Tiago Forte's Blog, page 50

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…

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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…

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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…

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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.

A Skeptic Goes to the Landmark Forum

Note: The views expressed on this blog are my personal views and are not the views of Landmark.

In September of 2016 I completed a weekend seminar called the Landmark Forum in San Francisco.

It took three close friends, recommending it to me in three separate conversations, to get me there. I was very skeptical that a self-help seminar had anything to teach me, but decided it couldn’t hurt to check out one of the most popular training programs in the world. I have a training business, and I figured I could write it off as competitive research, if nothing else.

My first experiences with Landmark were off-putting, to put it charitably. The people who greeted me the first morning were suspiciously happy. The marketing was comically corny, models in stock photos smiling back from shiny brochures.

Walking into a room of about 150 people, I was greeted with the following statements written on a big poster:

In the forum, you will bring forth the presence of a New Realm of Possibility for yourself and your life.

Inside this New Realm of Possibility:

— The constraints the past imposes on your view of life disappear. A new view of life emerges

— New possibilities for being call you powerfully into being

— New openings for action call you powerfully into action

— The experience of being alive transforms

I was confused. I’d never encountered so many words with so little concrete meaning. I wrote them in my notebook to decipher later. Despite the initial worrying signs, I decided I would go along for the ride for three days and an evening.

Day 1

The first “distinction” (or lesson) we learned was “stories.” It’s a familiar concept — that we create narratives to explain our life experiences. And then we forget that we were the ones that created those interpretations, and we live as if they are real.

These stories become the lenses through which we see, hear, and feel. Anything that confirms the story we latch on to as confirming evidence, and anything that doesn’t, we often dismiss. This pattern of seeing what we want to see and hearing what we want to hear is called having “blindspots.” What we miss because of our blindspots makes us suffer, holds us back from what we want in life, and suppresses our freedom, power, self-expression, and peace of mind (the four benefits that graduates of the program voted were the most impactful on their lives).

As I said, it’s a very familiar concept. In fact, everything I heard in the Forum was familiar. I can’t think of a single thing that I hadn’t heard before in a book, a course, or a talk of some kind.

But here is where Landmark is different — the conceptual lesson is just a starting point, not the main event. It is distilled down to the absolute minimum required to take action, instead of endlessly elaborated on. The Forum is designed to bring these concepts from “the stands,” where we sit passively as observers, and onto “the court” of our lives, where they become real.

The facilitator invited participants to go up to the mic with questions, comments, and challenges, and the stories started flowing. I was struck by how easy it was for me to see the stories of others, and how apparently difficult it was for them to see their own.

One woman had a story that her parents had abandoned her, working late every night at the convenience store they owned. After just a few gentle questions from the facilitator, she uncovered another perspective: that her parents had worked so hard for so many years only to provide for her and her sisters, who they loved more than anything else in the world.

Committed to her own interpretation, she’d resented them for years. Besides the distance in their relationship, there was a clear impact on her: every time she was on the verge of a promotion as a corporate executive in the pharmaceutical industry, she pulled back, because “committing too much” to her work raised the specter of “abandoning” her own kids.

Again and again, people revealed the powerful filters they had placed on their experience of life. One young woman sobbed as she recalled her father accusing her of shoplifting a small item at a grocery store when she was 9 years old. This one incident, burned in her memory as a child, outweighed years and years of her father’s care in her mind, informing her view of him as unloving and uncaring.

In paired sharing, I talked to a young man my own age who had been the youngest of 9 children, and the only one who hadn’t been physically abused. His story was that of the survivor — that he didn’t deserve to be spared, and was somehow culpable for what had happened to his siblings. Even after a brilliant career at some of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious companies, that story weighed on him. He was still living out the self-sacrificial script of a martyr, trying to make up for an imaginary debt he thought he owed.

We live our lives looking for evidence that our stories are true. We want to be right more than we want to be free. More than we want close and intimate relationships. If the story is “I’m not good enough,” then we’ll either try a bunch of things, all the while looking for evidence that the story is true; or we’ll try nothing, assuming it’s true. In either case, the story is confirmed.

