As I write these words, I am crossing the Drake Passage, one of the most remote places on Earth.

We are crossing from Ushuaia at the southern tip of South America to the spit of land known as the Antarctic Peninsula. It is a barren, featureless expanse that isn’t part of any continent or ocean. Currents circle the globe uninterrupted here, driving enormous waves that can reach 40 feet high. 

This is a liminal space if there ever was one, and I feel the echoes throughout history of all the great navigators and explorers who risked their lives to traverse it. At the same time, I’m doing it on a luxury cruise, exquisitely outfitted for every conceivable comfort, creating a strange tension within me between pain and pleasure, past and present, outer and inner discovery.

I’m taking this opportunity to do my annual review, an introspective ritual I’ve practiced for over 15 years. As I close my eyes and allow my emotions to come to the surface, the main one I feel is fear. 

Not toward the 20-foot swells, howling wind, or frozen icebergs starting to loom silently around us. I’m afraid to begin this yearly ritual of looking inside and telling the truth to myself. I’ve done annual reviews so many times before, proclaimed their value to so many others, and now, committed to spending several years of my life writing a book on the subject.

I feel fear about whether I’ll do it right, whether I’ll discover something worthy, whether I’ll make it genuine or too performative, and whether I’ll be so focused on creating value for others that I forget to create value for myself.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to go deep enough, won’t uncover my true self, won’t see the hard truths I need to see, and most of all, won’t receive the benefits I’ve been so loudly promising to others, which would make me a fraud.

At the same time, I also feel tremendous gratitude. To be here on this once-in-a-lifetime cruise. To have achieved everything I’ve achieved while still young enough to enjoy it. To have the privilege of contemplating my life and work so deeply and with so many degrees of freedom. To have so many sources of information, so many people to draw on, and so many ways to see and be seen.

Fear and gratitude, the polar opposites of emotion, are my guiding lights through this passage, both the literal one and the metaphorical one I’m about to undertake in parallel.

A crossroads at 40

I sense that I am at a crossroads in my life as I turn 40 in May.

I revisited my “Life Goals” recently, a document that represented my first foray into the world of goal-setting. I started it when I was 20, after reading my first self-help book and deciding I needed to start writing down my goals.

What strikes me looking at it now is that every goal had an assigned “by when” date, and not a single one of those dates was later than 2025. I simply couldn’t imagine life after 40 as a 20-year-old. That seemed practically like old age at the time.

I’ve spent the last 15 years whittling away at that list of “life goals.” It’s been a north star, constantly reminding me of who I said I wanted to become. And I can see now that that list is finished. Not because I achieved everything on it, but because my idea of what it means to live a good life has changed.

I know now that achievements themselves don’t bring fulfillment or happiness. You have to have them, because pursuing goals gives your life direction, purpose, challenge, and stakes. But ultimately, the goal of any goal is to feel a certain way. 

Emotions are what we are really after, I believe, and these days I’m putting the specific things I want to feel front and center:

  • To recapture a childlike sense of innocence, of unapologetic joy, at the sheer wonder of existence.
  • To find a new direction and purpose for my business and career that fills me with energy and enthusiasm every day while generating its own financial fuel.
  • To understand and love myself more deeply, and to live from that place every day in a pure, unfiltered expression of my inherent nature.
  • To emerge as a more faithful and loving husband, a more caring and present father, a more courageous and skilled entrepreneur, and a more open and committed friend.
  • To feel a profound sense of alignment, determination, clarity, and confidence in the next era of my life and work.
  • To gain newfound freedom and empowerment towards my body and health.

The first thing I do every year as I begin my review is to choose a motto, slogan, theme, or catchphrase, to guide the review itself. This year that motto is “Begin again.”

As I turn 40, it feels like I’m beginning the second half of my life. Statistically, as I reach the approximate halfway point of my biological existence. But also ontologically, as I retire my previous approach to goal-setting and embrace a new philosophy of unfolding into the truest expression of who I’m meant to be.

2024 Wins

Let’s start with the wins!

Book sales

My book Building a Second Brain has been the brightest spot in the business, surpassing 320,000 sales this year in 14 countries and languages so far. It continues to sell about 10,000 copies per month worldwide, which is an incredible pace for any book to sustain and bodes well for the future. 

If we can maintain this pace, we should reach 500,000 copies sold in around 18 months.. I’m crossing my fingers that it reaches that milestone!

