Modern Wisdom - #501 - Tiago Forte - Supercharged Effortless Productivity

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

Tiago Forte is a productivity coach, Founder of Forte Labs and an author. The world has far, far too much information in it. Humans don't do well when they are overwhelmed with incoming signals and yet we can't stop ourselves from wanting to acquire more, interesting insights. Thankfully Tiago has created one of the world's most popular systems to Capture, Organise, Distill and Express pretty much anything. Expect to learn the most important apps Tiago uses to enhance his productivity, why everyone needs to go through an insane efficiency stage in life, how he's moving beyond pure productivity and into something more holistic, why read later apps can save your life, how to use the relationship between productivity and creativity and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 10% discount on everything from Wild Gym at https://www.wildgym.com/ (use code MW10) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: Check out Tiago's website - https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Tiago Forte. He's a productivity coach, founder of Forte Labs, and an author. The world has far, far too much information in it. Humans don't do well when they're overwhelmed with incoming signals, and yet we can't stop ourselves from wanting to acquire more interesting insights.

Thankfully, Tiago has created one of the world's most popular systems to capture, organize, distill and express pretty much anything. Expect to learn the most important apps Tiago uses to enhance his productivity, why everyone needs to go through an insane efficiency stage in life, how he's moving beyond pure productivity and into something more holistic, why read later apps can save your life, how to use the relationship between productivity and creativity and much more. Don't forget this Thursday, Drocker Willink, what on wisdom, just set your alarm or press

subscribe, which will be an alarm for you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tiago Forte. Tiago Forte, welcome to the show. It's great to be here, Chris. It's been a while. Three and a half years. It.G.R.G.R. Forte. Welcome to the show. It's great to be here, Chris. It's been a while. Three and a half years, it's been a very long while. Yeah, I'm excited to. I don't, in fact, I very rarely do follow-up episodes, so I'm glad we can have a part two.

Me too. Would you consider yourself the new David Allen now of 2022? So other people have said that. I try to be modest, but I mean, that's my aspiration to be honest, if I can make even half the impact he made on the world, I'd be, I'd go to my grave happy. Why? Why is he a hero?

I think just the way he did it, there's a lot of thought leaders, a lot of productivity authors, a lot of people who have created methodologies, but I think the fact that he took it to its full potential, I think is the main thing. It would be so easy to just write one book after another, sort of roam around to different subjects, make a name for yourself, but he just spent decade upon decade really just translating his principles into every format, every medium, every channel to really make sure it reached the ends of the earth.

And I just admire that kind of persistence on one thing because it's so important for people. The fact that people still use the GTD method 30 years after he first wrote about it, I think kind of shows the test of time. So given the fact that you're someone who spends a lot of time thinking about systems and productivity and stuff like that, how do you and how can other people avoid obsessing over productivity too much because looking at productivity can become a task in it like a sycophine task in itself and you can end up being super

unproductive because of your constant obsession about tools and techniques and tactics. Yeah, it's a great question. It can easily become a hobby, it can become a lifestyle, right? So, the way I think of this is productivity is a phase. There's a career in, or there's a phase in your career, in your job, in your business, where you should obsess about productivity. You should just make it as efficient as possible. But then it's productivity, it's like reading and writing and arithmetic. It's this foundational fundamental layer, right?

Like if you don't have just the basic ability to like say you're going to do something and then do it it to just clearly go from step one to step two to step three, which is what productivity is, nothing else you do, no other source of leverage is going to work for you. You don't have to perfect it. You don't have to take it to level 10, just get to like level six or seven. And then you move on to essentially higher sources of leverage, which are creativity, which are management, leadership, creating content, leveraging systems. Like, there's all these things that are much higher order, but that you need that basic

personal productivity to take advantage of. Yeah, I like that. I think a lot of the time when we're thinking about the stuff that we do in life and the tasks that we have in front of us and the personal development that we're doing, we look at what we're working on now and forget that we're going to complete that at some point. At least I do. My time discounting basically doesn't exist and I just see an endless, let's say that I'm working on my overhead position in the gym or I'm learning the Pomodoro technique or something, that's it.

That's me for the rest of time, but it's not, it's not. You write, the analogy is precisely correct between arithmetic or learning maths or learning something in school, right? You don't go back and learn what 2 plus 2 equals. Now, it's there, you now are able to build off the back of that knowledge. So if you were to say, if you were to create

a high level syllabus, or if you were to just pick the main things that people need to know, what would your productivity driver's license, what would it consist of? Yeah, it's great. I really like thinking about this because people always want to know the maximalist, most sophisticated, powerful, advanced version. Minimum, minimal, minimal viable productivity system. All the way. I mean, in school, you know, a C, 70% is passing. Just try to pass. I would really point people to code. The methodology, which is the heart of my book and everything I teach.

And the important thing is to realize it's not a tool, it's an activity. So you need some way that the four letters of code capture organized is still express. You need some way of capturing. Doesn't have to look any particular way. It could be writing on your arm. It could be capturing voice memos. It could be bookmarking websites. There's just so many ways. Just have one, just one reliable way to capture content. You're great, right? Organize, which I would just say is some way of organizing that content. Doesn't have to be my para approach. Doesn't have to be by category. It definitely shouldn't be very meticulous, but some way of adding structure to your notes. And then

the same for distilled. Some way of distilling, some way of expressing. It's almost like there's an analogy here to personal finance. In personal finance, you need to earn, you need to spend, you need to save, and you need to invest, right? Everyone, for the most part, who is beyond the most basic needs, is doing those four things. But I don't think most people would say,

oh, I have a personal financial system. This is my personal financial workflow. No, they just kind of generally know that those four things are happening somewhere in their lives. And that's enough to live a financially successful life. Same goes for knowledge. Why do, why does anyone need a second brain?

Yeah, it's funny. I often tell people you don't. And this is actually a good little accountability is whatever you're trying to do, like writing or podcasting or building a business, there is someone out there, many people, who are doing that without a second brain. Like obviously, right?

