I’ve been living with my family in a Mexican mountain town called Valle de Bravo for almost two years now, and I’ve found it to be one of the most special, unique places I’ve ever spent any length of time. The natural environment, the culture, the people, and the perspectives it offers have taught me…
In the early 2010s, the gaming startup Tiny Speck was a darling of the tech industry. The company had raised $17 million. The launch of its first game, Glitch, was covered by international media, including The Guardian and The New York Times. Within months of launching, it had tens of thousands of active players. But…
I recently did an experiment. I allowed files and folders to accumulate on my computer for a month – just let them pile up without organizing anything. By the end of that month, I had 222 individual items scattered across my desktop and downloads folder. The accumulated files were genuinely diverse… Financial documents: personal tax…
Six years ago, I attended a week-long course in Northern California called Groundbreakers. Facilitated by Joe Hudson and his wife, Tara, it was one of the most impactful experiences of my life. The experience I had there reshaped my relationship with the “voice in my head,” that is, with my own inner monologue. It helped…
In early 2023, after teaching 6,000 students over six years, I abruptly decided to stop teaching our Building a Second Brain cohorts. Even at that early stage, with the release of the first version of ChatGPT just a couple months earlier, it was clear to me the impact this new technology would have. Almost from…
You’re scrolling LinkedIn during a coffee break. A course creator you know just hit $100K in their first cohort. Another founder you know just closed a funding round. And a peer you met at a workshop got invited to speak at the conference you’ve been attending for years. “They’re so lucky,” you think, closing the…
Anthropic now offers two tools that can BOTH control a web browser AND access your local files. But they work very differently. Here’s the simplest way to think about it: Cowork is the easy option. It lives right inside the Claude desktop app — no setup, no installation, just start chatting and it gets to work.
At the start of 2025, I dubbed this “The Year of Profitability,” and now that it’s come to a close, I can say we successfully fulfilled that intention. We ended the year with 2.15M in gross revenue, and $650,000 in net profit, for a 30% gross margin. That’s our second-best year ever as a business!…
I’m incredibly proud to share news that’s been two years in the making: my next book is coming on November 3, 2026! It’s called Life in Perspective, and it represents the culmination of a reflective practice I’ve been refining since 2008: the annual review. If you’ve read Building a Second Brain or The PARA Method,…
In the summer of 2005, when I was 20 years old, I sat down and wrote one of my first personal goals: “Hold a position in the Associated Student Government of Saddleback College at start of Fall semester (August 22, 2005).” I had just dropped out of college on the East Coast after burning through…
My wife Lauren and I met at a co-working space in San Francisco in our mid-twenties. I was working an entry-level position at a creative consulting agency, at the bottom of the pyramid. Lauren was making $15/hour at an arts nonprofit, living rent-free with her aunt. We both saw no pathway to climb in our…
A new, powerful definition of intelligence is emerging out of the AI field: “boundary intelligence.” I first came across it in this excellent piece To Know Is To Stage by Venkatesh Rao, which appropriately, was co-authored by an LLM. Let me step back and explain what boundary intelligence means (mixing my own words with paraphrasing…
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