We also launched the book in Spanish, and I did a week-long promotional tour in Mexico, which led directly to us finding the town we ended up moving to later in the year. So that’s a pretty unexpected win!

My second traditionally published book, The PARA Method, also continues to sell decently, reaching 25,000 copies sold to date, or 1,400 copies per month on average.

Second Brain Membership

We successfully launched the Second Brain Membership publicly last spring, which I’m very proud of. Previously it had been a private community only for alumni of our live cohorts, but as we retired those, I realized it was time for a perennial, ongoing community where anyone learning about PKM from any source could find a vibrant network of peers to explore alongside.

We now offer weekly and monthly events, ranging from guided weekly reviews with our facilitators, to Q&As with me, to guest workshops on a variety of relevant topics. This year we also launched a 12-month “curriculum” where we’ll tackle one core PKM concept each month, which I’m already seeing the impact of.

We have about 550 active members and are making $22,000 per month in subscriptions. This membership is now our flagship offering within the Second Brain ecosystem, and we have some very exciting new features we plan on adding to it in 2025.

Second Brain Membership Curriculum

Wholesome Weekend #2

We hosted the second annual retreat of the entrepreneurial mastermind I started in 2023, which was one of the absolute highlights of the year for me. There is nothing like spending immersive quality time with a close circle of dear friends and respected peers all generously sharing their expertise across book-writing, YouTube, strategy, AI, online education, and many other fields.

I plan on continuing these retreats indefinitely, as they are deeply meaningful and enlivening. Bringing interesting people together for moments of connection and intimacy feels close to my true purpose, which is all the more surprising since I’ve always seen myself as an introvert.

Wholesome Weekend Group Picture

The first in-person Second Brain Summit

This was a longtime dream of mine and resulted in so many memorable moments, conversations, and new relationships I will treasure for a long time to come. I wrote about the experience in depth in Reflections on Our First In-Person Second Brain Summit, including pictures and a highlight video.

The financial model for a large-scale conference didn’t work out for us, and in general, doesn’t really fit with our business selling education and information products. I think in the future we will likely stick to virtual summits, and perhaps branch out into immersive, in-person “intensives” that bring together much smaller groups for training and personal development instead.

Tiago speaking on stage at the Second Brain Summit

YouTube growth

Our YouTube channel grew by 62,000 subscribers in 2024, to 288,000 total. This was 38% less growth than we saw in 2023, and I’m scaling back my ambitions here as a result. For a while, I thought we had a chance of becoming one of those “hypergrowth” channels that grow to millions of subscribers within a year or two, but the reality is I’m not willing or interested in obsessing over YouTube to the degree that requires. 

The channel is already big enough to do what I need it to do—distribute my ideas to new audiences, test which ones have the most promise, and cultivate readers for my future books.

YouTube Subscriber Graph

The newsletter

We added 22,000 subscribers to our newsletter last year, which was 39% less than in 2023. The newsletter has almost completely flatlined in its growth, which is honestly incredible to me given that our entire content strategy is centered on directing people to sign up for it. 

Many other creators I’ve talked to are seeing similar trends, and I think we’re clearly going through a major upheaval in how online attention flows, driven largely by AI. This is definitely one of the reasons our finances weakened this year, and I don’t know quite what to do about it yet.

Email Subscriber Graph

The Annual Review program

I taught a live course on how to do an annual review for the 7th time in December and January, this time radically expanding it from a 3-day workshop to a 6-week intensive program. I had just spent the previous 6 months deeply immersed in researching the topic for my book, and this was an incredible chance to test all the new ideas and techniques I’d developed on real live humans.

We welcomed 150 students from all over the world to this cohort, and the effects were transformational, beyond my wildest dreams, which has completely reinvigorated my motivation to turn all that material into the definitive book on the subject. That book will be my main focus for 2025, and I can’t wait to share it with the world.

The Annual Review program is now available as a self-paced edition if you want to make 2025 your most intentional year yet.

Here are a few other pictures of my favorite work-related moments in 2024:

Personal milestones and moving to Mexico

This was the first year of my 12-year career that I felt I maintained work-life balance. 

I didn’t overwork, didn’t extend myself, and didn’t sacrifice my present happiness for a future outcome. I can confidently say I’ve found my natural rhythm and learned how to protect the things that truly matter, like my peace of mind and family time. I did a great job respecting my boundaries, preserving my energy, following my needs and wants, honoring my talents and gifts, and giving myself permission to spend my days in joy.

