Tiago Forte's Blog, page 4

The Creative Power of Procrastination

Creativity is often described as an elusive, even magical, phenomenon. In reality, it’s a skill – and there are many ways to prime your brain to be more creative. 

Surprisingly, one of them is procrastination. We generally think of procrastination as a bad habit, a mental hurdle we need to overcome. But research shows that delaying and postponing tasks can actually stimulate creative thinking — provided the conditions are just right. 

Let’s look at the techniques that can turn procrastination into one of your most creative habits.

An honest look at procrastination

Procrastination stems from our urge to flee the discomfort of an unwanted task. In the brain, this plays out as a war between our logical prefrontal cortex — responsible for decision-making — and our hasty, pleasure-seeking limbic system. When the limbic system wins, we rebel against the undesirable task and choose the temporary dopamine hit of procrastination instead. 

Some of us are better equipped than others to fend off the urge to procrastinate. The volume of the amygdala — part of the brain’s limbic system and responsible for processing our motivations, fears, senses, and emotions — influences our likelihood to procrastinate, and its size comes down to genetics. 

However, it is possible to escape an inherited tendency to procrastinate: studies show that cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness meditation can change the size of the amygdala over time. But what if you didn’t need to eliminate procrastination, and you could harness its creative benefits instead? 

Procrastination and creativity: different sides of the same equation

To create anything meaningful, we need to allow our minds to wander freely. As multi-award-winning director Aaron Sorkin once quipped: “You call it procrastinating, I call it thinking.”

We may achieve our biggest creative breakthroughs when we throw off the mental constraints of a preordained task and follow our inner curiosity, but we can’t leave procrastination unchecked. If we do, the tasks we’re avoiding will still be waiting for us, accompanied by the guilt and the pressure of lost time.  For chronic procrastinators, it’s even worse: they have higher levels of stress and illness, and produce lower-quality work. 

Moderation is crucial. Researchers primed three groups of volunteers for different levels of procrastination and found that those who procrastinated moderately — delaying an assigned task for an average of 25% of their allotted time to complete it — generated higher-quality creative ideas. However, volunteers with high or low levels of procrastination (respectively, procrastinating for averages of 40% and 4% of their time) didn’t reap the same benefits. 

How do we hit this sweet spot? Through active procrastination, which means installing guardrails and optimizing the conditions for creativity.

How to stimulate creativity through active procrastination

Time-boxing, setting intentions, and choosing a procrastination activity can help you reap the full creative benefits of procrastination. Here’s how…

1. REFRAME HOW YOU THINK ABOUT PROCRASTINATION 

Shame is a common emotion when people procrastinate, but self-blame can sap your ability to be creative. Instead, build the habit of being compassionate to yourself when you procrastinate. The process of resetting how you think about procrastination takes time and effort, as you’re attempting to form new neural pathways — but by continually refocusing your thoughts on compassion, blame will cease to be the default emotion. 

When you feel the itch to abandon a task, observe the warring forces in your brain. You’re starting to procrastinate, and that’s OK because you’re about to maximize the benefits through active procrastination.  

2. ELIMINATE PASSIVE PROCRASTINATION BY REMOVING DISTRACTIONS

Distractions are common triggers for procrastination, as they give us an excuse to leap between multiple tasks without fully engaging in any of them. This is passive procrastination, and it’s the antithesis of procrastinating creatively. 

Rather than letting your mind play, you’re being controlled by inbound stimuli like emails and Slack notifications. The urge to respond to these cues can be hard to resist — and the rush of dopamine when we give in can trap us in a neverending reactivity loop.

To fend off passive procrastination, you need to make a conscious decision about what you’re consuming. Escape the reactivity loop by changing your response: instead of instantly consuming content presented to you by others, cut the loop by saving the content for later. For example, if it’s email that usually sends you into reactivity mode, a tool like SaneBox can help you remove distractions: you can snooze emails for later or consign them to the SaneBlackHole (a folder that you can train over time to collect your unwanted email). 

3. STRUCTURE YOUR PROCRASTINATION

If you have multiple projects, you can delay one by working on the other. Philosopher John Perry calls this structured procrastination, and it allows you to give in to the delicious feeling of avoiding your intended task while you make progress on something else. You might even find unexpected touchpoints: switching between different projects, aka “slow-motion multitasking,” is how some of the world’s greatest innovators sharpened their multidisciplinary ideas. 

4. CULTIVATE A PROCRASTINATION ACTIVITY

Building a habit when your mind starts to wander — like journaling, online puzzles, or an art project — can be an incredible way to get you “unstuck” from your current project by engaging different parts of your brain. Scientists speculate that switching to a second task forces you to clear your brain of information, allowing you to approach the first task from a fresh perspective when you return to it.

Whatever your chosen procrastination activity, time-boxing can ensure you keep within the limits of moderate procrastination. Give yourself 15 minutes, or even an hour, to explore wherever your restless brain is trying to take you. 

Time limits are especially important if your procrastination activity is browsing online, otherwise, you can slip back into the reactivity loop — see the next step for ways to interrupt the cycle.

5. CAPTURE IDEAS FOR LATER

If procrastination leads you to engrossing Reddit threads or you risk descending into a YouTube spiral, you need to be able to stop when your time is up. It’s easier to cut yourself off if you use a capture tool to add content to a read-later app (we recommend Reader by Readwise), so you can consume it at a different time. 

Later on, if you find the content useful but don’t quite know what to do with it (yet), you can use the PARA Method to add it into your knowledge management system, aka your Second brain (here’s how to choose a suitable app). This way, you can let your ideas simmer and mentally set aside your procrastination material for when you’re ready to return to it. In the meantime, you can go back to your original task with a newly playful and creative brain.

With these techniques, procrastination can transform from a time-wasting hindrance into a game-changing creative tool. Understand the neuroscience behind this common habit, reframe your mindset, and implement procrastination strategies — you’ll see your creativity flourish in unexpected ways.

This article is a guest post from our friends at Sanebox. 

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post The Creative Power of Procrastination appeared first on Forte Labs.

New Book, New Strategy: The 7 Main Things I’m Doing Differently for the Annual Review Book

I recently announced my next major book project: a book on how to complete a year-end life review as a ritual for self-reflection and growth.

I’ve had an annual review practice in some form since 2008, and I can’t think of anything else that has more dramatically impacted my life in that time. I can’t wait to bring this practice, which has existed for a long time among CEOs, executives, heads of state, and creatives, to the wider world.

The first question I’m asking myself as I embark on this years-long journey is, “What do I want to do differently from last time?” 

I’ve documented the process of writing and publishing my previous book, Building a Second Brain (BASB), in great detail, partly so that I can now look back and take stock of what worked and what didn’t.

Here are the 7 strategic decisions I’m making differently this time and why.

1. Think on a 5-year time horizon

The sheer timescale at which traditionally published books operate continues to astound me. As of now, it’s been 5.5 years since I started working on the proposal for BASB, and 2 years since its release in the US – nothing else in my life operates on this timescale.

We recently crossed an incredible milestone – 200,000 copies sold – and yet I still feel that the journey of the book is in its early stages. It’s tempting when embarking on an endeavor like this to focus only on the initial launch, but I’ve learned that it’s critical to think on at least a 5-year timescale.

What kind of book do I want to still be talking about and promoting 5 years from now? What do I want to spend my time thinking about and working on throughout that time? Given that I only have so many 5-year stretches in my career, how do I want to use them?

These are the kinds of questions I asked myself when deciding which book to write next, and vanishingly few topics made the cut. But now that I’ve chosen the most promising one, I’m going to make all subsequent decisions from the perspective of what makes sense on a 5-10-year time horizon.

2. Move toward more intuitive right-brain thinking

For BASB, I made a strong effort to move away from language and concepts that were overly technical, abstract, or rooted in the tech world. I had developed a lot of my thinking while immersed in Silicon Valley, and I knew I needed to broaden my language to appeal to a much more mainstream audience.

Yet even with that effort, the book is still quite skewed toward readers who are relatively tech-savvy. The idea of creating an external repository of personal information in digital form still appeals mainly to people who already think about how to use their technology more effectively.

With my new topic of year-end reviews, I want to continue this shift from a primarily left-brain, analytical lens to a more right-brain, holistic, intuitive, and emotional lens. I want to continue expanding my niche from a small hardcore group of productivity nerds to wider audiences centered around existing habits like journaling, mindfulness, goal-setting, and planning.

This shift will need to be reflected in everything from the words I use to the colors and design of the book’s branding, to the marketing materials we create, to the way I talk about the subject in podcast interviews.

3. Sprints, not marathons

Looking back on the whole experience of writing my first book, one of the most stressful aspects was the ever-present feeling that I had to be making progress on the book at all times. 

Logically I knew that’s impossible – a lot of time is needed for rest and recovery, for family and friends, and for other projects at work. Yet that feeling remained, at the back of my mind, like a subtle pressure against my brain, constantly questioning why I wasn’t advancing on at least one front. Writing a book might feel like a marathon, but even a marathon takes place in a series of shorter sprints!