There are people writing books with no particular, no taking a system, people building incredible businesses, having their relationships they want to have, reaching their goals. So it's not so much like a lot of self-improvement authors or people with a system will say, no, all of your success, your entire future rests on this thing. And I have to just be honest and say like a second brain is kind of optional.

But what I would say is for certain people in certain situations who are people who have to deal with a lot of information, who have to make sense of that information and make decisions on it, who have to create things, whether content or events or proposals or slides, if there's some kind of creative output, you will save unimaginable amounts of time, energy, headache, stress, and have just much greater peace of mind. With a more, a second brain is really just

a more rigorous approach to doing those things that you're already doing. Is there a danger when you start to do the second brain thing, which I've been familiar with for three or four years, I think since I first read your blog post on it, one of the guys, I'm very good friends with UCF, basically became addicted to indexing information. He saw any potentially entertaining or useful thing that he ever consumed or heard on the radio or whatever as fodder to be put into his personal knowledge management system. So given that the sort of people that are going

to be attracted to building a second brain are probably the kind of people that already have a predisposition to like indexing information and not forgetting cool stuff that they've learned or may want to use in future. What is a good way for someone to temper that propensity? Yeah, I feel like those people is me. You are these people. Yeah, I mean, that's my whole audience.

That's my whole audience. That's my that's my target market I mean if there was someone out there and there are many people who have no Interest propensity or desire to do this. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna You know, imagine me working with like an elite Athlete or artist or musician be like okay, you need a set aside. You know, you're craft and you really need to sit here It's your computer and just like take notes on things. I'm basically talking to people who can't help but take notes, can't help,

the organization of their digital life is actually the roadblock from a psychological point of view. They can't move forward because of the clutter and the disorder. So if you're that kind of person, what I would say is to just shift how you're spending your time from consumption to creation. Right, like this is a very powerful exercise. Just look at the time that you spend. This can be very ballpark. What percentage of say your time, how many minutes a day or hours per week are dedicated to consuming information?

All right, it's probably 100% or close to 100%. What would it look like? Just imagine the possibility that you could shift 10% of that over here to the other column, which is creating things out of the information you consume. Just try it. I don't know, maybe you won't like it. Maybe you'll decide, you know what, Tiago?

I'm fine just, you know, consuming the stuff. But if you find that you start to have benefits, you're like all sorts of things I'm willing to bet are going to happen. You will feel more confident in what you consume and what you know. You'll start to make connections with people as you share these things you're creating. you will develop your own ideas and your own ways of thinking about this content. All these things will start to arise. And if that happens, just keep shifting hours from the first column to the second column. I feel like at this point, I spend probably 70 or 80 percent of my time creating things.

It's like, I already know enough. I've read a lot of books. I only need to consume a little bit just to keep my ideas circulating and mostly I just want to produce things that are going to benefit others. That is kind of like a macro version of what we were talking about earlier on. You learn the foundations and then you start to implement. There's a, I first learned it in atomic habits, but I'm going to guess it's probably commonly held productivity wisdom in your world.

The explore exploit spectrum. Yes. For the people that aren't familiar, basically, that when you first begin out pretty much doing anything, but especially in a career or in a life, the goal is to explore more than you exploit. So you don't actually know what you're good at or what's going to be effective for you or strategies and tools and stuff. And then over time, you're supposed to begin to discriminate more towards exploit. I.e. you go narrow and deep on a few things that you know have the highest points of leverage and then you continue to move through there. That is something that's very attractive to me because there is a never good enough sensation.

There is a feeling in the back of a lot of people's minds that they're not ready and even if they start to create and start to see success, that there's still some sense of lack. And I think that after a while just knowing, look, I have enough minimum viable information to get me through. And here's the big thing. Execution is so much more rare than planning is. The vast majority of people on the internet are people that plan and pontificate and talk and make ideas, but don't actually end up executing. There's this interesting statistic around the fact that

planning is among the top 10 words across all of LinkedIn bios, and execution doesn't even make the top 100. So what does that tell us? It tells us that people are discriminating toward those that can have good ideas, but you know, if planning is the numerator, or if planning is the constant, then execution is the multiplier. Right. And you have this great tweet a while ago, man, and I must have quoted it so many times. A paradoxical thing about people who consistently choose the most high leverage activity is their efforts have a rough edged half-assed quality because polishing things to perfection

is a low leverage activity. And someone replied, someone replied, some guy out of nowhere that said, perfectionism is a nice way to hide from shipping at a pace necessary to find what works. I hadn't seen that reply. That's really good.

Yeah, it's really true. Wow, yeah, you touched on a few really profound things. Explore and exploit. My version of that word exploit is not very politically correct these days, so I prefer diver prefer divergence and conversions, which is the same thing. It's just you need to be exposed to all the options and then you need to choose one and give everything go into that option. And, gosh, this is a deep concept. You see failures on both sides, people not exploring enough, or not exploiting

enough, or cycling back and forth between those two often, or not realizing when it's time to transition from one to the next. And I think the crazy thing is, in the past, only CEOs of big corporations need to think about this, or generals, like army people. Now, each one of us is faced with such a vast array of opportunities. We have the agency and the necessity to choose among them. So it's like we now have to think at this extremely high level strategic level in a way that just wasn't, our parents just didn't have to do. Yeah, man. And I think as well that what that leads people to do is to continue to explore, right, it drills them into a constant scouting mentality. And that's where the perfectionism

is procrastination, masquerading as quality control thing comes in that, look, you need to just get to a stage where you start shipping work and the difference between putting something, putting two things out at 95 or one thing out at 99 You're going to be able to do them with the same amount of work and time because to get from 95 to 99 is basically Impossible or it's a huge huge lift But you're going to learn so much more. I'm sure that you're familiar with that study that a university professor did where he got Students it was a photography class and he got students to take a ton of photos and one set of students worked for the entire semester on a single photo and the rest of them were just told to take as many photos as possible and then submit one at the end. And the students

that lo and behold had taken a shit on a photos ended up having the best work because they deteriorated, right? They'd learned what worked and what didn't. Fascinating. Wow. Yeah, that's, that's, I think, very, that's it. That's the principle. What's a commonplace book? Commonplace book is the, the analog forerunner of what I'm trying to do. I'm a big student of history. I read, the only genre that I read more of than history is science fiction. So basically, I only read about the far future or the far past. Hahaha.

