Tiago Forte's Blog, page 38

Building a Second Brain: A 45-Minute Presentation

This is a 45-minute video recording of a talk I delivered at a conference recently.

It is a condensed version of some of the material from my course Building a Second Brain, with how-to examples of each of the three main parts of the methodology: Remember, Connect, and Create.

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The Four Pathways of Modern Book Publishing

In The Future of Ebooks, I laid out a vision for what books could become in a world free of technological constraints. But the modern reality of publishing is decidedly less idealistic.

I’ve spent the past couple months immersed in the world of nonfiction book publishing, trying to deeply understand the state of the industry. I’ve read dozens of articles and books, spoken to experienced agents and editors, and authors ranging from New York Times bestsellers to self-published writers.

I’ve found that the choice between “traditional publishing” and “self-publishing” is not quite so simple. We are witnessing not just the fall of the former and rise of the latter, but a cornucopia explosion of different publishing options. These pathways intersect and overlap in many places, but I believe that four of them have emerged as the main options, serving distinct purposes and goals:

Self-publishing: Make money short-term directly from books
Experts for hire: Build credibility and thought leadership
Crowdfunding: Build a community and develop a product
Traditional publishing: Long-term profitability and growth

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Let me briefly explain what each of these pathways entails, and then tell you which one I’ve chosen and why.

Self-publishing: Make money short-term directly from books

The rise of self-publishing has been swift, dramatic, and profound, putting a capability once requiring millions of dollars of continuous spending into the hands of anyone with a computer, internet connection, and bank account

The king of the self-publishing world is Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), a self-service web portal that handles everything from manuscript conversion, to configuring book listing pages, to tracking sales, to running promotions. All you have to do is upload a properly formatted Word document, decide on a cover image and listing details, and you can have your ebook on sale around the world within hours.

For this incredible service, KDP charges a dual royalty rate depending on the price you set for your ebook: if priced between $0–9.99, they take 30% of gross revenue; if priced $10 or higher, they take 65%. Which means that if you’re going to charge more than $9.99, you need to charge at least $20 to receive the same royalty payment of $7. I believe that Amazon’s strategy is to undercut the traditional $10-20 price range that most booksellers need to turn a profit, by pushing most of their self-published titles to be less than $10.

The main advantages of self-publishing are:

Control over contents and appearance (vs. having to compromise with the needs and desires of editors, agents, and publishers)
Speed to market (available for purchase on Kindle stores around the world within about 24 hours of uploading, vs. 6-18 months for traditional publishing)
Higher royalty rate (35-70% vs. 10-15% in traditional publishing)

These are significant benefits when compared to the old world of scarce gatekeepers. Anyone can write a bunch of text and publish it as a book, which is a miracle of modern technology.

But I think in our rush to usher in a new world, we’ve somewhat exaggerated the benefits of self-publishing. What good is control if you don’t know what you’re doing? What good is speed to market if no one knows about it? What good is a higher royalty rate if few people buy?

Several years ago I downloaded a free ebook by James Clear in exchange for my email address, called Transform Your Habits. It contained most of his ideas and advice on habit formation and breaking bad habits, and yet self-published on Amazon it would have hardly made a ripple compared to his mega smash hit Atomic Habits. Sure, James benefitted from a few more years of research and writing. But I think the true difference is in the trial by fire he undertook in getting this book ready for a mainstream publisher.

The problem with self-publishing is that the success of the book rests entirely on your shoulders. You are responsible not only for the writing, but for the graphic design, the positioning, the partnerships, the marketing, and the promotion of the product over a long period of time. And the success of your self-published book depends just as much on these other activities as on the content itself.

It is possible to do all these things well (or well enough) and capture nearly all the profits from a breakout success. But the chances of doing so are exceedingly small. I’ve self-published four books over the last few years, and sold maybe a few hundred copies in that time. I’ve learned a lot from walking the self-publishing route a few times, but it’s time for something new.

Experts for hire: Build credibility and thought leadership

One of the greatest benefits for a published author is the boost to their credibility and authority that only “having a book” can provide. Demand for this form of social proof has inspired a vast market of “experts for hire.” These experts unbundle the functions of the traditional publishers and sell them piecemeal:

Copyediting or ghostwriting
Strategy and positioning
Wholesale and retail distribution
Online and traditional marketing and promotion

The main target of these specialists has been wannabe thought leaders: consultants, coaches, trainers, and other subject matter experts who want a book as a tangible symbol of their expertise. They’re much less concerned with making money directly from book sales, and more concerned with visibility and exposure for their existing work. They want something to put on their website, to hand out at conferences and events, and to send to potential clients. The biggest of these thought leaders even have a chance at making a bestseller list, and there are specialized consultants dedicated to clever and even illicit ways of making that happen.

Experts for hire are often freelancers or micro-agencies who specialize in one slice of the publishing value chain. Sometimes they even come together and “rebundle” the publishing stack, like Page Two Books, which manages the whole project from concept development and market analysis all the way to final printing and distribution, for $20,000–30,000. This all-inclusive offering can be very attractive to established experts who want to write a book without having to manage all the tiny details of the project.

There’s even an option for those who want a book without doing the writing themselves: ghostwriters. Once seen as shadowy figures who were expected to remain at least semi-anonymous, ghostwriters have now become a reputable profession like any other. Scribe Writing (formerly known as Book-in-a-Box and founded by successful self-published author Tucker Max) offers two packages at $36k and $100k that include a comprehensive process for interviewing an expert, recording and structuring their ideas, and writing the book based on that material.

This pathway obviously requires quite a bit of upfront investment. But for those willing to foot the bill, the “experts for hire” pathway provides a middle ground between the complete self-reliance of self-publishing, and the full-fledged traditional publishing route. It allows people with some money to spend to acquire just the expertise they need, capturing the low-hanging fruits of credibility that only a book can provide.

Although I might be willing to hire such experts, there is one thing they can’t offer me: mainstream exposure. They can offer their wisdom and advice, but ultimately I am the client and what I say goes. Although that is appealing from a creative control perspective, it also means I will continue to do things how I’ve always done them. If I really want to break out of my tiny niche of philosophical productivity geeks, I will need more than service providers. I need someone with skin in the game.

Crowdfunding: Build a community and develop a product

This one is a bit of an outlier, incorporating elements from the other three pathways. You get the total control of self-publishing, plus some of the funding that allows you to hire the experts you need, plus some of the validation that comes from traditional publishing (in the form of pre-orders).

Crowdfunding is basically a more structured and time-compressed way of building the popular groundswell that you would otherwise use a blog to create. Instead of a very slow, patient effort to build an audience over a long period of time, you supercharge the process with slick online marketing campaigns, urgent deadlines, impressive-sounding funding milestones, and prizes.

