111: Building a Second Brain with Tiago Forte

When it comes to gifting, everyone on your list deserves something special. Luckily, Marshall's buyers travel far and wide, hustling for great deals and amazing gifts so you don't have to. That means your mom gets that cashmere sweater, your best friend, that Italian leather bag, your co workers unwrap their favorite beauty brands, and your nephews the coolest new toys. Go ahead. A price is this good, you can grab something for yourself too. Marshalls, we get the deals. You gift the good stuff. Shop now@marshalls.com or find a store near you.

This is what we're taught. Say your objectives, state your goals and then just relentlessly force reality to fit into your definition of success. Which doesn't work when the world is unpredictable and is a lot of effort and a lot of stress. Instead, you can look at your environment, look at your surroundings, look at your information environment and ask what value is already being created here? What is already happening? What has already happened? What's already been created by me, by my colleagues, by my customers, by my audience, by other people on the Internet, sometimes by accident, sometimes by happenstance that I can merely sort of just package up. I can kind of just like snap it together almost like a collection of Legos, and therefore only have to do that final 20% rather than starting from zero.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host, Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello. Hello my friends. Welcome back. You are in for a treat. Today we have the one, the only Thiago Forte who is here with us. He is one of the leading productivity experts and so much more who has taught thousands of people around the world how timeless principles and the latest technology can revolutionize their productivity, creativity and personal effectiveness. Today we're talking about his debut, brand new, already Amazon best selling and I'm sure many more lists book building a second a proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. Tiago is also a fan of Notion, as am I. So as I was building and writing free time and recording these episodes on Notion, everyone kept saying, do you know Tiago Forte? You should really know Tiago Forte. So with that, Tiago, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jenny. This is such a pleasure. I'm so Happy to be here.

Me too. And I joked before we hit record. And as my listeners know, it's like the introvert's guide to making friends is that we'll just wait to connect until you write a book and I invite you to the podcast.

Yeah, the perfect introvert meet and greet.

Exactly. Like, why even schedule a hello phone call when you know you could just do your deep work of the book, I'll do mine, then we'll connect. And so what I'm really saying, listeners, is this is the first time Tiago and I are ever chatting, and it's almost like trying to boil the ocean. Because as I was reading Building a Second Brain, it is the perfect extension, complement, foundation. If you read FreeTime or you're into these principles in your business, building a second brain just extends it all the way to getting all the clutter out of your mind into your second brain. Mine is the notion. Tiago is your second brain. In fact, in notion as well.

My core second brain app is Evernote Cool, which is my digital Notes app. But this is kind of a misconception. I think your second brain can actually be more than one. It kind of has to be more than one piece of software, at least. I. I don't think that there's one app to rule them all. I don't think one piece of software can do everything. So I use there's Evernote, but there's also things for my tasks. There's also Instapaper for Reading. I also use Notion for content management and for planning our content calendar. There's probably all in all, you know, six or seven different apps I use.

The best is when you get them to all talk to each other. It's true.

That's the hard part. That's the hard part.

In fact, I used a process you talk about in the book, but even something like Kindle Highlights, I have a service called Readwise that imports my Kindle Highlights and then exports them back into Notion. So even as I'm preparing for this, things like that, there are all these services that string them together.

I use Readwise, too. I'm a huge fan of Readwise. Highly recommend it.

Absolutely. I'll put the link in the show. Notes for everybody. Let's zoom out way beyond the tools and software, because you and I both agree that it's not about chasing the next shiny software object. The idea of building a second brain is about so much more. And as you really describe in the book, it's about unlocking creativity. It's about unlocking our Genius. And you also said there's an interesting relationship between building a second brain and time. I would love to hear more about that.

So, first of all, yes, a second brain is a system. And a lot of times people think system. They think software system or operating system or computer system, and it is manifested in those things, but it also transcends them. It's kind of like parallel to, like, your financial system, right? You and I, and everyone has a financial system. We may not be happy with it, we may not be happy with how much money is in it, but we have a financial system. But just because one or other account opens or closes or a checkbook runs out, or an investment gets bought or sold, that is one part of the system. But the system is more than the sum of its parts. It transcends any particular piece. And the same is true of a knowledge system. You want to look at the practical tools, but also understand that this knowledge collection, this knowledge library, will outlive and go beyond any particular piece of software.