By the end of day one, I was beginning to suspect I might have some stories of my own.

Maybe.

Day 2

This period of my life was a hard time. After three years of hard work on Forte Labs, I had the business of my dreams. And the business of my dreams was failing.

I had turned away from online courses after my second course, the first one I’d created with original content, hadn’t met sales expectations. The “story” I had made up to interpret that experience was that “online teaching simply isn’t profitable.” And that it especially isn’t profitable for me.

I began to pursue a series of other projects, taking on whatever I could to survive. The money was actually pretty good, and the clients prestigious, but it was missing what I loved the most — working directly with people on real challenges in their lives, especially people that couldn’t afford high-priced consulting and training.

I began to sink slowly into depression, using work to forget and to distract myself. I withdrew from my communities, from my friends, and even from my family, racing faster and faster toward goals I was sure would provide the satisfaction I was seeking. My health deteriorated, but I couldn’t find the motivation to change my lifestyle. I withdrew further, telling myself that I would return to my social life once things got better.

I remember one day walking to a local coffee shop when the cabin fever of working at home got unbearable. Walking up to the cashier to order my drink, I felt an intense wave of social anxiety, something I had never experienced before. I had become afraid of people. I had become afraid that someone would see how dysfunctional my life had become. I feared that they would point out what I deeply suspected — that I was a hypocrite, selling visions of professional success while my own life fell to pieces.

So I worked harder. I did more research, put in more hours, polished every nook and cranny of my online presence to a bright gloss. As bad as it was, I couldn’t face the alternative: that the business of my dreams had failed. It felt like if that happened, that I would have no future. Turning away from what was supposed to be the pinnacle of success, the only option I could see for myself was work that was less fulfilling, less interesting, and less rewarding.

As you can probably tell, this was all a big story. Not the lived experience, which was as real as anything. But the drama, the stark tradeoffs, the black-and-white thinking. It is when life becomes dull, restrictive, and threatening that you know you’re living in a story, not reality.

I sat in the Forum looking for a breakthrough that would help me bring my business back to life. And instead, I got my father, front and center in my mind. I kept trying to push the thought aside. My relationship with my father was fine.

Wasn’t it?

And slowly, as we talked and shared, the layers pealed back. I had a story that I was uniquely messed up, because of how my father had raised me. He had been too harsh, too judgmental, had failed to listen and to support me growing up. Because of that, my story went, I couldn’t have the self-confidence, self-acceptance, and happiness I craved.

This was, we soon learned, a “racket.” We blame others for things that happened in the past, making our case look as plausible and sympathetic as possible. We maintain lists of all the things our parents, our ex-’s, our former friends, and our ex-bosses did so, so wrong. We collect mountains of evidence supporting these judgments. But we are always innocent in our stories, victims of their inexcusable behavior.

The second distinction, of rackets, is that this blaming is often a pretense. It’s a way of concealing what’s really going on behind the scenes: we are getting a payoff. We get to be right (or make them wrong). We get to dominate them (or avoid their domination). We get to justify our behavior (or invalidate their behavior). We get to win (or make them lose). The ultimate purpose of a racket is to avoid responsibility.

A man blames his ex-wife for the failure of their marriage. But it is a pretense to justify his own less-than-stellar behavior in the relationship. A woman blames her lack of decisiveness for her business troubles, but it’s a pretense to protect her from ever having to take a real risk, to put something on the line (yes, you can have a racket against yourself). A recent college graduate blames the job market for not offering opportunities, but it’s just a distraction from the lack of preparation he hasn’t taken responsibility for (rackets don’t have to be against specific people). By selectively inflating the wrongdoing of others, our own responsibility is diminished in comparison.

The way out of the racket, with its sweet, juicy payoff, is to clearly see the cost. There is always a cost — love or affinity, vitality or wellbeing, satisfaction or self-expression. The cost ultimately boils down to the experience of aliveness. Over time, the payoff gets less and less enticing, and the cost grows steadily worse. Eventually we become like drug addicts, giving away much of what makes life worth living to buy even the tiniest amounts of self-justification.

