Tiago’s 2022 Annual Review: From Mid-Life Crisis to Reinvention

Releasing my book to the world has been the adventure of a lifetime, but also the challenge of a lifetime. It took everything I had, and the cost was substantial. For more than 3 years I’ve had to focus relentlessly on a single goal, which required me to aggressively ignore any interest, curiosity, or side quest no matter how tantalizing it seemed. For someone who is naturally divergent and curious like me, such single-minded focus is painful. 

As 2022 ends and I start envisioning what I want my life to look like in 2023, I know it’s time for a fundamental shift in my priorities. The current season of my life has lasted more than 4 years. I’m long overdue for a change.

Changing identities

What my series of mid-life crises has taught me is that identities are malleable and temporary.

An identity is an information construct – a loose collection of beliefs, values, viewpoints, priorities, goals, and principles for living held together by a story about who you are. Humans cannot survive psychologically without an identity. It’s the narrative glue that gives meaning to the chaotic storms of electrical activity cascading through our brains.

Like changing clothes as the weather turns, identities serve you for one situation but not necessarily others. When your identity wears out and no longer serves you, it’s time to find a new one. As the saying goes, the identity that got you here won’t get you to where you want to go next.

At certain liminal moments of unpredictable change, such as during a mid-life crisis, the superstructure of our identity becomes especially fluid. There’s a brief window in which we have the chance to shake it loose and build another. 

It all begins with gathering the data you need to understand what life is asking of you: your symptoms, your learnings, your desires, and your questions. 

Over the past few weeks, through extensive journaling, deep conversations with people close to me, and revisiting my photos, notes, accomplishments, failures, and memories from the past year, I came up with my own.

Symptoms – What pains am I experiencing?

An identity is a solution to a set of challenges – surviving, finding love, obtaining food and shelter, feeling a sense of purpose. That’s why when inventing a new one, I like to start with the most acute pains I’m currently experiencing – what I call my “symptoms.”

My goal is to drill down into the abstract, vague complaints I have about life and identify exactly what isn’t working for me right now. My goal is to pinpoint the pain I’m feeling in the most objective, specific possible terms.

Here are mine, grouped by major area of life:

Health

• A feeling of dependence on coffee, like I’m not myself and can’t get excited without it
• Constant sugar cravings, especially in the afternoon or in the evening after dinner
• Tension and tightness in my lower back, hips, and hamstrings from sitting so much
• Not having healthy, delicious food available at home when we’re hungry, leading to too many meals ordered in
• Excess body fat and a sense of defeat that I’ll never be able to get rid of it

Purpose

• A feeling in the pit of my stomach, usually just as I’m falling asleep or waking up, of being lost or purposeless
• A lack of motivation to pursue things I’m usually motivated by (writing, focusing, strategizing, reading, researching, planning, working in general)

Balance

• A feeling of anxiety at the end of the workday with no particular cause
• Not spending enough time with friends, and lacking connection to them
• Feeling tired and listless in the afternoon even though I don’t work past 3 pm
• Checking my phone and social media too often and feeling addicted to it
• Difficulty mentally transitioning away from work at the end of the day

Family

• A hunger for more rest and unstructured time with family
• Ximena (our dog) not getting enough attention and exercise, leading to her being neurotic and hyperactive
• Our house being too disorganized and messy, making it difficult to rest and relax in the evenings
• Not connecting with Lauren in the evenings, and feeling distant from her as a result

Notice that many or even most of these problems have direct, known solutions. None of them are unprecedented and there are many helpful books and how-to articles that will give me useful advice. In the past, I would immediately dive in and begin coming up with practical solutions to each one of them. And there’s a time for that. 

But here’s the thing about problems that I think most people don’t realize: you can’t solve them one at a time. Looking at the list above, if I were to adopt just one new habit or make one change for each symptom I want to address, that would be 16 new habits and lifestyle changes. It’s hard enough to change one habit, let alone 16 of them!

You have to address unwanted symptoms by addressing the root cause, asking questions like:

• What is the source of the pattern that’s playing out across the different areas of my life?
• What is the bottleneck in my thinking or behavior that is leading to all the other negative side effects?
• What kind of life am I living that is producing these side effects?
• Who am I being at my core that is manifesting these symptoms?

As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned that before jumping to solutions, there’s a lot of value in stepping back and looking at the complete picture these symptoms are painting for me. 

Using that lens, the picture I see is of a man who is overworked, pushing himself too hard on too many fronts, and using a combination of social media, sugary junk food, strong coffee, and distraction to salve the pain that causes. I see someone who is so tired and anxious that he doesn’t have the capacity to do the things he knows would make him less tired and anxious. I see someone who deeply wants to spend more and better time with his growing family, but doesn’t have clear enough boundaries between work and life to create the necessary space.

At the same time, I understand why these tradeoffs were made: to bring to completion the most important project of my life at all costs. Now I’m seeing the costs. Most of all, I feel tremendous sympathy and compassion for this man. And this is the key to the identity change that comes next: it has to come from a place of complete self-acceptance and self-love, not a desire to change someone who is bad or wrong.

As I move on to the next part of my annual review, I’m asking, “What kind of person could I become who would naturally and automatically make the changes needed to reduce my suffering?”

Learnings – What have I learned?

My next step is to summarize my most important lessons of the year. I want to thoroughly document the wisdom I gained to make sure it gets carried forward to inform my decisions about next year.

