Tiago Forte
@fortelabs
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The Second Brain Guy | Learn how to build one: https://t.co/vPhQg4soKp | Writing: https://t.co/x2KgFyuwlk | Videos: https://t.co/7LdtbIvWHw
Joined September 2013
The wait is over—the official Second Brain @NotionHQ Template is here. It’s built to make organizing your digital life effortless, with:. • The PARA Method so everything has a place.• A quick capture inbox to save ideas in seconds.• Simple task and project management to keep.
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This is very random, but the painting on the wall behind Grimes is by my dad, Wayne Forte. His trademark signature is in the upper right corner.
Grimes discusses the decline of religion in TIME interview. “I do think the death of religion is very bad. I think killing God was a mistake.”
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I saw a TikTok a few weeks ago that genuinely changed my life. Here’s the gist:. At every moment in a conversation, you always have only two choices:. 1. Ask something about what they just said. 2. Relate what they just said to something about yourself. Doing less of option #2 in.
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I almost invested in Coinbase in 2013 except I had no money and no connections and had never heard of bitcoin or coinbase.
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I’m looking for TV series in the “competence porn” genre:. • characters use logic & show prowess.• problems are complex & multi-faceted.• no magical thinking/magical powers.• skills are acquired thru years of practice.• no one stumbles inexplicably when chased by a monster.
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I cannot overemphasize how much everything is made up and there are no rules.
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I think AI is going to massively widen the cognitive divide. Those who already know how to think clearly, logically, and critically have gained immense leverage to do so at unimaginable scales. For those who don't already have that cognitive capacity, it's going to be harder than.
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I KNEW IT!. It takes real energy to move from one “brain state” to another, which explains what I think is one of the most under-appreciated facts in all productivity:. That the mere order in which you complete tasks is profoundly important. A sequence like Task A => Task B =>.
Switching brain state costs energy. "Stable" brain states exist in local energy minima, so there is an energy barrier to overcome to switch from one state to another. Nice summary of relevant papers and work by @DaniSBassett here: .
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Our financial advisor recently sent us details on starting a 529 college savings account for our son. Using standard projections from today’s costs, the proposal calculated that his 4-year college degree will cost $738,000. All we have to do is save $1,600/mo for 18 years. WTF
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We received an offer to translate my book into a language called Marathi. I wasn’t sure it would be worth it for some obscure Indian dialect…. Then I looked it up – 90 million native speakers, the 10th most of any language on Earth 🤯. India is unfathomably huge.
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Wanted: notetaking app with. The simplest 30% of Roam’s features.The aesthetics of Notion.The ubiquity of Evernote.The ease of capturing of Things.The free form drawing of OneNote. Wrapped in a stable, mature business model and mainstream-oriented brand.
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This is the most strikingly original and creative sci-fi book I’ve read in a very long time (and I’ve read more than 120 of them). It makes me realize most modern sci-fi is rooted in the 70s. We’re just rehashing the same tired tropes. This one makes full use of many ideas that
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I got a book deal!!! 🧠🔥🧠🔥🧠🔥🧠🔥. I couldn't be happier to announce that I've signed a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster @simonschuster for my book Building a Second Brain!. Here's the full story:.
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Honestly, we've lost more good people to venture capital than ayahuasca.
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1/ This article from @guardian on "South Korea’s millionaire, celebrity schoolteachers" is the perfect case study of what's going to happen in online education around the world. As usual, the future is already here, in Asia.
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I upgraded to ChatGPT Pro for $200/month last week. I thought it would give me slightly better answers, but instead o1-pro feels like a whole new product. The model gets curious, makes intuitive leaps, extrapolates based on reasonable assumptions, and fills in helpful details I.
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My parents just told me they thought every weekly email I send is only for them, because I address it “hey folks.” They got on my email list a few years ago and from that point forward thought I wrote them an update every week about what I’m up to 😂😂😂.
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1/ You can tell what is constraining someone in life by who they judge.
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Organizing my business, personal life, and creative work in .@NotionHQ is one of the most powerful things I've ever done. Here’s how I do it + get my free Notion template (thread).
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It’s alive!!! 300 pages with my advice on digital notetaking. Coming to bookstores in 9 months
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Digital Notetakers!. Here's a 3-step method & ChatGPT prompt to help you beat information overload:. • Find your pressing problems.• Decide on your Open Questions.• Never miss crucial information again. Want my Info Filter Framework?. Like & reply with 🧠—I’ll DM it to you
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Don’t trust anyone over 35 giving any kind of life advice if they don’t have kids.
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End of year = Annual Review time. I can summarize the essence of my Annual Reviews as:. Discovering what you truly want for your life, again and again, in more subtle shades and deeper layers each time. Doing an Annual Review is simple - here’s a few questions to get you going:.
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The American dream is to buy a home. The Latino dream is to buy your parents a home.
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Thinking of starting my own fund where I pay founders to not start new note-taking apps.