Something else has changed since last time as well: I have far more responsibilities. 2020 and 2021 were ideal times to write a book in many ways, with the pandemic shutting down the world and our new baby sleeping the days away. Now I have two young kids, a household to manage, and a larger, more complex business with a lot of projects happening in parallel. Oh, we’re also moving to Mexico in a few months!

For all these reasons, I plan on concentrating my writing time in a series of month-long sprints, with the in-between months dedicated to research, gathering feedback, and recovery. For example, my first sprint will be the entire month of June 2024, followed by two months off, and then again in September, with another two months off, and finally in December as work slows down for the holidays. 

I’m hoping this schedule will serve as a forcing function to allow me to completely set aside all my other work duties during the “on” months, leaning on the team to manage the business while I’m away, and then decisively turning off that part of my brain during the “off” months.

4. Recruit beta readers for feedback

My last two books were directly based on a cohort-based course I taught for 6 years, starting in 2016. Several thousand people completed it, and I therefore had a treasure trove of feedback, examples, case studies, and intelligence about what worked and what didn’t.

I’ve been teaching a workshop called The Annual Review since 2019, and over 600 people have taken it, but I have significantly less research this time around. I’ve also not really communicated my ideas about year-end reviews in written form before, except through publishing my own personal reviews.

This time around I’d like to try an approach I’ve seen many successful authors take: recruiting a group of “beta” readers to review the early manuscript and give me direct, specific feedback about which parts resonate and which need to be changed or removed.

5. Only our core platforms matter

Looking back at the numerous marketing efforts we made leading up to and following the last book’s release, I’m left with a sobering conclusion: it is really only our core platforms (which for us are the email newsletter, YouTube, and X) that truly make a difference in the scale of a book’s success.

By this, I mean both their size (the number of followers or subscribers) and just as if not more importantly, the quality of my relationship with those people. Do they like what I have to say? Do they trust me? Are they hungry for more from me?

I recently sat down to analyze Forte Labs’ audience growth since my last book was acquired in March 2020: in 4 years we’ve grown our audience an astounding 28x, from about 20,000 followers to 550,000 across all platforms:

Most of this growth is due to the two books I’ve published in that time, as well as the strong growth of our YouTube channel, both of which have also fueled growth in our email list (the vertical line below represents the date my BASB book was released, creating a clear inflection point in the long-term growth rate of our email list that has persisted to this day):

Last time, we didn’t really have the option of relying solely on my own audience. It just wasn’t big enough. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to bootstrap an audience almost from scratch but looking back, the return-on-investment for those efforts was pretty marginal.

This time around, I’m going to invest all our time, energy, and money into simply growing our audience, which ultimately means more and better blog posts, YouTube videos, social posts, and newsletter content. This offers an additional benefit: once the release is all over, we’re left with the greatest prize of all –  a larger and more engaged audience ready to receive whatever we do next.

6. Create tighter integration with courses

Over the past year, we made a tremendous effort to diversify our sources of revenue away from cohort-based courses. A year ago we made 95%+ of our revenue from cohorts alone, and today none of it comes from cohorts since we’ve stopped offering them altogether.

It was a longer and more difficult transition than I expected, but we now have a much more balanced business based on 5 main sources of revenue: self-paced courses, books, ads and sponsorships, affiliate commissions, and our new flagship, the Second Brain Membership.

For BASB, despite the fact that the book was based on a course, we didn’t do a good job of integrating the book with our courses. This was partly because the live, cohort-based version only took place at certain times of the year, and was about 66x as expensive as the book (or $999), which made it difficult to seamlessly bring book readers into it unless they happened to subscribe to our newsletter.

Even when we came out with a pre-recorded, self-paced version of the BASB course about a year after the book’s release, it too closely reflected the book’s contents, making it seem like a mere rehashing of the same material except in video form (and still at about 33x the price, or $499). 

I plan on avoiding both of these errors this time, by having both a live and self-paced version of the Annual Review course (at accessible price points) ready to go by the time the book comes out, and by creating a seamless path from book to course starting right within the book itself. 

7. Go for the New York Times bestseller list

For the last book, I didn’t purposefully try to reach the NYT bestseller list, mostly because I didn’t think it was possible with my small audience and niche topic. We did reach the Wall Street Journal list, which allowed us to add the moniker “best-seller.” 

This time, however, I plan on making a serious run at the crown jewel of the publishing world: the “Advice/How-To” category within the NYT list, sometimes called the “Mt. Everest” of bestseller lists because it is so difficult to land on. I’m told this requires a specific strategy of maximizing the sale of certain formats (ebook sales don’t count for this list, for example) at specific retail locations (only some of which are included in the official count).

Contrary to a lot of online discourse, I believe bestseller lists (and other forms of demonstrating authority and credibility) absolutely do matter. Part of the “war for attention” that we all fight every day as content creators is a parallel “war for credibility.” The Internet has flooded our world with information of every level of quality, and if anything, people are more dependent than ever on signals of credibility to determine what to pay attention to and believe.

And if nothing else, this goal gives us a new, exciting mountain to climb. People do climb Mt. Everest just for the fun of it, after all.

If you’d like to stay in the know about the progress of my annual review book, sign up for our newsletter below. And if you come across any interesting ideas, material, or people related to the subject, please send it to me at hello@fortelabs.com.

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Will Artificial Intelligence Replace the Need for Second Brains Entirely?

Like so many others, I’ve spent the past year exploring and experimenting with emerging AI tools. 

Throughout that time, there has been one question I’ve been trying to answer: Will AI replace the need for Second Brains entirely?

A lot of people seem to think so, and I admittedly have a self-interested motivation: to decide whether I should continue advising people to build a Second Brain at all, or just tell them to rely on AI and save all that effort. 

After many dozens of hours of experimentation, my conclusion is that AI is not going to replace the need for a Second Brain anytime soon.

Here’s why: no matter how powerful AI becomes, the data we put into it has to come from somewhere, and the AI’s outputs have to go somewhere. A Second Brain (or whatever you want to call it) is still needed both as the repository of all those inputs and as a staging area for storing those outputs until they’re ready to be used.

What’s Changed – Organize and Distill

There is no doubt that AI is going to radically change what we think of today as the creative process.

Looking at my CODE framework representing the creative process, however, it is mostly the middle stages of Organizing and Distilling that AI is transforming.

Organizing (step #2) is the stage of the creative process that inherently adds the least value – it is only needed to prepare the ground for the subsequent stages. Thus it’s no surprise that it’s the first one to be automated by AI. 

No longer does it make sense to meticulously format your data in a perfectly organized database – instead you can just dump a morass of text into a prompt window, and AI is smart enough to understand what you intended. 

As an example, Notion has added AI to its software, allowing you to interact with and “talk to” your notes without having to spend a lot of time adding structure.

Distillation (step #3) is also a perfect fit for the rapid, emotionless decision-making of AI. Large Language Models excel at rapidly summarizing huge amounts of text at whatever level of detail you desire.

For example, in my video on using ChatGPT to summarize books, I showed how AI was able to save me dozens of hours of formerly manual work to end up with a concise, actionable book summary.

What Hasn’t Changed – Capture and Express

The first stage of the creative process – capturing information in the first place – has still hardly been touched on the other hand.

New apps like Rewind allow you to record everything that happens on your computer, but in my experience that just creates a lot of recordings to wade through.

Although some capture tasks like digitizing handwritten text have been automated, we still have to write down our thoughts and ideas in the first place!

The quality of an AI chatbot’s response is always dependent on the quality of the inputs you provide it. AI cannot (yet) go out into the world and collect its own data, so we have to do that ourselves by capturing notes, highlighting passages in books, taking pictures, and saving our favorite ideas.

The fourth and final stage of creativity, expression, also still requires a human to decide what to do with the outputs of ChatGPT and other AI tools. Someone has to put the finishing touches on the final product via their own voice, style, taste, or perspective.

My wife Lauren’s video about creating a children’s storybook using AI perfectly illustrates this point: although every major component of the final product was created by ChatGPT, it was Lauren’s direction, synthesis, and creative nudges that allowed all the parts to come together in a cohesive, meaningful whole.

AI Concentrates Human Creativity at the Initial and Final Stages

AI doesn’t make human creativity unnecessary – it concentrates our creativity at the beginning and end of the creative process.

For a concrete example, in my video on Google’s new AI platform NotebookLM, I demonstrate how I can import the entire history of my reading highlights, and then freely make associations and connections out of that vast collection of text totaling 594,379 words from 719 sources.

While that capability seems almost superhuman, notice what it still required of me: to do the reading in the first place and save the excerpts I found valuable (capturing), and then to take NotebookLM’s responses and turn them into my own creation (expressing). In other words, the first and last steps of creativity haven’t been touched.

I can effectively skip from the first step to the last step, barely touching the steps in between. But that means I still need to take the first and last steps, to give the AI a starting point and an endpoint.

The relevant question has become: what do we do now that the “cost” of intermediate steps like organizing and distilling has plummeted?

Tasks that formerly required expensive human effort can now be completed with cheap computer effort, in fractions of the time. What kinds of goals, outcomes, and creative projects have suddenly become far more feasible than they were just a couple years ago?

For an example of what it might look like to work with AI as a real-time creative partner in this way, check out my in-depth interview (Part 1 and Part 2) with Srini Rao on the AI-powered noteaking app Mem (which by the way is the only notetaking app that OpenAI has invested in).