A big reason for this was our move to Mexico, which I’m realizing with each passing month completely transformed the trajectory of our lives.

My wife and I have long struggled to keep our household clean and organized. Every year it was a sore spot, as we seemed to drown under an ever-accumulating pile of unwanted junk, house projects, and chores. It felt hopeless, like we would never find a way to turn it around. And I noticed so many negative impacts on our health, happiness, and family harmony.

We decided to move to Mexico in April 2024 and did so in August. Now that we’ve been here almost 6 months, it’s shocking to me how many of our values and intentions naturally fell into place as a result:

  • We live in a smaller, simpler house with far fewer possessions, which makes it much easier to keep them organized.
  • We can afford full-time help here (which costs about $140 per week, a standard rate), which means we have someone spending 40 hours every week doing all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and watching the kids when needed.
  • We seem to do much better as renters, with a responsive, handy landlord right down the street who can fix almost anything himself and knows all the local vendors and service providers.
  • We’ve had the intention to spend more time in nature and visit more interesting places with the kids, and that’s also happened naturally as we explored our new mountain town and the surrounding forests.
  • We’ve long wanted to eat more home-cooked meals, and our “muchacha” now cooks all our meals and cleans up afterward. She used to work in a restaurant, and every day I’m blown away by the thoughtfulness and nutritiousness of her cooking.
  • We’ve wanted to be more social and spend more time with friends, and living in Mexico and its hyperactive social scene pretty much takes care of that entirely.
  • We’ve wanted to be more mindful and present with each other as a family and spend less time on screens, which is facilitated by weekly power outages that mean we all have to entertain each other.

It’s just astonishing to me that a single decision, which we didn’t even have on our radar when 2024 began, would completely change our lives just 8 months later. 

Yet in a way, we had also spent years laying the groundwork for it: through our previous experience living in Mexico in 2019, our long-time study of Spanish, pivoting the business to asynchronous products, and getting really clear with ourselves about what wasn’t working about our life in Long Beach, so that when the right opportunity arose, we were ready for it.

This isn’t to say that everything is perfect. Far from it! In a way, resolving one series of problems with our dramatic move just created a whole new set of problems, which is how life goes:

  • Vigorous exercise is more difficult in our small town since there aren’t convenient gyms or group classes, and running on mountain trails feels iffy.
  • We are much further away from our friends and family back home, which means we’ll see them less often, which is painful.
  • Our personal income and lifestyle have started to be constrained by the business’ weakness, which has made it difficult to afford to maintain two households at the same time.
  • Living in Mexico, doing everything in Spanish, and in a small town brings an array of challenges, from navigating Mexican bureaucracy, to figuring out how to find essential products and services when nothing is listed online, to acclimating ourselves and our kids to a new school and social environment.
  • Leaving Long Beach after 4.5 years, it was painful to admit to ourselves that we hadn’t succeeded in creating a strong community of friends there. Partly because so much of our social calendar was taken up with family commitments, but also because we just didn’t make an effort corresponding to our values.

2024 Disappointments

Just as important as celebrating the wins is commemorating the disappointments. I want to absorb whatever lessons these harsh experiences were trying to teach me, rather than sweeping them under the rug. There is no teacher like failure.

The business finances

It was a strange paradox of a year for Forte Labs. 

We reached some huge milestones – $10 million in lifetime revenue and $3 million in lifetime profit – but at the same time, it was the worst year ever for the business financially. We lost $230,000 for the year, a negative 20% profit margin, which was the first time we’ve been in the red in 11 years in business.

As I reflect on why this happened, the proximate causes are clear:

  • We hosted our first in-person conference, but overestimated how many people would attend and underestimated how much it would cost, and therefore lost about $270,000 on the event.
  • Several of our major projects didn’t pan out, such as an initiative to offer B2B corporate training, selling a “certification” to consultants and coaches based on our IP, and launching our self-paced courses in Spanish and Portuguese.
  • I waited too long to shrink the team after it became clear the business would continue to decline in the wake of ending our live cohorts 18 months ago.
  • Our top-of-funnel audience growth via the blog, the newsletter, and YouTube decelerated and plateaued, for a variety of reasons, some of them under my control and some not.
  • Our main lines of business now – self-paced courses, subscription membership, sponsorships, and books – are slow-moving sources of revenue that are spread out over time, rather than making money upfront and all at once like we’re used to with cohorts.

