Tiago Forte's Blog, page 39
February 5, 2019
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.
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.
February 4, 2019
Second Brain Case Study: Citation Management in Academia
This is an interview and case study with Addison Shockley, a Phd in Communication Studies with an emphasis in Rhetoric.
He has developed a customized workflow to use with his second brain that allows him to precisely track citations for writing academic articles, including multi-colored progressive summarization (red for arguments/debates, blue for external significance, black for evidence, purple for scholarly significance, and yellow for personal resonance) and a PARA system that spans PDF readers and reference management software tools like Zotero.
You can reach Addison at addison.shockley@gmail.com or on Twitter at @addisonshockley.
Here are the links mentioned in the video:
An informal written description of Addison’s workflow using PARA and Progressive Summarization
Evernote note with multiple highlight colors (which isn’t natively supported by Evernote, but can be copied and pasted from other programs that do support it)
How to set up Zotfile, Zotero, Dropbox, PDFExpert6, and Evernote
Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success by Wendy Laura Belcher (summary note here)
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.
January 29, 2019
A Vision for Escola Pura
At the end of every year I perform an “annual review.” It includes a series of exercises and questions designed to close out the previous year and help me plan for the new one.
I decided to do it differently this year. Under the guidance of my friend Ting, I took on a process of looking more deeply into my desires, dreams, and hopes for the future. It was a longer, much more embodied and introspective process than I’m used to. It included “vision quests,” guided meditations, spontaneous artmaking, and sharing our learnings in real time with a small group of people that Ting brought together online. Instead of my usual analytical checklist, laid out in a neat grid in a spreadsheet, I took on a process that was more about discovering the future than planning it.
I started by collecting my favorite photos, music, and videos from the year, reliving memories already half forgotten. I summarized my projects and milestones, including the outcome and what I’d learned from each. I listed my biggest disappointments, trying to just be with my grief over a reality that never came to be, despite my efforts. I started to feel within myself a space full of thoughts and feelings that didn’t have a clear purpose, and yet were as real as the chair I’m sitting in.
A few weeks into this process, I was hired last minute by a client to give a presentation at a company learning event in New Haven, Connecticut. I didn’t relish making a cross-country trip just a week before Christmas, and was a little annoyed at having my “process” interrupted. But a client is a client, and I went.
I gave my talk at a hotel at the edge of the Yale University campus. The following morning, with a few hours to kill before my flight, I decided to walk the grounds. It was 7 in the morning, and freezing, as I walked briskly toward the old part of campus.
Seeing the centuries-old buildings dedicated to learning and scholarship, I started to get in touch with something that had been dormant for a long time: the power of place for learning. Starting in the fifth grade, I went to a different school every year for five years. I continued this trajectory in college, bouncing between two U.S. universities, a community college in California, and two foreign universities, while switching majors at some point in between. These experiences had given me a strong sense of self-reliance, but had also left me without a strong connection to any particular place for my formal education.
In recent years, I’d joined the Silicon Valley bandwagon denouncing traditional educational institutions as archaic and outdated. Even looked forward to their demise. But walking that venerable campus, where so many great thinkers and leaders had been formed, I came face to face with the power of situated learning. I saw what was possible in an immersive environment where everything was designed and optimized for acquiring knowledge.
I visited the main library as it opened. It is designed like a Gothic cathedral, with arched windows and towering columns framing cozy study alcoves. The stained glass windows depict famous scientists and philosophers, instead of saints and apostles.
I strolled through the public collection, my eyes catching on suggestive titles, like clues to hidden worlds. It reminded me of a place that had impacted me deeply: the Laguna Niguel Public Library, where I had spent countless hours as a kid wandering the stacks. So many of the most influential books in my life had jumped out at me from the shelves unexpectedly, catching my eye as I scanned the titles.
This serendipity is what online education is missing, I realized. The random chance, the sense of destiny, and the lucky accidents that come from exploring a space that is full of opportunities, but that you do not fully control. Instead, we are targeted and sorted into carefully designed sales funnels online, each click making it less likely that we’ll encounter anything we don’t already “like.”
I walked down the street to the rare books library, a severe, modernist glass cube suspended in mid-air. In a glass case in the corner was a complete Gutenberg Bible, one of only 21 surviving in the world. Examining its pages, my face pressed up against the glass, I was humbled by the gravity of what this simple bound document had unleashed: modern civilization as we know it. From the most mundane of inventions had sprung unimaginable human potential.