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This paragraph by @kevin2kelly might have the highest density of travel-related wisdom I’ve ever encountered. Holy crap
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The most important paragraph I've ever read on modern education. I'm stunned. Via @soenke_ahrens
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In my experience, if you complete just ONE meaningful, concrete piece of work each day, no matter how small, you are in the top 10% of most productive people. If that piece of work is in any way evergreen and reusable, easily top 1%.
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I think I’m about to make the hardest pivot from knowledge management into sexuality as a source of personal empowerment. My most surprising discovery in personal dev’t recently has been that the groin is literally the source of our personal power. Sacral chakra is the most.
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I hate blogs that remove publication dates. Yes I understand you think your writing is 100% evergreen but you’re robbing me of one of the most important pieces of contextual information. Terribly unfriendly to the reader.
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Manuscript is complete! . 60,000 words, more than a year of writing. Now let the editing begin.
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Seeing my son’s instant fascination with large trucks and construction vehicles almost from birth has changed my mind: there’s no way this is socially conditioned. Some things are hardwired into the genes.
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How to launch a product with zero risk in 5 steps:. 1. Publish content.2. Build an email list.3. Ask them what they want.4. Build it.5. Sell it to them.
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Most people starting out are worried about quality, when they should focus on quantity. Publish something every week for a year, and then you'll just start having insight into what you should be creating, in what form, how, and why.
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Average entry level salary in the U.S.: $40,153. Average revenue generated per 1k YouTube views: $4. 10 million views gets you an entry level salary.
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Ladies and gentlemen…. My book Building a Second Brain is a Wall Street Journal national bestseller!. It’s time for the world to take note
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How to get 80% of the value of a Second Brain with 20% of the effort:. 1. Save notes from the books you read.2. Write summaries of those books.
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The busier life gets, the more of your time needs to be spent doing "meta-work" (the work of defining what needs to be done, how to do it, by when, and by who). Most people do the opposite and drop the meta-work, which is like trying to find your destination by driving very fast.
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Everything you want to achieve in life requires you to get used to its opposite . If you want to be smart, you have to get used to feeling dumb. If you want to be strong, you have to get used to feeling weak. If you want to be wealthy, you have to get used to feeling poor.
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It's slowly dawning on me that for nerds, thinking is a form of entertainment. Thus they don't want it to be simpler, more actionable, more impactful. They want it to be as elaborate and impressive as possible. Thus they prefer thinking tools that are baroque and complex.
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I don't know of a higher purpose to life than working on interesting projects with cool people.
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As far as I can tell, breathwork is 3x more effective than meditation. After 2 weeks of daily 10m breathing exercises I feel about the same level of benefits (less anxiety, more peace of mind) as 6 weeks of daily 15m meditation. I use the Wim Hof guided breathing video below 👇.
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I highly recommend having Secret Long-Distance Mentors. These are inspiring ppl who you’ve decided in your mind are your mentors, without telling them which would be awkward . I have about 15 of them most of whom I’ve never met in person.
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Being too open-minded is very stressful. Anything could be true! Anyone could be right! At any time or place! It's too many possibilities. You have to be a little closed-minded to have any peace.
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I'm now paying $200/mo for ChatGPT Pro, $100/mo for Claude Max, and $20/mo for NotebookLM. And that $320/mo gives me the productivity equivalent of many hundreds of people. What a time to be alive.
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Update on the notetaking hype cycle. -@tana_inc rapidly becoming the new "it" app.-@obsdmd being dethroned by even cooler kids.-@RoamResearch leaving trough since it can't go any lower.-@NotionHQ going mainstream via NYC billboards.-@evernote surfing plateau as always
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Pro tip: edit your writing when you’re tired because that is much closer to your readers’ state of mind.
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The secret to marketing, and I’m 100% serious, is to not do it very well. That way you are charmingly, endearingly incompetent and constantly build up reserves of trust and goodwill from all the value you’re leaving on the table.
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For anyone in Bangalore 🇮🇳, you can pick up my book at The Bookworm on Church Street!
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Notetaking helps you master the past. Meditation helps you master the present. Productivity helps you master the future. The modern trifecta of self-realization.
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If you can't write, make an outline.If you can't outline, make a list.If you can't list, summarize sources.If you can't summarize, highlight passages.If you can't highlight, just read.If you can't read, rest.
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Reading a book these days is like an act of war against the attention-industrial complex.
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What's the most underrated productivity tool?. IMO, a simple calendar.
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Procrastination is a silent message from our brains that:. 1. We don't have enough clarity to complete a task.2. It just doesn't serve a deep enough purpose.
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Does anyone else have a spouse that leaves things like this? Found both of these just now and I’m losing my mind
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Great use case for ChatGPT Vision: transcribing handwritten journal entries (or any other piece of handwriting) into digital text. I first tried Apple iOS' built-in text recognition, but it only recognized about half of the words as text at all.Then I tried the Readwise app,
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If you want to destroy someone’s creativity, remove all their constraints.
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Every single aspect of life gets easier when you know how to write well. It’s the closest thing to a life cheat code.