It’s hard to admit these missteps and oversights to myself. As I wrote them out in my notebook, I felt a series of uncomfortable emotions welling up inside me, bringing tears to my eyes: grief, disappointment, guilt, helplessness. It was painful to realize that I’ve somewhat lost faith in myself over the last couple of years of declining fortunes in the business.

Will I ever be able to come up with a hit product like the BASB cohorts again? Will I be able to create something people truly want? Am I capable of finding the right path and figuring out the next chapter?

I think what makes these questions painful isn’t the uncertainty or external consequences they entail, but the break in connection with myself they reveal. Not trusting myself means I can’t trust the journey, can’t trust my experience, can’t trust my future. It contracts the long time horizon that I normally like to focus on into a foreshortened present, fixated on survival.

Yet, now that I’ve written these words, and let a few hours pass gazing at monumental agglomerations of snow and ice out on the deck of our ship, I can already begin to see a few ways of reframing this “story.”

First, I can see that I took a lot of risks and made a lot of investments last year:

  • I risked hosting a full-fledged conference when that wasn’t something Internet creators normally do. I expect those relationships to bear fruit for years to come.
  • I risked selling the proposal for a book when the idea was only amorphous and half-formed, on a timeless practice that will only gain relevance as AI sweeps the world.
  • I risked bringing my most respected peers together for a weekend mastermind retreat in Sonoma, which wasn’t designed to make money but will also bear fruit for years to come.
  • I risked moving my family to Mexico and changing every aspect of our lives in pursuit of a more grounded, culturally connected future for them.

Second, I can see that 2024 was a grand experiment. I was testing the hypothesis that I could run the business without thinking about profitability at all. None of my decisions about which projects to take on were based on their ability to make money.

Framed as an experiment, I can say that the results were exceedingly clear: not prioritizing profitability reliably leads to a lack of profitability! In a funny way, it’s reassuring to know that. And now I can feel grateful that we have the financial reserves to conduct such an experiment without running the business off a cliff.

Third, our financial results indicate in unmistakable terms that the current business model, which was so perfectly suited to the pandemic era, is no longer working. Times have changed, the digital landscape has evolved, and the evidence couldn’t be clearer that we need to evolve with it.

In particular, it’s become very clear that growing an audience isn’t the panacea it once was. Over the last five years, our follower count across all platforms has grown 46x, from 13,000 in March 2020 to 624,000 today. It’s long been an unquestioned article of faith among online entrepreneurs that if you grow a sizable following, the money will naturally come, which is why a majority of my time has always been spent growing that following. But that maxim is breaking down now – it’s entirely possible to have legions of followers, but no corresponding business on the backend.

All this means that the main theme in the business for me right now is “searching”: searching for a new direction, for a new true north, for a winning product and strategy, and for a new identity in the aftermath of the BASB era. 2024 was a year of retrenchment, of retreat, of hibernation, of creating a solid foundation among our existing lines of business, and now I know it’s time to emerge from the winter.

I’ve also published a video sharing 7 insights from 2024 that reshaped how I think about business, life, and growth:

2025 Projects, Questions, and Intentions

Now it’s time to look forward – to the goals, plans, and intentions my team and I are committing to for 2025.

The theme I’ve chosen for this year is The Year of Profitability, as our financial results were clearly the biggest weakness last year. Among other things, this means we are:

  • Making profitability the main filter we use to decide which projects to take on
  • Splitting our efforts approximately 50/50 between creating new products and improving our existing ones
  • Keeping the team lean and expenses low, with no new hires this year
  • Returning to live cohort courses, but in a way that’s more sustainable for me
  • Continuing to invest in the Second Brain Membership as our flagship program, and having all roads lead to it from across our ecosystem

I recently sat down with our CFO to identify three numbers that will be our guiding lights this year:

  • To break even on a monthly basis, we need to make $67,000 per month
  • To reach a 30% net margin, we need to make $105,000 per month
  • To limit our labor costs to 40% of our revenue, we need to make $115,000 per month

Rather than waiting until the end of the year to check on these numbers, I’m going to be keeping a close eye on them every month.

With these criteria in mind, here are the main projects we’ve decided to move forward with.

