Tiago Forte's Blog, page 8

The PARA Method: The Simple System for Organizing Your Digital Life in Seconds

Imagine for a moment the perfect organizational system.

A system that told you exactly where to put every piece of information in your life – every document, file, note, agenda, outline, and bit of research – and exactly where to find it when you needed it.

Such a system would need to be incredibly easy to set up, and even easier to maintain. After all, only the simplest, most effortless habits endure long term.

It would need to be both flexible, adapting to your needs in different seasons of your life, but also comprehensive, so you can use it in every one of the many places where you store information, such as your computer’s file system, a cloud storage platform (e.g., Dropbox or Google Drive), or a digital notetaking app.

But most of all, the ideal organizational system would be one that leads directly to tangible benefits in your career and life. It would dramatically accelerate you toward completing the projects and achieving the goals that are most important to you.

In other words, the ultimate system for organizing your life is one that is actionable.

Instead of putting more obstacles in your way, postponing the actions that will make a difference, it would pull those actions closer and make them easier to start and finish.

After more than a decade of personal experimentation, teaching thousands of students, and coaching world-class professionals, I’ve developed such a system.

It’s called PARA – a simple, comprehensive, yet extremely flexible system for organizing any type of digital information across any platform.

I promise you that it will not only bring order to your life, but equip you with a set of tools for skillfully mastering the flow of information to achieve anything you set your mind to.

4 Categories to Encompass Your Entire Life

PARA is based on a simple observation: that there are only four categories that encompass all the information in your life.

You have projects you’re actively working on – short-term efforts (in your work or personal life) that you take on with a certain goal in mind. For example:

Complete webpage designBuy a new computerWrite research reportRenovate the bathroomFinish Spanish language courseSet up new living room furniture

You have areas of responsibility – important parts of your work and life that require ongoing attention. These might include:

Work responsibilities such as Marketing, Human Resources, Product Management, Research and Development, Direct Reports, or EngineeringPersonal responsibilities such as Health, Finances, Kids, Writing, Car, or Home

Then you have resources on a range of topics you’re interested in and learning about, such as:

Graphic designPersonal productivityOrganic gardeningCoffeeModern architectureWeb designJapanese languageFrench literatureNotetakingBreathworkHabit formationPhotographyMarketing assets

Finally, you have archives, which include anything from the previous three categories that is no longer active, but you might want to save for future reference:

Projects you’ve completed or put on holdAreas that are no longer active or relevantResources that you’re no longer interested in

And that’s it! Four top-level folders – Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives – each containing a small number of subfolders dedicated to each active project, area of responsibility, resource, and archive in your life.

It may be difficult to believe that a complex, modern human life like yours can be reduced to just four categories. It may feel like you have far more to deal with than can fit into such a simple system.

But that is exactly the point: if your organizational system is as complex as your life, then the demands of maintaining it will end up robbing you of the time and energy you need to live that life.

The system you use to organize information has to be so simple that it frees up your attention, instead of taking more of it. Your system has to give you time, not take time.

The Key Principle – Organizing Information By Your Projects And Goals

Most of us first learned how to organize information in school. We were taught to categorize our class notes, handouts, and study material by academic subject, such as Math, History, or Chemistry.

But then without realizing it, we took that same approach into adulthood. We continued to categorize our documents and files according to incredibly broad subjects like “Marketing,” “Psychology,” “Business,” or “Ideas.”

This makes zero sense in your post-academic career. In the workplace, there are no classes, no tests, no grades, and no diplomas. No teacher is going to tell you what to write down for the final exam, because there isn’t one.

What you do have, both at work and in life, are outcomes you are trying to achieve. You are trying to launch a new product, plan a family vacation, come to a crucial decision, find daycare in your neighborhood, publish a new piece of writing, or reach a quarterly sales number.

In the midst of your busy day, as you are trying to make these things happen, you absolutely do not have time to go rummaging through a vast category like “Psychology” to find the one piece of information you need.

Instead of organizing information according to broad subjects like in school, I advise you to organize it according to the projects and goals you are committed to right now. This is what it means to “organize by actionability,” a mantra I will return to again and again throughout this book.

When you sit down to work on a graphic design project, for example, you will need all the notes, documents, assets, and other material related to that project all in one place and ready to go.

That might seem obvious, yet it is exactly the opposite of what most people do. Most people tend to spread out all the relevant material in a dozen different places that would take them half an hour just to locate.

How do you make sure that all the material related to each project or goal is all in one place? You organize it that way in the first place. That way you’ll know exactly where to put everything, and exactly where to find it.

The Power of Organizing By Project

For several years, I worked as a productivity coach in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was the peak of the tech boom, and high-powered professionals from some of the world’s most influential companies were looking for any edge in their performance. I was happy to oblige.

I coached several executives at a well-known biotech firm in South San Francisco, on a beautiful campus overlooking the bay. I remember one beautiful spring day I was waiting for my next client, a Senior Director in charge of developing several new life-saving pharmaceuticals. 

Once he arrived, our coaching session started like every other, with a simple question of mine: “Do you have a project list?”

When working with a client as a productivity coach, one of the first things I will always ask them is to show me their project list. I need it to get a sense of what kind of work they do, their current workload, and what priorities and outcomes they are trying to move forward.

He said “Sure!” and, after jotting down a quick list from memory (the first warning sign), handed me a list like this:

Do you see the problem? Look again closely.

Not a single item on this list is a project, according to our earlier definition. Does “strategic planning” ever end for good? Is there ever a time when you can permanently cross off “vacations” from your list? Hopefully not!

Every item on this list is, in fact, an area of responsibility. This might seem like semantics, but it’s anything but. I’ve learned that no matter how smart or driven you are, there are two critical things you cannot do until you break down your areas of responsibility into specific projects.

1. You Can’t Truly Know the Extent of Your Commitments

One of the most common complaints I hear from people is that they “have no bandwidth.” And I sympathize – how much of the time does it feel like you have way too much on your plate?

But as long as you view your work through the lens of areas, you’ll never quite know just how much is on your plate. Looking at the list above, how much of a workload does “Hiring” represent? It could be anything from a part-time hire every 6 months to filling 50 positions this quarter. 

There’s simply no way to know at a glance, and that uncertainty will manifest itself as every area feeling more burdensome than it really is.

Imagine if you identified each of the projects within Hiring, and kept that list in front of you every day. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to tell how much there is left to do, and what you should do next? For example:

2. You Can’t Connect Your Current Efforts to Your Long-Term Goals

One of the most challenging (but also rewarding) aspects of knowledge work is that it requires our creativity. And creativity can’t really be sustained without a sense of motivation. You can’t keep doing your best thinking and contributing your best ideas if you’re burned out and demoralized.

What does our motivation depend on? Mostly, on making consistent progress. We can endure quite a bit of stress and frustration in the short term if we know it’s leading somewhere.

Which brings us to our second problem: without a list of individual projects, you can’t connect your current efforts to your long-term goals. 

Look at the list above again. None of the items on it will end or change – that’s the definition of an area of responsibility, that it continues indefinitely. Now imagine the psychological effect of waking up week after week, month after month, and even year after year to the exact same list of never-ending responsibilities. No matter how hard you work, the endless horizon never seems to get any closer.

Honestly, I couldn’t design a better way to kill your motivation if I tried.

When you break down your responsibilities into bite-sized projects, you ensure that your project list is constantly turning over. This turnover creates a cadence of regular victories that you get to celebrate every time you successfully complete a project. Imagine how motivated and accomplished you’d feel by breaking out the broad area of “Events” into each individual event you’re running:

No matter how wide-ranging your responsibilities are, you can always break them down into smaller projects. And you must, if you want to know whether you’re actually making progress toward your goals. 

Getting Organized For the Life You Want to Lead

Using PARA is not just about creating a bunch of folders to put things in. 

It is about identifying the structure of your work and life—what you are committed to, what you want to change, and where you want to go. It is about organizing information in such a way that it supports and calls into being the future life you want to lead. 

So much of what we call “organizing” is essentially procrastination in disguise. We tell ourselves we’re “getting ready” or “doing research,” pretending like it’s progress. When in reality, we are seeking any little thing we can polish or tidy to avoid having to face the task we are dreading.

PARA cuts through this facade, giving us a method for organizing anything that is so radically simple, there is no excuse and nothing left to do except the next essential step. It is a minimalistic way to add just enough order to your environment that you have the clarity to move forward, and no more.

There are other more complex, sophisticated, and specialized ways of organizing information out there, but PARA is the only one that stands the test of time because it gives you more time than it takes.

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

The post The PARA Method: The Simple System for Organizing Your Digital Life in Seconds appeared first on Forte Labs.

The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information

Imagine for a moment the perfect organizational system.

A system that told you exactly where to put every piece of information in your life – every document, file, note, agenda, outline, and bit of research – and exactly where to find it when you needed it.

Such a system would need to be incredibly easy to set up, and even easier to maintain. After all, only the simplest, most effortless habits endure long term.

It would need to be both flexible, adapting to your needs in different seasons of your life, but also comprehensive, so you can use it in every one of the many places where you store information, such as your computer’s file system, a cloud storage platform (e.g., Dropbox or Google Drive), or a digital notetaking app.

But most of all, the ideal organizational system would be one that leads directly to tangible benefits in your career and life. It would dramatically accelerate you toward completing the projects and achieving the goals that are most important to you.

In other words, the ultimate system for organizing your life is one that is actionable.

Instead of putting more obstacles in your way, postponing the actions that will make a difference, it would pull those actions closer and make them easier to start and finish.

After more than a decade of personal experimentation, teaching thousands of students, and coaching world-class professionals, I’ve developed such a system.

It’s called PARA – a simple, comprehensive, yet extremely flexible system for organizing any type of digital information across any platform.

I promise you that it will not only bring order to your life, but equip you with a set of tools for skillfully mastering the flow of information to achieve anything you set your mind to.

4 Categories to Encompass Your Entire Life

PARA is based on a simple observation: that there are only four categories that encompass all the information in your life.

You have projects you’re actively working on – short-term efforts (in your work or personal life) that you take on with a certain goal in mind. For example:

Complete webpage designBuy a new computerWrite research reportRenovate the bathroomFinish Spanish language courseSet up new living room furniture

You have areas of responsibility – important parts of your work and life that require ongoing attention. These might include:

Work responsibilities such as Marketing, Human Resources, Product Management, Research and Development, Direct Reports, or EngineeringPersonal responsibilities such as Health, Finances, Kids, Writing, Car, or Home

Then you have resources on a range of topics you’re interested in and learning about, such as:

Graphic designPersonal productivityOrganic gardeningCoffeeModern architectureWeb designJapanese languageFrench literatureNotetakingBreathworkHabit formationPhotographyMarketing assets

Finally, you have archives, which include anything from the previous three categories that is no longer active, but you might want to save for future reference:

Projects you’ve completed or put on holdAreas that are no longer active or relevantResources that you’re no longer interested in

And that’s it! Four top-level folders – Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives – each containing a small number of subfolders dedicated to each active project, area of responsibility, resource, and archive in your life.

It may be difficult to believe that a complex, modern human life like yours can be reduced to just four categories. It may feel like you have far more to deal with than can fit into such a simple system.

But that is exactly the point: if your organizational system is as complex as your life, then the demands of maintaining it will end up robbing you of the time and energy you need to live that life.

The system you use to organize information has to be so simple that it frees up your attention, instead of taking more of it. Your system has to give you time, not take time.

The Key Principle – Organizing Information By Your Projects And Goals

Most of us first learned how to organize information in school. We were taught to categorize our class notes, handouts, and study material by academic subject, such as Math, History, or Chemistry.

But then without realizing it, we took that same approach into adulthood. We continued to categorize our documents and files according to incredibly broad subjects like “Marketing,” “Psychology,” “Business,” or “Ideas.”

This makes zero sense in your post-academic career. In the workplace, there are no classes, no tests, no grades, and no diplomas. No teacher is going to tell you what to write down for the final exam, because there isn’t one.