I called my father, and followed the step-by-step format that we were coached through. I told him what I had been pretending: that he had “messed me up” and therefore my problems in life were his fault. I told him what that façade had been designed to conceal: that I had not taken responsibility for many areas of my own life, including my relationship to him as a son and a friend.

I told him the impact this had had on me: hiding things in my life that I didn’t think he’d approve of, silently judging him because I didn’t think he could handle what I had to say, avoiding rooms he was in because I couldn’t feel at ease with him around. The impact was that I had nothing more than a “cordial” relationship with the most important and influential man in my life.

I told my father that I loved him, with complete sincerity for perhaps the first time in my life. I told him that he had done a good job raising me into a man. And I thanked him for being the source of my life.

Saying these words was incredibly difficult. I had to choke them out through tears. As I said what I had to say, I had a vivid image in my mind of handing over my most precious treasure chest. My resentments and justifications stored inside like prized jewels. As I pushed it over, the chest opened, and there was nothing but trash inside.

Saying what I had to say, it felt like a thousand pound weight being lifted off my chest. I understood at that moment the saying, “Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” You don’t stop resenting for their sake. You stop it for your own sake.

Day 3

I’m not going to give away what happens on Day 3. I’ve tried, and it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever without having lived it. The Forum is a personal discovery, unique to each person, not a concept to be dissected and analyzed.

By day three, you have the foundation and the language as a group to move at a breathtaking pace. The paradigm-shifting moments I had looked forward to having every year or two with my own efforts happened about every hour.

I got clear that what was getting in my way was my constant desire to change. Trying to fix myself and everyone around me, I was blinded to how perfect we already are. Here and now, not someday or eventually.

I got clear that the only constraints I face are the ones in my stories. And I am the one telling them. I am the source of the language that shapes my experience, which means I can change it. I get to say how my life goes, and what kind of life is available to me.

Walking out of that conference room, I felt unleashed.

Day 4

I walked away from the Landmark Forum with a whole new relationship with my father as my biggest breakthrough.

It’s been almost a year and a half, and it’s only gotten better since then. He’s no longer a threat to me, no longer an angry and closed-minded curmudgeon I have to contain and avoid. He’s a friend and a partner in life. We can tell each other anything, even on topics where we don’t agree.

That would have been a pretty good result from a weekend, but what happened next took me by surprise.

I went back to my business, and everything started going differently. Meetings I’d dreaded started turning into meaningful conversations. Conversations that I hadn’t known how to navigate started turning into opportunities. Opportunities that I hadn’t been able to see before started turning into projects.

The lens I’d held up for my father had also been skewing my view of everyone else. I no longer sat down with an executive or a training manager already on the defensive, already expecting them not to like what I had to say. I actually started getting curious about what was going on over there, with them, instead of circling around my own head. I was able to see people simply as people, no better or worse than me, but with a need I could help with.

Over the next few months, I rebuilt my life. I opened myself up to my communities, which had been waiting there all along. I expressed what I was going through to my girlfriend, my friends, and my family, who in retrospect, had always been listening. I looked at my business with clearer eyes, letting go of projects that I’d taken on to reinforce my ego or avoid failure.

Landmark offers a whole curriculum of courses, on everything from communication to integrity to money to leadership. You get to choose your own adventure. A couple months later I took the Advanced Course, the followup to the Forum. While the Forum is about freeing you from your past, the Advanced Course has you design a new future.

The day after I finished the Advanced Course, on Monday morning at 8am, I walked into a Whole Foods cafe in Oakland and wrote out this note. This was the future I had designed in the seminar. It was to be a new online course, on note-taking and personal knowledge management, that I’d been thinking about for several years but had never been able to get started on.

I could see now the story that had been running in the background: that my success depended on me doing everything perfectly. This story had me endlessly revising and polishing my writing and my products, never convinced that they were quite good enough. It had me doing every last little thing myself, not asking for and sometimes even refusing offers of help (“They won’t do it right”). I had the experience of working harder and harder to try and “catch up” to an impossible standard I’d set for myself, but feeling like I was falling further and further behind. The piling debt and unpaid taxes weren’t the worst consequence of my unyielding perfectionism — it was the experience of myself as constantly stressed, anxious, self-critical, and resigned that it would ever change.

