the unprecedented opportunities opened up by the Internet. The mission of Forte Academy is to democratize access to these skills – to offer the best professional education in the world designed for the modern, connected era. And by doing so, to enable people to unlock their full potential.
Who We Serve
We serve knowledge workers: professionals who manage large volumes of information in their daily work, and use it to produce real-world results. We exist to help these people perform their work more effectively. Our training is designed to empower them to act with confidence and clarity in their work while avoiding information overload, stress, and missed opportunities.
We offer a series of online courses, including Get Stuff Done, Building a Second Brain, and Write of Passage, which together make up a curriculum for high-performance knowledge work. Our online programs are supplemented by a variety of other educational formats—books, videos, articles, essays, podcasts, and subscriptions—as well as in-person workshops.
These programs equip knowledge workers with practical skills such as task management, habit formation, knowledge management, goal-setting, and modern writing. And they deliver not just information, but the frameworks, habits, and mindsets to deploy them effectively. We teach these skills alongside technological tools that can be used to amplify and extend them.
How We Teach
Forte Academy is an interactive learning community where people of different ages, backgrounds, and learning styles come together. We believe in a practical, hands-on approach to learning. That the process of learning is iterative and experimental, not simply about memorizing facts.
Our live courses—Building a Second Brain and Write of Passage—are taught in cohorts of students who meet via video-conference at pre-scheduled times. On these live calls, we engage in discussions, ask and answer questions, reframe limiting beliefs, examine case studies, demonstrate tools and techniques, and provide feedback on students’ work. This is not a passive experience—we expect every student to attend, to participate, and to make an active contribution to the learning of the whole group.
You’ll meet your instructors first as teachers, but more importantly, we will be coaches, consultants, designers, and collaborators. As coaches, we keep students accountable for completing concrete projects and provide feedback on the results. As designers, we curate a structured, yet flexible environment where everyone is challenged but also gets the support they need. And as consultants, we advise them on customizing their own learning process.
Most importantly, we support our students in the big-picture questions that are more important than any individual subject: what matters to them, where they’re going, what they need to get there, and the impact they want to have on the world. Self-paced courses are effective for learning simple tasks, but for transformative learning, students need a community of fellow learners who can provide the accountability to see it through.
We are taking Forte Academy to the next level next year. We will be expanding our programs, adding staff and support, and continuing to build an educational curriculum designed for modern knowledge work. If you want to be part of the future of professional education, enter your email below and join our community.
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