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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A crossroads at 40

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 Wins

Let’s start with the wins!

Book sales

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

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

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

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

Second Brain Membership

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

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

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

Wholesome Weekend #2

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

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

The first in-person Second Brain Summit

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

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

YouTube growth

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

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

The newsletter

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

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

The Annual Review program

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

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

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

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

Personal milestones and moving to Mexico

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 Disappointments

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

The business finances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over to Lauren!

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

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

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

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

That’s when I turned to pen and paper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s magic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Picture Thoughts

Journal AND Digital

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

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

Systems Change as You Change

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

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

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

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

Making Time and Saving Time

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

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

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

Staying Flexible

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

Make it Simple and Pleasurable

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

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

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

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

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

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

#1. Go deeper than the surface level

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

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

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

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

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

#2. Commit for a set period of time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#4. Occasionally go “off the reservation”

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

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

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

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

#5. Share your stories in real time

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

This has numerous irreplaceable benefits:

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

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

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

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

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

#6. Move toward where you feel shame

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

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

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

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

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

#7. Seek variety and diversity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discovering the root of my pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ayahuasca as somatic medicine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fascial therapy as bodily restructuring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burning Man – my first experience with psychedelics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Hudson and The Art of Accomplishment

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

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

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

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

From that weekend workshop, I learned:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My heart as the bottleneck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading to understand myself and the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was hooked.

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

This realization changed everything for me. 

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

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

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

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

The first cracks in an opening mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mastering my attention through Vipassana meditation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Encountering psychological truths at the Landmark Forum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The power of transformational programs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the age of 22, one fine spring day at the Apple Store I worked at in college in San Diego, I began to feel a small scratch at the back of my throat. 

I tried for a few months to ignore it, but as it gradually grew worse – eventually turning into a searing pain throughout my neck and an inability to control my voice – I started seeing a series of doctors and specialists to identify the cause.

I tried anti-reflux medication, changing my diet, quitting coffee, anti-allergy pills, massage, voice therapy, and eventually, a powerful anti-seizure medication that gave me temporary relief but at the cost of whole body numbing and crippling memory loss. 

Why am I sharing this story with you?

Because this unexpected condition forced me onto a new path, and that path taught me incredibly valuable lessons – about psychosomatic pain and its sources, about the relationship between body and mind and how it can go wrong, and ultimately, about how to heal from the disconnection from myself that lay at the heart of it all.

In this essay, I’ll share with you what I’ve discovered in the hope it might help you too.

A descent into despair

At no point in my medical odyssey did I receive so much as a diagnosis – no MRI scan or neurological test or laboratory diagnostic could detect even the slightest thing wrong with me. 

I found that I was always treated as a collection of symptoms, and when a specialist couldn’t find the source of my problem in their assigned body part, they quickly passed me off to someone else.

After 7 years of this fruitless search, during which I saw more than a dozen doctors in four countries, I had made no progress, and the pain and tension I felt was worse than ever. It felt as if an area the size of a ping-pong ball at the back-right of my throat had lost all sensation, like when the dentist injects novocaine into your gums. This numbness inflamed all the surrounding areas as they struggled to compensate for the loss of function. This irritated other, even more distant muscles and ligaments in turn, like a slowly spreading wildfire of burning tension. 

Yet the physical pain was actually the least of my worries. It was really the social and psychological effects that sent me spiraling into despair.

When I opened my mouth to speak, I didn’t know what would come out. I might feel deep conviction in a business meeting, but my dysfunctional speech would come out weak and halting. I’d want to convey warmth and support to a friend, only to hear my words sounding monotone and strained. My words often had the opposite effect I intended, as if a demon had possessed me and was clutching me by the throat, distorting and undermining every word I spoke.

I can distinctly remember being at a house party in Oakland in 2014, and wanting to make a good impression. It was hosted by my then-girlfriend Lauren’s friends, and I wanted to fit in and be liked. I met someone who had also served in the Peace Corps, and was elated at the chance to connect in an environment full of strangers. But as I opened my mouth to speak, my voice was so tight and strained I couldn’t make myself heard at all, despite the relatively quiet surroundings. I might as well have been mute.