While attractive for many reasons – you get paid before the book is created and launch it to a waiting audience – it’s become clear in recent years that successful crowdfunding is really hard. The largest campaigns require a level of sustained effort comparable to starting a company, while even smaller campaigns for individual authors require a tremendous amount of work. Creating webpages and media kits, promoting and pushing the campaign, and of course, keeping track of and sending out numerous tiers of “perks” isn’t easy, and exist apart from the actual writing of the book. Experts can be hired to manage this process, but they aren’t cheap.

Crowdfunding is a viable pathway for those that have a longer term goal: to build a community around the book. While the campaign itself is unlikely to be very profitable with all the work required to run it, the long-term relationship with the community can make it worth it. This is why crowdfunding campaigns often lead to developing a “product line” of follow-up books (and related products) for the same audience, such as Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2.

The crowdfunding route has a lot of benefits, but I think I’m already past the stage where it makes the most sense. I already have a strong, loyal following that I know will be ready to buy on day one. And I already have a full-length manuscript of the book. I could stage a “bookwriting process” and pretend that I was using crowdfunds to develop the book, but that wouldn’t be genuine and would involve a lot of extraneous work I’m not willing to do.

Traditional publishing: Long-term profitability and growth

The paradox of modern publishing is that, the more traditional publishing shrinks, the more prestigious and coveted its blessing. The world of constantly self-promoting internet thought leaders has exploded so fast, that the imprint of a traditional publisher is more than ever a symbol of quality

Strangely, this makes the slowness and bureaucracy of these venerable institutions into competitive advantages: it is assumed that any book that makes it through so many rubber stamps and gatekeepers must be credible.

And in a way, this is true. Publishers may no longer be the gatekeepers for getting published at all. But they are still very much the gatekeepers of what makes it into the mainstream. Most people and institutions alike still make the decision about whether to buy and read a book not based on its merits, but on social proof. Traditional publishers are still the tastemakers that signal whether a book has been vetted.

Everything about the way they work is targeted toward a mainstream audience of book readers: the editing process seeks to make the language as accessible as possible; agents work to craft a proposal that aims for the largest share of the reading public; publishers buy books that tap into up-and-coming trends and movements. Their main capability is making bets on ideas that are just about ready to break out of a niche into the broader culture.

Most of the criticism of traditional publishing has centered around its unprofitability. And it is indeed unprofitable in the short term. From Tim Ferriss’ Definitive Resource List and How-To Guide to Book Publishing:

Advances are small and declining: less than 6% of all reported deals get an advance of more than $100k (as of 2011, and it’s gone down since)
Few books sell many copies: on average, fewer than 100 Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers in any year sell more than 100,000 copies, and usually only one or two top 1 million sold.
Even for what does sell, the author doesn’t make much: for a hardcover book, authors typically receive a 10-15% royalty on cover price; for a trade paperback book, authors typically receive around half the royalty of a hard cover (7%)
And there are other expenses: literary agents take between 10-20% of domestic, subsidiary, and foreign sales; some costs such as outside editors or online marketing consultants may be borne by the author
Nonfiction books have an even tougher time: nonfiction books that deal with advice, how-to, political and a host of other prescriptive and practical matters (including some religion) are treated by the New York Times separately from all other non-fiction. They are given the shortest of all the lists, the 10-slot weekly “Advice/How-To” list, sometimes referred to as the “Mt. Everest of lists.” To make matters more confusing, the Times refuses to track eBook sales for all this “lesser” non-fiction

And it’s not that publishers are intentionally screwing over authors, either. Anecdotally, publishers actually lose money on about 80% of book advances. That is, the book never sells enough to cover even the cost of the advance. The publishing industry closely resembles the venture capital industry in this way: the profitable 20% has to cover their expenses for the losing 80%, plus hopefully turn a profit.

This is why traditional publishers aim so squarely for mainstream hits: their entire business model depends on “unicorns.” They are looking for the massive successes that create a long-term flow of consistent income far into the future. And they have a ruthless eye for this, looking most closely at:

The stats and analytics behind your online following, including all websites, blogs, social media accounts, e-mail newsletters, regular online writing gigs, podcasts, videos, etc.
Your offline following—speaking engagements, events, classes/teaching, city/regional presence, professional organization leadership roles and memberships, etc.
Your presence in traditional media (regular gigs, features, any coverage you’ve received, etc.)
Your network strength—reach to influencers or thought leaders, a prominent position at a major organization or business
Sales of past books or self-published works

The thing is, mainstream success is just about the least sure thing that exists. It obviously depends on hundreds of other factors outside their control, and your control, and anyone’s control. It’s not a clear-cut financial return, like “70% royalty rate.” By working with a publisher, you are leaving a lot of value on the table to keep open just the slightest possibility of mainstream success.

But this isn’t as black-and-white a proposition as it seems. Both the proposal and the manuscript go through a process of simplification and distillation as editors and agents make the idea palatable to the decision makers at major publishers. That simplification process is inherently valuable even if it’s not a viral hit, and even if no publisher buys the book! The long-term success (and therefore profitability) of the BASB franchise depends on being able to make an impact outside my early adopter audience, and I see the traditional publishing route as a forcing function to make that happen.

I believe that this process – of translating my ideas into the language of a mainstream audience – is the most important thing I need. I’ve developed Building a Second Brain as an online course for a very nerdy, technical, engineering-centric audience. This has been perfect, giving me a solid foundation of logical, precise thinking under my feet. But at the same time, this has made some of my explanations almost indecipherable to outsiders.

It’s time to bring my ideas about digital note-taking, personal knowledge management, and “second brains” out of the tiny niche of early adopters, and into the mainstream of society. For that reason, I’ve chosen to take the most conservative, most traditional publishing route.

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The 7 Benefits of Building a Second Brain

In my online course Building a Second Brain, I teach people how to create an external repository of their best ideas, knowledge, and experiences, called a “second brain.”

But one of the most common questions I receive is, “Why should I?”

In this article I’ll summarize the 7 main capabilities that a second brain gives you. These are the 7 best reasons you should consider creating one for yourself.[image error]

 

Consistently move your projects and goals to completion

It’s difficult to get things done when your mind is bogged down trying to remember trivial details. By organizing your knowledge outside your head, you free yourself to execute more effectively in the moment. You can spin up and complete your projects far faster, because you’re starting with a collection of valuable material and reusing work you’ve already performed, instead of a blank page.

As you start to accomplish your goals at a steady clip, your creative confidence will be unleashed, allowing you to take on even bigger challenges.

Establish a creative process that helps you reliably produce your best work

We live in an economy driven by creativity, and yet for many people, creativity is something unpredictable and mysterious. Immersing ourselves in a pool of rich triggers, associations, questions, and ideas we’ve collected over time, we can more reliably spark our own inspiration and creativity when we most need it.

A second brain is the home of your creative process, a series of habits and routines for consistently publishing your work to the world, without overthinking it or being too perfectionistic.

Transform your personal knowledge into income and opportunities

We are living in the greatest age of entrepreneurship the world has ever seen. By publishing your knowledge in small bits online, it is easier than ever to find an audience, gain a following, and even create new income streams. Whether this becomes a business or just a hobby, you’ll find yourself with countless new opportunities and career options.