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post Will Artificial Intelligence Replace the Need for Second Brains Entirely? appeared first on Forte Labs.

Launching Building a Second Brain in Brazil and Mexico

One of the aspects of writing a book I most looked forward to was releasing it in my family’s country of origin, Brazil.

I’d spent years daydreaming about what that would feel like, returning to my homeland bearing the gift of hard-won knowledge to share with the people who had given me so much. 

Criando Um Segundo Cérebro came out in July 2023, about a year after the US release, and I decided to travel to Brazil the following month for a press tour to promote it.

In this blog post, I’ll recap our strategy for launching the book in Portuguese and Spanish, the results we achieved, what we found to be most effective, and what I learned.

Strategizing the launch in Brazil

Our strategy in Brazil unfolded in three stages, each one building on the one before:

Host or participate in a series of media interviews and events (in person and virtually)Funnel all the attention generated into a dedicated Instagram account and WhatsApp communityUse those platforms to launch my book and online course BASB Foundation in PortuguesePreparing for launch

I hired a Project Manager just for the launch of this book since I knew there would be a lot to coordinate and execute. I found someone in my network who was Brazilian and could handle all communication in Portuguese, which I also speak.

The first thing we did was segment our existing email list to find our “true fans” located in Brazil. Based on their IP address, there were 2,145 of them, out of 81,315 subscribers total at that time, which means 2.6% of my audience was based in Brazil.

Next, I created a WhatsApp Community (essentially a group with multiple subgroups within it) and invited all 2,145 subscribers to join. A couple hundred of them did – representing the most dedicated followers of my work there.

The WhatsApp Community became a central place for me to share updates, ask for help promoting content, announce major milestones, and receive feedback on my plans and ideas. I was blown away by the energy and enthusiasm this group of supporters demonstrated. They shared detailed unboxing photos, posted their recommendations and takeaways, boosted our own social media posts, bought extra copies for their friends and colleagues, and gave me tons of helpful advice about how to approach the Brazilian market. I’m incredibly grateful for their contribution to this launch.

The third and final step of preparation was to schedule a 10-day trip to Brazil, at my own expense, which would be used to extensively promote my book’s release in Portuguese.

Stage 1: Generate attention through media interviews and events

The goal of stage 1 was to drum up as much interest and enthusiasm for my book (and the broader idea of Second Brains) as possible.

I participated in 10 events, both online and in person, including:

An Instagram Live with a major creator interested in PKMAn academic-focused event with CRIE, a lab at a public university in Rio de Janeiro specializing in network science, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the study of knowledge managementTwo book signings hosted by my Brazilian publisher, Sextante, in each of the major cities of southern Brazil – Rio de Janeiro and São PauloTwo Second Brain Meetups I hosted myself, in Rio and São PauloA Notion Meetup organized by the local chapter of Notion enthusiastsA breakout session at Fire Festival, the largest conference on online education in Latin America, hosted every year by the online education platform HotmartA major podcast, which we filmed in person at a studio in São PauloA virtual Q&A hosted by the Brazilian Society of Knowledge Management.

For all these events, we took lots of pictures and in a couple of cases even hired a videographer to fully document the experience via short-form video, such as in this example:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Tiago Forte Brasil - Segundo Cérebro (@tiagoforte_br)

Through my publisher, we also received exposure through multiple media outlets, including MIT Sloan Review Brasil, Você RH, O Globo (the newspaper of record in Brazil, which I immediately sent to my mom!), Valor Economico, national radio program CBN, Saber Viver (a lifestyle magazine in Portugal), and Fast Company Brasil.

Besides the traditional media above, we had a legion of independent content creators who were kind enough to produce videos and summaries about me, my book, and my work, on a variety of social media platforms.

Stage 2: Capture the excitement in the new Instagram and WhatsApp accounts

As we were building all this anticipation, we asked everyone to follow our brand new Instagram account, with content only in Portuguese. We haven’t been very active on Instagram in the past (it’s our smallest social platform in the U.S.), but I knew it was by far the most dominant platform in Latin America and would be the ideal home base for our efforts in Brazil.

I knew that events (both in-person and virtual) create “spikes” of attention, but we’d need a way to capture that attention and maintain a longer-term relationship with people.

In the 6 months since its creation, our Brazil Instagram grew from zero to almost 3,000 followers. We posted photos and videos from all the events I participated in, creating a central repository documenting the efforts we made in the country for anyone to see in the future.

I also continued asking people I met and collaborated with to join the WhatsApp group, so we always had a single place to easily communicate and coordinate with them. 

Stage 3: Launch the Portuguese online course

The third and final stage was to create and launch our flagship online course, BASB Foundation, for the Brazilian market. The goal was to make this training as widely available as possible there and to recoup some of the investments we made for the book launch.

I decided to use an AI-powered tool called HeyGen to produce the new course, which accomplished three functions: 

Translate the actual text from one language to anotherGenerate the audio of me speaking to that text, matching my tone of voiceChange my lip movements to match the new words

Although I speak Portuguese, this saved me several days’ worth of filming and gave me a chance to verify the quality of the service in a language I spoke.

Here’s an example of the results:

Although the HeyGen team was highly responsive and did an excellent job supporting our needs, this endeavor ended up being a lot more complex than we expected. The initial translation was impressive but contained some errors and inconsistencies that we had to correct through several iterations. Here are some challenges we faced:

HeyGen’s AI-generated translation usually sounded too formalThe tone of the AI-generated audio was hard to adjustQuestions were a challenge and the emphasis wasn’t always accentuated in longer sentencesVery long sentences were difficult for the AI to translate while preserving the meaningTransitions between sentences weren’t always fluid and often felt weirdThe speed of the spoken words had to vary in order to match the lengths of sentences between languages, sometimes resulting in abrupt speeding up or slowing down

We also realized that launching a course in another language requires a lot more than translating videos. There is an entire infrastructure that needs to be built: from a landing page to onboarding emails to marketing to customer support. 

Assuming your goal is to make it possible for someone who doesn’t speak English at all to access the training, you have to translate 100% of the infrastructure around the course and make sure it works in their country, which is hard to test when you’re not there.

That said, using Hotmart as our course platform (the most popular one in Brazil) made it much more feasible. They provided a variety of tools and features we needed to make the launch possible, all easy to use and designed for the Brazilian market. Their team helped us at several crucial points, and I recommend them for anyone making a foray into Brazil.

The initial launch of the Foundation course in Portuguese was unfortunately quite disappointing, with only 13 sales totaling a few thousand dollars. I’m not sure why even our existing audience wasn’t receptive to it, but I suspect it’s because the $250 price point is still quite high for the Brazilian market, and there is a lot of free content on this topic (both in Portuguese and English) being published continuously that largely satisfies the demand.

For a full recap of how we localized our BASB Foundation course for the Brazilian market, read the recap written by our Director of Marketing here .

Was it worth it?

We sold about 6,000 copies of my book in Brazil in the first 3 months, and 9,500 in the first 6 months. That’s quite a phenomenal outcome! I believe we’ve set the stage for the book to be a perennial bestseller there for years to come.

Looking at the financial picture, we made about $10,000 USD between the book advance and course sales, and have spent $16,000 USD between contractors, SaaS services, and travel costs. I hope over time these two new income sources will match and eventually exceed what we invested to create a presence in Brazil.

Speaking of the less tangible, subjective rewards, it was without a doubt one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. At the book signing in São Paulo, my entire extended family came out to see me, including people who hadn’t seen each other in years. It was like a family reunion!

Seeing the incredible enthusiasm of the many people who came out to support me, and hearing story after story of how my ideas changed their lives, is something I will never forget. Not to mention the feeling that I gave back to my homeland and provided a reason for hope and progress in a country that is so in need of it.

Launching in Mexico and coming full circle

About 7 months later, in March 2024, I had the chance to do it all again – this time for the Spanish release of my book under the title Crea Tu Segundo Cerebro.

Although the book was being released in Spain and throughout Latin America, I decided to do the press tour in Mexico because of my special connection to that country. I had written most of the book proposal while living in Mexico City with my wife Lauren in 2019. It felt like the whole project was coming full circle to where it began.

Here’s a short video with some highlights from this amazing experience:

One major difference this time around was that my Spanish publisher, Reverte, had generously hired a local PR firm to handle all the interviews, media appearances, and events in Mexico City, where I spent a few days dedicated to promotion. I still had to pay for my own travel, but in Brazil, the cost of local staff had been the single biggest expense, and it was helpful to have them cover that cost.

This also meant that almost all the press this time would be from traditional media, via the PR firm’s network. I was fine with this because I had learned from my time in Brazil that I could access digital media outlets easily on my own. What I can’t do is gain the credibility that mainstream media provides, which is more essential in Latin America than in the U.S.

We followed up with much the same playbook as before:

Segmenting our existing email subscribers (we found there were about 5,498 subscribers located in 20 Spanish-speaking countries, or 4.7% of my audience)Inviting them to a Spanish-language WhatsApp Community (a similar number, about a couple hundred, decided to join, and they became an essential sounding board and chorus of supporters for everything we did)Creating a new Instagram account to centralize and promote all our Spanish language content and media mentions (this account has less than 100 followers so far, a testament to our focus on traditional media versus digital-native media)Participating in as many events as possible to generate interest and create media mentions which could be further shared to boost the book’s credibility

With the PR firm’s help, I took part in 12 interviews, including several newspapers and magazines, digital publications, a popular podcast, and two TV interviews (including the one below live on air in Spanish!).