I have this series of tweets where I joke that presence is overrated. Like the present time is like, it's so limited. There's only one present, but infinite past and infinite futures. Hahaha. I made all the Buddhist Twitter crowd mad. Hahaha. I mean, all the Buddhist Twitter crowd mad. But yeah, I just, when I can find a parallel in history for anything, I'm just 10 times

more confident in it. I don't think there's anything new under the sun, really. It's just repeated. Why did you say he wrote about a commonplace book? Yeah, I think I first heard about it. I don't remember exactly. It's been out, there's been mention of it, you know, on the internet for some time.

But getting really going back to the source and studying it, it reoccurse throughout history, especially during times of unusual change and uncertainty and times where things are really, where there's sort of like some revolution, right? Like the enlightenment, the renaissance, antiquity, ancient Greek times, it's like when there was basically too much information, information overload, at various points

throughout history, someone or some people said, hey, let's just get the parts that matter, put them in one usually book. And then this will be our guide and our reference and our roadmap for what to do next. Any famous people from history that you found that had commonplace books? I mean so many. It's almost like who didn't? I mean, John Locke is a famous one, John Milton, the English writer, a lot of English people, a lot of French. I think mostly we know about the European examples the most,

but I also found examples across different cultures in China. They had something similar in Japan and Poland in a few other places. I can't think of a lot of specific names, but it's really funny. It's almost like there's this secret undercurrent through intellectual history that only pops up here and there because in most cases, these great thinkers and artists, they either were embarrassed by this kind of underlying creative process,

but they'll be like, oh, that's just something I do. It's kind of embarrassing. I just write little scraps of paper and put them in the drawer next to my bed. Or they actually don't even see it. It's kind of invisible to them. It's just an invisible part of their process. I've written some posts on my blog and tried to surface these examples, but a lot of great examples from throughout history. That's a really interesting thing to talk about the fact that the people who are at the absolute peak of their craft

are often the ones that are either far too aware or far too unaware of the way that they get to it. Now obviously what you've had over the last whatever five to ten years has been this huge proliferation of creators that actually deconstruct these sort of structures, people like you, or maybe an Ali Abdahl, or someone like that, who their job is to look at it with a real fine grain sort of tooth comb, but the reverse is also true as well. And what you really want is to try and find someone who was unbelievably effective,

but had no idea what their system was. Those are the people that you want. I didn't know it like a productivity anthropologist or something to go and study in the wild. These people who are unbelievably efficient because by design, a lot of the people that are productivity minded and are using productivity style tools in a conscious way are all using the same tools. Right? No one's really experimenting that much because they go and watch some of your tools in a conscious way, are all using the same tools.

No one's really experimenting that much because they go and watch some of your stuff, or Ali's stuff, or David's stuff, or whatever, and they come up with their own version of that. Who are the people that did the patient zeros of the productivity movement? Yeah, you know, I've noticed this too is, yeah, this is really a missing

piece. There's really a gap kind of in the market. Often I'll listen to interviews by like the most well-known people, like the most famous actors, writers, directors, whatever it is. And they say these things, these little trite truism cliches. You know, like even like courses I've taken on Masterclass, like what is that show? The authors, the author or the actor studio,

these kind of like kind of pretty in-depth things. And then they'll say like, well, what's your secret? Oh, you just gotta keep persisting and endure until the end. It's like, okay, these are, these are quotes for hallmark cards. But I also can't blame them because they literally don't remember. They do not remember. Not only do they are they not aware of what they do now because it becomes completely unconscious, but do you remember what your creative process was like or or any detail of it from

10 years ago? Like, you. No. It's impossible. And so they want to give something to the audience and they want to provide something. But they're basically just tossing off something from the top of their head that they know is going to get a, ah, from the audience. And I'm just like, this has to change. We need, like you said, to become anthropologists,

look at people who are maybe just beginning now, by the way. They might not be those super impressive celebrities. Like, people maybe just ahead of you, just a couple steps down the path, deconstruct what they do. You know, we just did a last week published a YouTube video on our channel, deconstructing Ali Abdul's process. It's funny that you mentioned him.

It's our most popular YouTube video ever. And it's because of this. Like, even Ali was like, oh, I didn't realize I did it this way. And his team is like, oh, we didn't realize this happened. And then all his subscribers are like, wow, I never realized it's like, it's news to everyone. That's it's interesting that you could say,

it's maybe even useful to the person that you're studying. But yeah, man, I mean, the, I had Danny Treo, you know, Danny Treo, the Hollywood superstar, he was on the show last year. And he, I was asking him, because obviously he'd been to Jaila Bunch and he definitely was not a trained actor for the film actor's guilt.

And I was asking him about the sort of advice that he'd been given about acting. And there was a scene that he had to do where he had to walk in, sit down and pick up a glass of water and drink it. And the piece of advice was, you don't act like you're going into the room to sit down to pick up the glass of water and you drink it. You just go into the room, pick up the glass of water, sit down and you drink it.

I'm like, I understand that to you, that makes sense, Danny, but to us, that sounds like someone that has a mental problem, like that it sounds like insanity. So I do think there's something there. Before we move on, what give me your five most recommended sci-fi books? I mean, I have a list on my blog of over a hundred that I've read. Don't want that. Don't want that. I want the five most recommended. I might have to look it up though. Well, just do off the top of your head. I don't want the reference. I want the ones that come to front of mind. Yeah, my first brain is quite feeble.

I have to admit. Sorry, I see your first brain's atrophy because it's so fucking external. It's so atrophy, man. I'm telling you, my wife is often like, Tiago, you can't do without a second brain anymore. Okay, it is the buttress that holds you up now. It is. So, some of the ones that come to mind, I think my favorite of all time is Hyperion. Hyperion, I think it's Dan Simmons. It's being made into a TV show right now. Let's see.

