Memory matters. Memory is kind of everything. Like, who are you without your memories? If I if I took away your memories, you would be a different person. You would simply not be who you are. I gained a perspective that I can take control of what is happening to me in my life. I can use these practical problem solving tools to arrive at a solution, and then I can implement that solution in my life in a way that no one else can do for me. Hi everyone. I'm Ryder Carroll and today I have the distinct pleasure of interviewing Tiago Forte, author of Building a Second Brain, as well as the teacher of building a second brain course, which I took and loved. So let's get into that. So Tiago first question, tell us a little bit about what is building a second brain. Building a second brain is a methodology for creating a system of knowledge management. When I say a second brain, what I'm talking about is a system. A piece of software is my preference. To preserve and save for the future all of your most important information, your ideas, your memories, your mementos, your research, your reading, your highlights, your notes. The whole world of digital information is vast and chaotic and confusing but you can sort of curate the very best and most important of it in a second brain for, for safekeeping. It sounds like it could solve a lot of different problems. I'm curious for you, what problem did it solve? What problem were you looking to solve? The first one was a medical condition. One day in 2007, I was 22 years old, uh, working at the Apple Store in San Diego, uh, fashion Valley and in college at San Diego State University. Uh, I was working one day and just for no reason out of the blue, I started feeling like a pain intention in my neck one summer day, and I kind of ignored it, but it grew worse and worse and kept just deteriorating to the point that I reached the stage that I had trouble speaking, laughing, singing. It was like this just incredible, uh, vice grip around my throat that I would wake up in the morning with. Which is a kind of problem that kind of motivates you. Like it's, you know, I needed, I needed a solution to that. And so I started seeing different doctors, different specialists, eventually saw at least a dozen different doctors. None of them could give me any clue as to what it was much less a solution. Uh, and finally they gave me sort of a last resort, which was a medication. It's a very powerful medication called carbamazepine, which is an anti-seizure medication, usually used to treat schizophrenia. It effectively shuts down your, your nervous system, numbs your whole nervous system head to toe. Sort of like an off switch to the pain that I was feeling. Of course at the cost of basically feeling like I was drunk is what it felt like most days. Um, there was another side effect of that too, which was short term memory loss. So there's a period of a couple years where I had some relief, moderate relief from the pain, but uh, it just would completely wipe memories of conversations that I had and trips that I took, books I read, classes I took were just like gone, like the hard drive had been formated. And I think that experience, you know, the pain of it, the, the sort of sense of loss of having really precious memories, you know, disappeared, uh, really instilled in me in appreciation for memory. First that memory matters. Memory is kind of everything. Like who are you without your memories? If I if I took away your memories, you would be a different person. You would simply not be who you are. Eventually I just decided I had to take control of my treatment, so to speak. I, uh, asked for my patient record, which was like this stack of papers and folders, you know, this thick. Uh, took it home, digitized it on my parents' home computer on the scanner, and, uh, turned all that into digital form where then I could start to make sense of it, organize it, annotate it, underline things, connect things. But what I found eventually for that specific issue was that it wasn't an like an illness or an infection or a virus, that I could just take a pill. It was a functional condition is what the, the data was telling me. It was something in my body telling me, you need to take better care of yourself. You need to be healthier. What I took away from that was better habits, sleep habits, meditation, exercise, habits. Um, I really had to start taking care of myself, which as a 20-something had not been a priority, , and I found that the pain resolved itself. Didn't go away completely. Still hasn't actually, but I gained a perspective that I can take control of what is happening to me in my life. I can use these practical problem solving tools to arrive at a solution and then I can implement that solution in my life in a way that no one else can do for me. You know? Uh, and once I figured that out, I realized, oh, this is like a general approach to solving problems and creating results. And the whole time, I, I feel like I have one weird trick. There's one thing I do. I capture the organ, the information, I organize it, I distill it, and I express it. It's like my one thing I do. And it's just gone so much further than I ever expected and led to so many incredible experiences that now I teach it to others. That's an incredible story. What do you feel like is something that most people are surprised by in that process? They don't know anything about it. They're learning to build their second brain. What's the first light bulb that goes off? I think one of the big ones is having the, the centralization of it. I think we live in a decentralized era, which is the era of the internet, right? The internet arrived and now everything is supposed to be decentralized communication, decentralized, infor, you know, research, decentralized. Now even currency is decentralized with Bitcoin, and that's all powerful. I mean, in a, in a way we're making up for decades, centuries of over centralization by now becoming way decentralized. But it's sort of like there's this one arena that is worth being centralized, which is information. You don't have to keep things in 25 different places, which is kind of the default thing that people do. You can route it all back. You can suck it all back into one place. That is like your safe, your archive, your treasure trove. Maybe only some tiny percentage, 1% of all that information makes its way back here, but that will be the most important and most meaningful 1%. That's, that's the practice that is still a little