29. Tiago Forte: Building A Second Brain
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Hey everyone, it's Alex from Alex and Books, and you're listening to The Reader's Journey, the podcast that takes you on a journey to meet amazing authors, discover brilliant books, and learn valuable lessons along the way. Now, let's get started.

Everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Reader's Journey podcast. Today we have Tiago Forte, author of Building a Second Brain. Tiago, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Yeah, it's a pleasure. So I think a great place to start would be with the title of the book itself, because I follow you on Twitter for a couple of years. I'm familiar with the concept. But for everyone listening who hasn't heard of what a second brain is, how would you describe it?

Yeah, it's a good question. Your second brain, think of it like that notebook that you might keep in your backpack, your purse, your book bag on your desk, where you write down interesting things, interesting ideas, quotes from books, of course, even to-do lists, shopping lists, reminders. It's kind of like your one central place that you keep everything that you want to remember for the future, but that you just know is not going to stick in your head.

I think most people are familiar with the idea of a notebook, except what I propose is to make that digital.

to do that not on paper, which has certain advantages but also disadvantages, to do it on software because then you have it backed up, synced to the cloud, it's searchable, taggable, linkable, you get all these incredible capabilities. That system of digital note-taking is what I call a second brain. Yeah, I think it's super valuable, especially for knowledge workers to externalize all of this information so they can just try and keep it into their brain. And one thing I want to ask you about because I'm sure a lot of people didn't know, like

like your full-time job basically teaching people how to be more productive how to take notes and like a lot of people probably didn't imagine that's like a career like how did you stumble into that what's that story oh my gosh it's so it was such a long and winding road i i never thought it could be a career and sometimes i still kind of you know slap myself and is this real um

Gosh, we could go really far back, but I think the most relevant part is I was teaching productivity, which is kind of this established field, right? Like how to manage your to-do list, how to manage your calendar, how to manage agendas. And that was fine. I was making a living. But then I started to notice that...

there was this aspect of productivity, which was note-taking, that was really under-explored. It was just under-utilized. I would notice, like, I would take classes or online courses or go to seminars, and they would say, oh, write this down, or take notes on your ideas, or take notes on ideas for content, or take notes on this or that, and I'd always be like, well, how? Like, where? In what way? When do I come back to it?

All sorts of people tell you to take notes. No one tells you the details, how to do that, like in what ways, especially when it comes to software. Some people will give you some instructions for paper note taking, but digital note taking is just completely underexplored. And so I just started getting into it myself. And as I, my approach is often to teach things as I learn them instead of learning all the things and then teaching it later, I kind of learn and teach at the same time.

And what I've discovered is an incredible pent-up demand for this. A lot of people, it turns out, has that same question. So much so that I turned it into a blog and then an online course and now a book to teach people how to do it. So for everyone listening who, like, you know, they're interested in building a second brain, what are, like, the first maybe one or two steps you recommend them to take to, like, just start this process? Yeah, let's see. I would advise them to start with Capture. Capture is the first of four stages of

in what I call code, which is a framework for really the creative process. And the letters of code stand for capture, organize, distill, and express. So the first stage is capture, which just refers to documenting, writing down the things you want to save in a place that is external and that you trust are kind of the two requirements. It's kind of the first stage of all this, right? You can't do anything. You can't organize it. You can't review it, distill it until you've captured it.

And to do that, I recommend starting with the simplest Notes apps.

I mean, start with what's already on your phone. If you have a iOS device, that's Apple Notes. I believe Android also has a similar built-in note-taking app. If you don't have one of those, you can use one like SimpleNote that just really doesn't overcomplicate it. It doesn't have a lot of features. It's just open a new note, a blank document, write some things down. You don't need fancy input methods, just the ability to type text and

Uh, and you can worry about all the other stages later. Just focus initially on getting things down because I think what you have to do is you have to show, you have to demonstrate for yourself that you have things of value. You listening right now, you probably have this question. Do I have stuff up here that is worthy of externalizing and tracking over time? I guarantee that you do, but you have to sort of prove it to yourself. And the best way to do that, I always say for one month, take one note a day.

