If you had a Second Brain...
How much more organized, effective, calm, and creative could you be?
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Tiago Forte
@fortelabs
The Second Brain Guy | Learn how to build one for yourself: buildingasecondbrain.com | Writing: fortelabs.com/blog | Videos: basb.io/youtube
Tiago Forte’s Tweets
Verum ipsum factum
"We only know what we make"
– philosopher Giambattista Vico
There's so much wisdom in this short sentence
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Distilling information is a cognitively expensive task
It forces you to make decisions about what's important and what isn't
Treat it as an expense
You don't want to take it on before you have to
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What makes good writing?
Details!
Vivid, juicy, specific, striking, colorful details
This is what most writing online lacks
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I was tired of forgetting 98% of books.
I was sad to recall <10 things about my dad.
I was sick of having meetings only to learn nothing.
So I built a digital brain, where I store memories/info from my life.
I break down my process on this 20-min epi of The Crazy Ones 👇
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Your Second Brain is a project execution environment
It's where you go to get stuff done
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Here's when I do each part of the CODE Method:
• Capture: in the moment
• Organize: during my weekly review
• Distill: as little as possible as late as possible
• Express: as often as I can
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“Consistently good enough” is better than “occasionally great”
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10 years ago the people I most admired were those who worked the hardest and attracted the most attention
Now I admire those who work the least and give their attention to others
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This also means each “generation” is closer and closer together – only 2-3 years apart now
But this means that they achieve fame with less real life experience and wisdom
Which makes them more susceptible to burnout and giving up
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A pattern I’ve noticed after 10 years of running an online business:
Each generation of online creators is younger than the one before, because they can build larger audiences faster using more viral social platforms
Cont.
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P.S. I just realized we added over 10,000 subscribers just last month alone, which was more than the TOTAL number of subscribers for the first 7 YEARS
Here's the very first one I ever sent, on 9/28/2013, for your entertainment
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We're just getting started and have SO MUCH good stuff coming out soon
Join us here to be part of the next chapter:
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I also want to give a special shoutout to , whose approach to email marketing we've adopted wholesale
Including: Mastering ConvertKit course, Palladio template builder, RightMessage customization engine, and overall philosophy of personalization & automation
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Special credit goes to our head of marketing
She joined us in Jan. 2022 and pulled us out of a long slump by relentlessly improving our email funnel, adding more than 50,000 subscribers in the last year 👇
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100,000 subscribers to the Forte Labs Newsletter! 🎉
I think this was the hardest accomplishment of my life. Basically a decade of continuous effort since the first issue in 2013
Thank you to everyone who’s been part of the journey🙏
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What's your weirdest obsession that you'd share with the world if you knew you couldn't fail?
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Making a decision is fundamentally emotional
Yet, we've mostly lost access to what we actually want
Our logical mind readily serves up more positive and negative aspects for each of the options available
Often, all we have to do is listen to the feeling in our body
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The way you do one thing is the way you do everything
The way you approach your productivity, your career is likely the way you approach your relationships, too
Whatever is blocking you in one area is probably also limiting you elsewhere in your life
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Introverts (like me) like to distill information by highlighting the best parts of a note
Extroverts (like my wife) like to distill information by telling a story and listening to what resonates with the other person
Both are effective
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The world is changing so fast
As new subjects rise up and others fade away
So do experts rise up and fade away
The world's expert on ChatGPT has only a couple of months of experience
The days of slowly "paying your dues" are over
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I didn't write my book from scratch
No author does
Mine was assembled from approx. 300 intermediate packets
Most of them blog posts and tweets that I knew resonated with my audience
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Are your parents still together?
- yes62.9%
- no25.8%
- show results11.3%
1,803 votesFinal results
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Building a Second Brain now available for pre-order in Dutch!
It comes out Feb. 28
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The most definitive proof I’ve become a father and a manager:
After over a decade of having all notifications on my phone silenced by default…
I’m rejoining the world of “always ring”
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Last live session of BASB I’m teaching ever. Hitting me right in the feels
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Little known fact: extroverts feed on the energy of introverts, not just vice versa
They see us standing by ourselves at parties and can't wait to come over and absorb our life force
Source: my wife
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✨ Big news: After 2 years of private beta and hundreds of hours of engineering work…
Previously, teaching on Maven was invite-only. That changes today.
Now, anyone can use ’s course builder!
Check it out—it’s free to get started.
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If you're curious which books impacted me the most...
Check out my list of 10 little-known books that changed my life
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I used to read over 50 books a year
But hardly remembered anything I read
Then I made a rule that I had to write down at least 10 bullet points with takeaways from a book before I could start the next
That helped me read less but learn more
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What’s the best book you’ve ever read on how to “get organized”?
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Making yourself feel bad is ironically a way to make yourself feel better
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Here's a cool exercise my wife taught me:
Take an hour and go to the park or anywhere else in nature
Then only do what you *feel like* doing
This is so hard to do as adults
Because we need to justify and have a logical reason for anything we do all the time
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My wife and I have the best childcare situation imaginable, yet most days we feel like we’re just barely hanging on
Parents, how do you do it?
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My creative process:
1. Write 1,000 tweets
2. Turn the best 100 tweets into blog posts
3. Turn the best 10 blog posts into ebooks
4. Turn the single best ebook into a published book
5. Repeat
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What is a self-care practice so powerful it *gives* time, instead of taking time?
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Other people are other people
What you can control is the relationship you have with yourself
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Reality doesn't come in preformed chunks that we can't control
Reality is just a chaotic flow of information
You can pick and choose anything you want from it
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