I think when people hear building a second brain, they think about software. That's where their mind goes. Even it's where my mind went when we started this talking about notion. And then we're leveraging all these tools and stringing them together. And then a lot of people that I interact with will think, well, I'm not good at that, or that's not for me. But what you describe so beautifully, especially in the second half of the book, is how this frees our mind to do what our minds do best. To engineer luck, to expand our creativity, to expand time. So tell us a little bit about how this generates time in a way that's different than just obsessing over the latest productivity tips and tricks and hacks.

So this goes deep. This goes deep. A couple things. First, I always talk about the interplay between productivity and creativity, and I really like doing that because in people's minds, they're opposites. They're like black and white, have nothing to do with each other. And I think that's just incorrect. I grew up with a big inspiration for this book, and my work in general is my father, who is a professional artist, a painter. And growing up, it was always strange because people would hear or find out about, oh, your father is a professional artist. He must, you know, just wander around daydreaming. He must kind of just flow with the wind. He must be completely spontaneous with no rule or structure. And I was like, no, that couldn't be further from the truth. My dad was ordered. He was very Structured. He had what he called his routines, what he called his strategies. He had all these little essentially, productivity tips, you know, ways of structuring his time, structuring his ideas, writing down his ideas, creating accountability and creating containers where his creativity could thrive. And even within all that structure, you see these paintings that are wildly creative, wildly imaginative. And so I kind of see part of my mission as taking this more practical approach to creativity that is more realistic and bringing it to everyone. Because, honestly, everyone is now creative, needs to be creative. It's no longer reserved only for, you know, artists and painters and musicians. If your job is still being done by you, a human, it's because there's some element of creativity or solving new kinds of problems. So I think that's an important sort of context, is like, productivity enables creativity. And then also, by the way, creativity also enables productivity. I always say, you know, people say, oh, I have no interest in creating content. I just want to be more productive. And I'm like, okay, so imagine this. You have a website, let's say you have a blog, and you write, I don't know, an article on one of the ideas that you're known for or that you commonly explain to people. If 100 people a week, let's just say, visit that blog post and read it. Or 100 people a month. Imagine the time that that saves, right? Like, what would it take you to explain or communicate this idea to 100 people a week? It's like having your own personal salesforce out in the world, explaining and teaching your idea over and over and over again while you sleep, while you're doing whatever else. So I think you really need both.

There's also, as you talk about, such an abundance of information now and little snippets. And even if people don't think that they're in the creative arts, interestingly, my dad's a painter, too. Highly organized, structured as well.

Funny, funny.

I know. Like, there's really something in common here of what kind of child it creates. Just that dance. I think we've both probably observed that dance between structure and creative output. And my dad is super structured within his days and yet so prolific and productive in terms of his output because he keeps putting in the reps. And he also reads a lot and writes, and he has tons of marginalia. He sends me binders of the consolidated xeroxed marginalia from reading about philosophers, you know, or reading original philosophical texts. And so I think some people struggle with productivity because they're overwhelmed by their own information gathering and they don't know how to collect it, save it. So synthesize it, as you say, distill, and then express it. And so, interestingly, when people read a book like yours, as I did, and I go, this is so rich. It's so well written. It's so well described and explained. Okay, yes. And as you say, 80% of the project really happens before you sit down to start it from your second brain.

Exactly. That's such a funny coincidence. Yeah. Beware, if you are an artist, your child may write productivity and time management books.

Yeah, right. And be like, obsessed, organized. Yeah, I would love to hear more about that. And also this, that you don't start a project until it's 80% done. What you mean by that?