These are my top 10 lessons for 2022:

1. Don’t communicate emotionally charged messages via email or any other text medium; have a phone call

Communicating via text is efficient in a lot of situations, but I had to learn more than once this year that it isn’t ideal for messages with an emotional component. Sending emotionally charged messages in written form usually leads to the recipient making the most dramatic and negative possible interpretation. If there’s emotions involved, make a phone call.

2. No one creates better content or marketing in our niche than us – trust that we know what we’re doing and there are no big secrets out there

I always assume that we still have a lot to learn, but several times this year I found that when it comes to creating content or marketing in our niche of PKM, we are the experts. I’m resolving to trust our instincts on this front more next year, instead of relying on outside authorities, which will allow us to save money and move faster.

3. I am a Wisdom Worker, not a Knowledge Worker

Early in my career, I was an Information Worker – I spent most of my time taking in, organizing, editing, and manipulating information for others to act on. Later on, I became a Knowledge Worker, conveying tacit knowledge I’d begun to gather from experience. Now I increasingly see myself as a Wisdom Worker, letting go of the implementation details almost completely and instead helping others feel through uncertainty and fear to their truth.

4. There is no greater source of leverage in the world than ideas

Looking back, I realize part of my motivation for pursuing a traditional publishing deal for my book was that I lost faith in the power of ideas on their own. I felt it wasn’t enough to publish interesting ideas online; I needed to push them to their full potential and into a format that could spread to every nook and cranny of the world. But now that the book is out and I’m considering what to do next, I’m returning to the realization that ideas are indeed the greatest source of leverage in the world, and I want to spend more time with them.

5. It’s ok to change my mind

I worked all year long with a business coach for the first time, and through those conversations realized that I have a strong aversion to changing my mind about anything. I have an internal narrative that changing my mind means I’m inconsistent, flaky, and therefore can’t be trusted. While it’s sometimes valuable to persist stubbornly toward a goal, I’ve also increasingly seen the negative side effects of this attitude, such as sticking to decisions that make no sense or maintaining strategies that aren’t bearing fruit. In 2023, I’m embracing the fluidity and freedom to change my mind freely.

6. The CEO is the ceiling to the company

I came across this quote in my journals from a book I read years ago, and it instantly struck me once again. Now that we have a team, I can see clearly that the company is an extension of my psychology as the founder – all my strengths and knowledge get amplified and extended, but so do my weaknesses and limitations. My #1 job is to proactively work to uncover my blindspots because otherwise, they become permanent fixtures of the organization I’m trying to lead.

7. With great leaders, you don’t need a lot of their time

This phrase was uttered to me in passing last year as part of a couple’s retreat my wife and I attended. Seeing it scrawled in my notes, I know it’s time to really let it sink in. In the past, I demonstrated my commitment to my course, my projects, and my business through raw, brute force. I spent more time and exerted more effort than anyone else as proof of my commitment. But as we welcomed our second child, this attitude needs to give way to another: that the measure of my success as a leader is how minimal my intervention can be. I’m committed to stepping back and allowing others to make their own decisions and thus find their own voice as leaders.

8. My purpose is to bring people together over ideas, in inspired communities

Part of my reason for diving deep into my past journaling was to find evidence of my essential nature – what has always been true about me? And when I looked at the most fulfilling, most meaningful experiences of my life, they all had to do with bringing people together in inspired communities centered around the power and beauty of ideas. I want to return to this more purposefully next year.

9. I don’t play zero-sum games

Another common pattern from my past was that any time I was faced with a competitive, zero-sum game – a situation in which someone else had to lose in order for me to win, or vice versa – I chose to opt out of that game completely. At heart, I’m not a competitor. I’m a cooperator, and I’m drawn to environments where everyone can win. As the PKM space heats up and competitors flood the market, I’m going to look for the new, more exciting game I can play next.

10. It’s time to give up teaching the BASB course

This was the hardest one for me to acknowledge, and allowing the possibility to even surface in my mind required working through some uncomfortable emotions with my coach. 

Teaching Building a Second Brain has been the defining activity of my career and my life since that first small cohort in late 2016. I’ve given it everything I have – every ounce of energy, every good idea, every creative solution – but 16 cohorts are enough, and now it’s time to let a new generation of leaders take the reins.

In 2022, we made a series of changes that set the stage for this transition:

• Centralized all our programs on Circle so the community is at the core of what we do
• Changed from a one-time cohort model to a community membership model with year-round events
• Increased from 2 to 4 cohorts per year, with each live session delivered twice in different time zones
• Reduced the price of joining a cohort from $1,499 to $749
• Launched Foundation, the first-ever self-paced version of BASB
• Turned on “always on” purchasing for both Foundation and the Membership so people can join anytime

These changes effectively quadruple the number of opportunities to take our program over the course of a year – from 2 to 4 cohorts, with each one delivered twice in parallel. Participating in a cohort has also become far more accessible, with the price of entry dropping 50% from $1,499 to $749. 

For people who want to learn the fundamentals of the BASB method at their own pace, the Foundation self-paced course is even more accessible at $499. And for those who want to go deeper, the Membership now includes weekly workshops and other events throughout the year led by our most experienced members.

This is the new BASB ecosystem that I hope gives everyone a chance to build a Second Brain at a pace, price, and format that best suits their needs: