Tiago Forte's Blog, page 4

Did My Bestselling Book Turn Out to Be a Financial Failure?

It’s now been two years since the release of my book Building a Second Brain. It has already reached and surpassed every goal I had for it, with 250,000 worldwide sales and many new countries and languages still to come.

On this occasion, however, I want to answer a longstanding question that is only just starting to come into focus: Has the success of this book grown the underlying business?

This was one of the most important rationales I had for writing a mainstream, traditionally published book in the first place (which I first formulated in March 2019) – to create a “loss leader” and promotional vehicle for the other products our company sells, such as courses.

With two years of hindsight and data, we can start to arrive at some answers. Let’s approach it through a series of questions.

Did the book grow our audience?

My first hypothesis was that the success of my book would significantly grow our audience. Looking at the growth trajectory of our email list over the past five years allows us to compare the period before the book and after it (the vertical line is the book’s publication date):

The graph above shows a clear inflection point right around the time my book was released, strongly suggesting it made a big impact. 

In the two years preceding the book’s release, our email list grew by 42 new subscribers per day on average (from 16,000 to 46,000 subscribers). In the two years since the book’s release, it’s grown by 108 new subscribers per day on average (from 46,000 to 125,000).

That represents a 2.6x acceleration in new subscribers per day on average. In a timeline where the book never existed and the previous growth rate remained constant, we would have ended up with 77,000 subscribers today, instead of 125,000, which means there are 48,000 people on our email list that likely wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for the book.

Looking at social media, I compared our following on each platform where we have a presence between March 2020 (when I signed the publishing contract for Building a Second Brain) to March 2024 (when I signed for my next book).

We’ve seen tremendous growth across every platform, including 180x on LinkedIn, 147x on YouTube, 24x on Facebook, 16x on Instagram, and 13x on Twitter/X. Overall, the Forte Labs audience grew 28x over these four years, an incredible result.

In this chart showing the trajectories of each platform over the last two years, you can clearly see that they fall into three distinct groups: the low-effort platforms where we only repurpose content from elsewhere (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn), the high-effort platforms we focus on (Twitter/X and the newsletter), and then YouTube, which stands on its own due to the power of the algorithm in continuously finding new audiences for our videos.

I can definitively say that my book succeeded in massively growing our audience. There were several additional factors, such as the major investments we made into YouTube over the same time period, and pandemic-fueled growth, but I still conclude that most of this wouldn’t have happened in the absence of my book.

Next, I’ll turn my attention to whether all those new followers and subscribers actually led to growth in the underlying business.

What is our audience worth?

Although there are a lot of intangible or difficult-to-measure benefits of writing a bestselling book, the one I’m interested in most is the financial return-on-investment. If the numbers don’t make sense, then everything else is a wash.

If there are 48,000 subscribers on our email list who wouldn’t be there otherwise, I wanted to calculate how much revenue they would theoretically add to the business. I know our Lifetime Customer Value is $720, so assuming we can convert 10% of those subscribers to customers, that suggests $3.4 million dollars in potential revenue.

Now, realizing that potential revenue is an entirely different question. In late 2023, we stopped offering live cohorts, which were our primary revenue source up until then. This made it significantly harder to monetize all those new followers, forcing us to depend on lower-priced products such as self-paced courses.

Looking at the onboarding survey for those courses, the main ways people found out about us are YouTube (this includes other people’s channels as well as our own), and in second place, my books.

Cross-referencing these referral numbers with our course sales over the past couple years indicates that about $486,000 of our revenue came by way of books, which suggests that we’ve only successfully realized 14% of the potential revenue of this new, larger audience.

Did my bestselling book turn out to be a financial failure?

My strategy with the BASB book was to treat it as a “loss leader” in favor of monetizing via courses, and now I have the chance to determine whether that’s panned out.

Looking only at the book itself, we’ve spent $1.13 million dollars ($570,000 on staff costs plus $560,000 on everything else) on its creation and promotion so far. On the revenue side, book advances have added up to $498,000, and if we add another $486,000 in course referrals, that adds up to $984,000 in total book-related revenue. Which means five years after the start of the project and two years since publication, we’ve yet to break even and are still about $146,000 in the red.

