Building a Second Brain

The Creative Process Workshop

We’ve developed a live, in-person creative writing workshop called The Creative Process. First prototyped in New York City, we’ve since delivered it in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Arizona, with many more cities around the world planned for the coming year. As the name suggests, this isn’t just a workshop to help you write better….

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Zen Courses Podcast With Janelle Allen

I recently joinedย Janelle Allen on her podcast to talk about “organizing” our learning for better productivity. She is the founder of Zen Courses, where she helps business owners apply learning & marketing strategies to create profitable online courses that change lives. Here’s some of the things we talked about: 5:08 My entrepreneurial journey 9:17 The…

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Building a Second Brain at Knowledge Conf 2019 (Russian)

This is a presentation by Andrei Aleksandrov at Knowledge Conf 2019, in which he summarizes my Progressive Summarization technique for highlighting passages while reading for easy retrieval. It is in Russian without subtitles. Here is the automatically generated transcript in Russian (anyone willing to translate it to English for me?): 07:40 ะฝะฐั‚ะบะฝัƒะปัั ะฝะฐ ะผัƒะดั€ัƒัŽ ั‡ะตั€ะตะฟะฐั…ัƒ…

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Introducing Second Brain Meetups

Iโ€™m proud to announce the official launch of Second Brain Meetups, a network of local meetup groups for anyone interested in using technology to build a โ€œSecond Brainโ€ โ€“ a trusted system for saving your most valuable ideas, insights, and knowledge. These groups are meant to connect people with like-minded peers in their local city…

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Organizing Ideas Using Machine Learning

I have a confession: my Second Brain hasn’t been working very well lately. The problem is the “Resources” stack, one of the four main buckets that are part of my PARA organizational system. It has ballooned to more than 100 individual notebooks, and I can’t even remember which ones exist. Which means the decision of…

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Topic Discovery Using Machine Learning

By guest contributor Ergest Xheblati Recently I was asked by Tiago to see if I could do something interesting with his Instapaper article collection stored on Evernote. I had recently completed a similar project at work where I looked at product descriptions and generated tags from them. I thought I could do something similar for…

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Live Q&A โ€“ Building a Second Brain Live Cohort

This is a recording of a live question & answer session for the upcoming cohort of my online course Building a Second Brain. I run these cohorts 3-4 times per year, taking a group of students through the entire course via weekly Zoom calls and Slack office hours. Enter your email address here to be…

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Announcing the Second Brain Week of Reflection

Iโ€™m very proud to announce the Second Brain Week of Reflection, a 5-day immersive seminar dedicated to exploring the deeper implications of โ€œbuilding a second brain” for individuals and society. From May 17โ€“23, 2020, Lauren and I will host 10 people at the Chateau dโ€™Orion, a guest house and cultural center at the foot of…

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Venture Stories Podcast with Erik Torenberg

I recently joined Erik Torenberg on the Venture Stories podcast. We had a very wide-ranging conversation including: Why productivity is not an end in and of itself Why content creation (not just consumption) is integral to your career How to better deal with the 11 hours of media a day that the average person consumes…

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