Confronting my Productivity Guru - Tiago Forte

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 it's a very different answer than you'd expect it's this moment of truth where you have to 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 uh 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 uh inspiring i said that twice 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 thiago 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 second brain in 2019 and it completely changed my life i would say it changed the way i approached my business with the way i approached 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 thiago 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 is 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 thiago forte this is gonna 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 and i 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 um and on very zoom calls here and there uh 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 quote like her being a parent does and like stress tests your time management and like productivity systems so like how did i guess you 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 um became a dad about 18 months ago um it just radically constrains your time energy attention bandwidth all of it in 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 i can go on trips 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 i love i really enjoy um which is such a contrasted 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 i mean 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 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 yeah but then i think but i don't even have a kid like come on i've been easy yeah it's it's difficult to imagine the transition before it happens um but i think it's it's hard it's it's painful because it's just so much change you just have a way you're you're used to spending your time and it has to all change but i think now you know approaching two years in it's it was helpful uh it's actually interesting the 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 five percent what is the five percent that the one percent 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 work day it's this moment of truth where you have to you have to look yourself in the mirror and just be so honest 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 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 and answer what is the number one thing that i need to get done today and just focus all of my attention on that ah okay 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 or and and it's actually on days where the calendar is chock-a-block with something yes this conversation or the the video we just did for the channels and 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 blog to do this in yeah and then it gets done like parkinson's law and yes but when i had the whole day for filming a video it takes the whole day to film the video exactly it's it's really true um so changing gears a little bit um one thing i'd like to ask guess 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 i just wrote that uh i just you know almost aspirationally in fact very aspirationally maybe three four years ago said who 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 if 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 um but how that happened i don't know how how far back do you want to go so what did you do at uh after school yes let's see i studied business um so i graduated in 2009 okay 2000 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 uh and so i joined the peace corps oh are you familiar with the peace corps no what is that i've heard of it but yeah it's a it's a us government agency basically that's existed since the 70s or late 60s that basically pays u.s 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 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 twenties mid-twenties 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 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 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 um and it wasn't 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 i don't know what that is celsius but i 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 from 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 loved teaching i learned um actually that was the first time i i taught kind of productivity related things at the time it was it was basically study skills okay because i would go into these classrooms and you know 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 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 uh 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 um 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 that's when like the word productivity i feel like hasn't like would have become popular after that time so how 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 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 i came back from ukraine uh to get my first sort of real professional job in san francisco and i so i went from you know 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 you know i came back to my home state and i 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 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 notetaking 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 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 to two i've got a teaching block i know the ward round is from eight till eleven so between eleven and one i need to do this list of jobs let's figure out the ones that rely on other people being in bottleneck like getting radiology to approve my scan request first and then okay cool let's do the stuff that requires waiting on things yeah and so i almost have like a waiting for list on my little page yeah um started using the ipad people would always be like oh using your ipad what's that like yeah um and it seems like more and more jobs are actually about managing knowledge and managing information flows i think that's that's mostly what jobs are these days is your 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 to literally any job any kind of work which is cool because once you you you sort of boil it down to that level you can learn from anyone you can look at chefs and i've 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 when 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 um yeah it reminds me that this um uh bertrand russell has an essay in praise of idleness where he talks about um how and he wrote this in like the 1930s or something like that uh maybe in the 1910s about how how the modern world is obsessed with productivity yeah and he was writing this 100 years ago and he was saying well what is the definition of a job a job is moving matter or above the earth's surface or telling other people to do that and i think and then our friend paul millet expanded on that definition or which is like either moving matter or moving pixels or telling other people to move matter or pixels yeah at the earth surface basically what we're doing is jobs we built our whole lives around this kind of construct of our 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 gonna 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 i'm telling other people to do that 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 uh these different methodologies like agile or scrum these used to be such a rarified abstract for like academics and like universities now you know there's actually power and dabbling in those things and applying them yeah because i think i think the thing that's interesting about that 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 thiago and i talked a lot about the idea of productivity 