Lilis Brude by Octavia Butler was a big favorite exploring more of the biological side of science fiction instead of technology so much. And then some of the classics really are the best. Ender's Game, Ready Player One is a newer one, obviously Dune, obviously the Asimov series. I didn't want to believe that the best ones were the mainstream ones. They're the most cited ones, but science fiction. Yeah, you kind of need to read the classics. They really are kind of the best ones.

Give me your understanding of the relationship between productivity and creativity. Because I had Chris Bailey that wrote hyperfocus on the show. He gave me a very interesting understanding of this. I'm keen Bailey that wrote hyper focus on the show. He gave me a very interesting understanding of this. I'm keen to find out your thoughts as well. Yeah, for me, they're just two sides of the same coin. They're two sides of the same coin. They compliment each other. They need each other. You can just imagine someone with a hundred percent creativity and no productivity, zero percent productivity. They might have the most brilliant imagination

and ideas, no one would ever know, and I won't ever matter because not one piece of work will be finished. And then you have someone say, full productivity, no creativity, they're basically a machine just churning out identical widgets. So I think productivity is about getting it done, creativity is about getting it right. And you have to sort of oscillate and cycle between those or like we were saying with Explore and Exploit in a given situation or in a given moment, which one is this a situation for productivity

or is it a situation for creativity? I love that. I really love the idea of moving between the two and this is something that Chris taught me as well. He came on the show of moving between the two. And this is something that Chris taught me as well when he came on the show about how if you look at an artist work room, it's very messy. There's cigarette ends and paint and open cans of stuff all over the what is that doing? It's engendering an atmosphere of creativity. Now, if that was the environment in which that person tried to submit their tax returns, it's probably going to be suboptimal. They want to go somewhere

which really sort of infuses them with, okay, this is kind of structured and clean and rigid. And there was never a point, there was almost never a point where I'd presumed that I would actually want less focus and less productivity. I always presumed that just pressing harder on the pedal of productivity was the solution to pretty much everything, but it's not. And I think that Alex Hormosi has this great little aphorism where he says, Beginners overvalue thinking and undervalue doing, advanced people do the opposite. And that, again, what we're talking about is getting from the tools that get you from 0 to 50 and not the same ones that are going to get you from 50 to 100.

The explore and exploit paradigm is part of this. The productivity and creativity is part of this. The thinking and doing is part of this. This is something else, maybe that we're seeing in the productivity space is everybody grows up and you get kids and you know like Ali starts a business and David gets a girlfriend and stuff like we're starting to see as people grow up their requirements in life and the insights that they get from their productivity tools change as well. Oh yeah, that's been fascinating for me to see. It's like, just like you were saying my cohort, the people that I'm learning and growing with,

going through these life stages. And suddenly the work has to change. The advice that I give has radically changed. Like I have probably a quarter or less of the free time that I had three years ago when we last talked. Right, I have, since then, I got married, bought a house, had a kid, have a second kid on the way, got a dog, two cars. Like, if I'm giving this, shilling the same advice as three years ago, I'm off my rocker,

it has to change. But then of course, part of that is your audience growing up with you, which is natural. But then this creates the entry point for the new generation, which we're just starting to see, you know, which is so exciting. Dude, Gen Z productivity is going to suck. Let don't try and be diplomatic about it. Gen Z productivity is going to suck dick. What are they going to do?

You're going to tell you how to swipe through TikTok faster. I'm not about that. Okay, right. So workflow of building a second brain, high level, it's this code that the, what is it? Not an aphorism. Not an apology. No, what's, when you break something down, acronym, thank you, God, my first brain's wrecked as well. Take us through code. See you first. Take us through code. See yous first.

Yeah, so this is basically the creative process in my view, in my opinion. I'm capturing just refers to writing things down. I mean, this has been a necessity for hundreds of thousands of years. There is a mountain of evidence that once you externalize, you have a thought, an idea, theory, a prediction, you write it down, all these things happen. You gain objectivity, you gain distance, you can start to work with it, you can start to improve it, you can start to share it with others and get their feedback. Externalizing your ideas is fundamental. The only thing that I'm saying is new is just in the past few years, digital notes apps, alongside mobile devices and software in general, has reached a point, I think the balance of power with paper has shifted. That now it is worth and justifiable to take it digital in the first place,

rather than write it down a paper and then try to digitize it later. How should people choose what they should capture as opposed to just ruthlessly indexing everything? Yes, this is one of those things. what they should capture as opposed to just ruthlessly indexing everything? Yes. This is one of those things. I think people might just need to go through a phase of hoarding because nothing that I can say seems to sink in until they have over-collected way too much crap and are doing the digital equivalent of standing in their living room with so many mountain piles of things and stuff that they can't even walk through their house. And it's fine actually. In fact, there's even like a life, like speaking of life stages.

When I was in my early 20, all through my 20s, I was collecting just everything. I was just exploring, right? I was just taking so much in. Now I'm in my middle eight thirties and it's like, okay, I have 7,000 notes, 7,000 notes that I have it like not on mass but individually curated and saved. So it's like, okay, I'm going to I'm reading an article or something. There's a new idea. Okay. It's like I could take a note on this, but is this this note really going to be the thing that like makes the difference or should I just like capitalize note on this, but is this note really going to be the thing that makes the difference?

Or should I just capitalize on these 7,000 notes over here? So I think people just need to try capturing everything, but then I think what you eventually get to is being far more picky, far more discerning, like you said. And the best rule of thumb that I know is to save something that resonates with you. Save something that moves you like on a somatic intuitive emotional level. Is the best rule of thumb that I've encountered for deciding what to save. There's an idea from Tim Ferris called the good shit sticks. Yes. And that has been, now this might be a cope from me because I don't have a particularly efficient

personal knowledge management system. You'll be episode 500 and something in four years of this show, I'm just looking at my Apple notes, which is what I use, 2,247 notes. And I don't know whether it is a cope, but certainly for me, just allowing the stuff that really, really certainly for me just allowing the stuff that really, really does make me think, holy sh- I can't not write that down.

