We are so proud to unveil the new generation of Building a Second Brain, our online course on how to leverage the power of information and unlock your full potential.

After 5 years and over 5,000 alumni graduates from over 100 countries, we’ve learned a ton about how to create the ultimate learning experience. 

We looked at many hundreds of pieces of feedback our alumni have shared with us and turned all of it into a massive overhaul for Cohort 14.

As always, our guiding question is “How can we make a course that is impossible to fail?”

I don’t want you to sign up full of excitement and enthusiasm, only to fall off the wagon as soon as it starts rolling. I refuse to add to the list of failed experiments you may have had trying to adopt various notetaking systems.

We’ve assembled a team of over 40 world-class operators and experts all aligned behind one goal:

Making. You. Win.

We are your support team to make sure you succeed spectacularly in your pursuit of this life-changing system we call a Second Brain. Learning is inherently social, and we’re going to give you all the mentoring, coaching, feedback, and accountability you need to decisively achieve your goals in the course. 

My promise to you is that this will be one of the most impactful, proud achievements of your life.

As always, we continue to offer every single student:

    • 5 live sessions taught live by Tiago on the most important pillars of the BASB methodology
    • Lifetime access to the BASB alumni community on the Circle platform
    • Lifetime access to future updates to the curriculum
    • Lifetime membership to the Forte Labs blog, including paywalled articles and series diving into advanced aspects of digital notetaking and knowledge management
    • A core curriculum of 7 lessons, with studio-quality video and broadcast-quality audio
    • Full-quality recordings of all sessions (including mentor sessions) with full captions, transcripts, and when available, chat transcripts
    • Our Second Brain Snapshot comparing your knowledge management skills before and after the course
    • A variety of breakout sessions led by our Alumni Mentors on specific notes apps, kinds of creative work, and approaches to knowledge management
    • Access to our Second Brain Resource Vault, a collection of case studies, templates, guided walkthroughs, and top Q&A answers by Tiago

The Premium Edition additionally includes:

    • Lifetime access to join any future live cohort               
    • Exclusive interviews with writers, entrepreneurs, and other experts on how they capitalize on the value of their knowledge, not available anywhere else
    • 5 weekly Premium-only Q&A calls with Tiago, where he explores the more nuanced implications of Second Brain techniques
    • Advanced tutorials recorded by Tiago on specialized use cases for how he uses his Second Brain
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BASB (as we like to call it) isn’t just a course you sit around and study by yourself. It’s not a huge library of videos you’re somehow supposed to find the time to watch. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach that ignores the stunning diversity in how people think and act.

It’s more like a global conference – I deliver the keynote address and lead the main sessions, but then we break into small groups for more specialized workshops, intimate chats, and even serendipitous encounters with like-minded classmates in the virtual “hallways.”

We are first and foremost a community, and when you join a cohort you become part of that community forever. 

Enrollment for Cohort 14 is now closed.

 

Here are the biggest improvements we’re making to the course (see the version notes for a comprehensive list).

Signed Hardcover Edition of the Book

You will be among the first people in the world to receive a hardcover edition of Tiago’s upcoming book Building a Second Brain. We will send you a signed pre-release copy so you can benefit from the most succinct, distilled version of the BASB methodology we’ve ever released.

Image Building a Second Brain Book

Tech Week

We’ve noticed that many people begin the course without knowing which second-brain app they want to use. So we’ve added a whole week of sessions designed to help you not only make this pivotal decision, but also to learn the features of the app you’ve chosen (and the best ways of capturing content into it) from people who have already mastered it.

We are here to support you in real time as you adopt a second-brain app as an essential component of your creative process, including the subtleties and nuances it might take you years to figure out on your own.

1 Year of Premium Access to Readwise

One of the main challenges that Second Brainers confront is “integrating” their various apps together. There isn’t “one app to rule them all,” and everyone at some point finds the need to get different platforms to work together.

