We’ve been living in Valle de Bravo – a mountain town a couple of hours outside Mexico City – for 9 months now.

I’ve lived in 5 countries for at least 6 months each, and traveled in another 20, and I think this is the most perfect place I’ve ever encountered for an expat family to live.

It’s so perfect, in fact, that I think it can actually serve as a template for finding other great places to live around the world.

After months of reflecting on what makes this place so special, I’ve identified 13 criteria (and one bonus criterion) that create the magic. 

What’s fascinating is that these aren’t just random qualities – they work together as a system, each element reinforcing the others to create something truly extraordinary.

1. Right Distance from a Major City

A 2-3 hour drive outside a major city is the perfect distance.

It’s close enough that you can drive in for the day or the weekend, yet far enough that people can’t commute daily. This creates a rooted community instead of a bedroom suburb.

We love being relatively close to Mexico City and everything it offers, but we don’t feel like we have to go there to access people, culture, or entertainment.

I’ve also met some of the most fascinating people ever here – artists, writers, poets, spiritual guides, entrepreneurs, permaculturalists, and creators working remotely.

2. Mountain Location

The mountains are objectively a wonderful place to live.

You get milder weather, fewer mosquitos, tons of nature, and cold nights to cozy up in bed. Plus activities like hiking, horseback riding, and camping.

The mountains also keep it from developing too much and maintain the region’s rural and outdoorsy character, with that small town feel.

Valle is a world-class destination for paragliding, waterskiing, and other outdoor activities, located in one of the few mountainous, temperate regions of Mexico.

3. Water Access

A lake provides recreational activities like swimming, sailing, powerboating, and waterskiing. It also creates beautiful waterfront views.

Research consistently demonstrates that proximity to water bodies leads to higher levels of mood improvement and stress reduction compared to other natural environments. The sights, sounds, and even smell of water provide a calming sensory experience that promotes a uniquely positive state of mind.

Valle is well known for its lake. Lots of people water ski most weekends throughout the year.

4. Tourism and Wealth

This may not seem desirable, but a certain level of tourist influx brings benefits.

There’s likely to be more investment in the town, interesting people coming and going, and more amenities like restaurants, grocery stores, and paddle courts than there’d be otherwise. People are also more likely to visit you.

All the more so if it’s also a wealthy enclave. Valle has a population of around 100,000 that doubles during busy weekends, since many people have weekend houses there. But it rarely feels crowded.

5. Few Foreigners

Our main goal in moving abroad was to immerse our kids in the Spanish language and Mexican culture. I know from living abroad before that this really only happens if there aren’t too many Americans around.

Valle has surprisingly few foreigners living there. It seems like it’s kind of an undiscovered secret for Mexico City families.

6. Warm Culture

Mexico has to be one of the warmest cultures anywhere. We’re constantly surprised by how completely open and generous everyone we meet is.

Especially the families at our kids’ school, who have become our closest friends.

It’s like rewinding the clock to a time before smartphones and the Internet. People greet each other, even strangers treat you like a human, everyone knows each other, and it’s easy to make friends.

At a restaurant, if a kid is crying, a waitress will pick them up and carry them around. They’re happy to give you an extra condiment without charging you for it.

I love that we’re raising our kids in a culture that teaches them how to be warm and open, with a background level of trust between people.

7. Airport Distance

You might think you want an airport nearby, but many of the positive qualities above exist because it’s not too easy to get here.

There’s an airport in Toluca, an hour away, but it’s not international. So you have to drive to one of the international airports in Mexico City, around 2-3 hours away.

8. Low Labor Costs

The single most life-changing part of moving to Mexico has been getting full-time help.

My wife and I save probably several hours a day because our help does all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and sometimes watches the kids.

We spend all this extra time on exercising, resting, sleeping, art, hobbies, socializing, and hanging out with the kids – all things we had much less time for living in Southern California.

We pay probably double the local going rate, and it’s still remarkably cheap for us. About $137 per week for 40 hours (or $3.40 per hour).

9. Slow Lifestyle

Part of our motivation for moving abroad was to deprogram ourselves from the work-centric life we adopted in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.

We found it simply impossible to do this living in Southern California. As long as everyone else was work-centric, there was nothing to do and no one to hang out with!

A core part of that work-centric mindset is an addiction to speed. We found we couldn’t slow ourselves down when everything around us was trying to speed us up.

Every place has a background tempo that dictates the underlying speed of everything within it. I think the only truly effective way to change your tempo is to change your environment.

Mexico, and especially small Mexican towns like Valle, operate at a fundamentally different pace than the US. The cultural emphasis is on relationships and enjoying life rather than maximizing productivity at all costs.

10. Similar Time Zone

If you’re from the US and do business there, you’ll probably want to be in a similar time zone.

This facilitates so many things, from scheduling calls easily to not having too much jet lag when you visit home.

It’s also a bonus if you can get back to the US in just a few hours and have connections to different places within the US. This means Mexico and Central America are ideal!

11. Strategic Inconvenience

In the US, we’re constantly driving toward efficiency, which mostly means removing people from the process. This results in a highly efficient society in which everyone feels alone.

In Mexico, they just throw people at every problem. It isn’t optimized, but there are so many people around, it’s way more fun!

Resisting that drive toward efficiency and convenience is nearly impossible as an individual, and even more difficult as a family, because you seem strange for actively resisting things being too easy.

I’m happy to be raising my kids in a place where there’s still friction, still humans you “have” to deal with, where you literally can’t go it alone to accomplish anything of significance. Relationships are the central element in life.

Part of this is also having a tolerance for risk. We live in a bubble-wrapped, liability-waiver, hyper-sensitive culture, especially when it comes to children. We’ve forgotten how to let them rough it up and find out for themselves.

Paradoxically, as my wife put it, we “overvalue” life to such a degree that we end up devaluing life, by refusing to allow our kids to face its risks.

It’s very hard to intentionally expose your kids to risk, though – you have to move somewhere where the environment provides it. We love that in Mexico, kids are an integral part of every activity. They’re not in a separate world where everything is anesthetized and infantilized.

12. Good Schools

This is probably the crux if you have kids, because good schools are hard to find anywhere. I would start your whole search for a location on this basis.

Valle has several great options, including (incredibly for such a small town) a Montessori and Waldorf school.

High school is harder, and some families move to Mexico City when their kids reach that age. But there are a couple of good options and additional ones on the way as more people settle permanently in town.

13. Good Weather

This is also a good starting point for your search, as weather defines so much of daily life. Obviously you’ll want somewhere without too many extremes.

Valle has year-round spring-like weather, except for an intense rainy season from June to September. But that just gives us the perfect excuse to travel in the summer, as many families do.

14. Artistic Culture (Bonus)

I don’t consider this essential, but Valle has a wonderfully artsy vibe. It was the “Woodstock of Mexico,” hosting a huge concert in 1971 that introduced rock ‘n roll to the mainstream.

This makes it unusually rich in all kinds of art, music, dance, and even psychedelic medicine. It’s more open-minded generally than most places in Mexico, all of which we enjoy immensely.

Finding Your Own Valle de Bravo Around the World

After thinking through these criteria systematically, I discovered dozens of other towns that fit this template. Here are some of the most promising options (courtesy of Claude 4):

In Mexico

Malinalco, Estado de México 

• 2 hours from Mexico City Mountains: Dramatic cliffs, mystical pre-Hispanic sites 
• No lake but swimming holes and streams 
• Wealthy weekend enclave for Mexico City families 
• Very few foreign residents 
• Traditional Mexican pueblo culture 
• Labor costs comparable to Valle 
• Extremely slow-paced, artistic community 
• Good private school options emerging

Zacatlán de las Manzanas, Puebla 

• 3 hours from Mexico City, 2 from Puebla 
• Mountains: Pine forests, apple orchards 
• Lake: Presa de Tenango nearby Mexican tourist destination (famous for apples/cider) 
• Almost no foreign residents 
• Warm provincial Mexican culture 
• Very affordable labor 
• Traditional, family-oriented lifestyle 
• Growing educational options

Real de Catorce, San Luis Potosí 

• 3 hours from San Luis Potosí (with airport) 
• Mountains: High desert mountain town 
• No lake but stunning desert landscapes 
• Mystical/spiritual tourism, wealthy Mexican visitors 
• Few permanent foreigners despite tourism 
• Deep traditional culture Very low labor costs 
• Contemplative, artistic atmosphere 
• Alternative education options

Tapalpa, Jalisco 

• 2 hours from Guadalajara Mountains: “Pueblo Mágico” with forests
• Lake: Presa del Nogal 
• Guadalajara’s weekend retreat 
• Minimal foreign presence 
• Traditional Jalisco hospitality 
• Affordable labor 
• Outdoor-focused, slow lifestyle 
• Good local schools

Cuetzalan, Puebla 

• 3 hours from Puebla city 
• Mountains: Cloud forest, coffee region 
• Waterfalls instead of lakes 
• Cultural tourism but few foreign residents 
• Strong indigenous Nahua presence 
• Incredibly warm community 
• Very low labor costs 
• Traditional, market-town pace 
• Local schools with cultural programs

In Central America

Suchitoto, El Salvador 

• 1.5 hours from San Salvador 
• Mountains: Overlooking Suchitlán Lake 
• Lake: Lago Suchitlán (country’s largest) 
• Arts/culture destination for wealthy Salvadorans 
• Almost no permanent expats 
• Warm Salvadoran hospitality 
• Very affordable labor 
• Artistic, slow-paced colonial town 
• Emerging private school options

Gracias, Honduras 

• 3 hours from San Pedro Sula 
• Mountains: Celaque National Park 
• Hot springs instead of lakes 
• Honduran tourist destination 
• Virtually no foreign residents 
• Traditional Lenca culture influence 
• Extremely affordable 
• Quiet, colonial atmosphere 
• Local schools improving

Matagalpa, Nicaragua 

• 2 hours from Managua Mountains: Coffee highlands 
• Rivers and waterfalls 
• Nicaraguan tourist/coffee region 
• Very few expats 
• Warm mountain culture 
• Lowest labor costs 
• Coffee-farming lifestyle pace 
• Several school options

Volcán, Panama 

• 1.5 hours from David 
• Mountains: Volcanic highlands 
• Streams and rivers (no lake) 
• Wealthy Panamanian retreat 
• Some retirees but families can find Spanish immersion 
• Indigenous Ngäbe influence 
• Reasonable labor costs 
• Agricultural, outdoor lifestyle 
• Good private schools

San Agustín Lanquín, Guatemala

• 3 hours from Guatemala City
• Mountains: Limestone caves region
• River: Cahabón River (turquoise pools)
• Growing eco-tourism, Guatemalan visitors
• Few permanent foreign families
• Q’eqchi’ Maya culture
• Very affordable
• Nature-based, slow lifestyle
• Community schools with cultural programs

In the United States and Canada

Nelson, British Columbia, Canada

• 3 hours from Spokane, WA (airport)
• Mountains: Stunning Selkirk Mountains
• Lake: Kootenay Lake (magnificent)
• Tourist/wealthy enclave: Vancouver families’ mountain retreat
• Warm Canadian mountain culture (surprisingly bohemian)
• Slow, artistic, non-work centric lifestyle
• Good Waldorf school + alternatives
• Great weather (for Canada)
• Pacific Time Zone
• Missing: Low labor costs, foreign language immersion

Salida, Colorado, US

• 2.5 hours from Denver
• Mountains: Arkansas River Valley, 14ers all around
• River town (Arkansas River) rather than lake
• Wealthy outdoor enthusiast enclave
• Warm, artistic community vibe
• Deliberately slow, “simple life” culture
• Growing alternative school scene
• 300+ days of sunshine
• Mountain Time Zone
• Missing: Low labor costs, foreign culture, major language immersion

Joseph, Oregon, US

• 3.5 hours from Boise (a stretch, but worth it)
• Mountains: Wallowa Mountains (“Alps of Oregon”)
• Lake: Wallowa Lake
• Tourist destination, Portland/Seattle wealthy retreat
• Genuine cowboy/artist culture mix
• Extremely slow-paced, no chain stores
• Small but good school
• Beautiful weather, real winters
• Pacific Time Zone
• Missing: Low labor costs, foreign culture, close to major city

Sandpoint, Idaho, US

• 2 hours from Spokane
• Mountains: Selkirk and Cabinet ranges
• Lake: Lake Pend Oreille (huge, gorgeous)
• Wealthy Seattle/California exodus destination
• Surprisingly warm, outdoorsy culture
• Anti-corporate, slow lifestyle ethos
• Waldorf school + good public schools
• Four real seasons
• Pacific Time Zone
• Missing: Low labor costs, foreign culture

Rossland, British Columbia, Canada

• 2.5 hours from Spokane
• Mountains: Ski town in the Monashees
• No lake but close to Christina Lake (30 min)
• Weekend destination for Vancouver/Calgary families
• Small, tight-knit community
• Extremely slow, outdoor-focused
• Good elementary, high school requires creativity
• Snowy winters, perfect summers
• Pacific Time Zone
• Missing: Low labor costs, foreign immersion

The System Behind the Magic

Strangely enough, the mountain town I lived in for a year when I was 14 – Campos do Jordão in Brazil – meets most of these criteria as well. It’s a few hours outside São Paulo, in the mountains, a tourist destination and wealthy enclave, with a warm and inviting culture.

The year we spent abroad there was so formative for me, I think I’ve subconsciously tried to recreate as many of those conditions as possible for my kids, but in Mexico.

What I’ve learned is that these criteria work together as an interconnected system. The distance from a major city creates the rooted community. The mountains provide the natural beauty and limit overdevelopment. The tourism brings investment and interesting people. The culture provides immersion and different values.

Each element reinforces the others to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

The real insight isn’t just about Valle de Bravo – it’s about understanding what creates the conditions for the kind of life you actually want to live, then systematically looking for places that provide those conditions.

What would your criteria be? What kind of life are you trying to create, and what environmental conditions would support that vision?

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In 1997, a young hip-hop producer from Detroit named J Dilla did something that violated every rule in music: he programmed his drum machine to play “off beat.”

Not just slightly off, but deliberately off—breaking up the rigid timing that had governed musical performance in every genre.

What happened next confounded the music industry. Instead of sounding amateurish, the “wrong” beats created a revolution. They somehow felt more organic, more alive, and more expressive than anything else in electronic music up to that point.

Professional musicians couldn’t explain it. Hip-hop critics couldn’t categorize it. But listeners—particularly other producers and artists—couldn’t get enough of it.

And here’s the paradox that stopped me cold: Dilla used the most mechanical of tools—a drum machine—to create something that sounded profoundly, unmistakably human.

(I suggest listening to this playlist of J Dilla-produced songs on Spotify while reading the rest of this piece.)

I’ve been thinking about this story as I’ve watched the panic unfold around AI and creativity. Many cultural critics and artists paint a bleak picture. They warn of creative fields decimated by automation, of human imagination rendered obsolete, of a future where authentic human expression drowns in a sea of algorithmic content.

But what if they’re wrong?

What if new technology doesn’t destroy creativity but instead transforms it in ways we can’t yet imagine?

Recently, I found an unexpected source of insight into this question—a book about the life and innovations of that same hip-hop producer: Dilla Time by Dan Charnas.

As I learned about Dilla’s career, I couldn’t help but notice striking parallels to our current moment with generative AI. Here are seven insights drawn from the early history of hip-hop that challenge today’s techno-pessimism about AI and creativity:

1. Technology can create new creative forms that humans can’t

James Dewitt Yancey—known as Jay Dee and later as J Dilla—died in 2006 at the age of 32 from a rare blood disease called TTP, but his revolutionary approach to rhythm lives on. As Charnas puts it: “He is the only producer-composer to emerge from hip-hop and, indeed, all electronic music to fundamentally change the way so-called traditional musicians play.”

J Dilla’s innovation was impossible without the Akai MPC3000 drum machine. By deliberately manipulating the timing of drum hits, he created what Charnas calls “Dilla Time”—a style that juxtaposed even and uneven time-feels simultaneously, creating a pleasurable rhythmic friction that no human drummer could physically execute.

The parallel to generative AI is clear: while many fear AI will make creative work formulaic, it might instead enable entirely new forms of creative expression—forms that humans alone couldn’t accomplish due to our cognitive or physiological limitations.

2. The most innovative uses of technology often subvert its intended purpose

Drum machines were designed with a quantizing function to “correct” human timing errors using software. 

But J Dilla deliberately subverted this function. He turned off quantization or manually moved drum hits off a mathematically precise grid, creating beats that communicated emotion through “imperfect” rhythm.

This paradox—using a machine designed for metronomic perfection to create controlled imperfection—suggests that the most powerful innovations often come from subverting a technology’s intended purpose.

The most transformative uses of AI may similarly come from those who find ways to bend the technology, introducing controlled variations that make its output more distinctively creative and human.

3. New technology can reconnect us with ancient traditions

Surprisingly, Dilla’s innovation via digital technology represented a return to older forms of musical expression. His rhythmic approach reconnected with polyrhythmic traditions from West Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia that had been marginalized by the conventions of European classical music for centuries.

As ethnomusicologists noted, Dilla’s rhythms broke through the European frame that colonialism had forced on much of the world’s popular music.

This challenges the narrative that technology alienates us from our authentic human nature. In this case, the drum machine allowed musicians to reconnect with complex rhythms that had been all but lost to history.

Similarly, AI might not lead us into a posthuman future but instead return us to our primal roots, surfacing ancient aspects of our psychology that were repressed by industrial-age modernity.

4. Creative relationships with technology evolve from conforming to bending

Early hip-hop producers conformed their creative process to their drum machines’ limitations, trying to make audio samples fit neatly into the rigid 16-pad time grid. But Dilla took a fundamentally different approach.

As DJ Jazzy Jeff observed: “Everyone in hip-hop had heretofore been trying to cut, splice, and jam samples to accommodate the machine’s time grid… But Jay Dee did the opposite: he bent the machine grid to accommodate his sample sources, because he was focused on using those samples for their rhythmic and harmonic feel.”

This evolution from conforming to technology’s rigid constraints to bending it to human intention is instructive. The earliest AI-generated art shows creators conforming to algorithmic limitations, but as these tools develop and creators’ technical understanding deepens, we’ll see more instances of the technology being bent to accommodate our visions.

This evolution from conforming to bending seems inevitable in every creative-technological relationship. It’s not a question of if professional creators will bend AI to their will, but when and how they’ll discover the equivalent of turning off quantization in their generative workflows.

5. New technologies create new creative specializations

J Dilla’s innovation created an entirely new category of musicianship. He wasn’t a traditional percussionist but what audio technology pioneer Roger Linn called a “sequencer player”—someone whose primary instrument was the programming of rhythmic time itself through digital interfaces.

Dilla made microsecond timing variations in ways that were impossible for human drummers, creating a new art form that required a new type of technical virtuoso.

We’re seeing the same pattern with generative AI. These tools are giving rise to new creative specializations: prompt engineers, AI image directors, model fine-tuners—emerging roles existing at the intersection of human aesthetics and machine capability.

Just as many classically trained musicians initially dismissed “sequencer players” as not being real musicians, we see traditional creative professionals dismissing these new AI-adjacent creative roles.

But these new creative forms don’t replace existing ones—they expand the total landscape of expressive possibilities. They are additions to our creative ecosystem, not wholesale substitutions within it.

6. Technological innovations transform how we value information repositories

Hip-hop pioneered sampling—taking segments of existing recordings and transforming them into new compositions. J Dilla elevated this practice using sophisticated digital techniques to chop, stretch, and manipulate audio samples into entirely new sonic arrangements.

This practice made certain information repositories—warehouses of obscure vinyl records from defunct labels—skyrocket in commercial value. Producers spent countless hours digging through dusty crates searching for unique drum breaks and bass lines no other producer had discovered.

We’re seeing this same pattern with generative AI, where specialized datasets have suddenly become incredibly valuable for training and fine-tuning. Collections of information previously overlooked in the pre-AI economy now hold tremendous monetary and strategic value.

This raises profound questions about creativity itself: Has human creativity ever truly been about creating from nothing? Or has it always involved recombining, transforming, and recontextualizing what came before us in novel ways?

7. Machine innovations feed back into human creative practice

Perhaps the most powerful lesson from J Dilla’s story is how his machine-enabled innovations transformed human musicians’ techniques. 

Professional performers like Questlove of The Roots and neo-soul keyboardist D’Angelo meticulously studied Dilla’s machine-made rhythmic patterns and learned to replicate them with traditional acoustic instruments, fundamentally rethinking their relationship with music in the process.

As Charnas describes: “Jay Dee could shift a drum’s position in time by programming it, and there it would remain. But Questlove had to counteract a lifetime of physical reflexes, to retrain his body to do things and feel time differently.”

A machine-made innovation forced one of the world’s most accomplished drummers to unlearn years of muscle memory and develop entirely new techniques. The drum machine wasn’t replacing the human musician—it was pushing human creativity into previously unexplored territories.

J Dilla’s innovations extended beyond hip-hop, influencing jazz orchestration, classical composition, and mainstream pop production. His work has been interpreted by symphony orchestras at Lincoln Center and studied in university music conservatories.

This pattern suggests something important about our AI future: the most significant impact of generative AI on human creativity may not be direct replacement of jobs, but how it challenges professional creators to develop new capabilities and aesthetic perspectives they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

Embracing the Meta-Creativity of the AI Era

If the evolution of music production technology and electronic instruments teaches us anything, it’s that new tools don’t eliminate human creativity—they transform it, often in ways that expand rather than contract the range of human creative expression.

But this technological transformation requires a specific creative approach.

J Dilla didn’t set out to revolutionize rhythm—he simply explored the creative possibilities of his MPC3000 with extraordinary dedication and meticulous attention to detail. His daily creative routine, as described by Charnas, involved rising at 7 am, cleaning his Detroit studio while listening carefully to newly-acquired vinyl records, and then making beats from 9:00 a.m. until noon. He created them “quickly, one after the other, finished them, and then moved on.”

I find this aspect of his disciplined practice particularly illuminating for our AI moment.

This combination of structured daily practice, deep listening to source material, and rapid iterative experimentation mirrors what the most innovative creators are now doing with generative AI tools. The truly groundbreaking uses of AI aren’t coming from those who simply prompt a model to create something and uncritically accept whatever it produces. They’re coming from those who engage in a sustained dialogue with the technology, who develop deep technical understanding of its capabilities and limitations, and who have a clear creative vision that transcends the particular tool itself.

What would a “J Dilla approach” to generative AI look like in your specific creative field?

What we should be looking for (and investing in) are not just incremental improvements in AI model capabilities, but the emerging meta-practices that leverage AI to create new forms of human-machine creative collaboration. These emerging practices might involve using AI to rapidly explore creative possibilities, to overcome specific technical obstacles, to challenge established aesthetic assumptions, or to handle routine aspects of production work so that human creators can focus on higher-level creative decisions and emotional subtlety.

The story of J Dilla reminds us that when a new technology enters a creative field, the most interesting developments often happen not at the center of that technology’s intended use but at its experimental edges—where innovative humans push it beyond its manufacturer’s instructions, bend it to their unique artistic vision, and in the process, discover entirely new dimensions of creativity.

Rather than fearing that AI will replace human artists, we should be asking more specific questions: What new forms of meta-creativity will emerge in the AI era? What new patterns of thought and creation – what new harmonies between human aesthetic intelligence and machine computational intelligence – might become possible through thoughtful collaboration?

The answer to these questions won’t come from the technology itself, but from the James Yanceys of our era—those visionary creators and artists who see in our new digital tools not a threat to human expression, but an invitation to expand it in ways we’ve yet to imagine.

And perhaps, just perhaps, that creator could be you.

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I’m proud to introduce Death Clock, a life expectancy calculator that predicts the day of your death based on 17 personalized variables.

Give it a try for free!

This is not only the first “app” I’ve ever created myself, but also my first experience with AI-assisted coding, which has become known as “vibecoding.” 

I can definitively say this was one of the most eye-opening, impressive encounters with technology I’ve ever had, and it opened my eyes to a vast horizon of possibilities that I think AI-assisted coding will open up going forward.

Here are my observations and insights based on my first few hours of vibecoding.

Finding an entry point

One of the first things I look for when trying to learn a new skill is a good “entry point.”

Simply typing the topic into Google or YouTube is not smart, as it only results in a flood of mediocre-quality, clickbait-driven results. Instead, I look for a single, in-depth piece of content or a course taught by a qualified instructor with a strong track record of quality. Ideally, there’s also an accompanying community or discussion forum associated with it, so I can see what others are doing.

All these criteria were fulfilled when I signed up for my friend Nat Eliason’s new course, Build Your Own Apps with AI. One recent Saturday morning I started watching the instructional videos while my wife and the kids were sleeping in.

The course recommends the coding program Cursor. As I downloaded the desktop app and created an account, the complex-looking interface was already starting to intimidate me. I had downloaded IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) before, but since I have virtually no technical ability or knowledge, I always felt overwhelmed and confused by the unfamiliar interface and quickly gave up.

Here’s what the interface looks like in Cursor:

As I watched Nat’s videos, it soon dawned on me how incredibly straightforward and easy it was to create functional code using Cursor, for one simple reason: it draws on the formidable powers of leading LLMs.

As I began experimenting, I found that it wasn’t necessary to interact with any part of the software except for one: the ongoing chat with the AI. Although you can directly manipulate the code, navigate around the various project files, approve or reject individual edits, and issue commands in a terminal window if you want, none of that is strictly necessary. The AI can take all the actions itself.

Building Death Clock v1

After watching the first module of the course, I decided to go right ahead and try building something I actually wanted: a life expectancy calculator. 

I’m in the midst of writing my new book, on the art and practice of completing an annual life review, and I’m finding that one of the main themes of the book is reckoning with one’s mortality and limited time on the planet. It’s quite hard to take on that longer-term perspective day to day. But at least once a year, I think it’s incredibly valuable to do so. I was looking for a way to give readers a visceral, felt sense of how short life truly is.

I can write thousands of words about mortality and its ability to put our lives into proper perspective, but no volume of words compares to the power of a personalized, interactive tool that calculates your own expected date of death. It’s the difference between generic advice and an expiration date that takes into account your own unique life circumstances.

Living in Mexico has also exposed me to a very different attitude toward death than I’m used to in the US. Instead of something to be feared and the mention of it avoided, death is a much bigger part of the culture, from the ofrendas of Día de Muertos to the ubiquity of skeleton iconography to the constant awareness of ancestors. I want to make death something that people can talk about more openly.

And lastly, I turn 40 next week, so let’s just say that mortality is on my mind

Working with the AI

I started my project by creating an empty folder, loading it up into Cursor, and asking it to “Build a web app that calculates someone’s life expectancy based on lifestyle factors.” That was it. There were no technical specifications, no feature requests, and no tech stack. Just a simple request made in natural language.

Cursor gives you the option to select which LLM you want to use, including all the leading models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. I kept it on “auto-select,” which means it decided which model to use depending on the situation.

It proceeded to immediately build a full-fledged React project, which took several minutes and involved creating an entire structure of multiple interlinked files. I asked it to open the app in my web browser, and it prepared the file, which I just needed to double-click.

Here’s what that very first version looked like:

So the app now existed, but with one tiny problem: there was no way to input any personal information! I asked it to add input fields for each of the lifestyle factors, and in a couple of minutes they appeared. I put in my own information as a test, and it spit out the results:

After only about 5 minutes, I already had a functional web app! This alone is astonishing, as I would have probably needed hours to get even this much up and running on my own. I thought back to my early web design efforts using Microsoft FrontPage as a teenager in the 90s, and how that experience was so daunting that I gave up on the endeavor altogether.

I spent the next several hours adding features, which amounted to no more or less than asking for them in the AI chat window and waiting. Here’s what I changed, one element at a time:

• Added a total of 17 questions, encompassing various aspects of a person’s life that influence their life expectancy
• Added an in-line BMI calculator, based on a person’s height and weight
• Asked the AI to create a logo of an hourglass and place it at the top of the page
• Had it try out a couple of styles, settling on a muted, grey and blue color scheme
• Added some interesting outputs and observations related to life expectancy to the “results” page, based on the answers to the questions
• Added a pie chart visualizing a person’s remaining lifespan (which required Cursor to download and install a new library, which it handled on its own)
• Added a call to action to check out my website at the end
• Set up a repository on GitHub and published the app using GitHub Pages, so I can share it with others

All this took about 3-4 hours, but I would estimate around half that time was spent waiting for the AI to do the work, or for the new version to deploy, so I could view it in a browser. While all this was happening, I hung out with the kids, washed dishes, took a shower, and got some reading done. Instead of requiring an all-encompassing, immersive day of obsessive learning, which is what I would have expected, I actually had quite a relaxing, balanced day!

There were only a couple of hiccups I encountered during this project. At one point, there was a bug that would make the whole screen go blank when I clicked the “Calculate Life Expectancy” button. Cursor asked me to copy and paste the error message from the console into the chat, but before I even did that, it guessed what the problem was and proceeded to fix it by itself. Here’s what that interaction looked like:

I sometimes had to perform actions beyond just clicking “accept all,” such as typing “y” into the command line to allow it to proceed, or typing in my computer’s root password to allow it to install something, so I did have to pay a bit of attention and look out for next steps.

A few times, a new feature didn’t work correctly the immediately, and required follow-up fixes, such as this first attempt at a pie chart:

One of the most surprising parts of working with an LLM in a coding environment is that the AI has context and knowledge about many, many domains that have nothing to do with code. For example, at one point, I got stuck with the GitHub settings, so I just pasted a screenshot of what I was seeing into Cursor, and got a precise diagnosis of what was wrong, plus step-by-step instructions on how to fix it.

But it also goes beyond software. At one point, I asked Cursor to tell me how robust or evidence-backed a question about income level was, and in seconds, it pulled in an academic paper that examined exactly this question. It still had to simplify the correlation between income and life expectancy into a multiple-choice question, but knowing there was at least some validity to this question gave me the confidence to move forward.

I kept assuming I would hit a roadblock and have to switch to a “real” LLM to do more serious research, planning, or structuring of questions. But that wasn’t the case: the LLMs that Cursor is drawing on are exactly the same ones you’d have access to via ChatGPT or Claude, so there’s no need to leave.

That also means that Cursor can do design work. I asked it to create a visual style reminiscent of the blocky, 8-bit graphics of early Nintendo games, but with a death-themed, macabre look. It instantly understood the assignment, using red and black to convey the right feeling:

I decided that look wasn’t quite right, so I had it pivot to a cleaner, more modern style. Here’s what that interaction looked like, replacing probably hours of work:

The ability to pivot on a dime like this and effortlessly try out a completely new direction is astonishing. Small experiments and whimsical curiosities can be indulged and tested without expending significant time or effort.

My 4 takeaways from vibecoding

This first experience of a few hours of vibecoding left me with 4 takeaways:

• Learning to code is now optional
• The new bottleneck is how you spend the time that’s saved
• Software is the new frontier of book publishing
• We’re entering a more impressionistic era of creation

Learning to code is now optional

Over the years, I’ve considered whether I should build an app many times. I live in the world of tech and software, and in many ways, the ability to create a new software tool is the pinnacle of agency in that world.

Yet every time, I’ve decided not to pursue building an app, either because I lacked the time to learn it myself, or didn’t want to spend the thousands of dollars it seemed to require to even build something basic.

But now, in a matter of hours and at almost zero cost, I can build something that’s genuinely useful. I didn’t learn anything about coding, but I think that’s overall a good thing. Learning can be fun and is certainly useful, but it isn’t always inherently good or necessary.

Why should the ability to leverage software be limited to those willing to spend months or years studying arcane details of technical implementation? Why should someone’s vision or mission require them to know the low-level details of how a webpage gets rendered? And now, nearly all of the details are “low-level.”

Learning coding is now optional, but I think AI tools will also make it easier to learn to code for those who decide they want to. At any point, you can bring in context from any part of the codebase and ask the AI to explain it to you at any level of detail you want. You can even have it explain things outside that environment, such as the many external systems and interfaces you’ll need to get a full-fledged website working.

This is such a remarkable level of accessibility for a technology that was previously very hard to use, and it’s difficult to predict how the world will change when everyone can wield the power of software.

The new bottleneck is how you spend the time that’s saved

It’s so fast to create and edit code this way that the bottleneck starts to become how fast you can move your mouse, the speed of your internet connection, how long it takes to deploy a new build, the speed of refreshing the page, etc.

I predict we’ll see a variety of efforts to speed up every little step involved in coding, the same way that factories once invested millions in reducing the time it took to switch a production line from one activity to another, as that became the bottleneck.

But more broadly, the true limiter on the quality of software that people will be able to produce using Cursor and similar tools is how they spend the time that AI frees up for them. 

You could spend it chilling by the pool or watching TV, but you have to remember that everyone else is also having all their time freed up, so the level of competition will increase like a rising tide. Many web apps that people will build this way are hobbies, or experiments, or complements to other projects. Still, many will have some kind of competition or alternative, and the only way to compete effectively will be to invest the time saved in new dimensions of quality.

Maybe you spend that time exercising and meditating, so that you can ground yourself and bring wiser, more holistic decision-making to the AI. Maybe you spend it reading and researching, so the knowledge underlying your app is richer and more nuanced. Maybe you spend it hunting for obscure sources or offline archives, so that you can incorporate context that the LLM doesn’t already know. Maybe you spend your time talking with potential customers, so your choices more accurately reflect what they want.

All of these are valid choices, and they will all become important dimensions of competition and quality, even more so than they already are today. The true scarce resource continues to be the time and attention of other people, and I only expect the battle for that attention to keep heating up.

Software is the new frontier of book publishing

One of the domains I’m most excited about applying these new tools to is book publishing. Books have changed so little over time, and increasingly suffer in comparison to other, far more interactive and engaging forms of media.

I don’t think bemoaning this fact and lecturing people on the importance of reading is helpful, but I do believe interactive web apps like this could make a tremendous difference. What if, every time you finished a book, or even a single chapter, you were presented with a link to a free, interactive, personalized web app that directly applied the ideas you just read to your own situation?

Instead of trying to guess how to apply a book’s ideas, or get upsold to a course, or have to get expensive support from a coach or consultant, you would have a self-serve piece of software you can immediately engage with.