I decided to write a new story for myself: that I could work closely with others, with all the vulnerability, risk, and messiness that entails. I decided that people would no longer be threats to me, but rather the most precious opportunities in my business and my life.

I got to work on my new course that day, but in a completely different way than I had before — holing up for weeks and weeks of solitary work confined in my apartment. The first thing I did was ask 10 of my followers to work with me to develop it, meeting with me for 1 hour every week for 6 weeks. Each week I would concentrate on producing just one unit of material, and showing it to them for feedback. The perfectionism that had kept content development clenched tightly in my iron fist was, simply, gone. Those six weeks included some of the most gratifying, collaborative conversations of my career.

Even after 6 weeks, I only got to about 50% completion. There were too many unknowns to be able to make all the decisions upfront, and I needed to call on another group for help. I decided to start selling the course before it was finished, and at a price ten times the usual one: $500 instead of $50. I remember sitting at my computer as sales began, terrified that no one would even visit the page, much less pay me that much money for an incomplete product.

But 50 people took a bet on me. With their help, I completed the course, finalizing each week’s content based on their real-time feedback. I was open and transparent about what was missing and where I wasn’t sure. And not only did I not die from revealing something imperfect — my customers unanimously agreed that “seeing how the sausage was made” taught them as much as the course itself.

I’d discovered a new “way of being” — connected, vulnerable, fearless, generous. And that is far more valuable than any habit, tactic, or framework.

Today

That new future has become my present. I did three more cohorts of the course, making huge improvements each time. I hired a course manager and later, coaches, making it into a world-class training for a new way of working. In 2017 I nearly quadrupled the previous year’s income, while having far more fun, making many new friends and collaborators, and staying connected to my body, my communities, and my purpose in the world.

One year later, Building a Second Brain has become a movement. We launched a self-paced version, which will allow many times the number of people to learn the material. I have an editor, a lawyer, and a group of reviewers supporting me as I turn it into a book. I work with a decentralized, remote team of 4 outstanding people, driving toward our goal of transforming how people work.

How can I explain how all this happened? I had all the content, all the skills, all the tools, all the contacts, and all the knowledge I needed. There was no fundamental insight I had to have, or new framework with step-by-step instructions. The Forum isn’t about giving you something new — it’s about taking away what’s in the way.

I’ve become a passionate advocate of the work that Landmark is doing. I know of nothing that comes remotely close in its ability to change lives in so short a time. About a dozen of my friends and family have taken it since then. Every one has come back to thank me for sharing with them one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives (especially the skeptical ones).

The people I’ve met there have become some of my closest friends, and more recently, collaborators. I’ve seen personal miracles time and time again, from nothing more than having conversations about our lives and what’s important to us. I’ve had to question everything I thought I knew about humans, and how much can change in how short a timeframe. That questioning has been challenging at times, but it has left me with a vastly expanded sense of what is possible.

I’ve waited a long time to write about my experiences at Landmark. The ones I’ve included here are just a drop in the bucket. I waited to tell this story because I wanted to see if the results would last. I wanted to be sure it wasn’t just a temporary emotional high, before putting my reputation behind it.

At this point, I am absolutely convinced that it works, that it lasts, and that this is some of the most important education going on in the world today. I recommend the Forum above my own courses and programs. The ability to see past your own interpretations and take full responsibility for your experience are absolutely fundamental to changing how you work, but go far beyond productivity. The work that Landmark does enables so many kinds of learning, growth, and change, my own work included.

There are a lot of personal growth experiences I’ve benefited from, as I’ve written about before on this blog. But making a real impact on this world is going to require something different. Most people can’t take 10 days off for a silent meditation retreat, or spend thousands of dollars for a week at Burning Man. Most will not go on Ayahuasca excursions in Peru or float in sensory deprivation immersion tanks. Those are priceless experiences, but we need something more integrated into daily life. Something that happens in normal, everyday conversations and relationships, and that we can participate in after work and on weekends. And that is the Landmark Forum.