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 four thousand 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 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 a short form who are very kindly sponsoring this episode of the podcast if you haven't heard by now short form 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 on the 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 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 a grit by angela duckworth you'll find that she argues the exact opposite of what oliver birkman 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 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 sums up your stream then head over to short form dot com forward slash deep dive and that url will give you a 20 discount on the annual premium subscription so yeah thank you so much short form 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 uh when you know i was i was interviewed on a podcast and they thought that they called me a productivity expert yeah oh i guess so okay fine fair enough now i am a guy 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 like yeah life is about more than just productivity kind of kind of thing like how how do you approach the word productivity which i think has industrial age kind of connotations of cranking out more and more widgets yeah so a couple things first i like industrial age stuff one of my biggest sources of inspiration has been modern manufacturing the theory of constraints just in time manufacturing um you know high velocity manufacturing automated manufacturing i think sometimes we disparage that stuff to our you know to our detriment um mod manufacturing today is not you know like in the 1920s these dirty soot-filled you know exploitative factories it is it is something much different it's very precise it's very technology-centric it's very collaborative um so i don't 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 phase in someone's life okay 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 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 then you start to get stuck right like 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 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 a 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 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 never really thought of the two as being being separate i get i i guess you know 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 just using your time intentionally yeah um which then makes it a more like gentle definition that you can apply to your personal life to your work life and who doesn't want to use the time more intentionally yeah but there's something about the word productivity that feels a bit more like ugh it feels very worky yeah and very much like i'm generating economic output for my employer and this is a bad thing yeah um any any thoughts on that yeah a couple things um so productivity is like efficiency efficiency is sort of a synonym right what is efficiency if you 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 is you know not is uh 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 to use the word productivity because it confronts people that's what i like i want people to be confronted okay because the same thing that has you kind of be triggered by productivity if you follow that thread you're gonna 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 so 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 um interesting um okay so again when people like uh the 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 the 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 a career you love i mean you're not going to get the jobs you want you're not going to 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 um you know most of my 20s i was working in non-profits i worked for a microfinance nonprofit in colombia 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 going to dedicate my life to just to service really that's what i wanted to do but i 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 life outcomes all of them increase their income increase their income if you can raise that one dial the downstream effect that 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 knowledge that 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 yeah raising the whatever of a country or the thing that matters is sanitation or vaccination or all these things like what what lands your 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 um but where it really came from was my research in microfinance microphone is funny because it is it's not it's a non-profit it's humanitarian it's you know development work but it's also finance and all the research that's been done there's some there's actually some major problems with microfinance but there's some very clear research that you know people if they just have loans like what is more mercenary than loans what is more like oh yeah like eve 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 uh i guess it just comes from seeing that in action you know i worked for a nonprofit in colombia in the coastal region of cartagena which is the poorest part of colombia and one of the poorest parts of latin america and our loans were like fifty dollars a hundred dollars 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 you know a cart for their business they would send their kids to school for a month or two they would they would make these little changes that then had cascading effects um and i guess it's just something i observed that that increasing your like it's i think very well established that hot 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 yeah but now all you talk about is how to make money yeah this is bad yeah 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 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 the people can as well and like without without having money it's like what do you what are you gonna 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 meet with the thing that i enjoy i don't want to be a wage slave my my housemate um 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 too many hours i can't live my best life because i'm spending all that time with my employer yeah 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 yeah on something that she actually wants to do i.e helping women's education yeah rather than trying to make a rich management consultant company a little bit richer yeah and without money and and so i think it's very easy to um it's very easy to cast shade on people that talk about money yeah thinking that like oh evil capitalist off 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 of 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 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 personal development is so expensive even something like this is a great example of a pasana meditation retreat yep it's free anywhere in the world there's centers all over free 100 free no cost but they're 10 days for you to take 10 days off from work and and like offload your responsibilities so no so you don't have to be in touch with anyone because you have no phone that's more 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 uh and so i just think money is this kind of base layer it's this kind of basic security that uni it's like maslow's you know 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 what interesting people keep telling me i use the word interesting too much um so there's a book on that bookshelf called happy sexy millionaire by stephen bartlett um is this um yeah um podcast hoster a podcast host entrepreneur um based in the uk and he has a phrase that health is your first foundation because like without health there is nothing else and