Tiago Forte's Blog, page 9

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

 

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

The post Tiago’s 2022 Annual Review: From Mid-Life Crisis to Reinvention appeared first on Forte Labs.

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.

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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.

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Bullet Journal: The Difference Between Our First & Second Brain

Ryder Caroll, the creator of the Bullet Journal, invited me to discuss all things personal knowledge management (PKM) and Building a Second Brain.

We covered:

First vs Second BrainWhat a Second Brain looks like How to use a notebook as a Second BrainGoals vs ProjectsThe Second Brain and reflectionThe future of digital notetaking toolsWatch our full chat 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.

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The Origins of Personal Knowledge Management | Dr. Jason Frand

I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Jason Frand, THE personal knowledge management (PKM) pioneer.

In 1999, Dr. Jason Frand and Carol Hixon wrote the revolutionary paper ‘Personal Knowledge Management: Who, What, Why, When, Where, How?’. This article coined the term PKM and changed its trajectory forever.

In this interview, we discussed:

Where the idea for PKM came fromHow PKM compares to travel agentsWhy knowledge is our most precious resourceThe best structure for organizing informationAnd much more…

As far as I know, it’s the only interview with him on the subject. Listen to the full interview 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.

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How to Capture Ideas Like a Pro | The Pinkcast

I joined best-selling author Daniel Pink on The Pinkcast to discuss how to take notes and capture like a pro. 

In 193 seconds, we also discussed:

Why we should offload information?The 30-day experiment to make you a pro at notetakingHow to retrieve your notes quickly and efficiently

Watch our quick chat here:

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

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All Things Second Brain | Productivityist

I joined fellow productivity nerd Mike Vardy on the Productivityist podcast to discuss the depths of PKM and what it really means to Build a Second Brain.

We dived into:

Why notetaking needs to be a little chaotic, messy, and informalWhy most life management systems failThe difference between productivity and personal knowledge managementWhen I prefer paper notes over digital notesThe “digital dumpster effect”How to decide what to capture in your Second BrainMy controversial stance on tagging and linking notesAnd more

Listen to the full episode here.

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

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The Business of Building a Second Brain | Conscious Creators Show

I sat down with Sachit Gupta on the Conscious Creators Show to discuss the business of Building a Second Brain. 

We covered…

Why I thought of shutting down my companyHow I went from solopreneur to a team of 10The biggest mistakes creators makeThe lessons I learned from my artist dadThe importance of systems vs. tools

I really enjoyed this insightful chat. With most interviews, I can predict where it’s going, but not this one!

Listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or watch our interview 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.

 

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Building a Second Brain to Organize Your Digital Life | All the Hacks Podcast

I joined Chris Hutchins on the All the Hacks Podcast to discuss all things Second Brain. 

We dived into:

How you can remember and use the things you learnWhy you should only save the quote and not the whole bookWhy there is no one app to rule them allWhy you need to maintain your Second Brain like you maintain your carThe keyboard shortcuts that changed my lifeWhy I want my biological brain to remain unoptimizedAnd much more…

Listen to the full episode here.

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

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My Favorite Favorite Problems

One of my favorite things about open questions is that they can be freely borrowed anywhere you encounter them.

In my course Building a Second Brain, I lead students through an exercise to identify their own favorite problems. They can then serve as a filter for what to capture in their notes, a guide for what material to give their attention to, and a north star as they choose which projects and goals to pursue.

I’ve kept a running list of the most interesting, resonant, and provocative questions my students submitted . Feel free to borrow these questions for yourself as is or tweak and customize them for your own needs. 

I’ve grouped them into high level categories to make discovering interesting ones easier for you.

