Confronting my Productivity Guru - Tiago Forte
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You only have, say, 90 minutes in a workday. What actually is going to make a difference? What is going to move the needle in my career and my business? And often it's a very different answer than you'd expect. It's this moment of truth where you have to look yourself in the mirror and just be so honest. As long as I thought that money was evil, business was bad, everything in that world was bad,

Those are some of the most powerful forces in the world. I was like a, you know, someone in the desert finding water. I saw and I studied, I really looked into the numbers, like what actually makes a difference in people's lives? And honestly, you can boil it down to one thing.

Hey friends and welcome back to Deep Dive, the ongoing podcast where every week I sit down with inspiring authors, creators, entrepreneurs, and other inspiring people. Inspiring, I said that twice, it doesn't matter. And we talk about strategies and tools that can help us live our best lives and we talk about their journeys and how they got to where they are. This conversation that you're about to hear is a conversation between me and my internet friend and now real life friend, Tiago Forte. Tiago is one of the world's foremost experts on productivity apparently, and has written a book which I've got here somewhere called Building a Second Brain. It's a book that's just come out fairly recently, but actually

I took his course, Building a Second Brain in 2019, and it completely changed my life. I would say it changed the way I approach my business or the way I approach my life and content creation and my YouTube channel and all the things. My brother jokes that like, just like I am the productivity guru for various people on the internet, Tiago is my personal productivity guru.

We talk about a bunch of things like life organization and productivity and about the concept of money and how to think about navigating what you actually want to do with your life. We talk a bunch about like misunderstandings around what it means to actually be productive. And then we do a deep dive into the methodology of building a second brain that will help you hopefully organize your life and organize your creative output, whether that's in your work or in your personal life. So I hope you enjoy this conversation between me and Tiago Forte.

This is going to be an interesting conversation. So this is the first time you and I are meeting in the flesh. Yes. I've been following your stuff for the last three years now. And I remember the moment where I discovered you. It was my brother who actually recommended your stuff to me saying that, look, Ali, you know how you are the productivity guru for all these people on your YouTube channel. Tiago should be your productivity guru.

And I was like, cool. I went on Forte Labs, kind of binged all of the blog posts and all that stuff. Took the course, Building a Second Brain. And then we've been kind of friends on Twitter for the last like three years. Yeah. And on various Zoom calls here and there.

So much stuff to talk to you about. I think your journey is pretty inspiring. We'll talk about the blog. We'll talk about productivity and creativity. But the place I wanted to start with is that you recently became a dad. Yes. And you have another child on the way. And I cannot imagine what being a parent does and stress tests your time management and productivity systems. So how did...

I guess you were a productivity bro before being a dad and now you're a productivity bro meets a dad. What was the difference between these two modes of operation? Oh my gosh, yeah. Became a dad about 18 months ago. It just radically constrains your time, energy, attention, bandwidth, all of it in multiple ways. I mean, obviously you want to spend hours a day. This is something I would not have guessed.

I can't, it's painful to be away from my kid for a day. Like, I wouldn't think that that would be true of me. I thought, you know, I can go on trips or I can, I don't know, go on business trips, but I need to see him every day. If I don't, it's painful, it hurts. And so now suddenly I have an hours a day commitment, but a commitment that I love, I really enjoy.

Which is such a contrast to before where, you know, before having a kid, before getting married especially, I just had unlimited, if I wanted to stay up all night and just, you know, binge learn something, I did. If I wanted to spend the whole weekend doing something, I did. There were almost no constraints on my time. I'd say that's the biggest difference. - And how does that like, you know, obviously you're a parent now, you're trying to juggle this like business that you've got as well, writing a book.

What effect does this kind of big thing in your life, i.e. wife and kid, have on the other aspects of your life? I'm asking selfishly because I'm very curious as to how. Because already I feel like, oh, I don't have enough time. But then I think, but I don't even have a kid. Like, come on, I've got it easy. Yeah, it's difficult to imagine the transition before it happens. But I think...

It's hard, it's painful, 'cause it's just so much change. You just have a way you're used to spending your time and it has to all change. But I think now, approaching two years in, it was helpful. It's actually interesting, having the kid coincided almost perfectly with hiring a team.

with hiring people. And, you know, I've always heard the advice, oh, you need to delegate, you need to outsource, you need to, you know, pick the 5%. What is the 5%? The 1% most valuable stuff. But until you actually need to, you don't do that. Like you think you do, but when you only have say 90 minutes in a workday, it's this moment of truth where you have to look yourself in the mirror and just be so honest about

Right. Like what actually is going to make a difference? What is going to move the needle in my career and my business? And often it's a very different answer than you'd expect. So I think overall, basically to answer your question, it's been a forcing function. It's been a helpful constraint where I just wake up in the morning and I have to ask myself an answer. What is the number one thing that I need to get done today? And just focus all of my attention on that. Ah.

Because I kind of do this. I ask myself, what's the number one thing I need to get done today? But then I actually have quite a lot of time to do the thing. Yes. And it's actually on days where the calendar is chock-a-block with something. Yes. This conversation or the video we just did for the channels and so on. Where it's like, oh crap, make progress on chapter one of my book or write 500 words. Yeah. I only have this 30-minute block to do this in. Yeah. And then it gets done like Parkinson's law and all that. But when I have the whole day for filming a video, it takes the whole day to film the video. Exactly. It's really true.

So changing gears a little bit. One thing I like to ask guests is how did we get here? How did you and I end up sitting across from each other and you end up being one of the world's most foremost experts on productivity? What was the journey?

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I just wrote that. I just, you know, almost aspirationally, in fact, very aspirationally, maybe three or four years ago, said, who do I want to be? How do I want to present myself to the world? And I wrote that. It wasn't true at the time. But it's something funny about kind of credibility and expertise is

certain people say it it's true and that's true of something like one of the world's foremost experts now that it's that's been printed in the New York Times in the Harvard Business Review on radio shows and podcasts and different YouTube channels it's kind of it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy but how that happened I don't know how far back do you want to go so what did you do at after school yes let's see I studied business

So I graduated in 2009, end of 2008, 2009, which if you remember in the US was the financial meltdown, the financial implosion. So there were no jobs. There were no possibilities. I had no particular skill. I really like I'm not just saying this. I really had no particular thing that I was uniquely good at. I'd studied business, which is kind of just like the standard thing to do. And so I joined the Peace Corps.

Are you familiar with the Peace Corps? No, what is that? I've heard of it. Yeah, it's a US government agency basically that's existed since the 70s or late 60s that basically pays US volunteers of all ages to go to usually developing countries and serve for two years. I was there two years and three months. So I went to eastern Ukraine and

the far eastern portion of Ukraine near the Russian border. And this is very random, but I was an English teacher there at a high school, combined middle school, high school for two years when I was in my early 20s, mid 20s. Okay. So it's like you were at this point where you didn't really know what to do with your life. Exactly. Let's do this thing. Yeah. It seems kind of cool.

So what happened next time? That's exactly what it was. I had no idea what I wanted to do. There was nothing that seemed particularly appealing. And so I just thought, how can I extend the student lifestyle where someone just tells me what to do for a couple more years? That's what the Peace Corps was. Okay.

And it was an amazing experience. It was challenging. I mean, you have those Siberian style winters. You know, I'm from California. To me, before Ukraine, a cold winter was like, oh, it's in the 50s, 50s Fahrenheit. Don't know what that is, Celsius. But I had no experience of real winters. So that was challenging. I was in the town completely by myself. The Peace Corps doesn't want Americans to be in the same place because then they just hang out together all the time. So I was the only American, only English speaker for many miles around.

And I think what I learned is I learned that I like teaching. I was an English teacher, so I was, you know, I had a day job. I would go every day to the school and teach, you know, from third grade to 11th grade. So I had experience teaching from really kids all the way to, you know, near adults. I learned that I love teaching. I learned, actually, that was the first time I taught kind of productivity related things. - Oh, how's that? - At the time it was, it was basically study skills. - Okay.

- Okay. - Because I would go into these classrooms and the Ukrainian, which is basically like a legacy Soviet education system is so old school. Like until you've experienced what a decades old school system is like, it's very different.

There was no concept of study skills. It was just, everything was pure rote memorization. Everything was just, this is the teacher talking at you for the whole class period, memorize it, regurgitate it for the test. And so I started teaching, you know, how to take notes, how to set goals, even just like for your class, how to make a schedule. Like imagine a student who has never had to make a schedule, never had to look at their agenda.