there's no point having loads of money if you don't have the health and the thing that you just said almost sounds as if money is your first foundation and i i wonder like i'm just thinking out loud here but i 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 yeah how are you gonna find the time to do the healthy things and yeah eat the healthy meal and to cook the whole food in your own place yeah 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 yeah being healthy is expensive the healthier the food the more expensive it is and the the worse the food is for you the cheaper it is which is like if you were going to 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 the healthy stuff difficult to access easy to spoil expensive and so it takes it takes a real investment to kind of get over to this side but but i mean obviously too to make money you also need to have a certain level of kind of biological you know stability yeah yeah i think it comes to comes to that law of uh 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 yeah more than making more money yes but when we were in our early days when we were in our early 20s trying to sort of hustle and or whatever at that point actually optimizing for making money is is is not the worst thing you could do yeah and spending the time cooking healthy foods yeah 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 certain things become more needle-moving than others yes and 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 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 i really think in terms of seasons also you know like when i learn about whatever topic let's say it's productivity i don't want to be like a productivity fan you know i don't want to like just casually once in a while as if it's as if it's like i don't know like like perusing a magazine like oh this is entertaining pick a pick a goal pick a skill you want to learn concentrate on it intensively immerse yourself in in it for a short amount of time and then go do something else that's the whole point is you acquire 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 yeah and similarly creativity is not an end in itself it's a tool 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 yeah um 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 yes rather than the thing that the tool lets you do yeah 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 this just is i just collect hammers that's fine people who collect hammers but like it would be hard to argue that that has you know and unless that's the thing they act they genuinely want to do i find this with like no taking apps i fall into the pattern of like oh 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 um so we were in the process of your journey so you've so you joined some 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 i had like i said no business and money investing uh productivity business none of this but my mom gave me one night rich dad poor dad oh yeah rich dad poor dad changed everything because it was my first exposure i was like i was like you know someone in the desert finding water i didn't know that's what i was missing i i was missing a relationship too in that case money coming back to the subject of money which was a relationship of abundance you know as long as i thought that money was evil business was bad everything in that world was bad i was those are some of the most like most powerful forces in the world right 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 i want to change business can be my friend instead of my enemy and i made a complete life pivot uh went went from from studying international development in school to studying international business uh started you know writing uh started writing and publishing my first little bits of content online i really just chose business as my means for for having the impact i wanted to have why do so many people seemingly at least the ones who are active on twitter uh why do they feel so like anti-business i think it's our arts our conditioning that'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 um 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 um 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 yeah 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 uh this course that i was i was gonna start the part-time youtuber academy 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 what you and david were both kind of laughing it was like it sounds like you think making money is evil yeah it sounds like you think selling something is evil yeah but what if that's not true and you sort of challenged me to question my assumptions around that yeah that actually what is money money is an exchange of value yeah and if you're providing something that is valuable and doing it in a way that's like authentic and with integrity and stuff yeah and people pay you for it that's literally how the world runs yeah and that is not an evil thing and there are so many creators that i speak to now that i i recount that conversation to when they're like ah it's okay for me to get to do a sponsored video sponsored by squarespace or brilliant or skillshare whoever happens to be sponsoring this episode um but as soon as i sell my own product suddenly that becomes oh i i couldn't do that yeah my audience would hate me for becoming a sellout 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 you know 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 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 nice so we're 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 i it took me years it took me years because i you know had that first uh professional job in san francisco which was in consulting learn 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 refine refinement another uh 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 uh 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 um 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 and she was like okay a couple more years you can go from junior project manager to project manager a couple years after that senior project manager a few few more years after that see you know project director and she was laying it out like 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 my own stuff and so i quit um and that that started kind of the the self-employment journey how did you just quit i mean this is the privilege of being single childless uh i really had very little savings um so i you do you mean like how i did it financially or like how i actually did it yeah i felt like the financial thing because like oh just quit your job yeah it's that's i i'm i ask because i i feel like every other person i meet me these days is like i'm thinking of quitting my job yeah i'm like great and they're like oh but money yeah you know what i think living abroad had really taught me how 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 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 you know your neighbors and so i just knew from experience in the peace corps in colombia in brazil that i i needed so little financially to get by of course i was in san francisco the most 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 yeah 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 yeah because i didn't have time to do research i would have spent two weeks doing research right so i said no let me just go on skillshare the only thing that i knew had to teach was productivity because i had taught it in the peace corps and this would have been like like eight 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 okay they would organize like workshops in cities and they they decided that's too hard that's too expensive so they pivoted online i was in that first wave which