I went back to the hotel, got my bags, and headed to the airport in Hartford for my flight back home. As I sat in the terminal waiting to board, I downloaded Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind. I had seen it on a few different recommended reading lists, but it wasn’t until my recent conversation with Allison Andrade about “ecstatic experiences” that I decided to give it a read.
The book is about psychedelics, with an emphasis on two substances derived from mushrooms – LSD and psilocybin. It is a sweeping tale of their history, culture, politics, usage, and practice, plus a series of the author’s personal experiences. Pollan is extremely well known for his best-selling books on food, plants, and cooking, but this book is an outlier. It documents his journey not only to learn about an interesting new trend, but to indulge his curiosity about what these substances had to offer, and just maybe, to help him find a renewed sense of purpose after a long and dazzling career.
I devoured the book on the flight back to L.A. The mix of history, science, and self-reflection is my kryptonite. I’ve had a handful of experiences with psychedelics, which have been some of the most profound of my life. But I had never studied much of the background of where they came from or how they worked.
I learned that we are currently perched on the edge of a “psychedelic revolution.” After several decades of stigma and prohibition, psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin are making a comeback. Hundreds of studies at prestigious institutions around the world have slowly been confirming their potential as a “miracle drug” for conditions as diverse as PTSD, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, trauma, and existential despair in the face of terminal illnesses. Research from the 1950s and 1960s on thousands of subjects that showed unprecedented rates of effectiveness are being unearthed and replicated. The psychedelic winter is coming to an end.
But what really got me was the history. I read about the Spanish Inquisition, how it sought to suppress and destroy any trace of the indigenous medicinal practices centered on what the Aztecs called teonanácatl, or “flesh of the gods.” The power of these experiences were too great a threat to the religion they sought to spread.
I was deeply moved to learn how a handful of Mexican villages in the far south of the country, so remote that they were unreachable by vehicle, had somehow preserved the tradition for centuries. Generation after generation, they had passed on the knowledge of how to make the “medicine” they knew was so effective in helping people.
In 1952, a Manhattan banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson sampled the magic mushroom in the town of Huautla de Jiménez in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Two years later, he published a fifteen-page account of the “mushrooms that cause strange visions” in Life magazine, marking the moment when news of this new form of consciousness first reached the general public in the United States.
After a couple decades of intensive experimentation showing spectacular results, psychedelics were banned in 1972 because of the fear that they would “corrupt the country’s youth.” From then on, a small underground community of enthusiasts, advocates, doctors, shamans, artists, writers, scientists, and therapists kept it alive. In recent years they have emerged as the leaders of a movement that is gaining force every year.
I was unexpectedly moved to tears by this matter-of-fact history. I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude that all these people, over so many years, had preserved this practice, at such great risk to their careers and even their lives. They had kept the secret alive so that I, someone they would never meet, could have the privilege of swallowing something that opened the doors to a vast inner world of wonder and love inside me.
Cramped in a tiny economy seat in the back of the plane, I felt for perhaps the first time ever that I was a part of history. That I was in the flow of something that extends far before and far after me. Reading about this movement, I saw a place for myself. I saw that I am part of a lineage of healers and truth seekers and teachers who believe in a better future for humanity. And who are willing to give our lives to it even if we will never see it fully realized.
There is something called a “contact high” in which you can feel some of the effects of psychedelics just by being around people who are taking them. I didn’t know it was possible to get a contact high from reading, but I think that’s what happened. As I read account after account of people’s psychedelic experiences, everything started looking brighter and warmer. I felt expansive, connected to everyone around me. Everything seemed imbued with sublime meaning.
As I put the book down and started journaling what I was experiencing, something started to take shape in my mind. Like an electric arc connecting parts of my brain that didn’t normally communicate, I started to see the closest thing to a “vision” I had ever experienced while sober.
I saw a school building, nestled in the Serra da Mantiqueira mountains of Southern Brazil. I knew it was there, because it was surrounded by araucaria trees native to that region. Their tall, slender trunks shot upward, each one topped with a crown of thorny branches arcing upward and outward like a spiky umbrella. It is a region familiar to me, because it was there that my family lived when I was 14 years old, in the most pivotal year of my life.