2025 Projects

Launch an official BASB Notion template

After years of requests, we’ve decided to finally create an official Second Brain Notion template! Notion has continued to prove itself as the preeminent knowledge management platform in the world and is the only one to have truly broken out into the mainstream culture.

We are gathering early feedback from our Second Brain members as well as outside Notion experts to come up with a template that is simple and maintains your focus on what matters, which is putting your ideas to use.

Write the Annual Review book

I sold the proposal for my next book in April 2024, and have spent the 9 months since intensively researching every aspect of year-end reviews. I’ve collected and reviewed hundreds of sources, from historical precedents for this practice going back thousands of years, to psychology studies proving the value of self-reflection, to surprising stats indicating that setting New Year’s Resolutions is actually very effective…as long as you do it a certain way.

I officially concluded the “research” portion of the book in early February, and am now working on the manuscript, which needs to be more or less finished by summer 2025, with rounds of editing continuing into the fall. 

If all goes according to plan, I’ll open preorders for my new book next spring, and it will be released around November 2026. From everything I’ve researched and discovered so far, this practice is going to change many lives, and I can’t wait to publish the definitive guide for it.

If you don’t want to wait so long, check out the self-paced edition of my Annual Review program, which includes many of the ideas and techniques that will be featured in the book.   

Produce more implementation-focused YouTube videos

Although our YouTube channel is technically an ongoing “area of responsibility” rather than a one-time project, we are making some changes to how we make videos this year.

Specifically, I’m noticing that the rapid proliferation of AI is starting to commodify many kinds of content. Now that you can hit “auto-summarize” and get a step-by-step summary of a video in seconds, without even having to watch it, the value of the typical “listicle-style” video is declining. We’re going to switch to more implementation-centric, “coaching” style videos, as I think viewers will increasingly want to know the “how,” not just the “what.”

We will also be publishing a range of annual-review-related videos this year to start building interest and momentum for the release of my book in a little less than two years.

Launch our own app and upgrade the Second Brain Membership

It’s been so gratifying to watch the Second Brain Membership flower over the last year since we launched it to the public in spring 2024. Up until then, it had been a private community only for alumni of our cohorts, which meant that it went completely dark for months at a time.

Once we decided to stop offering live cohorts, it made sense to turn that community into an always-on program that runs all year long.

This year I’m excited to share that we are upgrading to Circle Plus, which will enable a range of new features in our community for communication, collaboration, and engagement. The one I’m most excited about is that we are getting our own app! That means instead of asking people to “join our Circle community” (who the heck knows what that means?!) our call to action will be to “Download our app” on Apple’s App Store or the Google Play store.

This move will make the Second Brain community a more prominent and accessible part of our members’ digital lives – a place they can go to whenever they have something to share or something they want to learn.

Debut an official BASB certification

My book Building a Second Brain continues to sell around 10,000 copies each month worldwide, which has produced a constant stream of inquiries and requests for coaching, consulting, or contract work related to Personal Knowledge Management, from individuals to large companies. But as a tiny team, we’re not set up to service those needs.

That’s why we’ve decided this year to pursue creating an official BASB certification, which will qualify graduates of our courses in the knowledge and skills needed to help others build a Second Brain. I’m hoping this will kick off a thriving marketplace of practitioners and service providers as an extension of our products and books.

Create a new AI cohort-based course

Since early 2023 I’ve been contemplating whether and how I could teach a course on AI. The need was overwhelming and clear, but where I had much more doubt was as to my role. 

What knowledge or perspective did I uniquely have to offer in the rapidly evolving AI space? What kinds of skills could I teach people that would remain relevant beyond the next model release? How could I leverage my background, experience, network, and skills into a program that was impactful while also being sustainable?

I’ve wrestled with these kinds of questions a lot over the last couple of years, and although the pace of innovation hasn’t slowed down, I’m finally starting to catch glimpses of some answers.

My point of view on AI is that it is not primarily a technological challenge – it is a historical, cultural, psychological, ontological, epistemological, societal, educational, governmental, intra and interpersonal, economic, and ultimately spiritual revolution that is going to change everything about our world.

I believe that adapting to AI isn’t just a matter of learning some tactics and tools – it will require a deep and fundamental reimagining of who we are, what our purpose is as humans, what it means to live a productive and fulfilling life, and how we conceive of our place in the universe. In other words, it is a holistic, overarching transformation, not a narrow technical one.