was helpful right uh and i just i 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 the the the 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 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 were you like what were you gonna do if things didn't work out in those six weeks i was probably gonna move home yeah live on my parents couch i was starting to look at like local jobs i applied at target i applied at like play you know little retail shops at the mall i was i had some plans and process because of course i didn't know it was gonna 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 uh 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 yeah right um so as a combination of luck chance timing uh 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 you know couple 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 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's 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 it's interesting you say that so one of my one of my close friends is you know this friend working this management consulting job earning way more than six figures a year and kind of thing and she's like uh 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 just 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 it reminded me of the story of you know there's that cartoon of or some kind of uh 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 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 yeah attached to the foot yeah it's i think that's such a good like metaphor for these invisible shackles these limiting beliefs that hold us back yes i i run into this all the time myself from 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 it'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 i it really is true it's um you know the fact 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 unique 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 and for that's going to force you to kind of make a 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 um before a business has figured out their money printing machine it's very exhilarating very very like all hands on deck we need to 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 yeah suddenly you start caring about things like yeah oh i want everyone to only be working six hours a day i want to make sure we have bean bags wanna make sure we have massages at work and all this kind of stuff yeah 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 bean bag and all the perks that you could you could dream for yes because there is this sense of urgency when you're like i need to make this work yeah and once it's working you know then it's a lot it's very easy to just be like oh life is good that's very true that's why you want to live life um 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 yeah which is 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 in you know the idea of hormesis and you know what doesn't kill you makes you stronger 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 and like be in a stress situation is good for us yeah um whereas if we're a couch potato with a catheter and like a video game controller all day living a very comfortable life um then you know there's not much progress there yeah it's it's very true um so what 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 subsistence living month-to-month kind of lifestyle yeah so it's it kind of slowly changed and i tried i tried so many things for a while i thought let me go into consulting because 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 because 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 you know wealthiest corporations in the world and i lost the humanitarian service side right i was working you know for these companies just making the world's wealthiest companies even wealthier which is 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 um and so so 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 you know without that difficult of a process from corporate training i learned how to structure you know trainings i learned how to design workshops i learned how to uh to deliver content in a way that a professional uh 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 the first my first try was a success i i'm a master well the second and third and fourth attempts failed because gtd has a built-in audience has a built-in it's a movement and so there's like a ready-made demand um i had much more difficulty in fact i 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 you know 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 it 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 zune wow and i guess all of that has now culminated in this book yes building second brain a proven method to un organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential like how long have you been running the course well what's been the what was the story of kind of the the course and it's 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 a like a beta cohort in like december 2016. uh cohort one the first official cohort was like january february 2017. uh and now is this now we're in the the spring summer 2022 we've done 14 cohorts which is just insane to me like i really the same way earlier that i went from pa 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 you know finances i really for the first like seven eight nine cohorts it was just to 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 you know afford to do things like hire a team and hire higher people how did you get your first few customers it was all friends okay it was i think i i had a personal relationship with every single person in the first cohort it was like colleagues former co-workers people in that co-working space that i had met over lunch friends exes i just went into my social network and was like any favor that i have yeah and it really was them doing me a favor those early cohorts i 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 yeah it was just extemporaneous it was it was improvised uh around cohort six seven or eight i started to really have pride in what we were doing how much were you charging in the early days so it started at 500 500 yeah which was cohort one which is a huge does that sound cheap or expensive that sounds really expensive it was yeah right because it was my my self-paced course previously was 50 bucks or even less it was like 25. at the time that it was an outrageous price yeah um it was a really 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 brand expert yeah 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 dude that's what it is it's yeah it's like a reframe right it's like 500 for an online course so that's really expensive but hundred dollars for like yeah yeah basically corporate training is like that's way too cheap it's so cheap it's so bad it's that cheap and we increased the price so every cohort i would release a whole bunch of improvements yep increase the price by a hundred dollars so i went 600 700 800 900 there was always a reason that it got more expensive which was like the new features yeah uh until we reached fifteen hundred dollars for the lowest tier oh and then we started uh releasing new tiers a second tier third tier uh we stopped at 1500 because i want it to be accessible which is funny because like 1500 you know 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 yeah or going to a conference or investing in a personal coach or consultant like fifteen hundred dollars is it's a serious amount of money but it's there are other things in life that we invest fifteen hundred dollars in yeah i think it's an interesting price point because to some people watching and listening to this they'll be like 1500 like how can you possibly