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It was called Escola Pura, I somehow knew. “Pure School” in English. There we would teach everything they didn’t teach in normal school: productivity, effectiveness, organization, and project management to start. But also yoga, meditation, breathwork, and emotional intelligence. I would share everything I had learned in exclusive, expensive programs in Silicon Valley, like Landmark, Tide Turners, and Vipassana.
The students would be young people – from teens to 20s and 30s – who wanted to make an impact. On their own lives, on their families, on their communities, on their country, and on the world. They would come from the favelas and the bairros nobres, from the country and the cities, from the North and the South, from the coast and the interior, from the privileged and from the disadvantaged, from creative fields and from government, from business and from non-profits. We would equip them with the very best the world of self-development had to offer: the tools, the skills, the methods, and the wisdom necessary to excel, to make things happen, and to realize their goals, but also to heal, to contribute, and to inspire.
The school will be in a physical location, but it will be born digital. Technology skills – including coding, design, marketing, media production, and many others – will be part of every class. Technology is modern alchemy, and our students will be taught to wield it from the start.
The school itself will live with one foot on the ground, and one in the cloud. Class content will be available online in a flipped classroom; discussions and collaborations will seamlessly move between online and offline spaces; classes will incorporate tangible projects that are shared online with the world; instructors will conduct classes remotely when they need to, as they pursue their work across the globe. The dichotomy between “online” and “offline” education will be completely collapsed, just as it has collapsed in the real world.
Escola Pura will train a new generation of Brazilian leaders, equipping them with every practical superpower mankind has to offer, in service of whichever cause they care about. Eventually, we will invite others from different countries to see what we’ve done. We will license it, or franchise it, or sell it, or open source it, or just give it away. We will bring back Brazilians from abroad who have lost hope in their country. And then send them out again as ambassadors of light and hope.
That is all I know. It doesn’t seem right to say I “thought of it.” It’s more like I received it, fully formed. It was shocking to discover this plan already in my mind, like a perfect memory, except of something that hasn’t happened yet.
At the same time, this idea is me through and through. It’s not so much a metaphysical destiny as the sum of my life experiences.
My experience at Yale was an influence. I had to let go of my dismissal of physical places and institutions as essential for learning.
The Peace Corps was an influence. I saw that I could have a big impact in a short period of time, teaching young people how to define goals, make plans, and use their skills to serve their communities. I saw how little it takes to set a young person on a completely different trajectory.
GTD was an influence. I had to see that it was possible to teach people a framework that helped them be more responsible, organized, and effective. I needed to see that integrity could be taught.
My work with MESA was an influence. I had to see with my own eyes what it looked like for a Brazilian company to do work at a global standard. To come up with something new and revolutionary completely from Brazilian roots. I had to let go of my Brazilian cynicism about Brazil.
My experiences with coaching were an influence. I needed to see that there were forms of instruction far more powerful than mere content. To understand that true breakthroughs happen only when we are witnessed by another human being.
My experiences in Brazil and other parts of Latin America were obviously an influence. There is a saudade buried deep in my heart, for a homeland that I was not born in but always long for. It was planted there as my mother sang me to sleep with Portuguese lullabies; during long afternoons in my grandmother’s kitchen in São Paulo; at jubilant after school soccer games in Campos do Jordão where we lived when I was 14; and later in college as I partied the weekends away at universities in Curitiba and Rio de Janeiro. What I long for most of all is for Brazil to thrive. To reach the potential that always seems just out of reach. Brazil gave me everything it had to offer, and then sent me overseas to a country where I would have more opportunity and security. And it feels like it’s time to come home and give back.
The world badly needs what Brazil has to offer. Their resilience and courage in the face of adversity. Their creativity and adaptability under the most difficult conditions. But also their joy and their optimism over what they do have. Their social bonds and community life that can survive anything. It is an incredibly rich culture that the world has only begun to appreciate beyond the postcard images. Brazilians could be the leaders of a new world. They could teach us a new way of being in connection with our hearts, our bodies, our spirits, and the Earth
But Brazil also needs help. It is a dark time of deepening poverty and entrenched corruption. A new political regime proudly declares its racism, sexism, homophobia, climate denial, and opposition to indigenous and civil rights. And a majority of the voting population agrees that such measures are necessary for order and progress. It seems like everyone with a way out of the country is getting out. The minds and hearts that the country needs are fleeing for better opportunities elsewhere.