Taking on that perspective, I can begin to see how my way of thinking can help people. I can draw on my knowledge of history to surface lessons from past technological revolutions, my facility with moving between cultures to borrow ideas and ways of being, and my propensity to think holistically and in terms of principles to give people firm guidance amidst a roiling sea of change.

I don’t know exactly what this new course will look like, but I do know it will seek to give people fundamental training in the mindset and skills they need to thrive in the AI era. More to come soon!

Host an Annual Review immersive

For the last 7 years, we’ve taught a live virtual program guiding people through completing a year-end review. In 2025, we’re taking that program on the road! Toward the end of the year, we’ll invite a small group of people to our new hometown, Valle de Bravo, Mexico, to participate in a multi-day, immersive experience.

The details are still to be determined, but I intend to make it the most impactful, transformational experience possible, bringing together everything I’ve learned and discovered about how to make this yearly ritual a paradigm-shifting milestone in people’s lives.

We will also of course continue to offer the online program so as many people as possible have a chance to get support in their review process.

If you want to stay updated on any of these projects, subscribe to our newsletter below:

Open questions

Here are the open questions I’m holding for this year:

1. How can I make irreversible decisions to preserve my willpower?

As I wrote in my 2024 year-in-review, I was astounded at how the single decision to move our family to Mexico led to multiple other intentions seemingly naturally falling into place. I can still hardly believe it, and I want to continue looking for other examples where such a principle might also hold.

Instead of having to create a whole project to individually pursue each goal I have, what are other moment-in-time decisions I can make or actions I can take that allow me to feed two (or more) birds with one scone?

2. What experiences do I want to have with Caio and Delia over the next 10–15 years, while they’re small?

One of the most surprising aspects of becoming a parent is that from the moment the kids are born, you are presented with a complete timeline of their lives, and therefore yours.

You know at approximately what age they’ll begin walking, talking, and going to school. You know when they’ll be in each grade, what kinds of travel and experiences they’ll be ready for, and when they’ll start having friends and wanting to hang out with them instead of you. 

You know when they’re likely to leave home, which means suddenly you can predict the window in which you’ll probably spend 90% of all the time you will ever spend with them, which is before the age of 18.

My kids are 2 and 4, which means they’ll finish elementary school in 2031/2033, middle school in 2034/2036, high school in 2038/2040, and college in 2042/2044. I’ll be 46 when Caio finishes elementary school in 2031, 53 when he finishes high school in 2038, and 57 when he graduates from college in 2042. 

I don’t know why, but these dates completely blow my mind! 2042 is only 17 years away – I remember 17 years ago like it was yesterday! I graduated college myself that year, which means I am already halfway between my own college graduation and my son’s. 

Human lifespans keep getting longer, but the window of time we have to spend most intensively with our kids stays the same. Which means that, as a percentage of our lives, our time with our kids is actually shrinking in a way. “Childrearing” is therefore increasingly no longer a lifelong activity, but a discrete stage of life preceded and followed by many other stages.

All of this makes me want to be very intentional about how we spend those childhood years. I know I want to expose them to as many sports, musical instruments, forms of art, cultural experiences, social situations, spiritually transcendent moments, etc., as I possibly can. 

I want to immerse them long-term in at least two cultures – Mexico and Brazil – so they feel deeply rooted and connected to that aspect of their heritage. I know I want to go on many great adventures with them, having precious moments of depth and intimacy, discovering their limits, inventing new things, seeking new frontiers, and tasting everything life has to offer.

I feel far more commitment and determination around these intentions than any business goal, honestly, which leads me to conclude that all my decisions in the business need to be geared to creating the right conditions for what I consider these much more important moments with my family.

3. What does my jealousy of other people tell me is missing in my life?

One of my favorite indicators of what is missing from my life is what makes me jealous of others.

These days I feel an intense jealousy toward highly fit, middle-aged dads. I don’t know how they do it. It’s not primarily the outward markers of abs and a slim figure I’m jealous of, but the internal sense of dignity and self-respect they must feel when they look in the mirror. That is what I’m after, and exercise is going to be the main focus for my personal goals this year.

I’ve already noticed that my attitude toward exercise has to be different living in a rural town versus a dense suburb. It’s not about how many times I can hit the gym, or how many intensive exercise classes I attend. It’s about taking advantage of built-in opportunities to move, from hiking in the mountains we’re surrounded by, to meeting up with other dads in the afternoon for paddleball, to fitting in quick bodyweight workouts whenever I can.

