Tiago Forte's Blog, page 33

Tiago Forte’s Origin Story

I am a first-generation American, born and raised in Orange County in Southern California. I grew up in a mixed Brazilian and Filipino household with two brothers and a sister. Our home was filled with culture and the arts for as long as I can remember. My mother is a talented musician and singer who exposed us to the distinct rhythms of Brazilian music and the Portuguese language from our earliest years. My father is a professional artist who covered every wall of our home with his paintings and sketches.

We grew up in an evangelical, non-denominational Christian church, spending multiple nights a week at various services and Bible study groups. My mother sang in the church band, and I remember seeing her on stage singing every Sunday. While my father was known for his figures and still lifes, his true passion was Biblically themed art. Vivid scenes of Biblical stories like Cain and Abel, Jacob and the Angel, and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden looked down at us from large-scale canvases throughout the church. As a young child I got used to seeing my parents’ artistic talents admired and appreciated by hundreds of people every week. It left a deep impression on me, seeing how rewarding it could be to use art to serve others.

From my father I learned important lessons about the value of making things.

First, he has always been extremely prolific in his artwork, producing thousands of paintings over his career. His productivity is an essential part of his creativity. People often see his impressive works and ask “How long does it take him to paint one of these?” But that question makes no sense. At any given time he is “working on” potentially dozens of different paintings, ranging in size from 12 inches to 12 feet wide, at every stage of completion from a sketch in a notebook to a gigantic mural on a wall, and sometimes spanning many years of tweaks and adjustments. Working on so many things in parallel allowed him to switch to something new any time he got stuck, and provided many opportunities for cross-fertilization between subjects. My father didn’t just paint – he managed a creative pipeline that ensured he always had something interesting to work on. This wasn’t just a creative necessity, but an economic one, considering he was supporting four kids in one of the most expensive places in the country.

Second, my father always used both sides of his brain, left and right. Art had been his passion all his life, but he also had a keen side interest in mathematics. He loved music and followed his intuition, but also possessed a sharp analytical mind. Being questioned by him was like being deposed by a lawyer, every excuse quickly deconstructed and, usually, destroyed. He believed in the traditional humanities and in classical education, but also saw the potential of technology early on. We had an Apple Performa computer in our house in 1994, when I was just 9 years old. And to my amazement, in spite of his frugality, we were one of the first families in the neighborhood to have broadband Internet, once we made the case for its educational value.

And third, my father wasn’t just an artist in the backyard studio where he painted. He was an artist in everything – making sandwiches, planting a garden, buying clothes, or planning a vacation all presented themselves as opportunities for creativity. I learned early on that everything was subject to change, that everything could be reinvented or redesigned or reframed with my imagination as the only constraint.

My father was all about extremes, and from him I gained my drive and my will. From my mother, I was fortunate to learn the qualities that made those extremes manageable, that checked my determination with something softer and more forgiving. My mother had great patience, always willing to let us come to our own conclusions and make our own decisions. She was immensely gracious, that rarest of qualities in the modern world, never calling unwanted attention to our mistakes and our faults. Most of all, my mother always had a profound emotional intelligence, able to sense intuitively what was happening underneath the surface of others’ emotional lives. And to use that knowledge to help and to heal. She is a sensitive soul, and inheriting that sensitivity has helped soften the intellect that always insists I am right and know best.

The seeds of my current work are to be found scattered across my childhood years. I was always a collector, of everything from baseball cards (though I never played baseball), to coins, to Star Wars cards. But my favorite thing to collect was knowledge. I had a monthly subscription to “animal cards” – encyclopedia-style printed cards with interesting facts about different animals, which I kept organized in a cardboard box. I guarded this collection of knowledge zealously.

I loved organizing things, and saw the world through the lens of principles and systems. There is a famous story in my family of how I would sit in the bathtub playing with my Micro-Machines (miniature toy cars). Except I wouldn’t really play with them. I organized and reorganized them according to different criteria – by size, by color, by shape, by category. I was always captivated by the patterns that seemed to underlie the world around me, and by categorizing things I found a way to explore and experiment with those patterns. I developed a fascination with any subject that seemed to shed light on that underlying reality – religion, physics, biology, and science. My mind always saw things at different levels of abstraction, as a series of intertwined principles. This made it easy for me to grasp complex ideas quickly, but left me with little common sense. I was known as a daydreamer and a klutz.

I always loved learning, but was only an average student. I read voraciously on my own time, especially science fiction, historical fiction, and fantasy, but found the homework readings comparatively boring, and avoided them. I wasn’t very self-disciplined in doing my classwork, but I had a vivid imagination. I’d spend as much time as possible during class, at recess, and on the bus to and from school staring off into space and imagining stories. This often caused me to miss homework assignments or important announcements. I got into the habit of going up to the teacher at the end of every class to confirm the homework, since I assumed I hadn’t been paying attention. I was good at tests because they required abstract logic, but otherwise found it very difficult to memorize facts or pay attention to topics I wasn’t interested in. I was lucky that the experience of formal schooling didn’t taint my love of learning. To me, school was a distraction from learning, something to get over with so I could escape to my books and my games.

Growing up

The most pivotal year of my early life was 1998, when my parents reimagined our education and took the four of us out of school, moving to a small town in the mountains of southern Brazil for a year of cultural immersion. My mother was Brazilian, from São Paulo, and my father had developed a deep love for the country. They wanted us to learn the language and connect with our heritage, and knew that immersion was the only way.

All the school administrators in the U.S. told them they would ruin our education. Instead, that year ended up being the most educational of my life. I learned to speak Portuguese, which set the stage for a love of languages and travel that eventually took me all over the world. It was during this year that I started writing, sending out mass emails to friends and family back home recounting our adventures through the Brazilian countryside. I reconnected with my Brazilian roots in a way that shaped my identity as a global citizen, which later on inspired my nonprofit work. It seems crazy to move a family of six to a developing country, yet that act of creative courage made me into who I am today.

My earliest memories of doing work that I was passionate about are of volunteering. From about the age of 10, I would travel to Mexico with a team from our church on “service trips.” We would spend the weekend building houses, providing medical and dental care, and distributing donated clothing and books to poor communities near the border. As an insulated kid from a wealthy suburb, these experiences were eye-opening. I saw deep poverty, up-close and personal, in a way that I couldn’t ignore or distance myself from. Through to the end of high school I went on several international mission trips – running a basketball camp in France, putting on plays and film showings in Ethiopia, and building a schoolhouse in Belize. I decided very early on that I wanted to live a life of service. Not just because it was needed, but because it was so fun and deeply fulfilling.

My first paying jobs were fixing computers. After years of fixing my parents’ computer problems, I realized this was a service that many others needed. I made it into a business in college, driving around in my beat-up Honda Civic to rescue ailing PCs. Sitting with people in their living rooms and studies, I heard firsthand about their struggles with the technology that was supposed to empower them. I began with hardware and software fixes, but soon moved on to teaching them how to use their devices in the first place. The knowledge of how to properly operate and maintain a computer is what made the biggest difference – not only in keeping the computer running, but in enabling people to better communicate, create, and learn on the web.

I continued on this path, getting a job working at an Apple Store in San Diego. I switched to Macs, but the lessons were much the same: how to navigate the operating system, how to install new programs, how to diagnose and fix errors, and how to navigate the web. I soon started teaching classes on Apple’s iLife suite, which included software for editing photos, making videos, building websites, and recording DVDs. I can still remember the look of amazement on the face of an elderly woman as I showed her what her computer was capable of creating. As soon as she had some basic training, I saw that she quickly switched from frustration and disappointment to excitement and creativity.

Leaving home

While studying international business at San Diego State University, I embarked on a period of overseas study and work. I studied abroad at two universities in Brazil, learning how difficult and backward business could be in countries racked with corruption. I heard story after story about government officials demanding payoffs or relatives’ companies winning contracts. After finishing my studies abroad, I took a job at a nonprofit in Colombia, working on a microfinance crowdfunding website that facilitated donations to micro-entrepreneurs from poor communities. It was my first experience using technology for social good, and I started to get a sense of its immense potential for connecting people across borders.

After graduation, I left for the Peace Corps, serving for two years as an English teacher in a small town in Eastern Ukraine called Kupyansk. I taught English classes at a local school for students from the third to the eleventh grade, and worked on other projects to promote public health, youth leadership, and civic engagement in my off-hours. It was at this school that I began teaching basic productivity techniques to the youth of my Ukrainian village – how to make a schedule, how to formulate goals, how to identify existing resources, and other basic but useful skills. These lessons evolved into a summer camp program called Projects Bring Change, in which I taught a specially chosen group of campers how to plan and execute community service projects in their neighborhoods. We were featured in the local news, and my program was replicated at other camps for several years afterward.