I have no idea what path Escola Pura will take. Maybe it will be a small-scale experiment to validate a model for others to use. Perhaps it will start online to build an audience, and only later find a geographic home. Maybe we will start a pilot inside existing schools using government funds, or build a network of private schools independent of any institutions. For now it is just a web address – escolapura.com – that redirects to this post.
What I do know is that this path will take many years, will require resources and skills far beyond what I can supply myself, and will draw on a vast number of people whom I haven’t met yet. It might not happen within my lifetime, and probably won’t ultimately look like what I’m envisioning. But I am ready: to let go, to push through, to expand beyond my beliefs about what is possible, so that Escola Pura and what it represents has even a small chance of becoming real.
It is the most meaningful idea I have ever conceived of. If this isn’t a life purpose, then I don’t know what is.
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.
January 28, 2019
Commonplace Books: Creative Note-Taking Through History
One of the clearest predecessors to the modern practice of Personal Knowledge Management are “commonplace books” – centralized, personally curated, and continuously maintained collections of information from various sources that rose to popularity during the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution in Europe.
These books helped educated people cope with the “information explosion” unleashed by the printing press and industrialization. They were highly idiosyncratic, personalized texts used to make sense of a new world of intercontinental trade, long distance communication, and mass media. Commonplace books could contain recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas, notes from sermons, and remedies for common maladies, among many other things.
Their keepers would transcribe interesting or inspirational passages from their reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations, ideas, anecdotes, observations and other information they came across. The purpose of the book could range from personal recollection and reflection, to source material for writing, speaking, politics, or business.
Origins of the Commonplace
The word “commonplace” can be traced back to Ancient Greece, where a speaker in law courts or political meetings would keep an assortment of arguments in a “common place” for easy reference. The Romans called them locus communis, which means “a theme or argument of general application,” such as a statement of proverbial wisdom.
For many centuries, great thinkers and intellectuals maintained ongoing records of their work. Shakespeare had something like a commonplace in mind when he wrote in Sonnett lXXVII:
Look, what thy memory cannot contain Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find Those children nurs’d, delivered from thy brain, To take a new acquaintance of thy mind…
But the commonplace book would only come into its own during the European Enlightenment, when an exploding volume of printed media collided with changing political and societal norms. The commonplace book provided a private place for people to work out their thoughts and ideas about the dramatic changes taking place around them.
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January 25, 2019
Introducing RandomNote Web
I’m very proud to present version 3.0 of RandomNote Web, a free web app we created to help people serendipitously resurface and rediscover their Evernote notes, with the goal of improving their learning and creative output.
Version 3.0 was generously created by Chris Galtenberg, Callum Flack, and Ben Mosior, originally as part of the online course Building a Second Brain. It has proven so incredibly useful, we’ve decided to open it up for free to the world.
Imagine if you could push a button, and immediately be given an idea.
Not just any idea. A useful idea, that you yourself chose to save at some point in the past.
In recent years, books like Antifragile, Seeing Like a State, and Incomplete Nature have opened our eyes to the power of randomness as a means to creating more resilience, strength, and creativity in our lives.
Yet if you look at how most people behave, they seem to constantly be trying to remove randomness from their lives. They make to do lists, organize their files, and schedule their calendar all with the goal of making things more predictable and certain.
But there is something being lost as we impose more and more order on our information: serendipity. The greatest breakthroughs usually come from connections that are unexpected, unusual, and unorthodox. When we impose too much order on our ideas, it is these very connections that slip through the cracks.
We created RandomNote to purposefully inject some randomness back into your workflow. To remind you of notes you took the time to create and save, but have probably forgotten even exist. By systematically resurfacing knowledge from the past without requiring any extra effort, RandomNote helps you draw from the sum total of your accumulated life experience, not just what you can remember in the moment.
Here’s how it works:
Every time you visit this web address (https://evernote-random.glitch.me), you will be shown a randomly selected note drawn from your Evernote account
By default it draws from all your notes, but you can also choose to draw from a specific notebook (or from a certain set of notebooks if you follow my PARA organizational system)
If you want to edit, move, or tag the note that appears, you can open it in your browser OR in the Evernote app on your computer with one click
Bookmark the web address above for easy access, or even better, watch the video below to learn how to set RandomNote Web as the “default tab” in the Chrome browser – every time you open a new tab, instead of being shown a blank screen, you will have the opportunity to review a note at a glance.
