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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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.

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. 

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.

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.

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).

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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.

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.