And I just saw what a tremendous difference it made. You know, just as one example, I would teach my 10th and 11th formers how to do these things. And then they would use those skills to apply to university, get into university, which is a completely life-changing, you know, life-changing thing for them. And so that combination of kind of productivity, study skills, project management with teaching really started to spark something in me during those two years. Oh, okay. And I guess that's when, like the word productivity, I feel like hasn't like...

would have become popular after that time. So how were you thinking about it when you were teaching these things? Yeah, that's a good point. I didn't think of it as productivity at the time. I didn't know. I wasn't familiar with this whole world of thought leaders and blogs. None of that. You know, I was only 24 years old. I hadn't had any exposure. And so I came back from Ukraine and

to get my first sort of real professional job in San Francisco. And so I went from a village in Eastern rural Ukraine straight to the epicenter of Silicon Valley in a matter of like a couple months. It's a complete culture shock, reverse culture shock, right? Which in some ways is harder than culture shock. You go to Eastern Europe, you expect I'm gonna have some difficulty. You come back to California, I came back to my home state and I just remember most of all being just

so shocked by the pace of work. You know we were in a co-working space in downtown San Francisco surrounded by startups. It was it was the quintessential information overload. The speed at which communication happened, email happened, collaboration happened was completely foreign to me at that time. Okay what do you mean by that like the pace of pace of work? It was just so fast. I mean in the morning we'd have a meeting someone has an idea

Then the hour after the meeting, they write it up and then midday at lunch, they're discussing the next iteration. And then by the afternoon, it might be written up in a document that is shared with colleagues around the world. And to do all that, it wasn't just going fast. You had to absorb a lot of information, manage a lot of information, keep track of a lot of information.

So around this time I was introduced to productivity apps. I was introduced to digital note taking apps, Evernote and others. I was introduced really to social media. I had been on like, you know, Facebook and things like that before, but it was such a crash course in just what it means to be a knowledge worker and kind of just like a modern information centric person. Yeah. And I guess if I think of kind of most jobs these days,

It is that kind of knowledge work where really there's information flying at you from all angles. Even in medicine, to be honest, like a big chunk of the way I operated as a doctor was using productivity principles to figure out like prioritization and to-do list management and figuring out my schedule for the day being like, okay, from one till two, I've got a teaching block. I know the ward round is from eight till 11. So between 11 and one,

one, I need to do this list of jobs. Let's figure out the ones that rely on other people being a bottleneck, like getting radiology to approve my scan request first. And okay, cool. Let's do the stuff that requires waiting on things. And so I'd almost have like a waiting for list on my little page. Started using the iPad. People would always be like, oh, you're using your iPad. What's that like? And it seems like more and more jobs are actually about managing knowledge and managing information flows.

I think that's mostly what jobs are these days. If you boil it down to the most basic elements, you have inputs, you process those inputs and turn them into outputs. And you can map this to literally any job, any kind of work.

Which is cool because once you sort of boil it down to that level, you can learn from anyone. You can look at chefs and I've learned a tremendous amount from chefs. You can look at construction. My brother's a construction manager, a contractor. I learned things from him. I've talked to truck drivers, musicians, comedians. At the most basic level of inputs and outputs, we're all doing the exact same thing and therefore we can all learn from each other. Yeah, it reminds me of this.

Bertrand Russell has an essay in praise of idleness where he talks about how, and he wrote this in like the 1930s or something like that. Maybe the 1910s about how the modern world is obsessed with productivity. Yeah. He was writing this a hundred years ago and he was saying, well, what is the definition of a job? A job is moving matter at or above the earth's surface or telling other people to do that.

And I think, and then our friend Paul Millett expanded on that definition, which is like either moving matter or moving pixels or telling other people to move matter or pixels at the Earth's surface. Basically, what we're doing is jobs. We build our whole lives around this kind of construct of a job and our whole identities around, you know, me feeling like, oh my God, I don't have a job. Like once I leave medicine, what am I going to do? Like, who am I? All of these things is basically either moving something from A to B or moving a pixel from A to B. Right.

- It's so true. It's kind of crazy that that is our jobs. That is what we do. We have to become experts in these weird esoteric fields, you know, like something like, you know, personal knowledge management or UX design or, you know, these different methodologies like Agile or Scrum. These used to be such a rarefied abstract for like academics and like universities now.

there's actually power in dabbling in those things and applying them. Because I think the thing that's interesting about that basic level of inputs and outputs is that there's so much variation in how well people do that.

There's orders of magnitude variation. You think it's just inputs, outputs, but there's clearly, if you just look at the economy, look at the world, there's some people that do it very badly and some people that do it astronomically well. So in this episode, Tiago and I talked a lot about the idea of productivity, but there's one productivity book in particular, in addition to, of course, building a second brain, Tiago's book that I've really enjoyed over the last few months. And that is 4,000 weeks time and how to use it by Oliver Berkman, who we in fact had as a guest on the

previous season of Deep Dive. So you can check that out. That'll be linked down below and in the show notes. It's genuinely a really good book and it's all about kind of the finitude of time and it's about like existentialism and it's about like, what is the point of all this productivity? And it just takes a little bit more of a balanced and uplifting and nice view of the whole productivity thing. But if you want to get the key ideas from the book and maybe you don't quite have time to read the book in its entirety, you might like to check out the summary of the book over at Shortform who are very kindly sponsoring this episode of the podcast.

If you haven't heard by now, Shortform is the world's best book summary service. It's way better than all of the other competitors who I shall not name that I've tried out over the years. And it's way more than just book summaries. So they've got one pagers for every book in the catalog, but they also have detailed chapter by chapter summaries. So you can dive deeper into it. And the other cool thing is that they also have these little short form notes. So for example, if the author of a book makes a particular point, if that point is particularly controversial, or there's an author of a different book who's argued against

against that point, then short form will flag that up within the summary itself with a little short form note. So they'll say, for example, that, hey, if you've read Grit by Angela Duckworth, you'll find that she argues the exact opposite of what Oliver Berkman is arguing for in 4000 Weeks. And it's just really nice because it gives you a balanced perspective rather than just imagining that a single author's word, just because it's packaged up in book format, is gospel truth. The way I use short form personally is that firstly, if I get a book recommendation and I'm not 100% sold on reading the book immediately, then I will look up the summary of it on short

form. And based on how I feel about the summary, then I will decide whether I do or don't want to read the book. I also use it because it's a great way of revisiting things I've learned from books I've already read. So for example, my two main ways of doing that are number one, rereading my Kindle highlights, which is all the stuff that personally resonated with me. But it's also really useful to read the short form summary to see if there's anything that I've missed, or any particular in particularly interesting point that has sparked some kind of thought that resonates with something I read recently. It's just genuinely good for getting a detailed summary of the thing that I can then follow up on if I want.

If any of that sounds up your street, then head over to shortform.com/deepdive and that URL will give you a 20% discount on the annual premium subscription. So yeah, thank you so much Shortform for sponsoring this episode of the podcast. I want to talk a little bit about the concept of productivity because in a way, you know, and I guess you and I are very sort of plugged into this particular ecosystem and so we can maybe see the trend, but it seems like

the world has, or at least the people we follow on Twitter, has sort of moved away from productivity. And now I feel a little bit like, ugh, when...

I was interviewed on a podcast and they called me a productivity expert. I was like, oh, I guess I'm okay, fine, fair enough. Now I am. Now I guess I'm a productivity expert. But also a lot of people seem to be like, oh, well, what's the point of productivity? Life is about more than just productivity kind of thing. How do you approach the word productivity, which I think has industrial age kind of connotations of cranking up more and more widgets? Yeah, so a couple of things. First, I like industrial age stuff. Yeah.

One of my biggest sources of inspiration has been modern manufacturing. The theory of constraints, just-in-time manufacturing,

high velocity manufacturing, automated manufacturing. I think sometimes we disparage that stuff to our detriment. Manufacturing today is not like in the 1920s, these dirty, soot-filled, exploitative factories. It is something much different. It's very precise. It's very technology-centric. It's very collaborative.

So I don't mind using factories as a kind of metaphor. But to kind of answer your question more directly, I think of productivity as a phase. It's a phase in someone's life. There is a phase in your life, or it could recur, so there could be different phases, where you have to think about productivity. And then there's other phases where you think about creativity. I really see productivity and creativity as two sides to the same coin.

And where I learned about this was from my dad. My dad is one of the most creative people I've ever met, wildly imaginative creative.

But how does that creativity make it out into the world is productivity. So he has these very systematic approaches and routines and rules that he uses from, you know, the time of day that he paints from this time to this time, to how long he's going to spend on each stage of a painting, to the way that he takes notes. And so I see this kind of like pendulum, productivity, creativity, productivity, creativity. And if you go too far on either end of the spectrum, you start hitting diminishing returns and you start to get stuck.

Right? Like on both sides. You can get so fixated on productivity, your work starts to become formulaic, it starts to become very boring, and it's time to kind of go to the other end of the spectrum, creativity. But then you can go too far in creativity. That's when you get too precious.

You get to, oh no, that's my art. It has to be this certain way. And you know, you talk to someone six months later, what are you doing? Oh, I'm working on my, my one painting for the last six months. That also doesn't work. You're not, you're getting stuck. You're getting, you're getting sort of locked up in your own preciousness. And so I really see them as this kind of alternating back and forth pendulum. Nice. Yeah. I had a bit of thought as you were saying that. And I think I've, I've never really thought of the two as being, being separate. I guess, I guess,

Given that a bunch of videos I make happen to be vaguely themed around productivity, when people ask me, "Oh, what is productivity to you?" I kind of take a step back, I broaden it out and I say, "Oh, productivity is just using your time intentionally." Which then makes it a more gentle definition that you can apply to your personal life, to your work life, and who doesn't want to use their time more intentionally? But there's something about the word productivity that feels a bit more like, "Ugh."

It feels very worky and very much like I'm generating economic output for my employer and this is a bad thing. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, a couple of things. So productivity is like efficiency. Efficiency is sort of a synonym, right? What is efficiency? Again, if you go back to manufacturing, it's simply minimizing waste. That's how I think of it, which is one of the most important things in life. Like when people say productivity doesn't matter, I go, does it not matter that you not waste your time?