What you do have, both at work and in life, are outcomes you are trying to achieve. You are trying to launch a new product, plan a family vacation, come to a crucial decision, find daycare in your neighborhood, publish a new piece of writing, or reach a quarterly sales number.

In the midst of your busy day, as you are trying to make these things happen, you absolutely do not have time to go rummaging through a vast category like “Psychology” to find the one piece of information you need.

Instead of organizing information according to broad subjects like in school, I advise you to organize it according to the projects and goals you are committed to right now. This is what it means to “organize by actionability,” a mantra I will return to again and again throughout this book.

When you sit down to work on a graphic design project, for example, you will need all the notes, documents, assets, and other material related to that project all in one place and ready to go.

That might seem obvious, yet it is exactly the opposite of what most people do. Most people tend to spread out all the relevant material in a dozen different places that would take them half an hour just to locate.

How do you make sure that all the material related to each project or goal is all in one place? You organize it that way in the first place. That way you’ll know exactly where to put everything, and exactly where to find it.

 

The Power of Organizing By Project

For several years, I worked as a productivity coach in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was the peak of the tech boom, and high-powered professionals from some of the world’s most influential companies were looking for any edge in their performance. I was happy to oblige.

I coached several executives at a well-known biotech firm in South San Francisco, on a beautiful campus overlooking the bay. I remember one beautiful spring day I was waiting for my next client, a Senior Director in charge of developing several new life-saving pharmaceuticals. 

Once he arrived, our coaching session started like every other, with a simple question of mine: “Do you have a project list?”

When working with a client as a productivity coach, one of the first things I will always ask them is to show me their project list. I need it to get a sense of what kind of work they do, their current workload, and what priorities and outcomes they are trying to move forward.

He said “Sure!” and, after jotting down a quick list from memory (the first warning sign), handed me a list like this:

Do you see the problem? Look again closely.

Not a single item on this list is a project, according to our earlier definition. Does “strategic planning” ever end for good? Is there ever a time when you can permanently cross off “vacations” from your list? Hopefully not!

Every item on this list is, in fact, an area of responsibility. This might seem like semantics, but it’s anything but. I’ve learned that no matter how smart or driven you are, there are two critical things you cannot do until you break down your areas of responsibility into specific projects.

1. You Can’t Truly Know the Extent of Your Commitments

One of the most common complaints I hear from people is that they “have no bandwidth.” And I sympathize – how much of the time does it feel like you have way too much on your plate?

But as long as you view your work through the lens of areas, you’ll never quite know just how much is on your plate. Looking at the list above, how much of a workload does “Hiring” represent? It could be anything from a part-time hire every 6 months to filling 50 positions this quarter. 

There’s simply no way to know at a glance, and that uncertainty will manifest itself as every area feeling more burdensome than it really is.

Imagine if you identified each of the projects within Hiring, and kept that list in front of you every day. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to tell how much there is left to do, and what you should do next? For example:

2. You Can’t Connect Your Current Efforts to Your Long-Term Goals

One of the most challenging (but also rewarding) aspects of knowledge work is that it requires our creativity. And creativity can’t really be sustained without a sense of motivation. You can’t keep doing your best thinking and contributing your best ideas if you’re burned out and demoralized.

What does our motivation depend on? Mostly, on making consistent progress. We can endure quite a bit of stress and frustration in the short term if we know it’s leading somewhere.

Which brings us to our second problem: without a list of individual projects, you can’t connect your current efforts to your long-term goals. 

Look at the list above again. None of the items on it will end or change – that’s the definition of an area of responsibility, that it continues indefinitely. Now imagine the psychological effect of waking up week after week, month after month, and even year after year to the exact same list of never-ending responsibilities. No matter how hard you work, the endless horizon never seems to get any closer.

Honestly, I couldn’t design a better way to kill your motivation if I tried.

When you break down your responsibilities into bite-sized projects, you ensure that your project list is constantly turning over. This turnover creates a cadence of regular victories that you get to celebrate every time you successfully complete a project. Imagine how motivated and accomplished you’d feel by breaking out the broad area of “Events” into each individual event you’re running:

No matter how wide-ranging your responsibilities are, you can always break them down into smaller projects. And you must, if you want to know whether you’re actually making progress toward your goals. 

Getting Organized For the Life You Want to Lead

Using PARA is not just about creating a bunch of folders to put things in. 

It is about identifying the structure of your work and life—what you are committed to, what you want to change, and where you want to go. It is about organizing information in such a way that it supports and calls into being the future life you want to lead. 

So much of what we call “organizing” is essentially procrastination in disguise. We tell ourselves we’re “getting ready” or “doing research,” pretending like it’s progress. When in reality, we are seeking any little thing we can polish or tidy to avoid having to face the task we are dreading.

PARA cuts through this facade, giving us a method for organizing anything that is so radically simple, there is no excuse and nothing left to do except the next essential step. It is a minimalistic way to add just enough order to your environment that you have the clarity to move forward, and no more.

There are other more complex, sophisticated, and specialized ways of organizing information out there, but PARA is the only one that stands the test of time because it gives you more time than it takes.

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

The post The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information appeared first on Forte Labs.

How We Saved $27,000 in Two Weeks: Cost-Cutting in a Creator-Led Business

Over the past few weeks, we completed our first rigorous cost-cutting exercise in the 10 years Forte Labs has been in business.

Cost-cutting is a strange subject to talk about as a creator-led business. We’re not supposed to worry about those pesky annoyances called “expenses” or “profitability.” We’re on the Internet, and the Internet is a wide-open frontier of endless possibility, right?

Right?!

But as 2022 came to a close, we began to see signs of a weakening online education sector after several years of white-hot growth. Whether it was expectations of a looming recession, punishing inflation, or a post-pandemic preference for in-person experiences versus online events, I don’t know.

What I do know is that people are more hesitant to take out their wallets and spend their money on online self-development programs than at any time since before the COVID pandemic. I decided to learn how other companies typically approached cost-cutting and to review our expenses in the new year.

The results?

We saved $27,764 in recurring annual expenses, equaling about 3% of our non-labor costs. More importantly, we questioned where our money is going and what we really need to serve our customers. That led to a more realistic understanding of which software platforms and services are essential for us. 

Finally, we seem to have cultivated a mindset of frugality in our company culture that’s already reaping rewards as we’re faced with countless special offers and “must-have” purchases heading into the new year. 

Read on to find out how we did it, and get a checklist you can use to perform a similar feat in your own company, organization, or life.

The mindset of profit-maximization

The single most important thing I needed to do to cut costs effectively was to change my mindset toward money.

The last decade has been one of the strongest bull markets for online businesses ever, capped by two years of completely unprecedented, explosive growth. A decade of plenty instilled in me an attitude that it was so much easier and more fruitful to spend my time growing revenue rather than pinching pennies. It felt like we should spend money as fast as possible in order to make money even faster.

A mindset of abundance makes sense when the environment is one of abundance. But an environment of scarcity demands an attitude resilient to scarcity. In order to make a cultural shift within our company, I first needed to make that shift psychologically myself.

I asked Twitter how I could learn to become frugal, and picked up one of the recommended books, Double Your Profits in 6 Months Or Less (affiliate link) by Bob Fifer. The title sounded like a late-night infomercial, and the cover looked like it was from the 90s, which I soon discovered was accurate: the book was first published in 1993. 

In Internet terms, an ancient relic.

As I opened its pages, the author’s writing reflected an old-school attitude to business that I barely recognized. He sounded like a survivor of the Great Depression, scrounging for every nickel and treating every cost as a personal offense.

But as I continued reading, Fifer slowly introduced me to a powerful framework for thinking about costs during uncertain economic times. Here are a few of the most important takeaways that I decided needed to become part of our culture:

Our driving goal as a company is to be THE BEST in our field, which means we must maximize profit, which is the “permission to keep going.” All other goals or objectives don’t matter if we’re not profitable.To maximize profit, we need to consistently ask “What is the customer willing to pay for?” and eliminate everything else.All costs can be divided into 1) Strategic costs (essential for generating revenue) and 2) Non-strategic costs (not essential for revenue). Our goal is to spend more on the former than any of our competitors and cut the latter to the bone.Keeping resources (human and monetary) purposefully scarce forces us to soul-search about which tasks and projects are truly value-producing.Always make the spending of money a difficult process so that people must jump through several hoops to prove its worthiness.Every cost should be treated as a necessary evil at best, and we should look for any possible way to eliminate it.When considering eliminating an expense, ask yourself, “If I eliminated this cost, would I immediately lose revenue or profits? How and where?”If in doubt, default to cutting a cost, and if a consequence emerges, you can always add it back (whereas leaving it in place means that money is gone forever).The hardest part of all of your cost-cutting initiatives will be the resistance to change you will encounter. People learn to treat every service as essential even when it’s not.

As hard as this may be to believe, I had never really thought that the #1 job as a CEO is to maximize profit. With revenue doubling every year, and gross margins consistently above 60%, profitability seemed to more or less take care of itself. All that was left to do for us was to figure out how to spend it.

Which is why this quote rang so powerfully inside my head: “Full empowerment of an organization when you have not focused on profits is an abdication of your most basic responsibility as a leader.”

I could see with sudden, newfound clarity that nothing else we achieved – big product launches, huge audience growth, a bestselling book, prestigious media attention, or even an empowered team – meant anything if we weren’t profitable. 

I was encountering a set of timeless, conservative business principles for the first time, and it all seemed new again.

Cost-cutting as a ritual

With my new mindset in place, I wanted to spring immediately into action and begin eliminating costs right, left, and center.

But I knew that cost-cutting wasn’t a one-time event – it was a repeatable ritual that we would need to do again and again indefinitely. I resolved to move slowly and purposefully instead, documenting every step we took, every question we asked, and every unnecessary expense we identified for future reference.

Here were the 9 main elements of the cost-cutting process I put in place:

Formed a Budget Committee made up of me, our Director of Operations, and Business Operations Manager, with a standing monthly meetingSet aside time for a year-end review of every single transaction over the last quarter, in order to identify candidates for cost reductionScheduled monthly reviews of every transaction going forward (to question whether it’s necessary, can be reduced, and to categorize it correctly)Reached out to our main suppliers, contractors, and service providers to proactively negotiate price reductions (or extend payables or other terms)Instituted a new policy that all new costs must be approved by me personallyReviewed employee benefits to decide which ones people truly value, cutting the restWrote an internal memo to all staff explaining what we were doing and why it was important to our goals as a companyAsked every person on our team to suggest ideas for expenses we could reduce or eliminateBroke down our financial statements into 4 departments – Product, Operations, Marketing/Content, and YouTube – with each Director responsible for controlling their own spending

I also shared with the team a set of questions we would be using to question how we had spent money in the past, partly drawn from the book and partly from my own experience:

What is the customer willing to pay for? What are they not?Which difficult, uncertain expenses are we avoiding to cut in favor of easy, clear reductions?How can we make the process of spending money more difficult?Where can I personally set an example of how much we value each dollar?How can we make our company more of a meritocracy, rewarding those who contribute directly to the bottom line?How can we create a profit-maximized customer, instead of just a happy one?How can we remove benefits that employees don’t value, in favor of the ones they do?How can we create an attractive offering for each major category of customer at a price they are willing to pay?

Examining our credit card statements with a critical eye, I decided we needed to put as much thought into keeping money as we put into earning it in the first place.

How we reviewed every transaction

Our newly formed Budget Committee kicked things off by reviewing each and every transaction in the last quarter of 2022.

Our goal was not only to come up with a list of specific expenses to eliminate but to create a baseline that future quarters could be compared to. We also took the time to make sure expenses were assigned to the correct department, so that future decisions about where to invest would be more accurate.