With all your best ideas, insights, and research at your fingertips, you’ll be able to ride the wave of a rapidly expanding knowledge-based economy.

Enhance your thinking and uncover unexpected patterns and connections between ideas

In a knowledge economy, the trajectory of your career depends a lot on the quality of your thinking. Instead of always trying to think of something brilliant on the spot, you can collect the best stories, images, observations, anecdotes, and metaphors in one central place, priming your imagination and revealing connections between ideas.

Being able to recognize the larger patterns in what is happening allows you to see trends that no one else sees and recognize opportunities before anyone else.

Reduce stress, Fear of Missing Out, and “information overload”

The amount of information we are now expected to consume and keep track of is staggering. By outsourcing the job of remembering to an external tool, we gain the peace of mind of knowing exactly what to do with each piece of incoming information, and the confidence that it will never be forgotten. We can better manage our fears and anxieties by getting them out of our head and making a plan to address them.

By expertly curating and managing your personal information stream, you can make sense of the huge volume of information you encounter each day, and transform information overload into a clear mind.

Develop valuable expertise and credibility for a new job, career, or business

Your greatest asset is the knowledge you’ve gained through your experience. But until others have a way of accessing that knowledge without also taking your time, you’ll be chained to a desk. The great potential of making your knowledge tangible is that it frees you to spend your life as you want, while still providing value to others.

By cultivating a collection of knowledge that belongs to you and that you take from job to job, an economy of frequent job changes becomes an opportunity for learning instead of a threat.

Unlock the full value of the wealth of learning resources all around you

We are living through an explosion of online learning resources – online courses, webinars, books, articles, forums, podcasts, and other kinds of content offer us priceless knowledge for free or at affordable prices. But without a way to break this knowledge into smaller pieces, and store it until we need it, all this learning can feel like a waste of time and money.

A second brain helps you take control of your own learning, by filtering and curating the most valuable bits you encounter and saving them in a searchable format. Reading and learning become more enjoyable, and therefore effective, when we know that every potentially useful idea is being preserved.

Learn more about the course at https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com

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Building a Second Brain: An Overview

This is a summary of Building a Second Brain, my online course on capturing, organizing, and sharing your knowledge using digital notes.

How many brilliant ideas have you had and forgotten? How many insights have you failed to take action on? How much useful advice have you slowly forgotten as the years have passed?

We feel a constant pressure to be learning, improving ourselves, and making progress. We spend countless hours every year reading, listening, and watching informational content. And yet, where has all that valuable knowledge gone? Where is it when we need it? Our brain can only store a few thoughts at any one time. Our brain is for having ideas, not storing them.

Building A Second Brain is a methodology for saving and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections we’ve gained through our experience. It expands our memory and our intellect using the modern tools of technology and networks.

This methodology is not only for preserving those ideas, but turning them into reality. It provides a clear, actionable path to creating a “second brain” – an external, centralized, digital repository for the things you learn and the resources from which they come.

Being effective in the world today requires managing many different kinds of information – emails, text messages, messaging apps, online articles, books, podcasts, webinars, memos, and many others. All of these kinds of content have value, but trying to remember all of it is overwhelming and impractical. By consolidating ideas from these sources, you’ll develop a valuable body of work to advance your projects and goals. You’ll have an ongoing record of personal discoveries, lessons learned, and actionable insights for any situation.

We are already doing most of the work required to consume this content. We spend a significant portion of our careers creating snippets of text, outlines, photos, videos, sketches, diagrams, webpages, notes, or documents. Yet without a little extra care to preserve these valuable resources, our precious knowledge remains siloed and scattered across dozens of different locations. We fail to build a collection of knowledge that both appreciates in value and can be reused again and again.

By offloading our thinking onto a “second brain,” we free our biological brain to imagine, create, and simply be present. We can move through life confident that we will remember everything that matters, instead of floundering through our days struggling to keep track of every detail.

Your second brain will serve as an extension of your mind, not only protecting you from the ravages of forgetfulness but also amplifying your efforts as you take on creative challenges.

The Building a Second Brain methodology will teach you how to:

Consistently move your projects and goals to completion by organizing and accessing your knowledge in a results-oriented way
Transform your personal knowledge into income, taking advantage of a rapidly growing knowledge economy
Uncover unexpected patterns and connections between ideas
Reduce stress and “information overload” by expertly curating and managing your personal information stream
Develop valuable expertise, specialized knowledge, and the skills to deploy it in a new job, career, or business
Cultivate a collection of valuable knowledge and insights over time without having to follow rigid, time-consuming rules
Unlock the full value of the wealth of learning resources all around you, such as online courses, webinars, books, articles, forums, and podcasts

Part I: Remember

The first step in building a second brain is “capturing” the ideas and insights you think are worth saving. Ask yourself:

What are the recurring themes and questions that I always seem to return to in my work and life?
What insightful, high-value, impactful information do I already have access to that could be valuable?
Which knowledge do I want to interconnect, mix and match, and periodically resurface to stimulate future thinking on these subjects?

Most of the time we tend to capture information haphazardly – we email ourselves a quick note, brainstorm some ideas in a Word document, or take notes on books we read – but then don’t do anything with it. We are already consuming or producing this information, we just need to keep it in a single, centralized place, such as a digital note-taking app like Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, Bear, Notion, or others. These apps facilitate capturing small “snippets” of text, and can also store hyperlinks, images, webpages, screenshots, PDFs, and other attachments, all of which are saved permanently and synced across all your devices.

By keeping a diverse collection of information in one centralized place, it is free to intermix and intermingle, helping us see unexpected connections and patterns in our thinking. This also gives us one place to look when we need creative raw material, supporting research, or a shot of inspiration.

The following three guidelines will help you capture only the most relevant and useful information in your second brain

A) Think like a curator

It is tempting to turn on our mobile device or computer and immediately become immersed in the flow of juicy information we are presented with. Much of this information is useful and interesting – articles written by experts that could make us more productive, tips on exercise or nutrition, or fascinating stories from around the world. But unless we make conscious, strategic decisions about what we consume, we’ll always be at the mercy of what others want us to see.

Instead, adopt the mindset of a curator – objective, opinionated, and reflective. As you come across social media updates, online articles, and podcasts throughout your day, instead of diving in immediately, save them for future consideration. As you begin to collect content, you’ll be able to choose which sources to consume in a deliberate way.

B) Organize your content by project

How should you organize the content once you’ve captured it? Instead of organizing your files primarily by topic (for example, web design or psychology), which is time-consuming and mentally taxing, organize them according to the projects you are actively working on. This ensures that you are consuming information with a purpose – to advance your projects and goals – and only at a time and place where you’ll be able to put it to use.

The PARA organizational system takes this principle – organizing information by when you would like to see it next – and applies it to your entire digital life. Instead of organizing each one of the information management tools you use in a completely different way, use your projects as universal categories across all of them. This helps reduce the fragmentation of your project files, without requiring you to only use one tool for everything.