You know, does it not matter that you waste your attention? Does it not matter that you waste your ideas? Does it not matter that you waste your potential? Like, isn't that like almost what life is about? And it's easy to lose sight of that if you think of efficiency. But I really just think about it as minimizing waste. And then the other thing I was going to say, oh, think about other uses of the word productivity, a productive conversation.

Would you say a productive conversation is anti-human or is not benevolent or is kind of removing the humanity? No, I want all my, the most intimate conversation with my wife, I still want to be productive. That doesn't mean it's not a good conversation. Or alternatively, think of a productive ecosystem.

productive ecosystem. The forest is a productive ecosystem, not because we went in and clear cut everything and built a parking lot, but because there is value being created, right? And you could say economic value, but I just think of

There's plants being grown. There's animals that are surviving. There's evolution that's happening. There's families, animals and humans that are being raised from the sustenance of the forest. So I kind of like to use the word productivity because it confronts people. That's what I like. I want people to be confronted because the same thing that has you kind of be triggered by productivity

If you follow that thread, you're going to get to an incorrect assumption, a limiting belief, a blind spot that is going to limit you in life and in your career. Oh, that is beautiful. I can feel my kind of mindset changing about that because I've also been like, yeah, I agree. Productivity is a bit of a dirty word. Let's not use that word. Let's call it intentionality or something like that. But I like how you're just like, yep, productivity is a good thing. Like, of course, it's a good thing.

Interesting. Okay, so again, when people like the anti-productivity movement seems to treat productivity as being all about work in particular and would say that, oh, but like personal life and wellness and like self-care is like really, really important and like stuff. Do you think of this separation of productivity as being like work versus personal life or like how do you think about it? Yeah, you know, I think...

you know, being productive is ultimately about having a career you love. I mean, you're not gonna get the jobs you want, you're not gonna start the business you want, you're not going to advance if you're not productive, you're just not. It's wishful thinking. And so you have to learn it and then go beyond it. But the way I think of this too is,

You know, most of my 20s, I was working in nonprofits. I worked for a microfinance nonprofit in Columbia during university as part of my study abroad. I taught English in Brazil and then later in Ukraine.

I worked for the government in the Peace Corps. So like a majority of my 20s, I was a bleeding heart humanitarian. I was gonna dedicate my life to service really. It's what I wanted to do. But I became disillusioned with that whole idea because I saw and I studied, I really looked into the numbers. Like what actually makes a difference in people's lives? What knowledge, what training, what sometimes it's called capacity building or whatever it is. And honestly, you can boil it down to one thing.

If you want to improve someone's life outcomes, all of them, increase their income. Increase their income. If you can raise that one dial, the downstream effect, they will take care of all the rest. They'll improve their health. Their family will be healthier. They'll improve their neighborhood. They'll improve their psychology. They'll invest in education. It's almost like people can be trusted. People know what's best for them, but they need the resources.

So I made this hard pivot. I thought business for years was evil, was bad. I'm not going to do business. I made this hard pivot from like humanitarian stuff into business because I just thought I'm going to focus all my attention on helping people have amazing careers and amazing businesses because that's how they raise their income. And then everything else is going to be positively impacted. Interesting. How did you get to that conclusion that the thing that matters is raising people's income?

Because I've not heard that idea before. I've heard like, oh, the thing that matters is education for girls and raising the whatever of a country or the thing that matters is sanitation or vaccination or all these things. Like what lands you an income? Yeah, this might be a bit controversial. I don't even know. I don't know if anyone, if everyone would agree with that. But where it really came from was my research in microfinance. Microfinance is funny because it's a nonprofit, it's humanitarian, it's development work, but it's also finance.

And all the research that's been done, there's actually some major problems with microfinance, but there's some very clear research that

people if they just have loans, like what is more mercenary than loans? What is more like, oh, like, oh my gosh, loans that have finance charges and you're charging them interest. And yet for a lot of people, microfinance has had a tremendous impact. I guess it just comes from seeing that in action. You know, I worked for a nonprofit in Columbia in the coastal region of Cartagena, which is the poorest part of Columbia and one of the poorest parts of Latin America. And our loans were like $50.

a few hundred dollars. They just needed a little, like by our standards, like we spend that much on a dinner or like a lunch, right? And they would make investments. They would buy a cart for their business. They would send their kids to school for a month or two. They would make these little changes that then had cascading effects. And I guess it's just something I observed that increasing your, like,

I think very well established that higher incomes are correlated and I think causal from all these other things, right? Like how are you going to improve your health if you don't have money? If you have zero financial resources, what are you gonna do? Like you just don't have that many options. - I love that, that's great. Like I've, you know, since,

over the last year or two, my YouTube channel has taken a soft pivot rather than a hard pivot, a lot towards talking about like business and entrepreneurship and making money. And I will occasionally get comments from people being like, I liked your YouTube channel when you were talking about how to study for your exams. But now all you talk about is how to make money. This is bad. I've always kind of thought that like, they're right in that that is now the thing that I talk about. But like the way I see it, that, you know,

I'm all about kind of helping people to live their best lives and me trying to do that myself and hopefully trying to be a sort of a documentarian of what I'm doing to live my best life so that people can as well. And like without, without having money, it's like, what are you, what are you going to do? Yeah. You know, in, in the sort of the first world problem that me and most of my close friends have is like, oh, you know, I want to be self-actualized. I want my job to be the thing that I enjoy. I don't want to be a wage slave. My, my, my housemate, you know, works, works 14 hours a day for management consulting. And she's like, yeah, it's fun. But like, it's, it's,

it's too many hours. I can't live my best life because I'm spending all that time with my employer. And she started the YouTube channel, started a podcast, started a business, trying to do business coaching on the side to build up these streams of income to buy her the freedom to then use her life energy, the limited time we have on this earth on something that she actually wants to do, i.e. helping women's education rather than trying to make a rich management consultant company a little bit richer. And without money, and so I think it's very easy to

it's very easy to cast shade on people that talk about money. Yeah. Thinking that like, oh, evil capitalist, oh, making money is just about exploiting the poor or whatever terminology people use for this. But actually, like making money is how you...

raise this every everything else every sample society that we live in it's what you just say money is that the most fungible resource it's the easiest thing to exchange for anything else even more than time yeah because money you need anyway to just live to survive so if you're going to do that anyway I mean money can be exchanged for freedom like you said it can be exchanged for connections it can be exchanged for I mean the other thing that I really care a lot about and invest a lot of time in is personal development and

And personal development is so expensive. Even something like this is a great example of a postulate meditation retreat is free anywhere in the world. There's centers all over free, 100 percent free, no cost. But there are 10 days for you to take 10 days off from work.

and offload your responsibilities so you don't have to be in touch with anyone 'cause you have no phone, that's hard to even calculate the monetary value of that. So even for something that is free, you spend a lot of time in,

And so I just think money is this kind of base layer. It's this kind of basic security that you need. It's like Maslow's hierarchy. You need a certain foundation to be able to invest in freedom, self-development, creativity, productivity, all these other things depend on your income. - Interesting. I need to stop saying the word interesting. People keep telling me I use the word interesting too much.

So there's a book on that bookshelf called Happy Sexy Millionaire by Stephen Bartlett. It's this podcast host entrepreneur based in the UK. And he has a phrase that health is your first foundation because without health, there is nothing else. And there's no point having loads of money if you don't have the health. The thing that you just said almost sounds as if money is your first foundation. And I wonder, I'm just thinking out loud here, but I wonder to what extent it's like

Once you have sufficient money, then at that point health becomes your first foundation. But if you don't, it's very hard to take care of your health when you literally broke because like, how are you gonna find the time to do the healthy things and eat the healthy meal and to cook the whole food in your own place when you're trying to work multiple jobs to make ends meet? - Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely like a flywheel. They're synergistic with each other, but yeah, being healthy is expensive.

the healthier the food, the more expensive it is. And the worse the food is for you, the cheaper it is. Which is like, if you were gonna design an unhealthy society, that's how you would do it. Make the worst stuff cheap and easy and convenient and fast and everywhere, and make the healthy stuff difficult to access, easy to spoil, expensive. And so it takes a real investment to kind of get over to this side.

But I mean, obviously to make money, you also need to have a certain level of kind of biological stability. - Yeah, yeah, I think it comes to that law of equal and opposite advice that like for different people in different situations,

the exact opposite advice may well work. Absolutely. So for someone like me and you, probably we should probably focus on our health more than making more money. Yes. But when we were in our early days, when we were in our early twenties, trying to sort of hustle or whatever, at that point, actually optimizing for making money is, is, is not the worst thing you could do and spending the time cooking healthy food, going to the gym and all that kind of stuff. Okay, fine. But like, you know, there are things at different points in our lives that

certain things become more needle moving than others. Yes. I think for me, and this is the thing I encourage a lot of people to do, getting productive, becoming really good at your job, becoming really good at your studies, becoming really good at your work, becoming really good at the thing that you're doing to then start a business to build up potential streams of income. Yeah. That is actually a really good thing to be doing when you're young. Plus it's really, really fun as well.