I vividly witnessed that learning how to perform the most basic tasks – maintaining a personal agenda, identifying objectives, making meeting agendas, taking good notes – could completely transform the lives of young students. They graduated with life skills that made a meaningful difference in applying to universities and gaining well-paid jobs. These students used their skills to organize community service projects like trash cleanups and public art projects. I watched my group of students forge a new identity as doers and makers, and gain the confidence that they had control over their future.

I had to learn how to teach these productivity techniques in a way that made seemingly boring topics interesting and relevant, while overcoming barriers of language and culture. I researched active learning and communicative teaching, making my lessons into games, hands-on activities, and real-world exercises to make the learning stick. I came to believe that practical life skills were one of the greatest areas of need in youth education, but that they required new, more engaging ways of teaching.

Starting a career

I returned to the U.S. in 2012, settling in San Francisco for my first “real job” – as a Junior Analyst in a French innovation consulting firm. The firm helped its clients – typically large corporations – develop new products and services that would lead to new sources of revenue and even a new direction for the company as a whole. Working on websites, slide decks, and other digital products, I learned the power of good design to communicate a vision and the path to get there. I thought that I had left behind the days of cross-cultural communication, but instead found that the skills I had developed overseas – in empathy, adaptation, and problem-solving – were more relevant than ever.

As much as I was learning, I was also being overwhelmed by the demands of a fast-paced, technology-centric workplace. Struggling to keep up with the sheer amount of information and responsibilities I was expected to manage, I walked into a local bookstore and picked up the first book I thought would help – the best-selling book on personal productivity Getting Things Done by David Allen. GTD, as it is known, introduced me to the world of professional development, and gave me the tools to manage my overwhelming workload. The results I experienced were so immediate and profound, it sparked a desire to teach others the powerful methods the book had taught me. I started a book club with my coworkers to read through the book one chapter at a time, and discuss it over lunch once a week. The book club became a workshop, which I taught occasionally for the members of the coworking space where we worked.

I had discovered powerful demand for more modern, interactive, and flexible ways of learning about productivity. At the same time, the career path that stretched out before me became depressingly clear: I could expect a minor promotion and pay raise every year or two, at best, in return for my total dedication and effort. I saw that this path limited what I could achieve, not because of a lack of knowledge or skills, but because that was how the career ladder was structured. Instead of giving my creativity and ambition a wide open space to flourish, this path would pin me down in one specialized role after another.

But I still wasn’t ready to take the plunge into self-employment. I left the consulting job and started applying for various roles in the tech sector. But I couldn’t get so much as an interview for any of the positions I applied for. My skills and experiences were too random, too disconnected. There wasn’t any position I qualified for, and it was impossible to put my resume into any category besides “jack of all trades, master of none.” I knew that I had a lot to offer, but it seemed like the corporate world wasn’t designed to make use of it.

It was around this time that online courses caught my eye. I saw so much creativity and innovation happening at such a rapid pace, with people making an impact and sharing their ideas at the same time they achieved financial independence. I took my first online class, on the popular software language Ruby on Rails, in the spring of 2013. It was good, and certainly affordable, but I thought, “I can do better.” Drawing on my teaching experience, my newfound interest in visual design, my basic media skills learned at the Apple Store, and my passion for the GTD method, I turned my lunchtime workshop into an online course called Get Stuff Done Like a Boss. In the course, I taught people the GTD method via a series of short, easy-to-follow videos. The need for such a course was apparent – within a few months thousands of people from all over the world had completed it.

Forte Labs

With the unexpected success of this first course, I decided to put off looking for a new job and pursue this opportunity full time. Thus was born Forte Labs, an online education company which as of 2019 has taught more than 20,000 paying customers to elevate their performance and personal effectiveness via online courses and live workshops. It has evolved over time, as I’ve created other courses and started offering services such as coaching to provide more personalized support. I started a blog, which gave me a public forum to begin exploring new topics such as habit formation, self-tracking, design thinking, and other fields like the theory of constraints, just-in-time manufacturing, and flow states. The blog became a testing ground where I could experiment with a wide array of ideas, and turn the ones that received the most interest into new products.

Around the same time I started my business, I was introduced to meditation. Picking up a book on the recommendation of a friend, I began a daily practice that has had a profound impact on my life. I don’t think I could have withstood the uncertainty and challenge of self-employment without a meditation practice. It helped balance my mind, calm my nerves, and gave me much needed perspective amidst the harrowing ups and downs of the entrepreneurial life. This experience sparked my interest in other kinds of personal and spiritual growth. I became a personal growth enthusiast, taking weekend workshops on self-empowerment, studying positive psychology, and investing in coaching to reveal my blind spots and limiting beliefs. These experiences were not only personally meaningful and rewarding; they also somehow led directly to breakthroughs in my work that I didn’t even expect. I began to see that personal and professional growth are deeply intertwined – that the expansion of the self is tied to the expansion of an audience or business, and that work can be the fuel for personal awakening.

Based on these realizations, I’ve made personal growth the central theme of my work. I believe that developing self-awareness is simply the most important and rewarding thing that humans can pursue. The possibility that the activity we spend most of our waking hours performing – work – can also be a path of personal growth seems like the most unlikely and fortunate coincidence. But it is a coincidence I am dedicated to exploiting to the greatest degree possible.

I’ve found that even highly educated knowledge workers in the most cutting-edge industries struggle with some of the same issues I saw in teaching my Ukrainian students  – how to define goals, schedule their time, and manage projects to completion. I’ve seen how new technology, poorly applied and understood, can confuse and distract people rather than empower and free them. I’ve witnessed the spark of inspiration as people begin to see their computers as powerful tools of creation, rather than as burdens. I continue to discover the power of online platforms and good design in delivering paradigm shifts to a wide audience, which I first learned serving some of the poorest entrepreneurs and wealthiest corporations. And I’ve seen that all the material success in the world means nothing without the peace of mind that comes from self-love and self-understanding.

Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

Venture Stories Podcast with Erik Torenberg

I recently joined Erik Torenberg on the Venture Stories podcast. We had a very wide-ranging conversation including:

Why productivity is not an end in and of itself
Why content creation (not just consumption) is integral to your career
How to better deal with the 11 hours of media a day that the average person consumes
Why the “average human life is now too complex to be managed by the average human brain”
Why hyperfocus and intense productivity are symptoms of trauma, and how to deal with that trauma
The theory of constraints and why it’s so powerful
Religion and meaning-making for the secular world
The future of libraries and why Tiago calls them “digital nomad embassies

Check out the episode on the official podcast website, or listen to our conversation below:

Listen to “Building a Second Brain, Productivity, and Trauma with Tiago Forte” on Spreaker.

Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

On Purpose Podcast with Alex Beadon

I recently had a wonderful conversation with entrepreneur and online business evangelist Alex Beadon, on her popular podcast On Purpose. We talked about:

How I started Forte Labs
Where my inspiration comes from
The levels of the Digital Productivity Pyramid
The importance of Market Research and my process of getting it done
How to get started even if you don’t have any following
Is membership retention something to worry about?
My perspective on being strategic
How to find out what your passion is

Check it out on her website or listen below:

Subscribe to Praxis, our members-only blog exploring the future of productivity, for just $10/month. Or follow us for free content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

The Case for First-Brain Memory

By Tasshin Fogleman

Building A Second Brain (BASB) is an effective default for personal knowledge management (PKM) in the digital era. But outsourcing our creative thinking to a second brain has its pitfalls.

A robust memory can be a useful supplement to digital PKM systems. Contrary to Tiago’s assumptions, memory is not a useless, outmoded relic of our biological bodies. It is an astonishing skill, and we would be unwise to overlook it.

This essay will share multiple strategies for improving our memories, including spaced repetition, memory palaces, and other techniques for improving autobiographical memory.

Why LeBron James is My Hero

I’m not a basketball fan, but LeBron James has had my attention ever since I saw him interviewed after a loss:

A reporter asks LeBron about what happened at a difficult point in the game, a seven-minute stretch during which the Cavaliers lost several points. The clip overlays game footage with LeBron’s discussion of the events, which he describes in great detail.

For me, watching basketball is a blurry game of Pong: the ball goes back and forth, back and forth, and then it’s done. This clip let me see those seven minutes from the perspective of an elite athlete who has dedicated his life to the game.

The really impressive thing about LeBron James, though, isn’t his memory for basketball. It’s actually pretty ordinary for an elite athlete to have high recall for games in their chosen sport. But LeBron remembers everything. He remembers plays other teams playing other sports made. He can accomplish similar feats for video games, recalling the plays made, how he responded, and the result. He then synthesizes that information into new strategies on the fly. He can even remember what shirt you were wearing three years ago when you last saw him.