strange, like, why would you do this? Are you like a academic researcher? Are you a librarian? Those people have been doing it for a long time now we're just taking that practice to everyone else. So one of my favorite parts of your course was this concept of archiving. Like my biggest problem when it comes to like the digital management of information has always been me dreading to deal with my digital backlog, right? Like all the files, all the photos, all this stuff. And once I get all that addressed, then I can like move forward. But you have this way of dealing with the problem that I'd love you to tell us a little bit about. Yeah. It's this idea of archiving, which is actually something I learned from my my mom. I've been consulting, consulting with my mom on how to fix various problems on her computer since I was a kid, and I would notice that she never wanted to get rid of anything, like nothing. Every little image that she saved from the web, every email that someone sent, every random download, it had to all be kept. And the interesting thing is I found when I fought that I would, you know, we'd go file by file and say, okay, do you wanna keep this or not? Okay, delete, keep this or not keep this or not. We get about maybe 10 and then she'd be like, I'm exhausted. I'm so tired. This is so tiring. Making decisions is so tiring. And of course she has like a thousand files, so we're never gonna get anywhere like that. But then I realized mostly just cuz I didn't wanna spend the time. So my impatience always is my best teacher, was just like, you know what, mom, everything on your desktop, just get it. Put it in this new folder with today's date. And she's like, oh, okay. That's easy. I can do that. And then every few months we would just do that, all the random things on the desktop folder with today's date, all the things again, and again and again, until finally we just had a series of folders chronological through time with whatever was on her desktop at that time. And looking back and I realized, oh my gosh, this is actually very effective. This actually works. You never have to make the difficult decision to delete something and you kind of know where things are. It's almost like, I think there's an analogy to paper piles. Like a lot of people that have a lot of piles know where things are quite well, cuz they're sort of reverse chronological. They go, oh, I was working on that a few months ago. So it's like around here. And that's what we would find with the folders. She could find things just fine. And most of the time that just meant search. And so I kind of took that philosophy to the Apple store where I would help people organize their New Mac computers, and then I used it in my own life and it just kind of grew from there. But it's essentially avoiding choice overload, using chronology as an organizing principle, which every human being understands the passage of time and saving to your fu, leaving it to your future self the detailed organization or distillation or processing of that, of that, of that content. Especially since digital content just multiplies infinitely all the time. And so you have to be so discerning about how you spend your extremely limited time and attention with a, with a resource that is infinitely multiplying. Like you're not gonna win that battle. You're not gonna organize all the things. So it's best to just kind of do the minimum and save the rest for the future. Yeah, I think that's a pretty clean segway into how you delineate between what our natural first brain is good for versus our second brain. I think for me, I always noticed I have a very one track mind. I can concentrate and do one thing and one thing only, and the cost of distraction for me is, is so high. I feel like if I deviate from that and pay attention to this other thing, it's like, it's like waking up from sleep. I don't easily, I don't very easily get back to that thing that I was focused on. And modern life requires us to do many things at once. For most people, most of the time memory, remembering, memorization is the lowest priority. It's like on the whole stack of things you can use your first brain for memory's the lowest. It's the thing that we are worst at, and that takes the most time and energy. And that machines do the best. So it's like the first thing to be outsourced. And honestly, like you can really make this complicated with links and graphs and databases and all these things, but notes. There's a simple way to use notes that we often forget, which is just write something down, look it up, write that thing down, remember it, record or retrieve like many of the use cases don't have to go beyond that. And so, um, that's my top recommendation for people is to outsource especially the remembering of detail. Especially details that don't matter to your day to day life, um, that have to do with some specific task or project you're working on. So what would a second brain look like then? Yeah, it can look many ways, and this is part of the difficulty is to me a Bullet journal is a second brain. Some people use their calendar as their second brain. For some people it's, it's a task manager or a notes app. And really for most of us, it it's a collection, it's a system of all these working together. Uh, I kind of think of it like a solar system. Often a notes app or a knowledge management app of some kind is the sun, that's the, the centralized thing. But then you have all these planets and meteors and asteroids orbiting it that are part of that greater solar system. Um, but to me it's, it's just what is the natural default place. When you have an idea or something, you wanna remember that you go to write that thing down, the place that you most trust, that has the highest percentage chance that you're gonna see that again at the right time. So for you, it's not a matter whether it's digital or analog, it's a matter of, um, what you feel drawn to, essentially, what you're most comfortable with. What you feel drawn to, what you feel most comfortable with, what is most natural, what compliments your thinking style, what compliments your stage of life. It can change too. It doesn't have to be not a lifelong commitment. In fact, in a way I've had a different second brain for every season of my life. And what is more natural than to change how you do things as your life changes. That resonates greatly. A big part of whole journaling is about seasonality, like what happens next. And speaking of which, I'm curious, has a notebook ever