Tiago Forte on Second Brain, Creativity, and Unlocking our True Potential | Conscious Creators

I think most new ideas, most new improvements are a combination. So I almost feel like a sketchbook, like the little drawings you made as kids, are the perfect, like, proto-example of note-taking. It's just creating your own little imaginary world where you put only the things that you like and that you enjoy, expressing your imagination.

I love that.

Right, I almost think of it like there's like this changing landscape of, you know, possibility. I wanna find like the canyon That is like the shortest, most downhill path through that landscape instead of trying to go over the tallest mountain.

I actually want to start with the story of me finding Building a Second Brain because there's, I think, a really key insight in there. I found out about you, I feel like around 2018 or '19 through a common friend, Nathalie Lison. And I took your course and it's really interesting. Every time I've taken your course, I remember feeling like, oh wait, I didn't do it right or something because I would get so distracted and into the tools. I was like, Notion or Roam or whatever. And over the last week, I was reading the book before we do the interview. I was reading your book, which is right here, Building Second Brain, and I just had this unlock. I was like, oh, it's not about the tool. It's about the system that unlocks your creative potential. So can you talk about that insight and sort of like when you discovered that and how that felt as a creator?

Hmm. Yeah, I've discovered it and rediscovered it so many times. I think the earliest, the earliest moment that I realized that or started to see it Like with so many of my principles and things that I teach, started with my dad.

Mm-hmm.

And my dad, my dad is the most prolific artist I have ever seen. He has produced probably 10,000 paintings. Like, he has spent his entire life since he was— he says he became an artist at 3 years old, and now he's 72. So he spent almost 7 decades creating art. And it's funny because my dad, he was so not precious about his tooling. You know, the canvases he would get, he'd go to like some, like, you know, artist supply store, just get the cheapest canvas. He could have justified, oh no, I need a special canvas. His paintbrushes were the most basic. He would use paint that wasn't even like artistic paint. It was like house paint. And so I just could see very clearly that there was no relationship between the sophistication of the tools and the materials and the sophistication of what you could create with them. It just was so clear. And so I think I took that attitude to technology where there's no way that the best writers in the world are using the latest, most advanced writing technology. No. In fact, they tend to use the oldest stuff. When it comes to artistry, to creativity, there are certain fields where the Sophisticated technology matters. If you're like a particle physicist, you probably need, yes, the most advanced particle collider. But with creativity, no, you just need your own system, your own habits, your own principles.

And Seth Godin also tells a story of how every time someone, or Stephen Hawking or Stephen King, is speaking at a conference, people are like, what pen do you use? In the work that you've done with, I think, hundreds or probably thousands of students now through your courses, why do people get distracted by— why is the tool the first thing that people ask about?

That's such a good question. I would really love to know myself. My best guesses are it's concrete. It's something you can look at. It's something you can buy. People love buying something so they don't have to make any change or learn anything. It's like the classic, you know, you know, when you want to learn rock climbing, the first thing you go is, you know, spend $1,000 on rock climbing equipment. It's like the classic Making an acquisition instead of just like doing the thing that you want to do. I think because it's tempting to believe that if I just adopt this one thing, that it will somehow change all of my internal psychology. And it's not true for the most part. It's just easier. It's tempting.

So it starts with the internal psychology.

That's all there is. It's not even the main— it's the only thing. It's all internal psychology.

You have a system called Building a Second Brain. Could you describe the system and sort of like how that relates to shifting the internal psychology and then unlocking the creative side?

Yeah, so Building a Second Brain is— it's a philosophy, it's a methodology. It's basically a set of principles. It's really a set of principles that are completely platform agnostic. I've had people use over 30 different note-taking apps, which is where you implement these principles, over 30 different pieces of software to implement what I teach, which is the proof that it works in a whole variety of places. It just gives people a set of principles that honestly are timeless, that you could find throughout history. You can find it in almost every field. But that is not— it's funny, like, as knowledge workers, we're not taught principles. You know, you go and you learn, you're an accountant, so you learn some accounting, or you're a business analyst, you learn some, I don't know, business. But like, no one is like, no, you are actually part of a discipline. You are like a craftsperson called a knowledge worker. There are a set of timeless practices, like, just doesn't exist. And so I'm trying to add that in.

Yeah. And one of the things I've actually noticed In a lot of your work too is you bring in a lot of learnings from outside sources that are not technology, right? Like Toyota and manufacturing. What are some of the biggest influences outside sort of knowledge management that have influenced your philosophy in PKM and building a second brain?

There's been so many. Yeah, that's one of my favorite things to do is to go outside. Manufacturing is— so first, let's talk about technology. Technology is funny because it's an infant. It's something I think we really forget. It is absolutely in its infancy. It's like a 1-month-old baby. It's just, just started. It just happened in our lifetime, right? We are the first generation to have this digital technology. So we really need to look to other fields that are more mature, that have figured stuff out. I like manufacturing because manufacturing is like a toddler, right? It's still technological and it's pretty recent. I mean, modern manufacturing really started after World War II, in the '50s. So it's just a little older. It's a few decades older. But even having a few decades of maturity, there are just profound discoveries that, yeah, Toyota and just-in-time manufacturing have have figured out. But we can also look to the history of science. We can look to the arts, all different kinds of arts, music, dance, painting, poetry. We can look to writing, right, which has been around forever. We can look to even like warfare, blitzkrieg. Pretty much any field you look at, knowledge work is so expansive and so abstract. That you can look to any field, abstract away the details, and come away with a principle that I think applies to it.

Is there one that has influenced your work more than the others? Or more specifically?

I think just-in-time manufacturing the most. Every time I read anything on it, it's like I'm discovering a secret in plain sight that someone figured out in a factory in 1955. And what they've discovered has not even started to be spread or known in the knowledge worker field. It's almost like we're just rediscovering all the same things half a century later and thinking, oh, why didn't anyone tell us this? Well, they did. And I think, you know, where that comes from, by the way, is as knowledge workers, we look down on manufacturing. There's this whole thing of like, oh, the assembly line back when we treated humans like cogs in a machine. It took advantage of people and it was inhumane, all these things. And yeah, there were situations that it was inhumane, but not all of it was. In fact, if you look at Toyota, their culture of TPS, the Toyota Production System, was more humane, I think, than a lot of knowledge worker companies, digital companies that I see today.

It's funny that you actually mentioned that because I think on the creative side, people also sort of don't want efficiency to be part of being creative. It's sort of considered separate.

Exactly.

I know one of the things you wanted to talk about was how podcast hosts use info management in their work and life. And I'll share my story, which is when I initially started the podcast, it was just completely disorganized. Something was here, I would do one interview here, one interview here. I'm uploading at night. And as I started building a team, I actually started looking at More like things like throughput or like sort of like, what is the total time? Are we doing things in like parallel or sequence? And how do we get things done faster? So what can creators learn from those fields and bring into their knowledge management?

Yeah, so within manufacturing, there's different methodologies, Six Sigma and Lean and just-in-time and all these things. But there is a particular kind of niche that is the most insightful. That is exactly what you're talking about. It's called the theory of constraints. You know about the theory of constraints?

I don't know.

Oh my gosh. I have a series. I have an 11-part series on my blog that you can check out as a kind of summary. But it's like there was this guy, Eliyahu Goldratt. He was an Israeli physicist who back in, I think starting in the '60s or so, He basically discovered a set of principles that revolutionized manufacturing, first of all, but that was only the beginning. The principles were so powerful, and they had to do with throughput, they had to do with constraints, they had to do with thinking about things as a system, whether it was a factory production line, or he then went on to revolutionize other fields. He really impacted the medical industry. He impacted the military. He impacted all the way up until the modern day. So what is it called? So the way the software is developed, like in sprints and epics and different things, the whole philosophy of modern software development, if you go back, the true origins of it were in manufacturing. Like the word Scrum, right?