The value of a book is that the author has taken an extraordinary amount of time to research and think deeply about an important issue, topic, or skill. That’s a rare thing in our hype-driven online world of disposable headlines. But that same slow-moving, timeless quality makes it very difficult for books to recommend or prescribe any given form of implementation. There’s just too much variation between individuals to offer a one-size-fits-all solution, and long publishing timelines mean that any solution printed in the pages of a book is likely to be obsolete by the time it hits the shelves.

This is a way to combine the best of both worlds: to deliver the timeless, wise, holistic wisdom of books, accompanied by a suite of personalized, customizable, up-to-date digital implementation tools, accessible in one click or tap. This is how you save the culture of reading – not by resisting change but by embracing it. I plan on making extensive use of this approach in my next book.

We’re entering a more impressionistic era of creation

One of the most continuously surprising aspects of AI-assisted vibecoding is how brief, imprecise, informal, and vague my instructions can be, and still be understood. I could almost always just say “Fix this” with a screenshot, or “Make this look better,” or even just “Improve the question,” and AI would figure it out.

This is so different from past technologies that require you to be extremely exact, specifying what you want with mathematical precision. Even a single wrong character in a codebase of thousands of lines could result in a catastrophic error.

My unclear instructions often resulted in better results, because the AI would misinterpret my intentions and make improvements I hadn’t even thought of. Some of the best ideas came from the AI, either because I asked it for ideas or because it contributed them spontaneously as it guessed what I was trying to achieve.

Like the transition in painting style from the Realism of the mid-19th century to the Impressionism of the late 19th century, driven by painters’ desire to capture changing qualities of natural light, fleeting moments, and spontaneous experiences using quick, expressive brushwork rather than carefully finished compositions, we’re going to see a similar transition in software design.

Interestingly, what sparked the transition back then was technology – the advent of photography meant that scenes could be captured with nearly perfect realism, which devalued that ability by humans. Human artists pivoted in reaction, exploring a new frontier of perception, novel color combinations, and everyday life.

I think we’ll soon see our technological creations becoming much more impressionistic, based on ambiguous premonitions, subtle feelings, or vague notions that we can’t fully articulate. We’ll see people create various kinds of software as artistic expressions, or to capture a fleeting memory, or to convey a single message. Software will become its own mode of creative expression for a much wider range of people now that the price of entry has plummeted to near zero.

4 tips for using Cursor

Despite my lack of commitment to learning anything in particular, I found that I did end up learning a few things about how to work effectively in Cursor:

• You don’t have to deploy a new version with every new feature you build, as that takes a few minutes. But it’s a good idea to do so anytime you get a major new feature working, as you’ll be able to “roll back” to that point if you mess up anything in the future.
• It’s always helpful to bring in the relevant context to any interaction with the AI chat. Cursor makes this very easy by including an “add to chat” button both in the code window and in the terminal, which are the two places you’d want to draw on for context
• Pasting screenshots into the AI chat is remarkably helpful, as it allows the AI to see exactly what you’re referring to. Often, you don’t even need to say anything – the AI understands what’s working as soon as it sees how it’s appearing.

You can check out Cursor with a free trial at https://www.cursor.com. I signed up for the paid version for $20 per month to build my first app, though you’ll have access to a lot of functionality for free. I recommend their “getting started” documentation to learn about the basic features, which are more than enough to allow you to build your first simple app.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

In the early 1700s, Central Europe faced a crisis: the forests were running out.

An explosion in mining, shipbuilding, and early industry had devastated old-growth forests that had stood for many centuries. Meanwhile, the population was exploding as well, creating demands on forests that clearly couldn’t be sustained for long.

The kingdoms of Prussia and Saxony decided to apply the emerging methods of science to the problem, developing what would eventually become known as Scientific Forestry. In order to maximize timber production for the state, forestry officials turned their wild and messy woodlands into outdoor timber factories.

They began by meticulously cataloguing every tree in the forest by species and size. They analyzed growth rates and wood quality to identify the most productive species, settling on Norway spruce to yield the maximum volume of timber per square foot. They then cleared the existing forests and turned them into monocultures – endless rows of evenly spaced, identically sized spruce.

What had once been an impossibly complex tangle of diverse kinds of vegetation – oak, beech, fir, and countless others – became a “planned forest.” It was the biological equivalent of a spreadsheet, with straight rows of trees laid out in a precise geometric grid ready for bureaucratic regulation.

At first, it worked beautifully. Forestry officials could now predict with extreme accuracy the exact yield of every patch of forest. The new plantations produced more lumber, at a faster pace, to a more precise standard. Harvests came in on schedule and in uniform sizes ready for sawmills. Logging boomed and the revenue flowed into state coffers.

But something strange began to happen after the second or third generations of trees were planted. The first generation had flourished in the absence of competition for soil and nutrients, but in the following generations, those same ecosystems collapsed, with dramatic production losses of 20-30%.

In order to make the forest more productive, the underbrush had been cleared of smaller trees, bushes, and shrubs. That underbrush had fertilized the soil with decomposing leaves and wood; without this undergrowth, the soil soon became depleted. The disappearance of fungi, worms, and insects caused pollination and soil aeration to crash.

Pests like the pine looper moth and bark beetle raced through identical strands of trees, encountering no obstacles or predators. Storms damaged vast swathes of the forest, toppling over the shallowly rooted spruces like “bowling pins.”

It turned out in retrospect that the messy diversity of the forest had been the source of its resilience. When stresses such as storms, disease, drought, fragile soil, or severe cold struck, a diverse forest with its full array of different species of trees, birds, insects, and animals was far better able to survive and recover. A windstorm that toppled large, old trees would typically spare smaller ones. An insect attack that threatened oaks might leave lindens and hornbeams unaffected. The rigidity and uniformity of the system meant that failures were not small and contained but systemic. 

By the late 19th and early 20th century, forest plantations had become “a pale shadow of their previous ecological richness.” After all the effort and resources invested, the forests of Central Europe were now producing less timber than the wild forests they had replaced. All these changes culminated in what Germans grimly came to call Waldsterben, or “death of the forest.” 

The supposedly “scientific” management of forests led to ecological problems so severe that multiple generations of restoration ecology have been needed to restore the previous diversity in insects, flora, and fauna. Germany continues to struggle with the lasting effects of monoculture forestry to this day, most recently in 2018 due to the mounting effects of climate change.

This story is recounted in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, and in his book, Scott notes that far from being a unique or isolated incident, scientific forestry was one incidence of a far broader movement, which he dubs Authoritarian High Modernism. 

Across many facets of the modern world, from urban planning to public health, from transportation infrastructure to online social networks, we’ve sought to “rationalize” and “optimize” the messiness and complexity of the world. From the way we organize our cities and homes to how we manage the economy, all the way down to the systems and routines we create for our personal productivity, we’ve tried to impose rational order on complex systems based on a narrow vision of efficiency.

In this piece, I’ll argue that the results of that effort have been disastrous, and it’s time to return those systems to their natural, messy state.

An optimal level of mess

I first read the story of scientific forestry in a blog post by Venkatesh Rao in 2014. It was a paradigm-shifting moment for me. I saw in myself much the same attitude as 18th century German forestry officials – an unquestioned belief in order, reason, and systematic thinking.

I had always believed that anything I wanted to achieve in life was to be found on the other side of “getting organized.” My assumption was that there was one “best” path to achieving any goal, which was to follow a highly specific, structured, step-by-step plan with objectives and metrics. It was the “one true way,” as universal and unquestioned as my childhood religious faith.

Yet, in my early 20s, I began to run up against the limits of my blind faith in order. I began to see more and more examples of how it failed – in my own life, the lives of my friends and peers, and even in the business world and in society. The pitfalls and weaknesses of highly ordered, rationalized systems started to become ever more glaring, especially in a world that seemed to be changing faster and becoming more ambiguous and uncertain.

What if, I began to wonder, the costs of being neat and organized outweighed the benefits? What if there were hidden advantages to being messy, informal, loose, and even chaotic?

Last year, I picked up a book called A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, that finally addressed my longstanding question. Their striking conclusion after studying dozens of disciplines was a strong affirmative yes: that “moderately disorganized people, institutions, and systems frequently turn out to be more efficient, more resilient, more creative, and in general more effective than highly organized ones.”

They argue instead for an attitude toward organization that takes into account its costs, by asking yourself: Will more effort spent organizing be worth what it costs me in time and other resources? They suggest that there is an “optimal level of mess” for any given person and every given situation…and that it is just as common for people to err on the side of overorganization as underorganization.

This assertion is akin to heresy in our productivity-obsessed world. And for me personally, as someone who’s dedicated my career to teaching people how to be more efficient and organized, it felt like the portal to a hidden, subversive world.

The surprising benefits of disorder

This may seem counterintuitive, but you can think of “mess” not as simply the absence of order – like a vacuum of nothingness – but as a phenomenon in its own right, with its own qualities.

You can even conceive of mess as a valuable resource you can draw on or a strategy you can proactively apply when needed.

To understand when and where we might want to employ messes, we need to identify its unique benefits. Abrahamson and Freedman suggest six of them: flexibility, completeness, resonance, invention, efficiency, and robustness.

Messes are flexible in that they can adapt and change more quickly, more dramatically, in a wider variety of situations, and with less effort than would be required by highly ordered, formal systems. 

For example, the messiness of a jazz ensemble enables improvisation, as any musician can shift at any moment to address any other, whereas a symphony orchestra has to play the music as written. Neat systems struggle to fight off randomness, and when randomness inevitably leaks in, the system is thrown off.

Messes are more complete (or comprehensive) since they can comfortably tolerate an exhaustive array of diverse entities. 

Neat systems tend to whittle away at the diversity of their elements (as we saw in 18th-century German forestry). As another example, Thomas Edison tried any and every material in his quest to invent a workable lightbulb with a long-lasting glow, without regard to elegant theories as to why they might work. His approach to experimentation was wide-ranging and messy.

Messes are resonant, as in they facilitate surprising connections between overlapping, heterogenous elements. 

Alexander Fleming happened upon the discovery that led to the invention of the first antibiotic, penicillin, because his lab was notoriously messy. A small, ragged circle of mold had invaded one of his petri dishes, but the staphylococci culture it contained seemed to steer clear of the mold, his first clue that the bacteria couldn’t tolerate it.

Messes facilitate invention by randomly juxtaposing many elements in unexpected, unconventional ways. 

Neatness tends to limit novelty and the unexpected and sweeps them aside as aberrations when they do occur. A sobering example: a major reason modern terrorists are so hard to fight and defeat is because they are constituted by loose, constantly shifting, non-hierarchical, i.e., messy groups.

Messes are efficient, able to accomplish goals with a modest consumption of resources. 

Consider the “productivity” of the wild forests before scientific management took root – they produced immense value for a wide variety of human and non-human species, despite the complete lack of an organizing scheme. Neatness tends to require a constant expenditure of resources just to maintain itself.

Messes are robust in that they tend to weave together and interlace many disparate elements, making them more resistant to destruction, failure, and imitation. 

For example, competitive runners benefit from “inconsistent” workouts that mix up the speed, length, difficulty, frequency, and inclination of their running routines, leading to muscles that are more adaptable. Mixed-breed mutts are often hardier than purebred dogs thanks to the random interweaving of genes from their unlike parents. Neat systems, in contrast, tend to be more brittle and more easily disrupted or copied.

Later in the book, Abrahamson and Freedman introduce a seventh benefit: messes can be fun!

Consider the joy of sorting through antiques and doodads at a flea market, browsing a stack of random magazines, or spelunking through a messy collection of notes and finding something you didn’t even know you were looking for. Messy situations inherently include many qualities we find enlivening and interesting: surprise, delight, exploration, and discovery.

Adding disorder to a system can make it more effective

It’s one thing to believe that messes have some intriguingly positive qualities in theory. It’s quite another to realize those benefits in real life.

Let’s get one level more concrete and look at practical ways we can use the benefits of disorder in our daily lives.

Specifically, let’s see how disorder can make for more creative environments, allow information systems to contain more information, make the human brain smarter, enhance one’s personal productivity, and allow us to make more consistent progress on our projects and goals.

Disorder makes for more creative environments

In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson highlights many surprising examples of how disorder has led to new ideas and inventions throughout history. In his research, he found that innovation is often driven by “the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space.”

Perhaps the most classic model for such a space is the eighteenth-century coffeehouse, which Johnson notes was the hotbed for Enlightenment-era innovations that transformed our world: everything from the science of electricity to the insurance industry to modern democracy itself. 

Sigmund Freud famously hosted an intellectual salon on Wednesday nights in Vienna, where physicians, philosophers, and scientists came together to discuss the emerging field of psychoanalysis. The legendary Homebrew Computer Club in 1970s Silicon Valley was made up of a ragtag group of amateur hobbyists, teenagers, entrepreneurs, and academics, who together somehow sparked the personal computer revolution.

Berkeley psychology professor Charlan Nemeth began investigating the relationship between noise, dissent, and creativity in group environments more than thirty years ago, and her research offers a clue as to why noisy cafes and amateur hobbyist clubs might have fostered so much creativity: she found that “good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error,” ranging from mock juries to corporate boardrooms to academic seminars.

Maybe the best environment for our creativity is not sitting in a minimalist cafe, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, with an all-consuming focus on a tiny screen. Maybe there are times we’d be better served by immersing ourselves in randomness instead.

Disorder makes for more information-rich systems

Steven Johnson, in his book, introduces the field of Descriptive Complexity Theory, a branch of information science that has found that the more randomness in a system, the more information it can hold.

This may seem paradoxical, but imagine the case of two professors: one with a perfectly tidy, neat office with not a paperclip out of place, and one with a messy office full of personal items strewn all over the place. Which one provides you with more information about what kind of person the professor is? Clearly the messy one, since too much neatness and order tends to hide away the idiosyncratic details that distinguish one person from another.

Now imagine a digital notetaking app such as Notion, Obsidian, Tana, or Evernote. You might imagine that perfectly organizing your notes app – with neatly formatted text, seamless folders, comprehensive tags, and uniform headings – might allow you to fully maximize the potential of your knowledge.

But then again…maybe not. Maybe it is the very messiness that we tend to despise that makes our notes personal, intimate, and unique to us. A perfectly organized set of notes could belong to anyone, whereas a messier collection might contain all sorts of hidden clues about your unique desires and interests.

Disorder makes for smarter brains

In a 2007 study on the brain activity of children, neuroscientist Robert Thatcher and his team found that there was a correlation between the IQ of individual children and the amount of time their brains spent in “chaotic mode” (in contrast to “phase lock,” which is a more ordered and focused state of mind).

Every extra millisecond spent in chaos added as much as twenty IQ points, whereas time spent in phase lock was correlated with reduced IQ. Their conclusion is astonishing: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are likely to be.

It turns out that the human brain relies on disorder for its basic functioning at multiple levels, from the processing of raw sensory data to the interplay of abstract ideas. Our brains evolved to navigate a messy world, and perhaps when we insist on organizing its activity, we rob it of that essential ability.

Consider how too much silence in a group dinner can be uncomfortable. Or that kids can knock out homework in a noisy home. Or that jiggling a telescope can help an observer’s eye pick up a faint celestial body. We are designed to thrive in chaos.

Disorder makes for higher productivity

Jane Jacobs, the famous urban planning theorist, noted a similar phenomenon at work in the design of cities. 

She noticed that planners had a tendency to substitute superficial visual order for true functionality. In other words, whether a neighborhood “looked right” became more important than whether it worked for its inhabitants. The assumption seemed to be that if an arrangement was visually pleasing, that automatically meant it would function well.

I see this tendency run amok in the personal productivity space as well: people tend to love visual order, manifesting as pleasing symmetry, clean lines, perfectly squared little boxes, and severe minimalism. Yet all too often, this order and elegance comes at the expense of functionality – Does the thing actually work? Does it work sustainably for the long term? Does it fit how your mind works? Does it provide more value than it requires in upkeep?

It’s far easier to make something superficially pretty than to answer such questions. It’s much easier to compulsively switch to a different app that promises to instantly sweep aside the digital disorder than to figure out what we’re truly trying to accomplish. It’s much easier to organize things than to decide which of those things actually matters.

No doubt some situations call for a more structured approach – think of checklists used by an operating surgeon or an airline pilot. But most of us don’t face such high-stakes situations in our daily lives and would benefit from less formal tools.

Disorder helps you make progress

We normally think of “organizing” a collection of physical, visual, or digital elements, but it also applies to how one structures one’s efforts, including goals and projects.

In Tim Hartford’s book Messy, he found in his research that the top scientists tend to switch topics frequently: “Over the course of their first hundred published papers, the long-lived high-impact researchers switched topics an average of forty-three times.” 

We are normally taught that in order to achieve something great, we have to focus maniacally on a single pursuit. Yet by cultivating a variety of projects at different stages of fruition, leading scientists clearly gain four benefits:

1. Multiple projects cross-fertilize, with the knowledge gained in one sometimes unlocking key insights in another.
2. Diverse pursuits provide variety that captures our attention, whereas a single-minded pursuit can become monotonous and boring.
3. Each project provides an “escape” from the others, giving you something to turn to when you face an impasse, instead of it becoming a crushing experience.
4. Turning our attention away from a project gives us a chance to process it subconsciously, which some scientists believe is an important key to solving creative problems.

This last benefit was designated by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard as “crop rotation.” One cannot use the same field to grow the same crop indefinitely. Eventually the soil must be refreshed by planting something new or simply giving it a break.

This agricultural metaphor brings us back full circle to James C. Scott’s ideas in Seeing Like a State, where he makes an intriguing observation: “The rule seems to be that the more rigid and exclusive is the specialist’s boundary, and the stricter the control within it, the more disorder rages around it.”

In other words, you can’t really ever eliminate disorder; you can only move it around. So perhaps the greatest cost of creating a highly organized environment is that everything just outside its borders – which includes the rest of your life, your body, your family, other people, the natural environment, and human society generally– becomes flooded with externalities for the sake of that perfect system.

Practical takeaways for your productivity

So what does all this mean for our personal approach to order and organization?

Here are some actionable takeaways I can offer based on the findings and examples above:

1. Don’t feel guilty about putting off organizing

The authors of A Perfect Mess note that there’s an advantage in putting off organizing: it’s more efficient to organize a larger batch of items all at once than to do it a little at a time. 

This is known as “batch processing,” and I tend to save it for my weekly, monthly, and annual reviews, when paradoxically, the more stuff that has piled up, the better!

Don’t feel guilty about postponing your organizing to a later date, or only doing it occasionally, because in the meantime, you’re benefitting from all the advantages of mess I highlighted above.

2. Notice and embrace the odd, eccentric ways you tend to organize

Many people say they don’t have time to get organized, but in reality, they are constantly engaging in a wide variety of ingenious organizing strategies. Our propensity to seek shortcuts, find the path of least resistance, and expend as little time and energy as possible to achieve an outcome are some of the most reliable ways to find little tips and tricks that may seem eccentric or odd but work for us.

Abrahamson and Freedman present multiple examples of how most people, since they aren’t aware of the ways they naturally stay organized, tend to misjudge how a technology system might help them. They assume that the laid back, informal methods they already use are suboptimal and that they need a piece of software that only adds a lot of burdensome formality.

3. Satisfice instead of maximize

One of the subtle implications of the ideas in this piece is that we don’t ever truly have control. If we try to fully organize our surroundings, we fall into the traps and pitfalls noted above. If we instead accept the messiness, then we don’t have full control over it either.

What’s left then is to accept the reality: that we are all careening through a chaotic void, with at most brief moments of stability and fleeting periods of agency. Instead of trying to order and control our lives, we can use this inherent randomness as an excuse to satisfice, which has long been recognized as an essential ingredient for happiness.

As Nicholas Nassim Taleb puts it, “Having some randomness in your life can actually increase happiness: it forces you to satisfice, instead of maximize. Research shows that those who live under self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.”

Living in the balance

It’s all a balance, all masculine and feminine, yin and yang. When the benefits of order start running out, it’s time to switch to disorder. And vice versa – when disorder starts careening out of control, try adding a little structure to the problem. 

There are no “right” ways that work universally in all situations; only tools that work better or worse depending on the job.

It’s not that order, reason, and efficiency are bad – it’s that they are sometimes extolled as inherent virtues when, in fact, their opposites can be just as valuable and useful.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

I spent 2 years serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Eastern Ukraine from 2009 to 2011. I lived in the town of Kupyansk, a couple hours outside Kharkiv, near the Russian border. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, teaching me so much about myself and life and the people and culture of Ukraine.

Kupyansk is now on the frontlines of the Russian invasion. The streets I walked every day have been decimated, the bridge into town destroyed, and my old students scattered across Ukraine and abroad, or sucked into the vortex of fighting.

When I landed in Kyiv in September of 2009 to begin my service, the country was at peace. It was a fledgling democracy, having gained its independence in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At 18 years old, the country was young, which meant naive and unsure of itself, but also deeply hopeful and optimistic about its future.

The word “Ukraine” means “borderlands,” and the land has indeed always been at the crossroads of many frontiers: between East and West, between Russia and Europe, between the Slavic world and the Latin and Germanic worlds, between Orthodox Christianity and Western Christendom. The sweeping, flat, fertile plains that make it an agricultural breadbasket have always beckoned to conquering armies from every direction to try their luck.

This identity of being in-between, of being at the periphery, gives Ukrainians many of their gifts, from their warmhearted hospitality and multicultural mindset, to their peacefulness and spirit of international cooperation. It makes them humble, grateful, creative, and bold. 

It’s also led to tremendous suffering. The Holodomor, the Soviet Union’s equivalent to the Holocaust, killed between 3.5 and 5 million people in a directed genocide and forced collectivization from 1932-33. The Crimean Tatars, a Muslim people who populated the Black Sea shore for many centuries, were forcibly removed from their homes by Stalin in 1944, loaded aboard sealed-off cattle trains, and transferred almost 3,200 kilometres to the barren, remote reaches of Uzbekistan. It’s hard to imagine such tragedies happening anywhere else but the edges of a “great” empire.

I had wanted to serve in the Peace Corps since I was a teenager when a friend of my parents had told me the stories of his service in the 70s. It sounded like the perfect scenario to me: lots of time in an exotic foreign location, immersed in a new culture, learning a new language, and serving people in need. This combined most of my main interests at the time, and I leapt at the opportunity.

When I arrived, I was so determined to put all my energy into serving and teaching that I decided I wasn’t going to write about my experience while I was there, which I now consider a grave mistake. I had been blogging about my travels in South America for about a year at that point, but still saw writing as an optional indulgence, not an essential way to document and understand my life, as I do today.

I did, however, make a video out of all the short clips I took on my iPhone 3G during my time there. It was my attempt to capture the spirit of my experience there – to commemorate the memories of the most exhilarating, and also most challenging, two years of my life.

14 years later, that video is also a record of what life in Eastern Ukraine was like before the wars. It feels like a snapshot of the final days of a beautiful experiment in Ukrainian independence, now undermined by the Russian invasions of 2014 and 2022.

I’ve decided to share it publicly as a small testament to what was lost. As one more piece of evidence that Ukraine once thrived, that Ukrainians know what kind of country they want to build, and could build it again if given the chance by the wider world.

In the US, we have a president and administration who have essentially switched sides, from this innocent nation struggling to defend its freedom and its rights, to Putin’s Russia, an aggressor toward so many countries on its borders and beyond. It’s the most evil act I’ve ever seen from my country, a betrayal of everything we claim to stand for, and I’m ashamed to have anything to do with it.

My hope is one day Ukraine will have independence, peace, and stability again. It deserves it, its people deserve it, and the world will benefit from it being secure, autonomous, and self-determined, not a vassal state under the thumb of Moscow like it’s been for so much of history.

If you want to help me donate directly to Ukrainian relief organizations, my book is now available in Ukrainian (Запасний мозок) and Russian (Создай свой «второй мозг»!). Here are direct links you can use to purchase it in various formats:

• In Ukrainian in Ukraine: on Rozetka and Yakaboo
• In Russian in Ukraine: on Zakupka
• In Russian in Russia: on Ozon and Yandex
• As an ebook in Russian everywhere: on Litres

I’m donating 100% of my royalties from both languages to non-profits and relief organizations in Ukraine forever, totaling $10,000 USD so far. And of course, I encourage you to donate directly if you’re able. Now that they’ve been abandoned by their main champion, the U.S., they need it more than ever.

In many ways, the origins of my work with Second Brains, digital organization, and productivity can be traced back to my time in Ukraine. It was the first time I taught “life skills” such as how to define goals, make project plans, gather resources, and execute on a timeline. There is a direct link between the community service program I created during my service, known as Projects Bring Change, to the central role of projects in all my teaching.

I hope this is one small way I can return the blessings that Ukraine and her people gave to me, and perhaps teach another generation of Ukrainians what it means to succeed with their goals in this uncertain and volatile time.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

I’ve suspected for years that the traditional concept of “goal-setting” was on its last legs. 

Every time I bring up “SMART goals,” I can see the light go out in my students’ eyes. An unmistakable feeling of dread and aversion fills the room, and the decline in energy and enthusiasm is palpable. They know they should set goals that way, but they don’t want to.

The SMART framework was developed 44 years ago by a director of corporate planning at an electric and natural gas utility – not exactly a paragon of modern business in the information age.

I knew traditional goals were an outdated relic of a bygone era, but I hadn’t figured out what to replace them with. After all, they seem like such a load-bearing pillar of modern society: you set an objective, you make a plan, and then you follow the steps to get there. 

What other approach could there even be?

I recently came across a book that proposes an intriguing answer, one that I’m confident is much better suited to our more unpredictable, dynamic world. It is based on extensive research in the field of Artificial Intelligence but its lessons apply broadly to any domain. 

It’s called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, by Kenneth O. O. Stanley and Joel Lehman. In this piece, I’ll summarize the book’s most interesting and useful points.

The fatal flaw in goal-setting

The concept of “goal-setting” has dominated our thinking about ambition, achievement, and progress for decades. 

It’s akin to a secular article of faith: the unquestionable “right way” to build, invent, discover, innovate, or create anything, from the smallest personal project to the grandest feats of civilization.

There are undoubtedly some advantages to traditional goal-setting, which explain why it’s stuck around for so long: it’s easy to understand, predictable, appeals to common sense, and offers comfort against the harsh uncertainty of reality.

But Stanley and Lehman ask a profound question in their book: What if that traditional approach to goal-setting is hindering progress on many fronts? What if it degrades our creativity, blocks us from serendipitous discovery, and dampens what makes us most interesting and unique?

They note that goal-setting works perfectly fine for modest pursuits. If you’re trying to improve efficiency on a production line by 5%, or finish a kitchen remodel, by all means, set a goal and follow the obvious steps to reach it.

The problem arises when we try to scale up this modest strategy to greater achievements – those that involve true ambition, novel invention, innovative breakthroughs, or pushing the frontier.

These are the kinds of pursuits in which goals lose their power, and can actually become counterproductive and lead you in the opposite direction of progress.

To understand why, it’s helpful to think of achievement not as creating something completely new from scratch, but as searching a space of possibilities.

Imagine yourself walking through a vast hall containing all possible inventions, each one floating in midair like a shimmering possibility. 

As you explore the hall, you start to notice that there is a structure to the space – inventions that are similar to each other are found in the same area, while inventions that are distinct are located far apart from each other. Some parts of the hall are dead-ends, leading nowhere, while others are full of potential, with pathways leading in multiple directions.

Now imagine you’re trying to invent a new kind of computer. The question is, why can’t you just go straight to the “best” computer design in the whole room? Presumably, it would entail a level of performance millions of times beyond our current designs, using technology that is unimaginable to modern science.

Well, when you put it that way, the answer is obvious: you have to proceed through each of the intermediate stages of technology to get to that level. Each invention builds on a previous generation, and you don’t get to skip steps.

Now we can identify what makes our task so challenging: those intermediate steps are not at all predictable. In fact, they often seem bizarre, nonsensical, or completely counter-intuitive until after you’ve taken them.

This isn’t a theoretical example: one of the crucial stepping stones to modern computers in the 1940s was vacuum tubes, which are devices that channel electric current through a vacuum. Yet the potential uses of vacuum tubes were so unexpected that it took over 100 years from their invention until someone realized they could be used in computing.

This might seem like an exceptional example, but it’s closer to the rule:

• The Wright Brothers invented the first airplanes by reusing bicycle technology, a seemingly unrelated stepping stone.
• Microwave technology was first invented for magnetron power tubes that drove military radar, until Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon, noticed it melted a chocolate bar in his pocket.
• In 1879, Constantin Fahlberg, working on coal tar derivatives, accidentally tasted a sweet residue on his hand—leading to the discovery of saccharin, the first artificial sweetener.
• Wilhelm Röntgen was experimenting with cathode rays when he noticed an unknown form of radiation that passed through solid objects, thereby leading to x-rays.
• In 1956, engineer Wilson Greatbatch installed the wrong type of resistor into a heart rhythm recorder circuit, accidentally inventing the modern pacemaker.

For each of these landmark accomplishments, fixating too intently on their original goal would paradoxically have blinded their inventors to the world-changing discoveries lying just outside their expectations.

For the most interesting, exciting, impactful achievements, goals are a false compass, distracting you from the highest potential directions. They induce a narrow tunnel vision, eliminating the serendipitous discovery, unorthodox creativity, and breakthrough innovation that are most valuable.

In other words, the best path through the vast hall of possibilities is not a straight one; it’s a twisty turny wild ride of daring leaps and hairpin pivots that would seem positively crazy to any outside observer.

Professor Amar Bhide presents evidence for this in his book Origin and Evolution of New Businesses: 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable.

Other examples from recent history also confirm the pitfalls of goals:

• If you focus too much on raising student test scores, you may end up worsening the quality of their education by encouraging rote memorization.
• If you optimize too much for making as much money as possible and therefore decide to take the highest-paying job, it may lead you away from becoming a millionaire in the long run.
• Fixating too much on reducing alcohol and drug abuse among young people at all costs might inadvertently lead to the abuse of even more dangerous drugs.
• Paying citizens to turn in venomous snakes may lead to them breeding snakes as a money-making endeavor (which happened in British-ruled India).
• Paying executives higher bonuses for higher earnings might lead to short-term profits but a long-term disaster when the firm collapses due to excessive risk-taking.

In all these examples, optimizing a certain measure of success in the short term, which makes it look like you’re moving in the right direction, is in fact leading you away from the long-term objective!

The same principle even applies at the level of individuals and their careers, for example:

• John Grisham first trained and practiced as a criminal defense attorney for ten years. The trigger for his career change was a particular testimony that he overheard one day from a young rape victim. Somehow that testimony made him realize that he should and could write, and he began waking early in the morning before work to gradually complete his first novel, A Time to Kill.
• Harland David “Colonel” Sanders (the founder of KFC) cooked for his family as a six-year-old after his father’s death, but would not make a living out of it until he was 40. In between, he tried his luck at piloting a steamboat, selling insurance, and even farming. But the opportunity for success didn’t arrive until he owned a gas station, where he began cooking chicken for his customers.

Building a great career or business might not qualify as a civilizational-scale achievement, but even at this relatively modest scale, objectives can trick us into settling for the known and the predictable instead of the far grander space of possibilities available to us.

An alternative to aimless wandering

The most common objection to this attack on objectives is that, if we don’t have goals, then we’ll be left to “wander around aimlessly.” 

But this book points out that there is another option – there is a way to intelligently explore a search space without the benefit (or drawbacks) of objectives.

The key, the authors tell us, is to “Loosen your requirements for what exactly you’re going to achieve; in other words, you can achieve something great, as long as you are willing to stop demanding what that greatness should be.”

This is such a radical assertion because it flies in the face of the first (and arguably most important) criterion of SMART goal-setting: to be as specific as possible. The demand for specificity is based on the assumption that you can and should control the outcome and that your control is facilitated by zeroing in on the precise details you envision.

Stanley and Lehman would describe this approach as “trying to drag a preconceived vision of the future into the present,” and as “doomed to fail.” 

Their philosophy is better understood as “treasure-hunting.”

Imagine you are part of a treasure-hunting team searching a remote island for lost pirate treasure. You have no treasure maps, but you do know for certain that the island is littered with lots of buried caches.

Your goal is not to arrive at any specific destination on the island, because again, there is no map and no X marking the spot! So any point you arbitrarily choose is likely to contain nothing. Instead, the better search strategy is to pursue novelty, i.e. to try and find places on the island that you haven’t been to before, or even better, that no one has been to before.

There’s far more likely to be a treasure in that hidden underwater cave that no one has even noticed than in the middle of the largest clearing in the middle of the island. That obvious fact points the way to the authors’ recommendation for what we should be optimizing for instead of goals.

How to succeed in a goal-less world

The elimination of objectives might seem like an intriguing idea at this point, but we need some principle to guide our efforts, don’t we?

The authors make six recommendations for what to do instead of setting goals:

1. Optimize for novelty and interestingness
2. Follow your gut instinct about which direction is most promising
3. Hold your plans lightly and be open to changing direction
4. Pay attention to the past
5. Double down on what makes you unique
6. Collect stepping stones

#1 – Optimize for novelty and interestingness

Stanley and Lehman argue that instead of targeting a specific destination, we should optimize for novelty and interestingness. 

Ideas that are novel and interesting have the tendency to lead to even more novel, even more interesting ideas, in a divergent, branching space of increasing possibilities.

This is deeper than simply trying random things because a novelty-driven search tends to produce behaviors in a certain order: from simple to more complex. This is because as soon as the simple options have been tried, and you keep pursuing novelty, then the only ones left to try are complex!

Eventually, doing something genuinely novel always requires learning about the world, which is why novelty search is inherently about accumulating information (whereas the pursuit of fixed objectives often requires you to ignore new information in service of reaching the goal more efficiently).

As the philosopher Alfred Whitehead put it, “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than it be true.”

#2 – Follow your gut instinct about which direction is most promising

If the structure of the space of possibilities is unpredictable and irrational, that means we have to rely on non-rational means of detecting it: inspiration, elegance, potential to stimulate further creativity, thought-provoking construction, challenge to the status quo, analogy to nature, beauty, simplicity, and imagination, for example.