That's the threshold. Now, my threshold probably could and should be a little bit lower than that. It probably- the probably RID is that I've read that I've valued that I've let go, but my requirements, given the amount that I have to put out on the show, three episodes a week, three clips a week, interviews and guessing that I do on other shows, other projects and things that have a going on outside of that, the availability for space in terms of demand has to be matched by the supply in terms of what I'm prepared to put into it. And for me, I'll probably have sent it to other people on WhatsApp.

I'll have probably taken a photo of whatever it is and gone, dude, this is unbelievable. I've linked it to a few friends. And then I'll go, yeah, I probably should, I probably should make that going. So again, there, I mean, is that an acceptable solution for you, do you think, if somebody has got a high overwhelm of information and not much time?

Yeah, raise the threshold. You know, there's a couple of beliefs I have that are kind of metaphysical and that I can't exactly prove, but for some reason have really helped me with this. Maybe someone out there can find some science to back this up. I embrace confirmation bias. I come up with hair-brained ideas, and then I try to look for evidence that. But one of them is that, kind of what you're saying with the good shit sticks, that your life is convergent. I think we tend to think our lives, especially those of us interested in many things with

many pursuits, many curiosities. We think life is constantly leading us on this wild goose chase divergent thing. And I guess I've just chosen to believe, I think life tends to be convergent in almost in a sense like you have a destiny. Like there's certain interests and people and opportunities and just pathways that keep arising again and again. It's almost like reality is like, hey, it's inviting you. It wants you to go down this path just because of your nature, your personality, your background, your history, your genetics.

So if I just believe that reality is convergent, it's almost like I only take a threshold that I sometimes use is is I only take a note of an idea if it's tracked me down and demanded that I pay attention to it multiple times. Like only on the third or fourth encounter when it's like, you know, banging on my door and being like, take a note of me then I'll be like, okay, fine, clearly reality is trying to tell me something that this is important to me. And then the other one is that reality is fractal. This is something I think there's probably science to this, but it's like patterns tend to be repeated at all scales. So like your life has a pattern that same pattern is repeated at the scale of a decade of your life. It's also repeated on the

scale of a year. It's repeated in each relationship, it's like the way that you do one thing is the way you do everything. And so there's a kind of recurring fractal pattern in your life, which if that's true, it means you can only have to pay attention to one level. Like there's principles that you want to discover, but the same principle is probably visible

from the way you do laundry, to the way you organize your computer, to the way you organize your room, to the way you organize your priorities, to the way you organize your relationships. It's like you only need to find the pattern at one level, and that whole stack gets unlocked for you. This is something I've never mentioned on any podcast because it's like really out there, but those are two kind of hypotheses that I have. Bro, I am 100% in with you here. And I don't adhere to the sort of woo metaphysical horse shit that much. I fell in love with Amor Fati, right, with sort of the love of fate. And I really fell in love with that over the last couple of years because I started to see

these consistent themes come up in my life. And obviously you're the common denominator between all of the experiences that you have, right? All of my exes are bitter, resentful, our souls. It's like, what all of them? All of them. Well, what do they have in common? Other than the fact that they were in a relationship with you? Nothing. So either you're selecting them or you're causing them to be this way. And yeah, just realizing I had this idea that I believe that most people's outcomes in life are going to occur no matter how much neuroses they apply to them. The all of the anxiety and all of the worry and all of the concern and the negative thought loops and the staying awake at night, I think at most, at most, nets you about an extra 10% in terms of the outcomes that you can get in life.

So another way to look at that would be to say, well, for the cost of perhaps between five and 10% of my outcomes in life, I could get rid of almost all of my anxiety and neuroses and thought loops and concern and sleepless nights. Okay, so what would my life be like? If I, if I believed that my destiny was my destiny to have, what would my life be like? If I already knew that the success or the family or the financial aspirations or whatever, if that was there, what would just imagine what it would be like? If I knew that the outcome was predestined, how would I behave?

How would that change my daily experience of the things and the challenges and the concerns and the worries and stuff that I have? And that, I think maps a little bit onto the fractal stuff, things at many levels, right? I've seen this, it's a risen, a bunch of different times. It's banging on the door, saying, hey, you need to take notice of this.

It's occurred in the gym and in my health and in my relationship with my parents. And you go, right, okay, I'm sorry, yeah, that's an error for me, I will do better next time. And you do, and then that's one of the principles that you need to keep a hold of. But yeah, man, I'm 100% with you on that. The two borderline autistic people that love productivity talking about the woo metaphysics

delivering the life direction in the universe. Yeah, it's kind of the exact opposite of the idea of self-improvement. But I kind of, I think the opposite of every great truth is also true. So like, yeah, you can transform your life for sure. You can change anything. And most things are pretty much, you know, kind of not predestined, but they're just the natural consequence of cause and effect. The future is unfolding, mostly based on the past.

I think it's psychologically healthy, honestly. Well, that's a really good point, the fact that it is an opposite. What does it mean that I believe so much in personal sovereignty and agency and living your life by design, not by default, and yet at the same time, I'm saying that most of the outcomes that you get in life are probably going to occur no matter what you do. I'm not really too sure how I square that circle, and yet I believe that both of those things are true at the same time. Maybe that's cognitive dissonance, I'm not too sure. Or maybe it's a cope.

But it genuinely seems to be true. It seems to be true to me that the people that are good end up getting good results. I mean, Charlie Munger's got that. No, sorry, it's Navale that says, you don't need spiritual energy to deliver karma to you. Karma is just you repeating your habits and patterns over and over until the world gives you what you deserve. Whoa. There it is, you know, like that, that is what it is. Are you the sort of person that continues to work hard? Okay, could you be working a bit more hard and a bit more efficient, a bit more productive

or whatever? Yeah, probably. But the fundamental code, right, the foundation, the base layer that you're writing upon is the fact that you're somebody that works hard and seeks out opportunities. And is personable on nice or polite or giving or a team player or a has humor or whatever, right?