Right.

We think that's a modern tech word that comes from manufacturing. And specifically, the Theory of Constraints was extremely influential in in the creation of that. So basically, it's all about throughput. Like, you can model your podcast as an information system with inputs and outputs, right? Your brain is an information system with inputs and outputs. A house is an information system with input. Like, any— almost anything you can model as an input-output system. And once you do, you have this set of principles which we can get into if you want, but the theory of constraints offers basically— Yeah, let's do it. Dramatically increase the output is the goal.

Do you want to go into the elements of it? Yeah.

Wow. I haven't talked about this in a long time, but actually I'm, I'm going to be getting back into it because this is so timeless. So this is kind of nice. But I would say like the one idea summary of the theory of constraints, we can start there, is that every system has a bottleneck and only improvement at the bottleneck Makes any difference.

Interesting. And the reason I say interesting in that way, by the way, is as I'm starting to build a team, I realized I'm the biggest bottleneck. So when you said that, I was like, oh, all the things that aren't happening are coming back to me. So I just had that realization when you said that. So continue.

Yeah, so I was just going to ask, on your podcast, your team, your company, do you know what the bottleneck is? It sounds like you do.

Right.

And you're right, it tends to always be the leader. So then, then if you, if you want to know what the theory of constraints has to say, no other improvement that you're making, improvements to your marketing, improvements to design, to sales, to audio quality, none of that makes any difference unless it improves the bottleneck.

So any improvement or let's say tactic we're implementing that doesn't impact me as the creator is not going to improve our output, basically?

Yeah, that's what TOC would say. In fact, they make it worse.

So something I'm curious about is if you think about your transition from being a solo creator to building a team or maybe other creators that you've worked with or seen through your courses, what are the biggest bottlenecks when it comes to the creator? And I'm guessing it probably relates to the psychology, but yeah, I'm curious, even in your experience, what were the biggest creator bottlenecks, personal creator bottlenecks?

Yeah, so if you are, say, building a company with The Theory of Constraints, which is abbreviated TOC, in mind, every day or week, you're just asking, what is the current constraint? And it's always changing. As soon as you fix one bottleneck, the bottleneck goes somewhere else, and then you fix that one, and then it goes somewhere else. It's like constantly just jumping around your organization. So I've had probably hundreds, just to name a few. At one point, the bottleneck was being willing to put my work on the internet, right? My fear, the fear of criticism, was the bottleneck on my entire career. My— I didn't have a business at the time, but, you know, that was, that was limiting everything. Once I started putting my work online, the bottleneck became how fast can I write? How frequently can I hit publish? Once I got in a rhythm of hitting publish and I was doing that every month or so, then it was the bottleneck was the quality. How interesting and impactful of an idea can I write about?

Okay.

And then it took a while to figure that out. Then the bottleneck became, how can I go beyond just talking about an idea and actually implement it? Right? Like, people may go, oh, this is a fascinating idea. Like, it's very entertaining, but I want to actually change things, improve things. Right? So that's when I started doing courses. Courses are just a way to implement the stuff that I write about in my blog. Right? So then I have the course, and now the course is taking up all my time, so I don't have time to write. And now the bottleneck is, can I find someone to run the course so I can spend more time writing? Right? Once I've hired someone who was a course manager, then the bottleneck becomes, how can I retain and compensate them so that they remain here and continue growing and improving? So it's just like one— it's like every solution to a problem, you're like, oh great, we solved it. That just creates a new problem.

Mm-hmm.

And then you solve that one and that creates a new problem and that goes on forever.

And when you're thinking about solving these problems, I think the first instinct all of us have is, again, what is the tool? But like we've talked about, it has to do more with the internal psychology. So what were some of the experiences that helped you get over those bottlenecks? I know you've talked about— I have a sense these two tangents might play a I think one is the Temple of the Universe, and I love the way you described it at the end of the blog post, the electric trickle moving up your arms. Can you talk about that story?

Yeah. Gosh. So to answer your first question, I really rely on what I call intensive personal growth experiences. I should probably make an acronym. IPGEs. I find that I am so inward focused and sort of like, I don't know, I tend to get stuck on a regular basis. My psychology just gets stuck. I find myself just trapped in this very narrow I have, like, 2 beliefs that are just, like, opposed, and they're just, like, locked in, and I can't do anything. Some people seem to be able to just, like, journal and, like, go for walks in nature and get unblocked. That's not me. I have to go outside, go to some kind of either retreat— like, I've done a couple long meditation retreats as one example— or join programs. I've done a lot of, like, transformational weekend seminars, like Landmark or, like, Tony Robbins. Or sometimes it looks like doing LSD, like doing psychedelics is another good one. Or sometimes it's working with a coach or another skilled facilitator. Like, I need to basically— like, you know what it is? It's I'm so cerebral. My entire life is lived up here in the conceptual plane.

Right.

But the conceptual plane is kind of fake. It's just like concepts colliding with concepts. So I find what all these experiences have in common is they force me to get back into my body. They get me into this embodied thing where then I have true moments of change, where I confront fear and doubt and uncertainty, not at the conceptual level where you're never going to find a solution, but at the somatic level, which is where all those things are rooted.

Right.

I guess I've never thought about this so systematically, but I guess this is my formula for having breakthroughs. Get out of my head and into my body, put myself into an environment that is intense and that I'm not in control and that I can be confronted with hard truths, and then to embrace what I find out and go with it and believe it and put it into practice in my life.

And so what are some of the examples of those experiences? And by the way, the reason I'm smiling is because when you were describing the cerebral brain, It felt like I was talking to a mirror because that's been exactly my journey over the last 3 years of going from solo to now building a team. And it was all like stuff that I had to take care of before that.

Totally. Yeah, I think it's common with smart people. With smart people, you know, we have— there's that saying like, for the person who has a hammer, every problem is a nail, right? If you're smart, your intellect is your hammer. And you think, we think often, we assume that we can go around and every problem in our life can just be intellectualized. And that is just so not true. In fact, I think it's a minority of problems that actually yield, like the true hard problems in life are not intellectual problems. But yeah, all the ones I mentioned, those weren't just examples, like doing LSD at Burning Man, huge breakthrough. Doing a 10-day silent meditation retreat, which I've done twice in Vipassana. Huge breakthrough. Working with a series of coaches. I had a mentor who had founded a tech company who was kind of a mentor to me, a coach named Joe Hudson, who I've now become a collaborator with in creating his own course, doing things like, let's see what else, nature retreats. I want to do ayahuasca soon. I actually have like a list in my notes of like every intensive personal growth experience that I want to have. And I'm only like 10% of the way through the list.

And they're like projects in itself. What's interesting is I was reading your blog post. I think you described your experience with— I think it was with Joe Hudson where you talked about unleashing anger. And it's funny, I actually had a very similar experience over the last year working with a coach. And the way she described what she did, it was psychic or medium healing. And I remember thinking, oh, this is so woo-woo. This is not like— what is this stuff? And through, after a few calls, I remember just having this experience where just sort of lying down after session and stuff, and my body just shaking, just letting stuff out. And I didn't think it would relate to business at all, but the changes that it led to in business were transformative. Did you have a similar experience where you went through those experiences and maybe there was something that was happening in the business that you thought was completely independent and it just switched because of that?