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A much better idea than a shorter working day or 4-day workweek is a shorter working year. With 1-3 months off. Optimizes for peak intensity instead of consistency. Basically what the Europeans figured out a long time ago.
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When I see beautifully polished Notion dashboards. I always think of how the energy needed to make it look perfect could have been used to move a project forward . There are diminishing returns to making something look nice.
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Am I missing something or is Clubhouse like the worst thing ever.
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It’s not your job to work more. It's your job to create systems that work more for you.
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Every internet-related market is in the first .1% of its ultimate potential. You’re not late. You’re absurdly early. We’re still in the prehistoric times of the internet.
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1/ My hot take on the Twitter saga:. What we are actually witnessing with Elon's takeover of Twitter is a major schism within the dominant ideology of the modern world:. The Californian Ideology. Let me explain 👇
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1/ I'm increasingly convinced that THE most important thing in productivity is to end every cycle with a clear milestone or deliverable.
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Don't listen to audiobooks on 2x speed. Instead, buy 2 sets of airpods, put one pod from each set in each ear, connect them to separate devices, and play 2 audiobooks at 2x simultaneously. BOOM. Welcome to 4x learning.
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Unbelievable. I've long noticed that people tend to have around 10-15 personal projects they're working on at any given time. Little did I know there's research that just that number is essential for maintaining a sense of purpose and fulfillment
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There's a secret to radically improving your productivity:. It’s called a Weekly Review. I’ve spent years testing, tweaking, and refining my Weekly Review. The results of all these experiments is this simple, 5-point checklist:.
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Nothing you consume can go on your resume. Only things you create.
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Making work remote without also making it asynchronous only makes it worse. You get the isolation of working alone without the benefit of control over your schedule.
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Notetaking apps used by the 1,300 current students in our course as their “second brain”
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1/ I see a lot of ppl starting education businesses these days, whether they want to or not, and whether they call it that or not. Here's the best 4x4 for thinking about the online education landscape I've found so far
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I’ve reached all my professional goals. All work from here on out is for fun.
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Some happy news in these dark times: @TheLaurenValdez and I are pregnant! Due mid-October. [New project: Pregnancy].[New area: Child].[New resource: Parenting].[Move to archive: Free time].
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I'm a big proponent of creating personal rules to simplify everyday decision-making and free up mental bandwidth. Here are 7 rules I've developed for myself around task management:.
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A paradoxical thing about people who consistently choose the most high leverage activity is their efforts have a rough-edged, half-assed quality. Because polishing things to perfection is a low leverage activity.
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My advice to almost every creator: you’re being way, WAY too strategic. Until you’re making a million dollars on the internet you’re in beta. Take all the time & energy you’re spending strategizing and iterate as fast as you possibly can. Every piece of content is a shot on goal.
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The countdown has started! . In exactly 100 days, my book Building A Second Brain launches. To celebrate, every day for the next 100 days, I will tweet one exclusive never seen before quote from the book. Join the countdown!.
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The best decision I’ve made recently is to add delays to everything:. -no email gets answered for 48 hrs.-no meeting gets scheduled before 1 week out.-no project gets launched w/ < a month notice. I paradoxically end up moving faster because frivolous stuff gets eliminated.
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“Happiness is simply the absence of desire…It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.”. –@JamesClear.
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Don't pride yourself on how many books you read. Pride yourself on how many ideas from those books you've implemented in your life and shared with others.
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"I'm sure if I buy this new iPad, then my creative potential will finally be unleashed. I need that second generation Apple Pencil to really be able to express the subtlety of my vision".
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Elite knowledge workers will increasingly be like pro athletes:. 1. Clear on and off seasons.2. Highly specialized training regimen.3. Dedicated team of coaches and trainers .4. Vastly unequal pay.5. Recruiters and scouts will scour the globe for them. How else?.
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I’ve been experimenting with @NotebookLM for the last several months, and I can confidently say it’s the best AI tool for learning and research right now. So I created a big walkthrough video, diving deep into its latest upgrade and breaking down everything you need to know. You.
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You can outperform 99% of people by:. • identifying key tasks each day.• eliminating low-value activities.• focusing on one thing at a time.• being patient and consistent. High performance is about doing the basics over and over again.
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The next big mainstream philosophy trend after Stoicism will be the exact opposite:. Feeling every emotion deeply and fully, letting each one flow through and rock you to your core, like a flash flood stripping you bare of every fear so you can taste everything life has to offer.
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2 rules for consuming content that changed my life:. 1. I'm only allowed to save new content to my read-later app (not consume it immediately). 2. When I want to consume content, I have to choose from what's in my read-later queue. Try it for yourself!.
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I found my dad’s old art notebooks from when he was traveling Europe at 19
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ChatGPT is revealing how much of our workday is dedicated to rearranging trivial bits of text into slightly different configurations. The point is not how intelligent AI has become, but how utterly banal and pointless most human work is.
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I spent my whole life looking down on normies leading a suburban lifestyle, 2.5 kids, white picket fence, doing normie things like watching TV, taking the kids to school, feeding the dog, etc. Now I consider it the highest achievement.
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