- I couldn't agree more. I really think in terms of seasons also. When I learn about whatever topic, let's say it's productivity, I don't wanna be like a productivity fan. I don't wanna just casually once in a while, as if it's like, I don't know, like perusing a magazine. Like, oh, this is entertaining.

pick a goal, pick a skill you want to learn, concentrate on it, intensively immerse yourself in it for a short amount of time and then go do something else. That's the whole point is you acquire a skill and then you step away and use it elsewhere. Yeah, because I guess the thing about productivity is that it's not an end in itself. It is like a means to the end of the thing that you want, i.e. helping you just do the things you want. And similarly, creativity is not an end in itself. It's

to help you do the things that you want in the world, have the impact, live a happy, meaningful life, whatever people's goals are, which are broadly aligned with those things. And that's, you know, as we said, going too far in one direction or another, you're in a way that there is a danger of worshiping at the altar of the tool rather than the thing that the tool lets you do. Like being a hammer enthusiast rather than

being a carpenter or something like that. A hammer enthusiast. I have the world's greatest collection of hammers. What have you built? Oh, no. I just collect hammers. That's fine. People who collect hammers, but it would be hard to argue that that has...

know and unless that's the thing they genuinely want to do I find this with like note-taking apps I fall into the pattern of like let's try this one let's try that one and I become the collector of note-taking apps rather than actually writing which is and putting it out into the world which is the thing I actually care about absolutely

So we were in the process of your journey. So you went back to San Francisco. Let's say you're in your sort of early to late 20s. And you said that you made this hard pivot from the humanitarian stuff to the business stuff. What was the story behind that pivot? How did that happen? Like I said, no business and money, investing, everything.

productivity, business, none of this. But my mom gave me one night, Rich Dad Poor Dad. - Oh, yep. - Rich Dad Poor Dad changed everything because it was my first exposure. I was like a, you know, someone in the desert finding water.

I didn't know that's what I was missing. I was missing a relationship to, in that case, money, coming back to the subject of money, which was a relationship of abundance. As long as I thought that money was evil, business was bad, everything in that world was bad, those are some of the most powerful forces in the world. And so I read that book. I read the whole book in one night. I couldn't sleep the entire night. Read it through the night.

And I just kind of was in a daze and I just thought, oh my gosh, business, this is what I realized from reading it. Business can be the vehicle for everything that I want to create in the world, for the impact, the positive impact I want to have, the people I want to help, the education I want to create, the life outcomes for people that I want to change. Business can be my friend instead of my enemy.

And I made a complete life pivot, went from studying international development in school to studying international business. Started writing and publishing my first little bits of content online. I really just chose business as my means for having the impact I wanted to have. - Why do so many people seemingly, at least the ones who are active on Twitter, why do they feel so anti-business? - I think it's our conditioning. It's what we were taught.

Yeah, that making money. People have so many, I'm sure you see this all the time, so many limiting beliefs around making money. You know, making money means you are compromising your integrity. Making money means you're taking advantage of people.

making money means you are losing yourself and not being authentic. Like there's some belief, and we all have these, we never actually completely let go of all those beliefs. They're lurking back here in our psychology. But those things, you know, they have truth in them, but they're not the truth. Yeah. Like money is the root of all evil kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I remember two years ago now, a year and a half ago, I had a call with you and our mutual friend, David, about this course that I was going to start at the Part-Time YouTuber Academy. And I

And I was thinking, oh, you know, I'll do it as a pre-recorded thing. I'll sell it for like $200. Why don't we partner up on it? Because I don't like the idea of selling it myself. But if I sell it with you, then it's like, it makes it okay. And you and David were both kind of laughing. It was like, it sounds like you think making money is evil. It sounds like you think selling something is evil. But what if that's not true? And you sort of challenged me to question my assumptions around that. That actually, what is money? Money is an exchange of value. And if you're providing something that is valuable and doing it in a way that's authentic,

authentic and with integrity and stuff. And people pay you for it. That's literally how the world runs. And that is not an evil thing. And there are so many creators that I speak to now that I recount that conversation to when they're like, oh, it's okay for me to do a sponsored video sponsored by Squarespace or Brilliant or Skillshare or whoever happens to be sponsoring this episode. But as soon as I sell my own product, suddenly that becomes, oh, I couldn't do that. My audience would hate me for becoming a seller, for selling my own thing. Yeah. Yeah.

It's so common. It's so common. And the internet almost makes this worse because you can just create free stuff forever and you'll get paid somehow, maybe like sponsorships or ads or something. But it's just a certain business model that we both found. Finding the most engaged people who are building their own businesses can really be a great business and really impactful for them. Like we were talking before recording that

Someone can hear a piece of advice a hundred times But then you look them in the eye and you say do X X is the right path for you and suddenly they're like, oh wow that really sunk in It's the power of teaching. It's the power of coaching. It's the power of interactive, you know forums. Yeah So where I guess at this point we're in your early 30s. You've made this pivot to business How do you go from?

kind of humanitarian bro to kind of business bro to world's foremost productivity expert? What was the journey there? There were a couple steps in between. Yeah, so let's see. It took me years. It took me years because I had that first...

professional job in San Francisco which was in consulting. Learned so much through consulting. Consulting is great for young people also because you just get exposure to so many different kinds of businesses. Every month there's a different client and so one day you're in you know petroleum refinement, another month you're in like self-driving cars, another month you're in something completely different packaged goods. And so I kind of had this broad exposure to different businesses. The one I liked the most by far was education right that's just what I loved.

And I quit that job one day when I just couldn't take it anymore. I wish I could say I had a plan, but it was like rage quit. Like I just can't take this. And the reason for that was I just remember putting in more hours than I had ever put into anything. I mean, consulting is brutal. You work just...

absurdly long days. You work late into the night, you work on weekends, you travel and work even longer. And I just realized, wait a minute, I can keep doing this for years. And I remember I had my first performance review. I always tell the story.

the first time someone had ever sat down and talked about my career. What do you want for your career? It was great. But then they, my manager laid out the path and she was like, okay, a couple more years, you can go from junior project manager to project manager. A couple of years after that, senior project manager. Few more years after that, you know, project director. And she was laying it out like it was so inspiring and amazing. And I was like, my God, I'm going to waste the most productive decade of my life

to climb this career ladder, I might as well do that for my own stuff and invest in my own stuff. And so I quit and that started kind of the self-employment journey. How did you just quit? I mean, this is the privilege of being single, childless. I really had very little savings. So do you mean like how I did it financially or like how I actually did it? Yeah, like the financial thing because like, oh, just quit your job. Yeah, that's...

I ask because I feel like every other person I meet these days is like, I'm thinking of quitting my job. I'm like, great. And they're like, oh, but money. Yeah. You know what? I think living abroad had really taught me just how little I can get by on. It is really something I think you have to learn for yourself. In Ukraine, I think I survived on like $250 a month was my total budget. And of course, that's Ukraine, right? Yeah.

But you just get creative. You learn that you can rely on other people. You learn that you can make money go so far when it comes to food.

You can crash on people's couches. You can travel cheaply. You can have fun cheaply. You don't have to go out to a posh restaurant. You can play a card game with your neighbors. And so I just knew from experience in the Peace Corps, in Colombia, in Brazil, that I needed so little financially to get by. Of course, I was in San Francisco, one of the most expensive places in the United States.

So I think I had about six weeks of savings. I had about six weeks that I could survive before I needed new income, which it turns out was the best scenario. If I had had even six months, it would have been bad. - Why? - Because, you know, six weeks, okay. I have two weeks to plan something, two weeks to launch it, and then hope that it makes money within the last two weeks.

That was literally the timeline. And so I just went on Skillshare, which is the only, yeah, it was Skillshare. It was the only online educational platform that I knew. 'Cause I didn't have time to do research. I would've spent two weeks doing research, right? So I said, no, let me just go on Skillshare

The only thing that I knew how to teach was productivity because I had taught it in the Peace Corps. And this would have been like seven years ago before they started sponsoring everyone's videos. Yes, this was 2013. Oh, wow. Like nine years ago. Yeah. Okay. So you went on Skillshare. Yeah. It was just when they were pivoting because Skillshare was originally in-person classes. They would organize like workshops in cities and they decided that's too hard. That's too expensive. So they pivoted online. I was in that first wave.

which was helpful, right? And I just didn't even have time to research different subjects. I just got the Getting Things Done book, which was the most recent book that I had read. Like how little of research and preparation I did when I look back was just, it was just insane. But I just had no time, right? It's Parkinson's law again. So I just created a course based directly on this book, which I can't recommend exactly because I almost got in trouble with the law.

Um, I had to put a disclaimer, you know, this is not officially approved by the David Allen company. So it was fine. Uh, but that very first course, which I created within a few weeks, ended up doing well and paying the bills for like a year, year and a half. I got very lucky. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. So what are you, like, what were you going to do if things didn't work out in those six weeks? I was probably going to move home, live on my parents' couch. I was starting to look at like local jobs. I applied at target.