charge that much for something that's completely freaking absurd cannot believe it you're a snake or salesman for another segment of people watching this is like 1500 that's like 10 times cheaper than the corporate training i spent like 15 grand on last week yeah and it's just like completely different approaches to money yeah and one thing that quite a lot of my consulting friends have said is that working in consulting 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 2.70 seems a bit more a bit more reasonable yeah and in a way unless you've you know i 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 of these team members like why can't you do everything yourself like you're doing it yourself i'm like for someone who doesn't have experience in in business yeah thinking about five six five six figure expenses it's like bloody hell that's like 10 years worth of salary yeah um 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 your tax bill is the government is in a way paying you to spend money yeah 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 there's gonna be some people that think oh tax avoidance bad but other segments like well i mean this is how economics works we want people to spend money yeah 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 that phrase then sort of gets used and applied to the wrong things yeah and it really is like a business where tons and tons of money spends that money on sort of the smaller vendors and they spend money on the smaller vendors and the smaller suppliers and you end up with this effect where like the whole economy moves 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 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 that's how it works let's talk about some of the concepts in the book you mentioned something in earlier in our conversation the idea of just in time can you expand on that what 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 we to an extent that we don't realize not a lot of people know this history but toyota uh motor company the you know the maker of cars they introduced this way of building cars which was instead of stockpiling all the resources you need you know all the the parts and the rubber and all the different things you know 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 by 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 okay quality gets radically higher why it's 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 stockpiled a thousand or ten thousand 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've stockpiled a thousand or ten thousand tires you just keep quiet and you just let them all go through because what are you gonna do you can't return them that that one defect has been replicated a thousand or ten thousand times uh 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 in operation in process that is ongoing currently uh and then applying this to knowledge work it's interesting we also want to keep working process low okay 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 yeah 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 there's not a linear relationship between i have 10 projects therefore it takes you know i can do 10 things with the tenth of the time in the same amount i like it there's this some efficiency that you lose out on by having so many bits in progress yes 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 bottle and i can think x if i focus on thing y yeah or was to that effect yeah um so how does that like just this idea of just in time versus just in case how does 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 cases how we were kind of educated which is you do everything way in advance you do it as perfectly as possible as as soon as possible uh 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 it's a radically higher level of uncertainty you don't know right if you spend six 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 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 you know 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 creator printer business from the ground up to the point that it's doing probably something like five million dollars 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 um 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 uh 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 derive 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 from that you save 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 will be 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 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 written twilight i wrote 50 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 going to be doing that classic thing that we want to 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 uh any kind of outcome right like it's it's difficult to 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 yeah it's 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 yeah 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 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 then you're assembling your essay based on those raw materials yeah rather than assembling your essay from the black page or attempting to assemble your essay via a google search where you're just going to be uh 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 yeah your own sort of external brain your second brain that you can then search for relevant things yeah and i guess that's 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 mind this for content ideas what about like not that not obvious things like that well what other use cases are there for a second brain outside the scope of i'm a quote content creator 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 yeah so how so here's the question how can i within seconds look at some resource someplace and know all the things that i might want to pick up at the hardware store and i did that i actually have this as a case as a like a micro case study in the book i i went into my notes went into the project folder for the studio that we were building went into one note that had things to pick up at the hardware store right 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 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 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 yeah those are all i guess projects yes in our life yes and unless you're used to thinking like a productivity nerd you might not think of them as projects like yes you know install bookshelf in bedroom or sort out cable management on desk setup like i need for that well i need some cable ties i need one of those like plastic boxes to put into i need some kind of cleaning implement for my keyboard because my keyboard's a freaking mess um i'm not going to 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 um 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 little 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 if is if you replace the instead of adding new levels of thinking replace the bottom levels which then frees up your time freeze 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 um i think uh 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 yeah and then i need to remember where i've written it down yeah and so the more second nature that becomes and the more i know that all of my things go in this folder yeah all my things go in this app all my things go in this particular notebook yeah the more likely i am to remember the things that actually matter to me exactly and i've i started applying this in the in the realm of people as well so i have like a people folder in my apple notes where um 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 null but next time i speak to danny which might be two months later i look at that