been part of your second brain? And if so, how? It has been. And it is. It is. I love, I mean, there's really nothing like, like a beautiful notebook. I mean the, the tactile sensation, the weight of it, how cool you look when you're like in a coffee shop, just like looking off into the distance. Like, I really. Okay. So to me there's journaling and then there's no taking, they're like different worlds. When I journal, it is a introspective, reflective, cosmic, mysterious experience, and I optimize for that. I'll often leave. Go to a park, go to an like a national park, places that evoke a sense of awe grande things that take me outta my routines. Um, I'll often take a lot of time, I'll often take a whole weekend or take a whole afternoon or, or an evening. I'm trying to get out of myself to, to, and also to explore like emergent subconscious desires and dreams and wishes that in the day to day are just submerged. In the, the hub of, of daily life. Um, and so I will do that on paper for sure. Cuz digital is just a gigantic distraction. There's Twitter and so the whole social media world. So I wanna do paper and pen. I wanna be away from civilization. I want to not have any rules or process or structure of any kind. But then none of that needs to be captured digitally. I used to, I used to take photos of every page in my journal as part of my weekly review, but it was never like what I was feeling about some interpersonal issue five months ago. I just never found a use for that. And if it, I did wanna revisit the past, I would just take off that notebook from the shelf. So journaling is over here. It's like my right brain introspective self, note taking is all the way over here. It's much more about external sources of knowledge. It's about projects, it's about goals, it's about efficiency and process and productivity. And so I guess I just have completely separated those. And paper journals for me live in this one over here. What do you think the point of productivity is to you? I think for me, productivity is simply manifesting what's inside, outside. It's kind of like something you said previously, I think about, I can't remember how you put it, but manifesting your ideas, making them real. Right. To me, productivity is the steps. The step by step process of getting an idea or a goal or a dream or a vision, or whatever you wanna call it, and having it not just be a concept in your head, as beautiful as that is, having it step by step, become a physical thing in the world that then becomes something other people can have, other people can access, can actually make a difference. A real difference to someone or something that's important to you. Um, productivity you know, there's other things needed. You, you have to supply the purpose and the principles and the meaning and the values. It's not gonna do that for you, right? It's just not. What if you have those things, A lot of people, you know, find those things, but then what are just, what is just the, the pathway, the steps. And that's what productivity is so good at. Just the most efficient line between where you are and where you want to. Assuming those two things are meaningful, productivity is what you need to get there. Speaking of productivity, I'm curious, how do you see, cuz a lot of people might be hearing this and thinking, wow, this is sounds like another productivity scheme of some kind. I would be curious to hear how you feel like building second brain compliments productivity, how it diverges from it. Yeah, so productivity is kind of the big domain that I'm in, right? But then within productivity, What we sometimes call pkm, personal knowledge management, which is specifically how do you keep track of information. Uh, and then within pkm there's various methodologies actually, and I'm one of them called Building a Second Brain. I think productivity is going through this transition right now where it used to be about checking boxes and paying attention to every detail, getting more done, more tasks, but there's an inflection point where it's really becoming about, about content. And the way I always think of this is like a blog. When I write a blog post, might take me five hours when I put that piece of writing on my blog in a way that people all over the world can access that knowledge at any time of the day or night far into the future without taking any of my time. What is that worth in terms of productivity? Like how much productivity would I have to have for me to replicate that that much? It's almost impossible to calculate. It's like having a whole sales force. It's having a, like having a whole team of people. And so content is a form of leverage. And I don't just mean often this, this looks like blogging or having a podcast or YouTube channel, but I don't just mean that. Think of content as you know, you write an FAQ for your team where you answer some of the most frequently asked questions and you surface that as documentation. Think about having a wiki for your company where. Some of the most common resources. Think about having a handbook for your employees. Something as simple as like having an email that you've written out that you can send every time someone asks a common question to me, that's all content. That's all documentation. So it's almost like we're all now having to become content creators. We're all having to produce creative works. We're all having to become writers. And what do you need to produce content at a standard of quality consistently. You need a pipeline, you need an archive, you need a reserve of some kind. Um, the way that writers always have had throughout history, they've been some of the foremost notetakers. It's almost like productivity and content creation are emerging where everyone is becoming a content creator and therefore everyone needs this kind of creative raw material to draw from. And that's where the second brain comes in. That's right. Yeah. One thing that goes around a lot in the PKM and world, which I found really interesting is this idea is like once you start tending to your knowledge garden, for lack of a better, which is another version of this, is that you, no one have to struggle with the blank page anymore. Yes. I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah, the blank page or these days, the blank screen, I think is the, the thing most to be avoided. There's there's no upside, there's no benefit. You know, it's terrifying. It's anxiety provoking. You also don't come up with very good ideas. If you're just