I applied at like plate, you know, little retail shops at the mall. I was, I had some plans in process because of course I didn't know it was going to work. I assumed it was not going to work. And there was a number of things that happened that made me get very lucky. Like Skillshare picked up my course and promoted it. It was like on the front page of Skillshare. The timing was really good with productivity stuff. People were really getting interested in productivity. Online education was taking off. There were, there was a number of factors that got really lucky, but then also of course it wasn't,

I had tried other things, kind of like your story. Like your first overnight success is really like the 10th thing that you try, right? So it was a combination of luck, chance, timing. But then I used that year, year and a half. It was barely enough year, barely enough money to make it a year, year and a half to,

to just really for the next three, four years, I just strung together literally like one or two months of rent at a time. I would go work an event, make another few hundred dollars. I would do a random consulting project for a friend, make another couple of thousand dollars. I really for a good three or four years, it was like month to month, maybe a few months at a time. If I had three months of rent paid, that was like plenty of runway.

And I guess you, it would be kind of irresponsible to take those sorts of risks now, now that you have like a family and a kid and stuff to support. Yeah. So the ability to take those sorts of asymmetrical risks where the downside is capped, but the upside is potentially huge. Actually, it's a lot easier to do when you're not supporting a family. Yeah. Um,

Like, it's, yeah, it's interesting you say that. So one of my close friends is, you know, this friend working this management consulting job, earning way more than six figures a year kind of thing. And she's like, oh, I know I want to quit my job, but like, how will I get back to that level of income? Yeah. I'm like, do you really need 150K a year to survive as a single person?

when you can just go home and live with your parents she's like oh but I don't want to do that yeah okay fine but like if you had to is that like a bad thing she was like no no it's not really it's like what are you actually scared of

And it reminds me of the story of, you know, there's that cartoon of some kind of parable where there's this kid and their dad and they go to the zoo and they see these two elephants. One's a little baby elephant and one's a big mama elephant. And the baby elephant has a chain, a metal chain attached to its leg. And the kid's like, Daddy, why is there a chain attached to the leg of the elephant? And the dad's like, oh, well, you know, this, you know, baby elephants like to run around. They like to escape. And so, you know, the chain stops them from escaping. Yeah.

And then they look at the mama elephant who's huge and enormous. And she's got this little piece of string attached to the foot. And she's just chilling. And she's just hanging out. And I think that's such a good metaphor for these invisible shackles, these limiting beliefs that hold us back. Yes. I run into this all the time myself. I'm like, oh my God, what if the business falls? What if like...

this and that and then i speak to someone i was like bro you've got like 10 years of runway yeah just by you know i've seen your investment video you literally have 10 years of runway i'm like you're right and that's crazy telling me that in the next 10 years you won't be able to figure something out it's crazy like why do you need 150k a year to live like you can literally just move back home or hang out with friends and make something happen yeah it really is true it's um you know the fact that that

my salary at that consulting job was so low. It was criminally low. Like it was barely survivable in San Francisco was a blessing because I had nothing to lose. You know, I'm just going to go from one subsistence salary to another subsistence salary. And so I think you need constraints, like the best way to destroy someone's motivation and productivity and momentum, give them a ton of money, give them a ton of time, give them a ton of freedom.

When you have an overabundance of those things, you just start floating in space because there's no hard line. There's no wall. There's no constraint for you to push up against. And that's going to force you to kind of make a choice. Yeah. Yeah, this reminds me of something I read in a business book recently around like kind of building startups and stuff where it's kind of the idea that before a business has figured out their money printing machine,

It's very exhilarating, very like all hands on deck. We need to make this happen. There is a sense of urgency, a sense of energy about the place. As soon as the business has figured out what its money printing machine is and now they scale and now they get more people on board. Suddenly you start caring about bullshit things like, oh, I want everyone to only be working six hours a day. I want to make sure we have beanbags. I want to make sure we have massages at work and all this kind of stuff.

And you often hear from people that the early days were in a way more fun than the scaling days when we had the table tennis table and the beanbag and all the perks that you could dream for. Because there is this sense of urgency when you're like, I need to make this work. And once it's working, then it's very easy to just be like, oh, life is good. That's very true. If that's the way you want to live life. But I think there is then a danger of

you know, a lot of big businesses move so much slower than smaller businesses. A lot of big businesses are at risk of potentially failing because they don't have that momentum that

a scrappy startup does absolutely i think that same kind of principle applies to our personal lives as well yeah that there is a level of like keeping up the scrappiness yes it's just generally fun as long as it doesn't overly burn you out and stress you out to the point where it's like chronic over such a long period of time yes but there is some energy and you know the idea of hormesis and you know what doesn't kill you makes you stronger yes a little bit of calorie restriction is good for the body a little bit of sleep deprivation is good for us a little bit of like having to run a

And like be in a stress situation is good for us. Yeah. Whereas if we're a couch potato with a catheter and like a video game controller all day living a very comfortable life, then, you know, there's not much progress there. Yeah, it's very true. So what was it in your journey that then caused things to, quote, take off, as it were? How did you move away from the subsistence living month to month kind of lifestyle?

- Yeah, so it kind of slowly changed and I tried. I tried so many things. For a while, I thought, let me go into consulting 'cause that has super low overhead, right? It's just one person. Didn't, wasn't very good at that, didn't enjoy it much. Then I went into corporate training 'cause I thought, I know how to teach. That was more profitable. That's when the money started getting better, but

I was just in these environments working in Silicon Valley for some of the wealthiest corporations in the world and I lost the humanitarian service side. I was working for these companies just making the world's wealthiest companies even wealthier, which there's no problem with that, remember as we were saying, but it just wasn't very satisfying. I needed to work with people who were just starting out, people who were in need, people who had a problem.

But at the same time, I was taking elements of all these things. Like from consulting, even though it didn't really work, I learned how to talk to companies. That's a skill, to be able to come into a business meeting and have a business conversation, right? I learned how to price things. I learned just how much money corporations have and how much they're willing to spend without that difficult of a process.

From corporate training, I learned how to structure trainings. I learned how to design workshops. I learned how to deliver content in a way that a professional could take in and take seriously.

But then I went to online education. Actually, even online education didn't really work because I had had that first GTD self-paced course. And so I thought, oh, this is my jam. My first try was a success. I'm a master. Well, the second and third and fourth attempts failed because GTD has a built-in audience, it's a movement. And so there's like a ready-made demand.

I had much more difficulty. In fact, I haven't to this day launched another successful self-paced course. So that also was not my skill. I didn't have the production capabilities. I didn't have the planning capabilities. And so I just kept trying things, trying to find my niche and it ended up being the most

something I would have never guessed, which was cohort-based courses, was taking the business stuff from consulting, the training from corporate training, the teaching of self-paced courses, combining all of them into an online course, but one that is delivered live via Zoom in a way that doesn't require so much polish, doesn't require so much preparation because I'm not good at that, but was all about the human connection and about interaction and coaching through Zoom.

Wow. And I guess all of that has now culminated in this book. Yes. Building Second Brain, a proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. Like how long have you been running the course? What's been the, what was the story of kind of the course and its sort of growth? Yeah. So it's wild because I never, I never made long-term plans for this. I never tried, I never thought much into the future. I really just ran one cohort at a time. So I did like a beta cohort in like December, 2016.

Cohort one, the first official cohort was like January, February 2017.

And now we're in the spring, summer of 2022, we've done 14 cohorts, which is just insane to me. Like I really, the same way earlier that I went from paycheck to paycheck and then one month's rent to the next month's rent, I was kind of used to that. I was used to very short term finances. I really, for the first like seven, eight, nine cohorts, it was just make enough money in this cohort to run the next one. That's all I thought about until very recently.

And it just kept going, each cohort a little bit better, a little more profitable, a little bit bigger until I could afford to do things like hire a team and hire people. - How did you get your first few customers? - It was all friends. I think I had a personal relationship with every single person in the first cohort.

colleagues, former coworkers, people in that coworking space that I had met over lunch, friends, exes. I just went into my social network and was like any favor that I have. And it really was them doing me a favor. Those early cohorts, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to those people because it was, I would just show up on a Zoom call, maybe with some slides. It was just extemporaneous. It was improvised.

Around cohort six, seven or eight, I started to really have pride in what we were doing. - Oh wow. How much were you charging in the early days? - So it started at 500. - 500? - Yeah, which was cohort one, which was a huge, does that sound cheap or expensive? - That sounds really expensive. - It was, right? Because it was, my self-paced course previously was 50 bucks or even less, it was like 25.

At the time, it was an outrageous price. It was kind of just this bold leap to say, if I'm gonna get on calls with you over the course of a month, if I'm gonna coach you, interact with you, consult with you, if I'm gonna be your personal second brain expert. You know what it really was? I charged not as an online course creator, I charged as a consultant.

