This is a compilation of all the personal annual reviews I’ve published, as well as other writing I’ve done about my long-term vision and goals. I’ve also included articles I’ve written about how to make such periodic reviews more effective, including annually, mid-year, monthly, and weekly.
This year feels like an especially major milestone, for a few reasons. First, because it officially marks 10 years that Forte Labs has been in business. In June 2013, I left my consulting job with plans to work on independent projects for a couple months before seeking my next one. Little did I know those…
I don’t pay much attention to my investment portfolio, but I watch my meaning portfolio like a hawk. A meaning portfolio is your collection of “meaning assets” – the reasons you get out of bed in the morning. They are the sources from which you derive your sense of purpose, fulfillment, self-worth, and ultimately, happiness….
We recently crossed the astounding milestone of 100,000 copies sold of my book Building a Second Brain! That’s just in the U.S. and UK, and over the next few months, it will go on sale in 20+ other countries and languages around the world. I have to be honest: every goal that I ever imagined
Over the past few weeks, I did something I’ve never done before: I read through all my old journals going back 10 years. I’m not a hardcore journaler, as you can probably tell by the fact that only 7 notebooks cover a full decade of my life. Journaling is more of a crisis intervention tool…
Writing down your open questions is an act of “externalization” – you are taking passing curiosities and interests from your mind and externalizing them into the outside world. That is a first step to making those questions active generators of possibility in your life, but certainly not the last. Once they exist in written form,
In this step-by-step guide, I’ll share the exact process I use for myself and my students to formulate the most powerful open-ended questions possible. In Part 1, I introduced “favorite problems” as a lens through which to filter the immense amount of information we are exposed to every day. A favorite problem is an open-ended
Richard Phillips Feynman was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. Born on the outskirts of New York City in 1918, his work in theoretical physics radically reshaped our understanding of the universe we live in at the most fundamental subatomic levels. When it was all said and done, his biography would
I joined Brandon Laws on the Transform Your Workplace Podcast to discuss how to start your Second Brain, why it’s important to express information, and how a Second Brain can benefit you and your life. We also dived into: The bottleneck of civilization How to capture information Why beautiful notetaking is not the best way A…
When I started my career, all the work I was doing felt like a giant blob labeled “work.” The tasks I was responsible for stretched out before me toward an endless horizon. No matter how hard I worked or how many hours I logged, that horizon never seemed to get any closer. But eventually I…
I first became self-employed in the spring of 2013, after quitting a promising consulting job that I could no longer tolerate (that’s a story for another time). I had no plan and no savings, and for quite a while my only goal was to pay the next month’s rent. Since I didn’t have a clear…
One of the most important milestones for a born-again Christian is to tell your “testimony.” A testimony is your personal story of how you came to the faith. It often includes the problems or challenges you were facing in your life at the time, how lost or confused you felt, the person or experience that…