This is an introduction to Building a Second Brain, the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. How many brilliant ideas have you had and forgotten? How many insights have you failed to take action on? How much useful advice have you slowly forgotten as the years have passed? We…
It has now been 10 months since my first published book Building a Second Brain was released in June 2022. And over 4 years since I kicked off the project in January 2019. The book has been an astounding success by any measure. Here are some of the milestones I’m most proud of…
We recently crossed the astounding milestone of 100,000 copies sold of my book Building a Second Brain! That’s just in the U.S. and UK, and over the next few months, it will go on sale in 20+ other countries and languages around the world. I have to be honest: every goal that I ever imagined for this book has been fulfilled.
Our digital world is constantly colliding and overlapping with the digital worlds of others. No one is an island, and that is especially true in our hyperconnected age where information can be so easily shared and intermixed. I’ve long advocated for individuals to create a personal system of knowledge management to help them skillfully navigate…
Imagine for a moment the perfect organizational system. A system that told you exactly where to put every piece of information in your life – every document, file, note, agenda, outline, and bit of research – and exactly where to find it when you needed it.
Over the past few weeks, we completed our first rigorous cost-cutting exercise in the 10 years Forte Labs has been in business. Cost-cutting is a strange subject to talk about as a creator-led business. We’re not supposed to worry about those pesky annoyances called “expenses” or “profitability.” We’re on the Internet, and the Internet is…
This research project started with a simple question that has crossed every author’s mind: How can I tell which books are successful? TV shows have Nielsen ratings, music albums have the Billboard Top 100, and movies regularly publicize their box office earnings, but not books. Bestseller lists like The New York Times are notoriously subjective, while more objective ones like Amazon and The Wall Street Journal only provide rankings, not raw numbers.
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….
The modern era didn’t start with the invention of the car, the television, or the internet. It was the arrival of the humble filing cabinet – a simple metal box with drawers that held pieces of paper on their edge – that changed everything. As Craig Robertson argues in his book The Filing Cabinet: A…
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…
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