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.

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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.

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