Adding YouTube to the picture, we’ve made $840,000 (via Google AdSense, sponsored videos, and course referrals) and spent $576,000, for a profit of $264,000. Our YouTube videos have been both funded by book revenue and inspired by the content of the book, so I doubt this performance would have been possible without the book. Considering the book and YouTube channel together, they’ve made $1.8M and cost $1.7M, slightly more than breaking even.

The great confounding factor in this entire analysis is that we are in the midst of an “online course winter,” as the immense surge of enthusiasm for everything digital that the pandemic unleashed is now giving way to an exodus, as people want to spend their time and money elsewhere. Nearly all course creators I know are struggling, and in a couple of years, we may see all these numbers turn around.

But if I’m being brutally honest with myself, the financial picture of my book has thus far been pretty mediocre. 

Despite its runaway success in terms of copies sold, I made three major mistakes that are making it difficult for us to capitalize on that success:

I spent too much money in the leadup and initial launch of the book, putting us deep into a financial hole that is now taking a long time to climb out of (I probably should have been more conservative with my spending and investments from the beginning).We killed our flagship program and main source of revenue just as our following was exploding (it probably would have been better to change and adapt the live cohort-based course to the needs of readers, rather than killing it completely).We didn’t create a clear pathway from reading the book to taking a course that picked up where it left off (our self-paced Foundation course is largely an alternative to the book in video form).

Essentially, I assumed and hoped that the “rising tide” of the book would “lift all boats” in the business, but without a clear pathway to a profitable course, and no funds held in reserve that would have helped us to build that pathway, we’ve been unable to translate much of the flood of interest we’ve received into profitability.

The big open question for the future is whether subsequent books will change this equation. I’ve already noticed that the short follow-up companion The PARA Method, which I released just a year after Building a Second Brain, has been almost pure profit, since it takes advantage of all the infrastructure and the following created by the first book and thus required very little new spending. 

My next book, on the practice of annual life reviews, will come out in the fall of 2026 and represent my first major title since BASB, and thus the first true test of whether my book writing efforts can be profitable long term.

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 Did My Bestselling Book Turn Out to Be a Financial Failure? appeared first on Forte Labs.

Rewriting My Financial Story: How I Healed My Relationship with Money

I recently attended a 3-day intensive program designed to shift people’s attitudes toward money, hosted by executive coach and teacher Joe Hudson and his team.

I didn’t really know what I was in for. I went mostly to accompany my wife Lauren, who said she needed a new perspective on money and thought I might get something out of it too.

What I got was so much more profound and multi-faceted than I ever could have imagined: a deep understanding of where my mindset toward money came from, how it has shaped my life and my decisions, and how to change it to serve me better.

The origins of my story about money

Like everything in life, my stories about money began when I was a child. As the program unfolded and we spent hours examining our most deep-seated memories and beliefs toward the subject, I slowly began to uncover three core pillars of my financial mindset.

Core pillar #1: We have enough money, but I don’t deserve it

In my earliest years, I received two conflicting messages about money: the first, that we had enough of it and therefore didn’t need to worry about it.

I knew my grandfather had been a successful entrepreneur and left us with a comfortable inheritance. In my family, we always talked openly about his legacy, how much he left to us, and how we planned to manage and invest it.

The second story was that we needed to be frugal. My father was a professional artist, supporting a family of four kids in Orange County (he always reminded us), and his spending decisions reflected his constant concern for keeping us financially stable.

I reconciled these two seemingly incompatible messages by believing, “We have plenty of money, but I don’t deserve it.” In other words, I made it about me and my worth. Money became synonymous with a feeling of deservedness, approval, and love, which means I interpreted my father’s tight fist as him withholding his love from me.

As I grew up into adulthood, this subconscious story manifested itself in profligate, even wasteful, spending. I found that I could spend money on myself and instantly receive that feeling of deservedness and recognition I craved. And I didn’t have to worry about the long-term consequences, because I knew someday that sizable inheritance from my family would arrive to rescue me.

This attitude followed me throughout my 20s, and I was always on the edge of financial solvency as a result. My spending criterion was simple: if I had the money, I spent it. It almost didn’t matter what it got spent on – I wasn’t into luxury or status goods thankfully, but for travel, tech, eating out, and books and courses, I spared no expense.

But something changed in 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic: I began making a lot of money for the first time in my life. The worldwide lockdowns created immense demand for the kind of course I’d been teaching for several years at that point, and I was perfectly positioned to reap ten-fold growth in the business.

This may seem like a fairytale ending, the perfect resolution for my chronic overspending. In reality, it exaggerated my existing habits and made my finances even worse. 

The rapidly growing balance of my bank account only meant I had even more to spend, and spend I did, on everything from hiring employees and contractors to expensive video production gear to buying cryptocurrency. It was all so easy to justify in the name of “investing in future growth” and preparing for a glorious future in which our revenue would continue to grow at the same rate for years to come.

Well, it didn’t. And starting in mid-2022 our sales began a free fall. The online course market was rapidly evolving as many other live, cohort-based courses flooded the market. The end of the pandemic meant people wanted to socialize and get out of the house, not sit at their computers on Zoom. We cannibalized our own sales by publishing our previously exclusive content in multiple forms for cheap or free. I had over-hired and over-invested, and suddenly there was no underlying business to justify it all.

Looking back with a couple of years of hindsight, there was a specific moment when my stance toward money caught up to me. It was the moment I had to lay off half the team at short notice. People I cared about suddenly lost jobs they loved, lost their health insurance, and had to scramble to support their families. This was the moment that I realized my attitude toward money wasn’t just affecting me; it was hurting many others.

The cycle of shame was complete: in trying to spend money to feel worthy and deserving, I’d wasted it, leading to a self-fulfilling future in which I felt like a failure who was even less worthy or deserving.

Core pillar #2: It’s shameful to care too much about money

There was another memory that vividly came to mind as we began the weekend: I was about 10 years old, standing by our backdoor in my parent’s house, next to my father, and I told him offhand that I didn’t want to worry about money – I just wanted to earn “enough to pay the bills” and spend my time doing work I cared about.

I know this was a core memory because I can remember feeling shocked by the strength of my father’s response: he replied sharply that it was irresponsible and dangerous to not care about money. In that moment, I realized that I had believed up until that point that my father didn’t care about money, and that was why he conserved it so much. I had expected a nod of approval when I said I also didn’t care about it. His sharp response made me see that it was in fact the opposite: he cared about it quite a bit because its presence or absence determined whether he was allowed to pursue his art full time, or would be forced to make money in other ways.

In retrospect, my takeaway from that conversation was that my father cared too much about money, and therefore I wasn’t going to care about it at all. The belief I internalized was: “It’s shameful to think about, worry about, or grub after money.” 

Frugality took on a negative connotation in my mind, associated with such words as “small-minded,” “fearful,” and “selfish.” It felt to me like retreating from life, like missing out on life’s pleasures. As a result I developed a judgment toward anyone who was too frugal: careful investors who analyzed every investment option, budgeters who meticulously tracked their expenses, and penny-pinchers who spent time clipping coupons or going to garage sales.

Looking back, I can see that overspending was my subconscious way of trying to escape the scarcity and fear I so strongly associated with saving money. The entire world of finances felt constrictive and limiting to me, and therefore I did everything in my power to avoid it. That included refusing to make or follow a budget, save or invest for the future, or create a financial plan.

In other words, I formed a domination relationship with money: either I dominate it or it dominates me. The main way I tried to dominate it was by refusing to give it attention, or time, and starving it of oxygen. Once in a while, when it ran out and became an emergency, I was forced to give it my attention, but only begrudgingly.

Core pillar #3: Money is easy to make

The previous two beliefs – that spending money was a way to feel loved and that it was wrong to conserve it or give it too much attention – might have led me to financial ruin, except for the third pillar of my relationship with money: that it was easy to make.

I found early on that I had a gift for entrepreneurship, probably inherited from my grandfather and great-great grandfather.

In a weird way, this third pillar both justified and amplified the previous two. I could afford to keep spending like crazy because I knew there was always more where that came from. And I could afford not to manage and cultivate my money too carefully because again, I had a way to replenish my reserves despite all the gaping leaks.

However, as long as I kept spending my money as fast as I made it, I was stuck in place. I couldn’t grow my business significantly, or outsource or delegate key functions, or invest in automation or scale. At various points in my entrepreneurial journey, I’ve had to face the fact that I am a highly-paid employee of my own company, not the owner of a true business that I can step away from.

The bottleneck on my entrepreneurial growth has never been my ability to generate revenue – it has always been my ability to generate a profit, and a crucial component of that is ensuring our expenses remain in check.

Owning my projections onto money

One of the main frameworks we used during the weekend was to treat money as if we had a real relationship with it, almost like a person. That included all the aspects of any complex, long-term relationship: past hurts and resentments, pent up rage or disappointment, recurring unhealthy patterns, as well as unexpressed love and gratitude.

This also meant that we had projections toward money, and the single most powerful exercise for me involved owning those projections. 

A projection can be understood as a defense mechanism in which someone unconsciously attributes their own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or traits to another person. It’s a ubiquitous feature of human psychology, a tool we use to avoid acknowledging undesirable aspects of ourselves (and thus avoid feeling the associated emotions) by perceiving them in others instead. It’s like judging a painting for its flaws without realizing it is in fact a mirror.

We went around the circle apologizing to money for the qualities we had projected onto it, and embracing those same qualities in ourselves instead. After a few fairly tame ones, and as my next turn approached, I began to feel an intense wrenching feeling in my gut. Tears began to pour freely from my eyes before it was even clear what I was going to say. As my turn began, I found myself saying to the others around the circle, as if with a voice that wasn’t mine, “This is the hard one guys. I’m going to need your help…”

What followed was one of the most intense and unexpected physical reactions I’ve ever had in such a setting. My whole body began shuddering, my feet stomping on the floor as I hopped up and down in my chair. Suddenly I began breathing rapidly, with sharp in and out breaths like I was running up a hill. I felt unable to speak at first, and instead made a series of animal-like growling, whimpering, and shouting noises. At one point I burst into hysterical high-pitched crying that lasted only a few seconds before abruptly stopping. I kept trying to meet the eyes of the others around the circle, but each time I encountered their gaze, my body would react again.

I remember watching all of this unfold like a spectator, my internal witness in awe of my body’s capacity to integrate a new perspective at the somatic level. I believe that’s what was happening: my body was wrestling and writhing with an idea the way a boa constrictor might wrestle with prey, or the way a woman might give birth. I knew that my ability to allow all this to happen, to let my body do what it needed to do without (too much) fear or self-judgment, was the culmination of years of work on my part. What I mostly felt was pride.

Eventually, once my body had completed its process, I was able to complete the sentence: that I had projected onto money that only it had the capacity to make change in the world, when in fact, that was just a way of avoiding facing the reality that it was me who had that capacity.

I couldn’t quite believe that this was the sentence that most triggered and confronted me. It felt almost cliche, like a motivational slogan. But in saying it again and again, each time a little more integrated and heartfelt, it dawned on me that I had never fully accepted this possibility. 

I’d spent much of the last decade trying as hard as I could to make a positive impact, from teaching English in South America to working in microfinance in Colombia to volunteering in the Peace Corps in Ukraine to starting an education business on the Internet. This endless striving came from an insatiable need to make a difference, to feel like my life mattered. 

I’d spent years proclaiming from the rooftops, via various globe-spanning online platforms, that I was making a difference. I’d documented and displayed the evidence proving to everyone I was making a difference, had harangued my team that we needed to make more of a difference, and plotted ever more grandiose plans to make an even bigger difference in the future. 

And yet, as I was smashing down the gas pedal on “making a difference,” I was simultaneously smashing the brake with the other foot, refusing to truly let in the evidence and the feeling that I was already doing so. The feeling that my mere existence, my life, made a difference, and that I didn’t need to justify it to anyone.

This was the feeling that I had to use every bodily movement to let in: that the central driving purpose of my life had been fulfilled, and in fact was always already fulfilled. I had created the story that “I wasn’t worthy” in order to make sense of the world as a child, but since that gaping hole inside of me was created by me, it was only me who could fill it, not any external form of achievement or recognition.

