My wife Lauren and I met at a co-working space in San Francisco in our mid-twenties. I was working an entry-level position at a creative consulting agency, at the bottom of the pyramid. Lauren was making $15/hour at an arts nonprofit, living rent-free with her aunt. We both saw no pathway to climb in our…
When I began writing my next book more than a year ago, on the topic of “annual life reviews,” I assumed that the practice was a fairly recent invention. Maybe it came from the self-help movement of the 1970s. Or from corporate performance reviews. At most, I figured it might trace back to Ben Franklin…
I’m thrilled to share a special guest post by my wife, Lauren Valdez. Lauren approaches productivity in a way that’s refreshingly different from my digital-first philosophy. She’s deeply rooted in the tactile and intentional, favoring physical tools like journals over digital systems. Journaling has been her cornerstone for reflection, decision-making, and creativity. I’m excited for…
Two books I read recently helped me tremendously to understand what’s happening now with Artificial Intelligence: Prediction Machines and Power and Prediction (affiliate links) by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. The authors are economists and professors at the University of Toronto, one of the leading institutions studying the economic impacts of AI. Their…
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…
Ryder Caroll, the creator of the Bullet Journal, invited me to discuss all things personal knowledge management (PKM) and Building a Second Brain. We covered: First vs Second Brain What a Second Brain looks like How to use a notebook as a Second Brain Goals vs Projects The Second Brain and reflection The future of…
One of my favorite things about open questions is that they can be freely borrowed anywhere you encounter them. In my course Building a Second Brain, I lead students through an exercise to identify their own favorite problems. They can then serve as a filter for what to capture in their notes, a guide for…
Your favorite problems will likely stay consistent over many years, but that doesn’t mean they can’t evolve. I’ve found that in most cases I never actually arrive at a final, definitive answer to a question. Instead, the question changes as I learn more. Let me illustrate this with a case study. I’ll show you how
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
Information is the fundamental building block of everything we do. But we often find ourselves mentally juggling and straining to recall things. I’ve found that the most successful people are always sharpening their memory power — so that their ideas become more concrete and new connections are easily revealed. I call it the “CODE” method:…
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…