The Forte Labs Blog

Dedicated to Exploring the Frontier of Modern Productivity

North Star Podcast: Tiago Forte on the Future of Online Education

Check out my super in-depth, 2-hour conversation with my co-instructor David Perell below. We talk about what we think the future of online education will look like, how creativity and productivity are evolving in the modern world, and what we’ve learned from teaching over 1,000 students through our online courses, Building a Second Brain and…

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The Forte Labs Community

I’ve never really written publicly about “community.” It’s not because I don’t think it’s important. It’s because I think it’s all-important. Almost too important to address directly. I believe community has to emerge. Like creativity, it can’t be directly created – only cultivated. Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of watching a…

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The Forte Academy 8 Pillars of Education

Our approach to education is based on 8 pillars. They are our guiding principles in designing every aspect of the learning experience for our students: 1. Deep trust Learning cannot happen without trust. Community cannot happen without trust. Growth cannot happen without trust. Our students demand an environment of deep trust, and we will do…

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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 наткнулся на мудрую черепаху…

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Introducing Second Brain Meetups

I’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 “Second Brain” – 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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Interview with Billy Broas

This is an interview with my online course marketing coach Billy Broas. It is an in-depth discussion on what really matters in the marketing of online courses, contrary to what most programs promise (10 easy steps to a profitable online course!). He built and sold his own course Homebrew Academy, and now helps other course…

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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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Second Brain Case Study: Using Digital Notes for Stand-Up Comedy

In this wide-ranging conversation, I spoke with Michael Skiba, who participated in the very first cohort of Building a Second Brain in January 2017. He talks about how he’s continued using and developing his Second Brain over that time. Our conversation includes: How he uses his digital notes to maintain a side gig as a…

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Live Q&A – 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

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

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