Inheriting my family’s attitude toward money

Another major theme for me during the program was coming to terms with the ways my family’s attitude toward money over the generations had been passed down to me.

First, and most immediately apparent, was a deep feeling that I didn’t deserve to be the recipient of all the sacrifices they’d made. Perhaps this was the true source of my sense of undeservedness, which I had interpreted as coming from my father. 

I know a lot about all four strands of our family line because my mom is an avid genealogical researcher. 

We know about the 17th-century religious wars our ancestors got caught up in as French Protestants, the persecution and discrimination they fled by escaping to the Netherlands and then the UK, the difficulty of traveling across the Atlantic to Canada only to face more discrimination, the harsh years they survived as immigrants in upstate New York, and the many tragedies and hardships they endured from car accidents to fatal illnesses to broken marriages.

I know all the vivid details of how they struggled to make ends meet, and what they had to give up to provide for their families. All that information has often felt like a gigantic burden on my shoulders: Who am I to be the beneficiary of so much pain and sacrifice? 

Paradoxically, having “enough” money has sometimes felt like it creates a sense of intense urgency, because I have no excuse to not realize my dreams and goals.

I realized I’d adopted a strange mindset as a result: that if I worked hard my entire life, maybe, just maybe at the end of it, I would deserve the money I’d received at the beginning. It was as if I placed the feeling of deservedness and worthiness at the end of a long road, and told myself I had no choice but to walk it. In other words, I would have to work just as hard to “deserve” the wealth I already had as if I never had it in the first place! This is what’s known as a “double bind” – a pair of contradictory beliefs held in place to ensure you can never win.

My family’s financial prosperity has made my pursuit of meaning feel harder. It has never felt like enough for me to survive, or merely prosper. The privilege of starting life’s race at the halfway mark has led me to feel like I can’t ever complain, can’t have problems, can’t relax. I’m afraid that my efforts and sacrifices won’t mean anything. I’m afraid the (even more) money we’ll leave to our kids will make their lives feel meaningless.

Considering all this in the weeks following the program, I realized that my family never left behind the scarcity mindset toward money they had adopted through the ordeals of immigration, the Great Depression, and the World Wars. My grandfather had grown up with a conservative, working-class mindset toward money, and never truly gave it up or learned to enjoy it even as he grew a successful business. He passed his money on to my father, who also refused to spend it, and is now passing it on to me with the same mindset intact.

I don’t know what exactly will change for me as a result of this weekend program, but I do already see my place in this legacy very differently: not to continue amassing wealth with no end in sight, nor to spend it thoughtlessly like it doesn’t matter. I’m starting to perceive a middle path between those two extremes: I can use the financial capacity that’s been passed down to me to heal the pain that gave rise to it in the first place. The privilege I embrace is the privilege of healing my family’s relationship to money, and moving us out of the realm of scarcity and fear for generations to come.

I can summarize my family’s attitude toward money as “Money is fine as long as we have enough of it.” I can see and appreciate how important that simple heuristic has been to help us survive through the centuries and across continents. I can also see that at some point, that becomes a limiting belief, because there is more to money than merely having enough. There are deeper and more subtle questions that I now have the freedom to explore, such as how I can invest that money and honor my ancestors’ sacrifice while still honoring my own life.

If you’d like to explore this kind of personal development work for yourself, check out the various courses and workshops offered by Joe Hudson’s company The Art of Accomplishment. You can also join their newsletter to hear about the programs they offer year-round, including one-time retreats like the one I attended, which are only open to course graduates. 

To give you a taste of what it’s like to work with Joe, he has shared excerpts from his coaching sessions related to money, including how to make money doing what you love and how to feel financially safe. I can also recommend the following episodes of the Art of Accomplishment podcast:

Money Can’t Save YouMoney Can’t Oppress YouMuch Ado About Money

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 Rewriting My Financial Story: How I Healed My Relationship with Money appeared first on Forte Labs.

Digital Attention Spans: AI as a Source of Infinite Patience

I recently came across a Substack post by Venkatesh Rao called Oozy Intelligence in Slow Time that was one of the most insightful I’ve ever read for understanding the nature of Artificial Intelligence.