If you review just 3 notes per day (out of the dozens of tabs you create), you’ll review more than 1,000 notes over the course of a year! That is 1,000 opportunities to reuse, remix, remember, or revive a piece of knowledge that you deemed worthy of keeping, using nothing but the brief moments while you type in a search term or wait for a page to load.
I believe this simple little web app has revolutionized my learning and creativity over the past year. I’m constantly being reminded of serendipitous connections – a quote I read in an article that I can now use in a blog post I’m writing, an interesting statistic that helps me make sense of a marketing trend; a stock photo that is somehow a perfect fit for a slide presentation I’m working on.
If creativity is the ability to see unexpected connections, then RandomNote Web turbocharges that process using the power of technology. There is no reason to wait around for serendipity to happen to you. By constantly putting in front of you the best of what you’ve read and learned, you are drastically multiplying the chances that “luck” will find you.
If you’d like to dive deeper into the field of personal knowledge management, including how to create effective digital notes in the first place, check out my online course Building a Second Brain.
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.
RandomNote Web 3.0
I’m very proud to present version 3.0 of RandomNote Web, a free web app we created to help people serendipitously resurface and rediscover their Evernote notes, with the goal of improving their learning and creative output.
Version 3.0 was generously created by Chris Galtenberg, Callum Flack, and Ben Mosior, originally as part of the online course Building a Second Brain. It has proven so incredibly useful, we’ve decided to open it up for free to the world.
Imagine if you could push a button, and immediately be given an idea?
Not just any idea. A useful idea, that you yourself chose to save at some point in the past.
In recent years, books like Antifragile, Seeing Like a State, and Incomplete Nature have opened our eyes to the power of randomness as a means to creating more resilience, strength, and creativity in our lives.
Yet if you look at how most people behave, they seem to constantly be trying to remove randomness from their lives. They make to do lists, organize their files, and schedule their calendar all with the goal of making things more predictable and certain.
But there is something being lost as we impose more and more order on our information: serendipity. The greatest breakthroughs usually come from connections that are unexpected, unusual, and unorthodox. When we impose too much order on our ideas, it is these very connections that slip through the cracks.
We created RandomNote to purposefully inject some randomness back into your workflow. To remind you of notes you took the time to create and save, but have probably forgotten even exist. By systematically resurfacing knowledge from the past without requiring any extra effort, RandomNote helps you draw from the sum total of your accumulated life experience, not just what you can remember in the moment.
Here’s how it works:
Every time you visit this web address (https://evernote-random.glitch.me), you will be shown a randomly selected note drawn from your Evernote account
By default it draws from all your notes, but you can also choose to draw from a specific notebook (or from a certain set of notebooks if you follow my PARA organizational system)
If you want to edit, move, or tag the note that appears, you can open it in your browser OR in the Evernote app on your computer with one click
Bookmark the web address above for easy access, or even better, watch the video below to learn how to set RandomNote Web as the “default tab” in the Chrome browser – every time you open a new tab, instead of being shown a blank screen, you will have the opportunity to review a note at a glance.
If you review just 3 notes per day (out of the dozens of tabs you create), you’ll review more than 1,000 notes over the course of a year! That is 1,000 opportunities to reuse, remix, remember, or revive a piece of knowledge that you deemed worthy of keeping, using nothing but the brief moments while you type in a search term or wait for a page to load.
I believe this simple little web app has revolutionized my learning and creativity over the past year. I’m constantly being reminded of serendipitous connections – a quote I read in an article that I can now use in a blog post I’m writing, an interesting statistic that helps me make sense of a marketing trend; a stock photo that is somehow a perfect fit for a slide presentation I’m working on.
If creativity is the ability to see unexpected connections, then RandomNote Web turbocharges that process using the power of technology. There is no reason to wait around for serendipity to happen to you. By constantly putting in front of you the best of what you’ve read and learned, you are drastically multiplying the chances that “luck” will find you.
If you’d like to dive deeper into the field of personal knowledge management, including how to create effective digital notes in the first place, check out my online course Building a Second Brain.
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 Power of DWYSYWD (Doing What You Said You Would Do)
Learning productivity is a journey. We have a good map of the territory, in the form of the Digital Productivity Pyramid. Often, when we embark on this journey – learning digital fluency, task management (GTD), personal knowledge management (BASB) and beyond – our motivation is primarily one of utility. We want to stop procrastinating, to get more things done, to excel at our work, and have a vibrant, flourishing career. GTD and BASB will absolutely help you meet those goals.
