Tiago Forte's Blog, page 50

Storm of Tweets: Micro-Essays on Work, Life, the Universe, and Everything

I’ve published an ebook of my best tweetstorms from 2016 and 2017, when I was most actively using the format. It’s free from April 6–10 ($5 after that). You can view the Amazon page and download here:

Storm of Tweets: Micro-essays on work, life, the universe, and everything

Foreword from the book

I first started using Twitter in the spring of 2012, fresh off the plane from Ukraine, where I served for two years in the Peace Corps. My first job in San Francisco was for a coworking space that also hosted events and classes. My first forays onto the network were to tweet links to our events or announcements, desperately trying to get some traction.

Within a few months, I started getting regular notifications. I was meeting people in the coworking space and at our events, and quickly learned that Twitter was the watercooler for online influencers. I started spending more time there, slowly moving from lurking to reading articles to responding to interacting. The accessibility of high-profile, successful people managing their own accounts blew my impressionable little mind away.

It took me a couple years to begin thinking of Twitter as a place for learning and ideation, not just consumption. I started reading the Ribbonfarm blog, which exposed me to intense intellectual discussions taking place in the social networks connected to it. Gaining followers who were interested in the same things as me, I started to blog more, testing out my ability to create insights for other smart people.

It was around this time that I started using the tweetstorm format specifically. A tweetstorm is simply a series of tweets (short snippets of text that can also contain links or images) with an overarching topic or point that are “threaded” together in a chain. You add tweets to the chain by successively replying to each previous tweet. What a tweetstorm adds versus, say, a blog post, is that each tweet stands as its own statement, with individual controls for others to like, reply to, or share, with or without their own commentary. Instead of a comments section at the very end of a webpage that no one reads, you get a distributed, modular, atomized, non-linear, open-ended conversation among any number of people.

The immediate need I was trying to fulfill was to get ideas out of my head, where they tended to cycle aimlessly until I captured them somewhere. The default place for these ideas was Evernote, but I thought, “Why not make these notes public?” These tweetstorms evolved from random musings shouted into the digital wind, to critical pieces in my process of developing ideas to fruition.

It’s difficult to overstate how important tweetstorms have been for my work and my business. They are the most-cited referral source for customers and collaborators alike. I’ve found thought partners, clients, mentors, and advisors through them. They’ve saved me hours of work, allowing me to simply link to a thread instead of explaining things again and again. By inserting these threads one tweet at a time into the slipstream of online discussions, I’ve found an audience that is hungry for meaningful insights delivered in bite-sized packages.

It’s also difficult to overstate what a remarkable format it is. First, it is a “soft” technology, created in an instant and driven by a practical need. It requires no special technology, no maintenance or updates, beyond the basic functionality of tweeting and replying. Second, it puts the comments and arguments, which are the best part of any piece of online content, on nearly equal footing with the original thread itself. By allowing multiple entry points to start a discussion–at a sentence by sentence level, instead of only at the end–it encourages discussion instead of just allowing it. Third, it enforces succinctness and brevity, both by the strict 140 (now 280) character limit, and also by the short attention spans that people usually bring to social media. Since virtually all writing can be improved by getting more quickly to the point, this has the effect of increasing quality across the board. Fourth, you are always one click away from self-written biographies for every person in a thread, allowing you to put in context what they’re saying. Anonymity is allowed but not required. The more transparent you are about who you are and where you’re coming from, the more credibility your words carry. Fifth, it is a format optimized for learning. As the writer, you can get feedback point by point along multiple dimensions: likes, retweets, and replies. I’ve found that often one seemingly minor point receives most of the attention. Or one tweet in the thread becomes its own parallel discussion, like a self-selecting chat room, telling you what people find interesting. The modularity of tweetstorms–that any given tweet can find its way into any number of feeds, discussions, hashtags, and retweets–allows the thread to appeal to multiple audiences, each tweet part of a great river but carried along its own particular currents. Sixth, it bypasses writer’s block, by keeping expectations low and spelling and grammer even lower. There is no barrier to just getting your ideas out there, because nothing is permanent unless you want it to be. Your inner critic stays asleep because “it’s just social media after all.”

I decided to review these old tweetstorms in preparation for a book I’m writing, based on my course Building a Second Brain. Tweetstorms are often proto-ideas that I found interesting enough to write about, but that aren’t yet complete enough to turn into full articles. They are like free-floating, raw genetic material, waiting to evolve into full organisms.

I discovered that I could export my entire tweet archive in one click, and then do a search for the prefix 1/, which I use to kick off each tweetstorm. By the time I had done that, I realized I was just a few steps away from an ebook. If I was getting so much value from rereading my own tweetstorms, why not bring others into the conversation? The self-publishing service offered by Kindle Direct Publishing has become so dead simple, all you need to do is submit a Word document and they take care of the rest. With some help from Ben Mosior, Marko Kosović, and Jay Dugger, we selected the best storms and put together the manuscript you’re reading now.

I’m a big believer in sharing your work publicly, as early and as often as possible. This book is an experiment to see just how far we can push that practice. My goal is to compress two years of thought experiments into an artifact that can be examined and unpacked in just a few hours. My hope is that readers will see the holes, assumptions, and hidden insights that I can’t see myself.