That is what happens every time. You just described exactly how it works. You have some thorny business issue that you just cannot get around. It just keeps recurring. It seems so endlessly complex. You try to analyze it. Then you go off and do some personal inner work that seems completely unrelated. Apologize to your parents for something that you've been resenting them for, or getting out your anger, or crying, or doing breathwork. And then you come back to the business and you're like, oh, well, this was simple. This actually wasn't that complicated. All the complexity and the uncertainty was coming from you. Right? Not, not the situation. So it goes back to what you said, you are the bottleneck in literally every experience you have. So if you are, you know, trying to, I don't know, increase sales, and you're experiencing frustration, that frustration is not coming from the sales, or the lack of sales. Frustration does not exist in nature. Nowhere out there is there any frustration. All the frustration is in here.

Inside, right?

In the body, yes, that's, that's a good distinction.

How does— do the ideas of like perfectionism and surrender play a role in this for you?

Oh my God, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that's why part of my criteria for these experiences is I have to not be in control. I have to not be in control. There has to be a leader or facilitator or teacher that is curating the experience for me. This is why I often do programs, right? I can go off and walk in nature by myself and I don't know, it's kind of relaxing. But what a leader or facilitator can do and what they're so good at is they look at you and then they work with you a little bit. And what they're trying to do is basically confront you, right? They're like, what is the thing you don't want to think or hear or feel? And then they just go after that thing like a heat-seeking missile.

Right.

And I think the reason that's powerful— yeah, I'm a control freak. I'm a perfectionist. I'm totally OCD. I want everything around me to be perfect and known and controlled 100% of the time. And so every time I have a personal growth experience, I'm trying to break that addiction. I'm trying to break out of the prison of the mind that I've created out of my perfectionism.

When you were describing that, I had this interesting thought, which is It actually describes my experience with building a second brain, which was at the start when you're building it, you're trying to in Roam control all the tags, right? And you're trying to really control things. And then there's a shift that happens when you've trusted the system enough and you sort of let go. The system then takes control because there's that trust of whatever project I want to do, It will get done.

Yeah, that's really it. Yeah, people think they start building a second brain, they think, okay, this is this mechanical device that I am, I am perfectly designing and like detailing and determining. It's not, it's more like a garden. Yeah, you may, you know, plant seeds, do a little watering, maybe do some weeding, some maintenance, some upkeep, but mostly it's an organic emergent process that's happening by itself. It's happening whether you want it to or not. It's happening in ways that you don't expect and maybe even won't like, but too bad. It's really about acceptance and embracing the emergence of that, whether it's an idea or theory or might I mean, it might take you in a whole different direction in life. It's scary, right? Like when you start just noting down what resonates with you and you look at that, oh, these are all the things that resonate with me. And then ask yourself, is my current life trajectory taking me towards these things or away from them?

Yeah.

Many people find— yeah, I was just gonna say, many people find like, oh, my career is not going to bring me more of these things that bring me joy. And they have to change careers. It's very, very potentially jarring.

Yeah, you almost have to— and by the way, there was a lag. That's why I think that was happening a little bit. You almost have to surrender to the system because the system might take you in a different direction. So let's say I'm a podcaster or a creator who has things all over the place, right? How do I start building a second brain? What are the different elements? Yes.

So the way that I would really recommend people do it is to not— usually when I say build a second brain, they want to immediately engineer this very sophisticated, all-encompassing system. And I really understand that because that's kind of what I have. Like when I do my demos and I show how I do things, you know, my second brain started as like a little kind of seedling, you know, and for, I would say, for several years, I only used it to manage my health. I had this chronic medical condition. Then for a few more years, I only used it to do my volunteer work in the Peace Corps. Then for a few more years, I only used it to do my first job. It grew so slowly, expanded from this one little use case to now I use it for basically everything. But you cannot start like that. That is trying to boil the ocean. That is trying to skip to the end. So what I tell people is, what is one project in your life? Or one goal or one arena of your life that you just want to be more effective. What you've been doing hasn't been working. You haven't been making the progress you want to make. It's either there's too much information, there's too much complexity, too much uncertainty. Just start using a second brain to just improve that one little thing and go from there. So I would ask you, what is a project that you're unhappy with, either that's already underway or that you'd like to start where you might want to use your second brain?

Yeah, let's actually do an example. So for me, it's one big thing is I want to reach out to companies that are in our ecosystem of podcasting and creators to do partnerships. A lot of that information just exists in my head. Some of them are relationships that I have. I have ideas for what the partnership document should be, but all of this is sort of just in my head right now.

Perfect. So what do you want?

I think the ideal outcome would be having a team member who's basically running that whole system, is completely equipped to do it, and I am only coming in for, let's say, doing the sales calls or those conversations, and everything around it is just happening beautifully. Like, system is executing, there's throughput and all of that.

And if you had that, what would it bring you? What would happen as a result?

It would change the business. I actually just had a conversation with a friend whose company helps people write books, and they basically grew massively just through those kinds of partnerships. And I know the thing that's holding it back right now is me thinking I have to do them because it's in my head and I know the people. So it would just completely revolutionize the business.

Is there any way that it would revolutionize the business besides more revenue?

It would help us build a bigger brand in the ecosystem. It would help hire team members. And I think every creator is going through this thing right now of I should just go on TikTok and Instagram and produce those short clips to build an audience. And I started doing that and I was like, wait, there's this other thing that's just sitting there that's much easier to do, and then I don't have to do that.

Seriously? So what I hear is you have more revenue, your brand is more prominent, and you have sort of a more sure path. To growth that doesn't rely on these, like, you know, new shiny things.

Right.

If those 3 things happened, so what? What would happen as a result?

More business growth, more time for me, and just like more peace and satisfaction and safety in life.

Time, peace, satisfaction, safety. Yeah.

And I think those are things like every creator wants.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the reason I ask these questions is, you know, a second brain is a different kind of intelligence. It's almost like an alien life form, right? The ways that it's going to accomplish, say, a goal like this one is very different from how you would. And so what you need to do kind of as a starting point is go a few steps into the future because, yeah, like as a business person, you're like, oh, I just need to hire this person to Lead these partnerships, have those calls, those conversations. But that is just like one milestone. Obviously, that's not the endpoint, right?

Right. Yeah.

The endpoint is we just, we just did through that conversation, like 3 or 4 points in the future, like the business is going to grow, the brand is going to be more prominent. And ultimately, way at the end, you're going to have more time, peace of mind, satisfaction, all those things.

Right.

So What I would do is define a project. This is a project, right? There's an outcome, there's a goal. You're not doing it just for fun, but to have a further outcome in mind, right? It doesn't have to be the ultimate one, like satisfaction, peace of mind. That's kind of abstract. But it sounds like what you're looking for is to— tell me if this is correct— is to just have a new profitable business unit that is based on strategic partnerships. Mm-hmm.

Right, definitely.

So make that the outcome, but be very— I want you to just radically open your mind as to the 1,000 different pathways that there are to reach that. Yeah.

What's interesting is, by the way, as you're explaining this, I'll just tell you my internal dialogue is I'm once seeing you do the concepts of coda and para in action, and maybe you can explain those. But I think the other thing too is, and I don't know if this is what you're doing, but it's so clear that it's like, I have a way, I think this is going to happen. But I think what you're trying to move me towards is, oh, create the system and the system might show you a different way than the thing that you have in your mind needs to happen.

Exactly. That's it. You are designing a system. That systematically brings that future into reality. You are not going to be the one personally walking every step of that journey because you don't have time.