We tend to think of Artificial Intelligence as being in an arms race with Human Intelligence. Which one is smarter? When will AI surpass us?

But there is a hidden assumption buried in that comparison: that intelligence is best measured by its peak moments – the flash of brilliance, the sudden epiphany, the intellectual breakthrough.

Rao suggests that we look instead at a completely different aspect of intelligence: how much it costs.

Human intelligence is tremendously costly. Most of our time is spent simply maintaining this high-performance machine we call our body. Eating, drinking, sleeping, grooming, socializing, resting, etc. can all be seen as “overhead costs” needed to merely keep us alive.

Because it costs so much just to function each day, every minute of focused attention we spend requires a certain return-on-investment to be justified. We are constantly making choices to maximize that “return” on our attention: Do I spend the next 30 minutes working out, or cleaning the kitchen? Do I spend today working on this project, or that project?

Activities that don’t meet our threshold for “required return” don’t get our attention, plain and simple. This can be understood as a kind of “minimum wage” that our brain must earn, otherwise it refuses to work. 

We make this calculation fairly seamlessly any time we consider engaging in an activity:

We might be willing to spend 10 minutes reading an interesting article, but not if it takes 30 minutes (“too long, didn’t read”).We might be willing to drive 20 minutes to eat at an exciting new restaurant, but not if it takes an hour.If you buy an appliance for your home that costs $20, but you spent 2 hours reading reviews and evaluating the options, the return on that purchase is lower than if you had instead received and acted on a trusted recommendation from a friend

This is part of what makes learning anything new so challenging: you have to spend lots and lots of time, with little return on that investment, in order to gain some future reward that isn’t even guaranteed. It’s akin to investing a lot of money into something without knowing if it will ever pay you back.

Another way of defining the “minimum wage threshold” for our brains is patience.

Rao asks: “How often are you in the mood to do boring, tedious, bureaucratic tasks (such as filling out forms, doing your taxes, or opening postal mail)?”

His answer, and mine, is: not often. It’s not that I don’t have the time for such tasks. It’s not that I’m not smart enough or don’t know how to complete them. The problem is that they require too much patience (i.e. they fail to meet my brain’s minimum wage threshold). I thus “can’t afford” to spend my attention on them, and instead tend to put them off for as long as humanly possible, usually until some catastrophic consequence becomes threatening enough that I have no choice.

If you think about it, there are many such tasks that would produce immense benefits for us, if we just had the patience to do them:

Spending hundreds of hours learning a new language or how to codeReviewing every note you’ve taken over the last few years for buried ideas or insightsOrganizing all your personal contacts in a searchable Notion database

These kinds of tasks involving collecting, organizing, summarizing, formatting, and reviewing information would be tremendously valuable if we did them, but often fall into the “requires too much patience” category for most people.

This is where AI becomes so powerful. AI effectively lowers the patience threshold to almost nothing. There is no task that is too boring, too mundane, too repetitive, or “beneath its dignity.” Unlike us, grinding away on such tasks doesn’t annoy it, ruin its motivation, give it a bad attitude, or make it angry at us. It is a dutiful employee requiring a minimum wage of virtually zero.

This is a very different way of understanding AI’s value. It’s not AI’s superintelligence or blazing speed that make it valuable to us: it’s AI’s patience in completing an endless series of tedious tasks that are too far below our patience threshold for us to justify doing at all.

Our attention is expensive, and thus can only be spent on activities with a clear outcome that can be achieved in a predictable amount of time. Whereas AI has an almost infinite amount of attention that is so cheap it can be spent lavishly, even wastefully, on activities that would never be worth our time. We can afford to spend this newly abundant form of intelligence on tasks that are below the minimum wage our brains are willing to work for.

The two components of patience

If we stopped here, this would mean that the main use for AI is completing our boring to-do lists for us. But there’s a level deeper to consider, because patience has two components that can be separated: time and detail.

As you toil away filing your taxes, for example, there are two factors that determine how much patience it takes: the level of detail that you’re required to process and the time it takes to do so. It is the combination of many complex details you have to process over a long span of time that makes taxes so excruciating.