Our gut – otherwise known as our intuition, instinct, subconscious, or emotions – has access to vastly more information than our conscious minds can consider, which means it can sometimes sense the shape of the network of possibilities in pre-conscious ways.

#3 – Hold your plans lightly and be open to changing direction

A third strategy is to hold your plans lightly and be open to changing directions since we never know when the prerequisites to a breakthrough will fall into place and suddenly make it possible.

Stanley and Lehman write, “To arrive somewhere remarkable we must be willing to hold many paths open without knowing where they might lead.” 

It takes a high degree of open-mindedness to “hold many paths open” in one’s mind without getting overwhelmed or discouraged. It means we have to find a way to explore paths in parallel, or opportunistically, rather than focusing all our resources on one all-important goal, as traditional thinking suggests.

#4 – Pay attention to the past

Fourth, the authors recommend special attention and sensitivity to the past, because the past is what defines what is novel. 

It’s much easier to know what happened in the past, and then escape it, rather than trying to arrive at a specific and unknown future. This might require studying the past, documenting the past, finding out what others have tried and how and why it failed, which goes against modern society’s bias toward the future.

#5 – Double down on what makes you unique

Fifth, a goal-less world frees us to double down on what makes us unique. There is no longer a singular destination that we’re all trying to arrive at, which also means there is no right path or wrong path. 

There are only more or less interesting paths, and one of the best ways of finding a new and interesting path is to look at what qualities, quirks, interests, biases, obsessions, or beliefs most set you apart from others.

Count Basie, who was a respected name in jazz during the birth of rock and roll, described how new musical styles really come about: “If you’re going to come up with a new direction or a really new way to do something, you’ll do it by just playing your stuff and letting it ride. The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.”

#6 – Collect stepping stones

Interestingness can be thought of as a network of stepping stones, each connecting to the next in surprising and unconventional ways. As you move through this network, you will come across stepping stones that seem promising, but it’s not clear how, why, or even when – it might be a stepping stone that you can only use years from now when the circumstances are right.

The answer is to keep a collection of those stepping stones in the meantime. We’re talking about information here – ideas, stories, metaphors, anecdotes, facts, theories, frameworks, hypotheses, experiments – which means this can be as simple as taking good notes for the long term.

This is, by the way, a wonderful and accurate way of describing what we’re doing when we build a “Second Brain.” Although I often emphasize the importance of keeping a list of currently active projects – the “P” in PARA – many of the notes you save won’t be directly related to a project, at least not immediately.

That doesn’t matter. As long as you keep an ever-growing collection of inherently intriguing stepping stones, over time the possibility space in which you reside can only expand. You’ll start to see more and more connections from the stepping stones in your collection to new projects, inventions, breakthroughs, people, places, conversations, and on and on.

This also explains why it doesn’t matter all that much whether your notes are comprehensive, or perfectly organized. It doesn’t matter if a given note completely captures the message of a given article, book, podcast, or course. All that matters is that it exists, so you can stumble across it in the future and be provoked to wonder if this is a stepping stone worth following at that moment.

Your main problem will start to become how to choose where to spend your limited time and attention in the face of such a staggering number of exciting possibilities branching out in all directions. But at least that’s the best possible problem to have.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

I recently published my 2024 Year-In-Review looking back over the events and lessons from last year.

Now it’s time to look forward – to the goals, plans, and intentions my team and I are committing to for 2025.

The theme I’ve chosen for this year is The Year of Profitability, as our financial results were clearly the biggest weakness last year. Among other things, this means we are:

• Making profitability the main filter we use to decide which projects to take on
• Splitting our efforts approximately 50/50 between creating new products and improving our existing ones
• Keeping the team lean and expenses low, with no new hires this year
• Returning to live cohort courses, but in a way that’s more sustainable for me
• Continuing to invest in the Second Brain Membership as our flagship program, and having all roads lead to it from across our ecosystem

I recently sat down with our CFO to identify three numbers that will be our guiding lights this year:

• To break even on a monthly basis, we need to make $67,000 per month
• To reach a 30% net margin, we need to make $105,000 per month
• To limit our labor costs to 40% of our revenue, we need to make $115,000 per month

Rather than waiting until the end of the year to check on these numbers, I’m going to be keeping a close eye on them every month.

With these criteria in mind, here are the main projects we’ve decided to move forward with.

2025 Projects

Launch an official BASB Notion template

After years of requests, we’ve decided to finally create an official Second Brain Notion template! Notion has continued to prove itself as the preeminent knowledge management platform in the world and is the only one to have truly broken out into the mainstream culture.

We are gathering early feedback from our Second Brain members as well as outside Notion experts to come up with a template that is simple and maintains your focus on what matters, which is putting your ideas to use.

Write the Annual Review book

I sold the proposal for my next book in April 2024, and have spent the 9 months since intensively researching every aspect of year-end reviews. I’ve collected and reviewed hundreds of sources, from historical precedents for this practice going back thousands of years, to psychology studies proving the value of self-reflection, to surprising stats indicating that setting New Year’s Resolutions is actually very effective…as long as you do it a certain way.

I officially concluded the “research” portion of the book in early February, and am now working on the manuscript, which needs to be more or less finished by summer 2025, with rounds of editing continuing into the fall. 

If all goes according to plan, I’ll open preorders for my new book next spring, and it will be released around November 2026. From everything I’ve researched and discovered so far, this practice is going to change many lives, and I can’t wait to publish the definitive guide for it.

If you don’t want to wait so long, check out the self-paced edition of my Annual Review program, which includes many of the ideas and techniques that will be featured in the book.   

Produce more implementation-focused YouTube videos

Although our YouTube channel is technically an ongoing “area of responsibility” rather than a one-time project, we are making some changes to how we make videos this year.

Specifically, I’m noticing that the rapid proliferation of AI is starting to commodify many kinds of content. Now that you can hit “auto-summarize” and get a step-by-step summary of a video in seconds, without even having to watch it, the value of the typical “listicle-style” video is declining. We’re going to switch to more implementation-centric, “coaching” style videos, as I think viewers will increasingly want to know the “how,” not just the “what.”

We will also be publishing a range of annual-review-related videos this year to start building interest and momentum for the release of my book in a little less than two years.

Launch our own app and upgrade the Second Brain Membership

It’s been so gratifying to watch the Second Brain Membership flower over the last year since we launched it to the public in spring 2024. Up until then, it had been a private community only for alumni of our cohorts, which meant that it went completely dark for months at a time.

Once we decided to stop offering live cohorts, it made sense to turn that community into an always-on program that runs all year long.

This year I’m excited to share that we are upgrading to Circle Plus, which will enable a range of new features in our community for communication, collaboration, and engagement. The one I’m most excited about is that we are getting our own app! That means instead of asking people to “join our Circle community” (who the heck knows what that means?!) our call to action will be to “Download our app” on Apple’s App Store or the Google Play store.

This move will make the Second Brain community a more prominent and accessible part of our members’ digital lives – a place they can go to whenever they have something to share or something they want to learn.

Debut an official BASB certification

My book Building a Second Brain continues to sell around 10,000 copies each month worldwide, which has produced a constant stream of inquiries and requests for coaching, consulting, or contract work related to Personal Knowledge Management, from individuals to large companies. But as a tiny team, we’re not set up to service those needs.

That’s why we’ve decided this year to pursue creating an official BASB certification, which will qualify graduates of our courses in the knowledge and skills needed to help others build a Second Brain. I’m hoping this will kick off a thriving marketplace of practitioners and service providers as an extension of our products and books.

Create a new AI cohort-based course

Since early 2023 I’ve been contemplating whether and how I could teach a course on AI. The need was overwhelming and clear, but where I had much more doubt was as to my role. 

What knowledge or perspective did I uniquely have to offer in the rapidly evolving AI space? What kinds of skills could I teach people that would remain relevant beyond the next model release? How could I leverage my background, experience, network, and skills into a program that was impactful while also being sustainable?

I’ve wrestled with these kinds of questions a lot over the last couple of years, and although the pace of innovation hasn’t slowed down, I’m finally starting to catch glimpses of some answers.

My point of view on AI is that it is not primarily a technological challenge – it is a historical, cultural, psychological, ontological, epistemological, societal, educational, governmental, intra and interpersonal, economic, and ultimately spiritual revolution that is going to change everything about our world.

I believe that adapting to AI isn’t just a matter of learning some tactics and tools – it will require a deep and fundamental reimagining of who we are, what our purpose is as humans, what it means to live a productive and fulfilling life, and how we conceive of our place in the universe. In other words, it is a holistic, overarching transformation, not a narrow technical one.

Taking on that perspective, I can begin to see how my way of thinking can help people. I can draw on my knowledge of history to surface lessons from past technological revolutions, my facility with moving between cultures to borrow ideas and ways of being, and my propensity to think holistically and in terms of principles to give people firm guidance amidst a roiling sea of change.

I don’t know exactly what this new course will look like, but I do know it will seek to give people fundamental training in the mindset and skills they need to thrive in the AI era. More to come soon!

Host an Annual Review immersive

For the last 7 years, we’ve taught a live virtual program guiding people through completing a year-end review. In 2025, we’re taking that program on the road! Toward the end of the year, we’ll invite a small group of people to our new hometown, Valle de Bravo, Mexico, to participate in a multi-day, immersive experience.

The details are still to be determined, but I intend to make it the most impactful, transformational experience possible, bringing together everything I’ve learned and discovered about how to make this yearly ritual a paradigm-shifting milestone in people’s lives.

We will also of course continue to offer the online program so as many people as possible have a chance to get support in their review process.

If you want to stay updated on any of these projects, subscribe to our newsletter below:

Open questions

Here are the open questions I’m holding for this year:

1. How can I make irreversible decisions to preserve my willpower?

As I wrote in my 2024 year-in-review, I was astounded at how the single decision to move our family to Mexico led to multiple other intentions seemingly naturally falling into place. I can still hardly believe it, and I want to continue looking for other examples where such a principle might also hold.

Instead of having to create a whole project to individually pursue each goal I have, what are other moment-in-time decisions I can make or actions I can take that allow me to feed two (or more) birds with one scone?

2. What experiences do I want to have with Caio and Delia over the next 10–15 years, while they’re small?

One of the most surprising aspects of becoming a parent is that from the moment the kids are born, you are presented with a complete timeline of their lives, and therefore yours.

You know at approximately what age they’ll begin walking, talking, and going to school. You know when they’ll be in each grade, what kinds of travel and experiences they’ll be ready for, and when they’ll start having friends and wanting to hang out with them instead of you. 

You know when they’re likely to leave home, which means suddenly you can predict the window in which you’ll probably spend 90% of all the time you will ever spend with them, which is before the age of 18.

My kids are 2 and 4, which means they’ll finish elementary school in 2031/2033, middle school in 2034/2036, high school in 2038/2040, and college in 2042/2044. I’ll be 46 when Caio finishes elementary school in 2031, 53 when he finishes high school in 2038, and 57 when he graduates from college in 2042. 

I don’t know why, but these dates completely blow my mind! 2042 is only 17 years away – I remember 17 years ago like it was yesterday! I graduated college myself that year, which means I am already halfway between my own college graduation and my son’s. 

Human lifespans keep getting longer, but the window of time we have to spend most intensively with our kids stays the same. Which means that, as a percentage of our lives, our time with our kids is actually shrinking in a way. “Childrearing” is therefore increasingly no longer a lifelong activity, but a discrete stage of life preceded and followed by many other stages.

All of this makes me want to be very intentional about how we spend those childhood years. I know I want to expose them to as many sports, musical instruments, forms of art, cultural experiences, social situations, spiritually transcendent moments, etc., as I possibly can. 

I want to immerse them long-term in at least two cultures – Mexico and Brazil – so they feel deeply rooted and connected to that aspect of their heritage. I know I want to go on many great adventures with them, having precious moments of depth and intimacy, discovering their limits, inventing new things, seeking new frontiers, and tasting everything life has to offer.

I feel far more commitment and determination around these intentions than any business goal, honestly, which leads me to conclude that all my decisions in the business need to be geared to creating the right conditions for what I consider these much more important moments with my family.

3. What does my jealousy of other people tell me is missing in my life?

One of my favorite indicators of what is missing from my life is what makes me jealous of others.

These days I feel an intense jealousy toward highly fit, middle-aged dads. I don’t know how they do it. It’s not primarily the outward markers of abs and a slim figure I’m jealous of, but the internal sense of dignity and self-respect they must feel when they look in the mirror. That is what I’m after, and exercise is going to be the main focus for my personal goals this year.

I’ve already noticed that my attitude toward exercise has to be different living in a rural town versus a dense suburb. It’s not about how many times I can hit the gym, or how many intensive exercise classes I attend. It’s about taking advantage of built-in opportunities to move, from hiking in the mountains we’re surrounded by, to meeting up with other dads in the afternoon for paddleball, to fitting in quick bodyweight workouts whenever I can.

4. What would it look like to pivot BASB toward AI?

When generative AI first exploded into the mainstream a few years ago, I assumed it was the end of the Second Brain methodology I had spent years developing. If anyone could sign up for an AI chatbot that “knew” the entire Internet, why would they spend the time and effort to curate and build their own personal knowledge base?

But as time passes, I’m beginning to think that maybe AI is not a replacement for the Second Brain, but its true fulfillment. 

People still need to read, take notes, learn, and express themselves even with the aid of AI tools. The “context” you bring to any interaction with AI matters more than ever. There are still many reasons it’s worth storing your favorite ideas, stories, insights, and memories in a private place that only you control.

Maybe, just possibly, AI is going to make the process of building a Second Brain much easier and more accessible to more people, which means the demand for my work might go up instead of down. Maybe I was early to the rise of intelligent software, and am now poised to take advantage of my reputation and experience and teach people how to use it.

This line of thinking is sparking a lot of new ideas for me, which I will be exploring in the coming year.

Here are other open questions I don’t even have the beginnings of an answer to, but I notice fill me with a sense of curiosity and wonder:

1. How can I integrate more anger work into my life and work?
2. How could I explore and understand my relationship to food this year?
3. What is the bottleneck in my thinking or behavior that is leading to poor financial results in the business?
4. What is the business that gives me more of the life I want now?
5. How can we bring service into our family life?
6. What is a hobby I can be passionate about, that’s hands-on, that I can do with Caio in Valle?
7. What is the kind of work that our new home and lifestyle are best suited to?
8. How can I balance book-writing with all the new initiatives and projects I want to take on this year
9. How can we have other people generate new ideas using their energy and enthusiasm, instead of continuing to rely on me
10. What role does the blog play now that I’m not writing as much, and our web traffic is declining
11. How do we make our community bottom-up instead of top-down?
12. What would it look like to make Forte Labs a platform for others?
13. How can I be the kind of leader and manager who inspires people to greatness without me needing to be there?

How I want to spend 2025

As the years pass, I’m increasingly finding that it’s more useful to define exactly how I want to spend my days, as a substitute for goals. Goals have the tendency to require a lot of suffering and sacrifice in the short term, which paradoxically means the more ambitious they are, the worse my life becomes!

As I turn 40 in a few months, I’m not interested in sacrificing current pleasure in order to arrive at a far-off destination anymore. I did that in my 20s so that I would have the life I have now! 

Here are the ways I’ve decided I want to spend my time in 2025, to bring me the happiness, peace, and joy I’ve worked so hard for:

1. Visiting various gardens, parks, and museums around Valle with the kids—being outside or exploring new places with Lauren and the kids, combining quality family time with exploration, discovery, learning, and fun in a physical setting.
2. Playing with the kids at home—being physical and wrestling with them, especially in contrast to watching TV.
3. Spending time in person, in deeply immersive and intentional spaces, with fellow entrepreneurs and creators I know and trust and want to get to know better—helping me feel seen and accepted and connecting on a more personal level, rather than only through my work.
4. Meeting and connecting with people who are passionate about the same ideas and possibilities, like at my conference, meetups, or elsewhere—I feel like such people are “on the same wavelength” and resonate with how I see the world.
5. Deep reading and writing for many hours at a time with no other commitments for the day—getting to this level of flow is one of the most deeply gratifying experiences, soothing my soul while also making me proud of the progress I’ve made.
6. Working on long-term, large-scale, highly novel creative projects—these make me feel like I’m not wasting my time with a bunch of trivial, forgettable projects, but something that matters and that expands who I am and what I’m capable of.
7. Immersing myself in unusual, novel, complex environments that fully absorb my senses, pull me into the present, and teach me things about myself and the world. For example, museums, new countries and cities, nature, and even online—these environments make me feel embodied and expansive, versus stuck in rumination in my head.
8. In deep, intimate conversations with people I find interesting, receptive, and self-aware—whether dinners with other couples, coffees with new acquaintances, or spontaneous encounters with strangers in public—these conversations feel profound, curiosity-provoking, moving, like I’m discovering someone else while also discovering aspects of myself at the same time.

If anything I’ve written here resonates with you and you see a way we could work together, don’t hesitate to reach out at hello@fortelabs.com.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

As I write these words, I am crossing the Drake Passage, one of the most remote places on Earth.

We are crossing from Ushuaia at the southern tip of South America to the spit of land known as the Antarctic Peninsula. It is a barren, featureless expanse that isn’t part of any continent or ocean. Currents circle the globe uninterrupted here, driving enormous waves that can reach 40 feet high. 

This is a liminal space if there ever was one, and I feel the echoes throughout history of all the great navigators and explorers who risked their lives to traverse it. At the same time, I’m doing it on a luxury cruise, exquisitely outfitted for every conceivable comfort, creating a strange tension within me between pain and pleasure, past and present, outer and inner discovery.

I’m taking this opportunity to do my annual review, an introspective ritual I’ve practiced for over 15 years. As I close my eyes and allow my emotions to come to the surface, the main one I feel is fear. 

Not toward the 20-foot swells, howling wind, or frozen icebergs starting to loom silently around us. I’m afraid to begin this yearly ritual of looking inside and telling the truth to myself. I’ve done annual reviews so many times before, proclaimed their value to so many others, and now, committed to spending several years of my life writing a book on the subject.

I feel fear about whether I’ll do it right, whether I’ll discover something worthy, whether I’ll make it genuine or too performative, and whether I’ll be so focused on creating value for others that I forget to create value for myself.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to go deep enough, won’t uncover my true self, won’t see the hard truths I need to see, and most of all, won’t receive the benefits I’ve been so loudly promising to others, which would make me a fraud.

At the same time, I also feel tremendous gratitude. To be here on this once-in-a-lifetime cruise. To have achieved everything I’ve achieved while still young enough to enjoy it. To have the privilege of contemplating my life and work so deeply and with so many degrees of freedom. To have so many sources of information, so many people to draw on, and so many ways to see and be seen.

Fear and gratitude, the polar opposites of emotion, are my guiding lights through this passage, both the literal one and the metaphorical one I’m about to undertake in parallel.

A crossroads at 40

I sense that I am at a crossroads in my life as I turn 40 in May.

I revisited my “Life Goals” recently, a document that represented my first foray into the world of goal-setting. I started it when I was 20, after reading my first self-help book and deciding I needed to start writing down my goals.

What strikes me looking at it now is that every goal had an assigned “by when” date, and not a single one of those dates was later than 2025. I simply couldn’t imagine life after 40 as a 20-year-old. That seemed practically like old age at the time.

I’ve spent the last 15 years whittling away at that list of “life goals.” It’s been a north star, constantly reminding me of who I said I wanted to become. And I can see now that that list is finished. Not because I achieved everything on it, but because my idea of what it means to live a good life has changed.

I know now that achievements themselves don’t bring fulfillment or happiness. You have to have them, because pursuing goals gives your life direction, purpose, challenge, and stakes. But ultimately, the goal of any goal is to feel a certain way. 

Emotions are what we are really after, I believe, and these days I’m putting the specific things I want to feel front and center:

• To recapture a childlike sense of innocence, of unapologetic joy, at the sheer wonder of existence.
• To find a new direction and purpose for my business and career that fills me with energy and enthusiasm every day while generating its own financial fuel.
• To understand and love myself more deeply, and to live from that place every day in a pure, unfiltered expression of my inherent nature.
• To emerge as a more faithful and loving husband, a more caring and present father, a more courageous and skilled entrepreneur, and a more open and committed friend.
• To feel a profound sense of alignment, determination, clarity, and confidence in the next era of my life and work.
• To gain newfound freedom and empowerment towards my body and health.

The first thing I do every year as I begin my review is to choose a motto, slogan, theme, or catchphrase, to guide the review itself. This year that motto is “Begin again.”

As I turn 40, it feels like I’m beginning the second half of my life. Statistically, as I reach the approximate halfway point of my biological existence. But also ontologically, as I retire my previous approach to goal-setting and embrace a new philosophy of unfolding into the truest expression of who I’m meant to be.

2024 Wins

Let’s start with the wins!

Book sales

My book Building a Second Brain has been the brightest spot in the business, surpassing 320,000 sales this year in 14 countries and languages so far. It continues to sell about 10,000 copies per month worldwide, which is an incredible pace for any book to sustain and bodes well for the future. 

If we can maintain this pace, we should reach 500,000 copies sold in around 18 months.. I’m crossing my fingers that it reaches that milestone!

We also launched the book in Spanish, and I did a week-long promotional tour in Mexico, which led directly to us finding the town we ended up moving to later in the year. So that’s a pretty unexpected win!

My second traditionally published book, The PARA Method, also continues to sell decently, reaching 25,000 copies sold to date, or 1,400 copies per month on average.

Second Brain Membership

We successfully launched the Second Brain Membership publicly last spring, which I’m very proud of. Previously it had been a private community only for alumni of our live cohorts, but as we retired those, I realized it was time for a perennial, ongoing community where anyone learning about PKM from any source could find a vibrant network of peers to explore alongside.

We now offer weekly and monthly events, ranging from guided weekly reviews with our facilitators, to Q&As with me, to guest workshops on a variety of relevant topics. This year we also launched a 12-month “curriculum” where we’ll tackle one core PKM concept each month, which I’m already seeing the impact of.

We have about 550 active members and are making $22,000 per month in subscriptions. This membership is now our flagship offering within the Second Brain ecosystem, and we have some very exciting new features we plan on adding to it in 2025.

Wholesome Weekend #2

We hosted the second annual retreat of the entrepreneurial mastermind I started in 2023, which was one of the absolute highlights of the year for me. There is nothing like spending immersive quality time with a close circle of dear friends and respected peers all generously sharing their expertise across book-writing, YouTube, strategy, AI, online education, and many other fields.

I plan on continuing these retreats indefinitely, as they are deeply meaningful and enlivening. Bringing interesting people together for moments of connection and intimacy feels close to my true purpose, which is all the more surprising since I’ve always seen myself as an introvert.

The first in-person Second Brain Summit

This was a longtime dream of mine and resulted in so many memorable moments, conversations, and new relationships I will treasure for a long time to come. I wrote about the experience in depth in Reflections on Our First In-Person Second Brain Summit, including pictures and a highlight video.

The financial model for a large-scale conference didn’t work out for us, and in general, doesn’t really fit with our business selling education and information products. I think in the future we will likely stick to virtual summits, and perhaps branch out into immersive, in-person “intensives” that bring together much smaller groups for training and personal development instead.

YouTube growth

Our YouTube channel grew by 62,000 subscribers in 2024, to 288,000 total. This was 38% less growth than we saw in 2023, and I’m scaling back my ambitions here as a result. For a while, I thought we had a chance of becoming one of those “hypergrowth” channels that grow to millions of subscribers within a year or two, but the reality is I’m not willing or interested in obsessing over YouTube to the degree that requires. 

The channel is already big enough to do what I need it to do—distribute my ideas to new audiences, test which ones have the most promise, and cultivate readers for my future books.

The newsletter

We added 22,000 subscribers to our newsletter last year, which was 39% less than in 2023. The newsletter has almost completely flatlined in its growth, which is honestly incredible to me given that our entire content strategy is centered on directing people to sign up for it. 

Many other creators I’ve talked to are seeing similar trends, and I think we’re clearly going through a major upheaval in how online attention flows, driven largely by AI. This is definitely one of the reasons our finances weakened this year, and I don’t know quite what to do about it yet.

The Annual Review program

I taught a live course on how to do an annual review for the 7th time in December and January, this time radically expanding it from a 3-day workshop to a 6-week intensive program. I had just spent the previous 6 months deeply immersed in researching the topic for my book, and this was an incredible chance to test all the new ideas and techniques I’d developed on real live humans.

We welcomed 150 students from all over the world to this cohort, and the effects were transformational, beyond my wildest dreams, which has completely reinvigorated my motivation to turn all that material into the definitive book on the subject. That book will be my main focus for 2025, and I can’t wait to share it with the world.

The Annual Review program is now available as a self-paced edition if you want to make 2025 your most intentional year yet.

Here are a few other pictures of my favorite work-related moments in 2024:

Personal milestones and moving to Mexico

This was the first year of my 12-year career that I felt I maintained work-life balance. 

I didn’t overwork, didn’t extend myself, and didn’t sacrifice my present happiness for a future outcome. I can confidently say I’ve found my natural rhythm and learned how to protect the things that truly matter, like my peace of mind and family time. I did a great job respecting my boundaries, preserving my energy, following my needs and wants, honoring my talents and gifts, and giving myself permission to spend my days in joy.

A big reason for this was our move to Mexico, which I’m realizing with each passing month completely transformed the trajectory of our lives.

My wife and I have long struggled to keep our household clean and organized. Every year it was a sore spot, as we seemed to drown under an ever-accumulating pile of unwanted junk, house projects, and chores. It felt hopeless, like we would never find a way to turn it around. And I noticed so many negative impacts on our health, happiness, and family harmony.

We decided to move to Mexico in April 2024 and did so in August. Now that we’ve been here almost 6 months, it’s shocking to me how many of our values and intentions naturally fell into place as a result:

• We live in a smaller, simpler house with far fewer possessions, which makes it much easier to keep them organized.
• We can afford full-time help here (which costs about $140 per week, a standard rate), which means we have someone spending 40 hours every week doing all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and watching the kids when needed.
• We seem to do much better as renters, with a responsive, handy landlord right down the street who can fix almost anything himself and knows all the local vendors and service providers.
• We’ve had the intention to spend more time in nature and visit more interesting places with the kids, and that’s also happened naturally as we explored our new mountain town and the surrounding forests.
• We’ve long wanted to eat more home-cooked meals, and our “muchacha” now cooks all our meals and cleans up afterward. She used to work in a restaurant, and every day I’m blown away by the thoughtfulness and nutritiousness of her cooking.
• We’ve wanted to be more social and spend more time with friends, and living in Mexico and its hyperactive social scene pretty much takes care of that entirely.
• We’ve wanted to be more mindful and present with each other as a family and spend less time on screens, which is facilitated by weekly power outages that mean we all have to entertain each other.

It’s just astonishing to me that a single decision, which we didn’t even have on our radar when 2024 began, would completely change our lives just 8 months later. 

Yet in a way, we had also spent years laying the groundwork for it: through our previous experience living in Mexico in 2019, our long-time study of Spanish, pivoting the business to asynchronous products, and getting really clear with ourselves about what wasn’t working about our life in Long Beach, so that when the right opportunity arose, we were ready for it.

This isn’t to say that everything is perfect. Far from it! In a way, resolving one series of problems with our dramatic move just created a whole new set of problems, which is how life goes:

• Vigorous exercise is more difficult in our small town since there aren’t convenient gyms or group classes, and running on mountain trails feels iffy.
• We are much further away from our friends and family back home, which means we’ll see them less often, which is painful.
• Our personal income and lifestyle have started to be constrained by the business’ weakness, which has made it difficult to afford to maintain two households at the same time.
• Living in Mexico, doing everything in Spanish, and in a small town brings an array of challenges, from navigating Mexican bureaucracy, to figuring out how to find essential products and services when nothing is listed online, to acclimating ourselves and our kids to a new school and social environment.
• Leaving Long Beach after 4.5 years, it was painful to admit to ourselves that we hadn’t succeeded in creating a strong community of friends there. Partly because so much of our social calendar was taken up with family commitments, but also because we just didn’t make an effort corresponding to our values.

2024 Disappointments

Just as important as celebrating the wins is commemorating the disappointments. I want to absorb whatever lessons these harsh experiences were trying to teach me, rather than sweeping them under the rug. There is no teacher like failure.

The business finances

It was a strange paradox of a year for Forte Labs. 

We reached some huge milestones – $10 million in lifetime revenue and $3 million in lifetime profit – but at the same time, it was the worst year ever for the business financially. We lost $230,000 for the year, a negative 20% profit margin, which was the first time we’ve been in the red in 11 years in business.

As I reflect on why this happened, the proximate causes are clear:

• We hosted our first in-person conference, but overestimated how many people would attend and underestimated how much it would cost, and therefore lost about $270,000 on the event.
• Several of our major projects didn’t pan out, such as an initiative to offer B2B corporate training, selling a “certification” to consultants and coaches based on our IP, and launching our self-paced courses in Spanish and Portuguese.
• I waited too long to shrink the team after it became clear the business would continue to decline in the wake of ending our live cohorts 18 months ago.
• Our top-of-funnel audience growth via the blog, the newsletter, and YouTube decelerated and plateaued, for a variety of reasons, some of them under my control and some not.
• Our main lines of business now – self-paced courses, subscription membership, sponsorships, and books – are slow-moving sources of revenue that are spread out over time, rather than making money upfront and all at once like we’re used to with cohorts.

It’s hard to admit these missteps and oversights to myself. As I wrote them out in my notebook, I felt a series of uncomfortable emotions welling up inside me, bringing tears to my eyes: grief, disappointment, guilt, helplessness. It was painful to realize that I’ve somewhat lost faith in myself over the last couple of years of declining fortunes in the business.

Will I ever be able to come up with a hit product like the BASB cohorts again? Will I be able to create something people truly want? Am I capable of finding the right path and figuring out the next chapter?

I think what makes these questions painful isn’t the uncertainty or external consequences they entail, but the break in connection with myself they reveal. Not trusting myself means I can’t trust the journey, can’t trust my experience, can’t trust my future. It contracts the long time horizon that I normally like to focus on into a foreshortened present, fixated on survival.

Yet, now that I’ve written these words, and let a few hours pass gazing at monumental agglomerations of snow and ice out on the deck of our ship, I can already begin to see a few ways of reframing this “story.”

First, I can see that I took a lot of risks and made a lot of investments last year:

• I risked hosting a full-fledged conference when that wasn’t something Internet creators normally do. I expect those relationships to bear fruit for years to come.
• I risked selling the proposal for a book when the idea was only amorphous and half-formed, on a timeless practice that will only gain relevance as AI sweeps the world.
• I risked bringing my most respected peers together for a weekend mastermind retreat in Sonoma, which wasn’t designed to make money but will also bear fruit for years to come.
• I risked moving my family to Mexico and changing every aspect of our lives in pursuit of a more grounded, culturally connected future for them.

Second, I can see that 2024 was a grand experiment. I was testing the hypothesis that I could run the business without thinking about profitability at all. None of my decisions about which projects to take on were based on their ability to make money.

Framed as an experiment, I can say that the results were exceedingly clear: not prioritizing profitability reliably leads to a lack of profitability! In a funny way, it’s reassuring to know that. And now I can feel grateful that we have the financial reserves to conduct such an experiment without running the business off a cliff.

Third, our financial results indicate in unmistakable terms that the current business model, which was so perfectly suited to the pandemic era, is no longer working. Times have changed, the digital landscape has evolved, and the evidence couldn’t be clearer that we need to evolve with it.

In particular, it’s become very clear that growing an audience isn’t the panacea it once was. Over the last five years, our follower count across all platforms has grown 46x, from 13,000 in March 2020 to 624,000 today. It’s long been an unquestioned article of faith among online entrepreneurs that if you grow a sizable following, the money will naturally come, which is why a majority of my time has always been spent growing that following. But that maxim is breaking down now – it’s entirely possible to have legions of followers, but no corresponding business on the backend.

All this means that the main theme in the business for me right now is “searching”: searching for a new direction, for a new true north, for a winning product and strategy, and for a new identity in the aftermath of the BASB era. 2024 was a year of retrenchment, of retreat, of hibernation, of creating a solid foundation among our existing lines of business, and now I know it’s time to emerge from the winter.

I’ve also published a video sharing 7 insights from 2024 that reshaped how I think about business, life, and growth:

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

I’m thrilled to share a special guest post by my wife, Lauren Valdez. Lauren approaches productivity in a way that’s refreshingly different from my digital-first philosophy. She’s deeply rooted in the tactile and intentional, favoring physical tools like journals over digital systems. 

Journaling has been her cornerstone for reflection, decision-making, and creativity. I’m excited for her to share her journaling practice with you, not as a “how-to,” but as an inspiring example of how to customize systems that resonate with your life and values. You can find more of her ideas, thinking, and work on her Substack newsletter.

Over to Lauren!

For a decade, I bounced between task managers like a serial dater afraid of commitment. Asana to Things, Todoist back to Things, Apple Reminders… Each new app promised to fix my life, but left me more overwhelmed than before. My digital task lists grew into monsters that paralyzed me with anxiety, so I would dump them and start again.

Then my husband Tiago hit me with a truth bomb: ‘I think the problem is you, not the tool.’

Damn him for being right. What I really needed wasn’t another sleek productivity app – I needed a way to face the mess in my head.

I needed a simpler, more intentional way to manage not just my tasks, but my emotions. I needed a way to manage my anxiety that gets in the way of starting a task. I needed a way to simplify overwhelming amounts of information. I needed to find pleasure in my productivity system, rather than it feeling like a burden. 

That’s when I turned to pen and paper.

Lauren’s Journaling Practice: Intentionality, Flexibility, and Joy

Journaling isn’t just something I do—it’s a way I make sense of life and stay true to my values. My journals help me slow down, reflect on highs and lows, and make more intentional decisions. They’re my tools for staying present and navigating life with purpose.

Here’s a look at how I use journaling, organized around the rhythms of daily, weekly, monthly, and annual reviews. Each journal has a unique purpose, and together, they form a system that’s messy, intuitive, and deeply personal.