I’ll end with a few guidelines on how to create your own tweetstorms. I imagine some of you will be inspired to try it out for yourself. But like anything that has the potential to capture people’s attention, there is a sensible and respectful way to go about it.

The first and most important guideline is to add value. Social networks are full of content that is inane, mindless, or actively harmful, and we don’t need another voice to join that chorus. Shed light on something you understand that others don’t. Tell a good story that motivates or inspires people. Create a packet of insight that others can take and use in their own work.

Second, don’t @mention people in the thread itself. This will result in them getting notifications for every reply, potentially far into the future. You don’t want to burn people like that. They know who you are. If you want to bring them into the conversation, quote-retweet the tweet that is most relevant to them, add a question or request and their handle, and allow them to decide whether to jump in.

Third, don’t make the thread more than 15–20 tweets long, since your followers will be flooded with them all. Make sure that every tweet in the thread is necessary and adding value to your point, otherwise you’ll lose followers instead of gaining them.

Fourth, start every tweet with the same number format, to make them easy to identify and search for in the future. Common options include 1/, 1., and 1).

Enjoy your romp through my imagination. Following the hyperlinks in the date for each tweetstorm will take you to the original thread on Twitter, which you can then share or discuss live. And tweet me @fortelabs if you discover anything interesting ;)

Subscribe to Praxis , my members-only publication exploring the future of productivity, for just $5/month. Or follow via email , Twitter , Facebook , LinkedIn , or  YouTube .

Storm of Tweets: Micro-Essays on Work, Life, the Universe, and Everything was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Storm of Tweets: Micro-Essays on Work, Life, the Universe, and Everything

I’ve published an ebook of my best tweetstorms from 2016 and 2017, when I was most actively using the format. It’s free from April 6–10 ($5 after that). You can view the Amazon page and download here:

Foreword from the book

I first started using Twitter in the spring of 2012, fresh off the plane from Ukraine, where I served for two years in the Peace Corps. My first job in San Francisco was for a coworking space that also hosted events and classes. My first forays onto the network were to tweet links to our events or announcements, desperately trying to get some traction.

Within a few months, I started getting regular notifications. I was meeting people in the coworking space and at our events, and quickly learned that Twitter was the watercooler for online influencers. I started spending more time there, slowly moving from lurking to reading articles to responding to interacting. The accessibility of high-profile, successful people managing their own accounts blew my impressionable little mind away.

It took me a couple years to begin thinking of Twitter as a place for learning and ideation, not just consumption. I started reading the Ribbonfarm blog, which exposed me to intense intellectual discussions taking place in the social networks connected to it. Gaining followers who were interested in the same things as me, I started to blog more, testing out my ability to create insights for other smart people.

It was around this time that I started using the tweetstorm format specifically. A tweetstorm is simply a series of tweets (short snippets of text that can also contain links or images) with an overarching topic or point that are “threaded” together in a chain. You add tweets to the chain by successively replying to each previous tweet. What a tweetstorm adds versus, say, a blog post, is that each tweet stands as its own statement, with individual controls for others to like, reply to, or share, with or without their own commentary. Instead of a comments section at the very end of a webpage that no one reads, you get a distributed, modular, atomized, non-linear, open-ended conversation among any number of people.

The immediate need I was trying to fulfill was to get ideas out of my head, where they tended to cycle aimlessly until I captured them somewhere. The default place for these ideas was Evernote, but I thought, “Why not make these notes public?” These tweetstorms evolved from random musings shouted into the digital wind, to critical pieces in my process of developing ideas to fruition.

It’s difficult to overstate how important tweetstorms have been for my work and my business. They are the most-cited referral source for customers and collaborators alike. I’ve found thought partners, clients, mentors, and advisors through them. They’ve saved me hours of work, allowing me to simply link to a thread instead of explaining things again and again. By inserting these threads one tweet at a time into the slipstream of online discussions, I’ve found an audience that is hungry for meaningful insights delivered in bite-sized packages.

It’s also difficult to overstate what a remarkable format it is. First, it is a “soft” technology, created in an instant and driven by a practical need. It requires no special technology, no maintenance or updates, beyond the basic functionality of tweeting and replying. Second, it puts the comments and arguments, which are the best part of any piece of online content, on nearly equal footing with the original thread itself. By allowing multiple entry points to start a discussion–at a sentence by sentence level, instead of only at the end–it encourages discussion instead of just allowing it. Third, it enforces succinctness and brevity, both by the strict 140 (now 280) character limit, and also by the short attention spans that people usually bring to social media. Since virtually all writing can be improved by getting more quickly to the point, this has the effect of increasing quality across the board. Fourth, you are always one click away from self-written biographies for every person in a thread, allowing you to put in context what they’re saying. Anonymity is allowed but not required. The more transparent you are about who you are and where you’re coming from, the more credibility your words carry. Fifth, it is a format optimized for learning. As the writer, you can get feedback point by point along multiple dimensions: likes, retweets, and replies. I’ve found that often one seemingly minor point receives most of the attention. Or one tweet in the thread becomes its own parallel discussion, like a self-selecting chat room, telling you what people find interesting. The modularity of tweetstorms–that any given tweet can find its way into any number of feeds, discussions, hashtags, and retweets–allows the thread to appeal to multiple audiences, each tweet part of a great river but carried along its own particular currents. Sixth, it bypasses writer’s block, by keeping expectations low and spelling and grammer even lower. There is no barrier to just getting your ideas out there, because nothing is permanent unless you want it to be. Your inner critic stays asleep because “it’s just social media after all.”