C) Keep only what resonates

The word “organization” often brings to mind an analytical way of thinking. But analysis is time-consuming and tiring. In deciding which passages, images, theories, or quotes to keep, don’t make it a highly intellectual, analytical decision.

Instead, your rule of thumb should be to save anything that “resonates” with you on an intuitive level. This is often because it connects to something you care about, wonder about, or find inherently intriguing. By training ourselves to notice when something resonates with us at a deeper level, we improve not only our ability to see opportunities, but also our understanding of ourselves and how we work.

Part II: Connect

Once you start collecting valuable knowledge in a centralized place, you’ll naturally start to notice patterns and connections. An article you read on gardening will give you an insight into online marketing. An offhand comment by a client will give you the idea of creating a webpage with client testimonials. A business card you saved from a conference will remind you to follow up and propose a collaboration.

You can greatly facilitate and speed up this process by distilling your notes into actionable, bite-sized summaries. It would be near impossible to review your 10 pages of notes on a book you read last year in the midst of a chaotic workday., for example. But if you had just the main points of that book in a 3-point summary, you could quickly remind yourself of what it contains and potentially apply it to something you’re working on

The following three guidelines will help you summarize and distill your notes into actionable, useful tools for execution.

A) Design notes for your future self

A powerful mindset for interacting with our notes is to “design notes with your future self in mind.” Every time we create a note or make an edit, we can make it just a little easier to find and make use of next time.

This can include:

Defining key terms in parentheses in case we forget what they mean
Inserting placeholders when we leave off summarizing a source so we know where to pick back up
Adding links to related websites, files, or emails that we’re likely to forget over tim

By constantly saving packets of knowledge in a format that our future self can easily consume, we follow a “pay it forward” strategy that we get to benefit from in the future!

B) Summarize progressively, at different levels of detail

A common problem with notes is that they are too long and dense. You can’t afford the time it would take to review and remind yourself of everything they contain. Executive summaries can help, but often it is a challenge to identify what exactly the main point is in the first place.

Progressive Summarization is a technique that relies on summarizing a note in multiple stages over time. You save only the best excerpts from whatever you’re reading, and then create a summary of those excerpts, and then a summary of that summary, distilling the essence of the content at each stage. These “layers” are like a digital map that can be zoomed in or out to any level of detail you need. Progressive Summarization allows you to read the note in different ways for different purposes: in depth if you want to glean every detail, or at a high level if you just need the main takeaway. This allows you to review a note’s contents in seconds to decide if it’s useful for the task at hand.

C) Organize opportunistically, a little bit at a time

It can be tempting to spend a lot of time to create highly structured, perfectionistic notes. The problem is, you often have no idea which sources will end up being valuable until much later. Instead of investing a lot of effort upfront, organize your notes opportunistically, in small bits over time

Your rule of thumb should be: add value to a note every time you touch it. This could include adding an informative title the first time you come across a note, highlighting the most important points the next time you see it, and adding a link to a related note sometime later. By spreading out the heavy work of organizing your notes over time, you not only save time and effort, but ensure that the most frequently used (and thus most valuable) notes surface organically, like a ski slope where the most popular routes naturally end up with deeper grooves.

Part III: Create

All of this capturing, summarizing, connecting, and organizing has one ultimate purpose: creating tangible results in the real world. Whether we want to lose weight, get a promotion at work, start a side business, or contribute to a cause we believe in, the true purpose of learning is to turn our knowledge into effective action.

With a substantial reserve of supporting material in your second brain, you never need to sit down to an empty page and try to “think of something smart.” All creativity stands on the shoulders of giants, and you have the benefit of already having the best ideas of those giants documented in your notes!

What should you create? It depends on your skills, interests, and personality. If you are analytical, you could draw on a group of articles you’ve read about Big Data to write a blog post summarizing where you think machine learning is headed next. If you like to perform, you could borrow ideas from your notes on YouTube cooking videos you’ve enjoyed to make one of your own. If you are campaigning for investment in your local park, you could distill the minutes from past city council meetings into a speaking agenda for your public comments at the next one.

With a second brain at your disposal, you always have something to inspire you, remind you, support you, or guide you as you engage in the projects and interests that are important to you. You are able to draw on the sum total of your life experience and learning, not just whatever you can think of in the moment.

The following three guidelines will help you create more, better, and more meaningful creative output for whatever purpose you decide is important.

A) Don’t just consume information passively – put it to use

A common challenge for people who love to learn is that they constantly force feed themselves more and more information, but never actually put it to use. The goals and the experiences that would enrich their lives get endlessly postponed, waiting for the “right” bit of knowledge they supposedly need before getting started.

But information only becomes knowledge – something personal, embodied, grounded – when we put it to use. That’s why we should shift as much of our effort as possible from consuming information, to creating new things. The things we create – whether they are writing pieces, websites, photographs, videos, or live performances – embody and express the knowledge we’ve gained from personal experience. We all need to be part of bringing to life something good, true, or beautiful. Creating things is not only deeply fulfilling, it can also bring us unexpected opportunities, introduce us to new friends or collaborators, and have a positive impact on others – by inspiring them, entertaining them, or informing them.

B) Create smaller, reusable units of work

Once you start to curate a collection of valuable knowledge in external form, a very different way of working becomes not only possible, but necessary.

You will begin to think of your projects as made up of discrete parts. I call them “intermediate packets,” which can include any kind of content we’ve already mentioned: a set of notes from a team meeting, a list of relevant research findings, a brainstorm with collaborators, a slide deck analyzing the market, or a list of action items from a conference call, for example.

Instead of trying to sit down and move the entire project forward all at once, which is like trying to roll a giant boulder uphill, a more effective approach is to end each work session – whether it is 15 minutes or 3 hours – by completing just one intermediate packet. This allows you to work in smaller increments, making use of any available span of time, while getting lots of feedback and taking frequent breaks. Not only does this result in higher quality output, it fuels the motivation and the inspiration that we need to do our best work. These packets can then be saved to your second brain, and re-used the next time you have a similar need.

C) Share your work with the world

There are many benefits all along the process of building a second brain: less stress, better focus, more insights, and enhanced productivity. But the real payoff comes at the end, when you create something out of the knowledge you’ve collected and share it with the world.

It can be tempting to wait until everything is “ready,” until you have all the information you think you need, and all the sources have been double checked and reviewed. But as you continually curate and save pieces of content, review and summarize them, create a series of intermediate packets, and then recycle them back into your second brain, you’ll start to realize that there is no such thing as a finished product.

Everything is in flux, everything is a work in progress, and everything you put out there has an implicit “version 1.0” attached to it. This can be tremendously empowering – since nothing is ever final, there is no need to wait to get started. You can publish a simple website now, and slowly add additional pages as you have time. You can publish a draft blog post now, and make revisions later after you’ve received feedback. You could even self-publish an ebook on the Kindle store, and any future updates to the manuscript will be wirelessly synced to everyone who purchased the book!