And at the end of 30 days, look at what you capture and ask yourself, is this material something that is worth keeping track of and resurfacing over time? And I think you will decide that yes, it is. Yeah, I believe in the book you talk about how a lot of people are already taking the steps to build a second brain. They just haven't been very intentional about it. You're already consuming a lot of content.

It's like now it's time to start like capturing like what you found valuable. The next step would be like organizing So I like how you mentioned like a lot of people are already doing the first couple of steps But if you just be a little bit more intentional about it, it could be so much more impactful exactly They really are

They're doing so many of the steps. And I really think you can take one stage at a time because each stage has value. Like capturing by itself, writing stuff down, even if actually you never revisit it, is inherently valuable by itself. So I know people that don't go beyond capture incredibly enough. They write things down. That act of writing, formulating in their own words, helps it solidify in their mind.

I do encourage you to go on to subsequent steps, but it's important to realize it's not like you have to do the whole system perfectly or have this holistic system before you get any value. The value comes the minute you start writing things down. All right. Yeah. And that's pretty amazing to know. Like just capturing it is very impactful. If you start organizing it, it gets even better. It's like each day as you go, it's like the knowledge multiplies and then more things you could do with it. Yes. That's great to know. Yes, exactly. Yeah.

And so you write in a whole book about like note taking and the whole note taking process. But I noticed you don't really recommend like a certain one specific app. Is this because like you're just hiding it like that's your secret ultimate weapon or is like the system more important than software? I wish there was the secret ultimate note taking app that I could now unveil for you all. That would be an amazing marketing coup. Unfortunately, there's no secret. There's no silver bullet. I wish there was.

I don't make software. That's not what I do. And so there's this sort of interesting bridge where I talk about principles and techniques and methods, and then you kind of learn those, and then there's a bridge over to the practical options, right? You have to choose from what's out there. Luckily, we live in this, honestly, digital note-taking revolution. I don't know if...

you all realize, you know, this didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago when I started, there was not this many choices. There are dozens, hundreds of different note taking apps to serve every profession, every style, every kind of temperament, every need, every level of complexity.

And so we actually have a series both on our blog and on YouTube where we take you through the process of choosing a note taking based on your personality and based on your note taking style. So I'd refer people to that. But otherwise it's a, this is why I teach a course, right? Is it's a,

process of personalization. I wish I could just tell you, this is the one. But no, you kind of have to try out different things and test them, see how you like them, 'cause ultimately your Notes app is deeply personal. It fits into your life like your favorite pair of shoes. It's gotta be so comfortable, feel so natural.

So yeah, that's what I would recommend. Yeah, and I think a great point you just made there because I think a lot of people listening, their first answer might be like, oh, just tell me which note-taking app and I'll do that. But as you mentioned, it's not like one specific app for everyone. It's like you have to find what works best for you. I think what you did such a great job with this book is like you talked about the system that you could use for any note-taking app and that's a lot more valuable than just choosing a specific app itself. Exactly. I mean,

I've switched several times my second brain platform. Started off on paper, actually, then went to Microsoft Word, back the OG writing program. Then I was on Google Docs, which brought it to the cloud, and now I'm on Evernote. I've been on Evernote for almost a decade. But I expect, you know, we're doing something, usually software, you're using it for a short period, for a project or a job or something. Right.

With a second brain, you're thinking on the scale of many years. So you can't think, oh, I'm going to choose this one platform that's going to be viable forever. It's not. Something's going to happen. It's going to go out of business. They're going to be acquired. They're going to shut down. Or maybe they just grow so big that they kind of lose touch with their original customers. You will have to change your second brain software over time. And that is really why I...

sort of decided settled on these timeless note-taking principles that don't depend on the feature set of any particular program and because i focus on the timeless principles that's what allowed a book to be written right because if it was about features this book could not exist right because everything would be out of date in like six months yeah i think they're saying like the more updated book is the sooner be outdated but if a book has like timeless lessons like this one it'll be around like

five, 10, 20 years from now. So that's really good. Exactly. Exactly. So I want to get into your book. So while reading it, I had like a few like aha moments. One of them was about not just being a note taker, but a note giver. And you want to like give notes to your future self. Can you kind of like expand by what you mean on it? It's really this idea that you are in relationship to your past selves and your future selves. This is something I haven't seen talked about a lot because

At least when it comes to something like taking notes is, you know, when you come upon a note or a document you've created in the past, it's like a time capsule. It's like your past self packaged up this gift of knowledge, sent it through time, whether on purpose or an accident, sent it through time to your present self.

So, when you receive that gift, how do you feel? Do you feel grateful? "Oh, thank you, past self. You did a great job. I appreciate you." Are you annoyed? You know, "What does this mean? I can't make sense of this. This is pointless." Like, how does that feel? Okay. Now, take how that feels and realize that your present self and the notes you're taking now is going to be a gift that you package up once again for your future self. It's always happening. You're always going to have a past self and a future self.

And so once you go through that cycle a few times of taking a note and then revisiting it, you start to realize that you can get much better at that process. You can take notes in a way, and this is what I write about in the book, in a way that your past self,

in a way that your future self can really benefit so much so that over time your learning and reading compounds and grows like a high interest rate checking account where you actually build wealth, you know, knowledge wealth because your knowledge is just growing on itself over and over.

And so there's, I don't know, something kind of mysterious and beautiful about constantly paying it forward, basically. Every time you take a note, pay forward that gift of knowledge, which is so great because the person you're paying it forward to is you. Yes.

Yeah, I think that's been a huge shift for me. First, when I started reading books, I wouldn't write or highlight in it. Then I would go back to a couple years later, and it's basically a blank book. I don't remember any lesson from it. Then I started highlighting the text in the book.

But then if I go back to a couple of years later, it's like, why did I highlight this? What was it? Why was that important? But now it's like, I'll highlight it, you know, I'll add some text to it, add some context to it. So that way my future self understands like, oh, this was important, but also why was it important? Yes. Yeah. That's exactly what it is. It's just adding enough meaning, enough context or annotation that the next time, you know, it is, it's just the next time you come back to it, you're not starting from scratch. Yeah.

That's all we're trying to do is just the effort you put into reading, which is really significant, right? Like reading a book in today's chaotic world is like a serious thing.

As long as the next time you come back to that book or just those notes, you are not starting from scratch. You are starting where you left off. You will be just light years ahead of other people. For sure. So when it comes to reading books and highlighting, one thing I hear a lot from people is like, oh, this book was so good, I just had to highlight almost every single paragraph in it.

How do you go about like taking notes in a book like highlighting it how much highlighting is too much like what would you recommend? For people to do. Yeah, it's true. So I teach a an approach to highlighting that I call progressive summarization and Everyone knows what highlighting is and that's kind of also the problem Is the way that we were taught to highlight or more likely never taught to highlight comes from school where it doesn't really matter if

How you highlight doesn't really matter what you highlight at most. Maybe it was for the test or to write an essay or something. You never were going to revisit those highlights again. In fact, you couldn't because they're probably stuck in some textbook that is, I don't know, in the basement or given away or sold. Right. We weren't taught to highlight.

I almost think of that yellow as like gold. Like it's, you're like labeling, annotating something as a golden nugget of knowledge that doesn't just serve one use case or one project, but is for a lifetime of learning. It's like a gold bar that you go down and put in your safe as like your future wealth. And mostly what that comes down to practically is taking much less highlights. You need to learn to be distinguishing.

Right. The attitude can't be, Oh, this is kind of interesting because most of what's in books is interesting. I mean, you chose the topic of the book, right?

You chose the book in the first place because the topic is interesting. So how, you know, that doesn't work. You have to think more in a utilitarian way is what I think. How is this going to be useful? How can I apply this? How can I use it in a presentation or a project or a piece of writing? And the truth is when you look at books through a utilitarian lens, there's relatively little in a book that is directly practical and useful. Right.

Right. There's a lot of interesting stories and metaphors and examples. But then there's these key moments where it's like the the key takeaway, the key advice. That's what I recommend that people highlight. Yeah, that's a great rule to follow. So when it comes to like we know, you know, you want to be consuming information, you want to be capturing it. How do you balance whether it's like consumption of information, capturing information and actually like applying that information? How do you go about balancing those three?

Yeah, this is kind of the purpose of code. You know, capture, okay, it's in an external form. Organize, okay, it has structure. Distill, it's boiled down to the key points. And all of that is leading up to the fourth step, which is express. I really believe the purpose of knowledge is to be shared.

you can say shared, you can say expressed, you can say applied, implemented, communicated, practiced, whatever verb most resonates with you, right? But I think it's just something about the nature of knowledge that until you try it, until you actually try using it, you don't know if it's true, right? This applies, I think, more to nonfiction, although in some ways to fiction also. But, you know, you hear about a good piece of advice about how to be a better parent,

How do you know if that works? Like, that's just something that someone just said, right? And maybe it works for them, but not for you. Or maybe it works...

you know, it worked back then when they wrote it, not anymore. Everything is constantly changing. So you have to kind of have this skeptical site. It's almost like a scientific lens. Okay. This author has made an assertion. Okay. Now I need to validate, I need to replicate this assertion. Um, and another thing I'd say is when I say express or apply this knowledge, that doesn't mean you have to like go out and like,

I don't know, conduct an experiment in a laboratory. Something as simple as bringing it up in conversation. Right? Like bring up an idea that you read about in conversation with a friend. See if it's interesting to them. See if it resonates. See if, you know, it sparks an interesting discussion.

That counts as expression. That counts as putting it to use. What I want to avoid is just reading something, going, huh, that's interesting, and then never touching it, discussing it, or reviewing it ever again. That kind of passive reading where you just intake it and do nothing with it

It's fine. Like, there's nothing wrong with it. And you can read just for fun, of course. But I think that a lot of the problems in this world, honestly, and the problems in people's lives can be solved. I mean, the answers are there. The answers are in the books. We just need to find them and apply them. Yeah.

Yeah, and that's such a great point. Whether it's reading or note-taking, you don't want to get to the point where it's productive procrastination. You're just reading more books to just read books. You're taking notes just to take notes. It's time to actually distill that information and actually express it, like you said. So I love that you kind of hammered down that point in your book. Totally. I mean, it's the world we live in. We live in the information age. So anything that you want to do or achieve or have comes down to finding and putting to use the right information. Anything. Yeah.

You want that certain job, you want to start a business, you want to start a family, you want to move to that city or that country. I mean, as a human civilization, we've overcome like so many practical problems. It really mostly comes down to just finding the info, putting it to use, finding it, putting it to use. And it's everywhere all around us. We don't have to like go...

you know, to the jungles to find this stuff. It's just sitting on pieces of paper and on devices around us. All we need to do is have a framework and a method for utilizing it. Yeah. And speaking of that framework, I love the Para framework you came up with because instead of, like you said, instead of organizing the information by topic, you organize it by how actionable it is. So can you just like dive into that and explain how it works? Of course. Para is...

probably the most popular single technique that I've come up with. And it really came from working at the Apple store in college. I worked at the Apple store in fashion Valley, San Diego, and we would do these one-on-one personal consultation sessions. People would pay, I think it was like $99 or something to bring in their new Mac and have one of the Mac specialists like me teach them. And I started to notice, you know, they would often be switching from a windows PC to

And they would have transferred over hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of files. And we would sit down and we had 60 minutes. And at first I thought, oh, well, let's go and organize all these files that you brought over. That's the sensible thing to do. But after 60 minutes, we'd have gotten through like 1% of their files.

And their energy would be so low, they'd be so bored. It was like pulling teeth. And I started to realize this is unnecessary and it's actually not helpful. These people didn't switch to a Mac because they wanted to reorganize all their files. They did it because there's some creative project they wanted to take on. They wanted to write a book.

or start a blog, or make a music record, or create a resume, or finish school. And so I started just getting all those files, putting them in what we call the archives, just putting them out of sight and out of mind, and then getting the small amount of information, documents that they actually need to complete their project right now, which is like a tiny percentage, and organizing those according to three things.

which are the P, A, and R in the word para, P-A-R-A. The first is projects. So what are your projects? Group the information for each project in one place. The second one is areas of responsibility. So like your health, your finances, your job, your school, the things that aren't projects, but that you have to manage and track over time, the hats that you wear in life. And then the third was resources, all the stuff that you're learning about, curious in, but that isn't immediately actionable.

And then that last A is archives. So projects, areas, resources, archives. And what I started finding is people would come back after a year or two and they were still using that same organizational method. And they said this is the most amazing approach to organizing I've ever seen. Where did this come from? Can you teach my friend? And I started to realize, wow, this utterly simple, very straightforward way of organizing your entire life in four folders is actually awesome.

And that became the basis of the course that I taught and now the book that I wrote. Yeah, it's such a powerful framework. I remember, so I got a new laptop a couple months ago. And the first mistake I did was transferring all my files to my new laptop. And I'm like, this is just as messy as my old laptop. So then I literally factory resetted the whole thing.

And then transfer to the files, but just put them all in the archive folder. So that way, like you mentioned in the book, if you ever want to search it or find it, you can. But it kind of stops you. You don't want to spend so much time and energy on your old projects because the whole reason you want to get that creative outlet, start that new project, focus on that. So just doing that simple thing by archiving all your old documents has been a game changer because it lets you focus on the new projects and what you want to currently work on. Exactly.

Exactly. That's a great attitude. The past is always going to be chaotic. You're never going to perfectly document and organize the past. But the future is unknown and unfolding right now. And anything could happen. And you still don't have to organize the future either. But...

If you just have a little bit of access to what's been created in the past, you can create a future you can't even imagine. Yeah. So we've been talking a lot about building a second brain and you've been teaching a course about this for a couple of few years now. Has there been like one or two stories about people who built a second brain that's really like changed their life? Like if you could, I'm sure people would be interested in hearing those stories. Oh yeah. That's a great question. I don't know if anyone's asked that before.

Oh my gosh, so many stories. So many stories. One that comes to mind that is actually in the book was Patrick, which is actually not his real name, but I'm using the name Patrick to protect his identity, who is a pastor of a church in Colorado. And he had this incredible story that he posted to the discussion forum for the course where he creates memorials for people who died.

And he started to realize that creating a memorial is a creative act. It's a creative project. And it would take him, I think he said like eight or 10 hours to create a memorial, which is a lot for a pastor. All the responsibilities that a pastor has, you know, to create, you know, spend eight or 10 hours for one memorial is kind of a lot. And he started using the techniques in the book to,

instead of sitting down having to block off two or three days and only do this thing which is what I call a heavy lift a heavy lift is when you sit down and you're just like I'm gonna grind through this using only usually your first brain brute-forcing it basically right he instead started to take what I call a slow burn approach where as he was talking to the family he would record a

using a voice transcription app on his phone, what they were saying. We now have apps that you can transcribe everything a person is saying and then just export that all at once to your notes. He would write down little notes as he was driving and, or hopefully when he was done driving, um, that of ideas that occurred to him. Uh,

when he was reading messages from the family, he would capture those things. So by the time, basically all this means, by the time he sat down to write the memorial service, instead of starting from scratch and trying to make stuff up, he had this collection in his inbox of his notes app, all these little tidbits, which he could then kind of combine. And he said that using that process, slow burn approach, the time it took to make a memorial went from eight to 10 hours to like, I think two hours.

Which, think about what that means. That might not seem that life-changing. But for Patrick, it was. Because the time he saves means he has more time to tend to his congregation, more time to add creative content.

aspects to these memorials more time to just actually this is the most meaningful thing more time to sit with those families and actually be with them and comfort them and help them grieve and not be kind of stressed out and worried because he's got to go and create this this thing so that's just one one example but i'm just amazed by how everything we do practically is a process of

taking in information and doing something with it. So when you learn something like building a second brain, which is so fundamental, it changes your relationship to information. And when you change your relationship to information, your relationship to almost everything changes. It's something very deep. It's a very deep layer of reality. Yeah.

And you just covered on like one of my favorite points in the book is like if you have a second brain, you never really start from a blank page. And starting with a blank page is like something you never want to do. Like there's a myth like about writers. They just sit down and start writing and just the creativity just flows and genius just comes out. But like as you talk about in the book, like if you have your second brain, you have a ton of like research and like knowledge and information saved about a topic. You just haven't like organized it and distilled it.

So I just love that idea of like if you have a second brain you never have to start from blank page again and like the example you just gave like he went from Taking him eight hours to write it to two hours, which is like four times faster So I think just such a like a powerful benefit of having a second brain Exactly. I I call that starting with abundance. We live in this world of incredible abundance. Why would you? Why would you do that to yourself? Why would you be so

unkind to yourself to essentially lock yourself in an empty room and try to come up with something when right outside the door is this world of information abundance so many stories and examples and metaphors and people's ideas and your ideas and all these things all of it is building blocks all of it is raw material that you can bring into your own work

Or your own life. It's just so fascinating how many benefits there are to building a second brain. How much of the work you're actually doing and how much you could just multiply the advantages of having a second brain in your life just by following a few simple steps.

Absolutely. So I noticed towards the end of the book in the acknowledgements you talk about, you mentioned James Clear and how he helped guide you through the writing process. So I love to learn because he's like one of the best nonfiction authors out there. So what kind of wisdom or guidance did he share with you? Oh, boy. Wow. You made it all the way to the acknowledgements. That's like the extra credit. Yeah.

Yeah, I tried to make the acknowledgements meaningful. I tried to really demonstrate the attitude that I write about in the book itself, that it's all a collective process of sensemaking. You know, I have trouble saying even the words my book.

Sounds ridiculous because that's like saying my child, like as if one person raised this child, every single person in those acknowledgements was pivotal to making this book come to life. And James really was one of my primary advisors. He was very generous with his time, getting on calls with me from the very early days. We have the same agent. We share a book agent. So there was some crossover there, but let's see, what did he, I think the main thing that I learned from James, there were many, but if I had to summarize, I think

Actually, very early on, I wasn't even sure I wanted to go through a traditional publisher. And so I remember one of my first calls with him, I was like, "Oh, should I self-publish? Should I go through a publisher? Why did you go through a publisher?" And the way he said it, I'm not sure he used exactly these words, but this is what I remember. He was kind of like, "Look, do you want to impress a small group of niche bloggers on the internet, or do you want to reach the widest possible range of people?"

And it just hit me. I was like, oh my gosh, that is kind of confronting because I spend a lot of my time trying to impress a small group of niche bloggers. Yeah.

Those are my peers. Or Twitter followers. Or Twitter followers, yes. Twitter peers, yeah. Exactly. You know, I put something on Twitter, but you know, when you put something on Twitter, you always have a few people in mind that you hope see it, right? Yeah, like Naval or someone likes your tweet, it's like, oh, you're done for the day, you're good. Exactly, exactly. And if that's the case, and there's nothing wrong with that, but if that's the case, just self-publish. Don't go through this multi-year process of trying to find a publisher. Yeah.

But, you know, I spent most of my 20s doing international development work and charity work, nonprofit work, or in the Peace Corps working for the U.S. government. So I'm kind of a bleeding heart, you know, type. And I just remembered all the people that I worked with or that I taught or that I served overseas. And I thought, who can this knowledge really make the biggest difference for?

It's not the New York City blogger or whatever who already knows a lot of this stuff. Maybe that person will have a few light bulb moments, which is fine.

But I really thought of like the zero to one people. The people who, if not for a book like this that is published through a huge publisher, translated into all these languages, distributed through all these countries, might never, might not in their whole life ever have exposure to advice about digital note taking. That's really who I did it for. That's really who I had in mind.

The goal, which is really what I learned from James, and he had the same attitude with Atomic Habits, was how can we boil this down to the simplest possible framing so that the widest range of people can benefit from it in their lives? That was really a gift that he gave me. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's such a great point. I'm sure someone like one day is going to pick it up from an airport that never heard of you or like book just catches their eye, you know, starts reading it, builds their second brain and just kind of like transformed their life. Yeah. Yeah. And so, uh, continuing this path down the path of like writing a book, how long did it take you to write this book? And how long do you think it would have taken you if you didn't have a second brain? It took a long time. It took a really long time.

I think it's been three and a half years since I first spoke to my agent, which was one of the first conversations I had before she was even my agent. And really, so three and a half years really on the book, but the course on which the book is based, which is really how the ideas were developed has now been going on five and a half years. But then really, where did those ideas come from? It goes back a decade. It's really like a decade of my life that has been dedicated to this kind of stream of work and,

You know, I couldn't really accelerate the process because it didn't depend on me. It depended on the rather slow step-by-step, you know, process that publishers follow, which actually I, at this point, I kind of now understand, you know, think about if you, if you self publish a book, you just upload a file to a server, an Amazon server, and then it's instantly available around the world. But,

What we're doing is very different. This book is going to be in bookstores from many different companies in many different countries. It's going to be available through dozens and dozens of different sales channels. And so it just takes a long time. What I will say is having a second brain allowed me to write this book and continue to make progress on it when everything in my life and the world was changing.

So within those three and a half years, of course there was COVID, but also we, during that same period, we moved from Mexico where we were living in Mexico city back to the U S we, my wife and I got pregnant and had our first kid. We bought our first house, bought our first dog, bought two cars, did extensive renovation throughout the house, including on our home office. Um, and I started, um,

excuse me, I started hiring a team, went from a team of one to 10, nearly 10,

Continue teaching the online course which is you know a thousand people at a time taking this course So a lot of things going on during that period that I think if I I'm sure if I didn't have an external place to keep track of all the details Either the book would have been completely derailed or all those other parts of my life would have been derailed The ability to constantly offload what I'm thinking turn my attention to something else make progress offload that turn my attention back and

is is completely due to my second brain yeah it's great to hear that it's something i'm going to be like implementing more in my life as well and for anyone listening out there who like they're aspiring authors uh would you recommend actually like building a course first like which is what you did so that way you kind of test these concepts and get like feedback from people and then see what works best and then put it into your book or like could they just like skip that step what would you what would your advice be to like those aspiring writers

Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people in your audience, they read books, but they also have in the back of their mind, they want to write one, right? I'd encourage people. It is an incredible experience. You really got to dig deep and find out what you're capable of.

My advice, so my advice depends a lot on your situation. I have a blog post where I talk about kind of the four main pathways to publishing. I only took one of those pathways, which was traditional publishing. So it depends a lot on your goals, depends on who you're trying to reach, depends on your subject matter, depends on your, the time you want to spend, the resources you have. But I would say for those who are writing about nonfiction, especially self-improvement, which is my case, I would say,

I cannot imagine a better way to prepare for that than teaching a course. Because the thing with nonfiction that I think a lot of people don't realize is the way that a nonfiction self-improvement book is measured is on the efficacy of the ideas. Like, do they actually work? And do they actually work for a lot of people?

And you can't really know that as a writer. You know, you write something down. Let's say something that worked for you. How can you possibly know whether that is efficacious for a lot of people? You just can't. You have to do research. And what research looks like when it comes to humans is teaching, coaching, consulting,

Having people take your advice, try it, and then come back to you and say, this part worked, this didn't. This other part worked with some modifications. In the past, you had to do that. For example, David Allen did executive coaching. But executive coaching is one-on-one. So it took him 20 plus years coaching one person at a time.

you probably want to go a little bit faster than 20 plus years. So what a course allows you to do is to vastly accelerate that process by teaching groups, right? I teach a live cohort based course where we have people get on zoom calls and we actually interact, but you can also do this as a, as a self-paced, like a video course. You just need, basically what you need is large groups of people from diverse backgrounds, diverse ages, diverse cultures, diverse, every, every kind of diversity. Um,

trying what you're saying, coming back to you and saying what worked. And then you just get the top 10% of what worked, stick it in a book. And that is how you know the book is effective. You're not guessing. You're not just being like, oh, this is kind of an entertaining anecdote. You're putting every single idea in this book. I'm certain works for a lot of people because I've seen it. And that's, by the way, what gives me the confidence to spend, you know, three plus years of my life on it. Yeah. And I think just go back to like a big theme in your book is like,

You want to make everything actionable, whether it's building your second brain, it's not just taking notes, but actually applying them. Whether it's writing a book, because if you teach a course, you get immediate feedback of what works, what doesn't. And just this current theme of not just capturing information, but actually applying it, seeing what works. And that's the real benefit of the entire process. Exactly. Yeah, it's very meta, because what I've just described is what the book itself is teaching, is how to do that, not just if you're writing a book,

but anything you're trying to do. I mean, I really want people to get this. I don't think they realize for anything they want to do, anything, I dare you, I challenge you to give me an example where this doesn't apply. Whatever you're trying to do, there are people that have done it before. They have shared in some form advice, stories, models, examples, things not to do, pitfalls, mistakes.

It's that same thing going back to starting from a blank slate. Don't try anything from nothing. Try to start where other people left off and you'll start off on step number 10 instead of step number one. That just requires a process of note-taking because you can't just go memorize all this life advice. You have to write it down.

organize it, distill it, synthesize it into your kind of your own like cheat sheet. This is the advice that I'm putting into action. Yeah. Like with anything in life, it seems like the best way to just stand on the shoulders of giants to learn from others and kind of like get skipped those beginning steps. And so for everyone listening who I guess, yeah, would want to build their second brain, um,

What's like the main takeaway like you want them to have from this podcast or like the first thing you want them to do? If they could just do one thing after listening to this episode, I would say try my 30-day note-taking experiment It's really the best place to start, you know, I almost want you to be skeptical Like I said even about what I'm saying, right? I'm telling you it is worth building a second brain It is going to have tremendous benefits for you over your lifetime. Maybe and

Try it. Do an experiment. 30 days. Write down one note per day. And when I say a note, I don't mean pages and pages and pages. It could be one quote, one observation, one thing that happened to you today, one story, one realization. It doesn't even have to be from the external world. It could be something from your internal thinking.

Write it down in whatever is literally the easiest solution, even if it's not digital, even if it's on paper, post-its, or if it's an app on your phone, whatever. And then at the end of the 30 days, just look over that list of 30, at least 30 notes and ask yourself, what is the value in this information? How would I use it?

What would be the effect on me of continuing to do this over time? Look at how much effort it took. Was it hard? Right? How can you make it easier? Like do a 30 day experiment before committing. And I think what you'll find, what almost everyone that I've talked to has found is they're surprised by what's there. They realize, Oh, I thought this wasn't an uneventful month. It was just going about my daily business this month. And yet all these insights and interesting stories arose out of just my daily life and

And I'd say to start there. It's pretty fascinating how simple, yeah, effective just the whole note-taking process is and how much you could benefit from building a second brain. So for everyone listening, they can check out your book, Building a Second Brain. Where is the best place for them to go to learn more about you, your work, and just kind of learn more about the whole note-taking process?

You can find everything, including all the info about the book, the course that I teach, and a tremendous amount of free content that we publish at buildingasecondbrain.com. Well, really enjoyed your book, Tiago. Really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the Read Your Journey podcast today. This was so fun. Thank you, Alex. I really appreciate it. And hopefully your followers found some interesting tidbits. Thank you for listening, everyone.

Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Reader's Journey. You can learn more about what's covered in today's podcast in the show notes below.

If you enjoyed this podcast, the best way you can support it is by subscribing and leaving a positive review. If you're looking for reading tips or book recommendations, head over to alexandbooks.com. If you want to join my reading journey, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter by searching for Alex and Books. That's all for now. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope to see you soon. Read on, everyone.