The Forte Labs Blog

Dedicated to Exploring the Frontier of Modern Productivity

Anatomy of a $20k Webinar

Last month I partnered with Jeff Sauer of Jeffalytics on my first “joint venture” webinar. I’d wanted to try this format for a long time, as I’d heard it described as the “ultimate online marketing tactic.” I partnered with Jeff because I noticed that a huge proportion of my audience are freelancers, entrepreneurs, or have aspirations…

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A Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind

In 2006, inventor Ray Kurzweil released the book The Singularity Is Near (Amazon Affiliate Link), with a bold prediction that by the year 2049 we’d enter a “technological singularity.” Around that time, he argued, the pace of improvement in technology would become a runaway phenomenon that would transform all aspects of human civilization. The word “singularity”…

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Visualizing the Theory of Constraints with Mini Metro

By James Stuber @uberstuber Alex the Plant Manager has returned home from a hectic day at the factory. Hoping to unwind, he decides to try a new game. Alex has loved trains since childhood, so he is delighted when he discovers Mini Metro. The clean, minimalist game promises to be a nice reprieve from his…

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Why I’m Leaving Medium

I’ve been writing on Medium for three and a half years. In that time, I’ve written somewhere north of 100,000 words, in more than 50 long-form essays, read by many tens of thousands of people. I’m a “Top Writer” in two of the most popular categories on the site — Productivity and Reading — and have more than 8,000…

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Reading 2.0, Part I

At the last Town Hall, our Head Coach Corey Padnos facilitated an online workshop on speed-reading, called Reading 2.0. Here’s the full 60-minute recording: Part I was about SPEED. Corey led us through several exercises and drills designed to test and improve the speed of our reading, which you can watch short recaps of below….

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Trekonomics: The Economics of Post-Scarcity

I recently finished listening to the audiobook of Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek (Amazon Affiliate Link), by Manu Saadia. It was probably the most fun I’ve ever had thinking about economics, due to the outstanding premise: What if we treated the Star Trek universe as if it was real, and used it to draw…

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Praxis Anti-Book Club Instructions

Here are the step-by-step instructions for the Anti-Book Club for easy reference. And so you can run your own Anti-Book Club if you want. I’ll update this article with future improvements as I discover them. The Premise Start by reading my original article introducing the concept and why it’s important. Here’s a short version: Books…

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Wardley Mapping Workshop

On March 7th, 2018, our Head of Ops Benjamin Mosior facilitated a virtual workshop on Wardley Mapping, a value-chain mapping technique that has taken the strategy world by storm in recent years. First developed by Simon Wardley to navigate the emerging cloud computing industry, it’s now exploded into dozens of different industries and applications. Here…

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Second Brain Case Study: How I Write Long-Form Blog Posts

One of the most common questions I receive is how I write long-form blog posts. And especially how I write them frequently, at high quality, drawing on numerous sources. It’s taken me a long time to be able to make the process explicit. The Building a Second Brain course is basically my long-form writing workflow…

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Praxis Anti-Book Club version 2.0

A couple months ago we launched the first Anti-Book Club. It was a phenomenal success by my criteria, with 41 books on productivity, creativity, learning, and related topics summarized over the course of just a month. More importantly, the feedback was almost unanimously positive. It ranged from “interesting experiment” to “I’ll never read any other…

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My interview on the Buddhist Geeks Podcast

Listen to my conversation with Vincent Horn on the Buddhist Geeks podcast: We have a great conversation about what meditation and mindfulness have taught me about the future of work, what productivity means in the age of the network, and other topics like limiting paradigms, environment design, multitasking, and reframing threats as opportunities.

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