He remembers all of this with ease—without mnemonic tricks or techniques. In other words, LeBron James is not merely an athletic, 6’8” basketball player who happens to be ambidextrous and hard-working. A virtuous feedback loop between his raw athleticism, his dedication to and passion for his game, and his gift for memory has produced an athlete superior in body and in mind.

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The clinical term for such a memory is hyperthymesia, or Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). Clinically diagnosed hyperthymesia is very rare. LeBron’s example shows it is possible to remember far more than most of us think.

A Sane Default for Remembering

Building a Second Brain recommends that you use digital note-taking software to capture and organize notes. This approach allows new ideas and deliverables to emerge effortlessly.

BASB is based on the following assumptions:

Our memories are limited: As humans, our memories are limited, and we often forget things: names, faces, facts, figures, concepts, etc.
Forgetting is painful: Forgetting is often awkward, inconvenient, or worse.
Remembering is valuable: The ability to remember what we do and learn is extremely useful and fundamental to many goals we have.
Computers are good at remembering: Computers can store ample information with ease.
Brains are good at connecting: By storing relevant and interesting information in digital notes, we can use our native strength as humans – making intuitive connections between previously unrelated ideas.

Based on these assumptions, BASB recommends that you use the right tool for the job. Use computers to store information in the form of digital notes, forming a “second brain.” Use your “first brain” to handle pattern recognition and make unexpected connections between ideas.

BASB is the best system for digital knowledge management that I’ve found. Regular and consistent use of my “second brain” has been joyful, profitable, and world-expanding in the best possible ways, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

However, I disagree with the first assumption listed above, that our memories are limited. We do forget things, and it is mentally taxing to recall things, but as we have seen, it is possible to remember far more than most people think.

Memory is like a muscle. It makes sense not to strain our muscles, and BASB lets us avoid doing that with our memory. But we shouldn’t let our capacity for remembering atrophy either. Having built a trustworthy second brain, we should strengthen the native memory muscles of our first brains. So while BASB is a system for remembering valuable information, it makes sense to complement it with other strategies.

Spaced Repetition

The main contemporary competitor to Building a Second Brain is Spaced Repetition Software (SRS), such as Anki. It takes advantage of something called the forgetting curve. This graph predicts when we will forget new information. SRS uses an algorithmic approach to match this “forgetting curve,” so that you can review new information just before you forget it, for optimal long-term memory storage.

The practical implications? Spaced repetition can help you remember anything, forever. If you enter a fact you’ve learned into a spaced repetition system, and faithfully review your cards daily, you will end up committing that fact to long-term memory, and you will have spent very little time doing so.

I’ve used Anki extensively in the past. I used it to pass Ancient Greek in college. Rather than flunking out, I remembered obscure words my peers had forgotten.

I used Anki to complement my studies of programming by memorizing functions in programming languages, and keyboard shortcuts in my editor, Emacs. I became increasingly fluent in my chosen programming languages, to the point that I could get a job programming in one of them, despite having no formal training.

I also used Spaced Repetition for more trivial pursuits, like memorizing flags, geographical facts, people’s names and faces, and birthdays.

In my first conversation with Tiago, I asked him about spaced repetition software. At that point, SRS was the best-in-class personal knowledge management solution I had found, and I was thrilled that it existed.

Tiago’s reply astonished me:

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His stated goal was to memorize as little as possible:

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This astonished me. I wanted to memorize as much as possible – something SRS had helped me to do easily – and here was someone saying he wanted to memorize as little as possible.

After following Tiago’s work for several years, and taking his Building a Second Brain course, I see the value in PKM. And it’s easier now to see the problems with SRS. For starters, I found SRS to be emotionally exhausting. I experienced intense burnout and motivation issues every time I sat down to review my cards. From conversations with others who use or have used SRS, I’m not alone. It takes a lot of time, effort, and willpower.

I also believe that SRS is widely misused:

People use SRS to learn information, rather than remember it: Once you’ve learned a new fact – such as that “tiga” is the word in Bahasa Indonesia for three – SRS will help you to remember that fact. SRS is not well-suited to helping you learn information. It’s for remembering information you’ve already learned.
People don’t read the manual: It’s worth taking the time to read the manual for your SRS tool of choice, and learn how to use its features effectively. If you don’t, you may take a suboptimal approach and waste your time.
People use others’ flashcards: In my experience, shared decks of flashcards are of such poor quality that it’s not worth using them. Besides, making your own deck is a reward in itself for memory. If you do use others’ decks, download them and suspend them, curating and adapting them as needed. You may need to change the structure of the information entirely (e.g. from front/back to a custom format for that information). This curation is extremely time-consuming, and probably not worth doing.
People use it to remember too much and/or the wrong things: With Anki, it suddenly becomes possible to remember any fact you want. This includes obscure film trivia, esoterica of ancient software, and other practically useless information. Just because you can remember something, doesn’t mean you should.

SRS is like a sharp knife. SRS is extremely effective at helping you to remember information. It can more or less guarantee that you will remember important facts when you need them. But it is also very easy to waste your time by remembering information that you don’t really need, or taking a suboptimal approach because you don’t fully understand the software.

Tiago’s criticisms of Anki and SRS helped me to see these problems. But having taken the course and drank the Kool-Aid, I would politely disagree with Tiago. Tiago said that SRS doesn’t make sense. I still think that there is a place for spaced repetition software like Anki: as a complement to BASB.

Here are my current, highly limited criteria for using SRS. SRS might be the correct approach if you are learning something that is:

extremely fact-intensive
very important (actively relevant to your current responsibilities, goals, and long-term vision)
where easy recall will dramatically improve your outcomes (compared to using reference materials, notes, internet search, etc.)

For example, foreign languages are an excellent use case for SRS, if and only if they are relevant to your current responsibilities, goals, and long-term vision. If you’re simply taking a course out of a sense of obligation, it’s probably not worth the effort. But if you want to speak your long-term partner’s native tongue, you will find it extremely helpful (but not sufficient).

Outside of this narrowly defined scope, you don’t want Anki to be the cornerstone of your PKM. Use BASB instead. If you decide to use SRS, keep it relevant and related to your goals. If it stops being fun to review your cards, listen to the wisdom (and boredom) of your body, and move on.

Traditional Mnemonic Techniques

Like us, ancient civilizations were deeply aware that our memories are flawed. But they took a very different approach to solving the problem. The ability to memorize information – poems, events, people, ideas, etc. – was considered a moral virtue. Practicing memorization was thought to build character.

With these values, ancients developed incredible ways to memorize in efficient, effective ways.

There are many “mind hacks” for extending our first brain’s memory capabilities, using our first brain alone. One of the most famous mnemonic tools is a memory palace.

Memory palaces take advantage of the fact that our memories work very well on “location data.” It’s easy for you to remember the details of your childhood home, for example, even if it’s been years since you’ve been there.

To create a memory palace, pick a location you know well to use as the palace. Then you need to define a route to “walk through” the palace with. When you use your memory palace, you should always store memories in the same order. For example, I use my childhood home, and walk through the laundry room, then the dining room, then the kitchen, then the family room, then into my bedroom, and so on.

When you want or need to remember a series of related things, like verses in a poem or your shopping list, you place the items or ideas in memorable ways along the path in the memory palace. Like it or not, the brain remembers things that are funny (awkward situations), crude (sex acts, toilet humor), or unusual (multi-colored elephants). Try to link what you need to remember (“blue napkins”) to one of those things (“someone wrapped in a giant blue napkin on the laundry machine”). Between the extreme quality of the memory and the location it’s stored in, you’ll find that it will be far easier to recall than it would otherwise be.

I make use of these memory palaces frequently, as a complement to other memory storage devices. I tend to use them when I don’t have access to a capture device (notebook or smartphone), or can’t use one (when in conversation, or driving). In my line of work, training intensively at the Monastic Academy, I most often use them when meditating in a space where others are sitting quietly.

I often think of tasks I need to do, or new project ideas, when on the meditation cushion. It takes me about two to four seconds to come up with a memorable image related to the task, store it in the next location in my memory palace, and return to my meditation technique. Doing so lets me “record” the task with minor disruption to others in the room and my own meditation practice.

When I next have the ability to edit my task list, usually within twelve hours, I capture all the items in my memory palace and then “clear” the palace of the images I stored there.

As with SRS, don’t use mnemonic techniques to memorize everything ever. Be familiar with them, and learn how to use them, but use them judiciously as secondary tools where appropriate.

Mindful Review

SRS and traditional mnemonic techniques are both excellent, but they are most useful for concrete facts and concepts, like a foreign vocabulary word or the capital of a country. They don’t necessarily improve the kind of memory that LeBron excels at: autobiographical memory.