Yep.

And you have more important things to do right now. That sounds great. Everyone's like, yeah, sure, I love this system to just do this for me. But there's a catch, which is you have to be more open-minded. Right? Because it's not going to look like how you envision. It's not going to be the particular path to that destination that you personally would take. It might look totally different, and it might be quite uncomfortable. You know, like, like, I'll give you an example. When I launched my online course, I only had half the curriculum.

Mm-hmm.

Like, half. I was like, oh, this is the first half. After that, I was like, I don't know. I have no other ideas. You know, that's, that's all I have to say. And so, when we got to that point in the course halfway through, I just asked my students, well, what do you guys want to learn next?

Right.

And it was so, it was so terrifying because like as an instructor, you're supposed to have all the answers, have everything planned out, everything pre-thought, right? It was very vulnerable and uncomfortable for me to open up like that. But as soon as I did, they started giving me all these ideas and, oh, you could teach this and here's an interesting book and an article. They supplied basically all the material that I needed to complete the second half of the program. Now, I relied on the students, but then also I had to save all that somewhere. So everything they sent me, I just saved in my second brain because I needed time to kind of digest it, go through it, make sense of it.

What's interesting is, as you're describing it, I'm seeing now it form in my mind, which is, if I think about it as a project, it's reach out to X number of companies, And have these conversations. Now, as I'm having these conversations, I should be putting them all in one place so that then we can go through them and figure out what are the common questions, what are the common objections, the common things coming up, and then almost have the emergent emergence from there of what we're doing instead of going in with, this is what we need to do, this is what the sales process looks like, and this is the system.

Exactly. Yeah, you are. Instead of pushing, you know, forcing reality to fit my conception, you are sitting back, planting seeds, and waiting to see what arises, and then taking the path of least resistance, asking what is easy, what is simple, what is fun, what is natural, what, what is reality calling for?

Right.

I almost think of it like there's a, there's like this changing landscape of possibility. I want to find the canyon that is the shortest, most downhill path through that landscape instead of trying to go over the tallest mountain.

Obviously, building a second brain itself has gone through so many evolutions over 14 cohorts. To go meta, what's an example of something that came out of you sitting back and seeing how the course developed? Versus being like, this is what the course should be. What are examples of inflection points in the product itself that came through that process?

Yeah, I have a great example. So we've had 14 cohorts, like you said. In cohort 5, I decided, oh my gosh, we need coaches. It was basically like a panic out of fear. Usually bad decisions come out of fear, right? And I was like, oh, Like, what it really came from was not enough. Oh, this material is not enough. I'm not enough as an instructor. There's not enough value here. I need, I need to have other coaches to come in and like work alongside me. And I, so I reached out to like, basically, I think it was 5 people. 1 or 2 were friends. 1 was my wife, Lauren. And then 1 or 2 were alumni of the course. And I was like, oh, let me pay you this much money and, and just help me. And they were sort of like, well, what? What are we coaching people on? And I was like, oh, don't worry, we'll figure it out. And we just kind of did it. Didn't go very well. I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready as a leader. I wasn't ready as a manager. Wasn't— the course itself was not ready. It wasn't mature. It's like to have other people coach on the material, it had to be at a certain level of maturity and it wasn't there yet. And so I had to shelve the whole thing. And then way later, only in cohort 10, So another like 2 years had to pass. And suddenly, this group of alumni came, they just like approached me and were just like, we would love to, to be coaches in your program. And we have a suggestion for what to call us, which is alumni mentors, which is a great term because coach is a little too like the expectations are too high, like coaching, people think they're, they're just going to like talk to this person and they're going to be transformed. No, they just need a mentor. They just need someone who's done it before. who can then help them do it, right? And so I just— at that point I was like, oh, interesting idea. I was like thinking, oh, this is reality coming back and now saying, okay, now you're ready. And so I just had to say yes. Okay, yeah, do it. Do it how you guys think it should be done. And over time, that became one of the most important parts of the program. We've worked with over 80 different alumni mentors since then.

It reminds me so much of— and I think you're also a fan of this book, Mickey Singer's book, Surrender Experiment, in the sense that you were pushing for something to happen and it wasn't ready, and then the idea just came to you. Are there other examples when you think about building a second brain just as a product that came to you instead of you pushing that have become really cornerstones in the product? Yeah.

I mean, I think most new ideas, most new improvements are a combination, right? It's like, it's not just that you sit back and like twiddle your thumbs and just wait for like some incredible opportunity to just hit you in the face, right?

Mm-hmm.

There's more to it than that. Like, you are surrendering, you are waiting, you are seeing what emerges, but you're also doing things Like creating a vision. It's something that's so powerful. It's so cliché at this point, but it doesn't matter. It's so effective. I have this thing that I do called writing a personal narrative vision where I write— I've done this for years. I write out in extreme detail, ends up being like a couple thousand words, what my average day will look like at some point in the future, usually like 5 years in the future. down to what time I wake up in the morning, what my morning routine looks like, what I have for breakfast, what kinds of people that I— or even specific people that I'm getting on calls with, what I'm writing about, what subjects. I'll even put in the titles of future things that I would like to write. Just the detail is really important because then I think what that does is it primes you. It primes you to notice Because this is the thing, at any given time, there are infinite things arising and emerging.

Right.

There's not like a limited number. Of all the information you're exposed to in your life, what information do you actually— what percentage do you actually notice consciously? Like 0.0001%. So it's not that you're causing something to emerge that wouldn't otherwise emerge. You're just noticing different things. You're priming yourself by setting goals and having a vision to notice certain things. And then because you are awash in almost infinite amounts of data, that priming, that lens causes you to notice things that could make that thing come true.

That's so fascinating. We're just going to jump around like memento. There's another topic I wanted to ask you about was team building because I think it's something that a lot of creators face, which is I think the way I've learned this now with talking to hundreds of creators is you usually get to hundreds of thousands in revenue and you're doing everything yourself. You maybe hire a few people to help technically, like an audio engineer or a video engineer. You get to 5 people and then it's mayhem because you have too many people dealing with and you can't do everything. So through the lens of what we just talked about, where you have to almost sit back What did that journey of going from 0 to maybe 5 to now, I think you have 17+ people, look like for you?

Oh gosh, it's such a journey. It was such a journey. Yeah, I never set out to start a company, like an official company. I just, I mean, in the beginning, in the very beginning, I just wanted to have a few months on my own before I got my next job. That was my only goal, like, have 2, 3 months to just explore different things before getting a job. Then that seemed to work. I just did different freelance things. And then the goal was like, keep doing that. Can I do 6 months? Right? And for 2, 3 years in the beginning, every month, the only goal was just like, pay rent. It was really— that was it. Only much later did I start to think about Like starting a business, creating a company. And then only after that did I think about hiring. It took me a long time to get to hiring. It's so intimidating because as a creative, you value your solo flow time.

Yeah.

That's the reason you get into it in the first place. Just leave me alone. Just don't bother me so I can get into my beautiful flow state. Right? And you're like, now I'm going to hire someone who I'm going to have to manage and give directions, and they're going to have questions and annoy me all the time. It's very the opposite of— it seems like the opposite. But I think what it was was the business just started growing almost of its own accord. With the start of the pandemic is when the course really started going from something that provided me a comfortable individual lifestyle to something— it almost grew so big that I had to do something. There was actually a point where I was like, I either need to shut this down. Or start hiring. Like, those are my 2 choices because the interest was so big.

You considered shutting it down?

Yeah, of course.