The prospect of reviewing each and every transaction for a quarter – over 700 in total – might seem daunting, but we developed a succinct set of questions to accelerate progress. Here were the questions we asked for each item:

“Is this expense truly necessary?”: If not, cancel it (and ask for a refund for any unused periods)If it is necessary, then ask: “How can this cost be reduced?”Can it be paused when not needed?Can it be downgraded to a cheaper plan or lower level of service?Can it be switched from monthly to annual billing (to save money) or from annual to monthly (if it’s only needed occasionally)?Can we negotiate a better price?If it still remains, then finish by asking: “Which department should this be assigned to?”Take notes on any follow-up actions needed (to find out more details about a service from the person who uses it, and share corrections with our bookkeepers so they can accurately categorize transactions in the future)

As we walked through these questions, we were surprised by how many opportunities there were for cost reduction. We thought we ran a lean operation, but even for services that we couldn’t eliminate completely, there was often a more basic plan or smaller number of users that served our needs just fine.

Renegotiating rates with our suppliers and contractors

Our next task was to see how we could reduce how much we spent on suppliers, service providers, and contractors, which made up a significant chunk of our spending.

I found this can take many forms, and doesn’t have to be adversarial. People understood that we need to look out for our profitability and were often willing to work with us to keep us as a customer in uncertain economic times that they’re probably feeling themselves.

This part is ongoing and might include switching contractors from retainer to hourly billing (or vice-versa), asking them to add more value in lieu of reducing their rates, asking them to cover costs that are essential to their work (as is appropriate for contractors), requesting more favorable terms such as longer payable periods, seeking bulk discounts for suppliers we buy a lot from and other requests. 

SaaS services were much easier to reduce since they often have extremely high margins of 70-90% and thus are willing to keep you at almost any cost. We found that in some cases simply asking for a discount was effective. 

The key to all these conversations was for the negotiation to come directly from me, the CEO, since the staffperson who works most closely with a contractor is often on too friendly of terms to make such requests.

The results of our cost-cutting exercise

At this point you’re probably wondering what we cut exactly. Here’s the full list, including full cancellations and partial reductions on an annual basis:

In addition to $26,510 in planned spending, we received $1,254 in refunds from some of the services above for unused periods. The grand total of $27,764 represents about 3% of our annual non-labor costs, and 1.3% of our total costs, a sizable chunk of recurring spending that meaningfully improves our profitability for the coming year and beyond.

More important than the numbers, however, is the psychological effect of working through this process as a team. To my surprise, I found it required tremendous creativity and imagination. It’s forcing us to learn how to hack together jerry-rigged solutions to problems instead of just buying something off the shelf. As a result, we’re discovering how adaptable and resilient we are, and how possible it is to do more with less. 

If constraints are necessary for innovation, purposefully creating financial constraints around our spending has channeled our problem-solving ability and helped us prioritize what’s truly necessary from what isn’t. And through it all, we are finding new ways to rely on each other and hold each other accountable to protect the only number that proves we are creating value: profit.

If you want to know which software tools, apps, and services we continue using, click here. These are the ones we’ve found essential for running and growing our business.

The post How We Saved $27,000 in Two Weeks: Cost-Cutting in a Creator-Led Business appeared first on Forte Labs.

How I Used Amazon Reviews to Predict Sales of My Book

This research project started with a simple question that has crossed every author’s mind: 

How can I tell which books are successful?

TV shows have Nielsen ratings, music albums have the Billboard Top 100, and movies regularly publicize their box office earnings, but not books. Bestseller lists like The New York Times are notoriously subjective, while more objective ones like Amazon and The Wall Street Journal only provide rankings, not raw numbers.

The most reliable sales figures in the publishing industry come from NPD BookScan, but a subscription to that service costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and is only accessible to people in the publishing industry. Academic research on BookScan is explicitly banned!

Now, why is it a problem that we don’t have access to reliable sales figures for books? 

Without that information, authors don’t know who to look to as models. We don’t know if the seemingly meteoric rise of a book or author in the media is just hype, or if those books are actually flying off the shelves. As a result, we can’t learn what the most successful authors are doing right and thereby open the door for more authors to succeed.

That is, until now…

Using official sales figures from BookScan, publicly available data from Amazon, and some basic math, I’ve created a model for determining with a considerable degree of certainty which books are selling, to what extent they are selling, and the odds they are likely to continue selling in the future.

Here’s a summary of my findings:

The total number of Amazon reviews a book has is an excellent indicator of its actual sales (88% correlation)A book rapidly receiving a large number of Amazon reviews upon release is a strong indicator of lifetime sales potential (65% correlation)A book’s average Amazon rating is a weaker predictor of sales (30% correlation), meaning that it doesn’t matter so much whether a review is positive or negativeThe average book in my sample received 15 reviews per day over its lifetime, on average 1.5% of book buyers left a review, and each review on average corresponds to $115 in salesMy book Building a Second Brain is accumulating 11.7 Amazon reviews per day on average – faster than 11 books in this sample, and slower than 6As more time passes since a book’s publication, its average rating drops slightly, and the number of reviews it receives per day drops substantially

Read on for more detailed findings.

How can I tell if a book is selling well?

I started by selecting 20 books (including my own for comparison) to study closely. Each of these books had to meet the following criteria:

Published no more than 10 years ago (5.2 years ago on average)Received at least 2,000 Amazon reviews (with an average of 23,000)Rated highly on Amazon (with ratings between 4.4 and 4.8 and an average of 4.6)

I only chose books that I personally admired and felt had made a significant cultural impact, so that I’d be confident drawing lessons from them for myself.

Here are my subjects:

How to Take Smart Notes, by Sonke AhrensThe Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie KondoBuilding a Second Brain, by Tiago ForteUltralearning, Scott YoungSprint, by Jake KnappThis Is Marketing, Seth GodinFour Thousand Weeks, Oliver BurkemanThe Bullet Journal Method, by Ryder CarrollThe Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay StanierBig Magic, Elizabeth GilbertDeep Work, Cal NewportThe Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, by Mark MansonShow Your Work!, by Austin KleonThe Psychology of Money, by Morgan HouselAtlas of the Heart, by Brene BrownThe Daily Stoic, by Ryan HolidayThe Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der KolkAtomic Habits, by James Clear

I then looked up official BookScan sales figures for these books, via an industry contact. BookScan claims to measure about 80% of book sales, which doesn’t include ebook, audiobook, international, and certain retailer sales. However, since I have access to much more accurate and comprehensive data on sales of my own book, I was able to determine it’s actually far below that. I decided to apply a multiple to the BookScan sales figures to arrive at a more realistic “projected” sales volume for each book, which I then used in the rest of my analysis.

Each of the bestselling books I studied has sold 3.1 million books on average as of January 2023, ranging widely from 53,000 to 11.8 million copies. By cross-referencing these numbers with information from Amazon, I found the following correlations (ranging from -100% for a perfectly negative correlation, to +100% for a perfect positive correlation):

The total number of reviews positively correlates to total sales: 88%The average Amazon rating positively correlates to total sales: 30%The time since publication positively correlates to total sales: 29%

In other words, a book’s total number of Amazon reviews is an excellent indicator of a book’s actual sales. This makes sense since Amazon is the dominant retailer of books today and the more people buy and read a book, the more of them will likely leave a rating or review. Thus, a book’s number of Amazon reviews can be used as a publicly available signal of how it’s selling, a useful rule of thumb for any aspiring author looking for models of success.

The average Amazon rating for a book also correlates with more sales, but much less so, which means that it doesn’t matter very much whether a review is positive or negative. Just the act of leaving a review signals that a book is selling well. There’s no such thing as bad publicity apparently. The number of days a book has been on the market also somewhat correlates with its sales since obviously, they have had more time to make sales.

So far, not much of a surprise: books with more Amazon reviews, higher ratings, and more time on the market sell better!

How can I tell if a new book will be successful long term?

My next question was, “Are there any publicly available early signals that a book is going to be a long-term bestseller?”

While it’s useful to know whether a book published years ago has been successful, the lessons I can draw from it are limited. What worked well back then may no longer work well now. On the other hand, strategies that are working well for them now might not work for someone releasing a new book in today’s market. Lifetime sales aren’t enough – I needed to find a way to control for how long a book has been on the market.

To find the answers to these questions, I calculated the “average number of reviews per day” that each book on my list had received over its lifetime. In other words, at what rate did they receive reviews on average? I call this metric “review velocity.”

The review velocity represented a very widespread, from 1.2 reviews per day for Sprint, to 59.4 for Atomic Habits, with an average of 15 reviews received per day across all 20 books.

The reason review velocity is so helpful is that it allows me to compare the “trajectories” of books that were published at completely different times, including recently published books. I have no idea how a book’s reviews are distributed across time (Do a lot of them come in early when it gets released and then decline over time? Or do they start slow and pick up speed over time?), but working with averages allowed me to see the broad strokes.

When I compared “review velocity” with “sales to date” it produced quite a strong positive correlation of 65%. This means that a book’s review velocity isn’t as strong a predictor of sales as the total number of reviews, but a lot stronger than the average rating or time on the market. In other words, a book rapidly receiving a large number of Amazon reviews is a fairly strong indicator of lifetime sales potential.

I also noticed a lot of variation in the percentage of book buyers who left a review. It ranged from 0.3% for The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up to 4.8% for my book, with an average across all 20 books of 1.5%. I’m guessing this number starts high as hardcore fans leave reviews and then declines as the book spreads to more mainstream, less dedicated audiences. But it’s a good sign!

Sorting the list again by “sales per review” (How much in sales did a review correspond to on average?) produced the reverse of the list above: a range from $21 for my book to $381 for The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (and an average of $115). Which implies that as a book becomes more popular it sells better, but receives fewer and fewer reviews as a percentage of sales.

How can I tell how successful my book will be?

The next question I wanted to answer was personally motivated: Could I use these correlations to predict the future sales of my book Building a Second Brain? 

More than 7 months after its release, while I know it’s doing well, I really have no idea how well. Sales numbers mean nothing on their own – what matters is what standard of success I’m comparing myself to. Without knowing how the book is doing in the grand scheme of things, I’m not really sure what to do next. 

Is this a niche hit that will exhaust the early adopters and fizzle after a year or two? Or is it showing signs of potentially crossing over into a mainstream phenomenon? Is it on a path to becoming a career-defining mega-bestseller, like Getting Things Done, or is it more likely an introductory title that sets me up to write more impactful books later on?

By calculating what trajectory we’re on and what magnitude of sales we’re on track for, I can decide whether to change my marketing strategy, invest more resources (or less), or adjust my business model in response.

I sorted my spreadsheet by review velocity, with the following results:

My book comes in at 11.7 reviews per day since its release 7 months ago. 

This indicates that it is probably selling faster on average than The Daily Stoic, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Deep Work, Big Magic, The Bullet Journal Method, The Coaching Habit, This is Marketing, Show Your Work!, Ultraleaning, How to Take Smart Notes, and Sprint, but not as fast as Four Thousand Weeks, The Body Keeps the Score, The Psychology of Money, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***, Atlas of the Heart, and Atomic Habits. 

Assuming that review velocity stays fairly constant over a book’s lifetime, this is very good news! I would be overjoyed to have the same financial results and cultural impact of any of these books, and I seem to be around the middle of the pack. My book also has the same average rating among this group of 4.6. Being average among such a crowd is a great honor. 

If you would be so kind, especially given these findings, I would deeply appreciate if you left a review for my book here:

Leave a Review Other interesting correlations

While correlation doesn’t mean causation, here are other interesting relationships between metrics I discovered (along with my interpretations in parentheses):

Days on the market – No. of reviews: 17% (If books sold equally well over time, you’d expect this to be close to 1. This indicates that review velocity has increased a lot for more recently published books, versus older ones.)

Days on the market – Average rating: –11% (The longer a book has been out, the lower its rating drops, slightly.)

Days on the market – Reviews/day: –33% (The longer a book has been out, the more its review velocity slows down.