I decided to review these old tweetstorms in preparation for a book I’m writing, based on my course Building a Second Brain. Tweetstorms are often proto-ideas that I found interesting enough to write about, but that aren’t yet complete enough to turn into full articles. They are like free-floating, raw genetic material, waiting to evolve into full organisms.

I discovered that I could export my entire tweet archive in one click, and then do a search for the prefix 1/, which I use to kick off each tweetstorm. By the time I had done that, I realized I was just a few steps away from an ebook. If I was getting so much value from rereading my own tweetstorms, why not bring others into the conversation? The self-publishing service offered by Kindle Direct Publishing has become so dead simple, all you need to do is submit a Word document and they take care of the rest. With some help from Ben Mosior, Marko Kosović, and Jay Dugger, we selected the best storms and put together the manuscript you’re reading now.

I’m a big believer in sharing your work publicly, as early and as often as possible. This book is an experiment to see just how far we can push that practice. My goal is to compress two years of thought experiments into an artifact that can be examined and unpacked in just a few hours. My hope is that readers will see the holes, assumptions, and hidden insights that I can’t see myself.

I’ll end with a few guidelines on how to create your own tweetstorms. I imagine some of you will be inspired to try it out for yourself. But like anything that has the potential to capture people’s attention, there is a sensible and respectful way to go about it.

The first and most important guideline is to add value. Social networks are full of content that is inane, mindless, or actively harmful, and we don’t need another voice to join that chorus. Shed light on something you understand that others don’t. Tell a good story that motivates or inspires people. Create a packet of insight that others can take and use in their own work.

Second, don’t @mention people in the thread itself. This will result in them getting notifications for every reply, potentially far into the future. You don’t want to burn people like that. They know who you are. If you want to bring them into the conversation, quote-retweet the tweet that is most relevant to them, add a question or request and their handle, and allow them to decide whether to jump in.

Third, don’t make the thread more than 15–20 tweets long, since your followers will be flooded with them all. Make sure that every tweet in the thread is necessary and adding value to your point, otherwise you’ll lose followers instead of gaining them.

Fourth, start every tweet with the same number format, to make them easy to identify and search for in the future. Common options include 1/, 1., and 1).

Enjoy your romp through my imagination. Following the hyperlinks in the date for each tweetstorm will take you to the original thread on Twitter, which you can then share or discuss live. And tweet me @fortelabs if you discover anything interesting 

Praxis Anti-Book Club Instructions

Here are the step-by-step instructions for the Anti-Book Club for easy reference. And so you can run your own Anti-Book Club if you want…

Continue reading on Praxis »

Live Webinar: Build A Six-Figure Service-Based Business Without Trial and Error

After I quit my job in June of 2013, some of my very first projects were small consulting gigs. From designing a website for a friend for $50, to helping a local business figure out their social media accounts. These projects gave me some runway to get on my feet and start thinking seriously about what it would take to run a business of my own.

Starting out by offering a service gave me the flexibility, experience, and income I needed to later build products. My early clients paid for the learning that eventually made its way into blog posts, courses, and ebooks. Those products now give me the credibility to charge $15–20k on average for a two-day corporate training. That’s what it actually looks like to become a Full-Stack Freelancer.

Click here to register for the free webinar from 9:00–10:00 AM PST on Wednesday, March 28.

I know that many of you are interested in starting your own business. You want somewhere to put your new productivity skills to use! The best way to start a company, in my opinion, is to start by offering a service, for many reasons:

It allows you to gain experience with a wide variety of clients, to understand what you’re best at and who your ideal customer isIt can be started very cheaply and in parallel with a normal job if you’re not quite ready to take the plungeIt allows you to optimize for learning and skill-building without the hassles of infrastructure, equipment, warehouses, or storefrontsIt can be performed flexibly, on your own time and from different locationsIt builds your personal brand, growing a network that you can take with you from client to clientYou can easily build on your services with new products and content

Now here’s the downside: the very same things that make service-based businesses awesome also create pitfalls:

It’s easy to call yourself a consultant, but finding clients is another matter altogetherThere are few costs, but that also means there are constant new entrants, making it hard to cut through the noiseIt’s easy to change what you’re offering quickly, but you often have to start from scratch with new projectsYou can work from anywhere, but that also means work-life balance and structure around your workday can be elusiveYou get to focus on you and your brand, but that also means your reputation is on the line from day one

I’ve been looking for ways to support freelancers, solopreneurs, and wantrepreneurs because I know how difficult it can be to overcome these challenges on your own. There’s no reason we should each have to reinvent the wheel. I want to help make the leap from employment to entrepreneurship a little easier and less risky.