making them up on the spur of the moment. You, you're not incorporating the feedback of others. You're not drawing on past thinking and past work. It's like anytime you are just sitting down to a blank page or screen and trying to create something, I think you're putting yourself in a, in a difficult situation. And so what I really did is just studied the lives of prolific creators. Like I'm a huge fan of history. I always go to history and when you look at writers, poets, musicians that made amazing work, but also a lot of work prolific work. They all have something like this. It's kind of amazing. They don't often talk about it. You have to be a little like a detective and kind of discover the behind the scenes process. But they all have a notebook. They all have a journal, they have a bulletin board in their office with, you know, newspaper clippings. They have a, a swipe file. They have something that they're often not like, like they're almost embarrassed by it. They're like, oh, that's just some little thing I do. That doesn't matter, because they're focused on the work that they're producing. But I think having that kind of archival system is essential for any kind of producing. Yeah. So what I'm hearing you say is essentially that having the second brain doesn't only help you store information, but also makes it near impossible for you to ever have to encounter the blank page. Because essentially, if you're interested in anything, you can just go into your second brain, be like, what do I know about productivity, boundaries, time, accounting, finances, and you have this wealth of knowledge. This is one thing that I find interesting in the personal knowledge management space, and one thing that you talk about often, which I love, is this idea that you don't organize information based on where it comes from, but on where it's going to. Right, which I think is such an interesting shift in context. One thing that I struggle with with organizing the content is a lot of the time I don't know where it's gonna go. Right. I'm curious how you run in, how you deal with this idea of running across some kind of interesting information somewhere out there that has no project, that has no purpose, but it's interesting. Where does that go in the second brain. Yes. So I think it's, it's good to point out that my approach to a second brain is extremely kind of utilitarian, probably because now that I think about it, that separation, everything about values, principles, that whole world is over here in the journaling world. So my note taking is left with just this utilitarian kind of practical focus. The reason I really like to constantly ask myself what is the practical purpose of what I'm collecting is, it's the ultimate filter. My constant tendency at all times is to over collect. To over acquire. And if I use the filter. So I do sometimes use the filter just what am I curious about what resonates, but I'm curious about a lot of things. A lot of things resonate. It's too wide of a filter sometimes. Sometimes I need a more narrow filter of like, Tiago, okay, what are you actually trying to accomplish here? What are you actually trying to get? And that just helps me make the, the filter so much narrower, cuz the truth is most of the time, so little is actionable, so little is actually needed to move forward. It's so tiny that I, I essentially just use that, that principle as a, as a stricter filter. There are other times, such as when I'm reading for pleasure or for fun or reading on vacation or reading just to learn about something that I use a different, different filter, which is what you, you also talk about resonance. Um, but even then, I, I have to, I have to be kind of strict with myself. It can't just be something like, huh. Because as I'm reading, that's just constant. I'm like, huh. Oh, wow. Oh, interesting. It's like every paragraph, right? And so I have to ask myself, like, is I, I try to use words like, is this moving? Is this scintillating? Is this surprising? Is this shocking? When I use words like, Suddenly I go, okay, many of these things that I'm saving and highlighting I kind of already knew, or I already had a sense of, or are kind of obvious. Um, so I'd say in both cases, their, their attempts to constrain how much I'm capturing in the first place, which then of course saves me so much work at every subsequent step. And the reason that's important is what you said, I'm trying to get to creation. All of this to me is creation, not just creating content for my business, but to me everything is, is. Having a kid is creation. Making a sandwich is creation. Walking through a city, you know, you're creating an experience, you're creating a, an itinerary, you're creating a conversation. Um, that's something I learned from my father, is he would, he, he's fantastically creative, but in every area when he makes you a sandwich, he has this thing he does where you'll ask kids, open the fridge. Dad, there's nothing to eat. I swear there is nothing to eat. He's like, oh yeah. And he'll go in and he'll combine like three or four ingredients that don't even exist as part of any sandwich. Put them together and he'll be like, try this and it'll be amazing. Some of the time. Um, he really brought that, that open-ended creativity to everything. Which means everything is fuel. Everything that happens, he can use. Everything that he sees becomes creative, raw material. It's not like this one small part of his life is creative and the rest is not creative. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that's a, that's a challenge that a lot of creatives face I think also is that there's like, there's too much information. There's always too much information, like how do you deal with that information? With building a second brain, you actually introduce. A four step process about how you can capture information. I'll let you talk about that one, but I thought it was really interesting in that it actually provides you with not just like, here's a second brain, you can dump anything you want into it. There's actually like a very specific methodology that people can use to make this effective. Yeah, call it code. Code is the heart and soul of building a second brain. Uh, it's really my attempt to describe, not just that there's a thing, there's an artifact, which is a second brain, but this isn't an artifact that is just like, oh, like a pretty museum piece that you just like put on the shelf and oh yeah, there's my second brain. It is something that