By consistently sharing your work with others – whether that is your family, friends, colleagues, or externally on social media – all sorts of benefits will start to materialize. You’ll connect with new collaborators who you never would have imagined would find your work compelling. You’ll find clients or customers, in some cases even when you weren’t seeking them. Others will reflect back to you their reactions and comments and appreciation (and occasionally criticism). You’ll find that you are part of a community that shares your interests and values. Accomplishing anything meaningful or important requires working with others, and the incredible power of the internet now allows us to find each other no matter how obscure or strange our interests.

Conclusion

Each note in your second brain is a record of something you’ve experienced in your life – whether that is from reading a book, having an interesting conversation, or completing a project at work. With all your most valuable ideas at your fingertips at all times, you never need to struggle and strain to remember everything you’ve learned.

As your second brain gains momentum over weeks and months, you will start to become different. You will no longer think about things in isolation, but as part of a network of ideas in which everything affects everything else. You’ll realize that something you learned at work about effective communication also applies to your family vacation debate.. A random fact you read in an airplane magazine will somehow end up being useful in a blog post you’re writing. A lesson from Ancient Greek history you picked up from a podcast on your morning commute will help you deal with a crisis at the office. You will start to think in terms of the systems and principles that you’ve gleaned through your summarizing and reviewing, and see them everywhere.

Your mind will start to work differently, learning to depend on this external tool to draw on resources, references, and research far beyond what it can remember on its own. You will start to conceive of “your work” as an integrated whole that you can actually point to, shape, and navigate in a direction of your choosing. You’ll be more objective and unattached, because if any single idea doesn’t work out, you know you have a huge trove of others ready to go.

Over time, you will start to recognize that everything you are learning and experiencing makes sense. You can see, mapped in the notes you are cultivating, the underlying structure of your life. Why you do things, what you really want, what’s really important and what isn’t. Your second brain becomes like a mirror, reflecting back to you who you think you are, who you want to be, and who you could become. Because you know how to capture and make use of anything, every experience you have becomes an opportunity to learn and to grow.

As this self-understanding dawns, you will look around at the notes you’ve collected, and you will realize that you already have everything you need to get started. You will start combining the ideas together, forming new perspectives, new theories, and new strategies. Ideas about society, about art, about psychology, about spirituality, about technology will start intermixing and spawning ideas you’ve never consciously considered. You’ll be shocked, in fact, at the elegance and power of what pops out of your notes.

This epiphany won’t just exist in your head. People can tell. They’ll start to notice that you can draw on an unusually large body of knowledge at a moment’s notice. They will admire your amazing memory, but what they don’t know is that you never try to remember anything. They’ll admire your incredible self-discipline and dedication at developing ideas over time, not knowing that you’ve created a system in which insights and connections emerge organically. They’ll be impressed by your ability to produce so much creative output, but in reality, you never lock yourself in a room to “crank out” some work. You just let your projects simmer until they’re ready.

Building a Second Brain is an integrated set of behaviors for turning incoming information into completed creative projects. Instead of endlessly optimizing yourself, trying to become a productivity machine that never deviates from the plan, it has you optimize an external system that is more reliable than you will ever be. This frees you to imagine, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you come alive here and now in the moment.

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 Future of RandomNote (Seeking Developers!)

“I must admit that after many years of work in this area, the efficacy of randomness for so many algorithmic problems is absolutely mysterious to me. It is efficient, it works; but why and how is absolutely mysterious.”

– Michael Rabin, from Algorithms to Live By

We recently launched version 3.0 of RandomNote, our free web app for serendipitously resurfacing notes from your Evernote account. We’ve had some very positive feedback, and now it’s time to ask for your help.

We need developers to help us continue to improve the app, from simple bug fixes, to adding new features, to tweaking the user experience, to making the backend run more efficiently.

I’ve taken down the paywall for my original article describing what I see as the potential of this app: RandomNote: Building an Idea Generator

To summarize from the article above, I believe there are 5 main benefits to using this app:

Recover some of the attention that’s been hijacked by social media for more productive uses (using some of the same quick feedback loops)
Make the process of revisiting notes more surprising, serendipitous, enjoyable, and rewarding
Create many more opportunities to encounter, tweak, modify, improve, and delete notes
Refresh your familiarity with what kinds of notes you have, without having to memorize their contents
Surface and stimulate cross-connections across typical categories and topics

I believe we have a unique opportunity to create something inherently useful, that matches a proven need for a growing audience – people who are interested in or actively using my Building a Second Brain (BASB) methodology, whether they’ve taken my course or just read my blog posts on Praxis.

Later this year or beginning of next year, I will publish the BASB book, which should grow the addressable audience another order of magnitude. My goal is to have RandomNote be a thriving, fully featured product by then, either as a free complement to my books and courses, or a stand-alone subscription.

Eventually, RandomNote could be part of a suite of web apps, plugins, extensions, and even full-scale applications directly enabling people to build their “second brain.” Instead of a random bunch of utilities competing with each other and all catering to the lowest common denominator, it would be a unified ecosystem of tools with a coherent methodology already baked in.

In the same way that GTD enabled the rise of a whole generation of task managers that could rely on terms like “inbox” and “next action,” RandomNote and friends could provide a similar conceptual framework to enable the spread of serendipitous, creative note-taking.

Here are a few examples of new features we’d like to add in the near future:

Add a brief instructions blurb upon initial sign-in, orienting new users on how to use the app
Make the “refresh” button more obvious/prominent so users know it can be clicked
Highlight the current filter button so it’s clear where the note is being drawn from
Add additional filter options (such as “least recently seen,” by tag, by keyword, by summarization layer)
Preserve the current filter across instances
Release other versions of the app accessible in more places (by email, menu bar dropdown, Chrome extension, smartphone notifications, homescreen app)

We’ve created an open-source GitHub repository for the project, which includes the code and a history of changes already made.

Chris Galtenberg has been the lead developer so far, and has a solid understanding of the app and the capabilities of the Evernote API. He will continue to direct and coordinate the big picture development of the project.
Callum Flack has led the design. He will be available for consultation on these aspects.

We’ll invite everyone involved or interested in the project to the dedicated #randomnotedev channel on the Forte Labs Slack, which will serve as our discussion forum for everything related to RandomNote development. I will be available there for talking through any hurdles or potential new features, and we’ll also be able to talk to beta testers from among existing Forte Labs customers in other channels.

We’re going to try a first experiment: Chris has identified 14 issues of varying size and complexity that are currently needed or wanted, and described them in the Github project.

If you are a developer willing to help us move this forward, could you take a look at these and contribute your code? If you have any questions or requests, join the Forte Labs Slack here and join the #randomnotedev channel.

Thank you for your interest!

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.

Behind the Scenes of a Profitable Online Course

I advise everyone I know to create an online course. Everyone has something to say. Everyone has valuable knowledge that others could benefit from.

I believe that in 10 years online courses will be like websites today – everyone who works online will have at least one. And without one, you will be all but invisible.