1. Morning Pages: Daily Reflection (3–5x per Week, 15–30 Minutes)

I use a cheap school notebook for this nearly daily practice inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Morning Pages are simple: write three pages by hand about whatever is on your mind. It’s messy, unfiltered, and deeply cathartic.

This practice is my brain dump—a space to clear my head of thoughts, reflections, and feelings. I often write about what happened the day before, including funny things my kids said or little moments we didn’t photograph but I want to remember. I also confront my anxieties, writing out absurd thoughts and reframing them as though I were compassionately giving advice to a friend with the same worries. Some days, I plan my day or draft ideas for work. Other days, big emotions surface, and I rage write–raging my complaints or my pains on the page. It’s my space to get things I would never say aloud out of my head and let them go. It’s always a surprise.

At the end of the year, I reread these pages. It’s humbling and inspiring to see how much I’ve grown, and I rediscover moments of joy and resilience I’d forgotten. When I skip this practice, my day is often less intentional and more chaotic—but that’s okay too.

2. Bullet Journal: Task Management and Notes (3–5x per Week, 15 Minutes)

It’s funny that the feature that makes digital tasks managers so great – quick capture, it the reason I can’t use them. I’m a people pleaser who defaults to saying yes. When I’m quickly capturing tasks, I’m not intentional about what I want to do. My digital lists eventually became so bloated that I spent more time organizing the lists than taking action. It was hard to find, organize, and prioritize what really mattered. I also an indecisive Libra; the more tasks on my list, the more paralyzed I become trying to figure out what to work on.  On top of that, I didn’t have consistent habits for maintaining those systems—like daily or weekly reviews—to keep things up to date.

Eventually, I discovered Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal system for managing my tasks and notes by hand in a paper notebook. I plan out my day and write out my tasks for the day by hand. I also carry my notebook around and take handwritten notes in meetings and even take notes on books I am reading by hand. 

What I love about the bullet journal system is how it makes me feel more deliberate about what I say yes to in my life. 

My #1 productivity principle is: what is simple is sustainable. Writing tasks by hand keeps things simple. It also makes me pause and think. If I don’t want to bother rewriting a task, I have to ask myself, “Does this really matter?” That moment of hesitation often helps me let go of things that don’t align with my priorities.

On most days, I average only about three tasks, and that’s enough. I don’t always do exactly what I set out to do, but I always update my bullet journal with what I actually did and see that all the tasks I used to not track digitally like doing laundry, going to yoga, and cooking dinner are big tasks that need to be celebrated too. There is also something that feels so good about crossing off a task physically with a pen. 

Ryder writes in his book, “Everything on your list has to fight for its life to stay there. More accurately, each item needs to fight for the opportunity to become part of your life.” That principle has transformed how I manage my time and energy.

Even though my bullet journal is primarily for tasks, it’s also where I take notes and plan projects. I create messy, functional spreads to brainstorm ideas, plan trips, or track habits like my sleep. Writing by hand takes longer than using an app, but it saves me time in the long run. Digital tools can be distracting—if I open my phone to track a habit, there’s a 90% chance I’ll get sucked into notifications and forget why I picked it up in the first place. By staying analog, I avoid that entirely.

You’ll notice my bullet journal isn’t cute or Instagram-worthy. For me, it’s about processing and getting things out quickly. The messiness is the beauty.

Above: I managed a mini hallway and living room remodel just using my bullet journal, planning my ideas, tracking the budget, and staying on top of the vendors. 

3. Weekly Review Journal: Reflecting on the Week (1x per Week, 45 Minutes)

For a decade, I struggled to maintain a weekly review practice. I knew it was important, but it always felt like a chore. Reviewing my week on a Sunday felt boring, and by Monday or Friday, I rarely had the time or motivation to sit down and do it.

That changed this past year when I found a weekly review system that I actually enjoy. My second productivity principle is, what is pleasurable is motivating. By making my weekly review pleasurable, it’s become a ritual I look forward to.

Most Sunday evenings, after the kids are asleep, I take out my weekly review journal. First, I flip through my phone’s photos from the week and pick 2–4 favorites to print using my sticker printer. Then, I go through my bullet journal to jog my memory and write a one-page summary of the week. I capture funny quotes from my kids, moments of joy, and even the harder things I experienced.

Life moves so fast, that I’m surprised by how much I forgot by Sunday. Sometimes I sit down feeling like I didn’t do enough or that the week was full of challenges. But as I reflect and write, my perspective shifts. I start to see how much I accomplished and am reminded of how beautiful life is, even in the hard moments.

My favorite part of this practice is how much I revisit this journal. Unlike a traditional scrapbook that might sit on a shelf, this journal becomes a living document I flip through regularly. Each page tells the story of a week, creating a wonderful summary of the year as a whole.

This ritual started because I failed to make a scrapbook as part of my 2023/2024 annual review. I had printed over 100 photos, bought stickers, stencils, and gel pens, and spent hours trying to create something perfect. But I bit off more than I could chew, and the project felt overwhelming.

That failure inspired this simpler practice—small, consistent reflections captured in real time. My weekly review journal is messy and imperfect, but it’s become one of my favorite ways to savor life and stay grounded.

The journal itself is nothing fancy—just an affordable notebook from Amazon. It holds up well to photos and marker pens, and my sticker printer makes it easy to capture memories. The photo quality isn’t great, but it gets the job done.

4. My Spell Book: Manifesting Goals and Intentions (Monthly & Annually)

Okay this is where I get a bit woo and may lose some of yall, but this practice is how I make something like goal-setting fun and playful. I like to call this my Spell Book because it feels magical! It’s where I reflect on what I’ve accomplished and write out my hopes, dreams, and visions for the future.

If you have ever set out to create a project, you have dared to put something into existence that never existed before.

That’s magic.

Creating something from nothing is one of the greatest powers we possess as humans.

Whether it’s sending out a newsletter, cooking a meal, hosting a dinner party, or bringing humans into the world, that’s creation.

It’s easy to forget all the things we accomplish and my monthly and annual review rituals are how I remind myself of how magical I am.

Some might call this goal-setting, but that term doesn’t resonate with me. Traditional goal-setting has often felt rigid and intimidating—like I’m setting myself up for failure if I don’t achieve something exactly as planned.

Instead, my Spell Book is about flowing with life’s cycles. My cousin introduced me to moon rituals, and they completely transformed how I approach reflection and intention-setting. Now, every new moon feels like a mini New Year’s celebration for me. We often associate rituals with religion. But a ritual is just a rite, practice, or consistent series of steps. There is something that makes me more motivated to perform a ritual where I light candles and put on a reflective playlist. I feel more enlivened practicing my new moon ritual, rather than a monthly review. The former feels spiritual, a practice I honor for myself, while the latter feels like something I’m supposed to do.

Here’s how it works: I use the new moon to reflect on the past moon cycle. I ask myself questions like, What were the highs and lows? What lessons did I learn? What do I want to let go of? Then, I set an intention for the next moon cycle—something I want to create, embody, or grow into.

On the full moon, I revisit my intention and recalibrate if needed. This practice reframes goals for me, turning them into a cyclical, embodied process. Instead of feeling like I’ve failed if I don’t meet a rigid target, I’m reminded that life ebbs and flows. Each moon cycle is an opportunity to start fresh.

This journal also serves as the home for my annual and birthday reflections. When I sit down for my birthday review, I flip through the past year’s moon reflections. It’s amazing how easy it is to see patterns, growth, and recurring themes. What used to feel overwhelming—looking back on an entire year—now feels manageable and even joyful.

I love choosing a special notebook for my Spell Book. Right now, I’m using one I found on Etsy, and I had it engraved to make it feel even more personal. The journal is both functional and beautiful, and that adds to the sense of ceremony and ritual I bring to this practice.

For me, this isn’t just about setting goals—it’s about connecting with myself, aligning with my values, and embracing the natural rhythms of life.

Big Picture Thoughts

Journal AND Digital

Journaling works for me because it matches how I process life. That doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned digital tools entirely—I still use my second brain systems like my calendar, Evernote, and Notion. These tools are indispensable for managing complex projects or tracking long-term details.

When something important comes up in my journals, it often transitions to my digital tools. Conversely, when my digital tools feel too overwhelming or disconnected, I come back to pen and paper. Writing by hand grounds me, especially when fear or paralysis sets in. Journaling helps me clarify what I’m doing and regain my momentum.

Systems Change as You Change

Over the years, my systems have evolved with me. Early in my career, when I was focused on execution, digital tools helped me manage a high volume of tasks and details. As my responsibilities shifted to leadership and decision-making, I needed a different approach. That’s when my moon rituals became essential—they gave me space to think strategically and navigate tough conversations.

Motherhood was another turning point. During my postpartum years, my brain often felt fractured, like a horcrux split into pieces. Journaling became my lifeline. It gave me uninterrupted time to process my thoughts, and my morning pages habit finally stuck.

And now, I’m moving into a space where I am journaling less and using more embodied practices like meditation to clear the gunk or move me past my fears. 

If you’ve tried and failed to start a journaling practice, it might not have been the right season of life for you. That’s okay. Systems aren’t static—they should adapt to your needs as they change.

Making Time and Saving Time

People often ask how I make time for all of this. The truth is, these practices bring me so much relief and joy that I crave them. I look forward to journaling, so I naturally make time for it.

Journaling also saves me time. Without it, I’d waste hours working on the wrong things, burning myself out, or spiraling in fear and anxiety. There have been countless moments when I was completely stuck on a project. After just 15 minutes of journaling, the answer became clear, and I eliminated 80% of what felt overwhelming.

I also keep things simple. I don’t try to make my journals pretty or perfect. If anything, the messiness ensures privacy—it discourages nosy people from reading what I write. Logistically, most of my journaling happens after the kids are asleep. Sometimes that means waking up early or skipping TV at night, but the payoff is worth it.

Staying Flexible

I’ve learned that I fail at any system that’s too rigid. Life isn’t predictable, and my journaling practice reflects that. There are weeks when I journal a lot and weeks when I barely touch my notebooks. Sometimes I miss my weekly reviews for two or three weeks. That’s okay. There’s no one “right” way to do this.

Make it Simple and Pleasurable

If you want journaling to become a habit, start small and keep it simple. Maybe set a 15-minute timer or decide to journal only when you’re traveling. Experiment until you find something that sticks.

And make it pleasurable! Invest in beautiful notebooks and pens that inspire you. Take your journal on a hike and reflect during a break. Treat yourself to a journaling date with a lavender latte at your favorite café. When you associate journaling with joy, it becomes less of a task and more of a ritual you look forward to.

Journaling has been my companion through the seasons of life—helping me reflect, navigate challenges, and celebrate the moments that matter. Whether you’re drawn to pen and paper or prefer a digital system, what matters most is finding a practice that feels true to you. 

Start small, experiment, and let your journaling evolve with you. It doesn’t need to be perfect or pretty—just something that helps you stay connected to yourself and your values.

You can find more of Lauren’s ideas, thinking, and work on her Substack newsletter.

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At the end of each year, I sit down to reflect on my milestones and memories—big and small—that shaped the past 12 months. It’s become one of my favorite rituals to celebrate progress and set the stage for what’s next.

Thankfully, technology can do a lot of the heavy lifting, making this process easier and more fun. If apps are already tracking so much of our lives, why not turn that data into a tool for reflection?

Here are some of my favorite shortcuts to use technology as a mirror for self-reflection and self-understanding:

Social Media

• Instagram Highlights or Stories Archive: Check what you’ve shared publicly or privately saved as Stories
• Facebook Memories: Review your “On This Day” feature for posts, comments, and photos from the year
• X Bookmarks or Top Posts: Look for posts you bookmarked or those that received the most engagement (via analytics)

Productivity & Notetaking

• Notion, Evernote, Obsidian, or other notetaking apps: Search your notes for key tags, projects, or frequent topics
• Daily Journaling Apps (e.g., Day One or Reflectly): Review your daily or weekly entries to find personal highs, lows, or repeated themes
• Task manager or project management apps: Look back through projects completed, milestones reached, challenges overcome
• Calendar apps: Look through past events, meetings, special dates, etc.

Communications

• WhatsApp or Text Messages: Scroll through photos, links, or memorable exchanges from key conversations
• Emails: Use search terms like “thank you,” “congratulations,” or “milestone” to surface important exchanges

Finance

• Bank Statements or Budgeting Apps (such as YNAB): Look at major purchases or investments, which often signify big life events or changes
• Amazon Orders or Receipts: Review purchases that reflect memorable moments (e.g., items bought for vacations, hobbies, or special occasions)

Health & Fitness

• Step-Tracking Apps (e.g., Apple Health or Fitbit): Review your best months, longest walks, or exercise streaks
• Meditation Apps (e.g., Calm or Headspace): Look at your most meditated days or longest streaks
• Diet Tracking Apps (e.g., MyFitnessPal): Spot trends or standout meals you might have recorded

Writing & Creativity

• Drafts or Google Docs: Look for essays, brainstorms, or personal reflections you started but maybe didn’t finish
• Art/Design/Drawing Apps (e.g., Procreate, Adobe Express): Find completed or in-progress creative works

Travel

• Google Maps: Check your timeline, showing you where you’ve been the past year
• Airline or Hotel Loyalty Accounts: Review your flight or hotel history to recall travels or trips
• Trip Planning Apps (e.g., TripIt, Hopper): See itineraries or trips you had on your calendar

Learning

• Online Course Platforms (e.g., Coursera, Udemy, Maven): Check what courses you started or completed
• Language Apps (e.g., Duolingo): Reflect on your language-learning streaks or new skills

Content

• Music: Check your Spotify Wrapped playlist or “Liked Songs” playlist
• YouTube videos: Review your watch history, or “Liked videos” playlist
• Netflix and other streaming services: Review your watch history
• Books: Review your ratings on Goodreads or the books you’ve read on your Kindle
• Photo apps: Look through your “favorited” album on your smartphone; or photos/videos you’ve shared via text message (which tend to be the best ones) 

A lot of these depend on which apps you currently use and how you use them, but I always find many meaningful tidbits that I’d completely forgotten about.

Want to see how all this comes together? Check out my annual reviews here for inspiration and ideas on how to craft your own.

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It has been only by writing this series of essays that I’ve come to realize that I have a set of principles I follow for my personal development. They might not be right for everyone, but they’ve certainly served me well.

#1. Go deeper than the surface level

I’ve repeatedly found that the real fruits of any personal development program or experience lie below the surface. There is always an introductory “light” version, which can be useful if you’re just looking for a taste. But don’t expect that to produce real transformation. 

I often notice that people who are “into” personal development will keep shopping around for different practices and gurus, only dipping their toes in the water before moving on to something else. This gives them the impression that they’ve “tried everything” and “nothing works,” when in fact, they’ve only inoculated themselves to a wide variety of powerful medicines.

For example, the Landmark Forum weekend seminar was impactful for me, but it was nothing compared to the half-dozen other courses from the same organization I went on to complete afterward. A single class can never compete with the impact of a full curriculum. 

The best way I’ve found to go beyond the surface is to take on a position of service or leadership (which are the same thing). It was only when I joined Landmark’s leadership training program and saw what it takes behind the scenes to produce transformation in others that the teachings truly sank in.

I’ve attended and participated in a variety of other programs and courses that didn’t even merit a mention in this series, simply because I didn’t go deep with them. Therefore they never had a chance to make their mark and become a part of who I am.

#2. Commit for a set period of time

Related to the above, it’s important to dedicate a substantial period of time to a given practice. I’ve compressed a seemingly large number of experiences into my story, but in reality, I almost never pursued more than one growth practice at a time or even one right after another. It takes time to integrate.

For example, after taking Joe Hudson’s weekend Tide Turners seminar in 2018, it took a full year before I felt ready to enroll in his more intensive week-long Groundbreakers program in 2019, and then another year before I participated in his online program The Art of Accomplishment Masterclass, and then another year before my wife and I joined a couple’s retreat he led in 2021. That’s four years of participating in and absorbing one person’s teachings, during which I didn’t pursue any other personal growth practice.

My typical rule of thumb is to have one big personal growth experience each year, as a kind of “spiritual rejuvenation” to ensure I’m remaining connected to my deepest self and that I’m not ignoring too many uncomfortable truths about myself. I know it’s time for my annual tuneup when life starts getting dull and loses its color, indicating that I’m starting to lose touch with my emotions and sense of wonder.

Committing to one practice for a set period and allowing one to settle before seeking another also ensures I’m not just seeking an endless series of dopamine hits in place of real change, or using courses as a way to distract from the necessary inner work. There is truly no rush, and the truth is, you can arrive at many of the same breakthroughs via multiple paths. It’s more important to go deep in one of them than to keep shopping around looking for the “perfect” option.

#3. Find a teacher, peers, and a structured environment

I’ve found far better results when I had a teacher, and a group of people undergoing the experience alongside me. This provides a strong source of accountability to ensure I keep showing up for others who depend on me. But just as importantly, I believe there is a mechanism buried deeply in our psyches that makes change much easier when done in groups.

We are a social species, and many aspects of all three levels – mind, heart, and body – are geared specifically to learn from other people. Doing anything in isolation is inherently foreign and unnatural for us, especially if it’s a confronting or scary experience like changing our most deeply rooted beliefs and ways of being. 

Other people give us outside perspectives to help shine light on our blindspots and give us comfort and encouragement at moments of fear. It’s also simply more fun and meaningful to undertake a challenge with others, and I’ve made some of my deepest friendships in adulthood as a result. 

Even Vipassana meditation retreats, which ostensibly are all about finding your own internal realizations in complete silence, benefit tremendously from the shared nature of the experience. There are also daily recorded teachings from the founder Goenka as well as a daily Q&A with the meditation teacher, which provide context and a sense of assurance.

This is why, whenever possible, I try to join a course, program, retreat, or group coaching experience, rather than only reading or researching a subject. 

#4. Occasionally go “off the reservation”

In contrast to the principle above, it’s crucial to occasionally go “off the reservation” and put yourself in an environment that is not planned and structured for you. If your breakthroughs depend on a perfectly ordered, predictable environment, then what good are they?

The true test of whether you’ve changed is diving headfirst into unstructured environments, such as when I attended Burning Man with almost no preparation. It forced me to adapt, and improvise, drawing on all the tools and lessons I now had at my disposal.

Another wonderful venue for this is travel, which inherently throws all kinds of surprising and uncomfortable scenarios at you. Although I haven’t included it here, I consider international travel and living abroad for longer periods a core part of my personal growth and do it regularly.

I firmly believe the ultimate goal of any structured program, skilled teacher, or new growth practice is to outgrow it. I don’t want to keep piling on one daily practice after another until my whole day is taken up in preparing to live my life, rather than living it. I see each new technique as a temporary season – like a metamorphosis I’m undergoing, until I eventually emerge from my cocoon as different from my previous self as a butterfly from a caterpillar, free to flutter off and live a full, vibrant life free of structures and rules.

#5. Share your stories in real time

This one is probably obvious by now, but I believe strongly in sharing your stories – not just at the end of the road when you’ve had all the insights and breakthroughs, but at each step of the journey.

This has numerous irreplaceable benefits:

• Helping you integrate and fully internalize what you’re learning by turning it into a narrative on the page and in your mind
• Allowing you to more effectively connect and cross-reference insights across experiences and at different levels of mind, heart, and body
• Documenting what you’ve experienced so you can revisit, recollect, and even reinterpret it in the future
• Giving other people in your life the chance to learn from and maybe even participate in a new experience they wouldn’t have otherwise (which if they do, gives you a lot of interesting things to talk about and relate over)

I’ve found that the best time to share your stories isn’t even at the “conclusion” of a single experience. You never know when a given chapter of your growth journey will end, and by the time it does, the most fundamental insights you had when you were a beginner are likely to be forgotten.

No, the best time to share is in real time, right at the frontier of your own progress. 

For example, in 2019, I delivered a talk at a conference called Refactor Camp based on adrienne maree brown’s book Pleasure Activism. This was at the very beginning of my exploration of somatic, body-centric personal development, and in retrospect, I didn’t know what I was talking about. I had very little personal experience to speak from, so this talk was less about my expertise as it was about my curiosity, my open questions, my first tantalizing insights, and most of all, an invitation for other people in my network to surface potential next steps for me.

When you open-source your growth journey in real time, you’ll find that all sorts of people who are on a similar journey will be drawn to you. They’ll become your confidants, your partners, and your friends. Putting your story into narrative form can also be tremendously healing in its own right, as I’ve done with my father’s story in documentary form.

#6. Move toward where you feel shame

Looking back on the formative personal development milestones of my adult life, it all seems so neat and tidy, as if I sat down and planned it in advance. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was almost no point at which it didn’t feel chaotic, random, and accidental.

I now believe that personal growth isn’t really something you have to go out and pursue like wild game. It is constantly present all around you, and happening whether you like it or not. There is nothing more natural for humans than to grow and change, and life tends to conspire to give you exactly the experiences you need to grow (a lesson I learned from Michael Singer).

However, in our modern world of constantly multiplying optionality, you sometimes have to choose to pursue one path over another, if only for the sake of time management. In that case, the best rule of thumb I’ve found is to move toward whichever part of your life is most associated with shame. The feeling of shame is a signal that a part of you hasn’t been seen, accepted, embraced, and loved, and until it is, it will continue broadcasting pain. The longer you ignore it, the worse that pain will become and the more it will spread to other aspects of your life.

The reason I say “move toward” is that you don’t have to make a full frontal attack on that area, and probably shouldn’t. This isn’t about forcing yourself or dominating yourself. It’s about learning new ways to love yourself. 

If there’s an aspect of your life that feels too overwhelmingly shameful to approach or think about or feel at all, then that probably means you’re not ready to. Instead, pick an area that feels shameful but one you have some curiosity or openness about. And you can start at whichever level you’re most comfortable with – mind, heart, or body. For me, that usually means reading books and articles, which allows me to start gaining intellectual familiarity and a basic understanding before diving into my feelings or my gut.

#7. Seek variety and diversity

As this series illustrates, it’s important to me to seek a wide variety of different “modalities” – to gain exposure to different ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and practicing personal development. 

A lesson I took away from my religious upbringing is that no one has an exclusive monopoly on the truth. No one religion, or philosophy, or teacher has it all figured out. They each perceive one facet of the truth, and their blindspots have to be filled in by others.

By mixing and matching my approach to personal development, I protect myself against some of the worst abuses and pitfalls of metaphysics– the cult leaders who abuse their authority, the pseudo-science that dismisses logic and reason, the fundamentalist tendency to conform “perfectly” to one philosophy and denigrate all the others, and most subtle but important of all, the risk of confusing the map with the territory and mistaking my perception of reality with reality itself. 

This life is too complex and wondrous to be easily encapsulated into a single perspective. This universe is too big and mysterious to be explained by any one mental model. This reality is too wondrous to ever be fully understood, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

In Part II, I told the story of how I opened my heart. This next chapter is about going further inward and downward – into the realm of the body and gut.

It all started when I was 22 and began to feel a nagging pain and tension in the back of my throat. That small discomfort eventually turned into a searing pain throughout the right side of my neck, accompanied by an inability to control my voice – to speak, to sing, or to laugh without a lot of effort. 

The social and psychological effects were even worse than the physical ones – I was so wrapped up and preoccupied with my voice dysfunction I found it impossible to naturally interact and connect with others, leading to intense feelings of isolation bordering on despair.

While I’d love to be able to say that my quest for self-knowledge was fueled by nothing but my insatiable thirst for truth, the reality is much simpler: it was pain that launched me on my journey. I turned inward because I had no other choice.

After several years of seeing a variety of medical specialists, undergoing countless tests and scans, and trying everything including powerful medication with severe side effects, I had almost given up hope of ever finding a remedy. That was when I turned to alternative, esoteric forms of personal development to find some relief from my suffering (you can read more about my journey through psychosomatic illness here).

By 2022, I’d explored Vipassana meditation, Landmark’s educational programs, psychedelics, and Joe Hudson’s coaching, and gained some incredible tools for turning my pain into something positive. 

But my quest began with the most fundamental sensations arising from within my body, and that is where it had to eventually return. Today my journey has led me full circle, back to where it all began: the realm of the body.

Discovering the root of my pain

It was in this third chapter of my story when I began to really get at the root of my chronic pain: that I had disconnected and dissociated from my body at a young age in order to survive painful experiences, treating the signals it was sending me as annoyances, distractions, or signs of weakness. 

The models for emotional expression I saw in my parents gave me the impression that there were certain “bad” emotions that should be avoided and ignored for the sake of family harmony. Conflict and disagreement in particular were swept under the rug.

I was always a sensitive, introverted child, and being thrust into the rowdy, rough-and-tumble world of school forced me to create a hard external shell to retreat into. I thought I had to be tough, to show I was a “real man,” and that meant first and foremost not succumbing to my own needs for comfort.

If I had to go to the bathroom, I would hold it for as long as I possibly could in an attempt to show my body who was in charge. If I was sick I refused to take medicine, because I didn’t want to feel weak and dependent. I purposefully wouldn’t put on a jacket when I was cold, or I’d refuse to eat when I was hungry, in order to “toughen myself up.”

Later in life, this compulsion toward self-numbing and self-punishment manifested itself in other ways. I began to develop a taste for danger as I became an adult, because it gave me a thrill that allowed me to feel excited and alive. I was attracted to places that offered acute risk, such as when I lived and volunteered in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, or worked in rural parts of northern Colombian (near FARC territory), or joined the Peace Corps in Eastern Ukraine. Somehow, I felt more at home and at ease living in these risky places because at least I felt alive.

As I started my career and business, this impulse to suppress my needs and wants at first felt like a terrific superpower. I could power through 12-hour days without a problem, work straight through the weekend, and ignore my needs for rest, recovery, and social connection seemingly forever. My ability to dominate my body caused me to receive a lot of praise, further cementing it as a core part of my identity.

But as the years passed and I entered my 30s, my dysfunctional relationship with my body began to break down. I could no longer physically push it the way I had throughout my 20s. Even if I could have, I didn’t want to have to do that anymore. While I’d gotten married and become a dad, that same relentless drive to push harder and move faster continued almost unabated. 

Yet I no longer knew what I was striving so hard for. What was so important that I had to sacrifice my present life to achieve?

Ayahuasca as somatic medicine

That sense of unease and weariness slowly grew throughout my mid-30s, finally breaking through the surface when I took part in my first ayahuasca ceremony in late 2023, which I wrote about in A Journey Between Worlds: The Story of My Ayahuasca Experience. 

I had experimented with various psychedelic substances in small ways before, but this was something different altogether: three potent ceremonies over three days, in the most conducive and supportive environment possible, and with a much earthier and more primal substance that was found in nature, not created in a lab. 

This was the first time I did healing work centered directly in the body, rather than using my mind or my heart as portals of entry. The mind loves to come up with theories, explanations, stories, interpretations, and justifications, and as valuable as those things are, I’ve come to believe that unless those ideas find their way into the tissues of the body, they will always remain merely intellectual playthings. The body speaks in a much more primitive language – the language of bodily fluids, physical urges, and visceral contraction and release.

I’ve learned that trauma isn’t primarily intellectual. What happened to you remains literally embedded in your nervous system, in your muscles and fascia, and even in the way your metabolism functions, your lungs breathe, and your posture holds you. Trauma shapes how you interpret your bodily sensations at the most fundamental level, thereby giving your everyday experience its default emotional state. Your body has hidden memories, storing fragments of your past all over your body, not just in your brain.

This is one reason trauma is so hard to heal from – it literally stays lodged in the tissues of the body, which continue to send the same urgent signals of panic no matter how many insights you think you’ve had.

Ayahuasca is known for the vomiting that often accompanies it, and I found that far from being an unfortunate side effect, it was an essential part of the healing experience. Vomiting is our body’s most visceral way of rejecting something that isn’t good for it, and that applies as much to ideas and stories as it does to poisonous substances. 

Instead of wrestling intellectually with an idea or a memory or a past traumatic event for hours, I found it was easier to just let go and allow the body to do what it needed to do. The change in mindset quickly followed.

For some, what their body needed to do was grieve, and their grief came out in spectacularly physical ways like wailing and prostrating and weeping. For others, it meant expressing fear, and they did so, with shuddering and shaking and shouting. 

For me, it meant reconciling with my younger self, and accepting that he had disconnected from his body and dissociated from the present as a way to escape the feelings he didn’t know how to process. I saw clearly who I had to become in order to survive, hardening myself and shutting down certain parts in order to make it through. 

I forgave that small boy, and thanked him, and in doing so, forgave myself, who is still that same boy. At the same time, I saw how these patterns of self-denial and emotional repression hadn’t started with me; they could be traced back through multiple generations of tough, resilient immigrants, passed on to me as my intergenerational inheritance. I saw that I could acknowledge the achievements of my ancestors, while also healing their pain using the full array of tools I had gained via the mind, the heart, and the body.

As I passed through all these experiences, and as the three-day retreat wound down, an awe-inspiring vision slowly began to fill me. I saw that there was an underlying theme to my life that transcended my writing, my teaching, and even my career: I am someone who creates bridges between worlds. Every time I say or write those words I feel emotion welling up from inside me.

Building a Second Brain was about connecting the right and left sides of the brain – making structure more creative and creativity more structured – but that was just one instance of a much larger theme. 

I’ve always built bridges: between the U.S. and Mexico and Brazil, between Christianity and secular culture, between liberals and conservatives, between the masculine and feminine, and between the body and mind. 

My ability to migrate between contexts and to see the good in every perspective, inherited from generations of my immigrant ancestors who roamed from one country and continent to another, is in fact my core superpower: to bridge the divide between and within people and transform the pain of separation into a source of connection.

My intuition tells me that the next chapter of my career and life will continue to be about embracing that inherent nature, and building bridges once again.

Fascial therapy as bodily restructuring

As part of my somatic explorations, I’ve seen a skilled fascial therapist (also sometimes known as a “bodyworker”) in Los Angeles regularly over the last few years. 

I’m always astounded that, within a couple hours, she can reliably locate and release emotions that have been trapped in my body, without me needing to do much except allow the accompanying thoughts, realizations, memories, and physical sensations to arise and flow through me without too much resistance.

I’ve come to understand that these sessions are changing me at a structural level, even though I have almost no understanding of what she’s doing. It isn’t primarily an intellectual process nor an emotional one. By releasing bodily tension directly, she is unwinding the underlying physiological sources of tension in my relationships, my decisions, my thoughts, and my goals. 

Often, as soon as she releases an underlying stiffness in my body, that part of my life immediately becomes more fluid as well. It’s not that I receive the exact answer to a problem I’m facing; it’s more that I regain the flexibility to consider the full range of possible options that my tension has been keeping me from seeing.

I’ve had to let go of the assumption that personal growth must always be wrenching, painful and confronting. Sometimes it does, but other times it requires nothing more than lying on a table and allowing things to come to the surface.

The somatic, bodily plane of my existence is the current frontier of my personal growth, and the one I’m most excited and intrigued by now. I think it was important that I started with the mind, since that was my “home base” and the entry point I was ready for in the beginning. It was also critical that I addressed the heart next, because I needed to learn how to allow my emotions to arise and use them to connect with others.

But these days, I am finding that the body offers some profound and tangible benefits:

• Healing at the somatic level often happens faster and more efficiently than at the heart and mind levels, because I can integrate new ideas directly without having to change my beliefs or mental constructs first.
• Once you learn to listen to it, the body is very decisive and self-confident, issuing its wisdom in single-word responses, utterly primal and unshakeable in its conviction (this capability translates to much more effective decision-making in business and other areas of life).
• Body-based work is often more fun and dynamic, because it involves movement and play (this also makes it easier to integrate into your “normal” life in the form of morning routines, exercise, yoga, or meditation).
• Somatic work is more “agnostic” and content neutral – it doesn’t impose any particular doctrine or dogma on you, and there is nothing you have to believe (or even necessarily understand) to receive its benefits.
• You don’t have to learn new skills to participate in somatic healing – you just allow your own body to do what it already knows how to do.
• You don’t need more information for somatic work – the body and brain already possess a tremendous amount of information, and usually just need a higher level of connectivity to make sense of it.

My body-based explorations are only beginning, but have taken on a few other tantalizingly promising forms:

• A more feminine approach to productivity, work, ambition, and effort, largely inspired by my wife Lauren and her understanding of nature’s cycles.
• Parenting, which is all about being present and embodied with children, since that is their default state (see my conversation with Joe Hudson on this topic here).
• Hosting in-person experiences such as entrepreneurial masterminds and our first Second Brain Summit, which in the past would have felt too overstimulating and overwhelming.
• Most recently, I’ve found that even inherently abstract topics, like my relationship with money, can be approached from a somatic perspective, allowing me to integrate new ways of thinking more quickly and at a deeper level.
• I’ve had a couple brief but powerful experiences with breathwork, and have been shocked how quickly and deeply I can go using nothing but my breath. I plan on exploring this avenue more in the future.

The aspect of somatic work I most appreciate is that it has given me a deep sense of certainty, rooted viscerally in my body, that I am okay. I can feel that everything will turn out alright, and that I can trust the journey of my life as it unfolds, without impatience or judgment.

The mind and the heart are wonderful, but they are also fickle creatures, fluttering around like hummingbirds reacting to every slight puff of wind. My body is like the earth, solid and monumental, unperturbed by the daily emotional weather, reminding me that I don’t have to be either.

I take great comfort these days in the constant reminders that I am an animal, an idea I would have previously felt aversion toward. I am a mammal like any other, and lying below all my abstract hopes and fears and worries and dreams is the biological reality of my skin and bones and guts and bowels.

Returning to that biological reality gives me peace. It roots me in the here and now. It compels me to seek out nature, one of the main reasons we decided to move to the mountains of Mexico recently. I am finding tremendous joy in coming home to my body after all these years of wandering in the wilderness of the mind like a prodigal son returning to his family after years of searching for something that he always had.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

In Part I, I recounted the first chapter in my personal growth journey, which was all about my mind and intellect and reframing the narratives that defined my life.

As transformational as that period was for me, around 2018 I once again began to sense that something was missing. 

I had gained a variety of tools to shift my perspectives from an intellectual point of view, but there was still a vibrancy and “juice” missing from my life.