I left the party early, and as I walked home through the dark streets of downtown Oakland, a terrifying thought arose in my mind: “Life is not worth living if I have to live it this way.” I’m an inveterate optimist, and had never felt this depth of hopelessness. It felt like the end of the road, the lowest of lows. And I knew in that moment I needed to try something new.

Discovering relief by looking inside

Shortly thereafter, I attended my first Vipassana meditation retreat, mostly in the hope of learning to accept and make peace with my condition. 

Instead, on the final day of the retreat, something remarkable happened: My attention had sharpened to a fine point after days of silent meditation, and I moved that mental scalpel to the place in my throat that had caused me so much suffering. To my amazement, it came alive! 

Like the circuit breaker in a house being flipped to full power, the entire area around the back of my throat instantly lit up with full sensation. For the first time I could remember, I swallowed normally, feeling the sublime joy of all the muscles in my throat and neck working in beautiful synchrony. 

Sitting quietly in a room and looking inside of myself had accomplished what tens of thousands of dollars and years of medical appointments couldn’t touch: total, instantaneous relief. That was the moment I knew I’d found a new way, a new path, and a new world. I found such relief a second time when I tried LSD at Burning Man. And a third time, when I did anger work at a week-long course called Groundbreakers. I was hooked.

What all these experiences had in common was that they were pattern interrupters. They temporarily shifted how my body and nervous system were operating, and by doing so, reestablished an internal connection that I had disconnected as a child to survive painful experiences.

An exploration of psychosomatic illness

These brief flirtations with relief set me on a new course – to research and study the underlying mechanisms of what was happening to me in these situations, with the goal of replicating them permanently.

The most compelling explanation I found was in the book The Divided Mind, by Dr. John Sarno. 

In his book, Sarno describes his years of experience treating psychosomatic disorders, most of all, debilitating back pain. I had long resisted the idea that my condition was psychosomatic. It was so visceral that I couldn’t accept that it was “only in my mind.” But Dr. Sarno’s work makes a crucial distinction: while the source of the pain may be in a person’s mind, that doesn’t mean the pain isn’t completely real.

I was struck by how closely his description of the illnesses he treats matched my own (in bold): “The patient may experience a wide variety of highly debilitating maladies, including muscle weakness or paralysis, feelings of numbness or tingling, total absence of sensation, blindness, inability to use their vocal cords, and many others, all without any physical abnormalities in the body to account for such symptoms.” This seemed to describe my situation exactly.

As I kept reading, I was further startled to see his explanation of the cause: “…the cause is to be found in the unconscious regions of the mind…its purpose is to deliberately distract the conscious mind.” I couldn’t believe what I was reading. He seemed to be suggesting that the body creates physical symptoms as a protective measure, to distract or shield the conscious mind from thoughts and feelings that are too threatening or painful to bear.

I kept reading, and in his extensive descriptions of his typical patient profile, I saw myself clearly reflected:

• Sarno notes that “…rage in the unconscious mind is central to understanding virtually all psychosomatic reactions.” I knew that repressed anger was one of my most deeply ingrained emotional patterns.
• He says that anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often coincide with the apparent physical symptoms, which I’d also experienced.
• Perfectionism and other “repressive” behaviors are ubiquitous among psychosomatic pain sufferers, with patients often describing themselves as “hardworking, conscientious, responsible, driven, success-oriented, perpetual seekers of new challenges, sensitive to criticism, and their own severest critics,” which the subconscious mind interprets as a form of control or pressure and is thus enraged by.
• Many patients are the caretaker type and are always worrying about their family, friends, and relatives; at the same time, they’ve often experienced emotional abuse, including harsh or excessive discipline, absence or unavailability, temper, or unreasonable expectations from those same family members, creating another source of internal tension.
• A majority have come from families with hardworking, loving parents who conveyed overly high expectations and hopes for their children, families not characterized by any particularly unusual dynamics that would stand out in today’s society.

Ultimately, Dr. Sarno recommends the following treatment for his patients: that they directly face and bring to their conscious awareness the anger, emotional pain, and sadness brewing in their subconscious mind. He recommends a detailed step-by-step plan for how to do so, including reading his book and related materials, journaling and reflective writing exercises exploring possible sources of emotional pain, and cataloging situations that create suppressed rage. 