What an “online course” looks like will probably radically change by then. It may look like a newsletter subscription, a private social media feed, an augmented reality lens, a swarm of conversational chatbots, or a virtual reality holodeck where someone can “walk through” your mind.

But whatever form it takes, every knowledge worker in the future will need some way for others to access their knowledge without also taking their time. As long as you only sell what you know by the hour, you’ll always be chained to a desk, whether you have a traditional job or are self-employed. You’ll never gain the freedom and flexibility that working with knowledge makes possible.

Creating an online course, or other educational content in some form, is really about setting your knowledge free. Allowing it to have a life of its own, to stand on its own as something inherently valuable. And by setting your knowledge free, you will also be set free to spend your life as you want.

In this case study, I want to show you how profitable an online course can be today. It’s certainly not easy, but it is eminently feasible. In a follow-up post, I’ll explain my strategy for making my online course the centerpiece of an entire ecosystem of products, services, experiences, and content.

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

Interview with Toby Sola, Co-Founder of Brightmind

This is a conversation and interview with Toby Sola, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Brightmind, a meditation app that expands the boundaries of human potential through tailored meditation instruction.

We discuss topics such as:

The intersection and fusion of monastic and entrepreneurial cultures


How Toby stays focused and motivated building a technology product designed to help people live better lives


The benefits of meditation and mindfulness not just on stress and sleep, but our ability to make a positive impact on the world


Meditation as training in letting go (and going beyond) your own perspective, which paradoxically allows you to hold on to it much more strongly when it matters most


Whether and how empathy for user experience design is teachable


Behind the scenes of developing an intentional meditation app


Critiques of current meditation teaching techniques and how Brightmind is addressing them, and setting up users for a robust meditation practice


Meditation as a cognitive operating system for modern life


Balancing solving problems (pains) with aspirational benefits (gains) in self-improvement training


How embracing what makes you unique and weird is crucial to building a strong brand and following

Click here and use promo code sitwithtiago for 50% off a Brightmind subscription.

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 Free Agent Ecosystem

One of the most exciting trends in coming years will be the formation of cooperative working groups made up of independent contractors.

Whether they are called networks, guilds, cooperatives, collectives, flocks, or something else, these groups will bring back many of the benefits of working collaboratively with others, without the bureaucracy and overhead of traditional organizations.

As attractive and compelling as it is to be a full-stack freelancer, there are three significant downsides that can’t be addressed without collaboration:

It is very solitary, even lonely work
It is difficult to find mentors and peers to learn from and to learn from you
You have to not only do the work itself, you have to market and sell it

One of the most interesting models I’ve come across is the Free Agent Ecosystem (FAE), a framework that describes a “sustainable, commercial ecosystem among collaborating professional services free agents.” It was first published in 2001 in a working paper1 written by a group of innovation and business consultants led by Joseph B. Sterling of Rainforest Strategies, along with Dr. Karen Dietz, Sharon Lieder, and Rita L. Sterling.

The framework was developed in response to a series of emerging business trends that have created the conditions for new kinds of collaboration:

Ubiquitous connectivity through mobile devices
Radical increases in computing power available to individuals
Narrowing corporate focus onto core competencies
Demand for innovation from networks of contractors, suppliers, consultants, and vendors
The ongoing transformation of employees into subcontractors

They argue that these trends are powerful headwinds in favor of free agents, while also demanding new skills. Free agents often don’t know how to structure deals with each other, making it difficult for them to take on projects that are too large and complex for an individual to handle alone. They also fear losing control of the customer relationship that is their lifeblood, and potentially not being compensated for their intellectual property. Not to mention legal and tax liabilities involved in hiring and paying others to deliver services.

As far as the technology has advanced for simple, two-way transactions online, the technology for large-scale collaboration has barely moved.

FAE proposes that an effective framework for effectively building coalitions of free agents must include three things:

An understanding of the “value chain” of professional services transactions
A way to deliberately cultivate the relationships and behavior of the ecosystem members
Agreement templates to structure service delivery and intellectual property transactions

These three components provide mechanisms and incentives for collaborating on all parts of project delivery. It allows small groups of decentralized free agents to serve more and larger clients without the overhead of large consulting firms. It offers a “relationship infrastructure” to bring just the right talent to each project – no more and no less.

To read this story, become a Praxis member.

Praxis

You can choose to support Praxis with a subscription for $10 each month or $100 annually.

Members get access to:

1–3 exclusive articles per month, written or curated by Tiago Forte of Forte Labs
Members-only comments and responses
Early access to new online courses, ebooks, and events
A monthly Town Hall, hosted by Tiago and conducted via live videoconference, which can include open discussions, hands-on tutorials, guest interviews, or online workshops on productivity-related topics

Click here to learn more about what's included in a Praxis membership.

Already a member? Sign in here.

Building a Second Brain: Premium Edition

This article details the extra features found in the Premium Edition of my online course Building a Second Brain.

The Standard Edition of the course contains “everything you need to build a second brain.” With an emphasis on “need.” As you can imagine, I’ve accumulated such a large volume of material over the years that I have to be careful not to overload novice students with too many concepts, metaphors, examples, instructions, models, etc.

The goal of the Standard Edition is therefore to give people just enough content and the right exercises to launch them on the path of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). But once they’ve started on that path, and only if they want to go further, the Premium Edition offers a wealth of additional resources, interviews, advanced tutorials, note templates, and in-depth Praxis articles to help them move even faster and farther.

The Premium Edition includes the following features for an additional $250 USD ($200 if purchased upfront):

5 exclusive interviews
5 advanced tutorials
The “Nerve Bundle” of pre-formatted note templates
3-month subscription to the Praxis blog

5 Exclusive Interviews

In the main curriculum of the course, I present to you my “official” second brain system using Evernote. By adopting my recommendations wholesale, at least on a trial basis, you can get up and running quickly. But once you are familiar with my approach, it can be very helpful to see how other people do PKM. Especially people who are well-known for their effective use of knowledge.

These in-depth interviews explore how Tiago and other experts use their second brains to execute projects, create content, and automate business processes in the real world. You’ll see a wide variety of approaches to this fundamental practice, some of which don’t use Evernote, or even any software at all.

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Interviews include:

The Origins of Personal Knowledge Management, with Dr. Jason Frand (58:27): Dr. Frand is a former Professor and Director of the Anderson Computing & Information Services Center at UCLA. His paper launched PKM into the mainstream of business computing, and in this interview we discuss what drove him to formulate PKM as a distinct practice.

Creating Productivity Rituals, with Renee Fishman (74:55): Renee is a gymnast, blogger, and coach who teaches high performers how to create not just productive habits, but “rituals” that provide structure and meaning to everyday life. In this interview, we discuss ways of making PKM practices a natural part of knowledge work.

Interview and Discussion with Venkatesh Rao, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Ribbonfarm (75:43): Venkatesh Rao is a leading thinker and blogger on innovation, the philosophy of technology, business strategy, and “refactoring,” a term he popularized that refers to seeing things differently. His writing on the Ribbonfarm blog has been the single greatest influence on my ideas and writing, and in this interview we talk about how he has sustained his creative output after more than a decade of long-form blogging.