Speaking at Reactive Conference in Slovakia last October, I met Jan, an information science professor and top-level government advisor with many similar interests. We hit it off, and he enrolled in my course Building a Second Brain. Shortly thereafter, I received an urgent message from him: “I’ve found someone you have to meet.”

That person ended up being Jeff Sauer, an entrepreneur and online marketing expert. We connected and quickly found that our approaches complemented each other perfectly: I teach people how to capture and utilize their knowledge using software, while Jeff teaches how to turn that knowledge and experience into profitable service businesses.

Jeff is an all-star in the online marketing world. As a partner he grew his marketing agency by 500% to $6 million in annual revenue, reaching the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies for five years in a row. He’s provided everything from SEO and web analytics services, to social media and online reputation management, to email marketing and e-commerce consulting, serving small businesses and Fortune 500 brands alike.

He’s also successfully made the transition to online products, launching in-depth courses on Google Analytics, Google Adwords, and data-driven marketing. Most recently, he’s summarized what he learned over 13 years into an online course called Agency Jumpstart. It is a treasure trove of models, frameworks, case studies, hard learnings, and live coaching on the art and science of scaling a service. It’s a rare insider view of the nuts and bolts of running an agency, from one-person freelancing all the way up to a big team. If I was starting a business today, I’d start with this course.

Because Jeff’s offerings are such a great complement to mine, I’m partnering with him to offer a one-time live webinar, integrating Building a Second Brain with Agency Jumpstart.

In this webinar, Build A Six-Figure Service-Based Business Without Trial and Error, Jeff and I will present some of our top recommendations for turning your knowledge into a service business.

You’ll learn:

The ONE revenue model for service-based businesses that virtually guarantees cash-flow month-after-monthThe importance of avoiding the Law of Desperation in your service-based business and how the Pipeline Rule can help you do thisWhat the “Sauer Reframe Technique” is and how to use it to ethically price your freelancing or consulting servicesHow to avoid the #1 mistake service-based businesses make when selling services

I hope you’ll join us!

Click here to register for the free webinar from 9:00–10:00 AM PST on Wednesday, March 28.

Live Webinar: Build A Six-Figure Service-Based Business Without Trial and Error was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Wardley Mapping Workshop

On March 7th our Head of Ops Benjamin Mosior facilitated a virtual workshop on Wardley Mapping, a value-chain mapping technique that has…

Continue reading on Praxis »

How I Write Long-Form Blog Posts

One of the most common questions I receive is how I write long-form blog posts. And especially how I write them frequently, at high…

Continue reading on Praxis »

Praxis Anti-Book Club version 2.0

A couple months ago we launched the first Anti-Book Club. It was a phenomenal success by my criteria, with 41 books on productivity…

Continue reading on Praxis »

My interview on the Buddhist Geeks Podcast

Listen to my conversation with Vincent Horn on the Buddhist Geeks podcast:

Buddhist Geeks

We have a great conversation about what meditation and mindfulness have taught me about the future of work, what productivity means in the age of the network, and other topics like limiting paradigms, environment design, multitasking, and reframing threats as opportunities.

Subscribe to Praxis , my members-only publication exploring the future of productivity, for just $5/month. Or follow via email , Twitter , Facebook , LinkedIn , or  YouTube .

My interview on the Buddhist Geeks Podcast was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Progressive Summarization V: The Faster You Forget, The Faster You Learn

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5

In Part I, I introduced Progressive Summarization, a method for easily creating highly discoverable notes. In Part II, I gave you examples and metaphors of the method in action. Part III included my top recommendations for how to perform it effectively. Part IV showed how to apply the technique to non-text media.

In Part V, I’ll show you how Progressive Summarization directly contributes to the ultimate outcome we’re seeking with our information consumption: learning.

The burden of perfect memory

In traditional schooling, the ability to recall something from memory is taken as the clearest evidence that someone has learned something. This is the regurgitation model of learning — the more accurately you are able to reproduce it, without adding any of your own interpretation or creativity, the higher your mark.

But in the real world, perfect recall is far from ideal.

This New York Times article tells the fascinating story of the 60 or so people known to have a condition called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). They can remember most of the days of their lives as clearly as the rest of us remember yesterday. Ask one of them what they were doing on the afternoon of March 16, 1996, and within just a few seconds they’ll be able to describe that day in vivid detail.

These are people who have achieved the holy grail of recall — perfect memory. And yet, they often describe it as a burden:

“Everyone has those forks in the road, ‘If I had just done this and gone here, and nah nah nah,’ everyone has those,” she told me. “Except everyone doesn’t remember every single one of them.” Her memory is a map of regrets, other lives she could have lived. “I do this a lot: what would be, what would have been, or what would be today,” she said….“I’m paralysed, because I’m afraid I’m going to fuck up another whole decade,” she said. She has felt this way since 30 March, 2005, the day her husband, Jim, died at the age of 42. Price bears the weight of remembering their wedding on Saturday, 1 March 2003, in the house she had lived in for most of her life in Los Angeles, just before her parents sold it, as heavily as she remembers seeing Jim’s empty, wide-open eyes after he suffered a major stroke, had fallen into a coma and been put on life support on Friday, 25 March 2005.