My then-girlfriend Lauren and I decided to uproot ourselves and move to Mexico City partly to try and recapture a feeling of excitement and adventure that our work-oriented lives in the Bay Area had increasingly failed to provide. We felt stuck and bored like our seemingly impressive careers were failing to give us what we truly wanted.

But it wasn’t merely a change of scenery that would give me the feeling of aliveness I was searching for. Yet again, it was an inner change that was needed, not an outer one. The next chapter of my story was all about opening up my heart and the channels of emotion that had long been frozen inside of me, under the supervision of guides and teachers who had already done so themselves.

Burning Man – my first experience with psychedelics

In July 2018, I received a last-minute invitation to Burning Man, an eclectic week-long festival that takes place every year in the desert of Northern California. 

Burning Man is a legendary institution in the Bay Area. I’d heard about it for years, but never had the funds nor the contacts to go. With only a couple of days’ notice and a set of equipment and supplies that was barely adequate for the harsh conditions, I hitched a ride out of town to the desert.

Burning Man was disorienting for me right from the start. As the first morning dawned, I found myself on an endless white plain devoid of geographical (and cultural) reference points. I was completely unprepared, not just in practical terms but emotionally and psychologically. I had been in a period of obsessive, narrow-minded focus as the early cohorts of my Building a Second Brain course found traction. Rather than free me up, that success locked me down. I desperately clutched at what felt like a thin lifeline of success after years of struggle.

Black Rock City, as the sprawling tent city is known, was a fanciful dreamscape. On every side, I saw sculptures and contraptions of every shape and size: a 5-story tall crystal-encrusted gramophone, a ferris wheel full of skeletons, a giant artificial tree of leaves embedded with LEDs pulsing in rhythmic patterns, a spiraling ambulatory staircase full of old pictures. 

The camps weren’t mere habitations but works of art in themselves: giant carnival big tops criss-crossed with hammocks, geodesic domes full of foam toys, insulated yurts, and a full-size 747 fuselage someone had managed to tow out into the desert. And most dazzling of all were the people, dressed as sultans arrayed in their finery, as dinosaurs, bunnies, ballerinas, wizards, or in many cases, simply naked.

I didn’t know where to go or what to do in the sprawling tent city, not realizing that most people slept during the heat of the day and went out during the cooler nights. I hardly knew anyone even at the camp I was staying with, and thus was ignorant of the customs and traditions that give Burning Man its logic. I felt threatened and confronted by the wildly unorthodox clothing, art, music, sculptures, sounds, and even ways of speaking and behaving I faced on every side, with no source of familiarity or comfort to be found anywhere. It felt like culture shock but magnified tenfold.

In A Productivity Expert Goes to Burning Man I recounted how a profound experience with LSD on the final night of the festival was the turning point for me. 

Some of my campmates had found me huddled at the foot of The Man – the giant 80-foot statue at the center of the city that gets burned as a final ritual – consumed with loneliness and fear. They took me back to camp, we each took a tab of LSD, and soon afterward headed to Camp Mystic, an encampment of interconnected structures, artwork, venues, and workshops all designed for one purpose: to explore the state of consciousness afforded by this magical substance.

I spent the next 10 hours exploring Camp Mystic and the rest of Black Rock City beyond, immersed in an intensity of belonging, connection, beauty, and harmony like I’d never experienced in my life. Wandering under the stars, whole chapters of my life were rewritten, ancient interpretations and meanings dissolving and being remade. Forgotten memories exploded into my mind from nowhere, seeking the attention and forgiveness they needed to be complete. As I watched the sunrise, I was awed by the beauty and perfection of the universe, every strand converging and finding a connection in me, the sole interpreter and witness of my experience.

I recently attended a talk by Dr. Brad Jacobs, a physician and integrative medicine practitioner based in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was about how and why “peak experiences” are so powerful for personal growth. He defines such experiences as “moments of full immersion” that often create “intense joy, creativity and clarity, and where you feel a deep connection to yourself and the world around you.” They include near-death encounters, vocational challenges like those faced by first responders, extreme sports like skydiving, or deeply immersive ones such as spiritual awakenings or journeys with psychedelic medicine.

Dr. Jacobs’ explanation for why these experiences can change us so profoundly helped me finally understand how being part of something like Burning Man, which on the surface can seem so fanciful and even self-indulgent, can inspire inner change. It’s because they:

• Overwhelm the senses
• Call you to the present moment
• Relax fixation to prior beliefs
• Suspend your belief prediction model
• Fertilize cognitive and psychological flexibility

In other words, an intense or immersive experience pulls you strongly into the present moment, and then forces your mind to relax its grip as the sole filter on your reality. When you see and hear things you’ve never encountered before, you can no longer pretend that you have everything figured out and under control. Out of necessity, your mental model of reality has to loosen a bit to let this new information in, and in that moment of cognitive flexibility lies enormous potential to change fundamental beliefs and assumptions about many aspects of one’s life.

I believe that’s exactly what happened in my time at Burning Man, and there were three lasting changes it inspired in me.

First, the experience gave me a potent sense of peace within the vastness of the universe, a deep appreciation for the hilarity and absurdity of my existence, and an unexplainable certainty that everything is just the way it should be. I hadn’t had that feeling of “being at home in the universe” since my Christian childhood faith.

Second, I felt an immense, almost oceanic desire rising within me to help others and alleviate their suffering. I’d been so focused on my own survival for so long, far past the point where it was necessary, and now saw a new kind of purpose taking hold in me – to pass along the gift, to help others heal in the ways I’d been healed, to make a difference with this miracle of a life I’d been given.

And third, Burning Man was the first time I saw myself as being part of a global movement of human transformation. I encountered so many people contributing to it in their own way: energy and bodywork practitioners, fire-dancers, orgasmic meditators, Chinese and Eastern medicine practitioners, yoga and meditation teachers, therapists, artists, and writers. I attended workshops on Bitcoin, polyamory, and chocolate as a healing medium, my first exposure to these concepts that persist as interests to this day. I saw that this was work the spiritual traditions of the world had started thousands of years ago, and that we all now have a part to play in. I saw I wasn’t alone in my seeking.

That week in the desert was brief but felt like a microcosm of my life – a confused and clueless young man dropped into a threatening and incomprehensible world, only to be shown a door to a deeper underlying reality that made it all make sense.

Joe Hudson and The Art of Accomplishment

As wonderful as my Burning Man experience was, I struggled to integrate that newfound sense of aliveness and awe into my normal, day-to-day life. The high I’d experienced out in the desert gradually faded as I returned to the routine of my workweek.

As I’d done before, I began looking for a structured program and a teacher who could help me awaken and embody the new “self” I’d discovered. While attending a meetup in San Francisco, I heard someone speak whose words immediately resonated with me: Joe Hudson, a former venture capitalist and current executive coach. Little did I know, Joe would be my guide for the next chapter, which was all about learning to access my emotions.

I had built a new intellectual foundation, opening my mind to new possibilities and acquiring a set of practical skills I could draw on whenever I faced discouragement. It was now time to go deeper, from the head to the heart.

After hearing Joe speak, and with the encouragement of a friend who’d already taken it, I signed up for his introductory weekend course. I captured my experience there in Tide Turners: A Workshop on Using Business to Fuel Spiritual Awakening (this program has now evolved into the online-only Connection Course).

From that weekend workshop, I learned:

• That vulnerability is a sign you’ve found your growth edge – that edge is different for every person and in every situation, can’t be planned or predicted in advance, and shifts moment to moment as a conversation unfolds. I discovered that I have the option of unlocking vulnerability in any interaction, simply by asking the question that lies at the edge of my comfort zone in the moment.
• The incredible power of open-ended, “How/What” questions to help people access their innate intelligence and resolve their own problems – instead of giving advice or proposing solutions, which usually just engenders resistance, I could invite them to tell the truth to themselves in a spirit of curiosity and self-love.
• How important it is to be impartial – to refrain from leading the conversation to a predetermined outcome of your choosing – and instead to be with people in their struggle, assume they know what’s best for them, really listen to what they’re saying, and reflect back to them the genius they already possess.
• “Joy is the matriarch of all emotions – she won’t enter a house where her children are not welcome” – this is a favorite and often-repeated quote of Joe’s, and its lesson is a north star for personal development. If you cut off access to any emotion – fear, disappointment, grief, anger – you also lose joy in the process. This observation functions as an accountability mechanism, reminding me that if I’m not feeling joy at any given time, it’s because I’ve lost one of her children along the way.

Joe’s guiding philosophy deeply resonated with me: that the most “worldly” experiences, such as in business, can fuel profound spiritual awakenings. That was also my first encounter with VIEW, an approach to having reliably deeper, more meaningful conversations that forms a cornerstone of Joe’s work, and now mine.

I would go on to take Joe’s more intensive week-long program the following year, in 2019, which I recounted in Groundbreakers: My Journey Healing Trauma, Unleashing Anger, and Awakening the Vagus Nerve (this program is still available only in person).

In many ways, Groundbreakers was the culmination of everything I had learned up to that point, like the final thesis for my master’s degree in applied self-development. It represented a leap from the world of the mind – with its sophisticated yet limited narratives, theories, models, and frameworks – to the world of the heart and its felt emotions.

During Groundbreakers, I worked through what felt like a lifetime of repressed emotions stuck in various parts of my body, from grief at the things I didn’t receive from my parents as a child, to a fear of failure that had been lurking in the back of my mind and unconsciously distorting my behavior for years. 

Most powerfully of all, I realized that I had shut down my anger as a child out of fear of my father’s reaction, to the point I was barely able to feel it at all anymore. On top of that, I actually felt proud of my inability to feel anger, as if it made me a better person, while under the surface that anger wreaked havoc on my inner life in its attempt to be heard. I discovered that anger is a form of surrender, and without it, all the other emotions remain throttled.

Here are some of the other lessons I took away from Groundbreakers:

• Recognizing my internal dialogue and what it is trying to accomplish – I formed a new relationship with the “voice in my head,” seeing through the ways it uses guilt, shame, criticism, and self-doubt in an attempt to give me what I need, and found far more productive ways of doing so without beating myself up.
• Anger can be a transformative source of vulnerability and determination – I completely changed my understanding of what anger even is, from a regrettable source of pain and conflict to an essential component of living a vibrant life. I’ve since found that anger is the clearest signal I have of what I want and what truly matters to me, and the most unstoppable form of determination to go after that with everything I am.
• Self-love as the engine of personal growth – I had always judged myself harshly as not being good enough, or worthy enough, which had been my main motivation to learn and grow up to this point. But as that self-judgment ran out as a source of fuel, I reversed it and found that total and unconditional self-acceptance and self-love is a far more powerful one.
• Healing is deeper and faster when it happens on multiple levels – Joe’s work combines multiple forms of healing work, demonstrating how effective it is to cross-reference approaches at the mind, heart, and gut level.

My heart as the bottleneck

Returning to normal life after Groundbreakers, I saw an immediate and dramatic impact on my work. 

My Building a Second Brain course had reached the point where it was ready for a larger stage and a wider audience, but I had felt stuck and fearful without fully realizing why. When I cleared my emotional channels and connected with my deepest seated desires, I was surprised to find within myself the kind of leader I didn’t know I needed. 

I realized that my style of leadership wasn’t about stoically charging forward in the face of implacable opposition like I’d been taught. It was actually about feeling every emotion – and I mean every emotion – much more deeply and viscerally as potent sources of information. I began to see that I could lead with authenticity and vulnerability, bringing others into the heart of my work instead of going it alone.

The newfound feeling of anger I had tapped into soon turned into a feeling of unbelievable clarity and determination. I got in touch with my anger at an unjust world that leaves too many people without options. I felt my anger that all the best knowledge and resources are reserved for the most privileged. I found my anger that people are suffering for lack of information that already exists and is already proven to work. 

With the determination to right these wrongs as my fuel, a few months later I sat down in our new apartment in Mexico City to begin writing the proposal for my book Building a Second Brain. Three and a half years later, that book was released to the world, and as of this writing has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide in 25 languages.

It still amazes me to see how getting in touch with my emotions was crucial to becoming the kind of person who could write the book that wanted to be written. It’s about a seemingly technical subject – personal knowledge management – and yet just beneath the surface, it’s really about people’s inner lives and all the beliefs, stories, fears, and worries about information that plague them. It was only when I tapped into the depth and breadth of my own feelings and learned to express them fluidly without shutting down or dissociating, that I was able to tell my own story and the story of my work in a way that resonated and moved people.  

What I learned in this second chapter of my journey is that it is my heart’s capacity, not my brain’s capacity, that is the bottleneck to the change I want to see in myself and the world. 

Which means I don’t have to get smarter or more precise in my thinking to make progress. I can decide to get more connected, more present, and more expressive instead. Every time I’m faced with a decision and am tempted to do more research or acquire more insights, I’ve learned that I can instead close my eyes and listen to the still, small voice inside, which has access to a subterranean current of deep wisdom that is so much more vast, yet also somehow so much simpler, than anything my mind can access on its own. I still consider this a miracle every time.

Exploring the world of the heart opened up vast new possibilities for me. My relationships deepened, my courage and conviction strengthened, and my work became a pure expression of my creativity. I became my own best friend, unconditionally loving myself no matter what happened. I began to live for the moment to moment joy of it, not just to reach a far off destination.

And yet as my heart has unfolded, I’ve increasingly sensed that there are still deeper layers, and still deeper sensations to explore. The heart is just one organ after all, and we have 77 others. Next I’ll share the story of my current explorations at the new frontier of my growth: the somatic.

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On October 3-4, 2024, we hosted our very first in-person Second Brain Summit in Los Angeles, and honestly, it was a dream come true. 

This event felt like a “bucket list” moment in every way. I’d count it among my top five life milestones, right up there with getting married, witnessing my children’s births, and signing my first book deal.

Looking back, I’m still in awe of the warmth, love, and generosity everyone displayed—from attendees to volunteers to our lineup of speakers.

One of my biggest takeaways from the Summit was personal: I learned the incredible growth that comes from letting go. 

For much of this project, I had to place my trust in others to handle details big and small. For someone who’s used to doing everything himself (or at least attempting to), this was transformative. For the first time, I felt fully carried by a team of talented individuals working right alongside me, taking collective ownership of a vision we all believed in.

A special shoutout goes to Simply Storied, our event organizer. They made it all possible, guiding us through each stage with finesse and care. And of course, none of this would have happened without the energy and dedication of our team and volunteers.

Now that I’ve had a month to process everything that happened, I’m ready to share my reflections with you, including some painful realizations and lessons learned.

Who joined the Second Brain Summit 

We welcomed 212 total attendees from 16 countries! Only 57% came from the U.S., with some traveling from faraway places such as Bali, Taiwan, and Australia to join us. 

59% were male and 41% female. A third of attendees identified as business owners and entrepreneurs, followed by employees and freelancers. 

I loved to see such a wide distribution of different ages at the Summit, as I think it’s super important for different generations to learn from each other:

Only 44% of attendees had ever purchased one of our courses or cohorts. So for many, it was the first time joining one of our experiences. 

I can confidently say that everyone who attended was a 10/10 in interest and passion. Each person followed such a unique and personal path to get there that we can’t identify a “typical” attendee profile. 

The highlights: What attendees loved the most  

Our highlights video will express this better than words ever could:

I was honestly taken aback by the positive things people said about the experience, starting about two hours in. They spoke about it being “life-changing” and “healing”; as the best conference they’d ever been to. 

My favorite quotes I overheard:

• “You created the world you wanted to live in.” (from my dad)
• “This is a conference for high-functioning autistic people.” (this one made me laugh)
• “I finally found my people.” 
• “This was a spiritual experience.” (from a speaker)

Here are the things attendees said they loved most: 

• The incredible lineup of 39 speakers, their diversity along multiple dimensions, and how most stuck around and participated for the full two days of the conference. 
• High-quality, warm and friendly, and interesting fellow attendees, whom many people noted were unlike any group they’d encountered elsewhere.
• The positive energy of the event, noting that people were genuinely excited to be there. 
• The opportunity to meet people in real life whom they had known online for a while and to have informal yet deep conversations in person.  
• The size of the event (~200 people) was ideal for connecting with others and getting to know them beyond superficial “networking.”
• The seamless, frictionless, classy event design and management (kudos to Simply Storied team)
• The sponsors added a lot of value by offering relevant products and education about how to use them. 
• The “Digital Swag Bag” full of courses, memberships, and tools, allowing attendees to go deeper into what they learned. 

Here’s how attendees reported feeling at the end of the summit (“inspiring connection” jumps out as perhaps the overarching theme of the entire summit):

By the end of the event, 98% of attendees said the Summit met or exceeded their expectations. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) hit 80, a rare and impressive outcome that shows how likely they are to recommend it to others.

This shows how hungry people are for such communal experiences in our digital-centric world and that there’s huge potential in this area.

The financial snapshot

In the interest of transparency, I’d like to share what it took financially to bring this event to life.

Ticket sales brought in $120,604, and sponsorships contributed an additional $60,000, for a total of $180,604 in revenue. However, our total expenses came to $349,771, resulting in a net loss of $169,166. This essentially meant we subsidized each attendee by about $798 on top of the ticket price, which ranged from $999 (early-bird) to $1,200.

The primary challenge? We only sold about half as many tickets as I had originally envisioned, leaving us with the cost profile of a much larger event than we actually hosted. Although we made adjustments along the way, I was so committed to delivering a high-quality experience that I chose to eat the additional cost rather than cut essential aspects of the event.

Moving forward, it’s clear we’ll need a more sustainable financial model to make future Summits viable.

What we’d do differently next time

After reviewing the attendee feedback and our own reflections as a team, here are the things we’d change if we were to host the Second Brain Summit again:

• Increase the focus on the B2B and professional aspects of our niche, making it easier for people and their employers to justify the cost and time to attend.
• Prioritize interactive workshops and hands-on practical sessions, which can only be delivered live and in person. 
• Cut non-essentials such as games, a reserved hotel block, and catered food. A smaller venue would also reduce costs for AV, rented furniture, on-site event staff, security, signage, etc.
• Pick a location different from downtown LA, as the surrounding neighborhood was pretty sketchy. 
• Cap the attendance at an even lower number, so we are guaranteed to sell out and can spend more time on the event design rather than marketing/sales. 
• Schedule fewer sessions concurrently. We had as many as 6 sessions happening at the same time, which was too many for people to choose from and created FOMO. 
• Start conversations with sponsors earlier (9-12 months before the event, when budgets are being committed), seeking deeper, more strategic partnerships that would allow for higher sponsor revenue. 
• Offer a recorded or live-streamed version of the Summit sessions, as so much value was on offer it would have been nice to capture it.
• Add a third day with an unstructured agenda, allowing for informal meals, walking around town, and follow-up meetups to process all the new information and deepen new relationships. 
• Sell a “high-ticket program” on the backend of the summit, such as a group coaching program or mastermind, to support the financial side. 

With these changes, I believe we could make future Summits a financially viable and deeply impactful addition to the Second Brain community. I know of no better way to build true community and connection in our increasingly fragmented, distracted, isolated modern world.

I’m deeply grateful to everyone who joined, participated, and made this Summit possible. It’s an experience I’ll never forget, and I owe a huge “thank you” to every single one of you who helped make it real.

A personal note

There was something about this summit that moved me at a very deep level. I felt myself changing, transforming into someone new. 

Diving into the emotions and insights afterward with my coach, I realized that gathering together all these wonderful people in a warm, welcoming environment had touched a nerve inside me: a longstanding feeling I’ve had that I didn’t belong anywhere.

I traced that feeling back to my school years when I attended 5 different schools in 5 years from 5th grade to 9th grade, which made me highly resilient and adaptable but also made me feel isolated and alone like I didn’t have real friends. I traced it further back, to being the child of immigrant parents from two separate countries, a true third culture kid.

That narrative – that I didn’t belong in any group and no one could understand me – simply couldn’t withstand the outpouring of acceptance and love of 200 people, all united together in one common purpose. It was just so obvious that everyone there had felt alone or misunderstood, but that we could, in the words of my father, “Create the world we wanted to live in” anyway.

Many people have asked me whether we plan on hosting another summit in the future. I honestly can’t say, but what I do know is that in the coming years community is going to be one of the last and most meaningful differentiators in a world transformed by AI. It’s one of the only things that can’t be generated algorithmically, no matter what “social” media tells you.

I honestly don’t know how the financial side makes sense, but I do know two things: that every time I’ve doubled down on community it’s always worked out; and that every time I’ve doubled down on what has aliveness and energy it’s worked out, even if I couldn’t envision how in the beginning.

So in one way or another, I’m going to keep seeking ways to build true, meaningful community, to bring people together whether virtually or in person, and to help forge relationships that transcend any particular app, trend, or niche, so that everyone in my community has the chance to feel that sense of shared purpose and belonging that has been so transformative for me.

The best snapshots from the Second Brain Summit

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When I left the religious faith of my youth in my early 20s, everything collapsed – my faith, my certainty, and the sources of meaning I had clung to since childhood. 

I grew up with a clear sense of purpose: fight the good fight, spread the gospel, and fulfill God’s divine plan for my life. Then, one day, I woke up and realized I didn’t believe any of it.

What do you do when the foundations of your life crumble, and the reality you once believed in dissolves away and slips through your fingers?

I didn’t have the answer at first, but over the next two decades, I began an unexpected journey—one that transformed not just what I believed, but who I was. Far from being the end of my spiritual path, leaving my religion was actually the beginning of it.

This blog series tells the story of how I pursued that path over the last 20 years. In the early days, I thought it was an external search, for someone or something outside of me. I eventually realized it is in fact an inner quest for self-knowledge about who I truly am.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that this quest has unfolded in three distinct stages. 

The first chapter was all about my mind and intellect, as I spent my 20s questioning the narratives that I’d constructed to explain my past. My logical brain, the prefrontal cortex, stood like a sentinel at the gates of my mind, and I needed to befriend him and assuage his fears before he’d allow me to go any further.

The second leg of my journey was centered on my heart and emotions, as I learned how to let down my walls and connect with other people vulnerably. It was about deprogramming my default attitude toward emotions – repression and avoidance – and finding new ways to let my emotions flow through me.

And today, at the precipice of my 40s, I’m at the start of a third chapter: reawakening and getting in touch with my body and my gut. It seems to be about changing how my nervous system works and responds to fear, intuition, and desire at the most fundamental level of my bodily sensations.

Let me tell you the story of this first chapter, beginning with my mind – the world of ideas, facts, and logic.

Reading to understand myself and the world

I had always been a dedicated reader, but my consumption of books took on a desperate, existential drive when I abandoned my religious beliefs. I felt like a child being born again, ironically, forced to make sense of the most fundamental building blocks of my reality anew.

I relearned the origins of the Middle East and early church history from scholarly sources instead of theological ones through books like Church History in Plain Language and The Gnostic Gospels. I read about Eastern religions, finding many principles and points of view that resonated with me in Buddhism and Hinduism. I devoured the books of James Michener, diving deep into places like Poland, Spain, South Africa, Alaska, Afghanistan, Mexico, and Palestine through the medium of historical fiction.

As I dove deeper and deeper into the past, I realized I also wanted to understand the future, and picked up my first science-fiction books. My preference was for “hard” sci-fi, which stuck to known or plausible scientific principles as much as possible. I eventually read over 100 sci-fi novels that inflamed my imagination with the potent possibilities of the unknown future.

I dabbled in literary fiction, thrillers, fantasy, mystery, and magical realism. I devoured biographies, travelogues, popular science, and speculative fiction. I had a habit of camping out at bookstores for many hours at a time, churning through a giant pile of books without purchasing any.

And then one day I discovered the category of self-help. 

It was 2005, and I was perusing the aisles at my local Borders bookstore in Mission Viejo, near where I grew up in South Orange County. That first book was called The Paradox of Choice, and it delivered a simple yet shocking message: having more options not only doesn’t lead to better choices in many cases; it leads to worse choices that we tend to be less satisfied with.

I was astounded by this insight. I just couldn’t believe such a practical, compelling idea was available for anyone to learn and apply to their own lives.

With the naivete only a wide-eyed 20-something is capable of, I thought it had radical implications for much of modern life, in which we are inundated with a constantly proliferating number of options for practically everything, and yet find ourselves with a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction and FOMO as a result. 

After that, I began to voraciously read every book on personal development I could get my hands on. Napoleon Hill taught me how to think and grow rich. Daniel Goleman introduced me to the importance of Emotional Intelligence. Tony Robbins introduced me to the tenets of positive psychology. Daniel Pink revealed the secrets to having an unstoppable drive. Malcolm Gladwell blew my mind with his analysis of tipping points. 

I was hooked.

I found it remarkable, and still do, that you can buy a book for $10 or $15 dollars (or read it for free at the local library, bookstore, or online via resources like the Gutenberg Project) and get instant access to a lifetime’s worth of knowledge from the world’s top experts on virtually any subject imaginable.

This realization changed everything for me. 

It taught me that everything in life is a “skill issue” – a known problem that someone has had before, has probably already figured out, and more than likely, is willing to help me with. I realized that I could choose any aspect of my life and reliably improve it through education and experimentation.

Looking back, these were the first stirrings of a newfound agency I felt in my life. 

With each new tool or insight I gained, the hold that my upbringing, my parents’ worldview, societal expectations, and default life scripts had over me was weakened. I began to see that I could decide who I wanted to be and how I wanted to feel. I wasn’t stuck with the natural temperament, skills, personality, or talents I was born with. My destiny was mine to author.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had already embarked on a journey. It was a journey into outer space, to make sense of how the world worked and what my place in it might be. It was also a journey into inner space, to discover who I really was at my core.

The first cracks in an opening mind

My love of reading followed me through college, a few years living and studying abroad, two years of service in the Peace Corps, and my first couple of years working in San Francisco. My beaten and battered Kindle was always by my side, every digital highlight synced to the cloud for safekeeping.

But in 2013 things started to change. I decided to leave my consulting job and strike out on my own as a freelancer, plunging headfirst into a way of life with far more uncertainty and unpredictability than I had ever experienced. 

I can still recall waking up on that first Monday morning and realizing I had nowhere to go, nowhere to be, and no one expecting me. I had the sudden thought that if I suddenly dropped dead, it would take days for anyone to find my corpse. I finally had the complete freedom I’d dreamt of for years, but instead of feeling liberated, I felt terrified. It was like waking up adrift on the open ocean, with no solid ground anywhere in sight.

As I cast about over the subsequent months trying every way I could think of to make money, I was faced repeatedly and harshly with the reality that I lacked most of the qualities I needed. I didn’t have the commitment and consistency I needed to accomplish my goals. I had no idea what valuable skills and knowledge I had to offer potential clients, much less how to effectively articulate them and close the sale. I didn’t have the social skills needed to find collaborators and make new friends without the shared context of a workplace.

Yet the absence of these external, professional skills paled in comparison with the inner qualities I was missing. I had the habits and self-care routines of a typical 28-year-old male; that is, I lacked them completely. I had little understanding of my own psychology – the ruminating and worrying and recurring anxieties racing through my mind. I avoided most of my problems, ignoring warning signs in my mental and physical health until they became unbearable. I didn’t have a way of getting to the root of my blindspots and baggage and thus recreated them time and again.

This was all the more frustrating because I had read all the self-help books. I knew all the terminology, could cite all the studies, and was following the “right” advice. In theory, all this knowledge should have prepared me for the challenges I was facing. In reality, it was all conceptual or theoretical knowledge, very little of it rooted in my personal experience.

The stark contrast between the sophisticated theories in my head and the poor results and struggles I was experiencing in my life eventually reached a breaking point. I decided that I needed something different, something deeper that would change who I was, not just what I knew. In my desperation, I decided it was time to go beyond reading books and find the environments, teachers, and training that would give me visceral, first-hand experiences of what it meant to change who I was at the deepest level.

Mastering my attention through Vipassana meditation

I decided to seek out what I now call “transformational programs” – structured, immersive, embodied experiences facilitated by skilled teachers who know how to facilitate lasting change.

I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time, the global mecca for self-development and self-exploration of all kinds, and couldn’t help but notice how many such programs existed and the benefits they seemed to produce for others.

I had picked up an introductory book on meditation and mindfulness which I’d discovered on an obscure online forum late one night. Over the course of a few weeks, I was introduced to the first elementary practices for calming my mind and observing my thoughts. 

The book introduced me to the classic “raisin exercise,” in which I closely examined a single raisin with all my powers of observation and all my senses, which showed me in sensual terms how much detail and complexity was hiding within my everyday perception. I wanted to go deeper but had little money as I struggled to make ends meet.

Soon afterward, I heard about a free 10-day meditation retreat known as Vipassana, which was hosted at retreat centers around the world. Free sounded like the right price to me, and I signed up, not knowing that it would be the portal to a new world and a new path that I am still following to this day.

I returned from that retreat and wrote my first blog post, 10 Days of Vipassana, recounting what I had learned:

• Attention is a skill. Unless I intentionally cultivated it, the modern world’s constant barrage of distractions would inexorably undermine my ability to focus or even think clearly.
• Every distraction takes a toll. Distractions are not just momentary interruptions that leave no lasting trace. Each one I allow to yank my attention away conditions me with the subconscious habit of valuing the new at the expense of the important.
• How I pay attention is more important than what I pay attention to. Which means that I don’t have to perfectly control my environment or my inputs in order to feel the way I want to feel.
• Paying attention to something takes away its power. So much of my life was dominated by fear of pain of some kind. But pain is as insubstantial and impermanent as any other sensation, and by giving my full attention to any anger, doubt, shame, or envy I was feeling I could loosen its hold on me.

Most meaningfully of all, I discovered through prolonged meditation that happiness is my default state, like the bottom of the well of my mind. It wasn’t something I had to go out and find like a rare prize. It was always there waiting for me, which meant all I had to do was remove the things that were in the way and return to myself in order to find it again.

That first Vipassana retreat and the daily meditation habit I adopted afterward equipped me with the basic tools of introspection. It introduced me to the simple yet profound idea that there is a vast inner world inside of me and that I could explore that world freely using meditation, without permission from anyone.

Crucially, this experience also led me to begin writing in public. It was the first time that I felt I had experienced something unusual and interesting enough to be worth sharing. Writing itself would also become an essential practice, allowing me to structure, process, and integrate lessons for myself, with the added bonus of helping others and eventually, building a following.

Encountering psychological truths at the Landmark Forum

A couple of years later, my freelancing work had become more stable and for the first time, I had a little disposable income to spare. In the space of a few months, three separate friends told me about their experience at a weekend seminar called The Landmark Forum. I felt I was ready to begin investing money in my personal development, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

I can still remember what an enormous commitment it seemed like at the time – spending 3 full days and about $750 on myself felt like an outrageous indulgence. It was also a completely life-changing experience, which I wrote about in A Skeptic Goes to the Landmark Forum.

I went on to take the rest of the Landmark curriculum over the next two years, including about a half dozen courses on integrity, communication, and self-authorship. I eventually completed their intensive 5-month leadership program, known as the Introduction Leaders Program (ILP). 

Here are the main lessons I took away from that experience, which was a holistic education in many aspects of leadership:

• Everything I think or believe is just a “story,” a narrative I’ve created to interpret and understand what’s happened, which means I can choose to disbelieve or edit or reframe any event from my past.
• Any time I’m blaming others, it’s usually to avoid taking responsibility for something myself, while also receiving hidden payoffs (such as self-righteousness or dominating others) that keep that blame locked in place.
• Witnessing the power of honest conversations in Landmark’s programs, I adopted vulnerability, collaboration, and openness to feedback as central values in my life, a sharp departure from my typical self-reliance and perfectionism (which led directly to the live cohort-based courses that would completely transform my career).
• I realized that trying to be “right,” which had driven me for much of my life, is ultimately futile when it comes to living an authentic life of intimacy with others.

Most meaningfully, I used these insights to take responsibility for my relationship with my father. I had had a long-running story that I was irreparably damaged because of how he raised me. I’d told myself that I couldn’t have the life I wanted because he had been too harsh, too critical, and had failed to listen to and support me in the way I needed him to. Those attitudes were, of course, a set of stories that kept me a victim toward any source of power or authority that reminded me of him.

Letting go of my resentment toward my father, while forgiving his imperfections and accepting that he was always just trying his best, unlocked a floodgate of gratitude not only toward him but for the life he had given me.

The power of transformational programs

Landmark and Vipassana served as my introduction to the category of “transformational programs.” 

They showed me that personal growth could be efficient. There were direct paths to concrete outcomes that irrefutably improved my life within a reasonable amount of time. These paths weren’t exactly predictable, but they also weren’t completely mysterious. Personal growth was something I could invest time, money, and attention in and reliably see tangible change in my life as a result.

I realized I didn’t have to wait until the end of my life to learn what life had to teach me – I could accelerate that process and yield the benefits while I was still young enough to enjoy them.

I began to develop a set of criteria for the kinds of programs I would seek out in the years to come:

• A time limit – a clear beginning and end to the experience, allowing me to calibrate my commitment and see results without getting in over my head.
• A structure – whether that is a series of meditation prompts and guidelines over a certain number of days, or a formal curriculum with learning objectives, I sought a structure I could use to track my progress.
• Teachers and guides – whether a skilled facilitator imparting their tacit wisdom, a seminar leader following a workbook, or a volunteer silently serving food in the kitchen, I wanted guides on my journey who had already been where I wanted to go, and who could therefore help me see through my assumptions and blindspots more quickly.
• Social interaction – though there are periods when solo work is needed, the vulnerable sharing and vicarious learning that can only happen in groups makes social experiences far more enjoyable, and thus more sustainable and effective.
• Accessibility – I want experiences that others can learn about and sign up for themselves, allowing them to follow in my footsteps if they so choose so that my family and my community can grow alongside me.

Following these guidelines, each new book, teacher, program, and practice I’ve encountered has uncovered new layers of who I am, like a perfect diamond encrusted with dirt and mud slowly emerging as those layers are washed away.

At the same time, the world of the mind and the intellect was just the first leg of my journey, akin to stocking the ship and navigating the calm waters close to shore. In the next chapter, I learned that true transformation isn’t primarily about acquiring information, and doesn’t occur only on an intellectual level.