Experience Design and Creative Flow, with Ting Kelly (68:19): Ting is an experience designer and entrepreneur who creates spaces, experiences, and products that bring more flow to work, in all its forms. In this interview, she shares her recommendations for enhancing the experience of flow through everything from specific tools, to morning rituals, to advanced calendaring, to food.

Interview and Discussion with Taylor Pearson (85:57): Taylor Pearson is an author, coach, and entrepreneur who wrote the best-selling book The End of Jobs. In this interview Taylor explains how he tracks and manages the information he consumes, both for short-term writing on his blog and for larger book projects.

5 Advanced Tutorials

Taking BASB is like being airdropped onto an exotic landscape on an alien planet. You have enough supplies and knowledge to survive, but you also have the option of striking out and exploring the terrain

Do you head toward the Mountains of Content Creation, to scale its intimidating, but exhilarating peaks? Do you turn toward the Desert of Academic Research to sift through the sands for the diamond in the rough? Or maybe you hike along the beautiful Blog Coast, and dive into the wealth of insights on popular blogs.

Each of these advanced tutorials is like a map for the aspect of building a second brain that you want to explore further, giving you a pathway to master whichever one is most important to your work or life.

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Advanced tutorials include:

Becoming an Evernote Power User, with Stacey Harmon (84:12): Stacey Harmon is one of the world’s foremost experts on Evernote and how to use it as a centralized organizational tool for your entire life. Her course Radical Productivity with Evernote teaches people how to become Evernote “power users,” and in this tutorial she presents a summarized version of her method.

Creative Problem Solving and Visual Thinking, with Chuck Frey (77:16): Chuck Frey is a recognized expert on mind mapping, visual thinking, and creative problem-solving, which he writes about on his blog, the Mind Mapping Software Blog, and in ebooks. In this tutorial, Chuck takes us through his top recommendations on software and techniques for creative thinking using technology.

Planning and Creating Note Templates with Evernote, with Stacey Harmon and Tiago Forte (109:35): Originally delivered as a special one-time webinar, this tutorial walks through the process of identifying, formulating, designing, creating, and using note templates in Evernote. This is one of the most powerful methods for saving time and effort, standardizing repeatable tasks, and helping you spend more time on the work that matters.

Practical Evernote, with Frank Gerber (87:55) Frank Gerber is an entrepreneur, writer, consultant, and startup advisor who has used Evernote in all aspects of his business and life. In this tutorial, he walks us through his Evernote setup and how he uses the program to prototype new business processes. He also talks about how a notebook he initially used to manage rental properties turned into a whole new business, called Centriq.

The Secrets of Bundles, with Tiago Forte (57:25): In this tutorial, I walk you through my process for taking advantage of “content bundles” – any large volume of digital content you gain access to as part of an online course, seminar, database, or limited time promotion. I show you how to use customized templates I’ve designed over the years to quickly summarize the purpose of a piece of content, so you can save it for future use instead of trying to consume it immediately.

The Nerve Bundle Note Templates

All of the techniques taught in BASB rely only on the simplest features of digital note-taking apps: lists, outlines, formatted text, and links.

But it can be helpful to use pre-formatted templates designed specifically for the techniques I teach. They ensure you’re automatically following my guidelines, help you avoid common pitfalls, and allow you to start your PKM practice on a solid foundation.

The Nerve Bundle is a shared Evernote notebook that includes customized templates for each of the 16 Workflow Strategies taught in the course:

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Using any one of these strategies is as simple as duplicating a note and filling in the details. Evernote now includes a built-in feature that allows you to save templates in your own template library, which you can pull from any time you create a new note.

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Each note template also contains a link to the full explanation of that Workflow Strategy on the online forum, with numerous examples from Tiago and others. While these templates are made for Evernote, you can easily copy and paste them to the platform of your choice.

You’ll also have access to future updates to the Nerve Bundle, which will be published to the same notebook and synced automatically.

3-Month Praxis Subscription

After completing the course, you’ll have a new awareness of the important questions and frontiers in the world of Personal Knowledge Management. If you’d like some help keeping abreast of recent trends, powerful new ideas, alternative approaches, and other examples of PKM in action, my members-only blog Praxis is a great place to start.

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Each month, I send out 1-3 in-depth posts on a wide variety of topics related to productivity, effectiveness, and learning. These include everything from summaries of influential books, case studies of second brains in the wild, new conceptual models that shed light on modern work, and personal reflections and experiences of my own.

Here’s a sample of the members-only posts published over the past year. Clicking a story will show you a short preview of the post.

In addition to exclusive content, I also facilitate a 60-minute “Town Hall” once per month. Conducted live using the Zoom videoconference software, these can include interviews of influential experts, Q&A sessions on recent articles, or special presentations of new material I’m developing. All Town Halls are recorded and published on the blog for anyone who can’t make it live.

If you want to continue being part of the Praxis community after 3 months, you can subscribe for $10 per month or $100 per year.

Lifetime access

I don’t advertise this because I want you to purchase the Premium Edition on its own merits, but you’ll also get lifetime access to future updates and additions. I am constantly creating new content and filming new videos, and I will periodically release them in the Premium Edition curriculum.

You can purchase the Premium Edition here if you haven’t yet enrolled in Building a Second Brain. Or if you already have, send $250 via Paypal to tiago@fortelabs.co and I will enroll you manually within 48 hours.

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.

Applications Open for Forte Labs Coaching 3.0

At the beginning of 2018, we launched the Forte Labs Coaching Program, a different kind of 1-on-1 coaching service focused on fundamental behavior change. I introduced you to Corey Padnos, who has many years of experience in different coaching modalities and is the only person trained and authorized to deliver coaching based on my methods.

Mid-year we redesigned the program to take into account everything we had learned, and launched version 2.0 focused on completing tangible projects. We introduced a new holistic model, the Digital Productivity Pyramid, showing how a series of technology-leveraged skills build on each other to form a complete framework for personal effectiveness in the digital age.

Over the course of 2018 Corey worked with over 100 people, individually and in teams, on implementing the ideas and methods found on the Praxis blog and in Forte Labs courses. We have seen spectacular results from a wide array of people as they have revolutionized their productivity, learning, and effectiveness. From studio executives to small businesses to lawyers to elite athletes to entrepreneurs, we believe we’ve unlocked the secrets of productivity coaching for high performers.

My strength is producing content and pushing forward the frontier of new thinking on personal productivity. Corey excels at listening for people’s real needs and helping them adapt new methods to their personal situation. By dividing our responsibilities and focusing on what each of us does best, we’ve created a coaching format that uses our existing content as a foundation, so we don’t have to start from scratch with each client.