Like the traits don't matter as much as the attributes. My dad is not an aphoristic sort of guy, but yours used to say that form is temporary, but classes permanent. And it was the fact that the long held attributes that you have will end up winning over time. Whereas the individual fluctuations in the market, the noise doesn't matter as much as the signal. I think it depends on the person too. There's a lot of people out in the world who could just use more agency, who could use dialing up the belief that they can change things. Other people need to be dialed down. Some people are just wailing on something, thinking, let me just knock down this are just wailing on something, thinking, let me just knock down this impregnable fortress.

And they could honestly probably, it sounds weird to say it, but use less agency. Bro, I've got Jocka Willink coming on the show this week. And I'm gonna ask him about this, because X-Trem ownership, right, is his idea. He's all about radical personal responsibility. I know when I ask him, is it possible to take too much responsibility? Why happens when you begin to take responsibility for things which aren't your responsibility? Well, that's part of

perhaps the the acknowledgement that you were able to step in and change things. Maybe that's a part of a masculine role as a man to be able to hoist the heaviest weight that you can find and carry it and such like and I go well Yeah, but after a while you actually end up that realizing you're not netting any benefit by doing this It's actually probably making you less effective and efficient So I'm really really interested to find out what what he what he says there. Okay, so two me too Someone's someone's captured whatever it is. They've got a note-taking app. They've put it down somewhere. Next up, what do they do? So, after you capture for a while, it starts to pile

up and you start to realize, okay, search is powerful, but not, someday maybe it will be adequate. We won't have to organize anything. But for now, you need to add some kind of order, some kind of structure. And I have a, I've approached this, it's called Para, which is probably the most single most popular technique that I've ever talked about or written about or mentioned, which I think the main principle there is instead of organizing as a short library, according to these broad academic subjects, business, psychology, botany, as if you're trying to create a university, this is personal knowledge management.

You should organize according to your projects and your goals. That's why it's worth putting in all this effort is to move forward your projects, achieve your goals. And so, Parah is basically about organizing content according to how actionable it is, and when it's going to be actionable. How do you not get lost in organizing? You've got progressive summarization and stuff like that. Is there another tool that you use?

How do people, if they haven't got a cut-up over indexing everything, how do they not get caught up over organizing everything? Yeah, it's like each step of code has its own benefits and its own pitfalls, right? You can definitely, there's traps all along the way. I think for me, it's the fact that there's only four categories. That's it, these are big buckets, right? It's like, for a physical analogy, it's less like a filing cabinet where it's like,

okay, where is the exact right little place for this to go? It's more like, you know, imagine your decluttering, your garage, you just have four giant buckets. And it's just like, this is important now, this will be important later, this might be important at some time and this is not important. It's like these very clear cut, like kind of simple decisions that you only have to make

one decision, unlike tagging, by the way, tagging you have to tag all the things that could be related to, all the things that connect. It's one decision, you make it one time, you take one action related to that decision and you're done. When it comes to distilling, just mentioned there about progressive summarization, what do you think most people get wrong when it comes to distilling and progressive summarization

as well? Yes, so this is the third letter, the D, for distil. I think the main thing, I talk about this in the book, we seriously underestimate how sensitive we are to the way that information is presented. The way, the format, the visual look. If you're familiar, anyone who's familiar with web design gets exposure to this. You change one little headline, the color of a button, the spacing, the shade. These minute differences can easily produce double digit changes in how many people click, how many people stay on the page, how many people take action.

So it's like, we've realized this in the public sphere, but then in the private sphere, it's just looks awful. Like any note taking you see, except like Notion is the big exception, is just so badly designed, it's like this ugly text that is all bunched up together, everything looks like it was designed by engineers because it was. And so progressive summarization is really just one way of paying attention to the visual interaction. Can you look and see just the title of a note and instantly grasp at least what it's about approximately. If you decide it's relevant to you, can you scroll down and see one or two or three highlighted passages that tell you in a glance what is the main takeaway, what is the main point, what is this trying to

say, and if you decide it's still relevant, you have all the other details right there in the surrounding note. That's that's what it is. It's the ability to perceive something quickly with little energy and then immediately be able to take action on it. So is that your job now to give your future self a gift of a well distilled, progressively summarized document that reduces everything down to their most component parts? That's right. That's right.

There was this, you mentioned there about the changes that you can do in UX and Web Designer. I got this statistic from Seth Stevens-Devidovitz' new book, a designer famously quit Google because it frequently ignored the intuition of trained designers in favor of data. The final straw for the designer was an experiment that tested 41 shades of blue on an ad link on Gmail to collect data on which one would lead to the most clicks. The designer may have been frustrated, but the data experiment netted Google and estimated $200 million per year in additional revenue. That is, I think I've heard of this. That isn't an insane story. I love that stuff, man. Okay, so we've distilled stuff down. We've progressively summarized the final step.

E. Yeah, so this is the it's the finale. It's the last one. I think the most important one. Like, you know, the question always in the back of people's minds, especially as they get into the weeds of this is like, why? Why am I doing all this? For what? For what purpose? And I think it ultimately comes down to self-expression, you know? We're all, as knowledge workers today, professional communicators. Like, isn't that what we're doing all day? We're communicating through all these different means and channels with various people. I mean, we live in a communication-centric world and you have something inside of you. Maybe it's your story, it's a message, it's ideas, it's opinions, decisions that basically all the outcomes

you're trying to create in your life depend on your ability to communicate what that is inside of you in a way that's succinct, that is well supported, incredible, that is compelling, that people want to pay attention to, and ultimately that they want to act on. That's self-expression is the purpose to create a second brain. What if people say, well, I don't have a blog or a podcast or a sub-stack, where can I express my ideas? I'm just a curious person. Yeah, this is a common thing people say. I think probably because they see me as an online

content creator and many of my examples and kind of anecdotes are based on that. But I would just push back on the idea that anyone is not a creator. You know, I have this definition of being a creator that I love, which is to bring something true, good, or beautiful into the world. To bring something that is true, factual, scientific, effective, that is good, a story, a truth, some meaning, a relationship, or beautiful, right? Like inspiring aesthetically pleasing, all that stuff. By that standard, I mean, when you host a dinner party, you're being a creator.