Self-improvementHow can I build a good reading habit?What can yoga teach me and move me towards?How do I improve the functionality of my brain including cognitive processing and memory?How can I improve every day by 1%?How can I structure my goals so I increase my chances of achieving them?What are the classics? What are they trying to teach us? And how is it relevant?How can I consistently achieve the goals I set for myself?What facets of my life can I automate?How can I become friends with people that I want to be like?What does systems thinking have to teach us about healing and personal growth?HobbiesWhat are ways I can be a more engaged, connected, and playful dancer?What is the most efficient way to learn how to draw?How can I improve my skateboarding skill?How can I use knitting as a means of bringing healing to the world?What kind of music do I want to create?How can I reduce friction to ensure practicing the keyboard is a part of my daily routine?Self-careHow can I live joyously with menopause and care for the aging female brain?What can I do to switch off and relax from time to time?How can I eat healthy food that is delicious, pescetarian, and gluten-free?How can I better strengthen and soothe the aching muscles in my feet, neck, and jaw?How do I create a body that I am proud of and that serves me well?How can I balance my personal life with my professional life while still feeling productive and fulfilled?How can I achieve regular deep sleep?How can I leverage social media in healthy and productive ways that add value to my personal and professional life?What are the optimum behaviors, habits and tools to mitigate my cognitive challenges (ADD)?Self-reflectionHow am I my own biggest stumbling block?How do I overcome my personal bottlenecks to be authentic, vulnerable, and risk failure?How do you find your way after losing your faith?What does living in integrity with myself look like?What does celebrating my life, showing gratitude for my life, look like?What can I do to accept myself as I am?What in my past casts a shadow on my present?What are the most simple and universally effective practices to experience and sustain inner peace?What am I missing?What does addiction and recovery have to teach us?Business/careerHow can I become a more natural and effective collaborator?How can I make problem-solving fun and attractive?How can I generate income pursuing my interests?What are the key skills to prepare for the future of music?What other things should I learn/unlearn to be an effective Executive Assistant?What forms of marketing are ethical, profitable for the marketer, and useful for the audience?How do I build a career I don’t want to retire from?How do I create residual streams of income that can buffer my productivity highs and lows?What is the best platform for me as a creator?What should my personal brand be, and how do I get it there?FinancesWhat should I invest my money into so it can work harder for me?How do I catch up building a nest egg midlife?How can we balance investing strategically with spending money on what we love today?LeadershipHow can I improve my leadership skills and consistently support, empower, and challenge those around me?What processes and people should I put in place in order to replace myself in the current business so I can focus on the next phase of the business before IPO?How do we create messages that are unique and persuasive to rural voters in Maine?Spouse/partnerHow do I express myself clearly and more often to my wife to show her that I love her to the moon and beyond?How can we cultivate a romantic relationship of respect, understanding, support, care, affection, and passion as a couple, which will serve as an example to our children so that they grow up to become adults responsible for the reality they live in, respecting themselves and others?How can I curiously explore life together with my life partner?EnvironmentHow can we learn to share and manage collective resources?How can we use models from nature to solve our gnarliest problems?How can I make environmental issues and climate justice appealing to Christian congregations?How can we reduce pollution while improving quality of life?How can I travel sustainably without harming the planet or other people?How do I determine the best intervention point in a dynamic but failing system?ValuesHow can I not lose track of my core values and live up to them?How can I foster greater understanding, equality, and unity without disenfranchising any in the landscape of gender diversity?How do I live a fulfilled life with no regrets in all aspects of my life?How can I deepen my self-awareness and sharpen the values that are most personal to me, so that they permeate all areas of my life?What can I do to get clearer on my purpose?How can people utilize technology in a way that corresponds to their values?