Another big difference from the Brazil launch was that I kicked off this press tour with a paid speaking gig at a major conference, at La Festival de Las Ideas in Puebla. This not only started things off with a bang but essentially paid for the entire trip so we broke even from day one. 

Overall, we’ve sold 2,675 copies of my book in Spanish for the initial launch. We’ve made $16,000 USD from Spanish-speaking markets and spent about $7,000, for a profit of $9,000. Taking that into account, our holistic efforts across Latin America have already reached breakeven.

We are planning on translating our course into Spanish (and other languages) as well, using all the best practices we discovered the first time, which hopefully will grow the return on our efforts as well as make these ideas more accessible throughout Latin America.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post Launching Building a Second Brain in Brazil and Mexico appeared first on Forte Labs.

Introducing the Second Brain Summit

I’m unbelievably proud to announce the inaugural Second Brain Summit, taking place October 3–4, 2024, in Los Angeles, California!

We’re gathering 500 of the most dedicated experts and practitioners of personal knowledge management in the world’s creative capital with three goals in mind:

To meet other like-minded people and see that we’re not aloneTo celebrate the explosion of digital creativity we’re living throughTo share and learn from each other the most powerful tools and techniques for personal knowledge management and productivity

For the last few years, we’ve hosted an annual virtual summit attended by thousands of people. The excitement and enthusiasm around those virtual gatherings has been so palpable, that we’ve decided to bring it into the physical world for the first time this year.

The Backstory: Where It All Started

I arrived in San Francisco in the spring of 2012, a wide-eyed and innocent kid hoping to start my career in the big city.

I wanted to break into the tech industry I’d heard so many amazing stories about, and to be part of the digital revolution that was brewing. 

I eventually succeeded in finding a job in consulting, but soon realized that while technically I was close to the beating heart of Silicon Valley, in reality, I was far from being part of it. I witnessed people succeeding spectacularly in their careers and even starting companies all around me, and started asking myself, “Why can’t I do the same?”

But without coding or design skills, or a strong network, or any particular insights into important markets, there was no clear way to get in the door. 

It was around this time that I began to attend various events around the San Francisco Bay Area. 

I became a regular attendee of the local Quantified Self meetup, in which people shared how they were using technology to track their step count, productivity, health, or other aspects of their lives. I attended the Evernote conference in 2014 to watch David Allen speak and meet other notetaking enthusiasts for the first time. I volunteered at the Inbox Love conference, an event dedicated solely to email software. I went to Maker Faire, where I saw people from all walks of life hacking together hardware and software into everything from beer fridge robots to exquisite art projects. I participated in various hackathons, where I was stunned to see useful apps whipped up in a matter of hours.

Looking back, being part of these events was a formative education for everything I’ve done and accomplished since. Some of the people I met became pivotal collaborators or mentors. Ideas I heard in passing ended up being cornerstones of my work. The mindset and perspectives I absorbed from successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders changed who I am at a deep level. Walking through those doors was one of the most important decisions I’ve ever made, opening up new horizons for me to this very day.

It’s been 10 years, and I did eventually succeed in breaking into tech, just not in the way I imagined. I discovered that I am at heart a teacher and that the most valuable thing I have to teach is how to succeed at the intersection of productivity and creativity. More specifically, how to effectively leverage digital notetaking apps in one’s day-to-day life, using a system I call a Second Brain.

When I began teaching this topic in 2016, there was no established term for what I was doing. One day I came across an obscure Wikipedia article mentioning a discipline called PKM, for Personal Knowledge Management. I had never heard of it before, but it perfectly described what I was doing. Since then, I’ve been amazed to watch PKM blossom into a full-fledged movement and industry encompassing huge companies, millions of people, and an endless stream of educational content appearing online every day.

PKM has become a global community, but I’ve long noticed there is something missing: there is no clear time and place where that community comes together in person. Seemingly every emerging trend and fledgling industry has its own in-person gathering, except us. There are numerous online courses, virtual summits, and social media feeds we can be part of, but if there’s one thing my path has taught me, it’s that there is no substitute for gathering in the flesh.

As always, I started this project by looking through years of my notes and observations on what I liked (and didn’t like) about conferences, summits, meetups, and other events I’d been to. A few things clearly stood out:

Speeches and keynotes aren’t the only draw anymore, since it’s easy to consume that kind of content onlineHands-on workshops and interactive Q&As are more valuable since they are hard to conduct onlineThe facilitators of these workshops shouldn’t be theoretical experts nor media pundits – they should be real-world practitioners putting their knowledge to the test in the trenchesEveryone knows the best part of conferences are the serendipitous “hallway conversations” and evening happy hours, so we should allow time for those and make them a central part of the experienceAttendees have a lot of knowledge and experience themselves, so we should have  dedicated time for “self-organized” sessions led by attendees on any topic they chooseA Pop-Up University for Digital Creativity

As our plans and thinking around this summit slowly took shape over the last year, it dawned on me that what we’re really creating is a “pop-up university” for a skill not found in any college or university: how to leverage digital tools for creativity.

Productivity is an essential starting point – without a firm foundation of knowing how to get things done, there’s little chance any of your creative endeavors will bear fruit. But productivity also isn’t enough on its own. It’s always just a means to an end, and that end is manifesting your creative dreams and visions into reality. Technology has become so powerful and accessible that it can help there as well!

Imagine if all your favorite online teachers and experts assembled in one place, at one time, to merge their knowledge and experience together into one cohesive experience.

Imagine if you had the chance to see them in action using their tools and techniques of choice, and ask questions that get answered on the spot.

Imagine if you had the chance to find others who are on the same wavelength, and assemble a custom breakout session that very day to dive deeper into what you’re obsessed with.

Imagine if you could do all this just by walking around a beautiful space perfectly designed to activate all your senses, instead of clicking around fussy screens in your web browser and squinting at a tiny Zoom thumbnail.

That’s what we’re creating with the Second Brain Summit: an all-in-one, immersive, multi-sensory, choose-your-own-adventure learning experience designed to change your mind, touch your heart, and maybe even stir your soul.

All my most profound growth experiences have happened in the physical world, in an environment where I was faced with both my deepest fears and my highest hopes surrounded by people I trusted to carry me through to the other side. 

That is the kind of experience I want to create to help people navigate the technological renaissance we’re living through and to emerge on the other side as radically expanded versions of who they were when they walked in.

The Summit will take place over two days, but it isn’t meant to be a one-time event. It is the kickoff event for a community of practice around the potential of second brains and PKM. 

A community based not only on socializing or a shared interest but on collectively shepherding a new possibility into the world: that technology can unlock and unleash us from our biological limitations and usher in a new era of human flourishing.

This is a community that balances science and logic with emotion and beauty; that honors both our left-brain logic and right-brain intuition; that is confident with both top-down and bottom-up approaches; that encompasses multiple cultures and languages and ways of thinking in service of fulfilling our potential. 

We could pursue these visions alone, by ourselves. But as Mariame Kaba says, “Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” We do it together because it’s more meaningful to share the journey, more powerful to learn directly from each other, and more fun to have someone to celebrate with us at the finish line.

Join the waitlist and be the first to know when tickets go on sale on May 14th

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post Introducing the Second Brain Summit appeared first on Forte Labs.

Why We’re Moving to Valle de Bravo, Mexico

In August of 1998, when I was 14 years old, my parents pulled my three siblings and me out of school, packed up our house and our bags, and left the country. 

Instead of starting 8th grade in the wealthy suburb of Laguna Niguel, I would be attending a public school in a working-class neighborhood of Campos do Jordão, a mountain town in Southeast Brazil a couple of hours outside São Paulo. My parents had decided to move us to Brazil so we could spend a year fully immersed in Brazilian culture and the Portuguese language. 

I still remember the opposition they had to overcome to make the move: from our teachers and school administrators warning them that we’d surely fall behind academically, from people at our church who said a “third-world country” would be too dangerous for children, and even from our extended family worried we’d lose touch.

Yet looking back, I think this was one of the most pivotal decisions my parents ever made. With the benefit of 26 years of hindsight, I find it hard to express just how dramatically that one year shaped my future. 

It was during that year that I learned to speak Portuguese (I had only been able to understand it up to that point), which in turn opened the door to learning other languages like Spanish and Russian. I connected with my Brazilian roots and learned to see the world through a Brazilian lens, giving me an alternate perspective to the American one.

Brazil was my first overseas immersion, teaching me priceless skills like resilience, adaptability, and the self-confidence that I could find my way in any situation. I went on to further develop those skills during foreign sojourns in Colombia, Ukraine, and Mexico. 

It was in that year that I first found my love of writing. The very first thing I can remember writing of my own free will, not because a teacher demanded it, were emails I sent back home to our family and friends recounting our adventures during road trips around Brazil. It was the first time something happened to me that I felt was worth writing about.

