Is Recall the Second Brain for the AI Era?
We gave four people on our team Recall, an AI knowledge base and Evernote alternative, for three weeks. Here’s our honest verdict.
The Forte Labs Blog
Dedicated to Exploring the Frontier of Modern Productivity
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Introducing the Alumni Mentor Corps
I’m proud to introduce a new program as part of Cohort 2 of The AI Second Brain – the Alumni Mentor Corps. We are seeking a small group of qualified “Alumni Mentors,” successful graduates of the first cohort who want to return to guide and support new (and returning) students. We at Forte Labs are…
The Ultimate Guide to Claude Connectors
In late 2024, Anthropic released a new standard called MCP, which stands for Model Context Protocol. We didn’t know it at the time, but this would end up being a monumental moment in the history of modern AI. MCP would spread and grow to become the universal standard used by all AI platforms as a…
What I’ve Learned From Selling 500,000 Books
I recently reached an incredible milestone – 500,000 books sold across 8 titles. That includes 5 self-published Kindle ebooks, 1 co-authored book, and 2 traditionally published books, all released from 2017 to 2023. Here’s the breakdown of how those sales were distributed: Almost every single thing I believed about bookwriting when I started turned out…
The History Beneath My Feet: Two Years in Valle de Bravo
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…
5 Questions to Help You Navigate Uncertainty
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…
Why PARA Is the Key to the AI Era
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…
Groundbreakers 2: Seeking the Heart of Fear
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…
Introducing The AI Second Brain
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…
How to Create Your Own Luck: 5 Easy Practices
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…
The Difference Between Claude Code and Cowork
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.
My 2025 Annual Review
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!…
Topics I Write About Include
- Practical tools for making your day-to-day work more productive
- Summaries of the most important books for understanding modern knowledge work
- The nature of human attention and the flow state
- How to build a “Second Brain” to organize your ideas outside your head
- Insights from cognitive science we can use to change our behavior
- Practical techniques to enhance creativity
- How to use design principles to create workflows that support our performance
- Modern education and how to best take advantage of online learning resources
- Emotional intelligence and self-awareness as learnable skills
- The role of entrepreneurship and self-employment in the future of work
- Using science-fiction and futurism to predict the future
- New perspectives on traditional productivity topics like goals, habits, and time management
- How to effectively take notes and organize information to enhance your learning
- New ways of thinking about marketing in the digital era
- What personal growth looks like without mysticism and religion
- Project management and how it is evolving alongside new technology
- Deep trends in technology and culture and how they impact business strategy
- The power of curation and writing in carving out a niche and becoming a thought leader
- Exploring the Theory of Constraints and how it applies to knowledge work
- and much more…
Explore Our Articles By Category
Series
- Choosing your Second Brain apps
- The Making of a Bestseller: A Behind-The-Scenes Look at the Creation of Building a Second Brain
- Building a Second Brain Book Updates
- The Complete Guide to Landing a Book Deal
- Progressive Summarization: A Practical Technique for Designing Discoverable Notes
- Just-In-Time Project Management: A Digital-First Framework for Modern Projects
- The Rise of the Full-Stack Freelancer: A Portfolio Approach to Modern Work
- The Theory of Constraints 101: Applying Principles of Flow to Knowledge Work
- MESA: Creating the Ideal Work Experience
- The Untethered Soul: Roadmap of My Personal Growth
- A Quest for Self-Knowledge: From Self-Help to Somatic Healing
- 12 Favorite Problems
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