Two books I read recently helped me tremendously to understand what’s happening now with Artificial Intelligence: Prediction Machines and Power and Prediction (affiliate links) by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. The authors are economists and professors at the University of Toronto, one of the leading institutions studying the economic impacts of AI. Their…
Imagine a product manager sitting down with his team on a Monday morning to plan the next week. The main item on the agenda is the decision of whether to create a mobile app for their e-commerce website. The team quickly gets excited about the idea, imagining all the possibilities it could entail. They propose…
The conventional approach to intelligence has been to rely only on our own personal mental capabilities. We tend to assume that intelligence resides only in our skulls, the same way the computation of a computer is sealed inside its aluminum case. But in her book The Extended Mind (affiliate link) Annie Murphy Paul argues otherwise:…
I recently sat down to attempt something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time: using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically create a high-quality book summary. As I wrote in my Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books, writing book summaries is one of the very best ways I’ve found to absorb an author’s ideas deeply into…
One of the most common questions I’ve received since the release of Building a Second Brain has been how I used my own Second Brain to write it. There is absolutely no way I could have done this without my Second Brain. I honestly cannot imagine how anyone undertakes an endeavor of this magnitude without some kind of external content management system to depend on.
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.