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….
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…
For years I’ve heard about a phenomenon called intergenerational trauma – the idea that the impact of traumatic events can be passed down from one generation to the next. I have to admit I never believed it was a real thing. I had only heard about it in very woo-woo circles in San Francisco, and…
(While Having Our First Child During a Global Pandemic) Writing and publishing my book Building a Second Brain was by far the longest and hardest project I’ve ever completed. From the first call with the agent (who would eventually represent me) in January 2019 until June 2022 when the book was released to the world,…
One book has impacted me more than any other over the past 10 years: The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer.
I first read it in 2014 about a year after becoming self-employed. The first rush of excitement at my newfound freedom had waned, and I was beginning to feel the turbulence of the uncertain freelance world.
By Praxis Fellow FRANK ANAYA Every day you journal, you’re bringing fresh soil into your idea garden. But if you never look back at what you wrote, you’re losing the opportunity to till that soil, to work it and see what grows. Experts like Tim Ferriss and Julia Cameron say that the process of journaling is…
In order to get where you’re going, you need to know where you came from. When it comes to learning, you need a way to measure your progress toward your goal. How will you know whether you learned it? How will you compare your performance before and after? What concretely will you be able to…
As part of my year-end review, I always review my favorite reading of the year. These usually tend to be “long-form” online essays diving deep into interesting ideas. Revisiting my notes on these articles serves three functions: Helps me absorb their ideas more deeply Serves as a reminder to think about how I can use…
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…
I recently read and took notes on You Need a Budget (YNAB-Affiliate Link), a popular book on personal finance and budgeting (with accompanying software for managing budgets) by Jesse Mecham. My interest in this book is three-fold: I’m terrible at budgeting and need help I want to borrow principles and methods for managing money to help people…
A new framework for continuous learning One of the key challenges of living and working in the future will be continuous learning and experimentation. I’d like to propose a framework for this type of learning that is both feasible and focused on the individual: experimental habit formation. I believe it can help resolve one of…
By Tiago Forte The holy grail of self-improvement is a framework for self-directed experimentation and learning that can be used by the average person. The key question such a framework would have to answer is “How do people change?” In this post, I will suggest possible answers to this question by looking at the recent…
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