note like oh oh yeah he was in america for a week for a month how was your trip to america danny and that's like oh you remembered uh and it's like we're totally cool with writing down people's birthdays yeah as like oh you know i'm not gonna remember someone's birthday but i know it's important that i remember their birthday so i can send them something yeah 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 yeah we just don't trust our brain too yeah 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 i have dozens of friends around the process of getting married in the 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 a link take a note and put it in there 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 it's things i haven't even looked at you know 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 love it so what are the so we've got these um kind of principles in here um 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 and 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 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 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 going to keep doing those in the future they're timeless right and i boil that down it's it's amazing how long this took uh 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 uh stage and the 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 or your business nice that's a good summary yeah um 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 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 yeah 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 yes and then the express is the sort of the publishing basis yes exactly okay that was a brilliant summary thank you exactly rephrasing what you said just like a little bit worse um again i 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 this 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 a hook the hook of a song is so important that they will just write down either like individual words turns of phrase little sentences uh scenes from everyday life you know i saw someone in red pants get into a red cab or some just like little snapshot 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 they might even piece together a few of them or find some evocative little snippet and often build a whole song around the hook yeah yeah 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 we're like okay we've got it yeah the song is successful because the hook is really good yes and then everything else works around the song and they spend hours and hours and hours and hours in the studio being like what the hell is the hook yes 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 yes so that when 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 yeah that particular jacket yeah i guess it's that kind of idea of capturing yes and what's interesting about that is everything has a hook this is something amazing i've i've discovered you know i was talking to my my other brother who's a ballroom dancer would seem to be very different from you know 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 you like do a turn and then you kind of reach out to the side and go and go like that with your hand yeah 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 what 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 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 some material so in anything there is some there is one part of it that is more important and that's like the hook and that's 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 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 um you've said that word a couple of times and even before recording you mentioned the idea of constraints like what what does 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 yep 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 yeah it's not that you can do it all yeah 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 you know read any story from any corner of the world it's 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 reining 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 discreet stages instead of trying to do all the activities all the time there are designated times to do different kinds of thinking yeah there's such a common thing with writing as well it's like research isn't 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 yeah do the thing yeah and if you try and do all the things at once and nothing ever gets done yes yeah i think this was one of the key things that i learned from you kind of from 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 in a in 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 think now i'm filming the video which is very way different skill to sing down 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 yeah 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 done 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 use time more intentionally yeah whereas otherwise what i would have ended up doing is scrolling on instagram yeah and i'm so glad i spent those like three to five minute blocks here and there um doing stuff that contributed to the thing i genuinely cared about i eat making youtube videos and growing the channel and trying to build this business yeah rather than aimlessly scrolling through instagram yeah and i have no idea what i scrolled through and has added zero value to my life overall i think that's that's such a good observation yeah you're 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 no 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's 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 you're it's not going to be worth the trouble yeah i think i think that's that's a big part of it yeah and i guess this reminds me of how like 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 that says this is going to be fun um because 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 yeah 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 be coming 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 there or your apple watch or you know soon there's going to be smart glasses and airpods and all these things it's 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 um 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 i think it's 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 yeah even in the most demanding jobs even in even working medicine where this like super super busy day there's always going to be a little bit of down time 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 the crucial thing there is like figure out what what are the things you care about what are the projects what are the goals you're working on and then find ways to quit be more productive and you 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 more recently your podcast which basically is like short episodes that 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 genuinely 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 gonna 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 and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

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Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali, Abdaal, Ali Abdal, Abdal, Deep Dive With Ali Abdaal, Deep Dive, Ali Abdaal Podcast, Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal Podcast, tiago forte, building a second brain, tiago forte second brain, second brain, forte labs, keep productive, tiago forte notion, tiago forte things 3, tiago forte email, productivity tips at work, productivity tips and tricks, how to be productive all day, how to be productive study, how to be productive at home, how to be productive at work

Id: ggLHkAq6JLY

Length: 87min 29sec (5249 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2022