is in use. It has to be something that you're working with, you're operating, you are interacting with, and that interaction comes in four parts, four steps, which are really a workflow. It's like linear. There's a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning the seeing code is, capture Information has to come into your life in some shape or form, has to be written down, documented in some place outside of your head. Then it has to be organized in some way. There's some structure, some prioritization, some you know, hierarchy of how this is. This is. Then it has to be distilled. Once you've collected all the stuff, it's, it's gonna be too much no matter how strict of a filter you had. So then you have to distill it, which is kind of boil it down to its essence, the the actual sentences and ideas and takeaways that you are using. And then the E in code is express, which is basically my answer to like, what is the purpose to all this? Why are we doing all this? To communicate is to express your ideas, express your voice, express your story, express your, uh, your perspective and your view on the world, but not just the reason. It's not just e by itself is, I mean, part of it is just getting it off your chest. There's value in that. But if you want to communicate in a way that other people want to listen. Or that, you know, makes them happy or persuades them or provides value to them. If you wanna communicate in ways that advance your career, your business, your cause, your beliefs, uh, there needs to be some steps before express, which are c o d, that are essentially research you're gathering together. Organizing, and whether you call it the evidence, the supporting points, the examples, anecdote, stories like whatever are the building blocks of your communication are what goes into your second brain. And the purpose of that is that when it comes time to express, which is the singular moment, whether you're speaking, you know, live in front of a group, or you're sitting at your desk and writing, there's a singular moment where it's like, now it's the time. This is the moment. That is kind of mysterious and can't be fully turned into a process. But I know for sure that if you have a ready reserve of well organized and distilled building blocks that you pre-formatted and prepackaged for the specific type of expression you're doing, there's no way that's not gonna help. So in addition to code, you also introduce Para, which is another four step process for kind of thinking about how to deal with the content or how to, should I say, um, take advantage of all the content inside your second brain. Can you tell us a little bit about Para? Yes. So code is how to create things. Para is how to store things. Para is straight up just store. Files, store notes, um, and it's, once again, four letters. I love my four letters, uh, projects, areas, resources, and archives, which are these really big categories, but not like subject matter, but actionability. So the, the, the main principle here is really. What is the most important principle in organizing your information? Like you can really only make, you can really only have one main principle, and I think it's actionability what is needed right now for what you're doing today, which is projects, what is needed over time for your areas of responsibility. That's areas. What do you kind of wanna keep handy as needed resources and what is inactive and no longer relevant archives. Um, and that also kind of form. A bit of a, like a pipeline too, where often things start as projects. Oh, we're just, you know, like, uh, we're visiting Mexico City. That's, that's a trip project, has a beginning and an end, but then we love it and we decide, oh, we're going to move here. So the whole Mexico City folder, which had places to visit, people to meet restaurants to try, just gets moved one column over to areas, and now it starts getting filled with apartment hunting details and trips we want to take to surrounding areas. That first initial seed, which is just one weekend, grew into a whole area of our lives organically. But then one day we leave Mexico City, but we still wanna go back and visit. So it moves one column over, becomes a resource, right? For example, now these days a lot of friends are going there, and of course they always ask us, what should we visit? I don't wanna keep answering that anew again and again. So I have one note in that resource folder that is like my exact top 20 Mexico City picks with all the details and links. So the second they text me, I just, I don't even, I don't even write anything back. I just respond with the link to my note. I just go there. Um, and then one day that will no longer be relevant at all and it will just become part of the archives. Does anything ever come back from the dead? I think, I think this is the hardest thing for people to, to wrap their heads around is we're used to information systems where there is a one correct place. Like in the library you see that book, there's that long like call number. What that number tells you is there is one and only one correct place in this entire building for this book to go. And you're trying to find that place. But with personal information, that doesn't make any sense. There are notes and, and different files constantly moving back and forth. It's almost like a, it's like a ecosystem, you know? Where like the rain goes up in the clouds, then it gets rained down, then it goes on, the land goes into the ocean, evaporates. Those charts that we had in school is kind of how I think about para. Um, if something is not moving, moving, there's probably an issue. It's probably just not relevant, put it in archives. But even from the archives, things get resurrected. I mean, I think I have over 200 folders in my archives in Evernote. Every single, even small project that I've worked in for the past, almost decade, the value of that. Like someone can ask me, have you ever worked a, have you ever run a fundraising event, you know, for a large company? And I'll be like, gosh, like nine years ago I worked an event and did something. And then I'll go in and I'll find maybe just two or three notes, but they have good stuff. Like how else would I learn from that experience? How would I recycle those learnings back into my life without something like digital notes. Like I, I don't think most people do. Oh, it's so interesting because like your archive is essentially what our library is. Like for me I can like always pick up a book