Can you talk a little bit more about that or like where that came from? Because from the outside looking in, it was, oh, this course was really successful, and then boom, you just had this meteoric rise almost.

Yeah, I know. No, I find every year I have to find a new source of motivation. I really do. No source of— like, in the first year, it was like, oh, just try out this cool new thing and have fun. Year 2, it was try to make it a sustainable freelance income. Year 3, it was, you know, hire my first course manager and make it a little more sustainable so I can do more writing. Year 4, it was, you know, turn this into a book. Like get a book deal. Year 5, it's build a whole team that can, that can now develop a whole ecosystem and portfolio of different products and services. Now we're in year 6, and actually I'm doing my year-end review right now. I go on paternity leave in about a week and a half, so my year is basically over. Uh, and I'm, I'm like, I'm like searching what is going to— like for 2023, what is my source of motivation? Like, I need a new one. I have yet to find it, so I'll let you know. But it's a continuous process of sort of reorienting my motivation towards— like, it has to be new and interesting to me. If I'm bored, everyone else is going to be bored. My team is going to be bored. My customers are going to be bored. It's going to come through. I have to find a new source of excitement and enthusiasm in order to just keep going.

What you said is so fascinating because I think as creators, I've found these 2 models. I think one model is where someone finds something that works and just exploits that. Let's say it's something related to morning rituals. Then it's like morning rituals for real estate people or morning rituals for architects or morning rituals for another thing. It just becomes this thing of just keep doing that over and over again. And then on the other side, it's like, let's say, like a Bon Jovi where you're trying to create new music every time and you're trying to find that motivation. And yeah, it's really interesting to hear you describe you're wired that way. You mentioned in year 5, it was— or this year was building a team. What were your biggest challenges you faced when you were thinking about scaling your team as a creator?

Oh my God, there's just endless challenges. Gosh. And it's so fascinating because We, so, okay, we are bootstrapped.

Mm-hmm.

You know, there's no outside funding. There's no investors, no VCs, no crowdfunding, no debt. We are purely just the old-fashioned way of making some money, investing the money in the business, and then just growing. Feels very like traditional and conservative compared to how many companies are done today. Um, and so what that means is we can hire one person at a time, and usually it's like one person every 6 months. And what I find fascinating about that is every single person we hire changes the company. It's wild. It's almost like every— when you're as small as we are, like currently we're, I think, 9 people full-time. And then there's around like 10 to 15 contractors that we work with on some frequency.

Mm-hmm.

When you're this small, it's like, you know, when the core team is 5 and you add a 6th person, it's like, oh my God, Changed everything. And then a 7th person, it's completely different. 8th person, because it's just the team, it's like a family. It's like when a new kid is born into a family, all the relationships kind of change around. So, it's the cultural dynamics. It is defining roles. This is the thing with a bootstrapped company is you can't act like a big company and hire someone in this one very specific role. Oh, that is your one job. We joke that everyone has 3 jobs in our business. Everyone is juggling like 3 different areas, right? And then a new person comes in and several people give them one of their areas. It's like this— it's almost like an organism that's evolving, not in big jumps, but continuously over time. So we have to create new structures. It's really weird. Like, with 3 or 4 people, you don't really need like retirement accounts. You just kind of like pay people well and that's fine. With 7 or 8 people, now suddenly you have people who are married, some people who are different ages, some people who have kids, and now they're worried about retirement. So it's like even that little jump from 4 to 8 people, you need a whole new infrastructure. Someone has to create that infrastructure. They have to build it and think through it in the first place, and then they have to manage it. And then there's a cost involved in that. Right. So I just find it, it's like if you like solving problems, creating a business is just an endless evolving jumble of problems.

One of the things that you said was the sort of like the specialization part. I remember a few months ago we hired someone for a very specific thing. And what I realized, and I made a mistake where that person only wanted to focus on that and not really interact with the team. And very quickly it was like, oh wait, this is not going to work out. This was a bad decision on my part. I'm curious, what were mistakes like that that you made that looking back you're like, oh, that was very obvious, and things that other creators do all the time?

Gosh, there's so many. I mean, I've made every kind of mistake. I've made bad hires for all sorts of different reasons. Given people— it's like made the right hire, but put them in the wrong position, the wrong title.

Mm-hmm.

Right. Gosh, I've, for example, had one person report to another person on the team rather than have them report to me as they should have. Or the opposite, had them report to me, but then I get overwhelmed because everyone in the company is reporting to me and they really need to be reporting to someone else. You know what's funny about this is like, There are no universal principles. There's no universal advice. Every single company-building principle that I find, and then I'm like, oh yeah, I figured this out. And then I cling to it. It's like my one little island of security in a raging storm. Right. Before long, I realized, oh, there's exceptions. There's always exceptions to even the most solid rule. Like the example you said, I had a similar experience. I tend to favor full-time employees over contractors. And the reason for that is, A, it just feels like they're all in, you know, instead of like, oh, can I get on a call with you to like brief you on a new project? No, they're full-time, all their attention, all their bandwidth, they're like completely committed. And so my bias in the past was always like, no, let's not get a contractor, let's find someone full-time. There are big problems with that approach, right? full-time people are just so much more expensive. It's not just their salary, it's their health insurance, their retirement contributions, their computer you have to buy them. They're probably like 3 or 4 times more expensive, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so for a bootstrapped company, what that means for us is our rate of growth, that the number of people that we're able to work with is drastically lower if we can only work with full-time people. And you can't get people who are specialized, right? Like, so, so basically how I emerged from that situation is when we started building our YouTube team, We took a completely different approach. It's all contractors. There's only one full-time person. His name is Mark. And he works with like 7 or 8 different contractors. So the YouTube team of contractors is as big as the whole rest of the team combined. Like, think how crazy that is. I would have never taken that approach. But that is the approach Mark has taken and what it allows him to do. We have a specialized YouTube thumbnail designer. All he does is design thumbnails. We have a creative director for note-taking apps. All he does is do creative direction for YouTube videos about notes apps. It's just a completely different way of creating a team that Mark has done. And I just had to let go of my preferences and my assumptions and say, you know what? Go with it. Run with it.

What's so fascinating about what you said is we approached it in the complete opposite way, where I was like, I don't know if I can deal or hire full-time people. So everyone we've brought is contractors. And I think we are seeing some of what you were talking about, where, oh, they have other clients or other projects, and then how do you balance that? And then if this thing is working and we have to go all in, how do we deal with bandwidth and stuff? And it was really interesting actually too, coming into this, I was like, oh, I finally figured out team, kind of like how you're talking about, found the magic thing. And talking to you, I'm like, maybe not. Maybe there's a different level. If you were talking to a creator, let's say they've hired, they're like 3, 4 people and they're about to have that rocket ship that you went through for building a second brain, what else would you tell them?

Hmm.

Around business building or team building.

Gosh, you mean someone who has like a course specifically?

Yeah, creator with a course. Exactly.

Gosh, there's so many things.

There's—

I should do some writing on this. I think It helps if I'm specific to someone who has a course kind of like mine. The thing with courses is— so there's this funny thing where the jump from 0 to 1 employees is huge, right? Think about this. Let's say you are a successful freelancer. You're making, I don't know, let's say $150K.

Mm-hmm.