It seems that perfect memory isn’t quite the blessing you’d expect.

The importance of forgetting

I propose that forgetting is just as important to the process of learning as recall. As the world changes faster and more unpredictably, attachment to ideas and paradigms of the past becomes more and more of a liability.

Contrast this with most books and courses on “accelerated learning,” which tend to offer two kinds of approaches:

#1 Increase the flow of information entering the brain

This leads to techniques like spritzing, listening to audiobooks on 2x speed, speed reading, focusing on already highly condensed sources, blocking distractions, deep focus, and biaural beats.

#2 Improve memory and recall of this information

This leads to techniques like spaced repetition, memory palaces, mnemonics, music and rhyming, acronyms, and mindmapping.

All these techniques work. And they completely miss the point. They both operate with the same misguided metaphor: the mind as an empty vessel. You fill it with information like filling a jug with water, which you can then retrieve and put to use later. With this framing, your goal is to maximize how much you can get in, and how much you can take out.

But there’s a fundamental difference between a mind and a static container like a jug of water or a filing cabinet: a mind can not just store things; it can take action. And taking action is where true learning actually takes place.

Here’s the problem: the more we optimize for storage, the more we interfere with action. The more information we try to consume, meticulously catalogue, and obsessively review, the less time and space remain for the actions that matter: application, implementation, experimentation, conversation, immersion, experience, collaboration, making mistakes.

Learning is not an activity, process, or outcome that you can dial in and optimize to perfection. It is an emergent phenomenon, like consciousness, attention, or love. These states become harder and harder to achieve by trying to force them, a phenomenon known as hyper-intention.

The truth is, we don’t need to “accelerate” or “improve” the way our mind learns — that is what it evolved to do. All day, all night, whether you’re working or resting, talking or listening, focused or mind-wandering — your brain never stops drawing relationships, making connections, and noticing correlations. You couldn’t stop learning if you wanted to.

Knowing that our brain is continuously collecting information, our goal switches from remembering as much as possible, to forgetting as much as possible.

The information bottleneck

Contrast this dim view of perfect memory with this article on new deep learning techniques in artificial intelligence. Specifically, a new theory called the “information bottleneck.”

The basic question researchers were trying to answer was, how do you decide which are the most relevant features of a given piece of information? When you hear someone speak a sentence, how do you know to ignore their accent, breathing sounds, background noise, and even words you didn’t quite catch, and still receive the gist of the message? It is a problem fundamental to artificial intelligence research, since computers will tend to give equal weight to all these inputs, and thus end up thoroughly confused.

It turns out, our highly constrained bandwidth for absorbing information is not a hindrance, but key to our ability to perform this feat. What our brain does is discard as much of the incoming noisy data as possible, reducing the amount of data it has to track and process. In other words, our brain’s ability to “forget” as much information as quickly as possible is what allows us to focus on the core message.

This is also how advanced new deep learning techniques work. Take for example an algorithm being trained to recognize images of dogs. A set of training data (thousands of dog photos) is fed into the algorithm, and a cascade of firing activity sweeps upward through layers of artificial neurons. When the signal reaches the top layer, the final firing pattern is compared to a correct label for the image — “dog” or “no dog.” Any difference between the final pattern and the correct pattern are “back-propagated” down the layers. Like a teacher correcting an exam and handing it back, the algorithm strengthens or weakens the network’s connections to make it better at producing the correct label next time.

This process is divided into two parts: in an initial “fitting” phase, the algorithm “memorizes” as much of the training data as possible. It tries to learn as much as possible about how to assign the correct labels. This is followed by a much longer compression phase, during which it gets better at generalizing what it has learned to new images it hasn’t seen before.

The key to this compression phase is the rapid shedding of noisy data, holding onto only the strongest correlations. For example, over time the algorithm will weaken connections between photos of dogs and houses, since most photos don’t contain both. It might at the same time strengthen connections between “dogs” and “fur,” since that is a stronger correlation. It is the “forgetting of the specifics,” the researchers argue, that enables the algorithm to learn general concepts, not just memorize millions of photos. Experiments show that deep learning algorithms rapidly improve their performance at generalization only in the compression phase.

The key to generalizing the information we consume — to learning — is strictly limiting the incoming flow of information we consume in the first place, AND then forgetting as much of the extraneous detail as soon as we can. Sure, we lose some detail, but detail is not what the brain is best at anyway. It is best at making meaning, at finding order in chaos, at seeing the signal in the noise.

This paper on the role of forgetting in learning used problem-solving algorithms to determine exactly how much forgetting was optimal. Using a series of experiments testing different hypotheses, they found that the optimal strategy involved learning a large body of knowledge initially, followed by random forgetting of approximately 90% of the knowledge acquired. In other words, performance improved as knowledge was forgotten, right up until the 90% mark, after which it rapidly deteriorated.