No. of reviews – Average rating: 44% (The more reviews a book has, the higher its average rating. This isn’t intuitive, as you would think more reviews from a broader audience would mean lower ratings over time as the hardcore fans get diluted. It suggests a kind of “bandwagon” effect of people leaving higher ratings just because a lot of people have left reviews.)

Average rating – Reviews/day: 58% (The faster a book accumulates reviews, the higher the average rating will be. This also suggests a bandwagon effect, as people leave higher ratings just because they see the number of reviews growing quickly, suggesting a lot of people are reading the book.)

If you or someone you know has further insights into these questions, please let me know!

 

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The post How I Used Amazon Reviews to Predict Sales of My Book appeared first on Forte Labs.

A Single Creative Project Can Change the Trajectory of Your Life

It doesn’t have to be a huge project. It doesn’t have to be well-funded or prestigious or public. But it does have to draw something out of you so unexpected that it changes your conception of who you are.

The kind of creative project I’m talking about creates an unmistakable inflection point in your life. It changes your identity so much that you can never see yourself the same way again. 

I recently read through years of my old journals for the first time ever, and five creative projects stood out as early inflection points in my life. Each one taught me an essential principle for how to purposefully choose life-changing projects. Each of these projects:

Were about serviceWere self-initiatedWere shared with othersProduced a tangible artifactAsked for something in return

Together they make up a kind of “creative autobiography” that made me who I am today. Let’s take a closer look at each one to see how you can apply it for yourself.

Creative projects are about service

The foundation of my attitude toward creativity is that it is fundamentally a form of service to others.

I vividly remember traveling to Mexico for the first time at 10 years old on a volunteer trip with a group from our church. Before dawn on a Saturday morning, I climbed into my father’s red F-150 pickup truck, and together we drove two hours south to the border with a bed full of tools and supplies.

A community on the outskirts of Tijuana, similar to the one we visited

We made our way to an impoverished community of ramshackle houses, built out of pieces of scrap and plywood, on the outskirts of Tijuana. We had brought lumber to erect a series of simple wood-frame houses for families who lacked adequate shelter.

At 10 years old I couldn’t help much with the construction, so my responsibility was to ferry around hammers and nails, water and snacks. I worked tirelessly, stretching my inventiveness to its limit in search of any small skill I could offer or any meager resource I could give. Something as simple as playing with a 4-year-old so his parents could make a meal for the work crews proved that I could make a difference.

This might not seem like a typical creative project, but it demanded profound imagination from me. Only a short car ride from the wealthy suburbs of Orange County where we lived, I had stepped into a starkly different reality. I found myself face to face with the hungry eyes of children living in a kind of squalor my mind could barely comprehend. Everything I thought I knew about fairness, justice, and privilege was thrown into doubt.

This early experience shaped my understanding of creativity as a gift that is meant to be given away. I came to believe that if I had a skill, a resource, or a piece of knowledge that could alleviate someone’s suffering, I had the responsibility to offer it to them.

From that point on, I could never tell myself that I wasn’t ready, didn’t know or have enough, or needed to satisfy my own needs before I could afford to contribute. I had made a difference for someone when I was only 10 years old! For the rest of my life I’ve carried that value of service with me – to give even when I don’t feel ready, even when I’m afraid, and even when I don’t know exactly what I have to offer.

I see so many artists, writers, and other creatives getting wrapped up in their own perfectionism and preciousness. They seem to believe if they can just understand and analyze their own psychology well enough, the obstacles to their self-expression will disappear. But the mind can throw up psychological barriers far faster than you can tear them down.

The only reliable way out of my creative blocks is not to endlessly dissect them – it is to transcend my own fears and insecurities by making myself useful to someone with greater needs than mine. By the time I return to my own problems, they always seem so minuscule in comparison. 

Creative projects are self-initiated

The second key milestone in my creative autobiography was to commit to projects that were self-initiated: I chose to take them on of my own free will, and not because of any external obligation.

When I was 14 years old, my parents took me and my three siblings out of school and moved the family to Brazil for a year. It was important to them that we learn Portuguese and spend time with our Brazilian family, and they wanted to do it before we got too much older. After deciding they didn’t want to live in the vast metropolis of São Paulo, we moved instead to a small mountain town called Campos do Jordão.

It was there that I took out our Compaq laptop computer and decided, for the very first time, to write something because I wanted to. I had been forced to complete countless supposedly “creative” projects during years of schooling, of course, but this was different. I decided that I wanted to tell stories of our life in Brazil to the people who mattered to me back home, and I chose to write completely of my own volition.

I wrote about my new school and the friends I was making there. I wrote about my (mis)adventures exploring the surrounding neighborhoods and wilderness outside town. I wrote most of all about our frequent road trips across southern Brazil, our family of 6 packed into a tiny station wagon that only sat five, with my four year-old brother squeezed into the back between the suitcases.

One of my letters home about a roadtrip we made as a family

To be clear, my writing at this point wasn’t any good. It wasn’t about quality – it was about agency. 

There’s a tremendous difference between reacting to the pressure of an externally imposed demand that forces you to be creative, and the internally generated spark of an idea that you just have to express or you will burst. 

When you only respond to external demands, you train yourself to look for sources of motivation exclusively in the external environment. You get used to waiting for someone to choose you, to approve of you, or to give you permission to take the next step. It’s useful to know how to respond to external demands, but it’s not enough to sustain a creative life. 

In his book The Art of Learning (affiliate link), Josh Waitzkin says:

“In performance training, first we learn to flow with whatever comes. Then we learn to use whatever comes to our advantage. Finally, we learn to be completely self-sufficient and create our own earthquakes , so our mental process feeds itself explosive inspirations without the need for outside stimulus.”

What I’m talking about is the third stage – the ability to light that internal inferno and “create your own earthquakes” on demand. To experience yourself as a force of nature – a prime mover in the world that others will just have to make room for, or else.

Creative projects are shared with others

Some years later, after we’d returned to our home in California, I had my next epiphany: creative projects can be shared with others.

I think the main way our identities change is when we see that change reflected in the eyes of others. Our identities are socially constructed, which means we can’t change them as a strictly private affair. We change who we are by changing how others perceive who we are.

I remember clearly the first time I saw someone’s immediate reaction to something I’d created. I was 20 years old, and played a photo slideshow for my family of our past vacations, set to sentimental music using Apple iPhoto.  

It was so simple it barely qualified as creativity – my tasks were limited to selecting the photos, deciding how long to display each one, and choosing the music – and yet even in those mundane decisions I had the chance to express my vision.

A screenshot of a video I made with highlights from home videos from my childhood

As the slideshow played, I looked over and saw a tear in my mom’s eye. What?! Something I had made in an hour had created a moving experience for someone I cared about? I could hardly believe it. I knew I would never get tired of creating such experiences.

It was a beautiful, sacred moment, seeing that something in me could reach out and touch someone else. In that moment my passion for creating immersive, meaningful experiences for others was born, and it’s been with me ever since.

Creative projects produce a tangible artifact

The fourth milestone in my creative journey was when I discovered that my projects were more powerful if they produced some kind of tangible artifact.

When I moved to Brazil again at the age of 23 to spend a year studying abroad, I decided to share my writing a little more publicly. The only kind of blog I had ever seen were travel blogs, and my exotic experiences about living in Brazil were the only stories I had worth telling. So I decided to start my first blog, Tiago in Brazil (the name, alas, was not very creative).

A screenshot of my first travel blog, Tiago in Brazil

Fiddling with my blog template late one night, I installed a widget on my site that displayed a world map with a red pin showing the location of each visitor. I shut my computer, went to bed, and the next day woke up and idly opened my website. 

To my shock and amazement, there were red pins all over the map! Probably only a dozen or so in retrospect, but amazing nonetheless. I had made no attempt to publicize or promote my blog, but somehow random visitors from around the world had found it anyway.

This highlights the special property of tangible artifacts, whether pieces of writing, a website, a book, a product, or a course – they have an existence independent of you, like a child, which means they can travel far beyond you. 

Even when you sleep, or turn your attention to other things, or lose motivation or courage, the offspring of your mind will live on. And by continuing to live, they can grow and evolve and travel and spread, seeping out into the world in ways you can’t fully predict or control. 

Someday one might even come back to you, totally transformed, like a long lost prodigal son returning home. Only when you lose control over your creation can it find its own destiny.

Creative projects ask for something in return

The fifth and final principle I adopted was to always ask for something in return.

It’s tempting to think of creativity solely as a gift that you give others. And there is definitely an element of generosity and altruism in it. But I think if it’s always a one-way gift you’ll eventually burn out. You can’t draw from the well for very long without refilling it.

When I share a tangible artifact I’ve created, I always try to ask for something in return. At minimum, the time needed to even pay attention to what I’m showing them. It could also include their opinion or feedback, an action I’d like them to take, a return favor or help on a project, or a monetary payment. 

Creativity is an exchange – the fruits of my imagination for the fruits of theirs. I ask for something in return not just because it serves my needs, but because it is an invitation for them to express their own ingenuity or appreciation in return. It is an investment, according to my life philosophy of Servant Hedonism. 

From 2009 to 2011, I lived in Eastern Ukraine while serving as a US Peace Corps volunteer. I taught English at a local school as my day job, and in my free time worked on a variety of projects ranging from youth leadership summer camps to HIV/AIDS awareness to community service projects.

Me and my former Ukrainian students in front of a world map mural we painted.

The problem was that I had no funding, so I decided to package together all the posts from my Brazilian travel blog into an ebook and sell it as a fundraiser. To my amazement, I raised almost $3,000, mostly from friends and family. For a meager $15, they received a collection of entertaining stories and the chance to support my work in the Peace Corps.

That money funded a summer camp program I created called PBC, which stands for Projects Bring Change. Each summer I would recruit a small group of promising high schoolers and take them through an intensive process of planning, budgeting, and executing a community service project in their community, all within a single week.

One of my PBC groups in Kharkiv, Eastern Ukraine

I quickly realized these teenagers had never had any exposure to the most basic skills of self-management: how to keep a calendar, manage a meeting agenda, write a budget, or make a plan with concrete steps. I also saw how impactful it was for them to learn those skills. Even years later, many of those same students talk about the impact that one week of intense learning had on their lives.

Not only was PBC one of the most meaningful experiences of my life, it was the first seed of experience teaching people the skills of productivity. Several years later it would lead directly to the business I have today.

The cover of my first self-published ebook, still available for sale on Amazon

I remember how terrified I was to hit “publish” on that first ebook. My heart in my throat, my skin cold and clammy, my breathing irregular – asking for something in return for my creation felt like an existential risk. I felt sure I would be ridiculed and shamed for my audacity, even though the funds would be used for a worthy purpose. 

It was seeing appreciation in people’s eyes – the exact opposite of the judgment I had expected – that changed me forever. The creative work I put out into the world was like a key unlocking the tremendous amount of goodwill and love available all around me, including from strangers who I never spoke to.

Before I left Ukraine, PBC taught me a final, priceless lesson: the value of giving it away.

I created an operating manual and templates with everything I had learned running PBC during my service. I saved it to the shared drive accessible to all Peace Corps volunteers in Ukraine, along with a description of what the program was about. 

Years after I left I heard through the grapevine that there were still volunteers using it in their communities. An idea I had birthed into existence far in the past continued to serve people well beyond the point I had moved on.

I think often creative people are afraid not of failure, but of success. What if it actually works out? What if all my ambitions are realized? They are afraid that if it succeeds, they will be responsible for keeping it going forever. 

But PBC taught me that my role, even in things I invent, is limited. I don’t have to and cannot push everything I do to its ultimate conclusion. The ultimate act of responsibility toward your creation is to give it away.

Creativity as an exchange

Each of the projects I’ve described – sending that first letter, playing that first slideshow, hitting “publish” on the first blog post, or promoting that first book – felt like leaping across a chasm without knowing if there was anything on the other side. 

