Tiago Forte draws his Second Brain philosophy from mature fields outside tech, especially Toyota's just-in-time manufacturing system. He also pulls principles from history of science, the arts, writing, and military tactics like blitzkrieg to shape how people manage knowledge work.
What are some of the biggest influences outside sort of knowledge management that have influenced your philosophy in PKM and building a second brain?
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 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. 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 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 looked Like, 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. That, that every time I read anything on it, it's like I'm discovering like 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 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 We treated humans like cogs in a machine and it took advantage of people and it was inhumane, all these things. 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.