Strikingly, they found that this was true even if that 90% included problem-solving routines known to be correct and useful. Trying to “forget” only the least useful knowledge also didn’t help — random forgetting performed far better. The researchers used these results to argue for the existence of “knowledge of negative value” — forgetting it actually adds value.

Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible — it is a method for forgetting as much as possible. For offloading as much of your thinking as possible, leaving room for imagination, creativity, and mind-wandering. Preserving the lower layers provides a safety net that gives you the confidence to reduce a text by an order of magnitude with each pass. You are free to strike out boldly on the trail of a hidden core message, knowing that you can walk it back to previous layers if you make a mistake or get lost.

Minimizing cognitive load

How does Progressive Summarization help you offload as much of your thinking as possible? By minimizing the cognitive burden of interacting with information at all stages — initial consumption, review, and retrieval.

Cognitive load theory (CLT) was developed in the late 1980s by John Sweller, while studying problem solving and learning in children. He looked at how different kinds of tasks placed different demands on people’s working memory. The more complex and difficult the task, the higher the “cognitive load” it placed on the learner, and the greater the perceived mental effort required to complete it. He believed the design of educational materials could greatly reduce the cognitive load on learners, contributing to great advances in instructional design.

CLT proposes that there are three kinds of cognitive load when it comes to learning:

Inherent: the inherent difficulty of the topic (adding 2+2 vs. solving a differential equation, for example)Extraneous cognitive load: the design or presentation of instructional materials (showing a student a picture of a square vs. trying to explain it verbally, for example)Germane cognitive load: effort put into creating a permanent store of knowledge (such as notes, outlines, diagrams, categories, or lists)

Instructional design, inspired by CLT, focuses on two goals:

Reducing inherent load by breaking information into small parts which can be learned in isolation, and then reassembled into larger wholesRedirecting extraneous load into germane load (i.e. focusing learner’s attention on the construction of permanent stores of knowledge)

P.S. accomplishes both objectives.

It reduces the inherent difficulty of the topic you’re reading about by eliminating the necessity of understanding it completely upfront. It instead treats each paragraph as a small, self-contained unit. Your only goal is to surface the key point in each “chunk” — each chapter, section, paragraph, and sentence — leaving it to your future self to figure out how to string those insights together.

It also helps redirect extraneous load into germane load, by saving all these chunks in a permanent store of knowledge, like a software program. You no longer have to hold in your head all the previous points in a text, and fit each new point into that structure on the fly. You dedicate your effort to constructing small chunks of permanent knowledge, which will be saved for later review.

But reducing cognitive load isn’t just about making learning easier. As learning becomes easier, it also becomes faster, better, deeper, and stronger.

Recall as inhibition

Why is minimizing cognitive load so important to making learning deeper and stronger?

Because new learning can be impaired when a reader is trying to remember too many things at once. The more bandwidth being used for remembering and memorizing, the less bandwidth is available for understanding, analyzing, interpreting, contextualizing, questioning, and absorbing in any given period of time. Like a bursting hard drive slows down a computer with even the fastest RAM, a brain crammed full of facts and figures starts to slow down even the smartest person.

This blog post describes recent research on what is known as “proactive inhibition of memory formation.” Offloading our thinking to an external tool lowers the brain’s workload as it encounters new information. In the experiments above, telling participants they didn’t have to remember a list of items enhanced their memory for a second list of items.

At first, offloading your thinking seems to cause you to remember less. Especially if you do it immediately, as you read, such as with highlighting. The ideas seem to jump directly from the page to your notes, barely touching your brain. But in the long run, you actually end up remembering more. Being able to frictionlessly hand off highlighted passages to an external tool, free of the anxiety that comes with keeping many balls in the air, you’re free to encounter the next idea with an empty mind. If it’s compelling, it will stick, regardless of any fancy memorization techniques you may think you need.

The more you try to memorize what’s in any given book, the less bandwidth left over for seeing the patterns across them

Your attachment to what you already know may actually interfere with your ability to understand new ideas. Clinging to our notecards, diagrams, and memorization schemes, we may be missing out on simply being present. Carefree immersion is, after all, how children learn. And they are the best learners in the world.

Training your intuition

Technology has given us the ability to “remember everything.” Coming from a legacy of information scarcity, this feels like a huge blessing. But it’s clear the blessing has become a curse. Our brains and our bodies are breaking under the strain of constant, high-volume, 24/7 information flows.

We must transition from knowledge hoarders to knowledge curators. We must learn how to frame our options about what to read, watch, and review in a way that restricts what we pay attention to, so we can see clearly instead of being overwhelmed.

What is being called into question is the very purpose of learning. What is learning for, now that we can access any knowledge on demand?

Learning is no longer about accumulating data points, but training our algorithm. Our algorithm is our intuition — our felt sense about what matters, what is relevant, what is interesting, and what is important, even if we’ve never seen it before and can’t explain why we like it.

What’s interesting is that, just like the deep learning experiments mentioned above, we still need massive amounts of data for the initial training phase. In other words, we need diverse, intense, personal experience. But 90% of the data we collect through these experiences can be ignored, discarded, or forgotten. What is left over is wisdom — the distilled nuggets of insight that, when deployed in the real world by someone who knows how to use them, can uncompress into dazzling feats of accomplishment. These nuggets of wisdom apply across a wide range of situations, can be communicated from person to person, and even last for centuries as timeless works of art.