It feels like a decade of memories and lessons were packed into those 12 months. As this essay by Paras Chopra argues, the reason time seems to pass faster as we age is that the novelty of our days declines. We start living the same day again and again, and our brains don’t bother storing memories that are indistinguishable from each other. Chopra’s solution to this dilemma is one I’ve always followed: to “…dive head-first into unknown territory. That is, to travel physically or mentally.”

I’ve spent a lot of time recently reflecting on what kind of childhood I want my kids to have, especially now that they’re leaving the baby stage. I’m determined to recreate the same kind of experience I had as a kid for them. There is no greater gift I can imagine giving them than a new language, a connection to their heritage, and the knowledge that they can adapt to anything.

Which is why we’ve decided to move next summer to a small mountain town called Valle de Bravo, about two hours outside Mexico City.

Why Mexico?

My wife Lauren and I first considered taking the family to Brazil, but it soon became clear that Mexico made more sense for us, at least for a first round.

Mexico is a lot closer to the U.S., where both our immediate families live, with easy flights from most major cities. It’s very important to us that our kids maintain a connection with their aunts, uncles, and cousins back home, and we expect to visit home often.

Lauren is Mexican-American, so not only is there an existing heritage for her to reconnect with, but once we return to the U.S. there is also an extended clan that will allow our children to maintain the new identities they acquire.

Lastly, Spanish is probably more broadly useful as a language than Portuguese, and once they learn one of them, the other becomes far more accessible (especially if they learn it during their formative early years). I still plan on living in Brazil at some point in the future. 

Why Valle de Bravo?

Mexico City was perfect for our childless, early-30s selves, but we’re now in a different season of our lives, in which getting a fancy meal for cheap isn’t the thrill it once was. Now our highest pleasures are experienced vicariously through our children, and the capital doesn’t seem designed for them.

We visited Mexico as a family recently, and I happened to get an invite from a Mexican entrepreneur to visit his town, and on a whim, I said yes. After a few hours’ drive that ascended into the mountains, we entered a cozy lakeside town that reminded me of Lake Tahoe. It was clearly a wealthy, touristic enclave, but my host told me that a lot of families had moved there during the pandemic and never left.

As I questioned my host and expats I connected with online about what it was like living there, they began to paint a picture of a wonderful lifestyle centered on families, outdoor activities and sports, and pursuits we enjoy like environmental work, spirituality, and culture.

It’s close enough to Mexico City to travel there easily, but far enough to instill a sense of palpable peace and quiet. It’s elevated, which gives it a more temperate climate and cleaner mountain air. It’s quite a small town where everyone seems to know each other, yet it also has an unusually high concentration of entrepreneurs and creatives (both Mexican and foreigners) as well as great food options and amenities. 

One of our primary concerns was finding a good school for our son Caio, and we were delighted to find several highly progressive early childhood schools that focus on socio-emotional development, like the one we have back home. We visited one of the schools and spoke with the director, and it seems like a perfect fit not only for our son but for the social network of parents who share a lot of our interests and lifestyle.

It looks like we can find an amazing house for around $4,000 USD per month, which will have enough space for a home office and a room for a live-in nanny. That is around how much our home in Long Beach would rent for, so we’ll either seek out a home exchange with a local family or just rent it out normally (if you happen to have a home in Valle and want to do a home exchange with us in LA, please let me know!).

Otherwise, I was surprised to find that most of the amenities and services we rely on back home are available in Valle as well. Internet connectivity is fast, Costco delivers from a nearby city, and Amazon Prime orders arrive in two days. There is no shortage of shopping, nature, sports, and social life to keep us all busy.

There is an international airport in the nearest large city, Toluca, that is about an hour away versus the three hours needed to get to Mexico City’s airport. There are flights to and from LA every day or two for a few hundred dollars, with layovers in Guadalajara or Monterrey. 

I honestly can’t imagine a place that meets more of our requirements. It actually strikes me as very similar to the town we moved to in Brazil as children. We plan on making the move in the summer of 2025, in time for the start of the fall school semester, and staying for at least a year.

The fear and the bliss of leaving

This idea has been brewing for a long time in Lauren and me. As the concrete details have begun to fall into place, I’ve noticed that this isn’t just about the fun and adventure of a foreign land: it’s also about leaving the U.S. for its own sake.

I’m definitely not the first to observe this, and it saddens me a bit to do so, but I think there’s something deeply broken about the U.S. as a society now. Most people seem so disconnected from themselves and each other. Life is so work-centric and everything else is an afterthought in comparison. Everything is for sale, feels like a scam, or involves a tech company harvesting our attention for profit. It feels like the U.S. as a culture has entered a kind of stagnant decline that I don’t want to be a part of.

I don’t want my kids growing up only as Americans and seeing the world solely through that lens. I don’t want them steeped in the hyperindividualism, consumerism, tech addiction, media sensationalism, political polarization, and social isolation that are so unavoidable here. I increasingly feel that limiting my kids’ perspective to the American one would be dangerous to their mental health.

I recently read about the work of Professor Mariana Brussoni, about how important it is for kids to engage in risky physical play. It crystallized for me something I’ve always sensed: that in the U.S. we are gripped by fear of everything from traffic accidents to terrorist attacks to crime to dangerous playground equipment, despite it objectively being among the safest places on Earth. This culture of ubiquitous liability waivers, caution tape, and exaggerated caution I think is one of the deepest, most subtle causes of suffering in our society. When you act as if everything in the world is dangerous, all you see is danger and all you feel is fear.

At many points in my life, the Latino cultural qualities – collective welfare over individual success, default sociability versus isolation, cultural heritage versus material wealth, cooperation versus competition – have served as an antidote for me against nihilism and depression. They’ve given me an alternative “way of being” that I could switch to when my American outlook felt bleak. Giving my children access to that way of being is even more important to me than a new language.

To put this in personal terms, I’m just much happier when I’m abroad. I don’t feel nearly as much pressure to work long hours and pursue relentless achievement. When I’m abroad, time slows down, and the days feel longer. I create more memories, deeper relationships, and I like who I am more. 

The U.S. doesn’t work for me long term because it reinforces the worst parts of my psychology, or at least the parts that I’m ready to deemphasize now. The U.S. is the best place in the world to start a business, but now that I’ve done that, I want to go to where I will most be able to enjoy the “finer things in life.”

How the business will have to change

At first, I thought we would need to make some dramatic changes to how the business operates to accommodate this move, but the more I’ve thought about it, the less I think that’s the case.

Mexico City is only 1-2 hours ahead of LA time, depending on the time of year, so scheduling meetings and phone calls won’t be an issue. It’s easy to fly anywhere in the U.S. via plentiful international flights from several airports around the Mexican capital.

We’ve already retired the live cohorts of our course, which were the big heavy lifts that would have required a lot of synchronized meetings. And the team only meets in person once or twice a year anyway.

Our most critical and frequent in-person events are YouTube video shoots, which happen about every other month for a couple of days. But most of our equipment is portable, and I think we can either build our own studio in Valle or use someone else’s. There are many online creators based there and I’m sure there are ways to produce high-quality video recordings. We’ve already had to figure out a remote production setup with our editors calling in from Germany.

On the other hand, I was already planning on doubling down on book writing as my main focus, and this move is strongly in line with that. I’ll be able to create a slower-moving, more rural lifestyle with full-time childcare that allows me to focus on my writing most of the time. 

I always remember how our childhood travels abroad would inspire my father’s artwork, with Chinese or Brazilian or Israeli themes showing up clearly in his paintings. I hope much the same happens with my work, fueling my creativity with new ideas and new perspectives.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post Why We’re Moving to Valle de Bravo, Mexico appeared first on Forte Labs.

The Ultimate Guide to Storing, Managing, and Enjoying Your Photos

When it comes to storing and organizing digital information, photos are in many ways the elephant in the room.

They’re highly valued and meaningful, yet require a lot of storage space. For many people, photos are probably the earliest experience of having too much digital content to manage.

I first felt this sensation of information overload when I was 17, having received my first digital camera. In a matter of weeks, I had accumulated way too many photos and way too many decisions to make about them. 

Since then, I’ve tried everything from manually loading photos onto my hard drive, to managing photos in Facebook albums, to moving photos into iPhoto (Apple’s photo management system), and experimenting with Flickr when it all became cloud-based. 

For the last five years, I’ve stuck with one solution I’m confident in and will share with you here. I’ll cover where you should store photos in your Second Brain, how you can organize them, and what to do with your photos so they don’t just collect digital dust, but play a valuable part in your life.  

Where to store your photos 

Let’s clarify first where photos should NOT go: Your notes app is not the right place to store photos or videos because it’s not made to handle large-sized media (which would generally slow it down). 

I keep my photos in Google Photos which means they’re always securely stored in the cloud. 

Since I take the majority of my photos on my phone (which is probably true for most people), they’re automatically uploaded and backed up via the Google Photos app. 

It’s hard to overstate how dramatically this simplifies a process that used to take hours. If you’re old enough, you’ll recall how you tediously connected a wire from your digital camera to your computer and then manually transferred all these files. 