First, I wanted to touch on what you said. I think this is another misconception, basically. I think so much of this comes down to the fact that people don't have models for creatives. They don't have models in their life for what it means to be creative, to be an artist. And so they rely on what's on TV or what's in movies or what's in stories, which is just this very unrealistic kind of romanticized version of what it means to be creative. But my dad was the same. So I think what we're kind of speaking to is the balance between inputs and outputs. And I think the common myth is, oh, to be creative, you have to shut yourself off from the world. You have to go to, you know, the classic log cabin in the woods, like Henry David Thoreau, or you need a little isolated Parisian studio apartment with smoke curling in the air and a baguette on the table, like these kind of funny, cliched images. But my dad was the same. He was constantly taking it. Any city that we would travel to, he made a beeline straight to the museums. He was always about museums. Main thing that he wanted to see because to him it was like school. He'd go in and sketching in his notebook, standing in front of an old master, studying how they painted a hand or how they painted a foot or how they used perspective or how they used contrast. He was constantly writing things down, reading things, even watching tv. Popular culture was also a huge inspiration. And so when the time came to go create, rather than being in this vacuum, this blank space which is so hard to be in, he was just mixing and matching, almost like Legos, all these creative inputs that he had had, and that's where the inspiration came from.

I just love hearing his process and people laugh at me. Because I also married an artist. A painter. I think being a painter.

Me too, me too.

Oh, you did?

No way.

See, I joke that I got spoiled because the mind of an artist and this intellectual curiosity and creativity and exploration and just being a pioneer and an explorer. Yeah, I got spoiled. So I'm like, I was attracted to that and my husband too. My husband will like go deep into pockets of the Internet and find memes. And you know, meme is the ultimate packet of information and you talk about intermediate packets. So I want to just go back real quick, tell us about your philosophy. Why don't you start a project until it's 80% complete? And what do you mean by that? Because it's not probably what people listening think.

This kind of makes people be like, huh?

So I think it's completely the opposite of how we are taught to execute. We're taught to move projects forward. And by the way, I'm also a huge fan of history. I always try to go back and understand the history of how these misconceptions and preconceptions came to be. And this one in particular actually goes back to like the 1920s and 30s, I believe, or 40s, to General Motors, the car company. General Motors, back a hundred years ago basically invented this style of business called mbo, management by objective, which today is so natural to us. We don't even think of it as like a style or a philosophy. But back then it was radical. It was basically, let's have departments, let's set objectives, basically set goals for each department and then over the course of the quarter and the year and several years track our progress toward those objectives. Like that just seems like the only way to do it these days, right? But it's not. That is a hundred year old legacy that came from the industrial revolution and the early 20th century. And it's not the only way to manage projects. There's another way which is more natural when the world is unpredictable, right? The 20th century was this unusual time of predictability. You kind of knew next year there will be this much economic growth. If I work this long in this job, I will get promoted. If I work this many years, decades, I will retire with a gold watch. The world was kind of predictable for a while there. No longer, right? No longer. Now your company will face upheaval. Sooner or later, whole industries rise and fall. And so we need a way to plan what we're going to focus on and to make progress even in a world that is highly, highly unpredictable. And I call that approach just in time, just in time project management or just in time productivity. And it's basically instead of imposing your will on the environment around you, this is what we're taught. Say your objectives, state your goals, and then just relentlessly force reality to fit into your definition of success. Which doesn't work when the world is unpredictable and is a lot of effort and a lot of stress. Instead, you can look at your environment, look at your surroundings, look at your information environment and ask what value is already being created here? What is already happening? What has already happened? What's already been created by me, by my colleagues, by my customers, by my audience, by other people on the Internet, sometimes by accident, sometimes by happenstance that I can merely sort of just package up, I can kind of just like snap it together almost like a collection of Legos, and therefore only have to do that final 20% rather than starting from zero.

We'll be right back just after this. Hi, this is Deechen Laichman and I am here to tell you Toyotathon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4, or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive. Reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refresh, refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst.

I love your emphasis on intuition as well. And you say trust your intuition. Trust that as you go about the day and as you go about reading, you will collect what's interesting to you. And you might not even know what it's for yet. But that as this collection bucket, I call them collection buckets, start to fill to the top, ideas emerge, even about what projects to tackle. I love that how you talk about the kind of virtuous circle between collecting and then getting ideas and then the collection feeds those ideas and makes them better.