I’m hosting a live Zoom call next week for anyone who wants more information. I’ll answer any questions you have and share more of my experience, if you’d like. I’ll invite several other graduates to attend as well, both people I’ve met there, and people from my life that have taken it on my recommendation.

Register here to receive a calendar invite for a Zoom call on February 15 from 9–10am Pacific

The best way to see what the Forum is about is to attend a 3-hour introduction. Visit this page for more information and to find local times and addresses.

I especially recommend attending a “Special Evening,” a larger introduction led by a Forum Leader periodically in major cities. These sessions are facilitated by the people who actually lead the Forum, and use many of the same formats and distinctions, so you can get a sense of what it’s like.

The next Special Evening in San Francisco is on Feb. 21 (7–10pm at 75 Broadway). It will be led by Larry Pearson, one of the most remarkable leaders I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. I won’t be there, but let me know (tiago@fortelabs.co) if you’re going and I can have a friend meet you.

I will also be hosting a business introduction, geared specifically for creating breakthroughs at work and in business, at the Landmark Center in San Francisco (75 Broadway) on Wednesday, Feb. 28, 7–10pm. Drop your email below if you want to be notified of this and other introductions I’m organizing.

https://medium.com/media/84b0b2b7c0166e76167e7cbbf098c40e/href

Note: The views expressed on this blog are my personal views and are not the views of Landmark.

A Skeptic Goes to the Landmark Forum was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Building a Second Brain in One Tweet

Here’s how participants of Building a Second Brain , our online course on digital note-taking and personal knowledge management, described the course in one tweet (140 characters or less):

How to take digital notes, increase their value, store them for easy retrieval, and use them for projects and/or to create new connections.

— Greg Scholes

BASB is about making and using notes effectively in your work and life. It enhances your edge and intellectual capital.

— Mikael Suomela

Learning a simple and enjoyable process of specific actions you take to transform information overload into useful creative output.

— Moritz Bierling

An approach to PKM & GTD that integrates ideas from complexity, Zen, and lean to build a modern and useful system for shipping creative work.

— Joseph Kelly

Organizing information inputs (digital or otherwise) to make it available to efficiently support creative work.

— Drew Levy

Freeing the mind to focus on knowledge capture & management rather than task management by building a reliable habit structure.

— Dawn Williams

Collecting all relevant knowledge that I come across in a simple system that allows me quick and easy access.

— Jimmy Conway

Taking charge of your knowledge base so you can leverage it more efficiently.

— David Lukas

How to effectively apply note taking and content summarization strategies for increased productivity and workflow.

— Paul Solt

How to use Evernote to more effectively create value from information and your ideas

— Matthew Hamilton

Nominally, a system of writing & storing discoverable notes. Really though, it’s about re-imagining your relationship to your knowledge work.

— Rick Chafe

Creating a personal system to systematically create, obtain, organize, condense, and retrieve notes for recombination of ideas and concepts.

— Sang Hyo Lee

How can everyday mundane actions, structures and stances be molded into a personal emerging reflection and knowledge system?

— Jan-Philipp Hopf

How to turn notes from a pile of stuff into a living, improving knowledge & creativity source.

— Brandon Hudgeons

Getting the past, present, and future under control using brain-enhancing strategies and tools.

— Steve Parker

Drawing in data, remixing that data within and without into rich connections. Shaping that data as powerful perspectives to output.

— Damon Cook

BASB presents new ways of thinking about capturing flows of information and converting them into valuable knowledge.

— Evan Deaubl

Create a personal knowledge management system to Capture/Store, Organize and Retrieve ideas for creative insight/breakthroughs .

— Leonard (Lennie) Davis

To have strategies in dealing with the flow of information and resurfacing old information for new projects.

— Alexandre Jesus

A life reset on thinking. It’s a how-to on creating a personal, digital library and extracting meaning into physical packets of information.

— Ben Hazlerig

Notes — distillation, recall, organization, intersection.

— Richard Miller

Develop a system to manage all your information inputs and turn it into your best creative output.

— Jean-Francois Couture

Learning the ability to leverage digital note taking to create more value, creativity, and perspectives.

— Gjermund Bjaanes

Setting up a management process for your personal knowledge so that it is capture-able, retrievable and valuable both now and in the future.