from that age and like, look at what I did. I can't search for it yet, working on it. But yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. And one thing that I think is so brilliant about para is that it doesn't matter what your tools are like, that's something that I think is so unique about building a second brain, like you can do it any way you want. How do you use your second brain to pick your projects? Do you use the second brain to pick the project or do you use the second brain to support the projects that you pick externally? A little of both. Yeah. Projects to me, I. That word is so exciting to me. This is how I know I'm a, I'm a total nerd project. It's like a project is, it's, it's so concrete and real. It what a project is, is describing that concept, that idea turning into reality. It's like the threshold of the doorway. When you say this is a project, you declare that you put that into the air. Now all these things start moving people. Systems, tools, information, it's it's almost like the primal act of manifestation to say, this is a project I'm committing to it. I try to be open that they can come from anywhere. Sometimes they're outta necessity. You know, if you have a medical condition, a project is needed. It's not just hoping and, and wishing for it to get better. There's a whole set of actions and you know, stuff that has to take place to resolve. Some are really internal and kind of private. Some are from the external world and much more collaborative. They really come from all directions and all shapes and sizes. But what's important is, I think what's important is to really treat the, the beginning of a project as a sacred moment. Like I almost feel like there should, should be a gong or something, or a sound, or like a ceremony or a ritual. Because what is happening is really significant. You are, you are dedicating a chunk of your life to something. It's so significant. It's like, oh my gosh. I am, I am deciding that a, a section of my life, this one life that I get is going to this thing. It's time. I will never get. So I'd love to hear what your distinction is between a goal and a project. For me, a goal is just the destination. It describes a single moment in time and space where something will be true, but it's just one, it's, it's kind of instantaneous in a way. It's the finish line, like imagine a race, a marathon. The goal is just that one line at the end. And it's binary. It will. It will be. At that moment in time, it will be true or not true. The criteria that you set a project is the marathon. All the stuff details, so many details. You need to know the route, the shoes you wear, the food you ate, the training regimen. The amount of details to manage your project is always staggering to me. When you set a goal, right, you're setting it from your from, the furthest distance from understanding what that reality is actually going to be. Yes. So it's the most unrealistic part of any project because you just really don't know what the conditions of that goal are. And then as you get closer, it starts to, the, the resolution increases as you get closer and. What I'm hearing you say about projects essentially is like you can use that as a vehicle to kind of navigate on your way towards that goal. Yes, and that word is perfect vehicle because often people define projects and goals together. They, they say, we're gonna do X and Y is gonna happen, and they're kind of fused. They need to be separate because think about what happens when you just know where that finish line is. There's so many routes to. You can walk, you can run, you can crawl, you can get in a car, you can ride a bicycle. You can get in a plane. If you know only the destination and you are completely unattached to the means to get there, suddenly you have so many means at your disposal and you have to be open to them cuz almost never will. The first way that you think of to get there, be the best way. It just won't be. That all resonates a lot. I'm curious. Having structured your entire productivity system around the idea of projects, at what point do you shift goals? Once that project has, once the vehicle has been launched into the water, when do you, what are the criteria for which you change goals or realize that things need to change? Yeah. It's funny, I, I hold even goals. I hold very lightly. A goal is sort of like a hypothesis, just like in science with experiments, there's just as much value in it, not coming true as coming. True. Which is like very not how we're taught to think of goals. We're taught to think like, oh no, it has to happen. It's your job to make it happen. Um, I like when a goal doesn't turn out the way that I expect it. I mean, as one example, last year I had a goal to grow our YouTube channel to a hundred thousand subscribers. It didn't budge. It didn't even went up by one or 2000 subscribers. So the hypothesis was proven incorrect, right? Which was that I, by myself, can just make the YouTube channel grow. But that, that failure, the, the, the total lack of progress toward that goal taught me something. It taught me that I need a team, that I need equipment, that I need a studio. It's like if I hadn't failed, failed in that initial goal, I wouldn't have discovered all these lessons about what was actually necessary for success. To the point where these days I will often specify a goal in great detail. It almost becomes more like a vision. Like I describe all the things that are gonna be true because I want it to fail. I want there to be as many ways for it to fail as possible because every way that it fails teaches me something. Do you have any rituals in your approach to house keep. To make sure that things you're focusing on are still aligned. Is there a reflective nature to your practice? I do. Um, I have similar rituals. We a weekly review, a monthly review, an annual review, but I like to do things all at once. So I find in, in the midst of my workday work week, even over the course of a month, I can't think I have trouble thinking about my values and principles. It's almost. They require such a different state of mind. And in the day to day, I like to be so close to the, so close to the ground, so close to the metal, um, that I like to just do those in completely different places at completely different times. So like, just to give some concrete examples on a weekly basis I'll look at my projects, which is just like getting a little bit of perspective. It's like lifting my head a little bit and being like, okay, is