There are a few settings in Google Photos I recommend:

Turn on “Backup”: That way all photos and videos from your phone are uploaded automatically in the background to the Google Photos account associated with your Gmail address. Even if you lose your phone, your most recent photos will still be preserved in the cloud.  Choose the Backup quality: I recommend “Storage saver” which stores photos at a slightly reduced quality. That’s usually still more than enough to use your photos for various purposes which we’ll cover later. Turn off “Use mobile data to back up photos/videos”: Your photos and videos will only be uploaded when you’re on wifi to save data. Turn on “ Partner sharing ”: This setting automatically shares photos with your significant other so that you don’t have to manually send each other photos.

Note that you’ll likely have to buy additional storage with Google One to be able to store all your photos over many years. You can find the current pricing here.

How to organize your photos 

The good news is: You don’t really need to because Google Photos automatically organizes your photos for you in various ways. 

By default, you’ll view your photos in an infinite timeline organized by date with the oldest ones at the bottom and the newest ones at the top. 

When you select “Explore” in the left sidebar, you’ll find your photos categorized by people and pets, places, and things in the photos (such as food, forests, sunsets, mountains, receipts, etc.)

If you’re looking for a specific photo, I suggest using the search bar and typing in a keyword or location. You’ll be surprised how accurate the search results are. 

A more manual way to organize your photos is to curate them into albums (for example, of vacations and celebrations) that you can then share with others via a link Google Photos generates.  

Now, the question remains: What should you do with all the photos you’re taking? How can they add beauty and meaning to your life instead of just sitting around on a server somewhere? 

Why you should create photo books 

Having a concrete project in mind makes it clear and specific what all those photos are for. As with anything, a hands-on project will cut through the noise and make information manageable when it gets overwhelming.

For photos, the project I’ve stuck with for years is creating photo books – simple booklets printed on high-quality paper with a cover.

I’ve done dozens of these books, and they are without exaggeration some of the most meaningful things I’ve ever created. 

I keep them on my bookshelf and coffee table and bring them out during holidays and birthdays with my family. They constantly remind us of our favorite memories and times together. 

Since I have these books around, my photos are so much more available in our daily life. They make the past more present and vivid. And as a result, I’m more grateful and appreciative and feel closer and more connected to the people in my life. 

The few hours it takes me to create photo books easily yield some of the highest ROI for my entire year, which is why I’ve done them for a decade.

In fact, creating a photo book with the best memories of the past year has become a crucial part of my Annual Review process. It’s one of the first things I do because it gives me such a deep sense of perspective.

When you start to consider the goals and projects you’ll take on in a new year, you want to be in the most well-rounded, well-resourced state of mind. You want to feel connected to the things in your life that are good, true, beautiful, and important so that your decisions about the future are rooted in what’s best about the past.

I don’t know of a better way of doing that than reviewing my photos from the past year. By the time I’ve gone through these photos, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude for how incredible life is.

How could I not be? Every single photo is proof that the inner critic in my head that’s saying, “You don’t have enough” or “You’re not good enough,” is wrong. By the time I’ve presented it with overwhelming visual evidence of how amazing my life is, that critic is completely silenced. 

How to create a photo book the easy way

I’ll now share the process and lessons learned to create an annual photo book with the 100 best photos, highlighting the most important and meaningful moments from a given year.  

As for any project, I start by setting constraints to reign in any perfectionistic tendencies and minimize procrastination. 

Here are the constraints I set for myself:

The entire process shouldn’t take more than 3-4 hours. I only consider photos taken between January 1st and December 31st of that year. I set myself a deadline to get it done which is usually around January 5th. I only use photos I’ve taken. (I’m not considering photos that my wife or anyone else has shared with me. That would unnecessarily lengthen the process.) 

When you create these rules and boundaries, your likelihood that you’ll actually complete your project increases, which is really the whole point.

Next, I follow these three steps: 

1. Take awesome photos 

Not surprisingly, the first step is to take photos throughout the year. Over the last decade, I’ve learned a great deal about what makes a “top 100” photo. In turn, that has influenced how many and what kind of photos I take in the first place. 

My number one lesson is that I’ve learned to take way fewer photos because I know that usually only one photo from a trip, celebration, or meaningful moment will make it into the photo book. 

For example, when we took a trip to Disneyland with the kids, my whole goal was to come away from the day with one good photo. Once I had taken that photo, I put my phone away which allowed me to be more present with my family. I didn’t have the constant pressure to document every single moment, creating the perfect replica of everything that happened that day.

I also tend to take more photos of people and meaningful milestones (such as the moment I held the printed manuscript of my book in hand) and fewer photos of sunsets, fireworks, and random stuff that I know are not going to be important in the future.

2. Choose your best photos and add them to an album 

This is the single hardest part for most people. In fact, it’s so hard that most never get past this point.

I choose no more than 100 photos to represent a given year. That’s enough to give an overview of my favorite moments and people but not too much to become overwhelming. 

In my first years of creating photo books, I had about 400 photos selected on my first pass. It was a long, excruciating process to cut them down further until I reached my target number.

That’s why you need to embrace imperfection in this process. Remember that you’re not throwing anything away. You’re just elevating and distinguishing a small number of photos for easier access.

I promise that over time, you’ll get much better at making those decisions decisively. In fact, you’ll start to develop an intuition for what a “top 100” photo looks like even as you’re taking it.

I suggest choosing photos for your photo book in passes. Start on January 1st and only move forward, not dwelling on anything you see, moving any photo you think is one of the very best of the year into an album. 

I set a timer for the first pass which should take no more than an hour. The second pass should be done in about 10 to 15 minutes. You might need a third pass to reach 100 photos. 

Don’t worry too much about organizing them in chronological order, putting photos from the same trip or event together, if someone’s eyes are closed, or if a photo is a bit blurry. In a weird way, these mistakes and imperfections become a cherished part of the memories. 

3. Turn the album into a photo book and customize it 

Once you have the album with the photos you want in Google Photos, you select “Order photos” and then “Photo book” at the top of the screen.  

The great thing about Google Photos is that there are extremely few options for customizing your photo book. All you can do is move the order, change some formatting, add captions, and select the cover image and title. 

In the past, I’ve tried to use full-scale publishing software for this but it quickly became overwhelming since there’s way too much control over every little detail. As a result, these projects never saw the light of day. 

Next, you’ll choose between two sizes for your photo book. I always go with the smaller, square size, which also means that my photos don’t have to be high resolution to look great.

Hit “buy,” and in a couple of weeks your photo book arrives at your doorstep. 

More things you can do to elevate your photos

Creating photo books is not the only way to make your favorite photos more present in your life. 

Here are a few more options: 

Make prints and display them in your house or give them away to family membersCurate a photo slideshow to show at your next family gathering Create a photo calendar for the new year 

What’s essential for all these creative projects is that they spring from a selection of photos. You can’t do any of this if you have 3,000 of them. No one, not even you will want to look through that many photos.

Distillation is the key to turning your photos into something anyone will ever want to look at and enjoy in any form.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Storing, Managing, and Enjoying Your Photos appeared first on Forte Labs.

The 5-Year Journey of Publishing Building a Second Brain

An aspiring author asked me what I’d learned from writing and publishing my book over the last 5 years. I responded with a 17-minute video, recapping the timeline of the project, my biggest lessons, mistakes, and sales milestones. If you’ve ever considered publishing a book or are just curious about what went into the project, I invite you to watch my recap of the last 5 years.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post The 5-Year Journey of Publishing Building a Second Brain appeared first on Forte Labs.

The B2B Education Frontier: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of Corporate Training

For 10 years, I’ve been immersed in the world of online education.

Courses, social media, blog posts, videos – these have been my daily tools of the trade in developing the Building a Second Brain (BASB) ecosystem.

Yet I’ve recently been haunted by the feeling that we’re still barely scratching the surface – that after almost a decade spent translating my methodology into every medium I can think of (even a bestselling book), we’ve not yet reached even 1% of the people who could most benefit from it.

That haunting suspicion led me to spend much of the past year researching and investigating what it would look like to radically expand our footprint and spread my message much further and wider. I’ve had dozens of conversations with experienced leaders and entrepreneurs who have built sizable businesses, changed how companies operate around the world, and impacted millions with their ideas. 

Those conversations have led me inexorably to one destination: business-to-business (or B2B) education, also known as “corporate training” and adjacent business models like licensing, certifications, train-the-trainer programs, and others.

As popular as direct-to-consumer online education has become, the fact is most people still learn, work, and collaborate inside of institutions: schools, universities, small and medium-sized businesses, multinational corporations, government entities, non-profits, civic organizations, and countless other organizations.

I’ve come to believe that if you really want to change the conversation around an important topic, you have to reach inside these “commanding heights” of the economy. If you want your ideas to go beyond just your personal efforts, you need a lever much more powerful than your own company – you need to leverage the existing institutions that run the world.

I thought I knew a lot about how for-profit education worked, but as I began to research and talk to people, it slowly dawned on me that this B2B world I was entering was completely different from the consumer-centric (or B2C) world I knew. 

In many ways, they work in opposite ways, like a mirror image flipping all our most sacred assumptions on their head.

I’m documenting what I’ve learned about B2B education in public so you can accompany me on the journey to understand and master this new domain. I see so many online creators trapped in the same situation as me: We’ve worked so hard to grow an audience, invented valuable ideas, and demonstrated a proven track record of creating change in people’s lives at the individual level. 