It was as if I was your personal consultant, which with that framing, $500 is cheap. - That's really cheap, yeah. - It's like a reframe, right? - It's like $500 for an online course. Oh shit, that's really expensive. But $500 for like, yeah, basically corporate training is like, that's way too cheap. - It's so cheap. - It must be so bad, it's that cheap. - And we increased the price. So every cohort, I would release a whole bunch of improvements, increase the price by $100. So I went 600, 700, 800, 900. There was always a reason that it got more expensive, which was like the new features.

until we reached $1,500 for the lowest tier. Oh, and then we started releasing new tiers, a second tier, a third tier. We stopped at 1,500 because I want it to be accessible, which is funny because like $1,500 with one framing is not accessible at all, but we could also just continue to raise the price. But I kind of want it to be something that

is on par with like a weekend vacation or going to a conference or investing in a personal coach or consultant. Like $1,500, it's a serious amount of money, but there are other things in life that we invest $1,500 in. - Yeah, I think it's an interesting price point because

to some people watching and listening to this, they'll be like $1,500. Like how can you possibly charge that much for something that's completely freaking absurd? Cannot believe it. You're a snake oil salesman. For another segment of people watching this, it's like $1,500. That's like 10 times cheaper than the corporate training I spent like 15 grand on last week. And it's just like completely different approaches to money. And one thing that quite a lot of my consulting friends have said is that working in consulting is,

makes you realize how broken the world of money actually is because like the amount that corporations have to spend is so astronomically different you cannot even fathom the scale of it compared to the day-to-day that we spend being like that $3.50 coffee at starbucks was a little bit expensive yeah two pound 70 seems a bit more a bit more reasonable yeah and in a way unless you've

I often struggle to kind of explain stuff to my mom in this sense where she's like, wait, you're spending how much on this course or how much on this office or how much on these team members? Like, why can't you just do everything yourself? Like you were doing it yourself. I'm like, for someone who doesn't have experience in business, thinking about five, six figure expenses, it's like bloody hell, that's like 10 years worth of salary. But it's just like a different, yeah. It's a completely different mindset because it's tax deductible. Yeah.

That, I mean, I'm in California, some of the highest taxes in the US, you're in Europe. It's just a completely different mindset because you are paying with that pre-tax. So you actually want to spend money. It is to your benefit to find as many ways as you can spend money as possible because then your tax bill is, the government is in a way paying you to spend money. They're giving you like a refund on your taxes because you've made these investments in your business. Yeah.

And I guess there's going to be some people that think, oh, tax avoidance, bad. But another segment is like, well, I mean, this is how economics works. We want people to spend money. Yeah. And providing a tax incentive for a business to spend copious amounts of money on individuals doing corporate training or small businesses or big businesses. It's like, that's literally how the world works. Yeah. Like businesses spending money and like money. Essentially, you know, people hate on the idea of trickle down economics. Yeah. Because I think it's sort of that phrase. Yeah.

Then sort of gets used and applied to the wrong things. Yeah, but it really is like a business where tons and tons of money to spend spends that money on sort of the smaller vendors and they spend money on the smaller vendors and the suppliers and you end up with this effect where like the whole economy moves. Yeah, that sort of that sort of thing. Yeah, that's how it works. I mean, yeah, we do everything obviously by the book. You have to. It's just not worth it. You do everything by the book, but the government is shaping your behavior. Hmm.

they're saying spend money here don't spend it there we're just we're just following the incentives and spending money accordingly yeah like the government says like you can't tax deductible if i clothing for example here but you can training and so i'm not going to buy a fancy suit for me to wear in video videos because that's not legit yeah but like buying a course it's like hell yes yeah yeah and then in a way that incentive encourages investment in education and training yes in a way that it doesn't encourage investment in clothing or in alcohol or in petroleum or whatever things are not tax deductible i don't

That's how it works. Let's talk about some of the concepts in the book. You mentioned something earlier in our conversation, the idea of just-in-time. Can you expand on that? What does just-in-time mean for productivity? Yeah, so this goes back to manufacturing. This is, I mean, just-in-time manufacturing completely changed the entire world to an extent that we don't realize.

Not a lot of people know this history, but Toyota Motor Company, the maker of cars, they introduced this way of building cars, which was instead of stockpiling all the resources you need, all the parts and the rubber and all the different things, I don't know, on the factory floor,

they would have this network of suppliers where they would decide what car they're going to produce. And then just in time, just days or even hours before they would just pull, they would bring all the parts into the factory, produce it right then and ship it off. Which sounds like this weird esoteric, like, why does that matter? It matters tremendously.

Using things just in time, using resources just in time, you not only improve speed, which is nice, you improve efficiency, which is great. But an unexpected thing with that is you improve quality. Quality gets radically higher. Why? It's kind of hard to explain. It's interesting. It's basically...

Think about, let's take auto manufacturing. If you have a bunch of, I don't know, tires, right? That you stockpile a thousand or 10,000 tires, and then you start putting them onto the production line. You find an error, you find a mistake, a defect. What do you do? If you stockpiled a thousand or 10,000 tires, you just keep quiet and you just let them all go through. Because what are you going to do? You can't return them. That one defect has been replicated a thousand or 10,000 times, right?

And so by keeping another way of saying this is keeping inventories low. You don't want a lot of work in process. Work in process is anything that is like in operation, in process, that is ongoing currently. And then applying this to knowledge work, it's interesting. We also want to keep work in process low.

When you're doing too many things at once, I mean, this is just basic time management. When you have 25 projects at once, quality is going to suffer. Efficiency is going to suffer. Time is going to be wasted. So you want to work on few things at once. Yeah, because I guess working on 10 things at once rather than in a way one thing at a time, there's not a linear relationship between I have 10 projects, therefore it takes...

you know, I can do 10 things with a 10th of the time in the same amount. There's some efficiency that you lose out on by having so many bits in progress. But similarly, I think just doing things one at a time is also for me, not the sweet spot because sometimes my energy is like, oh, I actually want to work on this thing or I can be less of a bottleneck and thing X if I focus on thing Y or worse to that effect. Yeah.

So how does that like just this idea of just in time versus just in case? How does that relate to, I guess, personal productivity for us in our kind of work and personal lives? Yeah, so I would say just in case is how we were kind of educated, which is you do everything way in advance. You do it as perfectly as possible, as soon as possible.

which is okay if you know what's gonna happen, right? If you're taking a class in school, you know I need to study each lesson, each unit, each paper, each reading assignment is important simply because the professor said, you know, study this. But then you leave school and it's a radically higher level of uncertainty. You don't know, right? If you spend six months researching a topic,

that topic may never come in handy. You may never need that skill. You may never need that knowledge. So you have to be much more dynamic and fast moving. And basically you can think of it like just in time learning, learn something, acquire knowledge right when you need it, use it fast. Like

Like we've been talking about, get the results, get the feedback, learn, make another iteration, do it again, rather than stockpiling and growing this huge reserve of material before you even start. By the way, quick break from the podcast to mention my completely free five-day email crash course for creatorpreneurs. Now, a creatorpreneur is basically this portmanteau, I think the word is,

It's a mashup of creator and entrepreneur. It's basically a creator who wants to scale up their creative side hustle and turn it into more of a business. And in this completely free five day email crash course, every day I send you an email where I go over some of the lessons that I've learned over the last five years of building up this creatorpreneur business from the ground up.

to the point that it's doing probably something like $5 million in revenue every year. Within that, you'll also get a completely free set of links to resources from other successful creatorpreneurs that you can use yourself. Again, it's completely free. So if you want to sign up to the five day email crash course, then you can stick your email at the link in the video description or in the show notes. Anyway, let's get back to the episode. So the book is titled Building a Second Brain, a proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

This is a thing that we probably should have addressed earlier, but like what the hell is a second brain and why is it? Why does it help you organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential? Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. A second brain. Think of it. Think of things you already do. So you might have a journal or a diary.

Imagine if everything you wrote in that journal or diary was saved forever, was searchable, that you could actually drive insights from it. You could go ask it a question. What have I thought about money in the past? What have I thought about personal growth? How have my dates been in the past? What did I learn? You could actually mine the insights from that.

That's a journal or diary. Now imagine notes you took from books or articles. Now imagine even practical things like grocery lists, packing lists, travel itineraries. Okay, now add bookmarks that you saved from the web. Now add any kind of document that you've created from the past. All these things are things we largely already do to some capacity. But now imagine getting all of that material, which like we said, is just data.

All of that stuff is just information and you, you save it, you centralize it all in one single central place where, you know, we preserved forever. You know, you can always search for things, you know, you can, once it's saved in the same place, start to link things together, start to tag it, start to organize it. What would be the value? What would be the, you know, what would be the value of the, the aggregated sum of all that material? That's your second brain. Okay. Okay.

So a cynic would say that, well, what is the value of that? Why do I care if my, like surely, isn't it a bad thing if my private journal is in one place for some evil corporation to access forever? Like, why do I need to care about my shopping lists? Yeah, books I've read, I've read a few fiction. I've read Twilight. I've read Fifty Shades of Grey. In addition to getting things done, why does it matter if it's all in one place? Yeah, I would say a few things. If you make anything,

And I'd say more of us are makers or creators than you would think, right? If you're writing long emails, if you're writing reports, memos, analyses, project plans, like most knowledge workers have some, virtually all knowledge workers have some kind of output.

You can't just sit down and make something from scratch. Or if you do, it won't be very good. You won't have a lot of kind of interesting ideas to add to it. You need as a creative person, some repository, some store of ideas and insights to draw from, or else you're gonna be doing that classic thing that we wanna avoid, which is looking at the blank page or looking at the blank screen, right? And trying to come up with an idea, which is one of the worst experiences.

I would say even broader than making things, think about decisions. A decision is something that you in a sense create, right? You take into account all this information, all these inputs, what your team thinks, what your colleagues think, how the economy is doing, what people in your industry say. You are incorporating all of those inputs into a decision.