everything that was active last week still happening this week? Okay, back. On a monthly basis, I look at my areas of responsibility, so it's a little higher. It's like my marriage, how I'm being as a father, the household, my health, finances. And then really only once a year, um, do I really like open the hatches completely and really ask those big picture questions like, is my life going the way that I want it to go? What do I want? Where do I wanna be A few years from? Um, you know, are there any fundamental changes we wanna make to our, to our lives? Um, sometimes I do a mid-year review, so maybe every six months I'll do that. Uh, but I, I try to limit it. I think one, because it takes a lot of energy and time, but also because this is kind of strange, but I want the tension to build up. I don't know if this is just me, if I'm dysfunctional, but it's like by the time I, I go to those big picture questions, I almost want there to be this like backlog of emotional tension if only because when I open up that box, it then kind of springs out and it's very clear. Whereas if I, I found, if I ask those bigger questions too often, sometimes I'm like, something is a little bit wrong. But it's so subtle, it's a little misalignment that I just can't be bothered to go, to go, like, investigate. I, I have a similar thing and. Usually like keeping my place like super clean cuz it's just a way for me to get organized. But I definitely have that if I'm in a place that's like not tidy, you just kinda let stuff keep piling up. So then it's like so much more satisfying when you do clean it up properly and it's like you reset it. That's a good analogy. Yeah, that's a good analogy. That's exactly what it is. Is, how does that factor into your pkm? Like do you have any in those rituals? Like are you using your second brain just to become aware of like your personal life, your professional life, but is there also a way where you kind of like house keep like dust out your second brain for lack of a better? Yeah, there are a few things, like when a project either is completed or becomes inactive or gets postponed or whatever. Uh, I will get the whole project folder and move it to the archives, uh, on mass. Sometimes if it's related to a different project I'm working on or there's like a follow up, I'll go through the notes and see if there's anything relevant. But usually I don't even bother doing that. Just move it to the archives. That's the equivalent of like, you have something on your desk that you've been working on. It finishes you just kind of like put it all into one manila file folder and just like stick it in some drawer. It's all there if I ever need it, but let me just get it, you know, out of sight. Uh, same thing with areas, uh, areas tend to be longer term. They don't have nearly the same turnover. But for example, if I have an apartment that I'm living in, like the apartment that we had in San Francisco, there's all this documentation, you know, the light bulbs that were needed, the lease, the complaints from, you know, we had about the neighbors. Like all this stuff. I don't wanna delete it. But it's also no longer active. So the whole area folder gets put in archives. Uh, and then the same thing with resources. Sometimes I've been researching something, I'm curious about something and it just becomes no longer relevant. I don't wanna delete it, just move it just like that. Um, the fact that I'm treating, I'm not going note by note, which would take forever. I'm moving big groups of notes, is what allows it to be so fast. We're talking minutes. Just look at your projects, any that are completed, boom areas, any that are no longer active. Boom, resources. We're talking maybe 30 minutes a like a year or something. During that process, is that when you start thinking about like also personal and professional things as well? Like is the ritual of keeping your second brain in shape opportunity for you to see what it is that you're moving and what you're now releasing your commitment from and com recommitting to? Is that accurate? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. What I'm describing here is my para system, which is how I organize basically everything. It's a dashboard of my life. It is, it's, it's in some ways, you know, like a kanban board where you have like things you say you're gonna do and then things you're doing, and then things you've done, things move from the left to the right. That's how Para is also, it's basically a kaban board. So you've been doing, building a Second Brain for a while at this point. What has changed the most? The crazy thing is the methodology has not changed from the very beginning. It was all there. I think built into it is the kind of timelessness, the fact that it was, it, it's based on historical precedence. It's based on pre-digital precedence. I mean, everything that I teach in the book even applies to paper. If you think about it para can be done in paper. Progressive summarization is highlighting that that originated with paper intermediate packets. It's all valid with paper. If there's anything that's changed, it's the culture and the ecosystem. When I started was the peak heyday of Evernote, which a lot of people don't remember. I mean, the mania, the craze of how people were obsessed with Evernote. Still, we've not reached that point yet. It was a whole big thing, but there was only one option. You were on Evernote that was the one digital notes app. They were the first mover, the first people to do this. The first people to talk about a second brain. In this context. Uh, now, oh my gosh, there's a whole industry, dozens of different tools, many of them explicitly marketing themselves as second brains, which is incredible to me. Many of them specifically trying to support this use case of a long term lifelong knowledge repository. Um, so I hate to say, I hate my answer to be, oh, everyone else is caught up, But, uh, it's just, it's just flourished and become a diverse cornucopia of different methodologies in a way that I really, I really thought in the early days I was just helping a few people organize their Evernote, and it's kept escaping that framing. To become something that has transcended any particular piece of software. Why do you think it's so popular now? I mean, PKM has exploded recently with the rise of Roam and Obsidian and Logseek and on and on and on. Like why now? I mean, the technology has been around for a minute. Yeah. I mean, the only thing I can think of is