While on this journey, however, we start to realize that GTD and BASB can serve another purpose: sheer pleasure. We accomplish what we set out to do, and check items off our list of actions and goals; a sense of achievement, fulfillment, and satisfaction arises. We add notes to our collection of knowledge related to our projects, responsibilities, and interests, summarizing them and organizing them; it grows over time into a vast web of meaning, like creating a museum tailored exclusively to our interests. Through action and learning, a sense of pleasure, joy, and wonder arises.
When productivity is both useful and fun for us, it can become a way for us to cultivate virtue¹. These two primary methodologies, GTD and BASB, each have their own virtues, integrity and creativity that are cultivated with practice.
Getting things done and completing tasks more broadly allows us to cultivate reliability, integrity, and honesty. Integrity can be summarized in the following maxim: Do What You Said You Would Do (DWYSYWD, dwizzywood). There is a simple, cause-and-effect relationship between doing what we said we would do, being perceived as trustworthy, and how likely we are to succeed at what we set out to do.
If you don’t DWYSYWD, others will trust you less, and you will trust yourself less. When difficult things arise, you will be less confident that you can rise to the challenge, and will be less likely to succeed. If you DWYSYWD, others will trust you more, and you will trust yourself more. When difficult things arise, you will be more confident that you can rise to the challenge, and will be more likely to succeed.
When we realize the importance of this relationship, it becomes paramount that we follow it more and more closely. We become afraid² of not doing what we said we would do, and consider how we can make it more likely that we do what we said we would do. When we are presented with doing something, we consider how likely it is that we can actually do it, before we commit to it. And we assiduously track what we have committed ourselves to doing, so that we can ensure we do it.
GTD is an invaluable tool for DWYSYWD and building integrity. GTD ensures that you actually do what you said you would do. It breaks one word – do – into five steps: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage.
[image error]
By keeping track of what you’ve said you would do (capture), processing the relevant materials as actionable or reference (clarify), sorting the output into to do-lists and other storage systems (organize), regularly looking over and reviewing what you’ve agreed to (reflect), you can be prepared to actually do what you said you would do (engage). With a solid GTD system in place, integrity becomes increasingly feasible and consistent.
With GTD, you say to yourself what you want to do, and it stares at you until you do it. You can quantifiably track whether you’re doing what you said you would do, or not. You get more things done, and it’s easier to prioritize what builds up on your task list. You track and learn how you spend your time and energy.
Without GTD, people usually don’t track or know what they’re committed to, so their sense of cause and effect is subtle and cloudy. With GTD, this becomes quite clear. You also develop a felt sense of integrity – noticing how you feel when you DWYSYWD, and when you don’t. You see that you feel good, proud, and accomplished when you DWYSYWD, and there’s a sense of suffering, guilt, and fatigue that comes with not doing what you said you would do. You also become more careful about what you put on your task list, knowing that you are making or breaking a commitment to yourself.
When we implement and use a reference system with BASB, we also have the opportunity to cultivate a specific set of virtues: creativity, flexibility, and adaptability.
[image error]
BASB provides a system, structure, and occasion for creativity to emerge naturally. Our notes and files form a “network of ideas” – ideas that may not have anything in common other than our interest in them. This can provide the raw material for new projects, approaches, and ideas; the basis for completely unanticipated, novel, synthetic approaches to problems we’re facing.
Past learnings are resurfaced years later for similar projects. An article on a historical political movement can impact how you structure a project at your day job. A poem you read in a college course might change how you approach a problem in your side project, in new settings and contexts.
As creativity emerges more and more consistently, we learn to live, think, and act in ways that allow more and more creativity. Creativity feeds on itself, creating a perpetual flywheel that improves our results not just at one company or in the workplace, but across the many areas and epochs of our life.
As our creativity arises with increasing frequency and depth, a related set of virtues arises: flexibility, adaptability, curiosity, and humility.
We see that there are many perspectives on every issue, and gain the ability to see others’ perspectives, and to move between them fluidly. We become curious navigators of the sea of myriad perspectives, exploring from the small raft that is our own library of experiences, knowledge, and wisdom.
As we sail, we feel a broad, open hope, a sense of curiosity; but we also see how small we are, an invisible dot on an infinite ocean. Pierre Bayard points out that “the act of picking up and opening a book masks the counter-gesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.”