When you, you know, make a schedule for your kid's summer, you're being a creator. When you lobby your local city council for funding for the park, local park, you're being a creator. It's funny, I have a lot of these suburban examples of like being a suburban dad because that's how I'm creating a lot these days. But even those kind of mundane everyday things

are very informationally intensive. I mean, to vote in your local elections, the amount of information that I had to make sense of to just even understand who the candidates were. I mean, to plan a vacation is practically a, you know, a part-time job in some cases. I mean, even to get together with my friends, to get together with your friends in your 30s is like a serious project. I suppose as well, one thing that almost the vast majority of people are going to have

is maybe raising a kid. So you find out that you and your partner are pregnant and that you're going to, you've got eight months. Okay. I don't know how babies work. How do they work? And what do we need for the room? And should we go for a wireless or a wired in detective for the CCTV and, you know, all of those things, that is the most normal solution or the most normal requirements, sorry, that I could think of for someone needing to express on the other side. You're going to go through all of these different review sites and YouTube's giving you the different details about is it a pullout cut from the side of the bed or is it a fixed cut that goes on the edge of the bed? Is it whatever, whatever? This is not from personal

experience. This is my business partner. Me vicariously living the pain of his three kids through him. Going back to one thing that I can see is a potential stumbling block for people when they start to index this information, discoverability. Trying to, so there, for me to find the study from Seth Stevens-Davidowitz, I had to search Google. Now, I just put Google in and thankfully I knew it was about Google and it came up. But that's probably not the most, oh, I mean, is that sophisticated? I don't know, you tell me. Yeah, you know, I think this is a great filter. If there's anything that Google can find fast, reliably, just depend on Google for it. These sort of factual questions and answers. What is the population of France?

What year did this book come out? When was this historical figure born? These kind of things that you will instantly, with one search, top result, find the answer, don't use your precious human, you know, manual time and attention to say those in your second brain. What's the point? Yeah, I do like that. What can Google not find? It's first of all feelings. You can Google the answer to a question, but you can't Google a feeling, right? This comes back to why you should capture things that move you.

Images, stories, metaphors, you know, songs, music, paintings, things that you can't just do, you know, you can't do a Google search. Oh, an image that's going to inspire me in exactly this way. Things that are filtered through your experience, right? Like, lessons, one lessons, you learn from making that mistake, making that error, or you learned from a mentor, or you learn from a colleague. Things that maybe everyone knows them, or a lot of people know them, but we'll have a special resonance for you because it was through your experience. I think you should not try to compete with Google. They're going to win those use cases, but fill in the gaps basically with your second brain.

What tools do people need or what tools do you use to get this moving? The central one is a digital notes app. Digital notes apps are the best by far, the best, you can actually implement the second brain in all sorts of different systems. But I think what's important about digital notes apps is there ubiquitous. You can have them on your computer, on your tablet,

on your smartphone, on your watch, and soon on your glasses. They're just everywhere. They're casual. This is the key thing. Sometimes people want to have a database with this very precise data entry procedure and all these fields. The reason no-taking is powerful is that it's messy, it's spontaneous, it is chaotic, it doesn't follow, it's freeform.

Digital notes apps are almost like the only category of software that is that way. Software doesn't tend to be free form, right? You want that kind of open canvas. And they're free. You don't need to pay anything. Use Apple notes or Android. Whatever the Android equivalent is on your phone.

Use EverNote, which has a free tier. Use simple notes. Most of these apps, if not all of them, have a free option. Start there. This is the thing. Maybe this isn't for you. I'm not saying digital note taking is the answer to everyone and all their problems. It might be just an answer for some people for some kinds of problems. Just test it out using a free app on your phone. And if it's successful, just take it from there. If it wasn't for the fact that you was so heavily already invested into Evernote, would

you have moved across to something else? Or is this a you grandfathered in with Evernote, or would you be tempted by notion if you was starting again? Yeah, that's a good question. So it's funny. I've already migrated a couple of times. I started originally on Microsoft Word, so you a good question. So it's funny, I've already migrated a couple of times. I started originally on Microsoft Word, so you can believe it.

Then Google Docs, then Evernote. So my expectation, I mean, no technology lives forever, right? There's generations that mature and then kind of pass away. I'm sure at some point or another, I'm gonna have to move on from Evernote. It's gonna be, it's gonna get shut down, it's gonna be acquired, It's going to become obsolete.

I've been testing Obsidian. Because there's this kind of newest wave of very sexy, very trendy apps, sometimes called network thinking apps or link based apps like the three main ones are Rome, Obsidian, and LogSek. That people are just raving about their crazy... You need to know them. Oh, man. It's really hard to summarize, but basically, it's a completely new paradigm for personal

knowledge management. Instead of being based on a hierarchy, folders within folders within folders, it's based on a graph, much like the internet. Right? It's not an incremental improvement. It's a completely different paradigm. But from what I've seen, it has a long way to go. I mean, I was using obsidian. It took me two hours of intense troubleshooting to figure out how to sync this note that I just took on my phone to my computer. And I'm a reasonably tech savvy person. I tend to wait until a technology is mature.

It's been around for 10 years. So around like 2030, I think I should be adopting the new paradigm of nodes apps. That's funny. So one thing that I wish, I'm an avid Apple Notes user, I've tried and there's some stuff that I've gone in that's gone in ever note, there's some stuff which goes in notion. The only things that I would bring across to Apple Notes, if I could right now, would be linking notes within notes. I think that the ability of notion to do that way, you can nest kind of visually and you can hyperlink is phenomenal.

That's very, very intuitive and makes an awful lot of sense. And toggles, being able to snap bunches of batches of text closed so that you can just display things in a neat away. But Apple notes is not far off, man. I mean, for kind of the most simple use case, it's absolutely rapid. If you're typing on your phone, as soon as you press return, you'll see it appear on the screen in front of you on your laptop. It's really, really good. And I think that there's some updates coming with iOS 16, which looks pretty cool. If they can get anywhere close to those functions that I've just mentioned there, I think there will be no reason for me to change, at least not yet.