The deepest change happens on multiple levels, at multiple timescales, and changes every part of us, especially the parts we feel most ashamed and fearful of. For me, that meant my emotions, and thus it was my heart that I explored next.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

17 years ago, at the age of 22, I uploaded my first YouTube video.

My high school friend Derick and I had set up a digital camcorder, faced the camera with our backs to his bedroom wall, hit record, and just started talking about 3D printing, which was to be the first episode in a recurring show about emerging future trends. 

Needless to say, our show never had an episode two, but something was sparked in me that day. I saw that I could share a message with the entire world from my bedroom, without permission from anyone. All I needed was a message worth sharing. It would take me 14 years to find one.

I distinctly remember feeling back then, in 2007, that I was too late. I thought I had already missed the golden era of online video. Little did I know, those were prehistoric times, revealing only the faintest glimmer of what the YouTube empire would eventually become.

This piece is a comprehensive retrospective of my 17 years of experience on YouTube, including my path to 275,000 subscribers and 12 million views. It is a deep dive into the different “eras” I’ve moved through, the team and production process I’ve built, and the detailed finances throughout. 

I’ll summarize for you what I’ve learned so far, analyze my successes and failures alike, and distill practical insights that you can use in your own YouTube efforts. Whether you aspire to create YouTube videos in the future, or are already doing so now, my hope is that these lessons will shorten your learning curve and save you from making the same mistakes I made. 

Even after all these years and some notable successes, we still haven’t figured out a business model for YouTube that is sustainable for the long term, so this piece will also serve as a springboard for the next era of our channel.

The 4 Eras of My YouTube Journey

I’ve gone through four distinct “eras” in my time on YouTube, each one with a central theme:

• The Experiment Era (2007-2012): Performing random experiments and trying things out
• The Portfolio Era (2013-2020): Using YouTube as a professional portfolio
• The Startup Era (2021-2023): Starting to take YouTube seriously
• The Factory Era (2023–2024): Building a full production process

Each era lasted between 1 and 7 years, and they seem to be getting shorter over time as we iterate more quickly. These years encompass my entire adulthood, and reflect the stages of my growth both professionally, creatively, and as a human being.

Let’s dive into each era one at a time.

The Experiment Era (2007-2012)

The first era I think of as a series of crackpot experiments, dating from that first grainy video uploaded from my friend’s bedroom to the start of my professional career.

In that time I uploaded anything and everything I could think of, from photo slideshows showcasing my volunteering work in Rio de Janeiro, to profiles of microentrepreneurs in support of my microfinance work in Colombia, to short clips of my adventures across South America, to highlight reels from my Peace Corps service in Ukraine.

I had no particular goal, vision, or mission for what I wanted to do on YouTube. I thought of it as a social media site, like Myspace or Facebook – a place for me to share updates about my life and travels and to document my experiences for future record.

And yet some of the most basic lessons I learned during this period were essential, forming a foundation for everything that would come later: how to point a camera, frame an interesting shot, make sure the audio was working, and import it all to a computer to make simple edits and add appropriate music.

In this first experimental era I made 19 videos, which drew 7,411 views and 20.8 hours of watch time from a grand total of 3 subscribers, one of whom was my mom!

The Portfolio Era (2013-2020)

In early 2012 I returned from my Peace Corps service in Ukraine, excited to finally begin my professional career in the big city. 

After working in consulting for a couple years, I struck out on my own as a freelancer in June 2013. To mark the occasion, I uploaded my first “professional” video, a 102-minute long recording of a workshop I had delivered at a coworking space in downtown San Francisco. 

That video frankly left a lot to be desired. The video and audio quality were quite poor, there was no lead-in or introduction, no titles or animations, and no link to the slides. I had not yet heard of concepts like virality or retention. 

And yet, this early video already contained within it some promising signs of YouTube’s potential. It demonstrated that I could expand the reach of my ideas via digital video. It showed me that there was a place for educational content amidst the deluge of endless clickbait. And by including a link in the description to my first product, an online course teaching the Getting Things Done methodology in more detail, it proved that I could find customers by sharing content freely on the web.

All these seemed like earthshaking realizations at the time. With a single video, I could already see the outlines of a holistic online education business, from testing and validating ideas, to gathering feedback, to building community, to finding customers, to serving them with valuable products.

Despite all the limitations and flaws in what I had created, the essential quality of the material I was teaching managed to shine through, and it soon gathered thousands of views, which at the time felt like a big deal.

I forged ahead, uploading the first lesson of my course as a preview, and then a short promotional trailer filmed by a friend in an afternoon. I later leveled up the production values, hiring a videographer to film a Design Thinking workshop I was beginning to offer companies.

As sales of my first course dwindled over time, and a subsequent one I launched fizzled, I decided to set aside online courses to focus on where I knew I could make money: talks and workshops for companies. My YouTube channel accompanied me on this pivot, becoming essentially my “speaker’s reel.”

I spoke on emerging trends such as the Quantified Self movement, new theories of innovation, and shared my personal experiments in using network science to analyze my habits. My attitude was that I would speak for free if needed, as long as I could come away with a recording I could add to my YouTube channel – a tangible, publicly visible “proof of work” that I could point to for future gigs.

After a couple years, I was fed up with corporate work and wanted to return to where I began – teaching people directly online. I had started a blog in 2014 and found that writing was a crucial medium to fully work through the details and implications of my ideas. After writing dozens of in-depth essays, I decided to take my most successful piece, on how I used Evernote as a “second brain,” and turn it into a full-fledged course.

YouTube again played a crucial role in this new chapter. I published testimonial videos from my earliest cohort students, recordings of Q&As, interviews with experts, quick demos and case studies of PKM tools and techniques, recordings of talks on the subject I delivered, and a promotional trailer for my course, which I called Building a Second Brain. I also continued experimenting with personal interests and developing my videography skills during this period, such as with the documentary I created on my father’s life and artistic career once I realized that smartphone cameras were up to the task.

Five years after I wrote my first essay on the subject of Personal Knowledge Management, and two years into teaching the Building a Second Brain course as my sole focus, I uploaded a video that encapsulated for the first time my Second Brain methodology. In many ways, it was the culmination of the first six years of my career, incorporating ideas and insights from a dozen subjects I had researched, taught, and coached on in search of my niche.

It was my first “viral” video, reaching hundreds of thousands of views and serving as the default place to send people for an introduction to me and my work.

I had just begun exploring the possibility of publishing a book in early 2019 when this video came out, and it became the first true test of my holistic methodology. Nothing about the video is optimized or particularly strategic. It’s just a bunch of slides with voiceover, a decidedly low-tech style that didn’t even require a camera – just a computer and a mic. 

And yet, it’s difficult to overstate the impact this single video had on my career. It served as an incredibly effective delivery vehicle for introducing a complex topic to a wide variety of new people, including my future book agent and publisher, who in turn would help me spread my message to even more audiences far from my home base.

During this second YouTube era, which lasted seven years, I released 113 videos drawing 885,000 views, 101,000 hours of watch time, and gaining 20,454 subscribers. This small but promising start laid the foundation for the next era, when I would begin to invest in YouTube seriously and make it the focus of my content creation.

The Startup Era (2021-2023)

In July of 2021 I realized that we had only one year left until the release of my book, and I wanted to invest the book advances I’d received from various countries to make the biggest splash possible. This was also a few months after our largest-ever cohort (fueled by the pandemic), meaning I had substantial resources on hand to do so.

After looking at a variety of avenues, I decided making YouTube our primary focus was the most promising path we could take, for several reasons that remain just as or even more valid today:

• YouTube is the world’s most widely used and most influential platform for educational content, reaching millions of people with a highly accessible form of media that anyone can consume and benefit from.
• The algorithmic reach of YouTube is a powerful mechanism for continuously reaching new audiences beyond our original niche.
• Video production is expensive and time-consuming, but my business was finally at a place where we could afford to make those investments.
• Videos can be produced as a collaboration between a team, rather than relying solely on my personal time and energy as with writing.

By this point, I’d been experimenting on my own and uploading all kinds of videos for years, and knew I needed a different approach if I was going to change the trajectory of the channel and make it a long-term driver of book and course sales.

I’d reached 20,000 subscribers through my own personal efforts, but it had taken many years to do so, and I knew I now had less time and energy to dedicate to video creation with a toddler running around the house and a second baby on the way in a few months. I needed to find a way to massively level up both the quantity and quality of our videos, while also delegating most of the necessary work to my team so it didn’t fall on my shoulders.

I started at the most fundamental level of the videos I wanted to create – with a dedicated place where they could be made. My wife and I decided to extensively remodel our two-car garage, including new tile, an attractive brick facade along one wall, new electrical wiring and lighting, high-end cabinets along another wall, and stylishly modern furniture and interior design throughout, tastefully chosen by my wife Lauren according to a “Mexico City cafe” aesthetic.

Between the $50,000 remodel, $30,000 in cameras and other equipment, and $20,000 in consultants, we would eventually spend about $100,000 making the ultimate home studio, as I’ll detail further below. You can see a video recapping the project here. 

The next step was to hire someone to lead our YouTube efforts, since I knew I wouldn’t be able to remain hands-on all the time. After a wide-ranging search, I hired Marc Koenig as our first Creative Director to lead our overall YouTube strategy as well as provide creative direction for our videos from beginning to end.

It took more than 4 months from when Marc joined to the release of our first video in January 2022. This included everything from buying cameras and microphones and lighting, to brainstorming the kinds of videos we wanted to create, to establishing the initial team and the workflow they would use, to experimenting with test shots in the studio. 

We bought specialized furniture, cameras, microphones, lighting, rigging, computers, editing software, hard drives, and various other tools. We recruited a video editor, a production assistant, and several thumbnail designers. Marc flew out from Wisconsin a number of times to help set up our gear, brainstorm ideas, and iterate on everything from the framing of shots to how we would write scripts to my live performance on camera. We mapped out the first year of videos we wanted to create, scheduled a trip to the East coast and Europe to record a series of interviews with leading experts in our field, and built the beginnings of a production workflow to coordinate everyone who would be contributing.

We also hired a studio design consultant, Kevin Shen, who spent a couple weeks helping us improve our production setup and teaching me the basics of how images, sound, and light interact to produce a holistic effect for the viewer. I gave Kevin the mandate to help us make a “classroom that can teach the entire world,” encompassing not only filming videos but also teaching cohorts on Zoom, working and writing day to day, joining meetings with the remote team, recording interviews with guests, and more. It was a small 320-square-foot space that needed to elegantly straddle the physical and digital worlds while projecting a compelling message to the world.

All this was an incredible amount of work, and took much longer than I expected. There were so many twists and turns, for example:

• We had to buy a commercial-grade AC unit to make sure we weren’t sweating on camera, and to minimize the risk of cameras overheating.
• We needed a backup battery to keep everything online even during a power outage, and a second Internet connection in case the primary one went down.
• We found we needed full blackout curtains across every window to be able to keep the lighting constant, and a door with an access code so various people could come in and out at all hours of the day.
• Lights had to be mounted on walls or ceilings and folded away so we could use the space as an office whenever we weren’t filming.

We faced a constant tradeoff between aesthetics and functionality – we didn’t want an ugly space that we wouldn’t want to spend time in, nor a beautiful one that didn’t support our needs. This creative constraint led to a number of innovative solutions, such as using sound blankets that could be put away instead of wall-mounted pads.

Here’s the “before and after” comparison:

We kicked off this new era with an interview with Thomas Frank in January 2022, instantly 10xing our production values from one video to the next, wowing our viewers, and setting the stage for an epic run in the months to come. The video skyrocketed to hundreds of thousands of views and, more importantly, we now had a team and a process that would allow us to produce such videos regularly.

I was totally occupied with the launch and promotion of my book throughout 2022 and 2023, which meant that Marc led virtually all aspects of our video production, from generating ideas and choosing the most promising ones, to outlining and scripting, to coordinating and managing the editors and post-production workflow, to configuring the look and feel of the channel. This was by far the most control I had ever delegated to anyone, and forced me to give up my perfectionism and trust the process we were developing and iterating on, even when a given video fell flat. 

In August 2022, a full year after making YouTube my primary focus and beginning to feel secure in my new identity as a YouTuber, I wrote a blog post on Why I’m Becoming a YouTuber. It laid out my vision for how and why we would become a YouTube-centric company, after a first decade dedicated mostly to text-based content.

Despite all the talented people I had the privilege of working with during this period, I still had an extremely steep learning curve to climb. It felt so much riskier and more vulnerable to open up my creative process to so many other people, compared to the solitude and privacy of writing. My brain had to think about so many more factors than I was used to – technical problems, creative problems, communication problems, and logistical problems all interacting with each other, across multiple timescales and distributed geographically around the world. 

My most important lessons fell into three categories:

1. On-set production

Initially I thought I could create a “push-button” studio, where everything was already set up and automated and all I had to do was sit down in my chair and hit record. This quickly turned out to be a fanciful dream, for a number of reasons.

Conditions change from one day and even one hour to the next: the sun moves, the temperature fluctuates, sources of noise come and go. Every video also has different requirements, from where I’m sitting or standing to what I’m wearing to which devices I’m using.

Despite having the support of an on-set producer, I still needed to learn how light worked, including how the shutter speed, aperture size, and ISO settings influenced each other and how to adjust them dynamically based on what I was trying to accomplish in a given segment. I had to learn how sound worked, such as how far away the mic should be from my mouth, how to adjust the gain so it’s not too high or too low, and what effect my decisions would have down the line when the editors loaded up the files I’d created. 

Likewise, I needed to learn to always work from a checklist (such as the one below, about how to ensure our cameras wouldn’t overheat) rather than relying on memory, because one wrong setting could make hours of footage unusable. Checklists also ensured any given job could easily be handed off to someone else, so no one person became the bottleneck.

2. On-camera performance

I’d spent years creating content for the Internet at this point, but it had been primarily in the form of writing, either on Twitter or my blog. I thus had a rude awakening when I realized that communicating a message on camera required a radically different level of energy.

It wasn’t just that I needed to be more lively and animated for video. It went far beyond that. There is so much more being communicated in video form: my body language and hand gestures and posture; my emotions and vulnerability; my facial expressions and eye movements; my tone of voice, diction, pacing, and volume. Even the words I used and the structure of sentences had to change, from long-winded and technically precise to punchy and emotionally resonant. All this while reading from a teleprompter, and trying to “act natural.”

I still have a lot to learn on this front to be honest, as it isn’t natural for me to be effusively charismatic on command. I’d also like to move away from word-for-word scripts and incorporate more spontaneity and improvisation into my delivery, as that seems to result in more engaging, natural performances.

3. YouTube strategy

One of the most pervasive and damaging misconceptions I held about YouTube, and one that many creators seem to share, is that “All you have to do is create great videos and the audience will come.”

As much as I would love that to be true, this attitude fails to capture a crucial aspect of the platform: that the algorithm is everything. I’ve never paid much attention to algorithms, never optimized my content for SEO, and never tried to pursue “trending topics,” so this pains me to admit, but it’s plainly true.

When you see two of your videos – both of which you’ve invested similar amounts of time and attention into and which you believe offer important and valuable ideas – but one gets picked up by the algorithm and receives hundreds of thousands of views while the other merely thousands, it really forces you to stop and reconsider. YouTube makes it so excruciatingly clear which videos are succeeding and which are not, with so much precise data about every possible metric of success, it forces you to reckon very directly with the “why” behind each video.

If I was creating videos as an art form, or for the pure pleasure of it, it wouldn’t matter whether they were boosted by an algorithm. But the entire point of growing our YouTube channel is to expand the reach of my message, so it absolutely does matter how many people see it. If I believe a video’s message is important, and that by “packaging” it in a certain way I can have 100x the reach and thus 100x the impact, why would I not do everything in my power to make sure it gets seen by as many people as possible? Any other attitude, I believe, is a matter of stubborn pride.

This realization has led me to seriously study the “strategy” of YouTube – that is, the often secret or subtle tactics, techniques, and creative decisions that the algorithm looks for when deciding which videos to send to the stratosphere. For example, how to design a title and thumbnail that attracts a click, how to write an introduction and hook that keeps them watching past the first few seconds, and how to structure a video to maximize retention across different segments. 

Despite countless lessons learned, I have to admit that this is still the area where we need to grow the most. I still don’t really see myself as a YouTuber, am not immersed in the nitty gritty details of the platform every day, and as a result, it’s been a challenge to acquire the rapidly evolving “insider knowledge” that the most successful YouTubers seem to thrive on.

Marc decided to move on from Forte Labs in July 2023, capping off an incredible run of 31 videos that were watched over 5.7 million times, or over 183,000 views on average per video (compared to 7,800 views per video on average during my previous DIY era, a 23x improvement). Astonishingly, our channel attracted 392,000 hours of watch time during this period, or more than half a human lifespan. We added 161,000 subscribers in two years, or 6,700 per month (versus 243 per month on average during the previous era, a 27x acceleration). 

My hypothesis – that by making large investments of time and money we could rapidly level up every metric on our channel – was strongly vindicated.

(Marc now runs his own solo YouTube agency working directly with business owners, authors, and creators to launch their channels using many of the techniques and workflows he developed at Forte Labs – if you’d like to partner with him on your YouTube strategy, go here!)

The Factory Era (2023–2024)

In the summer of 2023 I was faced with a huge challenge: continuing to make high-quality YouTube videos without the creative lead who had driven the whole process forward up until that point.

And even though our creative director left the company on good terms and with a clear handoff, it was at this moment I realized the downside of having a point person who I’d completely delegated creative direction and project management to: key man risk, in which the departure of one person endangers a whole line of business. I realized it was time to create a more structured, predictable, and transparent process for our video creation.

We started by restructuring the team, putting our head of marketing and content Julia Saxena in charge of all YouTube efforts and bringing our two video editors and other contractors into direct contact with the rest of the core team (they had operated independently and outside our normal communication channels up until then). 

I was surprised to find this required a lengthy acculturation process, as they didn’t have a lot of context around the ways we worked, our values and priorities, and what was going on in the rest of the business. That isolation had allowed them to work in a focused, distraction-free way, but I could see they now needed to come into alignment and synchronize their efforts with ours.

We instituted a weekly all-hands meeting every Tuesday morning to talk through all things YouTube: which videos were coming up, the progress of already filmed videos, metrics and feedback on videos we’d recently released, and sharing lessons about titles, thumbnails, editing, and many other aspects of the craft. This ensured that ideas and insights were flowing between the three main parts of the company: marketing/content, operations/product, and YouTube.

Here’s what the team looked like once we integrated YouTube as a core function of the company:

During the prior two years of our “startup” era, the video team had worked in a relatively unstructured way, treating each video as a bespoke project being created more or less from scratch. This resulted in extremely successful videos from a creative and metrics standpoint, but also meant I had little visibility into our production process, such as which videos were planned or underway, which stage of post-production they were at, and most of all, when I could expect the next video to be released, with timelines ranging from two weeks to two months. This meant it was difficult to coordinate promotion across our newsletter and social media to give it the best possible chance of succeeding.

I’ve noticed this principle repeatedly: the factors that make one era successful become the weaknesses and blindspots of the following one. Conversely, the weaknesses of one era become the greatest opportunities and areas of growth for the following one. Like a pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other, we decided to pivot away from bespoke videos guided by a singular vision toward collaborative videos guided by a predictable process. 

This meant primarily focusing on two things during the subsequent 12 months of the Factory Era: adding predictability and visibility to our process.

To enhance predictability, we decided to stick unwaveringly to a two-week video release schedule going forward – every Thursday morning, 9 am ET. This unlocked several benefits:

• It provided a predictable cadence to synchronize all the moving pieces and contributors at various stages of a video’s lifecycle.
• It gave us a lot of lead time before each video’s release, allowing us to promote them across all our channels and with extra collateral like lead magnets or bonus resources.
• It forced us to lower our standards and ship a video to meet the next deadline, instead of spending an indeterminate period of time polishing it to perfection.
• It made it easier to compare metrics between videos and across time, as well as more accurately calculate the ROI of each video.
• Our publishing schedule was mapped out far in advance, allowing us to schedule around vacations, PTO, holidays and other events, and seasons of the year.

Once each video’s release date was fixed on the calendar, everything else needed to hit that deadline also became predictable. To hit publish on Thursday, we knew when we needed to have an initial A-cut, and then a B-cut, and then a title and thumbnail, and then a final review. This told us when we were behind schedule long before it became a crisis, and allowed us to tweak and tune our schedule to align with weekends and staff availability.

To gain visibility into our pipeline, we worked to thoroughly document every aspect of our production process in ClickUp. Having a “single source of truth” that everyone could see also unlocked a number of benefits:

• We now had dedicated documents for ongoing ideation around titles, thumbnails, video concepts, formats, insights, feedback, and analysis of our metrics, so we always knew where to look for these things.
• People could be assigned to specific videos and specific stages, and receive an email notification the minute a new milestone was reached and a video handed off to them.
• All comments, feedback, and decisions were centralized in comments that anyone could see, ensuring that key information wasn’t siloed away in 1-to-1 communication channels.
• Clickup allowed us to work in a highly iterative, collaborative, and asynchronous way among many people both internal and external, while minimizing meetings.

Looking back over the last year, we’ve seen substantial improvement across a variety of metrics. Comparing only videos released during the Startup versus Factory eras:

• Our subscriber growth rate grew from 6,737/mo to 7,428/mo, a 10% improvement
• Views per month grew from 80,110/mo to 107,923/mo, a 35% improvement (although the average number of views per video 30 days after publication went down, from 62,020 to 51,803)
• Our click-through rate (a measure of what percentage of people click on our thumbnails) grew slightly from 4.2% to 4.5%
• Average View Duration has remained basically unchanged, from 3:50 to 3:52 minutes
• We reduced the number of days needed to produce each video from 28 to 13 days on average, doubling our publishing cadence

And of course, all cumulative metrics have improved as the “back catalog” of our channel grows and compounds over time:

• Watch time grew from 16,355 hours per month to 28,052 hours per month across all videos, a 72% improvement
• AdSense revenue went from $1,326/mo to $2,067/mo, a 56% increase

We’ve found significant savings on the cost side as well:

• Total YouTube costs declined from $14,406/mo to $11,493/mo, a 20% decrease
• Cost per Subscriber (how much we spend to acquire each new subscriber) decreased from $7.63 to $4.71, a 38% drop
• Cost per View (how much we spend per view) decreased from $0.11 to $0.05, a 55% drop
• We cut the average cost per video by more than half, from $11,146 to $5,094

My takeaways from these results are two-fold:

1. The steady cadence of a new video released every two weeks, produced using a highly predictable and transparent workflow, is a powerful forcing function for consistency and keeping our rate of learning high
2. However, seeing as how the most important metrics (click-through rate, average duration viewed, and views per video at 30 days) are all unchanged or with only very slight improvements, this suggests that we’re not improving the essential quality of our videos, as defined by YouTube

In other words, while we successfully made the transition from “startup mode” to “factory mode” in terms of our internal production process, we’re only treading water when it comes to the value we provide our viewers. And since everything on YouTube is designed for rapid growth, merely maintaining our performance is at best a mediocre outcome.

The Underlying Business

Since I began investing heavily in YouTube over the last few years, the question of return-on-investment has become paramount. No matter how successful our channel is, it can’t be justified or sustained unless it contributes to the bottom line of the business.

Starting with the top of our funnel, it’s very clear that YouTube audience growth is in a category all its own, far outpacing all other active platforms including our two primary ones, X and the newsletter:

The overall Forte Labs audience across all platforms has grown from 13,600 in March 2020 to 578,000 in June 2024, a 42x increase. 264,215 of those followers came from YouTube, or 47%, meaning that YouTube alone has accounted for almost half our audience growth since 2020.

In terms of financial results, the channel has made $517,955 in revenue over the last four years, across the following 6 monetization sources (the two tiny slices are book sales made directly through YT Shopping, and YT Premium payments; course referrals are inferred by asking customers where they heard about us):

In terms of costs, we’ve spent $483,651, including $345,734 during the Startup Era to get the new system up and running:

Plus $$11,493 in monthly recurring expenses on average during the subsequent Factory Era, or $137,917 over 12 months:

In other words, over the last 3 years in which we’ve invested seriously into YouTube, we’ve spent $483,651 and made $517,955, for a profit of $34,304.

These numbers represent a paradox for me: on the one hand, they are probably in the top 0.01% of all YouTubers. To make a profit from content creation at all is a rare thing. And yet, from a business perspective, it’s quite unimpressive. For the amount of time and effort we’ve all had to put in, $952 in profit per month is a meager sum.

I continue to do it anyway for a couple main reasons:

• These numbers can’t fully capture the value that YouTube provides to me personally, to our team creatively, and to the wider business in terms of audience growth, goodwill, and expanding the reach of our message
• YouTube is a long-term play, expanding our sphere of possibilities for the future in ways we can’t currently imagine and opening doors we don’t even know exist

I’ve repeatedly found that our YouTube following can be leveraged for other, seemingly unrelated pursuits. For example, when we started outreach for potential sponsors for our first in-person conference, the Second Brain Summit, being able to include a sponsored video in our proposals made them much more attractive. If I ever land a TV show, the track record and viewership of our YouTube channel will be a pivotal part of it.

That said, I continue to find my much more highly involved role in our video production challenging. My natural inclination is to obsess and pour myself into it, but I’m constrained from doing so both for lifestyle reasons and, more importantly, because I don’t want to create a system with myself as the central element. I don’t want to build a successful channel that I can never take a break or walk away from – that cost is too steep, so I’m trying to find another way, with the team at the center.

The Next Era (2024–?)

In August 2024, I moved with my family to Valle de Bravo, a small town outside Mexico City. Our desire is to embrace a slower pace of life, immerse our two kids in the Spanish language, and focus on writing my next book (I announced the move, fittingly, as part of a “life update” YouTube video).

That move also represented the end of one YouTube era and the beginning of a new one, because it means I no longer have easy access to our home studio in LA. I’ll need to find a way to continue planning and recording videos while in a remote location, while also respecting the limits of family time and my desire to focus mostly on writing.

But there’s another, much more important reason it’s time to embark on a new era, which has been very hard for me to accept: it’s time for us to fully embrace, immerse ourselves in, and master the intricate and subtle strategy of YouTube algorithm-driven growth. 

We focused on the internal-facing and operational aspects of our YouTube process over the last year, which yielded strong results on the backend. But from what I’ve learned recently at YouTube-centric events like VidCon, and from talking to and listening to the YouTubers I look up to, our next frontier will be about leveling up the viewer-centric aspects of our videos – the curiosity-provoking, retention-enhancing, and virality-creating aspects that determine whether our videos get watched by a few thousand people, or a few hundred thousand, or even millions.

It’s taken me a long time to internalize the importance of virality on YouTube, mostly because I never paid attention to it on any other platform. For years I tweeted daily, never thinking about what was trending or what people wanted to see. Same thing on the blog: I never looked at the analytics, only writing about what I thought was interesting and important based on my own curiosity.

But YouTube is an altogether different beast. The algorithm is all-powerful, determining which videos will be targeted at likely viewers and aggressively boosted, and which will languish in obscurity, like a temperamental god deciding which of his subjects will perish in obscurity and which will be exalted to the heavens. If the algorithm’s divine judgment resulted in a 10% or 20% difference in viewership it wouldn’t matter so much, but in reality it’s more like a 10-100x difference, or even more. Our least viewed videos only receive a few thousand views, whereas our most successful receive more than 500,000, despite the fact that we’re spending similar amounts of time, money, and effort on them.

The artist in me wants nothing more than to ignore the importance of algorithmic growth. It offends my creative sensibilities, as I hate catering to the crowd and maximizing hype. That attitude works fine when it comes to my writing, because I enjoy doing it for its own sake, because writing is more about evergreen ideas that stand the test of time, and because writing is essentially free to produce.

But videos are different on all three counts: I don’t really love doing them for their own sake, they don’t really stand the test of time, and are quite expensive to produce. It’s hard for me to ignore the distribution element when each video is costing me about $5,000. Each one needs to have a return, to make an impact, otherwise what’s the point of making them at all?

This leads me to conclude that it’s time for the pendulum to swing back the other way. Now that we’ve built a finely tuned machine for spitting out high-quality videos, it’s time to return to the more subjective, subtle, strategic aspects of video making. On YouTube, this specifically means:

• Idea generation, which I’ve learned needs to be a near-constant activity taking place behind the scenes, to ensure that only the top 1% most promising ideas get made.
• Improve and double down on our most successful “formats,” which has become a major trend on the platform recently, as channels become more like TV shows with a highly consistent, repeatable formula that people come to expect and make part of their routines.
• Bigger bets, as video performance tends to be non-linear, meaning a 10% or 20% greater investment of effort might yield a 10-20x greater result; the trick is to know which ideas and videos to put extraordinary investment into, such as by releasing a single video and then only doing follow-ups or a series if it performs well.
• Titles, thumbnails, intros, and hooks, which I’ve learned are an endlessly subtle and rapidly evolving domain whose importance is impossible to overstate.
• Making the filming process enjoyable for me, as that is key to making it sustainable and viewers can always tell whether you’re having fun (this likely means finding someone to record videos in person with me in Mexico, whom I can iterate and improvise with in real time, which I find far more fun).

There’s another constraint I’m facing that adds a challenging wrinkle to this new era: the business is shrinking. 

After peaking around $3 million in revenue in 2021 at the peak of the pandemic, and plateauing at around $2 million the last two years, in 2024 we’re likely to see a 30-40% decline, or about $1.2–1.4 million. We’re experiencing the post-pandemic slump faced by many creator businesses these days, the continued impact of discontinuing our flagship cohort-based course last year, and significant headwind from the rise of Artificial Intelligence both in terms of lower search traffic and a lot of the enthusiasm around PKM shifting to AI.

As a result, I’ve had to let go of several team members, effectively reducing the team to the smallest core group necessary to send out our newsletter, support our courses and membership, and produce YouTube videos, while also giving me the time and space to write books.

Open questions for the next era

These are the five questions I’m currently grappling with, the answers to which will define the next few years of our channel.

How can we optimize for public metrics while keeping personal enjoyment high?

This obviously isn’t a binary choice, and any long-term successful channel requires some of both. But I’m considering where on the spectrum we should lie, between extrinsic motivators like viewership, subscriber count, and revenue, and intrinsic motivators like curiosity, pleasure, and making videos I think are important even if they don’t perform well.

This also affects the kinds of ideas we produce. From a metrics standpoint, we should probably only make videos that are directly Second Brain-related, as that is what I am by far the most known for. But my interests and curiosity lead me in many directions, and I don’t think I can stomach churning out such videos endlessly.

What is my relationship and level of obsession toward YouTube?

Veteran YouTuber Samir recently said in a video, “To do YouTube right requires all of you…your constant obsessive attention.” I see this attitude reflected in all the biggest names on the platform. They live and breathe all things YouTube, and it defines who they spend their time with, how they spend their days, and even their personalities and beliefs.

But this is where my background comes into play: I didn’t start as a YouTuber, especially not the classic profile of an early 20-something obsessing over videos 24/7. I don’t even particularly like consuming content in video form. I’m nearly 40 years old, have two kids, and a wonderful business that already sustains me financially and artistically. I don’t feel the pressure to “make it” on YouTube as a jumping off point for the rest of my career, nor am I interested in any of the negative effects of that level of obsession on my lifestyle, my health, my family, or my other interests.

At the same time, I don’t want to “phone it in” and do subpar work. I’ve always believed that if something is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well. In this paradox I see an experiment: for me to learn what it looks like to produce extraordinary outcomes without my time and effort as the primary input. I know that I have the capability to accomplish anything if I put my mind to it, but what does it look like to reach the same, or even greater, levels of accomplishment by harnessing a team and systems instead?

I think that is the current frontier of my growth as a founder, a CEO, and a leader, which is why I’m purposely holding back from throwing my entire being into YouTube and learning to depend on the team instead.

What are the video formats that work best for us?

We’ve experimented with many different formats over the last few years, and these are the ones that seem to have worked best:

• Case studies of Second Brain setups/workflows: Showcases of real-life applications of a Second Brain and PKM tools
• Techniques: Notetaking and productivity techniques that the viewer can use right away
• App and tool walkthroughs/reviews/reactions: Which apps Tiago uses and how; help viewers decide which app is right for them and get started with their choice
• AI: How Tiago and our team use AI tools, what impact AI will have, the overall mindset to deal with this shift
• Expressing yourself/becoming a creator: About the ultimate purpose of a Second Brain, what different ways of expressing yourself look like, how to become a creator or realize the potential of your creativity

My question is to what extent and how we should continue doubling down on and evolving these proven formats, or branch out into new ones that have more potential in the future. 

How can we engage with our audience to incorporate their feedback into our work? How can we learn what our audience wants?

One thing I’ve noticed from spending time with successful YouTubers is how incredibly close to their audiences they are. They interact frequently through comments and the community feed, among other venues. They often consume the same content and are part of the same online circles. They have a lot of inside jokes and subculture knowledge in common. Most of all, the best YouTubers are extremely sensitive to the slightest desires and shifts in perception among their viewers.

While I don’t necessarily want to be subject to our subscribers’ every whim, I do think this is an area I am weak in because I didn’t “grow up” on YouTube. I don’t have that much interaction with my viewers, and have chosen to cultivate the hermit life of a writer instead. I think there’s significant room for improvement in how we expose ourselves as a team to our audience, but am not sure how to do that without changing how I spend my time, which I don’t want to do.

How can we better measure how YouTube is driving business results? 

The most challenging contradiction of the last year has been watching our channel grow to unprecedented new heights, and receiving so much praise for that success, while at the same time, watching the underlying business decline.

As exciting as it is to watch our “top of funnel” grow so much, it means nothing if it’s not measurably contributing to the underlying business that makes it all possible. If profit is the permission to keep going, we’re not currently gaining that permission from the marketplace. Something needs to shift.

This could mean improving conversion rates to our courses and other products, doubling down on sponsorships, or other avenues, but I would say we haven’t yet found the business model that works for us long term on YouTube.

Our new (old) vision

What is my grandest vision for what our YouTube channel could become?