Exactly. Capture is where it all starts. Because if you have too strong of a opinion on what is valuable, what is interesting, what is helpful in terms of the information you're consuming, you're going to miss things, right? The best ideas are almost by definition unexpected. They're Surprising. They come from a direction that you don't expect. They're cross disciplinary, multidisciplinary. They don't fit neatly into one category and that's why they're powerful. But to notice, this really all comes down to noticing, right? When you're walking down the street, this often happens to me. Walking down a street in a city and you see a mural, right? And it's just something about it just strikes you and you don't know why. You can't explain it. There's nothing that you're working on in particular that this would be useful for. Maybe you're not even a designer, maybe the visuals aren't really a part of your work, but it's trusting yourself enough to just snap a photo of that mural or whatever it is, the cityscape scene, or a poster you see, or a logo or a storefront design, just because it's interesting to you and for no other reason. Trusting that if you constantly take in and surround yourself with interesting things, you're going to start to connect the dots and notice patterns and it's going to lead to new projects and new collaborations and even new businesses that you can't even imagine.

So then how do you, Tiago, tell when it's time, like you've been collecting, let's say, even something like this book, Building a Second Brain. I know you've written other books before, but I think this is your first traditionally published book, right?

Yes, yes.

So how do you know when your collection bucket is full enough? What whispers do you hear that say, all right, Tiago, it's time to roll up your sleeves and like, actually do this thing and create the book.

I kind of joke that the book is not a project. It is a collection of dozens of projects. I like to use the definition of a project that is very small. Like even something that just takes you a day or two, I think should be called a project because you have to track, you know, a set of information over time. But I'll give you an example. Actually, that just happened a couple days ago. I sat down and I wrote an email to. There's a group of people, it's four people, friends, who I'm encouraging to write books. And I've talked to each of them individually. I've said, hey, you should write a book. You know, I'll help you out, I'll give you feedback on your proposal. And so I had promised various of them, you know, to share my proposal, to share other ideas that I had, my learnings from going through the process and so I sat down to just write all four of them, the same email with all kind of my recommendations. Well, as often happens when you really get into something, even like an email, it took maybe an hour, I discovered, which I didn't realize, that I had a lot to say, I had a lot to offer. And as I went to hit send and in the following day, which was yesterday, I just realized, you know what? I kind of accidentally put together like a guide to publishing a book. That's what I mean by surprise. I didn't mean to, I didn't expect to. I kind of surprised myself by having put together this kind of extensive email. So what I'm going to do now, I have a note to self here to do this, is to get that email and turn it into a blog post. Just get exactly what I wrote, make some small changes and make it a public resource. Why not, right? That's a perfect example. I put in at least 80% if not 90% of the work. That value exists, but it's hidden, it's obscured somewhere in the sent folder of my Gmail. All it takes is like minutes to get it out of there and turn it into a really valuable business asset for me.

I so believe in that too. Like, you know, just sending someone a link rather than the data and email that often inspires me to do the same thing, like create the resources. Or even sometimes I'll create a loom and I'll realize, oh, this loom can be publicly shared because I was explaining something to someone. But that goes to what you say, even in the book is that there starts to be this behind the scenes sharing. Like sometimes people will say, oh, wow, you share so much. You're so transparent. I'm like, because I can't resist but share something I had to figure out the long hard way. It completes the process to share it. It's like no good hoarding it. You know, I know you talk about scarcity versus abundance, but it's like what you did, sharing your book process with your friends, it's satisfying. It's like you figured out so many things and you put your unique Tiago spirit spin on it with your unique mind. It's amazing to share that out.

It's the best. It's the best. So I think a common thing is people have this idea that there's like content creators and then everyone else, like again, black and white, all or nothing. And they'll say, oh, I'm not going to collect my ideas, capture my ideas, because I don't have A blog or I don't have a podcast. I'm not an entrepreneur. And I just think this is absurd because, you know, the average knowledge worker spends, I think it's 27% of your day writing emails, 27% of your day. That's more than one full day out of a five day work week. And what I would have them ask is, okay, is every single email that you're writing full of completely novel information you have never explained or communicated before? Likely not. And a place to start is to just ask. Like this is an exercise actually you can do is called faq. What is the most frequently asked question that people ask you? Like, what is it? Is it you know how to explain what you do? Is it this one question from your field? Is it a question about your expertise? What is it? How to start writing in public is just to answer that question thoroughly, put it on the simple website or even on your social media profile or whatever and just see how much time that saves you. Speaking of time, right? Every time someone asks you, you'll go, you know what? It's so important that I answer this question. Well, I've actually taken the time to compose the ultimate thorough answer with all my sources and all my recommended resources. You can access all of that with this link. I mean, how powerful is that?