The crucial thing to understand is that we have a minimum AND maximum threshold for BOTH the time we’re willing to spend and the number of details we’re willing to process:

If it takes too much time, we get impatient and opt out (think of a movie where not enough is happening to hold your attention)If it doesn’t take enough time, we get overwhelmed and opt out (think of a short-form video that is so fast it’s aggravating to watch)If it presents too much detail, we get frustrated and opt out (think of a book going way too deep into a technical topic you don’t understand)If it presents not enough detail, we get bored and opt out (think of a children’s book with not enough complexity to be interesting to us)

In other words, as humans, we have a clearly defined “window of attention” that limits what we’re able to pay attention to for long periods. Our attention span is an actual span with clear limits. Anything outside of that – that either moves too slowly or too quickly, that demands too much of our brains or too little – is tremendously expensive for us to attend to.

When you say “I don’t have patience for that,” you’re not saying you don’t have enough time. You’re really saying “That is below the level of detail I can sustainably process at the required rate.”

Thomas Carlyle once said, “Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.” The word “pain” is informative in this sense – it is actually painful for us to stay outside our window of attention for long. The brain has a “focal length” it is comfortable with, like our eyes, and that attention span evolved for chasing and hunting down an animal about our own size, or picking fruit from trees; anything outside of that feels unnatural and painful for us.

This might seem like a discouraging and even fatalistic view of human potential: there are just some things we can pay attention to, and some we can’t.

But there’s another detail that Rao highlights here: that time and detail interact and influence each other. They are not independent variables: changing one actually changes the other.

Consider that looking at a raindrop with your naked eye might be boring, but if you zoom in with a microscope, you’ll see millions of microorganisms blooming and buzzing in stunning diversity. The classic example of “watching paint dry” would be terribly exciting if you could zoom in to the molecular level and watch the symphony of chemical reactions playing out.

In other words, the more you zoom in, the faster things are happening. The rate at which time passes for you depends partially on how much information you can take in. It’s not that time is actually speeding up or slowing down – your perception of time is speeding up or slowing down, and that perception is strongly influenced by how much detail and complexity you can take in and process.

Considering this idea, perhaps it is not people’s intelligence that limits what they can pay attention to and learn: it is their patience. And what limits their patience is not some stoic quality of their character, but their ability to zoom in and take in enough detail that reality feels interesting.

This also changes our view of what exceptionally patient people are doing. It’s not that they have some inner reserve of steely endurance – it’s that they’re better at operating at a level of detail where things happen faster.

The gardener absorbed in the intricacies of trimming a bonsai tree, or the basketball player shooting hundreds of free throws in one practice session, or the chess grandmaster playing through dozens of alternatives of a match – maybe these people aren’t abnormally patient; they’re just better at zooming in to a level of detail in their craft that the full bandwidth of their attention can be occupied.

We tend to think of patience as primarily a moral virtue, alongside work ethic, honesty, integrity, and empathy. What if instead we removed the moral framing, and thought of it instead as a side effect of the way we consume information?

AI could be used to tweak and tune information with the goal of fitting it into our preferred window of attention. Instead of treating the content we consume as one-size-fits-all, we could use AI to modify that content so that it’s at the right speed and the right level of detail such that it feels captivating and enlivening for us to pay attention to.

If a piece of content is too detailed, we can ask AI to summarize and distill it for us in ways that a novice can understand. If a piece of content is not detailed enough, we can ask AI to elaborate and add more sources and examples.

If a piece of content is coming at you too fast, you can ask AI to slow it down, break it into chunks, and give it to you one piece at a time. If it’s coming too slowly, you can ask it to move faster and progress to more advanced topics sooner.

I can foresee a future in which we rarely consume a given piece of content without changing it to suit our preferred window of attention. A future in which we run all our content through an AI curator who refines and modifies it to fit how our brains work. Not doing so will feel like buying a pair of shoes without trying them on for size.

In that future, patience won’t be considered a moral virtue – it will be considered a failure to properly utilize the tools at our disposal to customize our experience according to our needs.

If you’d like to read the Substack post by Venkatesh Rao called Oozy Intelligence in Slow Time yourself, click here.

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 Digital Attention Spans: AI as a Source of Infinite Patience appeared first on Forte Labs.

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.

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