None of it was planned or strategized, yet looking back, it feels uncanny and serendipitous how each one prepared the ground and planted the seeds for the ones that came later:

A volunteering habit learned as a child years later prepared me to serve in the Peace CorpsWriting letters to my family eventually led to blogging, which today has become a bestselling published bookMaking photo slideshows of family vacations gave me a sense of visual aesthetics that allowed me to create beautiful slides as part of the online course that I teachA leadership program I created for a youth summer camp set the stage for a business teaching professionals around the world how to take agency in their own lives and careers

Who would I be, and where would life have taken me, without these experiences?

What has sustained me all these years is that I always receive so much more in return than I can ever give. The stories of the impact my work has had, the look of gratitude and appreciation in people’s eyes, their own self-expression created in response, and the profits to keep it all going – these are my fuel. 

Creativity for me is about awakening your agency. It’s about connecting to the source of your will, your power, and your truth to create a future that would not have happened anyway. It’s about daring to cross the boundary between the private and public worlds, artifact in hand and heart bared, to carry the flame of a message to someone who lacks fire.

Over the years, I’ve compiled a list of examples of creative projects that follow the five principles above, which are most likely to lead to the kinds of identity shifts I’ve described. 

Enter your email below to see my list of creative projects as inspiration for your own.

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Inventing the Digital Filing Cabinet

The modern era didn’t start with the invention of the car, the television, or the internet.

It was the arrival of the humble filing cabinet – a simple metal box with drawers that held pieces of paper on their edge – that changed everything.

As Craig Robertson argues in his book The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (affiliate link), this simple device transformed knowledge – abstract, immaterial, and particular to one person – into information, something far more tangible, utilitarian, and transferable.

Today we think of filing cabinets as old, musty pieces of furniture decaying in government buildings and doctor’s offices. They’ve become a symbol of inefficiency – a relic from the world of byzantine bureaucracies we’ve left behind. 

But that wasn’t always the case. When they first arrived, filing cabinets represented the latest cutting-edge technology. The Chicago-based company Flexifile called their product a “Desk with Brains,” invoking a parallel to “…the cells of the brain—places in which to systematically file data, letters, papers and information, ready for instant reference.”

The filing cabinet enabled office workers for the first time to form an instrumental relationship to a specific piece of information. That is, it allowed them to quickly find the one specific fact or figure they needed in order to understand or accomplish something.

In the same way the arrival of the typewriter mechanized the act of writing, the filing cabinet mechanized the closely related act of remembering. Together, they substituted human mental labor with an assembly line of information that both brought the Industrial Age to its apex and ushered in the Information Age. 

By looking at how such a simple invention changed history and democratized access to information technology for millions of people, we can take away powerful lessons for our own moment in history when millions more are in desperate need of better tools for thinking. 

Managing a sudden flood of information

Today we think of the filing cabinet as a “dumb” technology. It doesn’t utilize algorithms, software, internet connectivity, or even electricity. It lacks any form of digital intelligence that we’ve come to expect from our information management tools.

But put yourself in the shoes of an office manager at the turn of the 20th century. The telephone and telegraph have been invented and begun flooding the office with communication from every corner of the increasingly globalized business world. 

You are charged with developing a solution to this problem. 

It has to be precise, strong, secure, noiseless, compact, clean, reliable, and expandable. It must allow anyone with minimal training to follow an exact procedure for filing and retrieving papers, without effort or strain or risk of injury. The device has to simultaneously maximize the volume of papers that can be stored, protect them for an indefinite period of time, while also keeping any single one accessible within seconds. And oh, it must be affordable.

How long would it take you to develop a solution that fulfills these requirements?

In his book Where Good Ideas Come From (affiliate link), Steven Johnson describes an idea not as a single thing, but as a network. An idea can be thought of as an interconnected cluster of ideas, all supporting and enabling each other.

The filing cabinet is a perfect example of such an idea network. 

Its popularization depended on a series of enabling innovations that we now take completely for granted:

Steel plates for the walls, top, and bottomTabbed guide cards (with pre-printed labels)Manila folders (produced from abaca fiber, native to the Philippines)Die-cast rollers and drawer slidesChannels, grooves, and ball bearingsRods, flanges, and tonguesCorner posts, arms, and legsLocking mechanismsSubstitution cards (to keep the place of a file moved elsewhere)Route slips (to keep track of a file’s movement through the office)

All of these might seem like trivial inventions today. But it took at least a decade, for example, for manufacturers to recognize that they needed to use specific kinds of steel for different parts of the cabinet, to find effective ways of shaping and fabricating that steel, and to discover that they needed to use welding rather than rivets and bolts.

When all these small breakthroughs were combined, it produced a sophisticated yet simple machine capable of:

Storing loose-leaf pieces of paper so that any of them could be accessed easily while reliably preserving their locationSupporting drawers weighing upwards of 75 pounds while allowing them to be opened and closed effortlesslyKeeping related papers of different shapes and sizes together (versus the card catalog, which stored only one size)Integrating multiple subsystems, including index systems, charge systems, cross-reference systems, and archiving systems

These were the capabilities of a machine that could handle the incredible influx of 20th-century paperwork and thus run the modern world.

How the filing cabinet changed our understanding of and relationship to information

For most of human history, knowledge was something completely inseparable from a particular person. It didn’t mean anything to point to a piece of knowledge without reference to the person from whose life experience it emerged. The idea of a “piece” of knowledge didn’t even make sense, as knowledge couldn’t be broken down into discrete units as long as it remained in someone’s head.

The development of the filing cabinet completed an arc of history that began nearly half a millennium before, with the invention of the printing press. In contrast to scrolls, whose contents are displayed continuously without clear units or parts, printed books introduced the concept of uniform “pages,” each with a specific number. The filing cabinet took that concept even further, giving each individual piece of paper its own place in a wider system that could be expanded almost infinitely. 

As the 20th century began, not only could information be printed on paper, those papers now each had an identity of their own that existed apart from any person or book. Which meant that a document could be identified, handled, referenced, reconstituted, and shared by a wide variety of people for endless purposes.

Units of information became like the standardized, interchangeable parts moving down an assembly line: almost anyone could handle that information without needing to fully understand what it meant, in the same way an assembly line worker performed their duties without necessarily understanding how the whole machine fit together. They only needed to be able to move, polish, install, or test one part well enough to meet a certain standard of quality before passing it on to the next station.

This instrumental relationship to knowledge might seem to rob it of much of its nuance, but it also made the power of information vastly more accessible. The credibility and authority of a given piece of information now came not from the personal reputation of an expert, but from its place in a system of classification. We became a “documenting” culture in which the truth of any statement had to be proven by the records.

Accessed via a filing cabinet, information became standardized, atomized, and stripped of its context. It became a universal and impersonal resource that could be interacted with via the body and the senses, rather than only via the mind, setting the stage for the emergence of the information economy and opening the door to knowledge work as a profession.

The Second Brain of a century ago

The most remarkable aspect of the filing cabinet’s rise in my view is how closely it parallels our current moment.

Then, as now, the demands of business and everyday life were surpassing the limits of the human mind. A 1939 advertisement from office equipment company Globe-Wernicke proclaimed that “…the ‘strain on a gal’s memory’ could be only relieved by a filing cabinet that automatically guided a clerk to the needed papers.”

Then, as now, some of the work that previously had to be done manually was being rapidly automated by new, more advanced machines. As the bound papers of older records were replaced by the loose leafs of filing cabinets, advertisements began to describe the labeled tabs along the top as an “automatic index” that kept track of their own contents without the need to manually update a separate index.

Then, as now, the accelerating pace of business meant that speed became paramount in the accessing of information. In a “letter to the manufacturer” in 1913, a customer exclaimed that they could find a letter within 20 seconds, or 5 file folders within 90 seconds. The need for speed created demand for systems of classification that distinguished between files that were “alive” versus those that had gone “dormant” and could be safely archived.

Then, as now, managers and executives felt contradictory demands to be both a high-volume processor of information, and an innovative decision maker. Back then, they outsourced the job to secretaries and files. Today, we outsource it to increasingly intelligent software.

Then, as now, people sought training to help them better utilize their information technology. Authors of “how-to” books, such as Eugenia Wallace, provided explicit instructions for how to properly file a piece of paper and extolled the benefits of doing so efficiently: “Mind, eye, and hand can soon be trained so that they automatically act together and do team work that is invaluable.”

It’s difficult for us to imagine now, but filing represented a complex new behavioral and conceptual system requiring a thorough education. The new ways of thinking and working had to be bridged to existing behaviors and reinforced through training as early as high school. 

That education extended to the marketing of filing cabinets as well. One advertisement described the device as an “automatic memory” that was more reliable than the minds of people, foreshadowing today’s terminology of a “second brain.”

More than a century ago, there were even early hints of the “networked” or “associative” approach to knowledge tools that is attracting so much interest today. In 1923, two decades before Vannevar Bush’s seminal essay As We May Think, filing instructor (and former clerk) Ethel Scholfield authored Filing Department Operation and Control in which she noted that replacing one’s memory “presupposes a thoroughgoing automatic system for the association of ideas.”

Inventing the digital filing cabinet

One of the most frequent accusations leveled against Evernote, the software platform that kicked off the modern “second brain” movement in 2007, is that it is “merely” a filing cabinet.

The more I think about it, the more I think that’s true. But far from a damning indictment, I think the accusation is actually the highest of compliments. If the filing cabinet was a transformative, democratic revolution in humanity’s access to information, ushering in a whole new era of history, I think we could use much the same for our digital lives.

There is always a place for sophisticated devices used by technical experts. Even a century ago, there were far more advanced machines for retrieving information than filing cabinets. 

But the greatest need I see in society now is for a system that democratizes access to the power of information technology. A system anyone can use, with only the most basic training, yet one that is also capable of producing the kinds of historic feats we witnessed in the pre-digital age, such as the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan Project, or the Apollo Space Program. 

What is the modern, digital equivalent of the filing cabinet? What is a solution to the spiraling complexity in our lives that can be implemented without further adding to that complexity? What is the simplest possible system that could automate the easiest aspects of our cognitive labor, thus freeing up our bandwidth for more subtle, more complex, and more fulfilling pursuits?

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

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Why I Will No Longer Teach Building a Second Brain

This month will be the last time I teach a cohort of Building a Second Brain.

After teaching 6k graduates in 16 cohorts over 6 years, it’s time to pass the torch to new instructors who will take over from here on out.

Here’s why I’m making this decision:

At every point in my journey, I’ve been surprised by how passionate people are about their notetaking systems.

I’ve had to continuously elevate my horizons and think at bigger scales as I’ve seen what a profound impact it can have on people when they find one that works for them.

At first, I thought it was just about ditching tags and clearing your Evernote inbox.

Then about how to organize Evernote generally, then about how to organize all digital files, then about how to use productivity apps, then about how to create new things…

Now I believe having a Second Brain is a gateway to a completely new paradigm: How to leverage the two most powerful forces in human history – technology and knowledge – to create a life more exciting and meaningful than you can imagine.

We start with how to use a specific category of software – notes apps. And end up changing how people manage their time, relate to their own ideas, work with others, progress through their career, create content, build products and services, and so much more.

I’ve now published a book that’s on its way to 20+ languages, meaning 60% of the world can read it in their own language.

We’ve launched Foundation, a completely self-paced version of Building a Second Brain that anyone can take at any time.

And we’ll continue to publish blog posts and YouTube videos.

We’ve also made many changes to ensure what we teach is as accessible as possible:

Centralized everything we do on Circle, so the community is front and centerReduced the price of joining a cohort by 50% from $1,499 to $749Increased from 2 to 4 cohorts per year, with live sessions delivered in 2 time zonesExpanded from a one-time cohort model to a Membership with year-round eventsTurned on “always on” purchasing for both Foundation and the Membership so people can join anytime

The core material of how to create a Second Brain is now well-established, and widely available to anyone who wants to do so at whichever price, pace, and format they choose.

But I sense an unexplored frontier out there waiting to be discovered.

I’m asking myself questions such as:

How can the latest generation of “graph-based” second brain apps be leveraged best?How will AI change how we work with knowledge?What does knowledge management in teams and organization look like?How can the Theory of Constraints, JIT manufacturing, and info science be applied to modern knowledge work?How can sci-fi help us visualize and prepare for the future?

There’s another reason it’s important for others to take over the teaching of our educational programs.

There isn’t just one way to create a system of knowledge management. There isn’t one app, one method, one approach, or one way of doing it “right.”

There are as many types of Second Brains as there are first brains. We’re seeing a neurodiversity revolution, and it’s crucial that the way we use software fits with the wildly diverse ways our minds work.

We need many more different kinds of people to teach how they use their Second Brain. By letting the most successful graduates of BASB – the ones who have demonstrated that they know how to produce results – teach our cohorts, we’ll break out of the one-size-fits-all paradigm.

We’ll unlock a cornucopia of different techniques and philosophies for doing what really matters: Helping people find their voice, realize their vision, and create the change they want to see in the world with the help of technology and the Internet.

The Second Brain concept didn’t originate with me and won’t end with me.

It’s an idea that’s loose in the world, seeking new avenues for expression as humans come to grips with the god-like powers technology now gives them.

The future I want to be part of is one where there is an entire industry of PKM coaches, consultants, teachers, builders, creators, and entrepreneurs. I hope our company can become a platform for finding and nurturing a new generation of talent in this field.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who has been a part of this journey with me. It has been one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.

It’s been such an honor to serve you, and I hope you’ll allow me to continue doing so.

By the way, if you want to be part of my farewell tour, join us for Cohort 16 starting January 10th.

I’ll take you through the process of setting up your own Second Brain system, and then using it to complete a year-end review and set your goals for 2023.

Join Cohort 16

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

The post Why I Will No Longer Teach Building a Second Brain appeared first on Forte Labs.

Tiago’s 2022 Annual Review: From Mid-Life Crisis to Reinvention

Over the past few weeks, I did something I’ve never done before: I read through all my old journals going back 10 years.

I’m not a hardcore journaler, as you can probably tell by the fact that only 7 notebooks cover a full decade of my life. Journaling is more of a crisis intervention tool for me. I turn to it in moments of challenge or opportunity when my thoughts are too confronting to keep inside and I need to pour them out.

These notebooks have been sitting on my shelf for years. I’ve always known they contained valuable insights into my past, but for some reason, it had never seemed worth the time to read them page by page. 

Until now. 

You see, as 2022 comes to a close, I find myself in the midst of a full-blown mid-life crisis. 

Mid-life crisis as opportunity

Contrary to popular belief, a mid-life crisis is a precious opportunity. It’s a rare moment when you are forced to question your basic assumptions, which can open the door to making profoundly positive changes in your life. 

Our lives are dominated by inertia and habit – a mid-life crisis is a chance to restart in a new direction.

I began reading through my journals looking for clues to how I’ve navigated such moments in the past. I seem to have had 5 mid-life crises before, separated by 2.8 years on average. Each one was triggered by a major life event, and confronted me with an existential question I had to answer in order to move into the next stage of my life:

2009: I finished college and began to consider, “What path should I take after graduation?”2011: I returned from two years in Ukraine and began wondering, “What career should I pursue after returning from the Peace Corps?”2013: I left my consulting job on short notice and was immediately confronted with the question, “How can I support myself financially and independently?”2016: I recommitted to remaining a free agent after taking a job briefly, asking “What kind of business do I want to create?”2018: After moving to Mexico City, my partner Lauren and I wondered together, “What does life look like after leaving the San Francisco Bay Area?”

I began to find clues in my past writing that indicated a life stage was drawing to a close and a mid-life crisis was looming:

My usual sources of motivation stopped workingPursuits that used to fill me with enthusiasm started to feel grey and flatContemplating a future filled with more of the same began to feel dark and depressing

I found that a mid-life crisis is characterized by a sudden, pervasive loss of energy. Like the engine that powers my psychology is grinding to a halt. My goal then becomes to find a new source of energy and motivation for the next chapter.

The BASB era

The current season has been the longest in my adult life so far, at over 4 years. It started in late 2018 as my then-fiancé Lauren and I packed up our Oakland apartment and moved to Mexico City. We wanted to go on an adventure, to wipe the slate clean and see what a new city and country had to offer.

We had the absolute time of our lives, meeting new friends, immersing ourselves in the local culture and cuisine, and traveling widely throughout Mexico. It was in that time of newfound possibility that I made one of the most fateful decisions of my career. After taking a year-long break from my online course Building a Second Brain, I decided to start teaching live cohorts again.

It seems like an obvious decision in retrospect, but at the time it filled me with doubt. Previously, I had severely burned myself out trying to run every aspect of the course myself, from marketing to content creation to operations to customer service. I didn’t want to go down that same path and end up in mental and physical exhaustion again. 

I decided to focus on two changes: properly marketing the course so that it would be more profitable, and using some of those profits to hire a team to help me manage it all.

Cohort 9 kicked off in the spring of 2019 and set the stage for explosive growth in the business a year later as the COVID pandemic hit. Since then, we’ve grown to a team of 10 full-time staff plus a dozen trusted contractors who allow us to deliver live cohorts to more than 1,000 people at once. 

My fateful decision to recommit to BASB started a slowly building avalanche of momentum that 3 years later culminated in the publication of my book Building a Second Brain, which incorporated everything I’d learned over the previous 16 cohorts. 

It’s been 6 months since publication, and the book has already far surpassed my wildest aspirations. Alongside all our other efforts of the year, the biggest milestones include:

Landing at #2 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller listAmazon Editor’s Choice selection and Goodreads Choice Awards nominationForeign publishing deals in 20+ countries and languagesReaching 127k subscribers on YouTube, 99k followers on Twitter, and 93k subscribers to our email newsletterReceiving more than 1 million unique visitors to our two websitesHiring our Social Media Strategist Claire, Course Manager Guia, Product Operations Manager DL, and Customer Success Specialist ErikSpeaking at Google Talks and World Domination SummitHosting the second virtual Second Brain SummitHolding BASB meetups in São Paulo, London, NYC, Brooklyn, Miami, and San Francisco

Releasing my book to the world has been the adventure of a lifetime, but also the challenge of a lifetime. It took everything I had, and the cost was substantial. For more than 3 years I’ve had to focus relentlessly on a single goal, which required me to aggressively ignore any interest, curiosity, or side quest no matter how tantalizing it seemed. For someone who is naturally divergent and curious like me, such single-minded focus is painful. 

As 2022 ends and I start envisioning what I want my life to look like in 2023, I know it’s time for a fundamental shift in my priorities. The current season of my life has lasted more than 4 years. I’m long overdue for a change.

Changing identities

What my series of mid-life crises has taught me is that identities are malleable and temporary.

An identity is an information construct – a loose collection of beliefs, values, viewpoints, priorities, goals, and principles for living held together by a story about who you are. Humans cannot survive psychologically without an identity. It’s the narrative glue that gives meaning to the chaotic storms of electrical activity cascading through our brains.

Like changing clothes as the weather turns, identities serve you for one situation but not necessarily others. When your identity wears out and no longer serves you, it’s time to find a new one. As the saying goes, the identity that got you here won’t get you to where you want to go next.

At certain liminal moments of unpredictable change, such as during a mid-life crisis, the superstructure of our identity becomes especially fluid. There’s a brief window in which we have the chance to shake it loose and build another. 

It all begins with gathering the data you need to understand what life is asking of you: your symptoms, your learnings, your desires, and your questions. 

Over the past few weeks, through extensive journaling, deep conversations with people close to me, and revisiting my photos, notes, accomplishments, failures, and memories from the past year, I came up with my own.

Symptoms – What pains am I experiencing?

An identity is a solution to a set of challenges – surviving, finding love, obtaining food and shelter, feeling a sense of purpose. That’s why when inventing a new one, I like to start with the most acute pains I’m currently experiencing – what I call my “symptoms.”

My goal is to drill down into the abstract, vague complaints I have about life and identify exactly what isn’t working for me right now. My goal is to pinpoint the pain I’m feeling in the most objective, specific possible terms.

Here are mine, grouped by major area of life:

HealthA feeling of dependence on coffee, like I’m not myself and can’t get excited without itConstant sugar cravings, especially in the afternoon or in the evening after dinnerTension and tightness in my lower back, hips, and hamstrings from sitting so muchNot having healthy, delicious food available at home when we’re hungry, leading to too many meals ordered inExcess body fat and a sense of defeat that I’ll never be able to get rid of itPurposeA feeling in the pit of my stomach, usually just as I’m falling asleep or waking up, of being lost or purposelessA lack of motivation to pursue things I’m usually motivated by (writing, focusing, strategizing, reading, researching, planning, working in general)BalanceA feeling of anxiety at the end of the workday with no particular causeNot spending enough time with friends, and lacking connection to themFeeling tired and listless in the afternoon even though I don’t work past 3 pmChecking my phone and social media too often and feeling addicted to itDifficulty mentally transitioning away from work at the end of the dayFamilyA hunger for more rest and unstructured time with familyXimena (our dog) not getting enough attention and exercise, leading to her being neurotic and hyperactiveOur house being too disorganized and messy, making it difficult to rest and relax in the eveningsNot connecting with Lauren in the evenings, and feeling distant from her as a result

Notice that many or even most of these problems have direct, known solutions. None of them are unprecedented and there are many helpful books and how-to articles that will give me useful advice. In the past, I would immediately dive in and begin coming up with practical solutions to each one of them. And there’s a time for that. 

But here’s the thing about problems that I think most people don’t realize: you can’t solve them one at a time. Looking at the list above, if I were to adopt just one new habit or make one change for each symptom I want to address, that would be 16 new habits and lifestyle changes. It’s hard enough to change one habit, let alone 16 of them!

You have to address unwanted symptoms by addressing the root cause, asking questions like:

What is the source of the pattern that’s playing out across the different areas of my life?What is the bottleneck in my thinking or behavior that is leading to all the other negative side effects?What kind of life am I living that is producing these side effects?Who am I being at my core that is manifesting these symptoms?

As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned that before jumping to solutions, there’s a lot of value in stepping back and looking at the complete picture these symptoms are painting for me. 

Using that lens, the picture I see is of a man who is overworked, pushing himself too hard on too many fronts, and using a combination of social media, sugary junk food, strong coffee, and distraction to salve the pain that causes. I see someone who is so tired and anxious that he doesn’t have the capacity to do the things he knows would make him less tired and anxious. I see someone who deeply wants to spend more and better time with his growing family, but doesn’t have clear enough boundaries between work and life to create the necessary space.

At the same time, I understand why these tradeoffs were made: to bring to completion the most important project of my life at all costs. Now I’m seeing the costs. Most of all, I feel tremendous sympathy and compassion for this man. And this is the key to the identity change that comes next: it has to come from a place of complete self-acceptance and self-love, not a desire to change someone who is bad or wrong.

As I move on to the next part of my annual review, I’m asking, “What kind of person could I become who would naturally and automatically make the changes needed to reduce my suffering?”

Learnings – What have I learned?

My next step is to summarize my most important lessons of the year. I want to thoroughly document the wisdom I gained to make sure it gets carried forward to inform my decisions about next year.

These are my top 10 lessons for 2022:

1. Don’t communicate emotionally charged messages via email or any other text medium; have a phone call

Communicating via text is efficient in a lot of situations, but I had to learn more than once this year that it isn’t ideal for messages with an emotional component. Sending emotionally charged messages in written form usually leads to the recipient making the most dramatic and negative possible interpretation. If there’s emotions involved, make a phone call.

2. No one creates better content or marketing in our niche than us – trust that we know what we’re doing and there are no big secrets out there

I always assume that we still have a lot to learn, but several times this year I found that when it comes to creating content or marketing in our niche of PKM, we are the experts. I’m resolving to trust our instincts on this front more next year, instead of relying on outside authorities, which will allow us to save money and move faster.