I would say that is something that you need to draw on existing material. Any kind of outcome, right? Like it's difficult to go out into the world sort of naked in idea terms and make things happen without any research, without any creative raw material, without any planning. It's just hard to do. Okay. Yes. So the way that I kind of, you know, when people ask me, oh, what's the deal with the second brain thing? I'm like, it's basically a, you know, a...

digital note-taking system that you can put anything into and that you can then use for the things that you actually care about. So I think this is very easy to give an example to if you're, for example, a writer. You know, there's this idea of a commonplace book, which is a thing from

back in the day where anytime you read a book or you have an insight, you have an idea, you write it down in this one book. And now if you have multiple of these books that you've collected through 10 years of your life and you come to writing a book, you're like, cool, I now have all of these insights I've already gathered. I've already got the raw materials. It's almost like taking notes in class. Yeah. You, if you're then writing an essay, you're mining the notes you've taken in class, doing a little bit of Googling, but mostly doing it from stuff we've read in class, wider reading, other insights, maybe a little note that sparked when you were in a lecture and

And then you're assembling your essay based on those raw materials rather than assembling your essay from the blank page or attempting to assemble your essay via a Google search where you're just going to be derailed by SEO content marketers who are writing the most boring ass listicles to help drive content for their things. Exactly. So in a way, you're creating your own Google, your own sort of external brain, your second brain that you can then search for relevant things.

And I guess that's easy enough to think about. Like, let's say if you're a student and you're writing essays, easy enough if you're like a YouTuber, you're like, cool, I get to mine this for content ideas. What about like not obvious things like that? Or what other use cases are there for a second brain outside the scope of I'm a quote content creator slash student? Yeah, you know, there's all these little mundane things just from people's everyday lives. Like I'll give one very simple example. I'm driving by the hardware store. As a parent...

It's like I have to make use of every single minute. If I'm driving by the hardware store, I want to take advantage of that opportunity. Opportunistically, no. Is there anything that I could just pop in, pull in right here, pick it up from the hardware store, which is across town, right? Rather than trying to, from my home, set aside all this time to go to the hardware store. So here's the question. How can I, within seconds...

look at some resource, some place and know all the things that I might want to pick up at the hardware store. And I did that. I actually had this as a micro case study in the book. I went into my notes, went into the project folder for the studio that we were building, went into OneNote that had things to pick up at the hardware store, which I could have also done a search for.

And then right there in the note, I kind of reorganize it, put some things at the top, put some things in a section that says, don't worry about it for now. And that way it's like I can take advantage of a spontaneous opportunity in my day, which is driving by this hardware store to also pick up those items, which I would never be able to remember. Right. And it would also be hard to sit there in the parking lot and try to like make a new list and try to remember all the things that we were talking about two weeks ago that I have to pick up.

Okay, so it's like your second brain is offloading functionality from your own brain to be forced to remember things like three weeks from now when I happen to be swinging by the supermarket, what are the things that I need to grab? Yeah. And so it's not just like notes that you're taking from lectures, as it were, or videos that you watch or books that you read. It's also to-do lists for projects that you're working on

let's say you're remodeling your studio, let's say you're, I don't know, getting something installed in your kitchen, let's say you're trying to make your bedroom look a little bit nicer. Those are all, I guess, projects in our life. And unless you're used to thinking like a productivity nerd, you might not think of them as projects. Like, you know, install bookshelf in bedroom or sort out cable management on desk setup. Like, what do I need for that? Well, I need some cable ties. I need one of those like plastic boxes to put shit into. I need some kind of

cleaning implement for my keyboard because my keyboard's a freaking mess. I'm not gonna bother getting those things right now, so let's just chuck them in a to-do list such that next time I happen to swing by the hardware store, I can just pick up those things and it becomes a sort of seamless part of my life. Is that kind of the idea? - Exactly.

Yeah, I think people sometimes they think, oh, second brain, this is this advanced futuristic technology. It's going to be this like, you know, exoskeleton that's going to give me new powers and new capabilities. Sure, maybe eventually. But instead, think about instead of the top of your skill hierarchy, the bottom. What is the stuff that you're trying to memorize? What is the stuff that you're trying to keep in mind?

Right? You know, these little things. Are you trying to keep in mind, you know, your, the homework assignments your kid has to complete this week that you're helping them with? Are you trying to keep in mind, you know, places you want to visit next time you're in this country? Are you trying to keep in mind the ideas from the meeting with your boss last week?

Are you trying to keep in mind ideas that have come up in a marketing meeting? You probably don't even realize it, right? Because we were never taught, oh, that thing you're trying to keep in mind, don't keep that in mind. In fact, we're usually taught, keep this in mind, remember this. Like you can even notice the things people say in these little conversational moments. They're like, oh, can you...

can you remind me of this or keep this in mind or bring this up next time? I'm always like, no, I can't. I'm a fickle, fragile human being. I have to write it down. So what happens is if you replace the, instead of adding new levels of thinking, replace the bottom levels, which then frees up your time, frees up your attention, frees up your energy, which you can then dedicate to those higher levels. Yeah. Yeah. The way I think of it is like, think of it. It's like,

My brain is a dumbass. And I don't trust my brain to remember anything at all. And so if it's important, I need to write it down somewhere. And then I need to remember where I've written it down. And so the more second nature that becomes, and the more I know that all of my things go in this folder, all my things go in this app, all my things go in this particular notebook, the more likely I am to remember the things that actually matter to me. Exactly. And I started applying this in the realm of people as well. So I have like a people folder in my Apple Notes where...

anytime I have a conversation with someone and if I remember to do it, I'll just quickly be like, Oh, had a chat with Danny on the 16th of April, 2022. We talked about X. He's thinking of moving to America. He'll be in America for a month coming back on the 14th of May. Cool. That's fine. Sounds a bit banal. But next time I speak to Danny, which might be two months later, I look at that note. Oh, Oh yeah. He was in America for a week for a month. How was your trip to America, Danny? And then it's like, Oh, you remembered. Uh,

And it's like, we're totally cool with writing down people's birthdays as like, oh, you know, I'm not going to remember someone's birthday, but I know it's important that I remember their birthday so I can send them something. And therefore I'm going to write it down. Yeah. But there are also so many things about like, you know, people that we know that we want to remember that we just don't trust our brain too. Like, I don't know how old your kid is. I don't know how old Francesco's kid is. I know that you guys have kids and maybe sort of have another kid on the way. I have dozens of friends who are in the process of getting married and the problem

various stages of pregnancy it's like how do you keep track of all that it's important for those individual relationships yeah but no one would be like you know if for example you had a little address book and you kind of wrote down details yeah oh there's something cute about it yeah you put it in an app suddenly it's like oh my god you're being too systematic with your relationships what is wrong with you you're a robot yeah it's so funny i have a christmas notebook christmas presents notebook every time i come across an item that i think could make a good gift i just take a clip take

take a link, take a note and put it in there. - What a great idea. - And then at the end of the year, I just do a matching. I just get a list of everyone I need presents for, open up that notebook, it's things I haven't even looked at all year long, and then I just go, okay, this one for this person, this one for this person. As a result, everyone thinks I'm like this incredibly thoughtful gift giver. I'm the worst gift giver. I can't remember anything. I can't remember anniversaries, birthdays, nothing.

But using, I've essentially offloaded the part of my brain that would be constantly thinking or stressing out at the end of the year. Oh shoot, how do I buy all these gifts? And I'm just giving that job to my second brain.

So we've got these kind of principles in here. We have a whole longer video on your channel where people can watch and we'll link that in the video description where you and I kind of break down in detail with screen shares, with practical thingies. And I've got a whole other video on my main channel where I kind of literally break down the 10 top principles. But I wonder if you can do a quick whistle stop tour through the principles of the second brain and tell people where they might be able to find out more if they're interested.

Yeah, so basically the book is really built around four pillars, which are the stages of the creative process. I think the creative process is the most important part of people's productivity these days. How do you take inputs and process them in some creative way and turn them into outputs like we've talked about?

And what I really sought to do is say, everyone has special things, everyone has exceptions, everyone has some unique things, but what is the part of the creative process that is timeless? Like we can go back to the ancient Greeks, we can go back to Roman times, we can go back to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment. What are they doing that we're still doing? Because if I can find some things, that's likely that we're gonna keep doing those in the future. They're timeless, right?

And I boiled that down, it's amazing how long this took, into four steps. Capture, organize, distill, and express.

which underlies really all kinds of work. Things have to be captured, they have to be recorded in some way, shape or form. They have to be organized in some way, categorized, classified, grouped. They have to be distilled. You have to decide what is the takeaway, what is the main point, what is the main message. And then I think the purpose of knowledge is to be shared, is to be expressed. And so the last stage and the letters for that are C-O-D-E for code.

is express. How do you share it? How do you collaborate with it? How do you apply it? How do you put it into your own words? How do you put it into some form that has a positive impact on you, your family, your career, your business? Nice.