The emphasis throughout this process is on allowing the inner child to express their rage at all the responsibilities, pressures, disappointments, problems, and unfair expectations they’ve faced, and most of all, their self-imposed demands to achieve, take care of others, or be good. It’s about freeing yourself from needing other people’s recognition, and learning to care for yourself in a kinder, gentler, more forgiving way than perhaps you were raised. In other words, you are learning to be more compassionate with yourself.

In effect, the purpose of Dr. Sarno’s treatment is to “blow the cover” on the covert operation your body is running to keep you from thinking about the reservoir of rage within you. Once the big secret is out, there’s no sense in continuing the pain, and thus it ceases.

Healing through learning

Sarno finds the unavoidable conclusion of his work almost too good to be true: not only can physical pain be psychosomatic, but you can stop it by learning about it! 

And that is exactly what I found: the more I read and learned about Sarno’s work, the more the pain and tension in my throat dissipated, often in real time as the words entered my brain and my awareness of what was happening inside of me grew.

Another casual observation in Sarno’s book astounded me, and explained so much of my journey: “We know from experience that the theoretical wall, the barrier separating the conscious from the unconscious mind, cannot be breached from below—that is, the rage will not break through into consciousness—but there is nothing to stop us from intellectually breaching the barrier from above.” 

This explained why my personal journey had started with the mind and the intellect, as I read books and took courses on various aspects of personal development. I used my mind to create the “breach” that allowed my awareness to begin looking inside instead of outside for answers. Only then was I able to begin exploring the world of the heart and the emotions.

While intellectual understanding and self-study are crucial, Sarno also points out that it isn’t necessary to fully “figure out” or change repressed emotions. It is only necessary to acknowledge that they exist, and that they’re a normal part of life. He has found that truly accepting our genuine self, who feels many things, including feelings that might be unpleasant or painful, is what leads to relief.

The cause of psychogenic voice disorders

I discovered a 2008 paper called The role of psychogenic and psychosocial factors in the development of functional voice disorders. It examined a range of prior studies and concluded that psychogenic voice disorders “may develop in response to negative emotions following stressful life events,” and especially “situations where there was a strong challenge to speak out and yet a marked constraint against doing so.”

One thing I had never understood is why I would have the apparent symptoms of trauma when my childhood seemed relatively idyllic. This paper suggested an answer, indicating that “traumatic incidents and serious situations involving death, loss, separation and threat to personal or family security were reported infrequently” in patients with psychogenic voice disorders. 

Instead, the researchers found such disorders occurred more frequently in people who had “interpersonal problems with close partners or family members.” This included “difficulties with the expression of negative emotions related to repressed hostility, discomfort over sexual feelings and rebellion towards authority figures (Barton, 1960).” 

This seemed to fit my situation much more closely than the “acute” trauma caused by sexual assault, natural disasters, or extreme abuse. In my case, subtle, internalized forms of emotional repression led to subtle, internal symptoms of trauma. The suppression of anger in my family – the sweeping under the rug of any brewing conflict – might seem like it would have led to a peaceful household. In reality, it only turned the chaos inward where it was unleashed to do a different kind of damage.

Other common factors in the development of psychogenic voice disorders seemed to fit my situation closely as well. The patient data showed “a trend towards education and helping professions, and recent prevalence studies indicate teachers are more at risk for functional voice disorders than any other occupational group.” I had been a natural teacher almost my entire life.

The same paper proposed a possible explanation for the specific symptoms I’d faced: when emotions (such as anger, in my case) cannot be expressed, they are “reverted” to physiological symptoms associated with fight-or-flight. This reaction “is thought to prepare the organism for increased physical work, by fixing the upper extremities to the thoracic cage for combat, requiring firm adduction of the vocal folds and wide abduction to facilitate an increased volume and flow of oxygen in order to meet the body’s increased metabolic demands.”

In other words, when we repress emotions and don’t allow them to be expressed, the body reacts to this with a fight-or-flight response. In order to prepare for the increased physical exertion of fighting or fleeing, the body stabilizes the upper parts of the body (like the arms and shoulders) against the ribcage to create a solid foundation for movement. As part of that preparation, the vocal folds (or vocal cords) are brought together tightly to control the breath and then are spread apart to increase oxygen intake. 