That's so good. I love how you explained it.

I'll say every question lives three lives the moment someone asks it. When you document the process internally and ideally you are posting it publicly somewhere. But I love how you're explaining it. Like I actually wanted to answer this for you in the most thorough ultimate way possible. Bam. Here's the link.

I think people are embarrassed to do this. They think it's like insulting or something. They think that the caring, thoughtful thing to do is to re explain for this one person in this one situation. But it's not, it's truly not of service to anyone to spend your precious time, which is your precious life and their life. Re explaining something that's been done before. There's just no point, right?

And then it does get better and better over time. Like how to write a book. Resources you're creating, you're going to keep adding to it, you'll keep thinking about it. So it will be so much better because it emerged as its own mini project.

Exactly.

I know. I can just hear in my mind some people asking who get overwhelmed. Like you mentioned software Read later or instapaper. Sorry, Read later is the function that instant paper takes care of. Or things like Pocket. I've used those in the past. And it's funny because I use Web Clipper forevernote, and for years I had this folder called How We Work, which is so general and broad that it's meaningless. But I clipped all these articles that later became free time. But then there are other services that I'll use, like Instapaper or Pocket. And that is just where content goes to die. It goes in there. I never process it. I never even remember to look there, let alone read them. So I still subscribe to the inky newspaper and the Inky magazines that I want to read, and I read them by hand. Otherwise I don't get to it. My eyes are tired by the computer. I know you have processes like weekly and monthly reviews for your content. Do you even try to keep up with Instapaper or do you just go search when you have a relevant project to see what to grab?

This is kind of the reason I have a job is like every one of these software programs, it's never enough to just download the app. That's just the starting point. What really makes the difference is you is your shift in mindset, your shift in behavior, your shift in habits. That is what I do. I provide the human element. Yeah. Re later is a good example, because there's just a few quite small shifts that I think people can make to make it far more useful. A couple things. A few things. So first is a mindset shift, which is I actually think there's a benefit to you the instant that you save something to a relater app, which is you didn't get distracted by it. Right. Like what you described as Instapaper or Pocket or whatever being a place to die. You and your listeners consider maybe that's fine. Maybe for you or for this period in your life or for that piece of content that is exactly what you needed. You just needed like a dumpster to just throw it behind you so that you didn't interrupt whatever you were focused on to get into that piece of content. So that's one possibility. If you decide or your listeners decide that's not enough. I actually do want to get back to this. There's a couple little tips I have. So the first is I recommend sorting your reading list like an instapaper. It just shows you this big list of all the things you said you want to read. Or actually you can save things you want to watch, like videos or listen to, like podcasts. It's not only reading. And there's different sorting criteria. You can sort by date saved. You can sort by length. You can sort by different things. And the one I recommend you use, that I always use is sorting by oldest saved. So in other words, instead of having the newest, the most recent thing that you saved at the top of the list, it puts the oldest item that you saved at the top of the list and then as you go down, it ends at the bottom with the newest things. So what this does is it removes novelty bias. It removes this bias that we have to always go to the thing that just happened, the most recent thing. You're forcing yourself to start at the oldest thing. So that's the first half. The second half is I have a three strikes or you're out rule. Okay, so I start at the top item, which is the oldest item, and I'm allowed to skip it for any reason or no reason. I can skip it if I just don't feel like it, if the subject isn't interesting, if I just I'm not into it. But if I skip an item three times, I have to delete it. So it only gets three chances. If three separate times I decide this is not worth my time, it's not worth my time and there's no point in having it. I haven't invested any time in it, so there's no sunk cost. So just get rid of it. And over time that basically recycles and keeps my instapaper reading list fresh. And I never feel weighed down by this guilt of this ever increasing mass of things to consume.

We'll be right back just after this with Venmo Stache. A taco in one hand and ordering.

A ride in the other means you're stacking cash back. Nice.

Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when.

You pay with your Venmo debit card.

From takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more, pick a bundle with your go.

Tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Earn more cash when you do more with stash.

Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply.

Max $100 cash back per month.

See terms@venmo me stashterms.

This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart move being financially savvy Smart move. Another smart move having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.

One thing I'm really interested in is zooming out or going behind the scenes to how you structure your business and your team. Because I think that's also a creative dance between deep work, introverting, reading, curating, writing, and then there's a whole bunch of logistics and even people management that could come with building out even what I would call a delightfully tiny team. So can you tell us a little bit about how your business is structured and how many people you work with, whether full time or even contractors?

So we have, as you said, a small team. I find it delightful. I really love having just a core team that's very tight knit, where everyone knows each other, not a ton of bureaucracy, very little hierarchy. It's very flat. You know, I always ask us, what is the biggest impact we can make with the smallest team? How can we have each person maximally leveraged so that each person is making the biggest impact? And so we have a team full time equivalent of about eight people. People running operations, running content, running YouTube, running marketing, customer service, the usual functions. And the main reason that we have this team is to run the online course. So I think this is where I'm a bit different from many writers is I love writing. That's kind of where I started. That's my home base. But after having a blog for a few years, Starting in around 2000, I think 14, I just wanted to see my ideas put into practice. I love ideas, I love abstract concepts. But I would always wonder, is this idea just interesting? Is it just kind of entertaining? Or does it actually make people more effective in the real world? And for that reason, I wanted to really get in the weeds and work with people and coach them and consult with them. And that's why we started the online course Building a Second Brain, which is really the primary business, the flagship product that we sell.

Thank you for sharing. I'm curious about your time as it relates to managing the team. So do you have somebody who kind of reports into you? I know it's very flat, but are you managing all of those people and they're kind of pinging you with needs and questions and things, or do you have someone who's an in between, like Director of Operations?

A little of both. Almost everyone reports to me. There's four kind of directors of the four main departments. Some of them have some people under them as well. But I have a direct contact with most people. It's funny, before I hired anyone, I had this fear that my creative time, my Focus. My deep work was going to be completely disrupted. I was going to be just stuck in one on ones and meetings all day and all that stuff. But that fear was completely unfounded for a few reasons. I think it depends how you do it. One, you can hire people that are highly autonomous, very self directed, who know how to plan and design and execute their own work. So I think I only have three standing meetings a week. One on Monday and then two on Wednesday. Each one maybe 45 minutes long. So very, very manageable. Second is we try to be as asynchronous as possible so we don't have meetings by default, especially have big meetings by default that take up everyone's time. Google Chat is our chat tool. We use email, we use Loom is another one. These tools that allow you to do your own thinking thoughtfully, intentionally create an intermediate packet, a little document or a little artifact, and then share it in a way that people can reference it again and again. In a way. I feel like having a team allows me to focus more. There's no way that I would have been able to spend two years writing this book while also continuing to deliver the course, which is very time intensive without a team. They were the team that allowed all that to continue going so that I could focus on my creativity.

It's so true. Like you took yourself out of the bottleneck of all of that which enabled you to do this work, which is the whole point. You mentioned it so casually, like, oh yeah, hiring autonomous people. How have you found such great people? Because hiring itself is quite a skill. So what's your. Do you have a secret sauce to your hiring and sourcing great people?

It is, it's such a skill. And I think this is another reason I've gotten into it is I'm always just attracted to learning. I'm always just trying to maximize learning. And wow, is there a lot to learn in the realm of managing people, hiring them, recruiting them, giving them feedback, holding them accountable. It's kind of this like whole open field of learning that I'm having to do. There's so much to it. I think we seriously underestimate the skill and creativity that goes into management. I think mostly because most of us have had mostly bad managers. But to do it well, to do it as an art, to do it with empathy and to do it in a way that is caring of people, that is helping them fulfill their potential is a journey that I'm just starting. So I don't know if I have much advice to offer. I will say that it is very powerful to recruit from your audience. Right. Someone who's been through your courses, read your writing, knows your values and your principles, because it's almost like the first day that they start, it's as if they've already been with you, like six months or a year without you having to have trained them because they've been through your content.

What I find is, you know, that they resonate deeply so that filter has been met. And if they're attracted to your work, you can already assume they at least know how to organize, like, know how to process information, which is the big skill that you're teaching. Yeah, I love how you describe it. You're talking about our relationship to information and, oh, that's just such a beautiful way to say what it is you're doing, because it transcends software. It is about our relationship to information.