the, the convergence of all these trends. Everything from mobile device, Essentially eclipsing, you know, desktop computers and usage. Uh, even things like remote work, work from home. People now have a lot more autonomy. They have to structure their own information environment. Things like the huge growth in freelancing and entrepreneurship. Same thing, things like social media, reaching this peak of noise and chaos and, uh, controversy that people, there's this, this whole thing called, uh, the Cozy web. Have you heard of? The cozy web is like this idea that like people are, the storm of information online and in social media has become so overwhelming that they're almost like retreating into this like underground cave system of little private groups, WhatsApp groups, text message threads, circle groups, like groups that are not the wide open public internet, but that are smaller, more intimate, more protected. Um, that's part of this, you know, and like, think about before the second brain concept information management was basically Google, right? It was everything public and novel by default. Everything on full blast, everything in full view. That's only one way of doing things. There's also, besides the novel and the public, there's the private and the timeless. It's like the other, if you make a two by two, like the other, the opposite quadrant, right? The other end of the spectrum is now what we're developing, where it's private, it's timeless, it's personal, it's meaningful. It's, uh, subjective. Uh, according to you, all these things are what's, what the internet sort of left behind, you know, the internet the internet kind of disrupted many of our reading and note taking practices, and now we're coming back around to them. But in a digital centric way. A lot of the digital tools out there are designed to help us connect with the world around us and connect with each other, right? And it makes. Now where it's becoming clear that that's not necessarily making us more productive, like I think we hit that plateau now. It seems like technology's becoming significantly more personal. Yes. A lot of it focused on how we think, which is really interesting. And I'll, which kind of brings us full circle. Do you feel that technology, digital technology will ever be able to recreate the experience of writing on paper? I think it's the wrong question, I think no, but it's kinda like asking, you know, when cars were invented, will cars ever recreate the experience of riding a horse? And the answer is no. But that's not really what they're for. That's not really what they offer. Um, it's gonna create whole new experiences that we can't even. Uh, including some that could be comparable to writing on paper, but others that are not even in the same universe. Um, I think the, there's this idea called, it's kinda a hard word to say, ephemeral. Ephemeral. Like ephemeral. Um, that is sort of this theory of technology that I think is very true, which is the ultimate endpoint of any technology is to become ephemeral. Basically dissolves, it dissolves into physical object. Into, uh, language, into the, the built environment, into the culture, into the media, and it becomes this, this kind of transparent interface, um, that we just come to expect. My favorite example is, uh, when General Motors in the 1920s invented what was called MBO management by objective, which is simply, oh, as a company, the different departments should have objectives and work towards those objectives. That was. Incredibly, like the huge innovation of that era these days. If you suggested that, people would be like, that's just the way things happen. It's obvious, it's natural, and I think that will happen with thinking tools for sure. We will just have a thought and there will be either a device implanted in our, in our brain eventually, or it will be linked to something in our bodies, or the interface will be so seamless and transparent. That we will sort of think through that interface without having to think about the tool. Asking what notes app you use or thinking tool you use will be like asking, you know, what kind of air is in this room? Like what is the composition of oxygen and nitrogen? It's like this sort of esoteric question that doesn't even matter. Or it'll be like, you know what, what brand is the chair? Or like the parts in the engine of your car. It's like, I guess I could go find the answer, but it doesn't. Because it's a utility, it's a, it's a mundane mechanical part of my environment that I can just, this is the important part, 100% trust and it's just a hundred percent predictable, such that, you know, there, there's that, that quote by, I think Sir Alfred North Whitehead, I wanna say is his name, uh, that a lot of people talk about, which is civilization advances when we can do more and more things without thinking. Like the sophistication of what you can accomplish without having to think about it is the measure of our civilization and those thinking tools are gonna become completely ephemeral, built into just the way we do things. I think my interpretation of what you said, that the ultimate form of thinking tool is the one that you don't have to think about. Exactly. It's just exists. It just does. It's. So you can do yours. If people were interested in this, what is one piece of advice you'd send them off with? If this is the first they've heard about it? I think my number one advice is to just do an experiment for whatever period of time, a week, two weeks, a month. Try taking one note a day, one note of the kind that I'm talking about, an idea, a concept, a theory, a perspective, something that will be useful for the long term. See if it fits you. See if it's part of your value system to spend time doing this. Don't take my word for it, especially, don't take our word for it, that the kind of overly elaborate way that we do this is the way, that's just one way. Uh, it's basically to start small, start simply, and to build organically from there rather than trying to adopt wholesale someone else's system. I think that's a wonderful place to leave it. Where can people find you? Where can people learn about the course, about the book, about your YouTube channel? It's all at buildingasecondbrain.com. There's the course, the book. We also have a podcast, a YouTube channel, a blog, uh, every kind of resource you can imagine for helping people get started building their second brand. Thank you so much, Tiago I really appreciate your time. Absolutely, my pleasure.