This isn’t particularly measurable or objective, but my vision is simply to change the culture. Specifically, the culture around notetaking, reading, learning, productivity, and creativity. To make those subjects more accessible and less daunting. To open up many new entry points for different kinds of people to harness them, whether via technology or otherwise. Creating a profitable business is just a stepping stone to carry us toward that vision.

This vision remains unchanged from its first articulation on the blog two years ago: “To build an open-source Library of Alexandria for the PKM world.” I’ve learned so much about what it will actually take to achieve that vision, and I can now see it’s a much longer and harder road than I first naively envisioned. But I’m also more inspired and dedicated to it than ever.

YouTube is the world’s most important media platform, with more than 114 million active YouTube channels publishing 2,500 new videos every minute, all competing to reach 2.6 billion monthly active users in over 100 countries. I continue to believe we should have a horse in that race, and make our best attempt at shifting the perception and behavior around some of the most important facets of a 21st century undergoing rapid, daunting change.

As I write this, we’ve been living in a small town in Mexico for a week. In that time, two people have recognized me. In both cases, it wasn’t for my blog, or my books, or my newsletter, or my X posts. It was from my YouTube channel, where they said they had learned from me how to organize their information and make use of it.

These anecdotes are more meaningful to me than any quantifiable metric. They are signs that I’m escaping the confines of my niche, going beyond the narrow subculture of productivity bros, and having an impact on people who might never otherwise have access to such powerful ideas. 

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

This is a proposal I wrote for a television show based on my bestselling book Building a Second Brain.

If it resonates with you and you’re in a position to make a TV show happen, please let me know by emailing hello@fortelabs.com. I’m open to a variety of formats, funding sources, routes to production, and distribution platforms for this project.

Introduction

Have you ever felt drowned in a sea of ideas, struggling to recall that one crucial piece of information when you most needed it? Have you ever spent hours scrolling social media, or consuming content online, only to find yourself unable to remember even one useful takeaway?

Imagine a world where your mind is freed from everything you’re trying to remember and keep track of, while every important detail and inspired thought remains safely tucked away and easily accessible within seconds. Welcome to the possibility of building a Second Brain – a digital extension of your mind that remembers everything, so you can accomplish anything. 

This isn’t just about storing information; it’s about reshaping the way you approach life. You are offloading your thoughts to technology so you can think more clearly and calmly. By organizing the digital realm where you likely spend hours every day you enhance your focus instead of splintering your attention. Aligning your online habits with your values and goals transforms the time you spend consuming content – from merely passing the time to compounding your learning and growth over time.

By creating a Second Brain, you’ll have a dedicated, digital space you can step into anytime you want to focus your energy on what truly matters to you. Rather than relying on your scarce self-discipline or willpower, you’ll have a cognitive exoskeleton designed to propel you forward into taking action on the goals and projects that could transform your life.

Inspired by the revolutionary concepts from my books Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method, which have sold over 300,000 copies worldwide, and the transformative experiences of thousands of my students, readers, and followers, I’m excited to bring the power of the Second Brain to television. Let’s dive deep into the world of digital organization, redefining the way we engage with information and using it to unlock the best version of ourselves.

The Show

I propose an intervention/makeover/personal transformation style unscripted show revolving around people’s digital organizational habits and creative projects. 

This genre typically shows an expert or “guru” who comes into a person’s environment, and shines a light on an aspect of their lives that they are ashamed about, in pain from, or that is holding them back in some way. 

For example:

• Marie Kondo and people’s closets
• Ramit Sethi and people’s bank accounts
• Queer Eye and people’s wardrobes
• The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning and people’s possessions
• The Biggest Loser and people’s waistlines
• Dream Home Makeover and people’s homes

These are all domains that are crucial to our well-being and thriving, but that many of us feel disempowered or embarrassed by. 

There have been many such shows, but I’ve never seen one that deals with people’s digital life – their notes and documents, emails and text messages, web favorites and bookmarks, photos and videos, books and reading, YouTube videos and social media posts, etc. In my experience, most people would rather open up their homes or their bank accounts than show you what’s on their smartphones or computers, and that’s why we will find so many touching, hilarious, and ultimately meaningful stories there.

Why now?

Over the past decade we’ve become a digital-centric culture. 10 years ago, as of 2013, Americans spent more time on digital devices than watching TV. We consume digital media over 7 hours per day, with 44% of 18- to 49-year-olds saying that they go online “almost constantly.” Millennials (currently aged 24-41) are now the dominant economic, political, and cultural force in our society, and their experience of life is fundamentally shaped by the digital world. 

The Internet isn’t a thing anymore, it’s a place – the primary place we go to for education, entertainment, community, connection, and so many other needs and wants. Our digital lives are rich, fruitful landscapes where our hopes, dreams, and creative visions can come to life before our very eyes, as long as we have the will (and the tech-savvy skills) to see them through. 

Yet where is the authentic portrayal of that digital realm that has become such an important part of our experiences? At most, we’ll see a character in a TV show briefly sending a text message on a 5-year-old phone. Where is the self-discovery, the stories, the drama, and the life-changing inspiration that we find online every day?

The Stories

A starting point could be my story of struggling with a debilitating neurological condition that plunged me into a world of pain and shut down my ability to speak, ultimately leading to the realization of how crucial self-expression is to life (and inspiring my writing and teaching on this subject). 

Here are some of the other (real) stories we’ve heard from the graduates of our course, viewers of our YouTube videos, and readers of my books:

• The Colorado pastor who interviews the families of the recently deceased in order to write their eulogies found himself overwhelmed by the quantity of information he was collecting and taking weeks to distill it. He began using a voice transcription app to record the interviews and summarize the key points in minutes, freeing up his time to spend with the bereaved. 
• The UK single mom trying to juggle homeschooling and work, whose depression had advanced to the point that showering and brushing her teeth was a struggle. She adopted digital habits that led to her learning to manage her life and even enjoy reading again.
• The Florida education professor who felt frazzled managing her job while taking care of the kids, before she started using digital notes apps to capture ideas and insights on the fly, which made prepping for speeches something she can do in little batches during the small windows of her busy day.
• A college student who realized he was addicted to video games and watching his life pass him by. Upon discovering the power of a Second Brain, he began using it as a way to learn and grow while activating the same parts of his brain that video games once did.
• The Managing Director for an automaker in Mexico, who after treating her depression with medication, found that she also needed to change her routines around managing emails, her schedule, and her to-do list to put her life and career back on track. Now she’s teaching her team the same techniques and seeing it lift the performance of the whole department.
• The oncologist at a world-renowned cancer clinic who uses my techniques to condense his reading about new clinical trials and patient notes so he can quickly reference the information he needs while spending more time listening to and being present with his patients.
• The manager, whose company was being acquired and position made redundant, decided to utilize digital platforms to document and systematize his company’s knowledge. This led to him being named the General Manager of the new combined business, a position with far more responsibility and compensation.

And these are some of the topics and issues we can touch on:

• The tension between personal productivity for succeeding in your career, and creativity as a means to personal fulfillment
• The epidemic of Information Overload and the crushing stress of all the information we consume and have to pay attention to every day
• Social media’s impact on our attention span, mental health, and ability to focus
• The explosion in freelancing, the creator economy, and remote work as powerful possibilities that require fluency in using digital tools to manage our work and lives to take advantage of
• ADHD and other neurodivergent conditions’ effect on how we think, and how to use technology to consume and interact with information in more effective ways
• Content consumption on online platforms as a major influencer of our thinking, while requiring more intentional habits to glean the most helpful ideas and insights from the noise
• Our digital habits and the platforms on which they take place as important avenues for self-expression, self-determination, and creative agency

Potential challenges

Here are some of the main challenges we’d face in creating such a show, which also represent opportunities if we succeed:

• How to represent digital spaces and virtual interactions in a visual, engaging, relatable way
• What to call this subject (common terms include second brains, digital organization/hygiene/fluency, personal knowledge management, tools for thought, and others)
• How to frame the “promise” of watching the show (commiserate with others struggling with information overwhelm, gain inspiration from others overcoming relatable challenges, get new ideas for how to approach the digital world, be moved by the stories of courage and vulnerability as people confront their fears, etc.)
• How to make the stories relatable, grounded, and easy to understand, since this topic can easily become convoluted and abstract

Ideas for portraying Second Brains on TV

Here are my initial ideas and notes on how we could portray digital environments and habits on the small screen:

• Feature digital notes that are more visual rather than purely textual, including graphics, photos, drawings, diagrams, screenshots, etc.
• Project computer environments onto walls or 3D spaces that we can point to, talk about, and walk around in (like Hans Rosling did on the BBC)
• In Ramit Sethi’s show How to Get Rich there are some good examples of using a combination of zooming in, on-screen animations, and over-the-shoulder shots to make the screen feel less two-dimensional
• Go out into the field and interview real people (architects, sex workers, casino owners, professional athletes, musicians, etc.) on how they use digital notes/second brains “in the wild” as part of their professions (a good example of this is the 1997 documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which profiled an animal trainer, topiary gardener, robot scientist, and biologist studying mole rats)
• Borrow ideas from Sherlock on how to film thoughts and subjective experiences
• Use virtual or augmented reality environments to make the digital realm more tangible; for example, using the Apple Vision Pro to provide a new interface for interacting with digital content on our devices
• Create in-scene animated objects that I can interact with and move around (such as Bradley Cooper’s character in Limitless), or immersive, full-screen animations that illustrate concepts and ideas, such as Steven Johnson does in How We Got to Now on PBS
• Create a “studio” or “lab” with tangible materials and tools that are used to “think outside the brain,” like Stanford does in their design school
• Here’s a short video highlighting some interesting recent experiments in depicting digital/online behavior on screen

If this resonates with you and you’re in a position to make a TV show happen, please let me know by emailing hello@fortelabs.com. I’m open to a variety of formats and distribution platforms for this project.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

At the age of 22, one fine spring day at the Apple Store I worked at in college in San Diego, I began to feel a small scratch at the back of my throat. 

I tried for a few months to ignore it, but as it gradually grew worse – eventually turning into a searing pain throughout my neck and an inability to control my voice – I started seeing a series of doctors and specialists to identify the cause.

I tried anti-reflux medication, changing my diet, quitting coffee, anti-allergy pills, massage, voice therapy, and eventually, a powerful anti-seizure medication that gave me temporary relief but at the cost of whole body numbing and crippling memory loss. 

Why am I sharing this story with you?

Because this unexpected condition forced me onto a new path, and that path taught me incredibly valuable lessons – about psychosomatic pain and its sources, about the relationship between body and mind and how it can go wrong, and ultimately, about how to heal from the disconnection from myself that lay at the heart of it all.

In this essay, I’ll share with you what I’ve discovered in the hope it might help you too.

A descent into despair

At no point in my medical odyssey did I receive so much as a diagnosis – no MRI scan or neurological test or laboratory diagnostic could detect even the slightest thing wrong with me. 

I found that I was always treated as a collection of symptoms, and when a specialist couldn’t find the source of my problem in their assigned body part, they quickly passed me off to someone else.

After 7 years of this fruitless search, during which I saw more than a dozen doctors in four countries, I had made no progress, and the pain and tension I felt was worse than ever. It felt as if an area the size of a ping-pong ball at the back-right of my throat had lost all sensation, like when the dentist injects novocaine into your gums. This numbness inflamed all the surrounding areas as they struggled to compensate for the loss of function. This irritated other, even more distant muscles and ligaments in turn, like a slowly spreading wildfire of burning tension. 

Yet the physical pain was actually the least of my worries. It was really the social and psychological effects that sent me spiraling into despair.

When I opened my mouth to speak, I didn’t know what would come out. I might feel deep conviction in a business meeting, but my dysfunctional speech would come out weak and halting. I’d want to convey warmth and support to a friend, only to hear my words sounding monotone and strained. My words often had the opposite effect I intended, as if a demon had possessed me and was clutching me by the throat, distorting and undermining every word I spoke.

I can distinctly remember being at a house party in Oakland in 2014, and wanting to make a good impression. It was hosted by my then-girlfriend Lauren’s friends, and I wanted to fit in and be liked. I met someone who had also served in the Peace Corps, and was elated at the chance to connect in an environment full of strangers. But as I opened my mouth to speak, my voice was so tight and strained I couldn’t make myself heard at all, despite the relatively quiet surroundings. I might as well have been mute.

I left the party early, and as I walked home through the dark streets of downtown Oakland, a terrifying thought arose in my mind: “Life is not worth living if I have to live it this way.” I’m an inveterate optimist, and had never felt this depth of hopelessness. It felt like the end of the road, the lowest of lows. And I knew in that moment I needed to try something new.

Discovering relief by looking inside

Shortly thereafter, I attended my first Vipassana meditation retreat, mostly in the hope of learning to accept and make peace with my condition. 

Instead, on the final day of the retreat, something remarkable happened: My attention had sharpened to a fine point after days of silent meditation, and I moved that mental scalpel to the place in my throat that had caused me so much suffering. To my amazement, it came alive! 

Like the circuit breaker in a house being flipped to full power, the entire area around the back of my throat instantly lit up with full sensation. For the first time I could remember, I swallowed normally, feeling the sublime joy of all the muscles in my throat and neck working in beautiful synchrony. 

Sitting quietly in a room and looking inside of myself had accomplished what tens of thousands of dollars and years of medical appointments couldn’t touch: total, instantaneous relief. That was the moment I knew I’d found a new way, a new path, and a new world. I found such relief a second time when I tried LSD at Burning Man. And a third time, when I did anger work at a week-long course called Groundbreakers. I was hooked.

What all these experiences had in common was that they were pattern interrupters. They temporarily shifted how my body and nervous system were operating, and by doing so, reestablished an internal connection that I had disconnected as a child to survive painful experiences.

An exploration of psychosomatic illness

These brief flirtations with relief set me on a new course – to research and study the underlying mechanisms of what was happening to me in these situations, with the goal of replicating them permanently.

The most compelling explanation I found was in the book The Divided Mind, by Dr. John Sarno. 

In his book, Sarno describes his years of experience treating psychosomatic disorders, most of all, debilitating back pain. I had long resisted the idea that my condition was psychosomatic. It was so visceral that I couldn’t accept that it was “only in my mind.” But Dr. Sarno’s work makes a crucial distinction: while the source of the pain may be in a person’s mind, that doesn’t mean the pain isn’t completely real.

I was struck by how closely his description of the illnesses he treats matched my own (in bold): “The patient may experience a wide variety of highly debilitating maladies, including muscle weakness or paralysis, feelings of numbness or tingling, total absence of sensation, blindness, inability to use their vocal cords, and many others, all without any physical abnormalities in the body to account for such symptoms.” This seemed to describe my situation exactly.

As I kept reading, I was further startled to see his explanation of the cause: “…the cause is to be found in the unconscious regions of the mind…its purpose is to deliberately distract the conscious mind.” I couldn’t believe what I was reading. He seemed to be suggesting that the body creates physical symptoms as a protective measure, to distract or shield the conscious mind from thoughts and feelings that are too threatening or painful to bear.

I kept reading, and in his extensive descriptions of his typical patient profile, I saw myself clearly reflected:

• Sarno notes that “…rage in the unconscious mind is central to understanding virtually all psychosomatic reactions.” I knew that repressed anger was one of my most deeply ingrained emotional patterns.
• He says that anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often coincide with the apparent physical symptoms, which I’d also experienced.
• Perfectionism and other “repressive” behaviors are ubiquitous among psychosomatic pain sufferers, with patients often describing themselves as “hardworking, conscientious, responsible, driven, success-oriented, perpetual seekers of new challenges, sensitive to criticism, and their own severest critics,” which the subconscious mind interprets as a form of control or pressure and is thus enraged by.
• Many patients are the caretaker type and are always worrying about their family, friends, and relatives; at the same time, they’ve often experienced emotional abuse, including harsh or excessive discipline, absence or unavailability, temper, or unreasonable expectations from those same family members, creating another source of internal tension.
• A majority have come from families with hardworking, loving parents who conveyed overly high expectations and hopes for their children, families not characterized by any particularly unusual dynamics that would stand out in today’s society.

Ultimately, Dr. Sarno recommends the following treatment for his patients: that they directly face and bring to their conscious awareness the anger, emotional pain, and sadness brewing in their subconscious mind. He recommends a detailed step-by-step plan for how to do so, including reading his book and related materials, journaling and reflective writing exercises exploring possible sources of emotional pain, and cataloging situations that create suppressed rage. 

The emphasis throughout this process is on allowing the inner child to express their rage at all the responsibilities, pressures, disappointments, problems, and unfair expectations they’ve faced, and most of all, their self-imposed demands to achieve, take care of others, or be good. It’s about freeing yourself from needing other people’s recognition, and learning to care for yourself in a kinder, gentler, more forgiving way than perhaps you were raised. In other words, you are learning to be more compassionate with yourself.

In effect, the purpose of Dr. Sarno’s treatment is to “blow the cover” on the covert operation your body is running to keep you from thinking about the reservoir of rage within you. Once the big secret is out, there’s no sense in continuing the pain, and thus it ceases.

Healing through learning

Sarno finds the unavoidable conclusion of his work almost too good to be true: not only can physical pain be psychosomatic, but you can stop it by learning about it! 

And that is exactly what I found: the more I read and learned about Sarno’s work, the more the pain and tension in my throat dissipated, often in real time as the words entered my brain and my awareness of what was happening inside of me grew.

Another casual observation in Sarno’s book astounded me, and explained so much of my journey: “We know from experience that the theoretical wall, the barrier separating the conscious from the unconscious mind, cannot be breached from below—that is, the rage will not break through into consciousness—but there is nothing to stop us from intellectually breaching the barrier from above.” 

This explained why my personal journey had started with the mind and the intellect, as I read books and took courses on various aspects of personal development. I used my mind to create the “breach” that allowed my awareness to begin looking inside instead of outside for answers. Only then was I able to begin exploring the world of the heart and the emotions.

While intellectual understanding and self-study are crucial, Sarno also points out that it isn’t necessary to fully “figure out” or change repressed emotions. It is only necessary to acknowledge that they exist, and that they’re a normal part of life. He has found that truly accepting our genuine self, who feels many things, including feelings that might be unpleasant or painful, is what leads to relief.

The cause of psychogenic voice disorders

I discovered a 2008 paper called The role of psychogenic and psychosocial factors in the development of functional voice disorders. It examined a range of prior studies and concluded that psychogenic voice disorders “may develop in response to negative emotions following stressful life events,” and especially “situations where there was a strong challenge to speak out and yet a marked constraint against doing so.”

One thing I had never understood is why I would have the apparent symptoms of trauma when my childhood seemed relatively idyllic. This paper suggested an answer, indicating that “traumatic incidents and serious situations involving death, loss, separation and threat to personal or family security were reported infrequently” in patients with psychogenic voice disorders. 

Instead, the researchers found such disorders occurred more frequently in people who had “interpersonal problems with close partners or family members.” This included “difficulties with the expression of negative emotions related to repressed hostility, discomfort over sexual feelings and rebellion towards authority figures (Barton, 1960).” 

This seemed to fit my situation much more closely than the “acute” trauma caused by sexual assault, natural disasters, or extreme abuse. In my case, subtle, internalized forms of emotional repression led to subtle, internal symptoms of trauma. The suppression of anger in my family – the sweeping under the rug of any brewing conflict – might seem like it would have led to a peaceful household. In reality, it only turned the chaos inward where it was unleashed to do a different kind of damage.

Other common factors in the development of psychogenic voice disorders seemed to fit my situation closely as well. The patient data showed “a trend towards education and helping professions, and recent prevalence studies indicate teachers are more at risk for functional voice disorders than any other occupational group.” I had been a natural teacher almost my entire life.

The same paper proposed a possible explanation for the specific symptoms I’d faced: when emotions (such as anger, in my case) cannot be expressed, they are “reverted” to physiological symptoms associated with fight-or-flight. This reaction “is thought to prepare the organism for increased physical work, by fixing the upper extremities to the thoracic cage for combat, requiring firm adduction of the vocal folds and wide abduction to facilitate an increased volume and flow of oxygen in order to meet the body’s increased metabolic demands.”

In other words, when we repress emotions and don’t allow them to be expressed, the body reacts to this with a fight-or-flight response. In order to prepare for the increased physical exertion of fighting or fleeing, the body stabilizes the upper parts of the body (like the arms and shoulders) against the ribcage to create a solid foundation for movement. As part of that preparation, the vocal folds (or vocal cords) are brought together tightly to control the breath and then are spread apart to increase oxygen intake. 

This was the most precise description of what I experienced in my vocal cords I had yet encountered: a combination of too much tightness and tension, and somehow at the same time, too much looseness and lack of control. It was like reading the user’s manual for my body, specifically the troubleshooting section, where my seemingly unexplainable problem was described in precise detail.

Studying the vagus nerve

All my research was pointing to the vagus nerve, which I came to understand was the central actor in my story.

The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the body, running from the diaphragm all the way up the torso, through the neck to the brain. It is like the “main information highway” of the body, connecting together and coordinating the parasympathetic nervous system in the heart, lungs, and digestive tract, and governing such functions as sucking, swallowing, facial expression, and the sounds produced by the larynx.

I began to study the vagus nerve intensely, filling my notes with anatomical diagrams and cross-sections of the throat from every direction. I found that right at the point it passes up through the right side of the neck, there is a “choke point.” If the nerve senses too much pain coming up through the nerves from the body, this is the last place it can shut itself off and thus prevent those signals from reaching the brain. Like a circuit breaker flipping off when it detects a dangerous surge of energy, the vagus nerve does the same for the body.

It was another book, The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, that helped me understand why the vagus nerve seemed so central to my symptoms.

He calls this complex of nerves our “social-engagement system.” When it’s functioning properly, “…we smile when others smile at us, we nod our heads when we agree, and we frown when friends tell us of their misfortunes.” It also sends signals down to our heart and lungs, slowing down our heart rate and increasing the depth of our breathing, making us feel calm and relaxed, centered, or pleasurably aroused. 

Dr. Van Der Kolk explains that any threat to our safety or social connections triggers changes in the vagus nerve. When something distressing happens, we automatically signal our upset in our facial expressions and tone of voice, which are meant to beckon others to come to our assistance. Our throat gets dry, our voice tense, our heart beats faster, and our respiration becomes more rapid and shallow. In other words, our bodies purposefully signal to others when we are distressed, effectively reaching out to the people who care about us for help.

And here I was desperately trying to hide my symptoms, doing everything I could think of to prevent anyone, even my closest family and friends, from realizing anything was amiss. As I saw what was happening, and clearly saw the war raging within myself that I was by definition always losing, I felt the edifice of my total self-reliance begin to collapse. I couldn’t do it all myself. I couldn’t carry it all myself. Not when I was a child, innocently looking for a way to express my rage. And not even as an adult, trying to achieve and succeed and improve all on my own. 

It was slowly becoming clear that anything that stimulated or awakened my vagus nerve immediately improved my throat symptoms. Both major emotional releases and psychedelic experiences, but also simpler things like breath holding, cool wind in my face, and playing with animals or children. I could often feel in real time my throat muscles tensing or releasing based on what I was doing moment to moment.

With time, I’ve come to see my vagus nerve’s sensitivity and tendency to shut down as a wonderful gift. I’ve realized it is akin to having a real-time barometer of how connected I am to my body and my heart at any given moment. It represents my inner child, prone to hide or run away at the first sign of something scary, but also the source of my deepest innocence and joy. 

When I abandon and dissociate from myself – by overworking, drinking too much coffee, distracting myself with social media, or not saying what I’m feeling – I can feel my throat closing down soon after. It is as if my vagus nerve switches off, protecting me from the pain emanating from my body but also throwing off my intuition, my self-awareness, and most concretely, my ability to speak, swallow, sing, or laugh. 

As soon as I find the courage to reconnect with my body, to bring my feelings back online, it always turns on again, and I have my voice back. It is the greatest blessing to receive such clear and unmistakable communication from my body – I would rather be stopped in my tracks as soon as I fall out of alignment with my authentic self, than spend years in disconnection and look back on my life with regret.

If my story resonated with you, and you’d like to learn about and explore psychosomatic pain and its resolution for yourself, here’s what I recommend:

• Read Dr. John Sarno’s book Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection
• Check out the Psychophysiologic Disorders Association and their self-assessment quiz
• Enroll in Jonny Miller’s cohort-based online program Nervous System Mastery

I’ve read hundreds of books on productivity and self-improvement over the years.

Many of them are filled with vague prescriptions or clichéd advice, but a small number were truly transformative for me. They served as intellectual lighthouses on my journey, helping me understand what was happening to me as I explored my past, my psyche, and my pain.

Here are the 10 personal development books that have been most inspiring and impactful for me, in the order in which I encountered them (all the following links are affiliate links, for which I earn a small commission at no cost to you):

Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, by Mark Williams and Dr. Danny Penman

I found this book on an obscure online forum late one night soon after arriving in San Francisco to begin my first professional job. 

I had read a lot of philosophical or mystical accounts of meditation and mindfulness, but this book was different. It describes a series of empirical, first-hand experiments I could run to reach my own conclusions, free of unprovable metaphysical claims.

I still remember the classic “raisin experiment” – a series of prompts in which you examine a single raisin in extreme detail using one of the senses at a time – which opened up a doorway into the infinite intricacy and subtlety of my everyday perception. Since then I’ve always returned to the idea that running experiments to uncover my own truths is far more powerful than just accepting someone else’s philosophy.

The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment, by Michael Singer

Michael Singer’s first book, which I wrote about in The Untethered Soul: The Roadmap of My Personal Growth, has been like a user’s manual for my mind over the last decade. I’ve reread the book multiple times, and each time I’m astounded at how Singer is able to describe almost exactly what I’m experiencing inside the confines of my mind in such vivid detail.

It has served as a roadmap in my journey, reassuring me that each dissolution of a part of my identity is a good thing even when it feels disconcerting. 

His second book, The Surrender Experiment, is an autobiography of his spiritual journey, including his incredible achievements in business. It gave me hope that success in business is not incompatible with the spiritual life and that the former could even be a gateway to the latter. 

Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism, by adrienne maree brown

Adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy is a mainstay in political activist circles. I picked it up at my then-girlfriend Lauren’s suggestion and was skeptical at first, expecting a lot of sociopolitical theory and shrill finger-wagging.

Instead, I was shocked to discover a powerful framework based on nature metaphors for understanding and shaping change, systems, interdependence, and power, which I summarized in Emergent Strategy: Organizing for Social Justice.

Her followup book, Pleasure Activism, is an even more radical exploration of the “politics of pleasure,” and has influenced my thinking for years as I learned to tap into pleasure as a source of motivation in my work. I wrote about my takeaways in Pleasure as an Organizing Principle.

Man Enough: Fathers, Sons and the Search for Masculinity, by Frank Pittman

This was another book I read at Lauren’s recommendation. It is an exploration of what is known today as “toxic masculinity,” including all the ways our upbringing and societal expectations shape our understanding of what it means to be a man and a father.

Pittman was a psychiatrist, and thus his writing isn’t about abstract theories or political diatribes. It’s rooted in the real conversations and experiences of his patients, which gives his ideas a vulnerable, personal grounding.

His book helped me see and understand how masculinity had been communicated across generations in my family, how that legacy had affected me, and which parts I wanted to embrace or reject in my own life and parenting.

It Didn’t Start With You, by Mark Wolynn

Mark Wolynn’s book, which I wrote about in It Didn’t Start With You: How to Understand and Heal from Intergenerational Trauma, opened my eyes to the tremendous importance of family history in unraveling one’s own individual trauma. 

You would think that discovering how unresolved trauma is passed down through generations would feel like a great burden, adding to the already formidable burden imposed by a single life’s experiences. Instead, I experienced this revelation as a tremendous relief. Finally I had the context to understand why so much of my pain seemed to come from before I was even born.

Up until that point, I had never realized what a weighty responsibility it had been to feel that all my problems and shortcomings were mine and mine alone. To hold myself responsible for my own pain and its healing. This book helped me see my own healing efforts as a service to past generations of my ancestors, giving them so much more meaning and significance.

The Yoga of Eating, by Charles Eisenstein

Charles Eisenstein’s book, which I wrote about in The Yoga of Eating: Food as a Source of Information, gave me a whole new perspective on eating and food and its importance in cultivating my intuition and self-awareness.

I had never thought much about food, considering it a mere source of fuel for my brain. But as I got older, what I ate started to have a bigger impact on how I felt and performed. So I knew it was time to revisit that relationship.

Eisenstein’s book is such an unorthodox approach to this topic. It’s not based on science, nor does it recommend any particular diet. It’s about reframing how you understand the very nature of food – not just as macronutrients but as a potent source of information flowing from the external world into your cells.

The Body Keeps the Score, by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s book is an encyclopedic tour de force of many aspects of trauma and its treatment, which I summarized in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Treatment of Trauma.

This book rose to international mega-bestseller status, despite its semi-technical and often winding prose. I think that’s because it has become the banner for a broad increase in awareness of trauma, a complex and nuanced subject that can take many forms and has many potential causes and forms of treatment.

Our society is becoming “trauma-informed,” and this book is the best deep dive into what that often charged and misunderstood word really means in the context of our lives.

How Emotions Are Made, by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barret’s book gave me a completely new way of understanding emotions and how they work, which I recounted in How Emotions Are Made: The Theory of Constructed Emotion.

This book is mostly about the science of emotions, which is helpful for avoiding many of the unfounded assumptions and ancient cultural baggage around the topic. Dr. Barrett’s work creates a bridge between the heart and the mind, giving us a way to think and reason about our emotions, but also a way to feel into our thoughts.

I believe that emotions are the most important frontier of personal development in society today, and understanding what they are at the most fundamental level is crucial for exploring that frontier.

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In June 2024, I attended VidCon, the preeminent global conference on YouTube and all things Creator Economy.

It was the first large-scale event of its kind I’ve ever been a part of, and it introduced me to many fascinating and surprising trends emerging on the Internet.

Here are my top takeaways from the conference that are going to inform my work on our YouTube channel:

#1 – YouTube is becoming increasingly influential and dominant

YouTube continues to encroach on and replace traditional media consumption channels like cable television. In fact, the fastest growing device for YouTube viewing is connected TVs, and 10% of total TV-watching time in the U.S. is now spent on YouTube alone, outpacing all other digital platforms including Netflix. 

During a panel on TV viewing habits, it was fascinating to watch a veteran Disney VP repeatedly defer to Mr. Beast’s content strategist when it came to questions of how best to reach online audiences.

In the last five years, media spending on digital platforms (which includes all advertising spent by companies) has grown from $1 billion to $7 billion USD, an astonishing rise that shows no signs of slowing down.

Yet that’s still only 1.9% of the $360 billion in media spending per year in the U.S., meaning there’s still enormous room for growth. 

#2 – Creators are starting to figure out how to “exit”

In the past, most YouTubers were “accidental” – they stumbled onto the platform to pursue a geeky side interest or just for fun, and then unexpectedly found traction. These days, in contrast, creating content online has become a full-fledged career being pursued by millions.

I attended a session with the founders of The Game Theorists channel, MatPat and Steph, who create videos analyzing and explaining video games. After 13 years building multiple channels and acquiring tens of millions of subscribers, they were acquired by Lunar X in 2022. As part of the several years’ long transition, MatPat will be replaced with 4 other “hosts” who have been working with the company for as long as 10 years.

This points to one reason why “Goodbye YouTube” videos have become such a trend. The first generation of professional YouTubers is approaching their 40s, and many of them are truly leaving the platform. As they plan their exits, they’re experimenting with a range of options, from simply disappearing and riding off into the sunset, to bringing on other talent to their channels, to selling their IP to larger media companies.

Interestingly, one panelist noted that it’s worth building a YouTube channel with such an exit in mind, even if you never plan on leaving, because it will lead to a more sustainable, less risky, and more profitable backend business.

#3 – The difficulty of staying on top

Related to the above, one theme that I kept noticing throughout the event was just how difficult it is to stay on top. In various sessions, I heard from people who’d been at the top (whether measured by subscriber counts, views, or clout) only to lose their spot in the limelight as trends shifted and younger, harder-working YouTubers took their place.

The amount of work it takes to stay relevant on the platform seems staggering, with 70 or 80-hour workweeks seemingly common. This reinforced for me how challenging it is to create a sustainable business in an inherently unpredictable, quickly changing, trend-driven creative industry like the Creator Economy. And it made me all the more determined to find less fickle, longer-term income sources (such as books) that don’t depend on the whim of an algorithm.

#4 – Are you the Network, the Show, or the Talent?

We’re definitely seeing an expansion in the power and influence of major creators in mainstream culture.

One session explored how creators were once viewed primarily as “talent,” essentially using YouTube to kickstart their acting or hosting career in Hollywood. YouTubers like Lilly Singh were lauded for leveraging their online viewership to make the jump to “legitimate” TV shows and movies. 

But power, money, and influence are increasingly flowing to online creators, who command the vast audiences that major media companies are desperately trying to reach. This has led some creators to begin identifying primarily with a “show” – a repeatable format that often gets released as a series of similar videos over time. This gives the creator more options and more negotiating leverage, since a show can be taken over by another host, or sold to a different network, without losing its original appeal.

We’re now entering a third era, in which creators are accruing so much power and money that they are starting to see themselves as something even bigger – as a network unto themselves. For example, the aforementioned creators of The Game Theorist channel have expanded over time to include The Film Theorists, The Food Theorists, and The Style Theorists, each one applying the same format of in-depth nerdy analysis to a new category.

Lunar X didn’t merely acquire talent, or even a successful show; they acquired a thriving network of channels, which together provide far more financial and cultural weight with much less risk of any single one failing.

#5 – Generative AI is here to stay

Gen AI was a recurring theme of the conference. Seemingly everyone is experimenting with and exploring it. In the sessions I attended, I found a much more nuanced and complex view of its potential than what I typically see on social media.

A survey of online consumers presented at one session showed that 60% of them actually prefer GenAI content to human-created content. I think these are early signs that for certain people and certain topics, the sheer prolific variety that AI is capable of will make it superior.