— Gabe Bassin

Using digital tools and a well-designed workflow you create a 2nd brain to off-load organization, creative thinking, & idea generation.

— Wess Daniels

Managing reference material for actionability and for generating new ideas.

— Thomas McMurphy

BASB de-bottlenecks your main constraint, your brain, creating insights that help you chart your course in a complex world.

— Andreas Marinopoulos

It’s about a systematic approach to gather, store, process and prepare any information in a way to use it in future as fast as possible.

— Pavel Bubentsov

Constructing a PKM system to maximize focus on meaningful and purpose-driven work leading to a greater output of tangible projects.

— Jeffrey Golde

The course is about taking our stored knowledge and placing it into a dynamic system where it can be drawn up for use in new projects.

— Douglas Crane

BASB helps you exploit information collection so it’s the most useful for you at the right time.

— Angel Gonzalez

BASB provides a strategy for personal knowledge management that is robust, adaptable, and essential to thrive in a world of info overload.

— Graham Hawkes

A bootcamp for organising your projects, offloading them from your brain and 10xing the productivity using technology.

— Santhosh Guru

This course teaches you to retain, organize, synthesize, and remix the best of your knowledge.

— David Perell

How to systematically create connections where you never thought they would be.

— Kris Vockler

How to reframe your self-concept using reflection through digital notes to improve effectiveness of work and satisfaction from doing it.

— Joshua Daniel

For me it’s about organizing my thoughts in a systematic way that makes recall and re-assembly of those thoughts into ideas much easier.

— Michael Dorsey

Creativity on Demand.

— Mohammed Ali Vakil

Leveraging technology to increase organization & effectiveness and reduce cognitive burden by offloading tasks to your PKM system.

— Alex Hardy

I think this course is about realising the true potential of an individual for learning, thinking, and producing.

— Yasir Khan

Tweetably? BASB is about enabling creativity through the use of tools both intellectual and technological.

— Peter Shirley

Gaining greater clarity through notes.

— Zachary Sexton

Use notes to reflect yourself: see where you want to focus, what the steps are, how you’re progressing & draw new perspectives in the process.

— Callum Flack

Taking notes, organizing your notes, sharing them so that they become something bigger.

— Michael Fogleman

Combining theory and practice for PKM; putting your best ideas to work.

— Shruthi Jayaram

Building a Second Brain is about learning specific mindsets and techniques as it pertains to personal knowledge management.

— Corey Clippinger

Creating an actionable knowledge database.

— Thomas De Moor

A course that helps you manage your personal knowledge so you can become increasingly more productive over time.

— Yunzhe Zhou

Set up your reference information by capturing and organizing information in a way to enhance retrieval and leverage that info for new work.

— Michele Wiedemer

How to increase your creative output through better managing your ingestion & mobilization of knowledge.

— Nat Eliason

It’s about building a personal system for capturing, organizing and retrieving knowledge and about workflow to maintain it.

— Mikhail Miller

Having a structured approach for knowledge work that doesn’t rely on long stretches of uninterrupted time.

— Ellen König

How to take snapshots of the mind for future use.

— Chris Clark

Trusting in a system to take EVERYTHING on my mind and find a home for it — but teaching me how to get it back out again too…

— Rob Wilson

The course is about three basic elements of efficient knowledge management: how to consume it, organize it and then use it.

— Alex Sedgwick

BASB provides a roadmap and the necessary tools to challenge your previous methods of thinking and creates a format that enhances who you are.

— Chris Mazder

To learn more, check out our online bootcamp on Personal Knowledge Management, Building a Second Brain .

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 .

Building a Second Brain in One Tweet was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Interview on the Super Power U podcast

Check out my new interview with Lisa Betts-Lacroix on the Super Power U podcast below (38m). We talk about “creative productivity,” how I was deeply influenced by my artist father, and how I identify people’s “superpowers.”

You can find highlights and resources mentioned on the official podcast page.

Talk radio, podcasts and live radio on demand in 1 mobile app | Stitcher Web App

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 .

Interview on the Super Power U podcast was originally published in Praxis on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.