There is one service that stands out in this regard: Readwise, the ultimate second-brain companion. It is designed specifically to help you capture quotes, excerpts, highlights, and comments from various sources (including books, online articles, read-later apps, podcasts, social media, emails, and more) and route all of them to the centralized knowledge repository that is your Second Brain.

We’re going to make it a no-brainer (heh) for you and foot the bill for a full year of premium access to Readwise, so you can explore everything it has to offer risk-free.

Guided Tour of Tiago’s Second Brain

Many of the most common questions we receive are about how Tiago personally uses his Second Brain. So we’re creating the ultimate answer to this question: an in-depth guided tour of all the nooks and crannies of his system of knowledge management across Evernote, Notion, and Obsidian.

This is the first time Tiago is opening the curtains on the most personal systems at the heart of his writing, business, and daily life.

Tiago’s Favorite Book Vault

One of the most powerful uses for a Second Brain is to automatically capture the highlights and comments from ebooks. We’ll share a collection of notes on 20 of the most impactful books on Tiago’s thinking, in exactly the format and style he recommends for digital notetaking.

This collection represents approximately 100 hours of mental effort to surface and summarize the most unusual, life-changing takeaways from 20 unique books, out of the hundreds he’s read over the past decade.

Tiago’s Collection of 4 Ebooks

Beyond the course, our blog contains extensive resources on different use cases and applications for digital notetaking. We’ve collected all of them, both public and paywalled, into a convenient 4-volume set of ebooks.

Image of Tiago Forte's Ebooks

These 4 books represent virtually the entirety of Tiago’s life’s work going back years, all curated and organized in a distraction-free reading environment. We’ll share each book in the open EPUB format, so you can use any ebook reader. And don’t forget – you can use the Readwise app to automatically save any highlights from these ebooks in your own notes.

Alumni Sprints

One of the most frequent requests we receive is to keep the cohort going! There is so much enthusiasm and energy after spending 5 intense weeks together, we’ve decided to roll out “alumni sprints” for the first time ever.

Our Alumni Mentors – previous successful graduates of the course – will lead a series of 1-week “sprints” after the end of the cohort on practical ways to apply what you’ve learned to your projects, goals, and creative challenges. Each Mentor brings a wealth of professional and life experience to the table, allowing you to find the perfect role model for this stage in your journey.

BASB for Your Profession and Creative Medium

Our Alumni Mentors continue to be the backbone of Building a Second Brain. They deliver personalized support to help you implement what you learn using a wide variety of notetaking apps and other tools. 

Besides recommending specific mentor sessions to match your notetaking app of choice, we will now also recommend them based on the kind of work you do. Obviously the needs of writers are different from those of product managers. Designers don’t want the same kinds of content as engineers. Teachers have very different goals than researchers.

We’ve recruited and trained three separate groups to make sure you have the support you need:

  • Moderators will focus on answering questions and pointing out helpful resources on the discussion forum 
  • Mentors will lead weekly calls specialized for certain professions, apps, and use cases
  • Senior Mentors will provide more advanced guidance and lead the Alumni Sprints

The mentor sessions are spread over 7 days of the week and across different time zones, so there will always be an opportunity for you to attend, no matter your schedule. You’ll be able to join as many or as few of them as you want to give you a smaller, more intimate setting to ask questions and get feedback. And of course, you’ll have access to full recordings of all of them indefinitely.

New Case Study: Launching the BASB Book to the World

In every cohort, I share a new case study about how I use my Second Brain to complete a project or reach an important goal in my own life. This time, I’ll take you behind the scenes of how I finished writing, launching, and promoting my first published book.

I’ll show you how I managed relationships with a wide array of editors and collaborators, how we created a customer avatar to guide our marketing efforts, how we secured international publishing deals in 7 countries (and counting) before the book is even released, and much more.

I’ll extract valuable advice from both my mistakes and successes alike for anyone launching a major creative project, showing you how my Second Brain made it possible every step of the way.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.