3. I am a Wisdom Worker, not a Knowledge Worker

Early in my career, I was an Information Worker – I spent most of my time taking in, organizing, editing, and manipulating information for others to act on. Later on, I became a Knowledge Worker, conveying tacit knowledge I’d begun to gather from experience. Now I increasingly see myself as a Wisdom Worker, letting go of the implementation details almost completely and instead helping others feel through uncertainty and fear to their truth.

4. There is no greater source of leverage in the world than ideas

Looking back, I realize part of my motivation for pursuing a traditional publishing deal for my book was that I lost faith in the power of ideas on their own. I felt it wasn’t enough to publish interesting ideas online; I needed to push them to their full potential and into a format that could spread to every nook and cranny of the world. But now that the book is out and I’m considering what to do next, I’m returning to the realization that ideas are indeed the greatest source of leverage in the world, and I want to spend more time with them.

5. It’s ok to change my mind

I worked all year long with a business coach for the first time, and through those conversations realized that I have a strong aversion to changing my mind about anything. I have an internal narrative that changing my mind means I’m inconsistent, flaky, and therefore can’t be trusted. While it’s sometimes valuable to persist stubbornly toward a goal, I’ve also increasingly seen the negative side effects of this attitude, such as sticking to decisions that make no sense or maintaining strategies that aren’t bearing fruit. In 2023, I’m embracing the fluidity and freedom to change my mind freely.

6. The CEO is the ceiling to the company

I came across this quote in my journals from a book I read years ago, and it instantly struck me once again. Now that we have a team, I can see clearly that the company is an extension of my psychology as the founder – all my strengths and knowledge get amplified and extended, but so do my weaknesses and limitations. My #1 job is to proactively work to uncover my blindspots because otherwise, they become permanent fixtures of the organization I’m trying to lead.

7. With great leaders, you don’t need a lot of their time

This phrase was uttered to me in passing last year as part of a couple’s retreat my wife and I attended. Seeing it scrawled in my notes, I know it’s time to really let it sink in. In the past, I demonstrated my commitment to my course, my projects, and my business through raw, brute force. I spent more time and exerted more effort than anyone else as proof of my commitment. But as we welcomed our second child, this attitude needs to give way to another: that the measure of my success as a leader is how minimal my intervention can be. I’m committed to stepping back and allowing others to make their own decisions and thus find their own voice as leaders.

8. My purpose is to bring people together over ideas, in inspired communities

Part of my reason for diving deep into my past journaling was to find evidence of my essential nature – what has always been true about me? And when I looked at the most fulfilling, most meaningful experiences of my life, they all had to do with bringing people together in inspired communities centered around the power and beauty of ideas. I want to return to this more purposefully next year.

9. I don’t play zero-sum games

Another common pattern from my past was that any time I was faced with a competitive, zero-sum game – a situation in which someone else had to lose in order for me to win, or vice versa – I chose to opt out of that game completely. At heart, I’m not a competitor. I’m a cooperator, and I’m drawn to environments where everyone can win. As the PKM space heats up and competitors flood the market, I’m going to look for the new, more exciting game I can play next.

10. It’s time to give up teaching the BASB course

This was the hardest one for me to acknowledge, and allowing the possibility to even surface in my mind required working through some uncomfortable emotions with my coach. 

Teaching Building a Second Brain has been the defining activity of my career and my life since that first small cohort in late 2016. I’ve given it everything I have – every ounce of energy, every good idea, every creative solution – but 16 cohorts are enough, and now it’s time to let a new generation of leaders take the reins.

In 2022, we made a series of changes that set the stage for this transition:

Centralized all our programs on Circle so the community is at the core of what we doChanged from a one-time cohort model to a community membership model with year-round eventsIncreased from 2 to 4 cohorts per year, with each live session delivered twice in different time zonesReduced the price of joining a cohort from $1,499 to $749Launched Foundation, the first-ever self-paced version of BASBTurned on “always on” purchasing for both Foundation and the Membership so people can join anytime

These changes effectively quadruple the number of opportunities to take our program over the course of a year – from 2 to 4 cohorts, with each one delivered twice in parallel. Participating in a cohort has also become far more accessible, with the price of entry dropping 50% from $1,499 to $749. 

For people who want to learn the fundamentals of the BASB method at their own pace, the Foundation self-paced course is even more accessible at $499. And for those who want to go deeper, the Membership now includes weekly workshops and other events throughout the year led by our most experienced members.

This is the new BASB ecosystem that I hope gives everyone a chance to build a Second Brain at a pace, price, and format that best suits their needs:

Cohort 16, kicking off on January 10th, 2023, will be my last time teaching the program as the main instructor (Join us!). 

I have tears in my eyes as I write those words. It feels like the end of an era, but this decision will lay the groundwork for a brand new era: Cohort 17 with new instructors we will recruit and train to lead our flagship program.

When I think about what I want to turn my attention to next, I can start to feel the hidden embers of excitement coming to life inside me. There are vast new frontiers yet to be explored beyond the fundamentals of setting up a notetaking system and using it to be more productive. Among other things, I want to explore:

The Theory of Constraints and how it applies in a digital-centric worldThe neurobiology of states of flow and how to create themThe new generation of “link-based” second brain apps and how they should be usedThe potential of “just-in-time” personal productivity as the world changes fasterThe subtleties of emotional intelligence and fluidityHow project management can be updated for an Internet-driven worldHow sci-fi can help us visualize and prepare for the future

The possibility of everyone in the world having a Second Brain is more exciting to me than ever, but it’s time to lean on others to carry our educational programs forward. I’m so incredibly excited to see how our most experienced Second Brainers interpret the principles, explain the use cases, and teach other people how to apply them.

In the meantime, I’ll be returning to my essential nature as an explorer, experimenter, and innovator on the frontier.

Desires – What do I want?

Finally, we arrive at my desires, perhaps the most important element to emerge out of a year-end review like this one. I can summarize the essence of my annual reviews as, “discovering what you truly want for your life, again and again, in more subtle shades and deeper layers each time.”

Desires are different from objectives or goals in that they aren’t concerned with the “how.” Desires can’t be constrained by what is practical, reasonable, or affordable. They simply arise, daring you to reshape the world to make them real.

These are the clearest desires I’m feeling right now:

I want to create immersive experiences for people where transformational breakthroughs happen naturally and continuously.I want to create a community of the world’s most passionate, curious, generous, and courageous people committed to personal growth and serving others.I want to maintain a portfolio of experiments pushing forward the boundaries of my field and exploring new frontiers.I want to be more present and mindful at home with Lauren, Caio, Delia, and Ximena – less time spent on devices, worrying about work, and mind-wandering.I want to create a business with a set of containers (courses, cohorts, memberships, summits, workshops) in which new ideas can continuously emerge and evolve, without us needing to pre-commit to any particular subject matter forever.I want to strengthen existing friendships and form new ones as rich, fruitful aspects of my life.I want to do more exploratory writing on topics that are currently fascinating me, blocking off my mornings exclusively for deep work.I want to place learning, traveling, and teaching back at the center of my life.

That final desire emerged from an interesting exercise I made up by drawing on the content of my journals. I noticed that all my favorite, most fulfilling experiences had to do with learning, traveling, and teaching, so I plotted them on a Venn diagram. 

I can see clearly that my greatest sense of satisfaction is found where those 3 activities intersect. Try it for yourself!

Decisions – How do I make it real?

My takeaway from this entire process is that it’s time to usher in a new season of my life. After an intense few years of all-consuming focus and convergence toward a goal, I want to turn my attention to something new.

To clear my schedule and create the environment I need to explore new interests, I will make the following decisions and changes effective immediately. Now is finally the time for practical solutions! 

I’m sharing them here in the hope that you, my readers, will hold me accountable to them. And if you think of any other way I can strengthen my commitment to this new direction, I’m all ears.

In 2023, I will:

Turn down all new BASB-related projectsStop teaching BASB cohorts after Cohort 16 (and turn them over to new instructors)Stop scheduling book-related interviews (except for the biggest names in podcasting, if they come calling)Stop writing new BASB-related blog posts (unless a piece coincides with my current interests)Only accept speaking engagements at my official rate (which is at the top of the market to filter for the biggest opportunities)Clear mornings completely of meetings and other commitmentsStart a standing bi-weekly meeting with the Product team (so I can inform their decisions while allowing them to work independently of me)

There are other symptoms to address and problems to solve, of course, but I’ve found that most of them largely resolve themselves when my priorities are right, I’m being honest with myself about what I want, and I have enough free time. 

By stepping back from teaching the cohorts I’ll open up time for writing, speaking, promoting my book to new audiences, connecting with other creators and entrepreneurs, and most importantly, spending quality time with my family.

My official theme for 2023 is Reinvention. I am reinventing who I am, what I do, and what I’m committed to for the next leg of this journey.

Questions – What are my favorite problems? 

The final step is to catalogue my open questions – I want to finish my review and start the new year with a divergent, generative set of open-ended wonderings. 

You can see clearly that they emerge directly from the symptoms, learnings, and desires above. I’ll add them to my favorite problems so I’m more likely to notice them over the course of next year:

How can we have other people generate new ideas using their energy and enthusiasm, instead of continuing to rely on me?How do we make our community bottom-up instead of top-down?How can I be the kind of leader and manager that inspires people to greatness without me needing to be there?Which new rituals or routines do we need to put in place to create cohesion among everyone on the team?How can I integrate cooking into my routines such that it saves time, instead of taking time?What would life be like without coffee? What else could be the source of my joy and excitement? How will I produce intellectual breakthroughs otherwise?What would it look like if my life wasn’t compartmentalized?How could we treat the business as a prototype for a mass scaleable franchise?What would it look like to make business decisions centered completely on what I want?What kind of father do I want raising my son and daughter?What gets me so excited I can’t sleep at night?What makes me most angry about the state of the world?What do I see that no one else sees?What evokes wonder in me?

If you enjoyed this article and would like to do an annual review for yourself, join Cohort 16 of Building a Second Brain starting January 10th, 2023.

Using BASB principles, I’ll teach you how to capture the right information from the past year, organize and distill it to surface the kinds of lessons I’ve shared above, and then use all of that to craft a unique vision for your life in 2023. 

Join Cohort 16

 

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Remixing Religion: The Dawn of Personalized Spirituality

About a decade ago, I came across a video on YouTube that profoundly shaped my view of how culture works. 

Everything Is A Remix by documentary filmmaker Kirby Ferguson argues that all new creative works are built from preexisting ones in an endless process of what he calls “remixing.” 

From music to movies to video games to technological inventions, he presents countless examples of how even the seemingly most original works are part of a long lineage of influences.

Or as hip-hop artist Questlove puts it, “The DNA of every song lies in another song. All creative ideas are derivative of another.” This hilarious video by the Australian comedy group Axis Of Awesome demonstrates that that is no exaggeration.

It was the first time I had encountered the concept of creative remixing, and it unshackled me from the ridiculous expectation that I had to sit alone in a room and somehow dream up something completely unprecedented. 

Growing up in a family of gifted painters, musicians, and dancers, I was always the black sheep with no particular creative talent to offer. But I knew, I was good at collecting, organizing, and cataloguing things, and suddenly I saw how those skills could give me a chance to shine. I began to repurpose the same notetaking system I had been using to manage my health to fuel my writing.

Since that time, I had assumed that “everything is a remix” was just a quirky observation about an obscure aspect of culture. That is, until I read Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (affiliate link) by Tara Isabella Burton. 

Based on extensive research combined with her own commentary, this book shows how that same practice of remixing is now entering the realm of spirituality and religion. Our most deeply held beliefs about the nature of reality, truth, and the human soul are rapidly shifting from unquestionable doctrine to yet another creative medium ripe for remixing.