It is possible to improve our memory for “life events” as well. I’ve found two techniques for doing so. Because they have to do with our own phenomenological experience, both techniques are essentially meditation or mindfulness techniques. The first technique is called Mindful Review.

The purpose of Mindful Review is to review (or remember) recent events that happened to you, and make use of them.

Here’s how I practice Mindful Review:

Review your recent actions, recollecting the last day or so in broad strokes.
Choose an event that seems important – one you might be proud of, or not so proud of, or simply an ambiguous event you’d like to explore.
Review this event by remembering it in as much detail as you can. Remember the area around you, how mindful you were (or not), what happened in your body, what you saw and heard, how you felt, what others may have said, their body language, etc.
If you feel proud of what happened, celebrate that! Commend yourself mentally. Say, “that was good! Nice work!” or something that resonates with you. Bask in any feelings of pride or joy or pleasure that arise. Explore and enjoy these positive emotions.
If you don’t approve of what happened, you can also turn this into a positive experience. You can envision having done it differently in the past, or set a different intention for the future.
Either way, feel good. Feel good in your body. In this way, we learn to celebrate and grow our successes, and learn from our mistakes – so there’s always a positive outcome.

You can stop there, or you can repeat this process with as many discrete events as you like. If, during the session, you think of something concrete to do as a result of this meditation (like offer an apology), follow up on that.

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Mindful Review works best when done regularly, ideally daily. If you practice it consistently, you will start to see incredible behavior changes over time. Some of these changes will be small, and some will be big. Either way, they will make a meaningful improvement on your quality of life.

And, for our purposes, your recall of recent events will improve dramatically. You will be increasingly able to remember the past day or so in extreme detail.

Calendar Memory

In 2012, someone with the handle Lembran Sar started a blog called Lembransation, dedicated to their exploration of a rather unusual memory technique. The author reports that they can currently remember seven years of memories.

The technique has two stages: a curation stage, and a review stage.

Curation: Each day, you pick an image of what happened that day, and associate it with that weekday and calendar date. For example, on Saturday, March 2nd, 2019, I chose a memory of playing a game with my Dad.
Review: You periodically review all of the images. At minimum, you do a review each day of all of the images from that month; your image of what you were doing on the same day of each month for the previous six months (e.g. February 2nd); finally, you review what you were doing on the same date for the last year(s) before (e.g. Friday, March 2nd, 2018).

I’ve done this technique for several months at a time, although I’ve currently paused my use of the technique. I know someone who has done this technique for a year and a half, and Lembran Sar has been doing the technique for seven years and counting. In my experience, it only takes 1-5 minutes a day. Your memory improves dramatically, the information comes in handy from time to time, and it’s a lot of fun.

I’ve done extensive work on my autobiographical memory of daily events by using Mindful Review. All that work came in handy with this technique. Recalling a chosen piece of a given day almost always brings back a flood of specific details from the day.

It’s easy to create a positive feedback loop between this technique and mindful review. The more you want to remember calendar days, the more you want to remember details, and vice versa. The more you want to remember something, the more you do. So if you do both techniques, you end up remembering larger and larger spans of time with more and more detail.

My long-term goal for using these techniques is to be able to recount precise words I or others said in conversations. This effectively means being able to recall entire conversations verbatim. This requires a high degree of skill, but everything I’ve seen from my experiments with these techniques suggests it’s possible. I have some practical reasons for wanting to be able to do this: my meditation teacher suggested it as a goal to strive for; it’s useful to be able to recall conversations in detail; it requires a high degree of mindfulness and concentration. But above all, it seems like a fun challenge.

Which technique to use?

This article has presented several different approaches to augmenting human memory. Each system has strengths and weaknesses. You shouldn’t necessarily use every tool available to you – rather, learn to use the ones that seem relevant to your purposes.

Use Building a Second Brain and digital note-taking as a default system for capturing, organizing, and using information.
Use Spaced Repetition software like Anki for fact-intensive information that is very important; highly relevant to your current responsibilities, goals, and long-term vision; and where easy recall will dramatically improve your outcomes (compared to using reference materials, notes, internet search, etc.).
Learn to use mnemonic techniques like memory palaces and the Major System. to exercise your memory. Apply them to your life and work if it seems fun, useful, or interesting.
Use Mindful Review for short-term autobiographical memory to improve your mindfulness and ethics.
Use Lembran Sar’s technique for long-term autobiographical memory.

Conclusion

LeBron’s memory has helped him to become one of the world’s most accomplished athletes. His example demonstrates that it is possible to create a positive feedback loop between athletic skill and accomplishment, intellectual capacity, and attentional skill. This is the same feedback loop that I have referred to as Mind, Body, Attention.

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LeBron is also a devoted philanthropist. One of his most famous projects is creating a school which is changing how educators think about providing services to at-risk youth. To me, this is a clear example of how excellence in Mind, Body, Attention can strengthen our sense of responsibility in the world. In turn, that compassion for the world can support us in deepening our own contemplative practice.

I don’t admire LeBron James because I want to become one of the world’s best basketball players. I want to develop skill in as many aspects of my life as possible, and integrate them into one seamless feat of excellence. And, as someone who has taken bodhisattva vows, I aspire to emulate LeBron in this way not for its own sake, or for my own glory, but for the benefit of all living beings.

Further Reading
Spaced Repetition

Want To Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender To This Algorithm
Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge
Leitner system

Mnemonic Techniques

Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein (notes)
A Master of Memory in India Credits Meditation for His Brainy Feats
The Major System, an interactive essay

Mindful Review

Catalyzing Positive Behavior Change with Mindful Review
Upasaka Culadasa’s The Mind Illuminated , Appendix E

Calendar Memory

Lembransation (notes)
A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering
Total recall: the people who never forget

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Announcing Building a Second Brain Version 9, Kicking Off Oct. 2

I’m very proud to announce version 9 of Building a Second Brain, open for enrollment starting now. 

To celebrate hitting the 1,000 student milestone last month, we are making the biggest upgrade to the course in two years. You can see all the new features we’re adding here (there’s too many to list here).

They will be available, as always, to all current and past students starting October 2, when we kick off the last live cohort of the year. Purchase by Oct. 1 at midnight Pacific time to join.

Submit your email below if you’d like to hear more about the upcoming cohort. I’ll send you my best free content, invite you to a free workshop and Q&A, and tell you a few of my favorite stories from recent grads.

I’ve been facilitating workshops across the country for the last few months, speaking to many people about the challenges they face and the goals they aspire to. 

I can’t help but notice that there’s a crisis of meaning that many of them face in the work they do. Even (especially) when they are outwardly successful, and doing highly creative work. There is something missing in their essential experience of work.

Too often, work and life begin to weigh us down, and we lose track of what makes us come alive. Imperceptibly, the work that was once exciting slowly turns into an endless series of obligations. And when we go looking for a better way of doing things, we have to wade through the scammy sales pitches, the superficial tips and tricks, and products that just don’t deliver what they promise. So most people just revert back to what they’ve been doing all along, except a little more jaded and cynical.

I believe we can all get to a point where we can take real pleasure in our work. I’ve seen the shift happen so many times. We can all experience the deep satisfaction that comes with executing something with great skill. To do work of excellence, that will stand the test of time. And I know that we can do so without giving up our peace of mind, our health, or our perspective. 

But it requires first taking responsibility for ourselves and our environment. From constant digital distractions to over-scheduled calendars, we’re constantly getting pulled away from the effortless focus and flow of being lost in the moment. There are no shortcuts, but there is a pathway. 

I recently wrote this post, What It Feels Like to Have a Second Brain, to try and answer one of the most common questions I’ve received: what does it feel like? What is it like when you have such a powerful system at your disposal? What’s different about your day to day work and life?

What really matters in this whole endeavor of building a Second Brain is who you become as a result of the process. How you feel when you get up in the morning and face your day. What you believe is possible. What you know yourself to be capable of.

If you are a knowledge worker – if you are paid based on the quality of your thinking – then there is no better investment than creating a digital environment that promotes clarity and focus. That offers up valuable resources and bits of knowledge right when you need them. 

Idea capture apps are the tools of your trade. Ideas are your bricks and mortar. Your potential as a learning machine is limitless, but your potential as a memory bank most definitely isn’t. It’s time to take a load off your shoulders and let the incredible machines that surround you do as much of that labor as possible.

In Building a Second Brain, I will help you find what “resonates” amidst the massive flow of information you consume every day – a clear intuitive sense that a piece of information you encounter is interesting, useful, or important to your goals. 

Once you become sensitive to this, you’ll find that your enjoyment of learning will skyrocket. With an effective system for idea management, your conscious mind will be satisfied knowing that it’s absorbing new information better now. And your subconscious mind is happy knowing it will be able to easily retrieve it again later. 

When order is reflected in both your internal and external worlds, you’ll experience a sense of harmony that is difficult to describe. 