It is.

Two more questions, because I know we're almost out of time. You briefly mentioned intermediate packets and so did I earlier. And you say that it's abbreviated as ip, which is a lucky coincidence because it actually is your intellectual property. So just tell us quickly, what is an intermediate packet as you describe it, and how does it create IP for us?

An intermediate packet is a building block. It is a building block, just like a Lego piece that is reusable, that can be mixed and matched and combined with others into almost anything. And I think this is foreign to people because we're used to thinking in terms of tasks, right? Like my to do list. I'm going to send this email, I'm going to make this project plan. I'm going to attend this meeting, I'm going to read this report. But this goes back to what I was saying, that we are all content creators. If you write the same email two or three times, if you can just notice, hey, I seem to be writing the same email again and again. If you could just get that effort you've put in, pull it out of your inbox, put it into a Google Doc or a notion page or even a public blog post, suddenly it's transformed. Suddenly this private, secret, internal thing that only has value if you are personally there sending it to someone. It's almost like you're open, sourcing your brain. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way for people to access what you know, even if you're not there, even if you're sleeping, even if you're tired or stressed out or hungry or hangry? Right? Like, imagine if what you know and what you can do was available to people without you having to personally spend your time, that would just unlock everything. Your time would be freed up to do new things, to do more creative, more leveraged things. So an intermediate packet is really just asking people to think of their work not in terms of these one off tasks, but instead in terms of these reusable documents, reusable building blocks. And the reason that's powerful is the more of these building blocks you have, the more things you can put them together, the more ways you can kind of mix and match them into new things without having to start from scratch.

It directly ties in with the FAQs and also your call to action for us to ship things even when they're not perfect, even when they're not complete, just hey, you have these useful little micro packets of info, make them public. Think out loud a little bit. Or as I call it, think of yourself as a qualified curator. Like, you don't have to be the end all, be all expert. Just be a curator that is qualified by your interest alone.

Exactly.

The last question that I ask every guest is if you could give fellow business owners permission to drop something altogether or do something differently, what would it be?

You know, what comes to mind is I'm sure a lot of your audience has social media presence. I think there's this real illusion you have to be everywhere, on all channels, like keeping all these balls in the air. I really don't think that's true. I would really just pick one place. We have so many options now. There's Twitter, there's LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube. Pick the one that best fits your personality, that best fits your style, where your audience lives. And just focus on that. Focus on really using that channel to express yourself. Like putting art into it, putting creativity into it, which is what really makes you stand out. Rather than trying to have a kind of anemic, mediocre presence across half a dozen different channels. I really see social media as a medium for creative expression. That's how I think of my Twitter. My Twitter, you'll find, is kind of random, it's kind of all over the place. That's because it's my studio, it's my canvas. I'm trying out different ideas. And Twitter has been for me, not just a way to broadcast my thoughts. It's been a development. It's like my lab, it's my laboratory where I happen upon completely new ways of teaching and communicating and explaining things.

I love that. So beautifully said. Permission not to be everywhere. Pick just one place and especially it's consistent. We just had Alexander Franz who said treat your newsletter like a tiny art project and now you're sharing of how you treat Twitter as an art project as well. And I just love picking one that resonates and use it for creative expression and nothing else. Just drop the shiny shoulds but just drop the shiny shoulds and express yourself and create your art. Which really ties it back full circle to how we started. Tiago, thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you and keep in touch?

Yeah, you can find everything@buildingasecondbrain.com including everything about the book, the course. I have a ton of free resources. A podcast. It's all there.

A podcast. I did not know about this. This is a great error on my part. Oh my goodness. I'm subscribing right now and listeners will put it in the show notes. Thank you so much Tiago. Thanks everybody for listening.

It's been so fun.

Likewise.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star. Thank you. Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my tech toolkit, a connection, continually updated list of all the software I use along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun and build with love.

Love.

This episode is brought to you by Marketa. When it comes to your payments provider, you can't afford to compromise Marketa's modern payment solutions flex with your business without the trade offs. Stable and agile. Secure and innovative. Scalable and configurable. If they say you can't have it all, don't believe them. Your business demands more. Choose a payments provider that delivers more. Choose Marketa. Visit Marketa.com Spotify to learn more.