I would start, this is what I recommend to people. Start with a default pre-installed notes app, really, because it's like with this whole practice, the main thing is whether you do it or you don't. Right? Doing it in any degree to any capacity with whatever standard will give you most of the benefits, whereas not doing it will give you none. This is why it's so important that it be frictionless. What frictionlessness does is it helps you cross over from the doing nothing to doing something, the zero to one, right? And if you need the built in notes up on your phone to do that, then you know, more power to you. I think it's perfect. What are five of your most used apps when it comes to your either daily productivity or even entertainment stuff? What are the things that you rely

on the most in terms of apps? Yeah, there's kind of a basic toolkit. I wrote about these in a blog post on getting to inbox zero, but there's kind of this, it's almost like you buy a toolkit and it has a hammer, a screwdriver. There's like five things that if it doesn't have that, you're like, what the heck?

It's like my to-do list app, which is things, which I've used for 10 years. It's my notes app, which is things, which I've used for 10 years, it's my notes app, which is ever known, also been on there for 10 years. It's my read later app, Instapaper. I think I've been on there six or seven years. It is my calendar app. I use one called BusyCal, which is just basically a client for Google Calendar.

And then it's the email app, superhuman. Those five are like my world. There's a second nature to me is like my arms and my legs. I like don't think about them. I just like operate them as like an extension of my nervous system. Convinced me on busy cowl and superhuman because I have a lot of calendar problems

and a lot of email problems. Yeah, so let's see. Busy Cal, I just love that I never have to think about it. Calendering is a funny thing. It's kind of ironically timeless. For a while, I was using woven, which was this like up and coming new, very sexy thing. Of course, like all up and coming trendy productivity apps got acquired or something got shut down. And I'm like, this always happens.

This is why I hate adopting new tech. Busy Cal, it's just made, you can tell by just like very nuts and bolts, designers and engineers just trying to solve like, you know, these little mundane like just stupid problems. Like when you invite someone to a calendar entry and then you move it to a different day, does it like, recent something? Like little things like that that just make your life like just better.

And I just never have to think about it, just does its job. That's that's the pitch. Okay, superhuman. Yeah, so superhuman is a bit harder because it's, you know, kind of expensive for a productivity out. I mean, I'm a little bit biased here because the founder of Superhuman, he told me that my article on reaching in box zero was one of the inspirations for the product. He said, they get that article, they sent it to every new hire as like, this is our philosophy. So when he told me that, and then I started using the software, I was like, okay, this is someone just custom designed an email out for me.

Because they kind of did. So I was helpless. The sales pitch was, I couldn't turn it down. And so it just makes the process, basically what superhuman does is it makes the process of clearing your email into the most hyper efficient. Get it done. Go from the top to the bottom process you can imagine. Versus how most people use email, which is as a combined CRM task management

system, reminder system, note-taking system, to-do list all these things. It's just hyper-focused on that one use case. Give me five physical items as well that you don't think that you could live with out. Oh, five physical items. I mean, a paper notebook. People are surprised to hear this, but there's certain situations such as conversations. When I'm meeting with someone in purpose in person, I tend to take physical notes because I've just found having a device is distracting. Let's see what else. My trusty hydroflask water bottle, essential wide mouth,

so that I can get ice in there. This like two or three X's, my water consumption each day. Let's see what else. What about the chair? What chair have you decided on at the moment? I'm currently in the market for a new office chair, and I sent Ali a text the other day

asking him whether he was still with Harmon Carden and he was like, yeah, I am, but I've changed from this thing to this thing. What do you sat on? You know what's really funny, Chris? When it comes to physical things, I am the furthest thing from an optimizer. I don't get into it. I don't have a preferred chair or pen or monitor or keyboard. Ali gets into this stuff, right? I have this weird thing where it's almost like, I'm so in the digital world. I have these very specific preferences about the digital world, but the physical world, I'm kind of like, I don't really live in the world of ideas

and I live in the virtual world. I barely am present here in the physical plane. Yes, that kind of brings true as well. So let's say that someone sort of likes the idea of this, but things look, I've already gone through the process of having to read a book. That was fairly effortful and I'm concerned about extra effort on the back end of going through and taking notes and progressive summarization and all of this stuff. What are the most important things of making this whole process or productivity overall less effortful, do you think?

I think it's giving yourself permission to do what you like. Just move toward what excites you. Move toward what moves you. This is a deep, it's funny, I teach this course, this intensive four-week program, you know, all this material. And honestly, I think it's mostly about unlearning, not so much about learning. Like I take people through this process, they have to unlearn everything they know about not taking, which is all based in school and all the problems

that come with that, all the baggage. It's what they learned at work in corporations, which is a whole another set of baggage. It's what they learned from their parents, right? And what we tend to learn from all these external authorities is what you care about doesn't matter. What you find interesting is probably not important. You need to spend your time and attention on things that someone else has said are important. It's like we're just systematically brainwashed into ignoring our feelings, our desires, what gives us pleasure, what excites our curiosity. And a lot of being successful in this is relearning that. You know that you do sound like Miyamoto Masashi or something at the moment. This old Zen Master that's been away in a cave on the top of...

I genuinely do agree and there's elements, especially talking about the repeating themes that you see that kind of spiral up and spiral down your life at different gradients. I definitely see this starting to come through for me as well. So, I often wonder how many of the insights that we get around productivity or personal development or self growth, how many of them are born of the efforts that we've gone through, and how many of them just come along for the ride as a byproduct of getting older. And I think that a big chunk of them actually adjust that with a little bit of a flavoring on the top of, oh, well, I found this one or I developed this one.

For sure. The real second brain is the things you learn, the relationships you have, the experience you made along the way. Look, Tiago, for a ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out all of this stuff that you do and read the blog posts that we've referenced today, where should they go? Yeah, you can find everything at BuildingA secondbrain.com. I love it. Tiago, until next time, man.

Appreciate it, Chris. Thank you.