ServiceWhere should I prioritize my time, energy, and attention to make the greatest impact in serving others?How can I empower others to be better leaders and lifelong learners?How might I make academic philosophy feel alive and meaningful for everyone?How can we do better as lawyers when mentoring young lawyers?What are my gifts and how do I share them?How can I make it easier for African content marketers to grow, get paid their worth, and become respected?How can I create a home and safe haven for people like me?How can I take advantage of the capabilities of my Second Brain to improve the quality of the clinical care I provide to my little patients and their families, without neglecting the most human, close and warm aspect of the relationship?How can I build a nonprofit organization to help dogs that are abandoned or part of the meat trade?How can I give back to my community in a way that only I can?How can I develop a course for women struggling with their curly hair that’s enjoyable, and gives them the results they want?Self-expressionHow do I speak with more conviction and stand behind my opinions?How do I discover my voice through writing and sharing my ideas with others online?How can I better listen to what others say, reducing the personal interpretation to a minimum?How can I develop my ability to express myself spontaneously, creatively, and authentically?What do I feel is important for me to express?What can I do to launch my YouTube channel?How can I channel my emotions to become a better communicator?What are the key ingredients of global music’s top hits?How can I increase my writing output without taking time away from my family?What would creating look like if it were easy, light, and fun?How do I learn to meet criticism with more acceptance and less resistance?How do I find the time to think and write a book in 12 months?How can I share myself with the world without draining my energy?Institutions and communitiesWhat is the best way to influence change in the school system to turn it into a critical thinking and problem-solving system?What are we unnecessarily tolerating as female attorneys?How can I help people trust democracy and engage more seriously in political debate?How can Indonesia improve its child protection and social welfare system to ensure that all children have equal opportunities to live and thrive?How do I control the negative news cycle while keeping a pulse on all that’s going on around me?How can I improve the state of education in my province?How can we design a better city or society from scratch?How do I balance needed time alone with making time to build community?How do I set aside space for the culturally unique sacred knowledge held in each religion while maintaining egalitarian access to spiritually rich truths in an agnostic digital space or multicultural community center?How can we create more collaborative neighborhoods with sharing economies and alternative currencies?How can imagination and play fuel organizing grassroots movements that uplift the working class and poor?Family and relationshipsHow can I help my father keep his remaining cognitive capacity and extend his health span as much as possible?How can we prioritize our personal time when we are in demand by so many other people?How can I address sensitive issues after allowing so much time to pass that the only thing I feel is shame?How can I organize realistic/feasible family vacations with a limited budget?How do I raise kids to be loving and empathetic yet understand that not everyone will be that way to them?How do I pass on the love of learning to my kids?What do I want my relationship with my parents to look like moving forward?How can I slow down and enjoy the experiences that life has to offer without impacting my family’s income?How might I become more of an advisor than an authoritarian to my two daughters?How do I create a life of wonder, curiosity, and traveling while still having a family?What can I do to design a career that allows me to see my kids grow up?How do I raise a child into a healthy, whole and contributing adult as a single mother while still being fulfilled and achieving my own fulfillment in life?EmotionsHow can we stay present with our most difficult feelings?How can I recognize the factors that most influence my emotions and express them with disarming frankness?How do I become immune to micro-aggressions and focus on what I can control?How can we deepen a more compassionate life for ourselves, for those around us, and for the rest of humanity?Personal knowledge managementHow can I create a system that allows my creativity to flourish?How do I translate my perspective into a meaningful and productive financial endeavor?How should I keep track of my twelve favorite problems?How can I master overwhelm and live meaningfully in chaotic times?How can I live life where I feel independent, free, and unbound by time?Which note-taking tool/task management app should I stick with?How can I use my Second Brain to continue learning throughout life, while bringing experiences, knowledge, and motivation forward that can inspire others?How can I ask better questions?How can I capture, organize, and distill the knowledge and experience from my current and previous projects?What frameworks can I adopt to transform my curiosity into tangible outputs?The futureHow can I understand, embrace and use emerging technologies, the internet of things, and cybersecurity while protecting my privacy, autonomy, and sanity?How can we create modes of work so everyone can live by their own definitions of work/life balance?How can I contribute to building up the people of the Basques, in which the daily use of language is a value to be cultivated, preserved, protected, and promoted, in the face of the globalizing and homogenizing threats of the cultures that surround us, as a heritage and unique enriching contribution to this corner of the world?How do we help individuals put out of work by automation?How can I leave a legacy that will serve generations of my family not yet born?What do I want to achieve by the time I am 40?How can I be remembered?

In Part 7, I’ll answer your lingering questions about favorite problems to close off this series.

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 My Favorite Favorite Problems appeared first on Forte Labs.