That's a great salary. You could do that forever. You know, you can even living on the coasts in the big cities, you can do great. $150K. I mean, you are at $150K solo, you are in the top, like already 0.1%. Right. But now let's say you want to hire one full-time person, just one. Okay. To find someone good, someone who's skilled, experienced, etc. Let's just say it's $100,000. Right? Like maybe it could be a little less, but Health insurance, all the usual stuff. $100K. Okay. Well, what I learned through painful experience is to hire someone at $100K, you need more than $100K. You need $200K, right? Because you don't want to have like just barely enough money to pay them because then you have like one bad month and then you have to fire them, right? And then plus there's just like so many extra costs. This is called the cost basis. The cost basis of an employee is usually 1.5 to 2 times what their salary is. Right. So now you have to make $200 extra, which means to hire one employee, you have to somehow go by on your own, by yourself, from $150 to $350.

Right.

That is a really hard jump. It's so hard. Right? So one way of doing it is through contractors like you're doing. Another way is through Having a product that scales without people, right? This is kind of how we did it. We would run cohorts with hundreds of people at one point, even over 1,000. You can run a 1,000-person cohort using Zoom with just 2 or 3 people. It's kind of amazing, right?

Mm-hmm.

And that's where it's basically leverage, getting leverage on your costs, right? Every additional student that joins that cohort, we don't have to spend hardly any more money. for each additional student. So every additional student is just pure margin, pure revenue. And so that wasn't sustainable. It actually does take more than 3 or 4 people to run cohorts, but we did it for just long enough that we could sort of build up a war chest of revenue, and then we used that revenue to hire more team.

And specifically the one I think you're talking about with the 1,000+, because I was part of that, it felt more like a music festival almost. Because you had all these different sessions, a lot of alumni mentors that you could just choose different sessions. It really felt like a 5-week-long music festival. Was that your experience on the other side building and running it, or what was that experience like?

Yeah, you know, when we were deciding on the pricing and really just the format of it, I had a previous course that did quite well. It was called Get Stuff Done Like a Boss. It was a self-paced course, kind of the traditional videos that you watch. It cost, I think, $50. And it did well. I think it sold thousands of copies. And I, you know, I was happy with it and everything, but I just started to really become disillusioned with that price point. You know, $50, you can't do any personal service. You can't get on one call. You can't write one email like that person, you know, a single $50 sale, they're on their own.

Yep.

And I craved that. I wanted— I didn't want to go retire on a beach in Bali. I wanted to get to know people. I wanted to work with them. I wanted to coach them. I wanted to get in the mix. I thought, okay, well, then let's do it on Zoom. Then as I was thinking through the model, I was like, I just asked myself, what would have to be true for this to be worth not $50 or even $500, but $1,000 or $1,500 or $2,000 or $3,000? I just looked around. What do business professionals spend $1,000 or $2,000 or $3,000 on? And what I came up with was conferences, summits, festivals, business trips, those kinds of things, right? Like, people drop $3,000-$4,000 on a conference if you include travel and food and, you know, the happy hour at night after the sessions, all those things. Easy, $3,000-$4,000 would be like a cheap weekend conference, right?

Right.

And so then we just structured our entire course to be like that. Breakout sessions, like, the equivalent of happy hours where you just talk to people. We made it personal. We asked people to turn on their cameras and use their real names so they actually got to know each other. We had different options, different sessions happening at the same time. We just basically designed it like a conference to justify not just the price, but to justify how much time and effort and engagement we were asking of people.

I actually remember too being on some of the introduction calls and Realizing that so much of the value came from the people that I was meeting on those calls. I'm curious if that insight— because recently you've moved from the, it seems like, cohort to more of a membership model. Was that driven by that insight or something else?

So yeah, we pivoted from selling courses one cohort at a time to a year-long membership, and there were many reasons behind that. I mean, one of them was just what you said. People said, oh yeah, the curriculum is great, but what I really like is the feeling of connection, the warmth, hearing people's stories, getting feedback, not just from our staff, but from fellow students. And so we just thought, okay, well, the cohort is already kind of full. There's already like more happening in there than people can even absorb. So we need a bigger container. We need like more time. And that's what led us to going from 5 weeks, everything has to happen within the 5 weeks, and it was getting to be too much, to extending that out to a year. And we kept it the same price, by the way. So we're giving people a year, which includes 4 cohorts, for the same price that we used to charge for a single cohort, which I think is a pretty compelling offer. But essentially, it's to create more time and space for those kinds of interactions that you mentioned.

How has that impacted student experience or student results and feedback and NPS and everything from a product standpoint?

It just started. It just started. We just did our very first cohort with this new model, which wasn't that different. It's kind of like kind of in transition. I don't know. I don't know. We're starting to plan a whole series. We're gonna have weekly events all year long, workshops, Q&As, you know, community meetups. The first one I think is next week. So I can't say yet. But the initial reception has been good.

And I think because a lot of the listeners are creators, right? I'm curious what impact that had on your team from a marketing and sales standpoint, because I really consider launching a cohort as like the— having been in marketing for a long time, launching cohorts is like the Olympics of marketing where you have this small window You have to get everything right. And if you don't, you have another chance once more in the year. So I'm curious, for you, from a marketing and sales standpoint and team standpoint, what impact did that have?

Yeah, that was a big part of it. The cohort launches are powerful because you have a limited time window, right? When people have to sign up by a deadline, that moves them to act like you wouldn't believe. Also gives us a cadence, right? Instead of trying to teach a course somehow Continuously all year long. There's like a season. Okay, this is the month that we teach the course. But it also— I mean, launches, as you said, have huge downsides, especially on our peace of mind, our ability to— when you're in those crunch times, it is all-consuming. You're hardly eating, hardly sleeping. You're working 12, 14-hour days. It is very grueling. I became a father a couple of years ago, and actually next month we're expecting our second. So part of my motivation is just like, I personally just do not want to be doing launches anymore. And same with the team. You know, there is these accumulating costs. Like, one of them is it's really hard to plan. You know, when you— like, up until just recently, basically, we as a company, we made 90% of our revenue from cohort launches, and there were only 2 per year. So 45%. Imagine making 45% of your revenue in week in the spring, and then another 45% during one week in the fall. And then the rest of everything else was the last 10%. It's a roller coaster. It's like, we would make, you know, all this money one month, and then the next, and then the very next month would be deep in the red. And actually, the next 5 months would be in the red. It's psychologically very taxing. And you just can't plan. It's like, we wanted to build new products, we wanted to hire new people, but because everything just depended on the next launch, which could be small or big or everything in between, we just had no way of knowing. It made it impossible to really envision the future.

Yeah, I had that experience where I ran a podcaster fellowship with On Deck and we did about, I think, 2 months of sales. And that was like 100+ students, which if you're going into running your first cohort and it's 100+ students, that's a wild experience. And we were 8 weeks long, and I think every week we did about 4 to 6 sessions, and some of them were podcasts like this, basically. At the end, I think everyone, including the participants probably, were just burnt out because you also don't get to make any product improvements because you're so inside it. And I'm sure now that with the yearly model, you actually get to look at feedback that's coming in and keep improving the product over time. Has that been the case for you?

Exactly. Yeah, the timing of this was so important, I think. In general, the timing— so most creators, I think, start with one product or service or some way of making money, or at least getting attention. And then over time, they want to diversify, they want to expand into other things, right? I think the timing of that expansion is so important. Like, it's one of the the really underdiscussed things in the creator economy, I think, because you can easily do it too fast, right? Like, this is the thing, it's so tempting because it's fast. You could go in 5 minutes and have an official, you know, official TikTok account.

Right.