There’s an important distinction between “note-taking” and “organizing.” I actually don’t have much to say on the former. Nearly everyone knows how to do it. 

I will focus on the latter: What to do with all these notes? How to structure them to be as useful as possible? How to ensure you can find them at just the right moment? No one wants a note-taking system; they want a note-giving system. A system they can trust to surface their knowledge when it can make the biggest difference. And that requires a systematic approach, not some productivity tips.

My approach in Building a Second Brain is different than other kinds of organizing – we are deciding what to keep, instead of deciding what to throw away. With virtually unlimited digital storage, you never really need to delete anything. You can pretty much keep it all, just in case. 

But you still need to clear your workspaces so all that data doesn’t overwhelm today’s priorities. I will teach you how to think like a curator – selectively choosing only the best excerpts, highlights, and passages of the information you consume for safekeeping.

People assume that once they “get organized” they will enter a blissful state of mind where everything is logical and clear. That state of mind is what they truly crave. I will show you that it is available here and now, at any moment, not just in some far off future. And the strange thing is, when you adopt that mindset upfront, the process of organizing (and staying organized) becomes tremendously exciting and rewarding. 

This course is made immediately available as a self-paced curriculum, so you can peruse it at your leisure. But the best learning happens in the live cohort. It takes some extra effort on both our parts – showing up to calls scheduled at specific times, completing assignments and giving feedback, and moving forward at the same pace. But I’ve seen time and again that it makes a tremendous difference in student’s success.

There is nothing like learning alongside a group of peers who are as determined as you are to harness the full potential of their ideas, guided by an instructor equally determined to make them succeed. The live cohort is an opportunity to get the very best of traditional education – the accountability, the relationships, and the feedback – and combine it with the very best of online education – flexibility, accessibility, and diversity.

I’ll tell you what to do, and just as importantly, what not to do. I’ll save you countless hours of reading, experimenting, and trial and error, leading you directly to the best practices I’ve discovered through experience and validated with research. You’ll learn a fundamental life skill that will serve you not just for one job or project, but for a lifetime.

I know it’s a considerable financial investment, and I want you to think about this decision carefully. Is this right for you, right now? Is this the area where you want to invest? Is this the lever that will enable you to change the trajectory of your career or business?

If the answer is yes, join us for the next cohort of Building a Second Brain, kicking off October 2, 2019. Click here to go straight to checkout.

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Don’t Set New Year’s Resolutions – Create Reusable Components

This article was originally published on the FugBugz blog.

With the new year just around the corner, we’re entering the season of New Year’s’ Resolutions. Prepare yourself for overcrowded gyms and inspirational Instagram quotes tagged with #bigdreams.

If that’s not quite your style, I’d like to introduce you to a very different way of making progress on your goals: Component Thinking.

Instead of fixating on far-off, audacious horizons, Component Thinking has you focus your efforts on creating small, reusable components in the short term, knowing that you’ll be able to assemble them into something bigger in the future.

Digital work is made up of components

Every work product is made up of smaller parts, which I will call “components.” This is true of physical products, but it’s not very easy to take them apart and put them together in a different form. But for digital products, reuse is easy.

Any snippet of text can be copied and pasted anywhere else. Any image or video can be edited and uploaded to different places. And of course, a piece of code can be reused in different parts of a software program, or even in different programs.

Here are some simple examples of how to create reusable components:

If you create a lot of business proposals, make a proposal template you can use again and again
If you often design websites, start collecting web clippings of websites you like in a notes app
Instead of just updating your resume every few years, start collecting work deliverables you could show off in a portfolio
If you find yourself writing the same onboarding email multiple items, make it into a knowledge base article that you can reference with just a link
If there is a common customer service issue you have to deal with, record a 2-minute screen capture that you can upload to your website

These actions are valuable not just for one-time use, but for many possible future needs. A template for business proposals is inherently valuable, independently of any specific proposal. A notebook full of model websites could be useful in any kind of web design project. A portfolio is always a good thing to have, whether you’re applying for jobs or raising a round of funding.

Having many of these components ready and waiting gives you a few powerful benefits:

Each one gives you optionality, increasing the number of options you can consider
Each one helps you take action more quickly, because you can reuse past work instead of starting from scratch
Each one can remove uncertainty by testing assumptions, making future projects less risky
You can improve components incrementally over time, by tweaking and adjusting them each time you use them, instead of trying to make all the improvements at once

The modularity of digital work

The impermanence of digital work can often feel like a curse. Nothing ever seems to be finished. We rarely get to celebrate a clear-cut completion. But we can turn this curse into a blessing – if nothing is ever final, there’s no point in waiting to get started!

Instead of waiting until you have all the pieces in place, launch a basic version and upgrade it slowly over time:

Launch a beta version of your app, knowing that any component of it can be added later through software updates
Send out a draft of your blog post, knowing that you can update the text at any time
Self-publish an ebook on the Kindle platform, knowing that any update to the manuscript will automatically be synced wirelessly to anyone who has purchased the book
Publish a simple, one-page website with a photo and a bio, and add a new page every few months when you have extra time

Digital work is naturally modular – the various components that make up a product can be created at different times, evolve at different speeds, and be swapped in and out. We can take advantage of this modularity to make progress on our goals in small pieces, instead of in one huge leap.

Solving problems by making things

Most people solve problems through analysis, which means “separating” the problem into smaller parts. The way makers solve problems is through synthesis – by making things and testing them. There is nothing like a tangible thing placed in front of a real human being to bring a dose of reality forcefully into a project.

The best components are those that:

Answer questions or test assumptions
Simplify or speed up future projects
Make future decisions faster or easier
Need to be done anyway

People are often afraid to start on projects until they know they will succeed. But this is like waiting to cross town until all the traffic lights are green at once. It won’t ever happen. We have to make progress whenever and however we can.

By focusing our efforts on creating multipurpose, reusable components, we are preparing the ground so that we can quickly take action when an opportunity presents itself. Instead of waiting for the conditions to be just right, we are actively revealing assumptions, learning new skills, and preparing the resources we’ll need.

This new year, instead of setting a flashy resolution, try creating a reusable component.

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Servant Hedonism: My Life Philosophy

On a recent Sunday afternoon, while reading on the couch, I was startled to realize that I had a life philosophy. 

It’s not a very deep or sophisticated one. It’s not rooted in a grand narrative. It doesn’t specify precisely which rules to follow or which decisions to make.

But it has served me well. It’s been a guide during dark times, when the world seemed hopelessly uncertain and complex.

I call it Servant Hedonism – serving yourself by serving others.

It combines two ideas that are often seen as opposites – service and pleasure – into one unified whole. 

Let’s start with “servant.”

“Servant” is meant in the same sense as “Servant Leadership.” It proposes that the essence of life is a kind of unattached generosity – the willingness and determination to be of service, in any way possible, as much of the time as possible.

I have found time and again that whenever I wasn’t sure which decision to make, this principle has led me to the most fulfilling and satisfying places. It’s a good rule because it’s simple – we are very good at telling how we can help. And it’s an easy one to satisfy – there are so many people in need all around us. 

Being of service is a fundamentally humble orientation toward life. It recognizes that you emerged from an ecosystem, and to an ecosystem you will ultimately return. It acknowledges that you have to pay your own way in this world. But you can do so by contributing to others, not taking from them.

In other words, you are not yours. You belong to a community that existed long before you and will continue long after you. In this brief moment of participation, you have the choice to make a contribution to the human project.

Being of service also has many practical benefits. It leads to positive sum interactions. It gives you a great reputation. It unites the people around you in common causes as you seek to be of service together. 

But even with all these practical benefits, there is one reason to serve others that stands well above the rest: it feels good.

This leads us to the second part, to “hedonism.” And it is the even more important part.

Serving others is the absolute most blissful state I know. Nothing else even comes close. Sharing your knowledge and gifts with someone and seeing their eyes light up at the sight of a new possibility for their life is a transcendent, out-of-body experience. The ultimate privilege in a relentlessly self-centered world.

But service by itself so easily leads to unnecessary sacrifice, martyrdom, and even self-destruction. The cold mandate to “be of value” to others can paradoxically lead to devaluing our own intrinsic worth. 

As activist adrienne maree brown writes, “You cannot create freedom for others through your own bondage. You cannot empower others through your own demoralization. You cannot create a fulfilling life for others by draining your own of its color. You are a seed, and that is not how seeds work.”

Service needs pleasure to avoid becoming yet another form of struggle and control.

These two principles, service and pleasure, are often pitted against each other. As if you can only do one at a time, or only pick one at all. As if any investment in one is automatically a disservice to the other. 

But I don’t believe that to be the case. 