This was the most precise description of what I experienced in my vocal cords I had yet encountered: a combination of too much tightness and tension, and somehow at the same time, too much looseness and lack of control. It was like reading the user’s manual for my body, specifically the troubleshooting section, where my seemingly unexplainable problem was described in precise detail.

Studying the vagus nerve

All my research was pointing to the vagus nerve, which I came to understand was the central actor in my story.

The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the body, running from the diaphragm all the way up the torso, through the neck to the brain. It is like the “main information highway” of the body, connecting together and coordinating the parasympathetic nervous system in the heart, lungs, and digestive tract, and governing such functions as sucking, swallowing, facial expression, and the sounds produced by the larynx.

I began to study the vagus nerve intensely, filling my notes with anatomical diagrams and cross-sections of the throat from every direction. I found that right at the point it passes up through the right side of the neck, there is a “choke point.” If the nerve senses too much pain coming up through the nerves from the body, this is the last place it can shut itself off and thus prevent those signals from reaching the brain. Like a circuit breaker flipping off when it detects a dangerous surge of energy, the vagus nerve does the same for the body.

It was another book, The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, that helped me understand why the vagus nerve seemed so central to my symptoms.

He calls this complex of nerves our “social-engagement system.” When it’s functioning properly, “…we smile when others smile at us, we nod our heads when we agree, and we frown when friends tell us of their misfortunes.” It also sends signals down to our heart and lungs, slowing down our heart rate and increasing the depth of our breathing, making us feel calm and relaxed, centered, or pleasurably aroused. 

Dr. Van Der Kolk explains that any threat to our safety or social connections triggers changes in the vagus nerve. When something distressing happens, we automatically signal our upset in our facial expressions and tone of voice, which are meant to beckon others to come to our assistance. Our throat gets dry, our voice tense, our heart beats faster, and our respiration becomes more rapid and shallow. In other words, our bodies purposefully signal to others when we are distressed, effectively reaching out to the people who care about us for help.

And here I was desperately trying to hide my symptoms, doing everything I could think of to prevent anyone, even my closest family and friends, from realizing anything was amiss. As I saw what was happening, and clearly saw the war raging within myself that I was by definition always losing, I felt the edifice of my total self-reliance begin to collapse. I couldn’t do it all myself. I couldn’t carry it all myself. Not when I was a child, innocently looking for a way to express my rage. And not even as an adult, trying to achieve and succeed and improve all on my own. 

It was slowly becoming clear that anything that stimulated or awakened my vagus nerve immediately improved my throat symptoms. Both major emotional releases and psychedelic experiences, but also simpler things like breath holding, cool wind in my face, and playing with animals or children. I could often feel in real time my throat muscles tensing or releasing based on what I was doing moment to moment.

With time, I’ve come to see my vagus nerve’s sensitivity and tendency to shut down as a wonderful gift. I’ve realized it is akin to having a real-time barometer of how connected I am to my body and my heart at any given moment. It represents my inner child, prone to hide or run away at the first sign of something scary, but also the source of my deepest innocence and joy. 

When I abandon and dissociate from myself – by overworking, drinking too much coffee, distracting myself with social media, or not saying what I’m feeling – I can feel my throat closing down soon after. It is as if my vagus nerve switches off, protecting me from the pain emanating from my body but also throwing off my intuition, my self-awareness, and most concretely, my ability to speak, swallow, sing, or laugh. 

As soon as I find the courage to reconnect with my body, to bring my feelings back online, it always turns on again, and I have my voice back. It is the greatest blessing to receive such clear and unmistakable communication from my body – I would rather be stopped in my tracks as soon as I fall out of alignment with my authentic self, than spend years in disconnection and look back on my life with regret.

If my story resonated with you, and you’d like to learn about and explore psychosomatic pain and its resolution for yourself, here’s what I recommend:

• Read Dr. John Sarno’s book Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection
• Check out the Psychophysiologic Disorders Association and their self-assessment quiz
• Enroll in Jonny Miller’s cohort-based online program Nervous System Mastery