And yet, like me, I don’t think most online creators have realized even 1% of the potential of their knowledge. They have no idea just how much value is locked up in their heads and in the content they give away so freely. They don’t see their content as intellectual property – an incredibly valuable business asset that could touch the lives of millions, not to mention creating an immense amount of wealth for themselves, their families, and their communities.

It strikes me that we online creators spend an overwhelming amount of time and effort on the “front-end” of our business: acquiring followers, nurturing them continuously, creating content, promoting it on social media, etc. But hardly any corresponding effort is spent on the “back-end” of the business – ways of capitalizing on the value of that content and turning that following we’ve built into a real, sustainable business. 

We might have a course or other product we can sell, but then what? What do we do with this vast amount of attention we’ve aggregated?

After years of developing my Second Brain methodology and establishing its validity and credibility, I’m finally ready to pursue a new chapter: teaching professionals within companies and organizations a better way of working, learning, communicating, and creating using technology.

The B2B versus B2C mindset

My first surprise has been just how distinct B2B education is from B2C education. They require a completely different set of attitudes to navigate successfully.

Working in public versus dealing in private

The B2C education world includes everything falling under the umbrella of “online education” – all the content, webinars, books, podcasts, and courses you can find publicly online, whether on open platforms like Udemy or Skillshare or white-labeled platforms like Kajabi or Circle.

This is the world of thought leaders and public intellectuals, of YouTube videos and podcasts, of massive audiences built on social media and sales funnels designed to turn them into customers. It all exists in public, visible for all to see. Anyone can simply perform a Google search, visit a webpage, pull out their credit card, and buy any educational product they want. It’s a performative arena that’s all about attracting the maximum amount of attention from the greatest number of people.

The B2B education world, I’ve learned, works very differently.

Little of it is publicly visible, which means you can’t just look up which training programs even exist, much less at what price or with what features. It is an ecosystem of professional trainers and facilitators, who maintain long-term business relationships and make personal sales calls, pursuing major contracts in the six or seven figures, and delivering their expertise in day-long seminars held in hotel ballrooms.

And it all happens to a large degree in private.

Low-ticket versus high-ticket spending

Many of the differences between these two markets come from the far higher level of spending a company is capable of compared to an individual. A consumer might put more effort into considering a $100 purchase than a company needs to make a $10,000 purchase.

With so much money at stake, it clearly makes sense to have a much more involved, high-touch, personal sales process based on phone calls and in-person meetings, rather than the mass market approach of email broadcasts. When a decision maker is investing such a sum, they want to speak to a knowledgeable human being they trust to look out for their interests and craft an offering customized for their needs.

When you’re making bespoke deals that are priced differently for each client, you don’t necessarily want everyone to know about them, so it’s not in your interest to publicize all the details on your website. And the best leads are much more likely to come in via referral anyway, so the website hardly matters.

A single decision maker versus multiple

Another major difference is that in B2C, the customer is spending their own money and will be the one participating in the training. They are therefore incentivized to be frugal, and to eke out every last bit of value from their purchase. This often shows up in the form of discount-seeking, complaints (whether justified or not), and sky-high expectations that are difficult to meet. 

In B2B, there are several roles played by different people: the decision maker (usually a manager leading a team, or an executive leading a department or division) is different from the buyer (an executive who has to sign off on the spending, or a procurement officer who has to process it) is different from the participant who will actually experience the training.

This means that there are different communications that have to be conveyed to each of these parties, and a variety of decisions and approvals that need to be coordinated among them to bring the training to fruition. If you’re the training company, this all means more personnel doing more high-touch work to fulfill everyone’s requirements. All this work takes time, which means B2B education operates on much longer cycles, with training events often scheduled 6-12 months or more in advance.

Quality content versus quality trainers

In some ways, B2B training has lower standards than B2C.

When it comes to the quality of the material – recorded videos, printed materials, graphic design – it is often far below what consumers expect online, where the fierce competition for attention demands that content be polished and optimized to perfection. On the public web, the half-life of trends, memes, and hot topics is far shorter, as the never-ending news cycle moves on within days or weeks. 

In B2B, everything moves much more slowly, since companies tend to be more conservative and risk-averse. They only jump on the bandwagon when a new idea has been proven, which might very well be 5-10 years after it first appears on the public web. This delay creates an incredible opportunity for those of us on the bleeding edge to ride new trends right into the heart of the corporate world.

Along other dimensions, B2B standards are higher. They usually expect an interactive component, whether in person (the traditional setting for corporate trainings) or, increasingly, via online video conference platforms like Zoom. This means you need facilitators who not only know the material and are excellent teachers, but who have the experience and gravitas to stand in front of a room of professionals with authority. These facilitators and trainers are therefore often older, in their 40s to 60s, with more career experience under their belt.

Entertainment value versus business value

Learners in corporate settings are generally more sensitive to the time demands of training.

They aren’t learning for the sake of personal interest or enjoyment – they are learning with a specific business outcome in mind, and every minute has a dollar value attached. That means they need the training packaged and contained within a certain number of minutes, hours, or days. 

Every lesson or module needs to take them closer to the result they’re seeking. There’s less room for material that is merely interesting or entertaining if it can’t be demonstrated to produce a result. Whereas with consumers, often being engaging and entertaining provides enough value to justify the purchase.

Why move into the B2B world?

So why enter this new arena at all? Why not stick with the tried-and-true B2C market I know so well?

From the perspective of a business owner, B2B education is an inherently more stable, predictable, recurring, and scalable business to be in, as I first learned from consultant and certification expert Pam Slim. It’s not driven primarily by trends, culture shifts, or what’s in the news, like the consumer markets. This can be a godsend for those of us who don’t want to comment on every emerging meme and pivot to a new idea every year or two.

B2B is about capitalizing on intellectual property that already works, again and again for many years on end. Paradoxically, it requires retreating from the frontier of pure innovation to tamer pastures where proven ideas have the time and space to mature to their full potential.

The three paths of B2B education

Every education company has Intellectual Property (or IP) as their core asset. That could include ideas, concepts, content, designs, frameworks, models, diagrams, tools, techniques, publications, software, patents, trademarks, or research you’ve developed or invented that conveys value to a learner.

The main question that determines which business model you choose is, “How do you want to deliver that value?” There are three popular approaches, depending on how much of the training you want to deliver yourself:

LicensingTrain-the-trainerIn-house deliveryLicensing

Licensing is the simplest business model, which involves fully outsourcing the delivery of your training to another company, contractor, facilitator, or in-house trainer (a trainer who works full-time within the company receiving the training). You create a legally binding agreement that grants the right to use your IP, with certain conditions and restrictions, in exchange for a fee (which can be one-time or recurring, or both).

An example of this model is Mike Michalowicz, a prolific author who’s written 11 books (such as Profit First and Clockwork) on themes designed to help entrepreneurs succeed. While he loves writing books, he’s not interested in building a full-scale training or implementation service to help companies put those ideas into practice. 

As he explained in a recent podcast episode, for each book, Michalowicz finds a licensed partner who becomes the “approved” implementer of that book’s methods. Usually he looks for a low to mid-six-figure consulting business that already offers a replicable, scalable service. 

That consultancy pays him an upfront fee plus a recurring percentage of revenue from the leads Mike sends their way. Which means he gets to spend 100% of his time (along with his 8-person team) promoting his books to their full potential, gaining a share of the financial upside from consulting, while not having to directly manage all the complexity that service entails. 

Train-the-trainer

Train-the-trainer goes a step further. You “train the trainer,” giving someone the tools they need not only to practice the new skill themselves, but to teach others how to practice that skill with accuracy and integrity. Once they’ve demonstrated proof of competence as a trainer, they become not just a practitioner, but a teacher in their own right, with permission to access and use licensed material such as participant workbooks and trainer guides.

These trainers can be “independent” trainers, offering their own services on the open market, or “in-house” trainers who work exclusively for one organization. They often have to complete “continuing education units” (CEUs) to maintain their status and can usually display an official designation (such as a badge or logo) on their website, email signature, or LinkedIn profile. In some cases, these trainers receive ongoing support such as updates to the training material, invitations to advanced training, coaching on best practices, access to a community of other trainers, or promotion via the IP owner’s website (often requiring the payment of an ongoing fee to maintain their active status).

An example of this model is the Sparketype Advisor Training and Certification Program, offered by Jonathan Fields’ company Spark Endeavors (inspired by his book Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come Alive). 

A “sparketype” is a personality type, which according to Fields’ research and experience helps professionals discover the kind of work that enlivens them and helps them fulfill their potential. They position themselves explicitly against existing “type-based” methodologies such as CliftonStrengths, VIA Character Strengths, DISC, MBTI, and the Enneagram, seeking to modernize and update them for the post-COVID world of rampant employee disengagement and burnout.

According to their website, over 850,000 people have taken their online assessment, creating a flow of warm leads who are primed to pursue further training. They created the role of Certified Sparketype Advisor (or CSA) to facilitate that training for companies and other organizations.

