It doesn’t have to be a huge project. It doesn’t have to be well-funded or prestigious or public. But it does have to draw something out of you so unexpected that it changes your conception of who you are. The kind of creative project I’m talking about creates an unmistakable inflection point in your life….
This month will be the last time I teach a cohort of Building a Second Brain. After teaching 6k graduates in 16 cohorts over 6 years, it’s time to pass the torch to new instructors who will take over from here on out. Here’s why I’m making this decision: At every point in my journey, I’ve been surprised…
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…
About a decade ago, I came across a video on YouTube that profoundly shaped my view of how culture works. Everything Is A Remix by documentary filmmaker Kirby Ferguson argues that all new creative works are built from preexisting ones in an endless process of what he calls “remixing.” From music to movies to video…
Mike St. Pierre invited me to speak at his 2022 Nonprofit Productivity Summit. In less than 25 minutes, we covered… Why I’m not a fan of digital minimalism The simple mindset shift to step out of the information overload crisis How taking notes can have a miraculous impact on you and your career The under-appreciated benefits…
I had the honor of interviewing Dr. Jason Frand, THE personal knowledge management (PKM) pioneer. In 1999, Dr. Jason Frand and Carol Hixon wrote the revolutionary paper ‘Personal Knowledge Management: Who, What, Why, When, Where, How?’. This article coined the term PKM and changed its trajectory forever. In this interview, we discussed: Where the idea for PKM…
I sat down with Sachit Gupta on the Conscious Creators Show to discuss the business of Building a Second Brain. We covered… Why I thought of shutting down my company How I went from solopreneur to a team of 10 The biggest mistakes creators make The lessons I learned from my artist dad The importance…
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…
The future has become so uncertain that goals are now obsolete. The stable, predictable world we grew up in is gone. The idea that you can make a “5-year plan” and execute it one step at a time is laughable. No one knows what’s going to happen in the next 5 years or even the next 5 weeks. Goal-setting was once central to our conception of what it means to navigate the future successfully. But goals can no longer serve as guides to an unfolding future that we have so little control over.
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 one of my favorite problems – teaching – changed over time as my life went through different stages.
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, such as in your notes, you now have a place to begin collecting potential answers to those questions without having to memorize them.
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 question you use to prime your subconscious to notice potential answers in the information you’re consuming.
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