What 18 Years of Annual Reviews Taught Me: A Live Q&A
I went live to answer your questions about my new book, Life in Perspective. Here are my best answers in writing, plus the full replay.
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Sold a Story: How We Failed to Teach Kids to Read
A friend who works in educational policy recently sent me a podcast, and after listening, I think it is one of the most remarkable pieces of content I’ve ever come across. It’s called Sold a Story (Apple Podcasts, Spotify). The series is produced by a small team at American Public Media, led by journalist Emily…
Introducing AI Second Brain Meetups
AI Second Brain Meetups are officially on! Between October 8 and November 28, 2026, local in-person groups are meeting in cities around the world. This is for anyone who is building what we call a Second Brain: a trusted system for curating your knowledge and enhancing your productivity and creativity. We’ve been talking about it…
What I’ve Learned from 4 Years of Hosting Mastermind Retreats
On January 8, 2023, I sent the following message in a WhatsApp group chat: This message emerged from my annual review that year, completed just a couple days before, in which I decided I needed more community in my life after years of working in isolation during the pandemic. To my utter surprise, about 10…
The AI Second Brain Is Back: What’s New for Cohort 2
In March, we launched the inaugural cohort of The AI Second Brain (AISB), a new immersive education program years in the making. It marked my return to teaching after three years of intensive research and experimentation with AI. I felt like an explorer returning from the wild frontier with a beacon of hope in hand…
Finding Alpha: What’s Worth Consuming in the Age of AI
On August 31, 1976, a fund manager named John Bogle launched a product that made him the laughing stock of Wall Street. His new fund made no attempt to beat the market. It simply bought every stock in the S&P 500 and held on. There were no star stock pickers, no fancy research department, no…
Operation Gallavant: An Overlanding Journey Through Latin America
I’m incredibly excited to inaugurate a new project I’m calling Operation Gallavant: a multi-month family road trip we’re planning on taking down the length of Central and South America. This is something I’ve wanted to do for many years. Ever since I was a child, we’d regularly visit my Brazilian family via a 12-hour flight…
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.
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…
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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