The decline of organized religion

According to polls, traditional organized religion is in steep decline across the United States and the developed world. 

Mainline Protestants, once the backbone of American Christianity, have been shrinking since the 1980s and as of 2017 constitute only 10% of the American public. Of those, barely a quarter attend church. 

Evangelicals, a much younger and more conservative strand of Christianity, have fared better than older denominations but are also now in decline. Only 8% of white millennials today identify as evangelical, compared to 26% of seniors. Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) are the least religious yet, with 34% saying they are religiously unaffiliated. 13% of them – twice the rate of the general population – identify as atheists. 

Almost one in five Americans was raised in a religious household, only to leave it later in life. Meanwhile, just 4% who were raised in non-religious households later join an organized faith. All these trends seem to tell a simple story: organized religion is dying. I found it an easy one to believe, since it reflects my own experience of leaving my childhood faith. 

But there is a deeper, much more interesting shift happening: even those who continue to identify with organized religions are incorporating new elements into their beliefs at an unprecedented rate. 

For example, 29% of self-proclaimed Christians believe in reincarnation, which isn’t a part of mainstream doctrine. In 2018, 42% of Americans said they believed that “spiritual energy can be located in physical things,” with an astonishing 37% of Christians agreeing. Three-quarters of millennials say they agree with the statement “Whatever is right for your life or works best for you is the only truth you can know.”

Religious remixing represents a wholesale shift in how we conceive of faith, and it’s sweeping Christians along with it, not leaving them behind. 

What is a religion?

In her research, Burton identified 4 fundamental needs that people typically seek to fulfill through belief in a higher power: 

Meaning: A bigger-picture sense of why the world is the way it is, including where good and evil come from.Purpose: The need to have a role to play in the overarching structure of reality, whether it is to evangelize the gospel, fight in a holy war, or engage in political activism.Community: Warm ties to a group that shares and reinforces common values.Rituals: The solemnized occasions through which people reaffirm their commitment to those values.

A religion, by this rather utilitarian definition, is any belief system that provides a person with a source of meaning, a sense of purpose, a supportive community, and a set of shared rituals. 

Organized religion has always offered these things – what has changed is that we now have permission to meet those needs by combining different spiritual ingredients into a concoction all our own.

There are potentially limitless options for which ingredients we can choose from, but I’m listing the ones below that Burton directly mentions in her book:

Renewed versions of old traditions, such as paganism and atavismTraditional religions such as Christianity (and its various sects and denominations), Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and DeismSecularized versions of traditional practices like meditation, mindfulness, and yogaPractices from alternative spirituality such as tarot, astrology, and the occultPolitical movements such as progressivism, conservatism, and the alt-rightAlternative lifestyles such as LGBTQ+Prophetic visions of the future, such as techno-utopianism and transhumanismSelf-care and wellness culture, including weight-lifting, paleo and other diets, and self-help booksOnline communities such as Reddit, YouTube, 4chan, Instagram, the Rationalist community, multiplayer video games, and fanfiction communities

A “progressive witch” might combine practices from the occult like tarot decks and spells with the theistic belief in a cosmic battle between good (marginalized groups fighting for justice) and evil (the repressive forces of organized religion). 

A tech worker might describe themselves as an atheist, while swearing by practices like meditation, mindfulness, and fasting in order to give their lives meaning and structure as they work toward a vision of a technology-transformed society. 

An LBGTQ+ activist might attend a local church for a sense of community and the comfort of ancient rituals, adding on self-care practices to rejuvenate themselves in their fight for gay rights, while connecting with like-minded friends and promoting their ideas via social media.

Burton calls the people who engage in spiritual remixing the “Remixed.” 

While the combinatorial possibilities are staggering, and growing all the time, there are a few aspects that the Remixed tend to have in common:

They often challenge traditional beliefs and lifestyles, including sexual, romantic, and familial norms.They tend to harness the resources of the free market, even if they otherwise espouse opposition to capitalism and consumerism.They are often focused on individualistic self-improvement, treating self-actualization as a secular form of enlightenment.Remixed believers reject the authority of tradition, institutions, and “default life scripts,” looking instead to personal experience and intuition as the highest sources of truth.

In an era in which traditional religion seems to have lost much of its appeal, we’ve begun to fuse different beliefs drawn from a competitive free market of ideas. Like shoppers perusing the windows of retail stores, we construct bespoke packages of meaning according to our individual needs and tastes.

The very definition of “religion” is in a state of flux. Younger generations are reimagining what it means to be part of something greater than themselves, without necessarily believing in a supernatural deity at all.

Burton has found that people aren’t necessarily rejecting religion wholesale so much as they are “remixing” different elements into their own personalized belief systems. Using this more flexible definition of faith, there’s evidence that we’ve become more religious than ever.

The so-called “faithful Nones” in the US – those who don’t identify with any organized religion yet incorporate spiritual beliefs and practices into their lives – score at least as highly on many measures of religiosity, like daily prayer and a stated belief in God, as European Christians.

The Remixed are people who demand agency and creative expression in their spiritual lives. 

They claim the right to mix and match various spiritual, aesthetic, experiential, and philosophical traditions. They craft spiritual experiences based on intuition and personal experience rather than any sacred text or institution.

They have been called the “Nones” (referring to the box they check on surveys of religious affiliation), “religious hybrids,” or SBNRs (for “Spiritual But Not Religious”) – when you combine these groups together, the Remixed make up at least 50% of the US population.

Origins of the Remixed

The roots of “personalized” religion in the United States go back nearly 200 years.

The US was founded on a strict separation of church and state, in stark contrast to nearly every other nation in the world. Transcendentalism, popularized by philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau starting in the 1830s, promoted the view that religious institutions only obscured our true nature and gained widespread appeal. 

Even the Jesus Movement, a 1970s phenomenon that brought evangelicals to the forefront of American culture and politics, was based on the idea of a direct, personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The more recent Prosperity Gospel might be the ultimate fusion of Christianity and capitalism, with a staggering 61% of American Christians agreeing with the statement “God wants you to be rich.”

But Burton identifies the most direct origins of the Remixed in a much more recent time: the Internet-driven “fan culture” of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The millennials (born between 1982 and 1996) were the first generation to come of age online, which means they were also the first to use the Internet not just to consume content but to form relationships and communities. Nearly a quarter of teenagers reported that they had made friends online by 2007. By 2015, that number had risen to 57%, with 25% saying they had met at least one online friend in person.

Media scholar Henry Jenkins terms this phenomenon “participatory culture.” We no longer passively absorb the stories that others have decided are good for us. Now, we participate in stories as active agents, creating the content that we want to see out of the raw material available to us online.

Scholars of religion have long pointed out that the Protestant Reformation couldn’t have happened without the printing press. Only a technology that allowed people to sit with a text in the privacy of their own homes and interpret its message for themselves could have given rise to such a personal faith.

If Protestantism is the religion of the printed book, then the Remixed represent the religion of the Internet.

Social justice versus Silicon Valley

Amidst the countless options for what to believe, Burton identifies two as the leading contenders for the title of official civic religion of the Remixed: social justice culture and Silicon Valley utopianism.

Social justice culture started as a small movement on liberal college campuses in the US, and in the last couple decades has grown into a major sociocultural force. Its core article of faith is that the goliaths of society – racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry and injustice – must be struck down at all costs in order to achieve a better, fairer world. The think tank More in Common estimates that 8% of the US population subscribes to its tenets.

Social justice culture extends the Remixed faith in individual human potential explicitly to marginalized and oppressed groups, linking all of our fates with their liberation.

Silicon Valley utopianism is less well defined, but includes several influential movements such as the Rationalists, Transhumanists, and Effective Altruists. This family of beliefs shares an equally radical view of human potential, including a deep faith in our ability to hack, improve upon, and optimize human performance. The utopia envisioned by this group involves the emergence of a “post-human” – a man-machine hybrid capable of transcending all human limitations.

Although this group’s prevalence is more difficult to measure, a telling sign is that half of all tech workers say they’re not just religiously unaffiliated, but outright agnostic or atheistic, compared to just 7% of the overall population.

Burton makes a fascinating observation about the relationship between these two rival ideologies: that they are really two versions of the same underlying belief system. 

Both social justice culture and Silicon Valley utopianism are obsessed with tearing down orthodoxy and groupthink in order to bring about a shining new vision of what humanity could be. Both treat the body (and its care and improvement) as the ultimate site of meaning. 

For rightward-leaning utopians, it’s about intense weightlifting, rigorous “paleo” and ketogenic diets, and other forms of “masculine” self-improvement. For leftward-leaning progressives, it more often takes the form of the “feminized” wellness industry with its emphasis on self-care. 

What’s the difference between Alex Jones’ Super Male Vitality (sold on his website Infowars) and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Sex Dust (sold on goop)? Spoiler alert: they are very similar products with many of the same ingredients, just marketed differently to different audiences.

Both social justice culture and Silicon Valley utopianism promise earthly self-actualization in an entirely materialist universe – either through transcending deep-rooted prejudices or the limits of our biology. 

The choice of which path to take is yours, but you are also free to find your own. 

Religion is a remix

Religious beliefs used to come in discrete, all-in-one packages. 

By choosing a religion or denomination (or being born into one), all the other choices were more or less automatically made for you. You didn’t have the option to accept or reject specific tenets.

But now, even religion is a remix. You get to personalize it for your needs.

For example, your beliefs about the nature (or existence) of sin. About how the universe started, and will end. About whether humans have a soul, where it was before you were born, and where it will go after you die. And the nature of morality and the hierarchy of values you choose to honor through your actions. 

Nothing is sacred anymore! 

No doctrine is safe from the vortex of cultural crosscurrents that roil mainstream culture. Or in other words, everything is now potentially sacred, a fundamentally pagan way of seeing the world that in some ways predates all of the organized religions.  

Religious institutions have long been one of the chief patrons of the arts. But now spirituality itself – the structure of beliefs, commitments, values, and rituals – is just another freeform canvas for us to play with, alongside music, film, photography, and art. The most fundamental parts of our identities, previously not open to reinterpretation, can now be shaped and molded like clay.

The idea of “remixing” is not just about online content creation – it’s a deep shift in our relationship to all the information that structures our reality. 

Whether we like it or not, we are rapidly being introduced to a level of self-expressive freedom previously only available to the gods; that you can construct your own reality and live in it.

That much freedom, of course, is terrifying. Our psychology did not evolve to radically restructure our reality at will. The cognitive and emotional burden is too overwhelming. While in theory we are free to construct entirely new belief systems from scratch, in practice we continue to choose from the available options. And those options are constantly evolving and competing for our allegience in the cutthroat spiritual marketplace that is the Internet. 

Remixing demands a kind of radical honesty, because you have to be willing to divulge your sources and trust that your contribution still adds value. It requires courage, because you don’t know if the pieces will hold together or if you’ve left out some critical component. And it requires humility, because your spiritual life is founded on doubt instead of faith.

In the short term, the permission to remix our beliefs may hurt us. Online spaces where it’s most prevalent can often feel like vacuums of meaning, creating favorable conditions for extremism, tribalism, cults, and conspiracy theories. Letting go of the old moral code enforced by organized religions may seem to cast us headlong into depravity. But it also opens the door for us to rebuild a new code of ethics grounded in modern times.

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

The post Remixing Religion: The Dawn of Personalized Spirituality appeared first on Forte Labs.

Nonprofit Productivity: Leveraging Software to Shape Your Career

Mike St. Pierre invited me to speak at his 2022 Nonprofit Productivity Summit.

In less than 25 minutes, we covered…

Why I’m not a fan of digital minimalism The simple mindset shift to step out of the information overload crisisHow taking notes can have a miraculous impact on you and your careerThe under-appreciated benefits of project-centric workWords of advice for the creative who don’t think they can be organized (and vice versa)

Watch it on YouTube:

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

The post Nonprofit Productivity: Leveraging Software to Shape Your Career appeared first on Forte Labs.