And then 5 minutes later, an official Instagram account. And then 5 minutes, you could go and have 25 different accounts today. But that's not it. That's because you got to feed those, you need a strategy, you need to have some consistency in those channels, right? And so like even with paid products, I see this, creators will launch one course, it does decently well, and suddenly they have this whole portfolio of courses. And I experienced this myself. It's not, it's not just building a course and launching it. It has to be marketed continuously. It needs its own sales funnel. You have to always be finding new leads. You have to always be improving it. You have to be maintaining and updating the technology. There's no such thing as passive income. There's no such thing as like putting a course on autopilot. There's a constant amount of maintenance. And so I think, I mean, if there's one decision that I think I made really well was we went almost a decade of our company with just one product. Like, think about how powerful that is. From 2013 to essentially my book, which came out just a few months ago in 2022, was like our second product. Right. Having one central focus, everyone on the team, everyone in our audience knows this is the one thing we do. Improving it as fast as we can was our complete focus. That, I think, has been really important for us.

And it's so opposite what most creators do, which is launch a product.

I know.

Kind of working, launch another one. And I actually have a friend who, he's been behind lots of really big course launches. I think their company's done over a billion in sales for different people in aggregate. And he said something really interesting where he was like, when you're launching a show or a course, around the first million or 2, or the first 2 or 3 years, you're just sort of exhausting your existing audience, maybe the first 1 to 10% of your audience who's really buying for you. Right. And then at some point, you have to switch from people buying from Tiago to people buying the product because of the process. You're nodding. It sounds like that's something you went through.

Definitely. Definitely. Yeah, it's like, over time, I would say there's multiple transitions like that. You know? Yeah, in the very, very earliest days, like, it's something interesting I found is, in the early days, you are marketing to early adopters by definition. Because your thing is new, right? Early adopters are like a different species.

Yes.

They're so different. They're not like normal people. They are— they're weird. They're bizarre. Their psychology, what they enjoy, what they want is just completely different from the rest of the population. But you can't skip them. You have to go to them first because they're the only ones crazy enough to buy what you're selling. So you go to them first and you develop a whole sales process, a whole set of arguments, a whole product to serve their needs. But then you're right, there's like a chasm you have to cross. I don't know if it's $1 or $2 million in. I kind of felt like for us it was earlier than that. It was around cohort like 5 or 6. You start to see the sales going down because you've essentially, like you said, exhausted that first group of early adopters. And I think that's where most people stop. Most people have like 1 or 2 years, they start to see the sales stagnate or go down, and they abandon it, do something completely different, right? They don't even try to cross that chasm. But if you can cross the chasm and basically create an offer that appeals to someone who isn't a super fan, maybe doesn't even know you, doesn't even care about you, they're just trying to solve a problem, then you can build a much larger business.

Mm-hmm.

You can build a business that doesn't depend on your personal output. You can build something far more scalable and sustainable than the typical solo creator thing.

That's fascinating. And one interesting thing that you mentioned in there, which you said is you had that happen around cohort 5 or 6, because I heard you mention in another interview, I think it was with Ali, that from a content perspective, you really started feeling proud of the course around Cohort 6 or 7. So can you go back to that time where you're experiencing, okay, we've exhausted the early adopters, now we need to maybe find a new market. And also the product is like, finally, okay, we're feeling proud of it. What was that experience like to scale from there to where you are now?

Yeah, that's a good question. It was kind of a tough transition, I think. So what happened with me was in 2016, 2017, 2018, When I started, I was on the frontier, right?

Mm-hmm.

This idea of creating a knowledge management system. Oh, PKM, personal knowledge management, was so interesting and exciting and innovative, right? I was, I was in a way ahead of the market, ahead of the culture. But then in 2018, it caught up and suddenly you had Notion breaking out into the mainstream. You had Roam Research, right? You had basically like more innovative things happening that were further out on the frontier. And so I started having like even the feedback that I would get on my course started getting negative, right? Around that time, people started saying like, this is the thing, early adopters, there's nothing that early adopters hate more than something that is going mainstream, right? It's like the punk rockers, like, oh, I was in— I was like early into punk and now punk is or rap or hip-hop or whatever. Music is a clear example. They hate when they start hearing it on top 40 radio. They want it to be this secret, special niche thing. And so, they would say things like, they'd ask for a refund and be like, oh, this is teaching Evernote. Evernote is so old and boring. I don't like this. Or they would say, oh, why don't you use Roam Research? It's clearly the latest, greatest thing. All these kinds of things. I basically just had to ignore all of that because I knew that those people weren't the future of the business. Those people are basically never happy. They're always on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. They only want something that is the latest and greatest. And there's just not enough people out there like that to build a sustainable business. So I, in a weird— it's funny because we're told to be customer-centric, always listen to your customers.

Yeah.

But in order to cross that chasm away from early adopters, you have to basically be like, okay, everyone, I hear what you're saying, but sorry, You are the past. You got us to where we are, but you are not the future of the business. I'm sorry. I love you. I appreciate you, but we are moving on from you.

How was that implemented tactically? Let's say a course creator is listening and they're going through that transition. I know you've worked with Billy also. I'm curious from a marketing and messaging standpoint, or maybe even Category definition standpoint, what were like the actions that you took at that point?

Working with Billy. So Billy Bross is a marketing consultant. He has a course that I helped him build and launch called the Keystone Accelerator. He was really fundamental for me making that transition because he has experience marketing a wide array of different courses on many subjects. And I think so. I think that's actually what's needed to cross that chasm is you just have to get good at marketing, right? Like with early adopters, it's almost actually good to be bad at marketing, right? You don't want to be very good at marketing to appeal to early adopters, because what they want is to feel like they're discovering something that is not widely known. And so if they see these, you know, slick marketing campaigns and, you know, these perfect calls to action and these Perfect sales pages—they get turned off, right? So early adopters like bad marketing, but then you suddenly have to get good at marketing if you want to appeal to people that you know aren't a super fan. And so he taught me—I mean, this is what it came down to—is just like appealing to people's just basic everyday problems. Like this is surprisingly hard to do. You know, instead of as as an example, instead of saying, "Oh, create a knowledge graph where you can connect the world's most interesting ideas into a multifaceted network of." That's like an early adopter thing.

Yep.

No, instead it was clear your email inbox, finish work an hour earlier, be less stressed at the end of the day, take better notes of the books that you're already reading. Like boring stuff, right? But that's what people are facing. Those are the problems they have now currently. So you don't have to like create this whole superstructure of belief, you just have to like Say, oh, that pain that you're feeling, I will solve that pain.

Yeah. And it's funny, when you were describing the superstructure of beliefs, it really reminded me of— and again, I've seen sort of the transition from the other side being a student of when Roam came out and everyone in your course was like— I saw over Quora, Roam went up and then they just kind of died down.

Exactly. Because that's the thing is The early adopter likes to say, oh, I use the latest, coolest thing, and therefore basically I'm cool, I'm better.

Right.

But then to maintain that feeling, that identity, they have to keep jumping, right? Because then when Obsidian comes out, to maintain that identity of latest and greatest cool thing, you have to jump to Obsidian. And then Tana now comes out, you have to jump to Tana. Early adopters are great for launching something, but by definition, they cannot sustain a long-term business.

And so you've made that transition, you've sort of crossed the chasm, came out with the book. Obviously, that has really expanded the footprint of the message. I'm curious as a creator now, because I saw an exchange also on Twitter with, I think, Venkatesh, where he posted the mind map of 2023. How are you thinking about what building in Second Brain looks like over the next few years?

Yeah, we're in this right now. We're doing our kind of end-of-year strategic planning to decide on goals and priorities. I don't have a checklist. I don't have one single way. It's more like I'm trying to— so I made a mind map of all the things we're considering. the different initiatives, goals, products that we could build, services we could launch. Like, I really like having all the options on the table. So then when you— when we choose something, we can say, okay, we're going to do this one. But then are we okay saying no to everything else?