4. What would it look like to pivot BASB toward AI?

When generative AI first exploded into the mainstream a few years ago, I assumed it was the end of the Second Brain methodology I had spent years developing. If anyone could sign up for an AI chatbot that “knew” the entire Internet, why would they spend the time and effort to curate and build their own personal knowledge base?

But as time passes, I’m beginning to think that maybe AI is not a replacement for the Second Brain, but its true fulfillment. 

People still need to read, take notes, learn, and express themselves even with the aid of AI tools. The “context” you bring to any interaction with AI matters more than ever. There are still many reasons it’s worth storing your favorite ideas, stories, insights, and memories in a private place that only you control.

Maybe, just possibly, AI is going to make the process of building a Second Brain much easier and more accessible to more people, which means the demand for my work might go up instead of down. Maybe I was early to the rise of intelligent software, and am now poised to take advantage of my reputation and experience and teach people how to use it.

This line of thinking is sparking a lot of new ideas for me, which I will be exploring in the coming year.

Here are other open questions I don’t even have the beginnings of an answer to, but I notice fill me with a sense of curiosity and wonder:

  1. How can I integrate more anger work into my life and work?
  2. How could I explore and understand my relationship to food this year?
  3. What is the bottleneck in my thinking or behavior that is leading to poor financial results in the business?
  4. What is the business that gives me more of the life I want now?
  5. How can we bring service into our family life?
  6. What is a hobby I can be passionate about, that’s hands-on, that I can do with Caio in Valle?
  7. What is the kind of work that our new home and lifestyle are best suited to?
  8. How can I balance book-writing with all the new initiatives and projects I want to take on this year
  9. How can we have other people generate new ideas using their energy and enthusiasm, instead of continuing to rely on me
  10. What role does the blog play now that I’m not writing as much, and our web traffic is declining
  11. How do we make our community bottom-up instead of top-down?
  12. What would it look like to make Forte Labs a platform for others?
  13. How can I be the kind of leader and manager who inspires people to greatness without me needing to be there?

How I want to spend 2025

As the years pass, I’m increasingly finding that it’s more useful to define exactly how I want to spend my days, as a substitute for goals. Goals have the tendency to require a lot of suffering and sacrifice in the short term, which paradoxically means the more ambitious they are, the worse my life becomes!

As I turn 40 in a few months, I’m not interested in sacrificing current pleasure in order to arrive at a far-off destination anymore. I did that in my 20s so that I would have the life I have now! 

Here are the ways I’ve decided I want to spend my time in 2025, to bring me the happiness, peace, and joy I’ve worked so hard for:

  1. Visiting various gardens, parks, and museums around Valle with the kids—being outside or exploring new places with Lauren and the kids, combining quality family time with exploration, discovery, learning, and fun in a physical setting.
  2. Playing with the kids at home—being physical and wrestling with them, especially in contrast to watching TV.
  3. Spending time in person, in deeply immersive and intentional spaces, with fellow entrepreneurs and creators I know and trust and want to get to know better—helping me feel seen and accepted and connecting on a more personal level, rather than only through my work.
  4. Meeting and connecting with people who are passionate about the same ideas and possibilities, like at my conference, meetups, or elsewhere—I feel like such people are “on the same wavelength” and resonate with how I see the world.
  5. Deep reading and writing for many hours at a time with no other commitments for the day—getting to this level of flow is one of the most deeply gratifying experiences, soothing my soul while also making me proud of the progress I’ve made.
  6. Working on long-term, large-scale, highly novel creative projects—these make me feel like I’m not wasting my time with a bunch of trivial, forgettable projects, but something that matters and that expands who I am and what I’m capable of.
  7. Immersing myself in unusual, novel, complex environments that fully absorb my senses, pull me into the present, and teach me things about myself and the world. For example, museums, new countries and cities, nature, and even online—these environments make me feel embodied and expansive, versus stuck in rumination in my head.
  8. In deep, intimate conversations with people I find interesting, receptive, and self-aware—whether dinners with other couples, coffees with new acquaintances, or spontaneous encounters with strangers in public—these conversations feel profound, curiosity-provoking, moving, like I’m discovering someone else while also discovering aspects of myself at the same time.

If anything I’ve written here resonates with you and you see a way we could work together, don’t hesitate to reach out at [email protected].

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