Progressive Summarization is about using the information you consume as training data for your intuition. You can consume a lot more, because you’re able to continuously offload it. But more importantly, even if you lost all that data, you would still be left with the greatest prize: who you’ve become and what you’re sensitive to as a result of the diversity and depth of your personal experience.

The new purpose of learning is to enable you to adapt, as the pace of change continues to accelerate and the amount of uncertainty in the world continues to spiral upward. This occurs at every level: adapting your lifestyle to fit changing societal conditions; adapting your productivity to fit changing workplace norms; adapting your communication style to fit new kinds of collaboration; adapting your thinking process to fit new ways of solving problems. It applies right down to the most narrow tasks — the hardest part about writing this article were the mental gymnastics I had to perform to not get stuck on my assumptions about what I was trying to say.

Making a dent in a universe that keeps changing shape increasingly requires working on projects and problems that are FAR bigger than you can hold in your head. The challenges of our time are vast and cross the disciplinary boundaries that experts limit themselves to. We need people who can hold the context of two or more completely different fields in their heads at once, and then apply their highly trained intuition to finding patterns and hidden connections.

A lot of people sense this intuitively, but their attempts to memorize and to recall all this context are futile. There’s simply way too much to know. And in the meantime you get frazzled, overwhelmed, and isolated attempting to do so. This is how we are missing some of our best and brightest minds, lost in their organizational systems as the world falls to pieces.

What we need is people who know how to recruit networks to “know” for them. Networks of people, objects, images, computers, communities, relationships, and places. To connect, unite, inspire, and facilitate collaboration between these networks.

And what does that take? It takes courage, to let go of the security of knowing everything ourselves. It takes vulnerability, to depend on others for our progress and success. It takes presence, noticing what we notice and being willing to bet on it before we know exactly why. It takes curiosity, being willing to ask questions that don’t yet have answers, or any reasonable path to an answer. It takes pushing through our assumptions about how learning should look to get what we know in the hands of someone who needs it, right now.

https://medium.com/media/21622decf4be93b9713b03dcb1e36ee9/href

Subscribe to Praxis , my members-only publication exploring the future of productivity, for just $5/month. Or follow via email , Twitter , Facebook , LinkedIn , or  YouTube .

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5

Progressive Summarization V: The Faster You Forget, The Faster You Learn was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Beyond the Orange Curtain — Adventures of an Orange County Kid in South America

I’ve republished my very first ebook from 2011: click here to buy on Amazon.

From the 2018 Foreword

I’m republishing this book because it directly addresses a fundamental barrier I see a lot of people struggle with: the intense fear and self-doubt around releasing their work to the world.

It took me a long time to really get how much of a barrier this is, because I come from a family of artists and performers. My father is a professional artist, whose paintings covered every wall of our home growing up. My mother is a singer and classical guitarist, and seeing her on stage at church every Sunday felt like the most natural thing in the world. Art, music, design, culture, and the performing arts were the ever-present backdrop to my childhood. Showing your art to others was an almost weekly routine.

I believe that this fear and self-doubt around publishing our work is reinforced by the way we tell the narrative of success. We like prodigies, with no past and no history, coming from nowhere to take the world by storm. They serve as mythic heroes, allowing us to bask vicariously in the light of fulfilled potential, which slightly eases the discomfort that we might not be reaching our own.

The narrative of success is so powerful, it becomes self-perpetuating. Those of us seeking success are encouraged, in a hundred ways large and small, to make the narrative fit. It makes it easier to get attention, and we could sure use a break.

But there is an impact. To prove we are on the chosen path, we believe we have to make success happen in a short period of time. So we delay starting until everything is “ready.” I see people holding back their work for years out of fear of the 1% who will criticize it, thus denying the other 99% of the fruits of their labor. They polish everything to perfection because they think they’ll only get one shot. And once they do start, the clock is ticking, so they are willing to trade anything for hypergrowth — their health, relationships, communities, balance, and self-respect.

But all this is the opposite of what the path to success really looks like. The path is slow and inelegant and rarely makes any sense. The whole thing is messy as hell. It takes one step back for every two steps forward (and occasionally five steps back). You have to give up being right again and again until you’re just sick of not being right. You have to push through walls you preferred to lean on, ask questions you would have preferred to answer, listen when you just want to be heard. It requires being the change you want to see, not just pointing it out politely.

Once we arrive at some level of success, it is so tempting to hide the evidence of all this mess. To delist the first YouTube videos, unpublish the early blog posts, and let those first few jobs slide off the end of the resume. And thus the narrative is preserved.

I think this does a disservice to the people just starting out in their careers and businesses. They need to see the early stuff. They need to see how far you came and how fast. They need to see your mistakes and how much they taught you. None of this makes it any easier. But it does make it possible, and that makes all the difference.

Scrolling through the archives of this blog, it might appear that I suddenly decided to start writing in August of 2014.

Here’s the real story.