For every book we pick up, for every skill we master, for every discipline we explore, for every quest we begin, there is another we do not. We see that there is more that we don’t know than that we do know, both as individuals (i.e., experts in one or more domains) and as humans more broadly (i.e., one species in a vast universe). With our curiosity and flexibility, comes a deep humility.
For some, this humility may be painful at first, but we can find some peace in knowing that it is the cure to many of our problems. Many humans, on discovering or creating something new, err tragically, becoming overconfident, brash, and arrogant, thinking that because they know one small thing, they know everything.
Take, for example, the quiet but giant leap between science and scientism, characterized by Alan Wallace in The Taboo of Subjectivity. Science is “a discipline of inquiry entailing rigorous observation and experimentation, followed by a rational, often quantitative, analysis; and its theories characteristically make predictions that can be put to the empirical test, in which they may turn out to be wrong, and the theory is thereby invalidated.” Its ideals are objectivity, skepticism, and pragmatism. Scientism is “the doctrine that science knows or will soon know all the answers and has been said to judge disbelief in its own assertion as a sign of ignorance or stupidity.” Science as a useful discipline is transformed into a religious dogma.
As explorers of the realm of knowledge, equipped with the cutting-edge tools BASB provides us, we can instead take the attitude of Charlie Munger, to avoid “intense ideologies”:
“I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say ‘I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are supporting it. I think that only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.’”
At first, we might seek to develop our skills in digital productivity for pleasures or gains, for a promotion or idle pleasure. And there’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever. But as we do that, it becomes increasingly possible to use productivity systems and second brains for another, higher purpose: the development of virtue and moral character. GTD and sound task management cultivate honesty and integrity; BASB and reference systems can help us to cultivate a humble creativity. And, perhaps most importantly: in this pursuit, we see that the cultivation of our virtues can be fun and playful.
¹ In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes three kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, utility, and virtue.
² In Buddhism, moral shame and fear are considered virtues, wholesome states. These are regret about past actions, and fear that we will do something harmful in the future. This is separate from an unwholesome sense of worry.
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 Virtues of Digital Productivity: Creativity, Flexibility, and Adaptability
Learning productivity is a journey. We have a good map of the territory, in the form of the Digital Productivity Pyramid. Often, when we embark on this journey – learning digital fluency, task management (GTD), personal knowledge management (BASB) and beyond – our motivation is primarily one of utility. We want to stop procrastinating, to get more things done, to excel at our work, and have a vibrant, flourishing career. GTD and BASB will absolutely help you meet those goals.
While on this journey, however, we start to realize that GTD and BASB can serve another purpose: sheer pleasure. We accomplish what we set out to do, and check items off our list of actions and goals; a sense of achievement, fulfillment, and satisfaction arises. We add notes to our collection of knowledge related to our projects, responsibilities, and interests, summarizing them and organizing them; it grows over time into a vast web of meaning, like creating a museum tailored exclusively to our interests. Through action and learning, a sense of pleasure, joy, and wonder arises.
When productivity is both useful and fun for us, it can become a way for us to cultivate virtue¹. These two primary methodologies, GTD and BASB, each have their own virtues, integrity and creativity that are cultivated with practice.
Getting things done and completing tasks more broadly allows us to cultivate reliability, integrity, and honesty. Integrity can be summarized in the following maxim: Do What You Said You Would Do (DWYSYWD, dwizzywood). There is a simple, cause-and-effect relationship between doing what we said we would do, being perceived as trustworthy, and how likely we are to succeed at what we set out to do.
If you don’t DWYSYWD, others will trust you less, and you will trust yourself less. When difficult things arise, you will be less confident that you can rise to the challenge, and will be less likely to succeed. If you DWYSYWD, others will trust you more, and you will trust yourself more. When difficult things arise, you will be more confident that you can rise to the challenge, and will be more likely to succeed.
When we realize the importance of this relationship, it becomes paramount that we follow it more and more closely. We become afraid² of not doing what we said we would do, and consider how we can make it more likely that we do what we said we would do. When we are presented with doing something, we consider how likely it is that we can actually do it, before we commit to it. And we assiduously track what we have committed ourselves to doing, so that we can ensure we do it.
GTD is an invaluable tool for DWYSYWD and building integrity. GTD ensures that you actually do what you said you would do. It breaks one word – do – into five steps: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage.