I believe service and pleasure can be one and the same, like two sides of the same coin. By asking yourself how you can be of service, you evolve into a more generous person who you enjoy seeing in the mirror. By enjoying yourself – including your mistakes and your defects – you become a more self-accepting and generative person who has more capacity to give. 

Servant Hedonism is ultimately about self-love. 

You love yourself enough to include yourself in the sphere of your love. You love your life too much to allow pain to be the defining experience of your days. You have the courage to ask yourself, as brown suggests, “What is happening and why did I decide to endure it?”

As Charles Eisenstein writes, “Pleasure is the feeling we get from satisfying a need. The more powerful the need, the greater the pleasure. To follow this principle requires, first, accepting that our needs are valid and even beautiful. And not just our needs, but our desires as well, coming as they do from unmet needs.”

I don’t think it matters that much whose needs those are. There’s a kind of blurring that happens when you intentionally collapse service and pleasure. It becomes hard to distinguish whose needs you are satisfying. It becomes meaningless to decide who is serving, and who is receiving.

There is a viral quality to Servant Hedonism. Once a person’s needs for safety, belonging, intimacy, and connection have been met, they find within themselves their own desire to serve. And thus the virus spreads.

Some might object to the word “hedonism.” It conjures images of drunken debauchery, dangerous excess, and even taking advantage of others. But I think it’s essential. 

You and your good have to be centered at all times. Because if your life is only a means to something else, then human life can’t be your highest value. And if you don’t value human life above all, you will soon find yourself in turn using the lives of others as a means to an end.

Servant Hedonism creates a magnetic attraction that draws others in. Instead of guilt trips and calls for personal sacrifice, people see that you are having great fun and reveling in your transformation. 

There’s no need to recruit them, or incentivize them, or convince them to join you. Pleasure is the gravity well of the human condition – it pulls and it pulls always and forever, the only form of perpetual motion yet discovered. 

Pleasure can be an organizing principle for a generative, flourishing life. It can be the organizing principle for our social movements, for our activism, for our economy. It might be the only organizing principle that is truly sustainable. 

Embracing Servant Hedonism is, paradoxically, a little painful at first. 

I think we fear that we’ll lose control, that we’ll go off the deep end of self-gratification. It feels almost impossible to escape the moralistic framing of pain as somehow intrinsically good, and pleasure bad. It feels like we have to completely meet all our needs before we can afford to give to others. Yet our needs are endless.

I find the courage to go on by reminding myself: you get to be part of the future you are creating. You don’t have to be a casualty of the transformation you are seeking. Your freedom and pleasure are essential ingredients of the freedom and pleasure of the world. 

Thank you to Ben Ford, Javier Rodriguez, and Michael Ashcroft for their feedback and suggestions.

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Public Libraries: Our Last Stand for Social Infrastructure

The relationships that underpin a strong community don’t happen by accident. 

They require “social infrastructure” – the physical spaces in which people have direct, face-to-face interaction. Communities emerge from places like schools, playgrounds, parks, athletic fields, sidewalks, courtyards, community gardens, churches, civic associations, markets, cafes, diners, barber shops, bookstores, and libraries.

Libraries are the focus of two books I read recently, which together gave me a profound new appreciation for their importance as social infrastructure. 

Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People (affiliate link) and Marilyn Johnson’s This Book is Overdue! (affiliate link) explore a world of urban controversies, exciting new ideas, changing demographics, and impassioned librarians I never knew existed.

This article is a summary of the main ideas I encountered in these books, along with our experience at a recent training we delivered to the staff of the Palm Beach County Library in South Florida.

Libraries as social infrastructure

Social infrastructure is different from the more widely known “social capital.” Social capital is a measure of the strength of people’s interpersonal networks, while social infrastructure refers to the physical conditions that determine how much social capital develops in the first place. It is more fundamental, and more tangible.

The study of social infrastructure asks, “What conditions in the places we inhabit make it more likely that people will develop strong or supportive relationships, and what conditions make it more likely that people will grow isolated and alone?”

The mere existence of public spaces doesn’t ensure that social capital will emerge. It depends how they are designed. Many modern public spaces are designed for maximum efficiency – dropping off the kids at school as efficiently as possible, getting people their coffee at the cafe as quickly as possible, maximizing the flow of shoppers through checkout and out of the store. 

But designing for maximum efficiency also tends to keep people separate and discourage interaction, which is, after all, highly inefficient. This explains why so much of our shared infrastructure doesn’t promote shared values. 

Klinenberg writes:

“[Social infrastructure] encourages people to form bonds that extend beyond their immediate families, not because they set out to “build community,” but simply because relationships naturally form when people engage in sustained, repeated interaction doing things they enjoy.”

He continues:

“The social cohesion that is essential for democracy emerges from shared participation in meaningful projects, not just from a commitment to abstract beliefs and values.”

Libraries are one of the last remaining places where people of all ages and backgrounds can find “shared participation in meaningful projects.” 

They help build friendships and support networks among neighbors who may never otherwise meet. They teach valuable life skills to kids and adults alike. They provide things to see, things to do, and programs to take part in for people who may be lonely, disconnected, or disadvantaged. 

The role of libraries

From these books, I understood for the first time the connection between what goes on in my local library, and the maintenance of a healthy democracy. These are the five pillars I identified as the role of libraries in modern society.

To protect free speech and truth

The “post-truth” era has made almost every source of information into a weapon. There are few disinterested parties we can go to for sound advice. Librarians have remained a neutral party in this war, trusted by the public more than any profession except nurses.

As E.J. Josey said, “Information justice is a human rights issue; the public library must remain ‘the people’s university’…and librarians can get involved and shape the future or they can sit back and watch the changes.” We cannot have justice in society unless we have justice in our access to information.

To provide space for intellectual exploration

Schools have become increasingly metrics driven in recent years, in a race to meet educational standards. But this has made “learning for learning’s sake” increasingly hard to find. Libraries provide a place that is safe not only physically, but also intellectually. A place where no one will question your choices, scrutinize what you’re reading, or force their priorities on you.

Marilyn Johnson recounts the words of a young woman named Shannon who found in her local public library a place of refuge and intellectual freedom:

“I never, ever encountered a librarian who said something like ‘Why would you want to do that?’ or ‘I can’t let you use that machine, you’re too young.’ I was shy, but they never made me feel weird. Nobody treated me like I was special or supersmart, either. They were just neutral. And that, I think, was a real gift. It made the library a space of permission, not encouragement that pushed you in a certain direction, where you feel like people are watching you and like giving their approval, but just freedom to pursue what you want.” 

To help people improve themselves 

Libraries are the original advocates of self-improvement. Klinenberg quotes from a conversation he had with a New York City librarian named Andrew: 

“At the library, the assumption is you are better. You have it in you already. You just sort of need to be exposed to these things and provide yourself an education. The library assumes the best out of people. The services it provides are founded upon the assumption that if given the chance, people will improve themselves.”

Andrew continues:

“…a lot of adults who use the library aren’t just people who are trying to improve themselves in terms of, say, intellectual capacity. They’re trying to improve themselves because they need an environment that’s not like every other environment they’ve ever known, that judges them, that takes advantage of them, that doesn’t want anything to do with them, doesn’t understand their role in society.”

This self-improvement is not just an individual pursuit of reading books. It happens in the activities that define the daily life of a library: book clubs, movie nights, sewing circles, and classes in art, music, current events, and computing.

To develop young people

Libraries are one of the very few public spaces where children are still free to roam, while still under adult supervision.

Children’s libraries give children their first small taste of independence, giving them library cards and the choice of how to use them. They offer study help and after-school programs in art, science, music, language, and math.

As they grow up, libraries can recommend books, authors, and genres to teenagers who may be seeking answers to questions they don’t even know how to articulate. They provide a refuge for young people who want to study or socialize without being hassled. And they train young citizens by teaching them what it means to borrow and take care of something public, and return it for others to use.

To serve everyone

This is perhaps the least tangible, but most important role of libraries in modern society.

It feels like a radical statement today to say that “Everyone is welcome.” Regardless of whether they are a citizen, a voter, a taxpayer, or a convicted felon, the library is free to everyone who walks in the door. In a time where market logic drives so much of what we do, libraries bestow dignity on everyone equally. They give us a chance to recognize the humanity of others, and in so doing, recognize it in ourselves.

The foundational principle of the library is that all people deserve free, open access to our shared culture and heritage and knowledge. Libraries are the guardians of the tangible artifacts that make our human rights enforceable. The library is one of the very few places left that serves everyone equally, regardless of their social status or ability to pay.

If we don’t invest in social infrastructure, the material foundations of our social and civic life erode. If we defund our libraries in favor of “looking things up on the Internet,” we will lose one of the few places dedicated to training people in the values and skills of democracy.