Corey now has more experience helping people implement my methods than I do, and to manage demand we’ve had to raise his hourly pricing to more than $1,000 per hour. As rewarding as that has been, our ultimate goal is to democratize access to the tools of high performance. We’ve both invested years of our lives and thousands of dollars in coaching, and we believe that it is a game changer for anyone seeking to truly level up their performance in a short timeframe, in a way that consuming content simply can’t achieve.

With that goal in mind, we’re taking everything we’ve learned from the past year and launching version 3.0 of our coaching program, introducing group coaching for the first time. We believe that we can scale our model to small groups of dedicated participants, providing the structure and accountability to launch you toward your goals this year, while keeping the price accessible.

The first cohort will begin February 12, and work together via 7 group calls over approximately 4 months, ending June 18. A group call every three weeks is often enough to maintain momentum and progress, but not so often that it becomes a burden or distraction. We will only be accepting a maximum of 20 participants in this cohort by application only.

The program includes:

A 90-minute group call every 3 weeks (for a total of 7)
A 60-minute 1-on-1 call with Corey, to identify your goals and strategy
Short check-ins via text message with Corey
Recordings of group and individual calls
Access to a private Slack channel for coaching clients only
Free access to The Mid-Year Review, a follow-up to The Annual Review course that guides you in revisiting and redirecting your goals mid-year (to take place summer 2019)

Program cost

The total cost is $1,000 USD, paid in two installments of $500 at the beginning and halfway mark.

We chose this price to make coaching as accessible as possible, while maintaining high expectations of what you will accomplish by participating. Coaching is not for everyone. It is for people who have already experienced success in their career or business, and who are seeking to partner with a highly trained coach to take that success to a new level.

In that spirit, we will not be offering refunds. This is an all-in decision, and you should only apply if you can be 100% committed from day one. While we will remain open to feedback and suggestions, you shouldn’t apply unless you trust us to deliver an experience that gives you a ten-fold return on your investment.

Click here to apply, or email us at coaching@fortelabs.co with any questions, or to set up a free 30-minute evaluation call with Corey to find out if the program is the right fit for you.

What we’ve learned

Here is Corey’s summary of what he has learned over the past year:

People want to be creative. We have reduced our days mainly to a task list. If we get the task list done, then we are going to be happy. But we need creativity not just for our side projects or the arts, but to enjoy our lives, our work, and our family. We worked with many different kinds of professionals last year (lawyers, real estate brokers, writers, executives, solopreneurs, side-project creators) and we discovered that the people who got the most value from the coaching were people who valued creative output.

The reason you’re not accomplishing your goals is because you don’t have a system. I’m pretty sure I heard some version of, “I’ve tried a weekly review and it didn’t work” with at least 5 clients last year. Across the board, it took modifying the system or implementing it until it became a habit. Honestly, not reaching your goals has nothing to do with being a procrastinator, disorganized, busy, or stressed. It does however have to do with not having a system that works for you.  

The biggest obstacle to being creative is disorganization. Imagine this: you’re sitting there, ready to write something. A story, an email, a note, and then you get a call. You say to yourself, “Shoot, that wasn’t in my [calendar, task list, anything you use to manage your life].” You take the call, and then you get back to writing, but you can’t move forward because you got thrown off. Then there’s another interruption: that open tab, that half-written document, etc. How do you organize your notes? Your tasks? Your calendar? Your files? These are the questions we address in this program.

Our new focus

Create your goals – you tell us what you want to achieve
Organize yourself – we use principles from Building a Second Brain to help you get there
Execute – this is where you do the work

We’re going to dive deeply into how you are organized as a pathway to accomplishing your goals and freeing up your time. With effective tools and systems in place to help you manage your productivity, you’ll have everything you need to unleash your creativity.

Click here to apply, or email us at coaching@fortelabs.co with any questions, or to set up a free 30-minute evaluation call with Corey to find out if the program is the right fit for you.

Testimonials

Here are some testimonials from recent coaching clients (emphasis ours):

“It’s great to be able to look back and attach a signpost in my life: who I was before working with Corey, and who I am after working with him.  While working with Corey, I ended up uncovering blind spots that were keeping me from getting the most out of my daily work and productivity . He’s got this x-ray vision that allows him to identify limiting beliefs and unproductive habits. The benefits keep paying off for me in the form of more time and mental space . I get to just be without all the excessive baggage of worrying whether or not I’m working on the right thing.  If you’re serious about uncovering and acting on a breakthrough in your personal or professional life, then I highly recommend Corey Padnos.”

– Angel Gonzalez, CMO, Snappy Kraken

“This was a super valuable use of my time and money to be able to coach with you . It was a bit of a process, but my trust in GTD/BASB is up, I’ve come closer to accepting there is no Black and White solution to productivity, and that I’ll have to ultimately make the tools work for me. Your coaching style and personality are great. A good combination of directness and warmth that contributes to getting stuff done, and understanding that many of the underlying problems are emotionally driven , or have emotional blocks in order to implement practical tools…Remarkably integrated with Forte Labs, and the cohesion should only grow as time goes on. I love seeing the organic growth of the whole business, and the coaching arm of it.”

– Jeff Golde, Founder of Golde Consulting, Adjunct Professor of Management at Columbia Business School

“Corey Padnos is one of those people that initially seems just too good to be true- he isn’t. Corey’s program helped me overcome multiple organizational obstacles I had struggled with for years . Breaking through them improved my day-to-day dramatically. For example, PROPERLY using Evernote helped me combine 5 systems in to one which saved me immense time, boosted my income, improved my productivity, and, most importantly, let me relax knowing everything was properly organized . I can’t thank him enough.  I’m a business coach and I hired Corey to help me do what I couldn’t do for myself. Worth every penny.”

– Leo Manzione, Senior Business Consultant, Run Right Consulting

Schedule

Here is the schedule for the 4-month term:

February 12, 9-10:30am Pacific time
March 5, 9-10:30am Pacific time
March 26, 9-10:30am Pacific time
April 16, 9-10:30am Pacific time
May 7, 9-10:30am Pacific time
May 28, 9-10:30am Pacific time
June 18, 9-10:30am Pacific time

Please ensure that you can make all of these call times. Although every call will be recorded and made available soon afterward, we don’t recommend applying if you will have to miss more than one, as the main benefit of the program is live interaction.

Questions
What will happen on the group calls?

We can’t say exactly, because it depends on the people in the group, the goals they are pursuing, and what is needed in the moment. The power of coaching is that Corey can work with one person on their specific challenges, while also listening for what the group needs to hear to move forward.

How much time will this program require of me?

Besides the seven 90-minute group calls, and your 60-minute 1-on-1 call with Corey, this depends completely on the goals and outcomes you commit to. We’ll give you guidance on how to do this, but ultimately it’s up to you how big of a mountain you want to climb.

How will I interact with the group?

You’ll be invited to a private Slack channel for coaching clients only, where you’ll be able to check in on your progress, get your questions answered, and share victories.

Click here to apply, or email us at coaching@fortelabs.co with any questions, or to set up a free 30-minute evaluation call with Corey to find out if the program is the right fit for you.

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