81% of creators reported better engagement with their AI-generated content, again showing that the ability to rapidly and easily create hyper-customized content is going to appeal to certain niches and allow certain kinds of content to be created that wouldn’t be otherwise.

#6 – The incredible rise of fan culture

A keynote presentation by a YouTube executive analyzing major trends on the platform zeroed in on the rapid rise of “fan” culture over the last few years.

In their research, they found that 85% of people online aged 14-44 say they’re a fan of someone or something. 80% of those people say they use YouTube at least weekly to consume content about what they’re a fan of. 47% of Gen Z viewers say they’re part of a fandom that no one they know personally is a part of.

66% said that they watch more content unpacking or discussing the subject of their fandom, than the original content itself. This could take the form of fancams, explainers, reaction videos, fan art, or hour-long video essays analyzing every minute aspect of a new video by a prominent personality.

For example, when Rockstar Games released the trailer to its long-awaited sequel, Grand Theft Auto VI, it was viewed 93 million times in the first 24 hours, setting a new record. But fans of the franchise also immediately started creating reaction videos, breakdowns of the trailer, and detailed deep-dives, which themselves accumulated another 192 million views in the same 24-hour period.

In other words, even the most successful, viral videos are now only a stone dropped in a pond. Their true impact is amplified by the legions of fan-created ripples that grow and spread far beyond what the original video could do on its own.

Fans are morphing from passive viewers to active co-creators, with 65% of Gen Z survey respondents saying they consider themselves to be “creators”. In effect, they are partnering with the celebrities they adore and extending their reach and relevance to new levels. In YouTube’s words, “fan culture has become the central driver of emerging popular culture.”

#7 – YouTube is an economy unto itself

It’s tempting to list YouTube alongside the other major social media platforms, but my impression from VidCon is that’s not accurate. YouTube is the juggernaut of the Internet, an ever-growing black hole of attention consuming ever more of the wider economy.

I’ve always thought of YouTube as a way to attract attention and find followers, only to send them to my email newsletter for a longer-term relationship. But I was shocked to learn that there are actually 10 different ways to monetize on YouTube:

1. Advertising revenue (through the YouTube Partner Program)
2. Channel memberships, where viewers pay a monthly fee for exclusive perks
3. Super Chat and Super Stickers, allowing viewers to pay to have their messages highlighted in live chat
4. Super Thanks, letting viewers purchase one-time animations to show appreciation
5. Merchandise shelf, selling branded products directly on your channel
6. YouTube Premium revenue, earning money when Premium members watch your content
7. Sponsored content and brand deals, partnering with companies to promote products in your videos
8. Affiliate marketing, earning commissions by promoting products with special links
9. Crowdfunding/fan funding through platforms like Patreon
10. Selling your own products or services, using your channel to market digital or physical goods

YouTube is at its most powerful not as a lead acquisition source for other platforms, but as a self-contained, integrated economy in its own right. You can achieve all the critical components of a business – from acquiring customers to monetizing them to communicating and supporting them to developing new products and services – without leaving the platform. And as the viewership grows, that’s where the incentives will lie.

#8 – The acquisition of attention is core to every business

This is the insight that trumps all the others, because it explains both YouTube’s rapid rise, and the broader proliferation of all parts of the Creator Economy.

Every business, not just media or entertainment businesses, has to acquire attention to sell its products or services. The only thing that varies is how different businesses or industries go about that.

There have always been a variety of competing options, but as YouTube continues to grow and dominate more and more of the world’s attention, it is finding its way into every industry imaginable, whether for lead generation, community engagement, R&D, recruiting, advertising, brand awareness, customer education, or something else.

If TV was the dominant communications medium of the 20th century, and all roads led to it one way or the other, it seems like YouTube is well on its way to dominating the 21st century.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

I’ve long believed that our choices about which projects to take on are among the most important decisions we make, and now I have evidence to back it up.

In an article on the TED blog and a paper called The Methodology of Personal Projects Analysis, research professor Brian R. Little examines how the pursuit of “personal projects” powerfully affects the trajectory of our lives. 

Little pioneered the development of a field called Personal Projects Analysis, or PPA, to study how the pursuit of such projects is a fundamental component of human well-being.

“Personal projects” by his definition include not just formal ones you might focus on at work, but informal ones as well. Toddlers are pursuing a project as they learn to walk. Lovers are pursuing a project as they fall in love. All the way to the highest reaches of human achievement, like landing on the moon.

The key factors in making them “personal” are that they are personally meaningful and that they are freely chosen, not imposed from the outside. Little’s research has shown that such “intrinsically regulated” projects tend to be more successful and lead to greater well-being than “externally regulated” projects.

Little and his colleagues have studied the projects of thousands of people, and found that they tend to have 15 active projects on average at any given time, falling into 6 major categories:

1. Occupational/Work: “Make sure the department budget is done.”
2. Interpersonal: “Have dinner with the woman in the floppy hat.”
3. Maintenance: “Get more ink cartridges.”
4. Recreational: “Take a cruise holiday.”
5. Health/Body: “Lose fifteen pounds.’
6. Intrapersonal: “Try to deal with my sadness.”

They have found that a person’s collection of personal projects not only shapes their life but even who they are at their core.

This is a fundamentally different view of “personality”: We are not limited to a collection of traits fixed at birth, or shaped in childhood. We evolve over time through personally meaningful pursuits we decide to take on. This opens up the possibility that we can purposefully choose the ways we want to change, by choosing projects that give us new skills, perspectives, and ways of thinking.

In other words, by changing what you do, you can change who you are. Your actions speak louder than words, including the words others have applied to you in the form of labels like “introverted” or “extroverted,” “ambitious” or “lazy,” “focused” or “distractable.”

Little’s research found that we can even take on new traits to more effectively pursue our personal projects. We commit to delivering a talk, and as a result, start to take on the traits of a public speaker. We say yes to a new relationship, and begin to change into someone more vulnerable. He dubs these “free traits,” like free-floating personalities, we can grab ahold of and put on like a new outfit.

It turns out that there is more than “nature vs. nurture.” There is more to us than the genes we were born with, and the events that unfolded shortly after our birth. There is a third component – projects – and those projects are actively shaping who we are now and for many years into the future. 

Which is another way of saying, a single creative project can change the trajectory of your life. 

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

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

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

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

Did the book grow our audience?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is our audience worth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

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

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

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

The origins of my story about money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Core pillar #3: Money is easy to make

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

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

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

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

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

Owning my projections onto money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inheriting my family’s attitude toward money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Money Can’t Save You
• Money Can’t Oppress You
• Much Ado About Money

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two components of patience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you’d like to read the Substack post by Venkatesh Rao called Oozy Intelligence in Slow Time yourself, click here. I can also recommend Matt Webb’s article Intelligence Too Cheap to Meter on this topic.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

Creativity is often described as an elusive, even magical, phenomenon. In reality, it’s a skill – and there are many ways to prime your brain to be more creative. 

Surprisingly, one of them is procrastination. We generally think of procrastination as a bad habit, a mental hurdle we need to overcome. But research shows that delaying and postponing tasks can actually stimulate creative thinking — provided the conditions are just right. 

Let’s look at the techniques that can turn procrastination into one of your most creative habits.

An honest look at procrastination

Procrastination stems from our urge to flee the discomfort of an unwanted task. In the brain, this plays out as a war between our logical prefrontal cortex — responsible for decision-making — and our hasty, pleasure-seeking limbic system. When the limbic system wins, we rebel against the undesirable task and choose the temporary dopamine hit of procrastination instead. 

Some of us are better equipped than others to fend off the urge to procrastinate. The volume of the amygdala — part of the brain’s limbic system and responsible for processing our motivations, fears, senses, and emotions — influences our likelihood to procrastinate, and its size comes down to genetics. 

However, it is possible to escape an inherited tendency to procrastinate: studies show that cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness meditation can change the size of the amygdala over time. But what if you didn’t need to eliminate procrastination, and you could harness its creative benefits instead? 

Procrastination and creativity: different sides of the same equation

To create anything meaningful, we need to allow our minds to wander freely. As multi-award-winning director Aaron Sorkin once quipped: “You call it procrastinating, I call it thinking.”

We may achieve our biggest creative breakthroughs when we throw off the mental constraints of a preordained task and follow our inner curiosity, but we can’t leave procrastination unchecked. If we do, the tasks we’re avoiding will still be waiting for us, accompanied by the guilt and the pressure of lost time.  For chronic procrastinators, it’s even worse: they have higher levels of stress and illness, and produce lower-quality work. 

Moderation is crucial. Researchers primed three groups of volunteers for different levels of procrastination and found that those who procrastinated moderately — delaying an assigned task for an average of 25% of their allotted time to complete it — generated higher-quality creative ideas. However, volunteers with high or low levels of procrastination (respectively, procrastinating for averages of 40% and 4% of their time) didn’t reap the same benefits. 

How do we hit this sweet spot? Through active procrastination, which means installing guardrails and optimizing the conditions for creativity.

How to stimulate creativity through active procrastination

Time-boxing, setting intentions, and choosing a procrastination activity can help you reap the full creative benefits of procrastination. Here’s how…

1. REFRAME HOW YOU THINK ABOUT PROCRASTINATION 

Shame is a common emotion when people procrastinate, but self-blame can sap your ability to be creative. Instead, build the habit of being compassionate to yourself when you procrastinate. The process of resetting how you think about procrastination takes time and effort, as you’re attempting to form new neural pathways — but by continually refocusing your thoughts on compassion, blame will cease to be the default emotion. 

When you feel the itch to abandon a task, observe the warring forces in your brain. You’re starting to procrastinate, and that’s OK because you’re about to maximize the benefits through active procrastination.  

2. ELIMINATE PASSIVE PROCRASTINATION BY REMOVING DISTRACTIONS

Distractions are common triggers for procrastination, as they give us an excuse to leap between multiple tasks without fully engaging in any of them. This is passive procrastination, and it’s the antithesis of procrastinating creatively. 

Rather than letting your mind play, you’re being controlled by inbound stimuli like emails and Slack notifications. The urge to respond to these cues can be hard to resist — and the rush of dopamine when we give in can trap us in a neverending reactivity loop.

To fend off passive procrastination, you need to make a conscious decision about what you’re consuming. Escape the reactivity loop by changing your response: instead of instantly consuming content presented to you by others, cut the loop by saving the content for later. For example, if it’s email that usually sends you into reactivity mode, a tool like SaneBox can help you remove distractions: you can snooze emails for later or consign them to the SaneBlackHole (a folder that you can train over time to collect your unwanted email). 

3. STRUCTURE YOUR PROCRASTINATION

If you have multiple projects, you can delay one by working on the other. Philosopher John Perry calls this structured procrastination, and it allows you to give in to the delicious feeling of avoiding your intended task while you make progress on something else. You might even find unexpected touchpoints: switching between different projects, aka “slow-motion multitasking,” is how some of the world’s greatest innovators sharpened their multidisciplinary ideas. 

4. CULTIVATE A PROCRASTINATION ACTIVITY

Building a habit when your mind starts to wander — like journaling, online puzzles, or an art project — can be an incredible way to get you “unstuck” from your current project by engaging different parts of your brain. Scientists speculate that switching to a second task forces you to clear your brain of information, allowing you to approach the first task from a fresh perspective when you return to it.

Whatever your chosen procrastination activity, time-boxing can ensure you keep within the limits of moderate procrastination. Give yourself 15 minutes, or even an hour, to explore wherever your restless brain is trying to take you. 

Time limits are especially important if your procrastination activity is browsing online, otherwise, you can slip back into the reactivity loop — see the next step for ways to interrupt the cycle.

5. CAPTURE IDEAS FOR LATER

If procrastination leads you to engrossing Reddit threads or you risk descending into a YouTube spiral, you need to be able to stop when your time is up. It’s easier to cut yourself off if you use a capture tool to add content to a read-later app (we recommend Reader by Readwise), so you can consume it at a different time. 

Later on, if you find the content useful but don’t quite know what to do with it (yet), you can use the PARA Method to add it into your knowledge management system, aka your Second brain (here’s how to choose a suitable app). This way, you can let your ideas simmer and mentally set aside your procrastination material for when you’re ready to return to it. In the meantime, you can go back to your original task with a newly playful and creative brain.

With these techniques, procrastination can transform from a time-wasting hindrance into a game-changing creative tool. Understand the neuroscience behind this common habit, reframe your mindset, and implement procrastination strategies — you’ll see your creativity flourish in unexpected ways.

This article is a guest post from our friends at SaneBox. 

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, 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.

I recently announced my next major book project: a book on how to complete a year-end life review as a ritual for self-reflection and growth.

I’ve had an annual review practice in some form since 2008, and I can’t think of anything else that has more dramatically impacted my life in that time. I can’t wait to bring this practice, which has existed for a long time among CEOs, executives, heads of state, and creatives, to the wider world.

The first question I’m asking myself as I embark on this years-long journey is, “What do I want to do differently from last time?” 

I’ve documented the process of writing and publishing my previous book, Building a Second Brain (BASB), in great detail, partly so that I can now look back and take stock of what worked and what didn’t.

Here are the 7 strategic decisions I’m making differently this time and why.

1. Think on a 5-year time horizon

The sheer timescale at which traditionally published books operate continues to astound me. As of now, it’s been 5.5 years since I started working on the proposal for BASB, and 2 years since its release in the US – nothing else in my life operates on this timescale.

We recently crossed an incredible milestone – 200,000 copies sold – and yet I still feel that the journey of the book is in its early stages. It’s tempting when embarking on an endeavor like this to focus only on the initial launch, but I’ve learned that it’s critical to think on at least a 5-year timescale.

What kind of book do I want to still be talking about and promoting 5 years from now? What do I want to spend my time thinking about and working on throughout that time? Given that I only have so many 5-year stretches in my career, how do I want to use them?

These are the kinds of questions I asked myself when deciding which book to write next, and vanishingly few topics made the cut. But now that I’ve chosen the most promising one, I’m going to make all subsequent decisions from the perspective of what makes sense on a 5-10-year time horizon.

2. Move toward more intuitive right-brain thinking

For BASB, I made a strong effort to move away from language and concepts that were overly technical, abstract, or rooted in the tech world. I had developed a lot of my thinking while immersed in Silicon Valley, and I knew I needed to broaden my language to appeal to a much more mainstream audience.

Yet even with that effort, the book is still quite skewed toward readers who are relatively tech-savvy. The idea of creating an external repository of personal information in digital form still appeals mainly to people who already think about how to use their technology more effectively.

With my new topic of year-end reviews, I want to continue this shift from a primarily left-brain, analytical lens to a more right-brain, holistic, intuitive, and emotional lens. I want to continue expanding my niche from a small hardcore group of productivity nerds to wider audiences centered around existing habits like journaling, mindfulness, goal-setting, and planning.

This shift will need to be reflected in everything from the words I use to the colors and design of the book’s branding, to the marketing materials we create, to the way I talk about the subject in podcast interviews.

3. Sprints, not marathons

Looking back on the whole experience of writing my first book, one of the most stressful aspects was the ever-present feeling that I had to be making progress on the book at all times. 

Logically I knew that’s impossible – a lot of time is needed for rest and recovery, for family and friends, and for other projects at work. Yet that feeling remained, at the back of my mind, like a subtle pressure against my brain, constantly questioning why I wasn’t advancing on at least one front. Writing a book might feel like a marathon, but even a marathon takes place in a series of shorter sprints!

Something else has changed since last time as well: I have far more responsibilities. 2020 and 2021 were ideal times to write a book in many ways, with the pandemic shutting down the world and our new baby sleeping the days away. Now I have two young kids, a household to manage, and a larger, more complex business with a lot of projects happening in parallel. Oh, we’re also moving to Mexico in a few months!

For all these reasons, I plan on concentrating my writing time in a series of month-long sprints, with the in-between months dedicated to research, gathering feedback, and recovery. For example, my first sprint will be the entire month of June 2024, followed by two months off, and then again in September, with another two months off, and finally in December as work slows down for the holidays. 

I’m hoping this schedule will serve as a forcing function to allow me to completely set aside all my other work duties during the “on” months, leaning on the team to manage the business while I’m away, and then decisively turning off that part of my brain during the “off” months.

4. Recruit beta readers for feedback

My last two books were directly based on a cohort-based course I taught for 6 years, starting in 2016. Several thousand people completed it, and I therefore had a treasure trove of feedback, examples, case studies, and intelligence about what worked and what didn’t.

I’ve been teaching a workshop called The Annual Review since 2019, and over 600 people have taken it, but I have significantly less research this time around. I’ve also not really communicated my ideas about year-end reviews in written form before, except through publishing my own personal reviews.

This time around I’d like to try an approach I’ve seen many successful authors take: recruiting a group of “beta” readers to review the early manuscript and give me direct, specific feedback about which parts resonate and which need to be changed or removed.

5. Only our core platforms matter

Looking back at the numerous marketing efforts we made leading up to and following the last book’s release, I’m left with a sobering conclusion: it is really only our core platforms (which for us are the email newsletter, YouTube, and X) that truly make a difference in the scale of a book’s success.

By this, I mean both their size (the number of followers or subscribers) and just as if not more importantly, the quality of my relationship with those people. Do they like what I have to say? Do they trust me? Are they hungry for more from me?

I recently sat down to analyze Forte Labs’ audience growth since my last book was acquired in March 2020: in 4 years we’ve grown our audience an astounding 28x, from about 20,000 followers to 550,000 across all platforms:

Most of this growth is due to the two books I’ve published in that time, as well as the strong growth of our YouTube channel, both of which have also fueled growth in our email list (the vertical line below represents the date my BASB book was released, creating a clear inflection point in the long-term growth rate of our email list that has persisted to this day):

Last time, we didn’t really have the option of relying solely on my own audience. It just wasn’t big enough. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to bootstrap an audience almost from scratch but looking back, the return-on-investment for those efforts was pretty marginal.

This time around, I’m going to invest all our time, energy, and money into simply growing our audience, which ultimately means more and better blog posts, YouTube videos, social posts, and newsletter content. This offers an additional benefit: once the release is all over, we’re left with the greatest prize of all –  a larger and more engaged audience ready to receive whatever we do next.

6. Create tighter integration with courses

Over the past year, we made a tremendous effort to diversify our sources of revenue away from cohort-based courses. A year ago we made 95%+ of our revenue from cohorts alone, and today none of it comes from cohorts since we’ve stopped offering them altogether.

It was a longer and more difficult transition than I expected, but we now have a much more balanced business based on 5 main sources of revenue: self-paced courses, books, ads and sponsorships, affiliate commissions, and our new flagship, the Second Brain Membership.

For BASB, despite the fact that the book was based on a course, we didn’t do a good job of integrating the book with our courses. This was partly because the live, cohort-based version only took place at certain times of the year, and was about 66x as expensive as the book (or $999), which made it difficult to seamlessly bring book readers into it unless they happened to subscribe to our newsletter.

Even when we came out with a pre-recorded, self-paced version of the BASB course about a year after the book’s release, it too closely reflected the book’s contents, making it seem like a mere rehashing of the same material except in video form (and still at about 33x the price, or $499). 

I plan on avoiding both of these errors this time, by having both a live and self-paced version of the Annual Review course (at accessible price points) ready to go by the time the book comes out, and by creating a seamless path from book to course starting right within the book itself. 

7. Go for the New York Times bestseller list

For the last book, I didn’t purposefully try to reach the NYT bestseller list, mostly because I didn’t think it was possible with my small audience and niche topic. We did reach the Wall Street Journal list, which allowed us to add the moniker “best-seller.” 

This time, however, I plan on making a serious run at the crown jewel of the publishing world: the “Advice/How-To” category within the NYT list, sometimes called the “Mt. Everest” of bestseller lists because it is so difficult to land on. I’m told this requires a specific strategy of maximizing the sale of certain formats (ebook sales don’t count for this list, for example) at specific retail locations (only some of which are included in the official count).

Contrary to a lot of online discourse, I believe bestseller lists (and other forms of demonstrating authority and credibility) absolutely do matter. Part of the “war for attention” that we all fight every day as content creators is a parallel “war for credibility.” The Internet has flooded our world with information of every level of quality, and if anything, people are more dependent than ever on signals of credibility to determine what to pay attention to and believe.

And if nothing else, this goal gives us a new, exciting mountain to climb. People do climb Mt. Everest just for the fun of it, after all.

If you’d like to stay in the know about the progress of my annual review book, sign up for our newsletter below. And if you come across any interesting ideas, material, or people related to the subject, please send it to me at hello@fortelabs.com.

Like so many others, I’ve spent the past year exploring and experimenting with emerging AI tools. 

Throughout that time, there has been one question I’ve been trying to answer: Will AI replace the need for Second Brains entirely?

A lot of people seem to think so, and I admittedly have a self-interested motivation: to decide whether I should continue advising people to build a Second Brain at all, or just tell them to rely on AI and save all that effort. 

After many dozens of hours of experimentation, my conclusion is that AI is not going to replace the need for a Second Brain anytime soon.

Here’s why: no matter how powerful AI becomes, the data we put into it has to come from somewhere, and the AI’s outputs have to go somewhere. A Second Brain (or whatever you want to call it) is still needed both as the repository of all those inputs and as a staging area for storing those outputs until they’re ready to be used.

What’s Changed – Organize and Distill

There is no doubt that AI is going to radically change what we think of today as the creative process.

Looking at my CODE framework representing the creative process, however, it is mostly the middle stages of Organizing and Distilling that AI is transforming.

Organizing (step #2) is the stage of the creative process that inherently adds the least value – it is only needed to prepare the ground for the subsequent stages. Thus it’s no surprise that it’s the first one to be automated by AI. 

No longer does it make sense to meticulously format your data in a perfectly organized database – instead you can just dump a morass of text into a prompt window, and AI is smart enough to understand what you intended. 

As an example, Notion has added AI to its software, allowing you to interact with and “talk to” your notes without having to spend a lot of time adding structure.

Distillation (step #3) is also a perfect fit for the rapid, emotionless decision-making of AI. Large Language Models excel at rapidly summarizing huge amounts of text at whatever level of detail you desire.

For example, in my video on using ChatGPT to summarize books, I showed how AI was able to save me dozens of hours of formerly manual work to end up with a concise, actionable book summary.

What Hasn’t Changed – Capture and Express

The first stage of the creative process – capturing information in the first place – has still hardly been touched on the other hand.

New apps like Rewind allow you to record everything that happens on your computer, but in my experience that just creates a lot of recordings to wade through.

Although some capture tasks like digitizing handwritten text have been automated, we still have to write down our thoughts and ideas in the first place!

The quality of an AI chatbot’s response is always dependent on the quality of the inputs you provide it. AI cannot (yet) go out into the world and collect its own data, so we have to do that ourselves by capturing notes, highlighting passages in books, taking pictures, and saving our favorite ideas.

The fourth and final stage of creativity, expression, also still requires a human to decide what to do with the outputs of ChatGPT and other AI tools. Someone has to put the finishing touches on the final product via their own voice, style, taste, or perspective.

My wife Lauren’s video about creating a children’s storybook using AI perfectly illustrates this point: although every major component of the final product was created by ChatGPT, it was Lauren’s direction, synthesis, and creative nudges that allowed all the parts to come together in a cohesive, meaningful whole.

AI Concentrates Human Creativity at the Initial and Final Stages

AI doesn’t make human creativity unnecessary – it concentrates our creativity at the beginning and end of the creative process.

For a concrete example, in my video on Google’s new AI platform NotebookLM, I demonstrate how I can import the entire history of my reading highlights, and then freely make associations and connections out of that vast collection of text totaling 594,379 words from 719 sources.

While that capability seems almost superhuman, notice what it still required of me: to do the reading in the first place and save the excerpts I found valuable (capturing), and then to take NotebookLM’s responses and turn them into my own creation (expressing). In other words, the first and last steps of creativity haven’t been touched.

I can effectively skip from the first step to the last step, barely touching the steps in between. But that means I still need to take the first and last steps, to give the AI a starting point and an endpoint.

The relevant question has become: what do we do now that the “cost” of intermediate steps like organizing and distilling has plummeted?

Tasks that formerly required expensive human effort can now be completed with cheap computer effort, in fractions of the time. What kinds of goals, outcomes, and creative projects have suddenly become far more feasible than they were just a couple years ago?

For an example of what it might look like to work with AI as a real-time creative partner in this way, check out my in-depth interview (Part 1 and Part 2) with Srini Rao on the AI-powered noteaking app Mem (which by the way is the only notetaking app that OpenAI has invested in).

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

One of the aspects of writing a book I most looked forward to was releasing it in my family’s country of origin, Brazil.

I’d spent years daydreaming about what that would feel like, returning to my homeland bearing the gift of hard-won knowledge to share with the people who had given me so much. 

Criando Um Segundo Cérebro came out in July 2023, about a year after the US release, and I decided to travel to Brazil the following month for a press tour to promote it.

In this blog post, I’ll recap our strategy for launching the book in Portuguese and Spanish, the results we achieved, what we found to be most effective, and what I learned.

Strategizing the launch in Brazil

Our strategy in Brazil unfolded in three stages, each one building on the one before:

1. Host or participate in a series of media interviews and events (in person and virtually)
2. Funnel all the attention generated into a dedicated Instagram account and WhatsApp community
3. Use those platforms to launch my book and online course BASB Foundation in Portuguese

Preparing for launch

I hired a Project Manager just for the launch of this book since I knew there would be a lot to coordinate and execute. I found someone in my network who was Brazilian and could handle all communication in Portuguese, which I also speak.

The first thing we did was segment our existing email list to find our “true fans” located in Brazil. Based on their IP address, there were 2,145 of them, out of 81,315 subscribers total at that time, which means 2.6% of my audience was based in Brazil.

Next, I created a WhatsApp Community (essentially a group with multiple subgroups within it) and invited all 2,145 subscribers to join. A couple hundred of them did – representing the most dedicated followers of my work there.

The WhatsApp Community became a central place for me to share updates, ask for help promoting content, announce major milestones, and receive feedback on my plans and ideas. I was blown away by the energy and enthusiasm this group of supporters demonstrated. They shared detailed unboxing photos, posted their recommendations and takeaways, boosted our own social media posts, bought extra copies for their friends and colleagues, and gave me tons of helpful advice about how to approach the Brazilian market. I’m incredibly grateful for their contribution to this launch.

The third and final step of preparation was to schedule a 10-day trip to Brazil, at my own expense, which would be used to extensively promote my book’s release in Portuguese.

Stage 1: Generate attention through media interviews and events

The goal of stage 1 was to drum up as much interest and enthusiasm for my book (and the broader idea of Second Brains) as possible.

I participated in 10 events, both online and in person, including:

• An Instagram Live with a major creator interested in PKM
• An academic-focused event with CRIE, a lab at a public university in Rio de Janeiro specializing in network science, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the study of knowledge management
• Two book signings hosted by my Brazilian publisher, Sextante, in each of the major cities of southern Brazil – Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
• Two Second Brain Meetups I hosted myself, in Rio and São Paulo
• A Notion Meetup organized by the local chapter of Notion enthusiasts
• A breakout session at Fire Festival, the largest conference on online education in Latin America, hosted every year by the online education platform Hotmart
• A major podcast, which we filmed in person at a studio in São Paulo
• A virtual Q&A hosted by the Brazilian Society of Knowledge Management.

For all these events, we took lots of pictures and in a couple of cases even hired a videographer to fully document the experience via short-form video, such as in this example:

Through my publisher, we also received exposure through multiple media outlets, including MIT Sloan Review Brasil, Você RH, O Globo (the newspaper of record in Brazil, which I immediately sent to my mom!), Valor Economico, national radio program CBN, Saber Viver (a lifestyle magazine in Portugal), and Fast Company Brasil.

Besides the traditional media above, we had a legion of independent content creators who were kind enough to produce videos and summaries about me, my book, and my work, on a variety of social media platforms.

Stage 2: Capture the excitement in the new Instagram and WhatsApp accounts

As we were building all this anticipation, we asked everyone to follow our brand new Instagram account, with content only in Portuguese. We haven’t been very active on Instagram in the past (it’s our smallest social platform in the U.S.), but I knew it was by far the most dominant platform in Latin America and would be the ideal home base for our efforts in Brazil.

I knew that events (both in-person and virtual) create “spikes” of attention, but we’d need a way to capture that attention and maintain a longer-term relationship with people.

In the 6 months since its creation, our Brazil Instagram grew from zero to almost 3,000 followers. We posted photos and videos from all the events I participated in, creating a central repository documenting the efforts we made in the country for anyone to see in the future.

I also continued asking people I met and collaborated with to join the WhatsApp group, so we always had a single place to easily communicate and coordinate with them. 

Stage 3: Launch the Portuguese online course

The third and final stage was to create and launch our flagship online course, BASB Foundation, for the Brazilian market. The goal was to make this training as widely available as possible there and to recoup some of the investments we made for the book launch.

I decided to use an AI-powered tool called HeyGen to produce the new course, which accomplished three functions: 

• Translate the actual text from one language to another
• Generate the audio of me speaking to that text, matching my tone of voice
• Change my lip movements to match the new words

Although I speak Portuguese, this saved me several days’ worth of filming and gave me a chance to verify the quality of the service in a language I spoke.

Here’s an example of the results:

Although the HeyGen team was highly responsive and did an excellent job supporting our needs, this endeavor ended up being a lot more complex than we expected. The initial translation was impressive but contained some errors and inconsistencies that we had to correct through several iterations. Here are some challenges we faced:

• HeyGen’s AI-generated translation usually sounded too formal
• The tone of the AI-generated audio was hard to adjust
• Questions were a challenge and the emphasis wasn’t always accentuated in longer sentences
• Very long sentences were difficult for the AI to translate while preserving the meaning
• Transitions between sentences weren’t always fluid and often felt weird
• The speed of the spoken words had to vary in order to match the lengths of sentences between languages, sometimes resulting in abrupt speeding up or slowing down

We also realized that launching a course in another language requires a lot more than translating videos. There is an entire infrastructure that needs to be built: from a landing page to onboarding emails to marketing to customer support. 

Assuming your goal is to make it possible for someone who doesn’t speak English at all to access the training, you have to translate 100% of the infrastructure around the course and make sure it works in their country, which is hard to test when you’re not there.

That said, using Hotmart as our course platform (the most popular one in Brazil) made it much more feasible. They provided a variety of tools and features we needed to make the launch possible, all easy to use and designed for the Brazilian market. Their team helped us at several crucial points, and I recommend them for anyone making a foray into Brazil.

The initial launch of the Foundation course in Portuguese was unfortunately quite disappointing, with only 13 sales totaling a few thousand dollars. I’m not sure why even our existing audience wasn’t receptive to it, but I suspect it’s because the $250 price point is still quite high for the Brazilian market, and there is a lot of free content on this topic (both in Portuguese and English) being published continuously that largely satisfies the demand.

For a full recap of how we localized our BASB Foundation course for the Brazilian market, read the recap written by our Director of Marketing here.

Was it worth it?

We sold about 6,000 copies of my book in Brazil in the first 3 months, and 9,500 in the first 6 months. That’s quite a phenomenal outcome! I believe we’ve set the stage for the book to be a perennial bestseller there for years to come.

Looking at the financial picture, we made about $10,000 USD between the book advance and course sales, and have spent $16,000 USD between contractors, SaaS services, and travel costs. I hope over time these two new income sources will match and eventually exceed what we invested to create a presence in Brazil.

Speaking of the less tangible, subjective rewards, it was without a doubt one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. At the book signing in São Paulo, my entire extended family came out to see me, including people who hadn’t seen each other in years. It was like a family reunion!

Seeing the incredible enthusiasm of the many people who came out to support me, and hearing story after story of how my ideas changed their lives, is something I will never forget. Not to mention the feeling that I gave back to my homeland and provided a reason for hope and progress in a country that is so in need of it.

Launching in Mexico and coming full circle

About 7 months later, in March 2024, I had the chance to do it all again – this time for the Spanish release of my book under the title Crea Tu Segundo Cerebro.

Although the book was being released in Spain and throughout Latin America, I decided to do the press tour in Mexico because of my special connection to that country. I had written most of the book proposal while living in Mexico City with my wife Lauren in 2019. It felt like the whole project was coming full circle to where it began.

Here’s a short video with some highlights from this amazing experience:

One major difference this time around was that my Spanish publisher, Reverte, had generously hired a local PR firm to handle all the interviews, media appearances, and events in Mexico City, where I spent a few days dedicated to promotion. I still had to pay for my own travel, but in Brazil, the cost of local staff had been the single biggest expense, and it was helpful to have them cover that cost.

This also meant that almost all the press this time would be from traditional media, via the PR firm’s network. I was fine with this because I had learned from my time in Brazil that I could access digital media outlets easily on my own. What I can’t do is gain the credibility that mainstream media provides, which is more essential in Latin America than in the U.S.

We followed up with much the same playbook as before:

• Segmenting our existing email subscribers (we found there were about 5,498 subscribers located in 20 Spanish-speaking countries, or 4.7% of my audience)
• Inviting them to a Spanish-language WhatsApp Community (a similar number, about a couple hundred, decided to join, and they became an essential sounding board and chorus of supporters for everything we did)
• Creating a new Instagram account to centralize and promote all our Spanish language content and media mentions (this account has less than 100 followers so far, a testament to our focus on traditional media versus digital-native media)
• Participating in as many events as possible to generate interest and create media mentions which could be further shared to boost the book’s credibility

With the PR firm’s help, I took part in 12 interviews, including several newspapers and magazines, digital publications, a popular podcast, and two TV interviews (including the one below live on air in Spanish!).

Another big difference from the Brazil launch was that I kicked off this press tour with a paid speaking gig at a major conference, at La Festival de Las Ideas in Puebla. This not only started things off with a bang but essentially paid for the entire trip so we broke even from day one. 

Overall, we’ve sold 2,675 copies of my book in Spanish for the initial launch. We’ve made $16,000 USD from Spanish-speaking markets and spent about $7,000, for a profit of $9,000. Taking that into account, our holistic efforts across Latin America have already reached breakeven.

We are planning on translating our course into Spanish (and other languages) as well, using all the best practices we discovered the first time, which hopefully will grow the return on our efforts as well as make these ideas more accessible throughout Latin America.

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