If you liked these ideas, I’ve started this list of “Cool Twitter librarians” you can follow to get more exposure to innovative thinking on public libraries.

Thank you to Brendan Schlagel, Jessica Burton, Andy Sparks, Bushra Farooqui, James Alkire, Doug Crane, and Lauren Valdez for their feedback and suggestions. Any errors, omissions, or indiscretions are purely mine.

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Libraries in the Digital Age: A Case Study in Equipping Librarians with the Tools of Idea Management

Last year I received an intriguing message from someone who called himself “The Efficient Librarian.” He had recently completed my online course Building a Second Brain, and said he wanted to talk about a collaboration.

This mysterious sender turned out to be Doug Crane, writer of The Efficient Librarian blog and director of the county library system in Palm Beach, in South Florida. In his role managing more than 500 library staff in the second largest county east of the MIssissippi, I learned that Doug was on a mission: to update the library for the digital age.

Doug had discovered David Allen’s Getting Things Done method years before, and in 2012 developed a workshop to teach the method to his staff. It was received enthusiastically, and he went on to speak and facilitate workshops at regional library conferences and associations across the state of Florida. Today he is the director of a sprawling network of 17 branches managing 1.2 million items, including books, CDs, DVDs, and many others

Doug called me because he had seen in my course a vision for the future of libraries. He saw that rather than being a force of disruption, technology could usher in a new golden age of Idea Management. An age when librarians spent less time helping people find reference materials on the shelf, and more time helping them solve complex problems using both online and offline resources.

In Doug’s manifesto, he points out that librarians were the original knowledge workers. Long before any of us experienced the stress of “information overload,” librarians were figuring out how to organize huge volumes of information and make it accessible to the public. Long before Google adopted it as their mission statement, librarians were hard at work inventing systems and tools to “organize the world’s knowledge and make it universally useful and accessible.”

But over the past few decades, the Internet upended the profession. As generation after generation of new online platforms emerged faster and faster, libraries struggled to adapt. No longer were librarians the guardians and gatekeepers of scarce knowledge. Instead, they had to learn how to help people make sense of abundant information online, vetted by no one. The controversy about how to cite Wikipedia in class essays was just the very tip of the iceberg – we now live in a “post-truth” era where every source of information is suspect.

In Doug’s vision, librarians could become not just reference specialists, but personal research consultants. They could master the skill of traversing multiple streams of information flowing through our increasingly digital lives. And they could teach that skill to patrons, unleashing a wave of creativity and empowerment in the communities they serve.

Imagine a future where a library was not primarily about the specific information on the shelves, but about the skills of curating, filtering, digesting, and managing information. Like a martial arts dojo, it would concentrate on training people in skills that would be useful outside its walls. 

Just as dojos teach not just the practical skill of karate, but a whole mindset of honor, respect, self-discipline, and courage, libraries would teach not only the skills of Idea Management, but the mindset needed in a digital world – self-efficacy, objectivity, tolerance, and skepticism.

Doug and I realized that we shared a belief that Idea Management, supported by the tools of digital note-taking, could be one of the most important frontiers in librarianship. That librarians could once again take a leadership role on the information frontier by embracing the powers of technology. Doug recommended two books outlining the challenge and the opportunity that public libraries are facing, and as Lauren and I read them, a whole new understanding of what is at stake dawned on us.

We decided to work together on a one-day workshop for the Palm Beach Library staff. It would be a customized version of our Building a Second Brain course, with the goal of equipping their librarians with the latest skills and tools for Idea Management using technology.

The tour

In May 2019, we touched down in Miami and made the short drive north to West Palm Beach. 

It is a massive county spanning beachfront, lakes, urban and suburban development, and inland agricultural land. It is famous for its wealth, including many high-end hotels, golf courses, and beachside resorts. Trump’s winter estate, Mar-a-lago, sits on an offshore island, and his lavish golf course lies directly across the street from the library headquarters. But there is also significant poverty hiding behind the gilded reputation, with 20% of the county’s children living below the poverty line. A land of excess and contradictions.

For our first day in town, we went on a tour of the library network, visiting two branches and an annex. We were amazed at the incredible diversity of the items they have available for borrowing, and the sophistication of the services they provide.

Alongside the usual fare like books, magazines, reference titles, and microfilm, the Palm Beach Library also offers:

Wireless hotspots for those who don’t have Internet access
Bird-watching kits with binoculars
Curriculum kits for daycare centers and preschools with large-format picture books and hand puppets
Tablets, laptops, and virtual reality goggles
Book-club-in-a-bag, with a set of 10 books and discussion questions

These items combine different kinds of media according to an intended purpose, instead of a static, one-size-fits-all piece of content. The trend of “user-centered design” that has swept the technology world is now finding its way into libraries. In example after example, we saw that the library staff had noticed a need, and then brought together a set of materials that fulfilled it in the most convenient way possible.

The library also offers a range of services designed to make its catalogue as widely accessible as possible. For example:

Talking Books, a nationwide program for patrons who are visually impaired or can’t hold a book
A Books-by-Mail program, which sends books free of charge to patrons who are mobility impaired or can’t visit a branch
The Bookmobile, a mobile library bus that sets up shop temporarily at schools and other underserved locations around the county
Free lunches for students during the summer, when they lose access to free lunches at school

These special programs are in addition to about 300 events and 400 computer classes held each month, reaching 10,000 people every year. 

Throughout our tour, we were surprised to see the extent to which technology was being integrated into every aspect of the library’s operations. 

The main branch has a CreationStation – a soundproofed digital media room where patrons can record podcasts and music, and edit audio or video on late model Macs. Several other branches will be adding such spaces soon. RFID stickers applied to books are part of an electronic tracking system that not only saves time, but protects patrons’ privacy. And behind the scenes, we watched gleefully as a new sorting machine automatically whisked incoming returned books to the correct bins for reshelving.

At the same time, we saw how technology could be an obstacle. 

According to this CNN article, loans of ebooks and audiobooks are taking off, growing at a rate of 30% per year. Libraries nationwide offer over 391 million ebooks to their patrons, including free display space at over 16,000 locations. These titles make up 45% of the total reads for major publisher Macmillan, but this isn’t in direct competition to sales: over 60% of frequent library users have also bought a book written by an author they first discovered in a library, according to Pew.

But incredibly, these digital files have to be purchased one license at a time. A multi-use audiobook license might cost $50-100, limiting how many people can read it at any given time, and only lasting a certain number of reads before it has to be re-purchased. The limitation in this case is not an outdated library not keeping up with the times, but an outdated publishing industry that continues to treat digital books like their physical predecessors.

Far from being a dusty, stale institution stuck in the past, what we saw on our tour was a vibrant, dynamic, quickly evolving organization full of people who care deeply about accessibility for everyone. Lauren and I were blown away by the breadth of the library system’s programs and services, and all of them offered for free to anyone. We came away with the sense that the library was an absolutely vital part of the community, especially for those with the fewest resources.

And this isn’t an isolated case. According to a 2016 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, about half of all Americans aged sixteen and over used a public library in the past year, and two-thirds say that closing their local branch would have a “major impact on their community.” And Millennials are the adult generation most likely to have used a public library, with 53% of Millennials (those ages 18 to 35 at the time) responding that they had used a library or bookmobile in the previous 12 months (compared with 45% of Gen Xers, 43% of Baby Boomers, and 36% of those in the Silent Generation).

Libraries are thriving, but their reputation in the digital age is not. Many question whether they are needed at all, now that information is accessible from anywhere. We saw that new practices in Idea Management could strengthen the role of libraries in a modern, digital-centric world. 

The workshop

Through informal conversations, illuminating anecdotes, and a recent staff survey, we discovered that the needs of the library staff fell into 5 buckets:

How to take advantage of digital tools
How to use discretionary project time
File fragmentation
Summarizing and communicating learning
Community Research Service challenges

1. How to take advantage of digital tools

In recent years libraries have dramatically shifted from focusing exclusively on books, to offering a wide range of CDs, DVDs, magazines, audiobooks, ebooks, and other media. In recognition of this trend, about a third of the library graduate programs in the United States have dropped the word “library” from their titles, and are now known as “information science.”

But the role of technology in the everyday work of library staff has been much less clear. The proliferation of quickly changing software programs, devices, operating systems, and online platforms has left people fending for themselves.

We decided to make the workshop a hands-on experience, with each person bringing the devices they typically use to try out the new note-taking methods we would be teaching.

2. How to use discretionary project time

With budget cuts and the public’s more widespread access to basic information, library staff increasingly have more discretionary “project” time. Instead of completely structured and routine tasks, there are more one-time or unstructured projects such as creating new programs, changing the layout of a space, developing a new resource, or organizing an event. Such projects require not just self-management, but creativity.