That's a good summary. Yeah. Okay, so let's just kind of break these down. So capture, meaning how do I take insights and like highlights and like notes and shopping lists and anything from any aspect of my life and just write it down somewhere? Yes. Organize. Now that I've written it down somewhere, where does it go? Yes. Does it get filed away in my folder for chemistry 1A or does it get filed away in my...

bedroom remodel or does it get filed away in my kids doctor's appointments folder yeah that kind of thing uh-huh distill is then i guess the next step of like for the things that i'm that are related to my kind of creative output whether it's a presentation for my work because i work as a management consultant whether it's a poster for a scientific conference i'm working on or a paper for this

journal submission because I'm a doctor or a scientist, whether it's a YouTube video because I'm a YouTuber, whether it's a blog post because I'm a writer or a podcast episode because I'm a podcast, like whatever the thing is, how do you take the stuff

from the bits that you've saved and figure out what are the bits that actually matter. Because you end up saving loads of stuff and then only some of it matters. And then the express is the sort of the publishing, basically. Yes, exactly. That was a brilliant summary. Thank you. Exactly. Rephrasing what you said, just like a little bit worse. Again, I can see how this would very much apply in the realm of the...

self-help content creator because that's like my jam. What other kind of case studies or use cases have you seen of the sort of the code concept, the second brain idea? Oh gosh, so many. I mean, people really, really come from all walks of life. I've seen musicians, you know, there's actually a term hook books, right?

hook the hook of a song is so important that they will just write down either like individual words turns of phrase little sentences Scenes from everyday life, you know I saw someone in red pants get into a red cab or some just like little snapshot and

so that when they go to write the song, right, imagine, oh, come up with a hook, what's a good hook, oh my gosh, like, think of something really smart and brilliant and original, ah! It's like too much stress. Instead, they just open up the hook book and they might even piece together a few of them or find some evocative little snippet and often build the whole song around the hook.

I've got a friend who's a music producer who was talking about this. He was like, you know, a hook like I'm in love with the shape of you. Yeah. It's just like the thing. Okay, we've got it. Yes. The song is successful because the hook is really good. Yes. And then everything else works around the song and they spent hours and hours and hours and hours in the studio being like, what the hell is the hook?

And so I guess similar to like marketers who have a swipe file or like artists who have like a, I don't know, a mood board or an interior designer who keeps like saving things on Pinterest for inspiration as you go along. I have like a folder on my Instagram of like menswear fashion inspiration. So that when I'm in a shop, I can be like, hmm, oh, that's a cool thing. Let's go into, I don't know, Uniqlo or something and get that particular jacket. I guess it's that kind of idea of capture. And what's interesting about that is everything has a hook.

This is something amazing I've discovered. I was talking to my other brother who's a ballroom dancer. What seemed to be very different from creating self-help content, but he

He showed me that when you're ballroom dancing, there's this thing you do with your hands. It's like a flourish. You know, you like do a turn and then you kind of reach out to the side and go like that with your hand. And he told me that's the hook. The way you can just look at someone's hand and tell how good of a dancer they are because that is what attracts the attention. That is what completes the movement. That is this like singular moment that defines the quality of the dance. Look at a building.

If you just look at a building, your eye goes to certain, it's not that you're looking at the whole building equally. It goes to the crowning on the window. It goes to some little detail. It goes to some material. So in anything, there is one part of it that is more important. And that's like the hook. And that's a great example of,

It's hard to come up with those things on demand. It's hard to come up with a brilliant hook, but it is worth just in your everyday, this is what I'm saying, in your everyday life, don't make any extra special effort. Just live your normal life. But when you come across those moments from a museum you go to, perusing a bookstore, something you hear on TV, something you hear on the radio, something that happens to you, something you feel, just write that down. And you will be amazed when you, after...

a week, a month, open that thing up and you will realize you have a way more interesting life than you realize. - I love it. Can we talk about this idea of constraints? You've said that word a couple of times and even before recording, you mentioned the idea of constraints. How does that relate to this kind of stuff that we're talking about? - Yeah, let's see. This is a super interesting subject. I think, okay, the way I would talk about this is what makes knowledge work so difficult

one of the things is that there's no constraints. There's no limits. You know, how much data can you download? Essentially infinite. You know, how many

Like how many sources of information do you have? Essentially infinite. Then on the output side, how many different ways can you use an idea? Infinite. How many different kinds of projects can you pursue? How many different kinds of goals could you have? It's not that you can do it all, but the optionality is so great. It's overwhelming. As humans, we were not designed to have such a vast optionality, right? Be able to date anyone in your city, be able to eat any kind of cuisine from the entire world.

be able to read any story from any corner of the world. It's actually maddening to have that many options. And so I think a lot of what my book is doing is

creating constraints around knowledge work. It is actually reigning in that optionality, the vast amount of options. I mean, even code, right? Code is just saying, okay, right now, just capture. It's like a rule. There's a limit to it. Just write the thing down. Don't worry about anything else. Then at a separate time, just organize, right? Like you're creating these very discrete stages instead of trying to do all the activities all the time.

there are designated times to do different kinds of thinking. Yeah, it's such a common thing with writing as well. It's like,

research is a step and then the first draft is a step and then writing is a step and then editing is a different step and ideally these things happen at different times because you need to be in a different kind of brain space to do the thing and if you try and do all the things at once then nothing ever gets done yes yeah I think this was one of the key things that I learnt from your course and your blog that I then applied to the YouTube channel of like actually you know I

idea generation is a thing that happens over time slash in one sitting. Then coming up with like title and thumbnail is a very different skill to coming up with the structure of the video, which is a very different skill to sitting down and filming the video, which is a way different skill to sitting down and editing the video. And back in the day when I was trying to do these things all at once or one after the other for one project at a time,

it would feel quite overwhelming. Whereas when I think of it like, Oh, I've got three minutes in between patients at work. Cool. Let's come up with a few bullet points for my next video or let me just generate five more video ideas or whatever that thing might be for other people. Um,

that's how I guess you can quote, be more productive, i.e. use time more intentionally. Whereas otherwise what I would have ended up doing is scrolling on Instagram. And I'm so glad I spent those like three to five minute blocks here and there doing stuff that contributed to the thing I genuinely cared about, i.e. making YouTube videos and growing the channel and trying to build this business rather than aimlessly scrolling through Instagram where I have no idea what I scrolled through and has added zero value to my life overall.

I think that's such a good observation. Yeah, you're making use, you're able to make use of smaller amounts of time because you're not trying to reinvent the wheel here. You know, you have three to five minutes. What can you do in three to five minutes

I always just think, can I make one note? A note can be one sentence, one bullet point that is likely to have future value. I can, I can do that in 30 seconds, right? It could be one quote, one idea. Sometimes I even do like just the title of the note. Can I think of without even, I can't even think of the content. I'm too tired. I don't have time. Can I even think of the title of a note that when my future self sees that will spark ideas to then fill in the content, the body of the note.

It's really amazing once you scale it down that low and also have a place to save it, right? If you don't have confidence that when you hit save, that note is going to be saved somewhere that you can then revisit it, then it's not going to be worth the trouble. I think that's a big part of it. Yeah, and I guess this reminds me of how it's pretty common advice for basically any kind of creative at least to always have

a notebook with you in your pocket, preferably one of ours in our essentially line. This is going to be fun. So that when you come across something interesting or something inspirational, you have a thing that you can just, a thing in your pocket to write it down. And given that most of us don't carry notebooks anymore, but we always have our phones with us, I guess the second brain is basically a sort of pocket notebook, but on steroids so that anything can go into it. And you know it's going to come in handy at some point further down the line. Exactly. Yeah, we have our phone more than any...

any notebook you could ever have. Even if you don't have your phone, if you have a tablet, if you can find a computer, log into your account or your Apple Watch, or soon there's gonna be smart glasses and AirPods and all these things. It's just exactly what you said. It's that creative notebook that is so obviously useful. I mean, just look at it. You use it all the time, except in digital form. That's what we're doing.

Nice. Yeah. Yeah. People often ask me, like, how did you manage to do all the things? How did you do the YouTube channel and stuff while working full time? I have a full time job. Like life is so hard. I can't, I can't make time for my thing. My thing is always like,

I mean, A, find a way to make it fun and like make it, make the process of the thing, doing the thing itself so energizing that it makes you want to do it in the evenings or the weekends or whatever. But also like no one genuinely works for like eight or 10, 12 hours a day. There's always moments of downtime, even in the most demanding jobs, even in even working in medicine where there's like super, super busy day, there's always going to be a little bit of downtime for lunch, a little bit of time on the toilet where if I wanted to, I could spend those five minutes just like doing something and contributing towards this project that I really care about. Yeah. Um,

I think the crucial thing there is like figure out what are the things you care about? What are the projects? What are the goals you're working on? And then find ways to be more productive. Use your time more intentionally and effectively to get those things because that's hopefully what is contributing to your meaningful and fulfilling life.

Couldn't have said it better myself. I love it. So this is a great place to end the conversation. Tiago, thank you so much for coming down. We will link to all of the things, the book, uh, your blog, your YouTube channel, um, or recently your podcast, which basically is like short episodes and summarize all the concepts of building second brain. I will link to the course as well. If anyone wants to take it, I took the course three years ago. Now, Jay only changed my life. I was a mentor on the course as well. And we will also link over here somewhere to the YouTube video that you and I are doing. And I will also have a summary of this book available on my main channel, uh,

by the time you're watching this. So thank you so much for listening, everyone. Amazing. Thank you for coming on, Tiago. Thank you so much. All right. So that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. So yeah, thank you very much for listening. I'll catch you hopefully in the next

episode.