The CSA certification is designed for existing coaches, facilitators, career counselors, L&D professionals, HR professionals, and managers, and costs between $2,500 and $3,500 depending on when you enroll. It is delivered over 11 weeks in a hybrid format combining self-paced content consumption and small group coaching sessions in “learning pods” of 8-10 people guided by a “mentor.” 

Participants are taught how the Sparketypes apply to the real world workplace, how they can be used to enhance professionals’ sense of meaning, engagement, motivation, and performance, and how to weave the Sparketype tools into their existing client engagements. 

Once certified (and as long as they maintain their active status for $500 annually), CSAs are equipped with a variety of tools and benefits, including:

Expanded “premium” Sparketype profiles and workbooks for participantsOfficial CSA training manualA quarterly “fireside chat” with Spark Endeavors founder, Jonathan FieldsFacilitated weekly small group and pair practice sessions with other CSAsAn “official” certification letter, certificate and digital badge for public displayLicense to use the Sparketype® processes, tools, resources, presentation templates, materials, brand identity, and programming in client engagementsAccess to monthly virtual office hours with Spark Endeavors staff to ask questions, get updates on new offerings, and connect with other CSAs from around the worldDiscounts on future trainings, in-person events, and other educational experiencesPublic listing on the searchable Global CSA DirectoryAccreditation by the International Coach Federation for continuing education creditsIn-house delivery

In-house delivery is the most involved option, allowing the creator of IP to maintain the most control over its delivery by handling it themselves. This requires either delivering the training yourself as the instructor or hiring your own trainers and ensuring quality control at every step of the process.

An example of this route is Box of Crayons, a company founded by Michael Bungay Stanier (author of the bestselling book The Coaching Habit). The company offers a range of training and services based directly on the book’s teachings – to instill “coach-like curiosity” as a business skill in companies.

Their website claims over 132,000 people within organizations have participated in their programs, including companies like IBM, Upwork, Expedia, and Salesforce (think for a second how long it would take to reach that many consumers individually on your own). They deliver their training themselves, via a mix of self-paced, cohort-based, videoconference, and in-person experiences. 

They also offer a range of “customized” options such as licensing, localization and translation, and train-the-trainer models for in-house facilitators. Which demonstrates that you don’t have to choose just one model to follow.

All these options have to do with who owns the delivery of the training. In any case, the company that owns the IP is responsible for creating and maintaining a variety of assets needed to make that delivery successful: participant workbooks, trainer guides, learning aids, video modules, resource guides, marketing materials, sales support materials, etc.

Other examples I’m studying include Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead programs, and even education not based on a single expert’s body of work, such as the Mayo Clinic Wellness Coach Training Program.

Pricing and costs

$1,500 per person per day is a typical cost for premium corporate training. For example, a 20-participant training for 3 days would come out to about $100,000.

A typical full-time trainer can handle up to 200 days of training delivery per year and makes around $1,500 per day, which means they can make $150,000 per year using only about half their capacity. Trainers who want to handle more training days or who are more experienced can make considerably more, while also pursuing their own business on the side.

Using these basic numbers, it takes serving about 666 training participants per year to create a 7-figure business. If there are 20 people in a typical group training, that requires delivering only 33 training days in a year total. 

For an 8-figure business, you would need 6,666 trainees, or 333 training days, which could be handled by as few as 2-3 trainers. This begins to paint a picture of what’s possible with relatively few staff, as long as you have a steady supply of leads.

6 guiding principles for entering the B2B market 

Through my conversations with knowledgeable people in this area, I’ve arrived at a set of helpful principles I plan on keeping in mind as we embark on this path:

#1 – Everything out there – all the content and advice – is designed for B2C creators; you have to look elsewhere for B2B

Most of the popular content you see online is designed for the masses. The masses are, by definition, mostly beginners, trying to make their first buck online. 

Therefore, to gain insight into B2B education, you have to largely ignore the vast majority of the advice you find on the public web, in favor of behind-the-scenes learning directly from entrepreneurs who have done it themselves. This requires a conscious effort to ignore certain sources of information (like social media) that are loud and certain, in favor of others that are more nuanced and mostly found behind closed doors.

#2 – Clients want to be seen as a partner and co-develop the training with you (not “I have a product and want to sell it to you”)

In the B2C world, we are used to creating our courses in private and then “unveiling” them to the world all at once via a launch. We hope to sell it to hundreds or thousands of largely anonymous consumers, which means no one person’s opinion is decisive in deciding what to create. 

In the B2B world, it’s very different – you are designing a training experience specifically for one client, which means you must show up as a partner and co-creator who takes their unique needs and goals into account.

#3 – However large your audience is, 1/10 of them will pay 10x as much, 1/10 of them will pay 10x that much, etc.

In other words, there is almost certainly a small segment of your customer base that is not price sensitive and would be willing to pay 10 times what you currently charge in exchange for a training event that suits their needs 10x better. 

They are often leading teams within large companies, have existing learning and development (L&D) budgets to spend, and have an urgent problem your education is perfectly suited to solve.

#4 – Target companies with more than 500 employees, which are likely to have substantial training budgets

As B2C creators, we are accustomed to selling to customers who can evaluate an offering, weigh the pros and cons, and then make the decision to purchase, all by themselves. That leads to a very efficient sale – the entire sales process can happen within one person’s head. 

But it also means, by definition, that we are limiting ourselves to individual consumers, freelancers, or small businesses. To grow beyond those small-ticket purchases, we have to wade into the arena of procurement, learning and development departments, executive sponsors, and requests for proposals, all of which come into play when the budgets approach 6 or 7 figures.

#5 – Teams are the secret to enterprise – everyone is on a team, and every team has a leader who is worried about “team performance”

While we will need to work primarily with large companies, that doesn’t mean that we can tackle the entire company as a whole. As Mo Bunnell (founder of leading business development training firm Bunnell Idea Group) told me, “Teams are the secret to enterprise.” 

Teams are discrete, clearly defined groups with a common purpose and a leader. A team usually has a budget to spend and can participate in training together without too much complexity. Focusing on a specific team allows you to deeply understand their context and needs and design an educational solution that suits them.

#6 – You need a funnel for recruiting trainers as robust as the one for recruiting employees

This was another eye-opening idea I heard from Mo – that in order to attract, retain, and eventually replace the best trainers and facilitators, you need to have a recruitment funnel just as robust as the one for recruiting employees. 

That means a dedicated website with messaging that speaks to people’s needs, an application and interview process, and a way to identify and follow up with the best candidates continuously, among other things. Since these trainers will be an extension of your team, you need to put as much thought and care into their experience as for the team itself.

The critical importance of sales

Succeeding in B2B education requires succeeding in sales.

Public online courses can be sold without ever interacting directly with the customer, but not with B2B. This is another reason most small-scale online creators never enter this market – they don’t typically have the means or motivation to master a full-fledged sales operation.

This means recruiting, hiring, training and quality-controlling a team of Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), since you don’t want all your sales efforts relying on one person long term. It means identifying and starting conversations with a continuous series of leads, whether inbound (they contact you) or outbound (you contact them). It means creating many systems – from software systems to tracking systems to customer relationship management (CRM) systems to account management systems.

I’ve been intrigued to hear from experts like Tim Grahl who have also found sales calls to be one of their richest sources of customer research. And from experienced entrepreneurs like Grant Baldwin and Bryan Harris who report that if you’re selling high-end, 4-figure training programs, you can likely afford to hire a part-time salesperson as soon as you’re closing 5-10 new customers per month (and pay them based on commission only to keep costs in check).

This is a domain I’ve only begun to familiarize myself with, and which I plan on studying further in the coming months.

Talk with us

I’m interested in having more conversations with people experienced in B2B education, whether entrepreneurs who have built businesses in this area, trainers and facilitators who’ve become certified and practice existing methodologies in their work, or potential candidates for our own certified Second Brain facilitator program.

If any of those match your interests, you can email us at hello@fortelabs.com.

Thank you to Mo Bunnell, Pam Slim, Chad Cannon, Jeremie Kubicek, and others for generously informing these ideas and insights.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

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Tiago Forte’s Annual Reviews

This is a compilation of all the personal annual reviews I’ve published, as well as other writing I’ve done about my long-term vision and goals. I’ve also included articles I’ve written about how to make such periodic reviews more effective, including annually, mid-year, monthly, and weekly. In some years my reviews were published as a single blog post, and in others it was divided into separate pieces.

Tiago’s Personal Annual Reviews20232023 Goals2023 Annual Review20222022 Goals2022 Annual Review20212021 Goals2021 Mid-Year Review2021 Annual Review20202020 Goals2020 Mid-Year Review2020 Favorite Reads2020 Lessons Learned2020 Annual Review20192019 Mid-Year ReviewTiago’s Long-Term Vision and GoalsTiago’s Life GoalsTiago’s Personal Narrative VisionBuilding a Second Brain: The 10-Year VisionTiago’s Writing About How and Why to Do ReviewsThe Annual Review is a RearchitectureThe Monthly Review is a Systems CheckThe Weekly Review is an Operating SystemThe Design of a Weekly ReviewDon’t Set New Year’s Resolutions – Create Reusable ComponentsWhat I Learned in 7 Years of Tracking Gratitude

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

The post Tiago Forte’s Annual Reviews appeared first on Forte Labs.