Growing up with four siblings, I was always the uncreative one. I played the piano, but not well. I was part of a kids dance troupe, but didn’t enjoy it. I was known from the youngest age for my advanced organizational skills — I preferred organizing my Lego blocks to playing with them — but it would be a long time before I found a way to express my creativity through that.

Writing was my salvation. I wrote furiously, on any and every topic. I used to send my Bible study small group leader long, impassioned emails with my thoughts on religion, spirituality, and truth. I filled journals upon journals. I was never a quick thinker, but a deep one. The slow, considered process of writing matched perfectly the pace and tempo of my thoughts.

The first time I noticed I could have an impact with my writing was in 1998, at the age of 13, when my family moved to a small town in the mountains of southern Brazil for a year. My mother is Brazilian, and they wanted us to learn the language while we were still young.

We had so many adventures roaming the country in our little station wagon. I began writing stories about these adventures to our family and friends back home to keep them updated (here’s an example). The stories were a hit, and the praise I received confirmed for me that I could be good at this, not just enjoy it.

Fast forward 8 years, and I found myself once again in South America. I was studying abroad for a year in two different Brazilian cities, and started a free Blogger site to write about my experiences. I can still remember installing a little geotracker widget in the sidebar of my blog, and watching with astonishment as pings came in from every corner of the globe.

I submitted one of my posts to a popular blog called Rio Gringa, written by an American woman living and working in Rio de Janeiro. She published it, and I can still remember my heartbeat pounding in my ears as the first comments started arriving. I learned that day that my writing could make an impact beyond my personal circle of family and friends.

A couple years later, I turned that blog into this ebook. The possibility had never occurred to me, until I discovered a service called Blurb. They provided an integrated end-to-end solution, “slurping” blog posts into an ebook format using their software, and also taking care of printing and digital distribution.

All the writing was done. It just required a once-over for typos, some headings and chapter titles, and a cover. Putting these elements in place one by one, making editorial and design decisions, I felt a new identity taking shape — I could be a creator, a maker, a writer. I could take my work all the way to completion. I didn’t need anyone’s permission.

The fundamental barrier I had to break through was believing that it mattered whether my work made its way out into the world. The voice of self-doubt rang in my ears, questioning “Who cares?” and “Who do you think you are?”

I didn’t dare sell the book on its merits. It felt selfish and arrogant to do so. But I found a way around my fear. At the time, I was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine. I used the book as a fundraiser, promising that all proceeds would go to the youth summer camps we organized each year. This altruistic purpose gave me the courage to ask for the sale. With the help of social media, I asked everyone I knew to purchase the book.

Amazingly, I raised almost $3,000. That money went to founding Projects Bring Change, a special program within the summer camps teaching basic organization, project management, and community service skills to a small group of the most engaged campers. I ran the program three times, with each group organizing and executing a community service project within a week’s time.

PBC taught me the enormous value of such foundational skills in making an impact on people and their communities, but also how difficult it is to teach them effectively. I would pick up this thread again several years later when I started Forte Labs. It turns out the elite creative professionals of San Francisco struggle just as much with their projects as the youth of Eastern Ukraine.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because the blog is long gone, but this ebook remains, in printed and virtual form. Everyone has valuable and transformative experiences, but few take away tangible artifacts that they can show off in portfolios, use as building blocks in future projects, and even offer as online information products.

As citizens of the digital age, we produce huge amounts of information every day. We can’t help it. It accumulates in our email, in our computer folders, in our photo apps, in our digital notes. Every project we complete produces gigabytes of valuable content — documents, plans, ideas, videos, brainstorms, mindmaps, mockups, photos, designs, wireframes, web clippings, prototypes.

What’s missing is bringing it that last 10% over the finish line. What’s missing is packaging it up and putting a bow on it, so others know how to find it and understand what it offers. What’s missing is a core set of skills, common in the performing and visual arts but that only rarely find their way into the workplace, for converging on a final product. Those skills are what I’m trying to impart through Building a Second Brain.

My hope is that this book will demonstrate what an intermediate step looks like on the path to building a fulfilling career or business. You’ll notice many mistakes, immature opinions, and naive dreams. But I hope you’ll also notice the seeds of insight, the maker-in-training, the young man eager to make something of his experiences.

Reading these stories is immensely gratifying for me. It reminds me of how much I’ve learned, how much I’ve overcome, and how many have loved me and contributed to me over the years. And that’s the thing that makes this all worthwhile: even if you never actually distribute or promote or sell your work, it’s still worth creating it.

Self-expression is not merely a means to an end. It offers the possibility of being known and understood, even for just a moment. And that’s enough, because a fleeting moment is all we have in this life.

I hope you enjoy it. As before, 100% of proceeds will go to youth leadership and civic engagement programs in Ukraine.

https://medium.com/media/21622decf4be93b9713b03dcb1e36ee9/href

Subscribe to Praxis , my members-only publication exploring the future of productivity, for just $5/month. Or follow via email , Twitter , Facebook , LinkedIn , or  YouTube .

Beyond the Orange Curtain — Adventures of an Orange County Kid in South America was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.