We decided to emphasize both actionability and creativity, leading participants through formulating a Project List and identifying existing sources of knowledge they could draw inspiration from to make their work easier and more effective.

3. File fragmentation

We heard a lot of comments about the “fragmentation” of the files the library staff were managing. They already store many different kinds of information digitally, but it is scattered across different platforms, saved in different formats, and accessible on different networks or devices.

Although some of this is unavoidable due to county policies and Florida Public Records laws, we knew that we could show people how to organize their files in a simple and consistent way that supported their projects and goals, using the PARA method. 

4. Summarizing and communicating learning

A lot of knowledge work involves gathering unstructured information – such as at a conference, from a book, or in a committee meeting – and then packaging it up in some form so it can be conveyed to others. And we found that library work is no different – often someone would attend a conference or event, and struggle when they had to come back and communicate what they had learned to their colleagues.

We decided to train participants in Progressive Summarization, a method of structuring and distilling notes to make them easier to retrieve. We knew that this tool would help them take what they already do and are already an expert in, and make it available to others.

5. Community Research Service challenges

One of the newest and most valuable services offered by the Palm Beach Library is their Community Research Service (CRS). It is a free service offered not only to patrons but also to local government agencies, non-profits, and other community groups. Trained librarians are assigned to these organizations to help them locate the best resources for whatever research they are conducting, and then put them to use.

The CRS represents an important shift not only from looking up facts to solving complex problems, but also in taking staff outside library walls to do work in the community. This is part of the library’s mission to “bridge the digital divide,” helping patrons to find, filter, curate, and digest good sources that they can put into action. It’s about not just providing the right answer, but teaching people to find answers for themselves.

In Doug’s words, “I really want to get the bulk of our staff who work in these branches more engaged in the community that they serve. I want to see them ultimately being as comfortable being outside the building, delivering library services, as they are in the building.” He wants his staff to “…be that expert in teaching people those initial digital literacy skills; not only how to discern what’s a good information source, but to manage the information sources.”

Although this service was not directly in the scope of this workshop, we knew that equipping the participants with reusable resources would allow them to translate what they learned with us into their own computer classes and other workshops, which reach 10,000 people every year. 

We developed and open-sourced a OneNote Resource Guide, a public shared notebook containing helpful resources on how to use Microsoft OneNote, a free note-taking app available on all the major operating systems and mobile devices. We also decided we would upload all the recordings, slides, and other materials produced for the training to a private online course on the learning management platform Teachable. Control of this course would be turned over to the library administration at the end of the project, so it could become a renewable educational resource for current and future staff to review.

The outcomes

The training was a success, producing a lot of insights for both participants and for us. Here were some of the things that the 30 participants said they took away from the experience:

“Useful concepts of learning, organizing, capturing and storing info”
“Breaking down challenging projects into intermediate packets”
“The ‘containers versus stream of information’ analogy: that we shouldn’t, and cannot possibly, save everything”
“The idea of not recreating the wheel, use existing sources of knowledge”
“Keep capturing in mind at all times”
“I have a place to pull from my past learned knowledge and not lose it/refer back to it whenever I want”
“OneNote ‘notes’ can include whole articles, files, voice recordings, photos, etc. which, depending on what kind of a project you’re working on, could be a big plus”
“Digital note taking can be a time saver, there are different ways to incorporate digital note taking into daily work”
“Use previous work examples as templates”
“Keeping all notes in one place makes it easier to keep track of tasks and projects”
“How to make use of knowledge that is captured (actionable v. inactionable)”

By far the biggest challenge we encountered was in the implementation of the technology. Participants had a range of difficulties, from network firewalls that prevented them from syncing their notes, to install permissions on computers owned by the organization, to challenges with understanding how the methods taught could be put into practice on slightly different configurations.

For future trainings, we’ll either need to leave the implementation for later and focus on the principles, or have a standardized note-taking setup that everyone uses.

A new kind of curation

One theme that came up again and again over the course of the project was curation. We saw that curation was an existing activity, very familiar to librarians everywhere, that we could draw on to show how Idea Management could be a central part of the future of libraries. 

Library staff are already experts on how to distinguish the best sources, compare and contrast similar works, make practical decisions about what to keep, pick works that cover different aspects of a topic, and vet them all for accuracy and relevance. All we needed to do was shift this activity from being primarily a public service offered to patrons, to being a practical skill that they could teach patrons to exercise for themselves.

The flood of information available to everyone online has ushered in a new reality: all of us need to become curators, able to pick out the signal from the noise and decide what it means for us. Without this skill, we are at the mercy of a relentless stream of updates, notifications, distractions, and news flashes pushing us in one direction or the other. Most of this content is designed to influence our thinking and behavior, not in our own interest, but in the interest of advertisers.

One of our underlying goals for the workshop was to provoke a cultural shift in the library, to show the staff that they already possess powers of curation that are desperately needed by their patrons. We wanted to make sure everyone got the same message, recognized the same challenges, and started a conversation about what it would look like for the library to become a space for learning and practice in the new skills of Idea Management.

Idea management and the future of libraries

Through this work and other reading, I’ve come to believe that Idea Management is critical for the future of society, and more specifically, the future of libraries. 

It is a higher order skill that ties together research and action, fact and narrative, objectivity and meaning, all in service of people’s projects and goals. Librarians are perfectly positioned to be the leaders in understanding, implementing, and training others in the best practices. To take on this new discipline as the next era of their mission to make human knowledge universally accessible and useful.

As Doug Crane points out on his blog, notes could be considered the most relevant unit of knowledge in today’s digital world: “Notes are the basic unit of knowledge management. I define a note very broadly as an ‘information artifact with perceived value.’”

The physical format of the information we consume is no longer relevant. Information has been abstracted away from its delivery mechanisms, and can now arrive in any format, on any device, and via any channel.

The most relevant unit of knowledge is now something less tangible, but no less valuable – a “snippet” of knowledge that represents a coherent idea. The simplest way to save such an idea for personal use is as a “note.” Whether that is a digital note or a scribble on a legal pad, it represents an external memory that can be created and later retrieved.

Doug continues, “Since they are so plentiful, the care and management of notes is the key challenge of knowledge work, which is addressed by the field of personal knowledge management.” If notes are the fundamental unit of knowledge work, then we need to learn how to manage them skillfully at a large scale. We need to learn how to curate our notes as knowledge assets, like a treasure trove that grows in value with every little bit of effort we put in.

We can design better software to make digital note-taking as easy as possible. But we can only get so far without human help. Idea Management also requires hands-on training, because it represents a fundamental shift in people’s relationship to information. According to the best-selling book The Second Machine Age, “…for technology to make a difference,…for every dollar of investment in computer hardware, companies need to invest up to 9 dollars in software, training, and business process redesign.”

Instead of constantly seeking the public and the new, Idea Management shifts attention to the private and the timeless. Instead of always creating new things on the spur of the moment, it encourages people to build up reserves of research and creative inspiration. Such a deep change in mindset requires specialized training and a real human to show the way. Librarians can be the coaches that help us usher in a new relationship to information.

Idea Management turns the concrete tools of librarianship into skills, and then puts those skills at the service of individuals, inside and outside the library. We need to take what librarians already do, and make it digital and available across time and space. We need professional curators to teach others how to curate their own knowledge in service of a better life. We need to teach people how to find, filter, curate, and digest the knowledge that is available all around them.

As a side effect, such a change could transform the library profession. As Doug puts it, “…[librarians] generally join the profession to make a fundamental impact in the community. I want to ensure that they’re achieving their own goals and dreams through their work and that it is more than just serving time and getting a paycheck.” In his vision, “the library system would make such an incredible impact in the community that people just naturally know the modern value of a library beyond childhood nostalgia and what it’s done to shape the community in the digital age.”

There are over 100,000 libraries across the United States, deeply embedded in communities in every corner of the country. They are part of an existing tradition that everyone knows about. They meet people where they are, simply because the libraries are there too. And they reach millions of people at minimal cost: Columbus, Ohio has one of the highest rates of in-person visits in the country, and residents pay only about $86 per year for a $100,000 annual income home. 

Libraries ushered in the modern age with the promise of universal literacy and access to knowledge. They could once again be the spark that lights a revolution in a digital age that we are all struggling to adapt to.

If you are interested in bringing our course to your library, public or not, please email lauren@fortelabs.co for more information.

Thank you to Brendan Schlagel, Jessica Burton, Andy Sparks, Bushra Farooqui, James Alkire, Doug Crane, and Lauren Valdez for their feedback and suggestions. Any errors, omissions, or indiscretions are purely mine.

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Modern Wisdom Podcast: The Definitive Guide To Digital Productivity

Enjoy this conversation on the Modern Wisdom podcast, in which I walk through each level of the Digital Productivity Pyramid, my model for how knowledge workers should be educated and trained.

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