[image error]
By keeping track of what you’ve said you would do (capture), processing the relevant materials as actionable or reference (clarify), sorting the output into to do-lists and other storage systems (organize), regularly looking over and reviewing what you’ve agreed to (reflect), you can be prepared to actually do what you said you would do (engage). With a solid GTD system in place, integrity becomes increasingly feasible and consistent.
With GTD, you say to yourself what you want to do, and it stares at you until you do it. You can quantifiably track whether you’re doing what you said you would do, or not. You get more things done, and it’s easier to prioritize what builds up on your task list. You track and learn how you spend your time and energy.
Without GTD, people usually don’t track or know what they’re committed to, so their sense of cause and effect is subtle and cloudy. With GTD, this becomes quite clear. You also develop a felt sense of integrity – noticing how you feel when you DWYSYWD, and when you don’t. You see that you feel good, proud, and accomplished when you DWYSYWD, and there’s a sense of suffering, guilt, and fatigue that comes with not doing what you said you would do. You also become more careful about what you put on your task list, knowing that you are making or breaking a commitment to yourself.
When we implement and use a reference system with BASB, we also have the opportunity to cultivate a specific set of virtues: creativity, flexibility, and adaptability.
[image error]
BASB provides a system, structure, and occasion for creativity to emerge naturally. Our notes and files form a “network of ideas” – ideas that may not have anything in common other than our interest in them. This can provide the raw material for new projects, approaches, and ideas; the basis for completely unanticipated, novel, synthetic approaches to problems we’re facing.
Past learnings are resurfaced years later for similar projects. An article on a historical political movement can impact how you structure a project at your day job. A poem you read in a college course might change how you approach a problem in your side project, in new settings and contexts.
As creativity emerges more and more consistently, we learn to live, think, and act in ways that allow more and more creativity. Creativity feeds on itself, creating a perpetual flywheel that improves our results not just at one company or in the workplace, but across the many areas and epochs of our life.
As our creativity arises with increasing frequency and depth, a related set of virtues arises: flexibility, adaptability, curiosity, and humility.
We see that there are many perspectives on every issue, and gain the ability to see others’ perspectives, and to move between them fluidly. We become curious navigators of the sea of myriad perspectives, exploring from the small raft that is our own library of experiences, knowledge, and wisdom.
As we sail, we feel a broad, open hope, a sense of curiosity; but we also see how small we are, an invisible dot on an infinite ocean. Pierre Bayard points out that “the act of picking up and opening a book masks the counter-gesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.”
For every book we pick up, for every skill we master, for every discipline we explore, for every quest we begin, there is another we do not. We see that there is more that we don’t know than that we do know, both as individuals (i.e., experts in one or more domains) and as humans more broadly (i.e., one species in a vast universe). With our curiosity and flexibility, comes a deep humility.
For some, this humility may be painful at first, but we can find some peace in knowing that it is the cure to many of our problems. Many humans, on discovering or creating something new, err tragically, becoming overconfident, brash, and arrogant, thinking that because they know one small thing, they know everything.
Take, for example, the quiet but giant leap between science and scientism, characterized by Alan Wallace in The Taboo of Subjectivity. Science is “a discipline of inquiry entailing rigorous observation and experimentation, followed by a rational, often quantitative, analysis; and its theories characteristically make predictions that can be put to the empirical test, in which they may turn out to be wrong, and the theory is thereby invalidated.” Its ideals are objectivity, skepticism, and pragmatism. Scientism is “the doctrine that science knows or will soon know all the answers and has been said to judge disbelief in its own assertion as a sign of ignorance or stupidity.” Science as a useful discipline is transformed into a religious dogma.
As explorers of the realm of knowledge, equipped with the cutting-edge tools BASB provides us, we can instead take the attitude of Charlie Munger, to avoid “intense ideologies”:
“I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say ‘I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are supporting it. I think that only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.’”
At first, we might seek to develop our skills in digital productivity for pleasures or gains, for a promotion or idle pleasure. And there’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever. But as we do that, it becomes increasingly possible to use productivity systems and second brains for another, higher purpose: the development of virtue and moral character. GTD and sound task management cultivate honesty and integrity; BASB and reference systems can help us to cultivate a humble creativity. And, perhaps most importantly: in this pursuit, we see that the cultivation of our virtues can be fun and playful.
¹ In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes three kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, utility, and virtue.
² In Buddhism, moral shame and fear are considered virtues, wholesome states. These are regret about past actions, and fear that we will do something harmful in the future. This is separate from an unwholesome sense of worry.
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.