Right.

Like, I want to— I want to make that conscious so that in 3 months we don't go, oh, but we really wanted to do the other thing. Like, let's do that instead. Like, I want to— I want to choose one thing, say put a yes next to it, and then put no next to every other thing. And so, I'm looking at a combination of what I find interesting and fun. That's probably the most important. I'm just simply not going to pursue something that I don't find interesting. What's profitable, right? Profitability to me just means sustainability. Only things that produce profit— profit is the permission to continue. So, only things that produce profit— Especially for a bootstrap business. What's that?

I said especially for a bootstrap business.

Like ours. Exactly. Exactly. I look at what the team wants to do, right? Like, one of my main jobs as CEO is to keep my team happy. I will, like, depending on, you know, the details, I might, I might change the direction that we pursue just because they want something or they find a certain direction interesting, right? That's worth considering. I talked to advisors, I talked to mentors. That's why I posted that mind map on Twitter. I wanted to know what everyone thinks. We'll ask our customers, what do you think? What do you think we should do? And then all that data, all that feedback gets funneled into my second brain, and then I can just start to make sense of it, put it in some sort of priority, some sort of framework, which is what I'm doing now. We haven't completed that, so I can't share what we arrived at, but it's going to be something just like number one priority, number 2 priority, number 3 priority for the next 6 months or so. Everything else is on hold.

And just focus on those. And I'm curious, as you're thinking about those, over the last week especially, there's just been this rise of the AI writing tools like Lex and Jasper. And I can almost see this Cambrian explosion of content that would feed into people's second brain. How do you think that's going to impact both consumption, curation, and— Uh, creation individually or for yourself?

Yeah, I just tried out Lex, which is one of the writing tools, last night. It was my first experiment.

I saw your Twitter post and I was like, I have to ask you about it.

Yeah, seriously. So it's very recent. Um, it's pretty mind-blowing. Uh, it's pretty mind-blowing because it's quite good. You know, it's, it's a bit simplistic, it's a bit cliché, it's a bit obvious what it comes up with, but honestly, so is most people's writing. Right. Like 80%, 90% of all the writing you see out there is kind of boring, obvious, and cliché. So that implies that these tools could replace 80% to 90% of current writing.

Mm-hmm.

I think it's going to replace a lot of— it's not going to replace just completely one for one, right? Because you still need a human to kind of add the prompt, make little edits, like delete something that doesn't make sense. I think probably what's going to happen, which is mostly just because this is what always happens with automation, Uh, the low— the lower end of the market is going to be replaced and disrupted and essentially disappear. Uh, the mid-tier of the market is just going to have to change what they do. They're going to have to focus on different aspects of writing or different kinds of writing. And then the top end of the market is just going to have their influence and power and reach even more massively amplified. That's just what always happens every time.

And when you're talking about the lower end of the market, I wonder if it includes all the Twitter thread boys, because that definitely falls in the boring and obvious and cliché content. Um, I know we're almost at time.

I think it— but, but even within each kind of content, you have that hierarchy. So within the thread writers, there are bad ones, there are mid-tier ones, and there are really good ones. Right? Like this, you'll see the same sort of distribution of impact, even within something as specific as Twitter threads.

Yeah. And I think what you said about the, the top ones becoming more powerful, I think that applies to like everything, like Twitter, courses, and sort of like, that's why I think when we were talking about earlier, when you talked about building a classroom to teach the entire world, That makes so much sense because the top end is going to have that sort of massive category-defining footprint.

Totally. Yeah, it's the difference between— have you heard of the term under the API or over the API?

I have no—

It's like this idea that the human labor force is being split into 2 groups: people who take orders from machines and people who give orders to machines. Like, those are just the 2 categories, right? And so the people who currently have power and influence and resources tend to be able to just leverage machines to accumulate even more.

Mm-hmm.

And people who don't tend to have their work increasingly sort of managed for them, organized for them by algorithms, by machines, like It's kind of, in a way, unfortunate. I don't know if that's good, that's the way it should be. We're just describing what just generally tends to happen.

That's so fascinating. By the way, quick time check. You have a hard stop in 4 minutes, right?

Yes.

Okay. So I'll ask some of the last questions we end with and then I'll draw it to a close. So we usually end with a series of questions. Given your background in building a second brain, I've modified it a bit. So I usually ask what 3 books have been the most impactful for you. I'll change it to, for you, who are 3 people, if you could have access to their second brain, who would those people be?

Leonardo da Vinci, Nicholas Luhmann, And Richard Feynman.

Interesting. Feynman's would definitely be fascinating.

Yeah. You know, we have access to all 3 of those people's notes. But actually, this is the funny thing about notes is they're so personal to you that a lot of it doesn't make sense. Like, I've looked through Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. I mean, besides the fact that I don't speak 15th century Italian or whatever language they spoke then, it's very hard to make any sense of. People analyze and try to figure stuff out, but I guess in a way what I'm saying is I would love to have access to their first brains.

That would be fascinating, especially Leonardo da Vinci's. Next one is, who's one person where if you could give credit or thanks to? That maybe you haven't had a chance to do that or never talked to thank, who would that be? Someone you're really grateful for.

Gosh, I feel like I try to do a good job of thanking people who have been influences. I can't think of anyone who's not been acknowledged, but I mean, David Allen has been— my work is basically built on the backs of his. He established this field of personal productivity. He demonstrated that you could create a methodology that applied to all sorts of different people. He introduced this idea that your mind is for having ideas, not holding ideas. Everything that I do is kind of an extension of those things.

And I'm looking at the book. I think it must have been amazing to have him be the sort of first one to give the testimonial. Next one is, for you, what does it mean to be a conscious creator? Wow.

I think it just means to create things with soul. You know, even though it's digital, even though it's bits and ones and zeros, I believe digital creations can have just as much artistry, just as much craftsmanship, just as much beauty and meaning as anything in the physical world, as any sculpture or painting or piece of furniture or whatever. That's not always clear because a lot of the stuff on the internet is very full of hype and scammy and etc. But I just think the internet is just as valid of a space for creative expression as any other.

Yeah, I have a friend whose company, their tagline is marketing with soul. So I love that. Last one, I usually ask about what you're excited about, and you've already talked about the product. I know you mentioned you're going on parental leave and having another kid. If you could give a second brain, sort of like a starter second brain for your upcoming baby, I'm curious what that would look like.

I think for a kid, I would do it on paper. Just have a little notebook. No lines, just blank, a cool little colored pen or something, and just practice. Honestly, I think I would do drawing because depending on how young they are, they probably either can't write or aren't very good at writing. So I almost feel like a sketchbook, like the little drawings you made as kids, are the perfect proto-example of note-taking.

It's just...

Creating your own little imaginary world where you put only the things that you like and that you enjoy, expressing your imagination, often drawing things that you find in the outside world, but not lifelike, just using the outside world as inspiration for your internal world.

I love that. I know you're considering enterprise or executive as one expansion, but maybe building a second brain for kids could be the other expansion.

I would love to. I would love to run programs in schools, in college campuses, in public libraries, you know, after-school programs. I hope one day we get there.

Yeah, I would love to see that. Um, Thiago, this, this was a really interesting interview and experience. Um, you've definitely been on the pioneer of cohort-based courses, so I think a lot of creators will learn from that. Uh, and just thank you for sharing so openly, um, both here and online. about your experiences growing, building a second brain.

Absolutely. It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

You're welcome.