Tiago’s course is helping me to recalibrate my personal and professional documentation and note-taking system to focus on the important parts of my digital files to obtain insights and rapid retrieval of existing knowledge. Unloading artifacts of knowledge into a uniform system throughout all my tools and documentation structure is helping me to focus on my most value-adding actions in life, and still be confident to obtain further insights.
BASB has gave me an organizational framework that is flexible enough to contain all areas of my life, through the different seasons of my life. It has helped relieve my anxiety to know I have a way to externalize all my knowledge, worries, and concerns. Knowing I have a way to edit and organize my thoughts digitally combats any disorganization and disorder I feel.
BASB has made a tremendous difference to my life. I switched from a passive consumer of information without purpose to consuming information more selectively and with purpose.
BASB helped me at home and at work to organize my digital life and reframe how I think about "success" when it comes to projects.
BASB has already impacted my life. I am not shy in front of others as I was before. I'm eternally grateful for the course, Tiago, support staff, and mentors for helping me find my direction, my port of call. BASB has been 100% worth the investment (money, time, and attention).
Tiago’s course provides profound insight into managing your thoughts using a system. Prior to this course, my system was undefined, but after taking the course I am confident I have the tools to enable me to think bigger, organize my thoughts, and achieve more.
Building a Second Brain gave me the confidence to kickstart things I've had in my mind but was never able to move forward. Originally, I was looking for a way to store things for systematic retrieval. After the course, not only did I learn a way to capture and express myself, I have also gained understanding about how my struggle in the learning process reflects how I approach things in life.
I'm more confident in synthesising my learning and sharing my ideas. I want to emerge as a thought leader in my field. Building a Second Brain has allowed me to distill and express my thoughts in order to achieve my goals, and my Second Brain ensures I always have the building blocks ready to explore any idea. I used to read a lot, but now I know how to use my learning better.
Building a Second Brain taught me how to translate knowledge and insights into action. It showed me how to sift through a lot of stuff to get to the gold. And it showed me how to make starting points that can actually grow into a full project. It will save me hours of time spent on researching and reading that went nowhere.
The Building a Second Brain program unleashed inner strengths I had hidden, pushing me to both feel in charge of all the aspects of my life, but especially calling me into publicly sharing my knowledge, my experience and my life. I now have more hope and trust that I can be valuable for other people that are also sharing this life journey.
My Second Brain has been very impactful in relieving "cognitive drag". I'm already doing things with the knowledge I've been collecting. Even something like cooking Thanksgiving dinner has been easier. I had three different menus to prepare while dealing with a lower back injury. Because of my Second Brain, I laid on my floor while my family helped. Because it was so well organized and planned in my Second Brain it came together easily and incredibly.
I have much greater confidence in what I'm storing, how I'm storing it, and more importantly how to put it to use. The Building a Second Brain course has given me clarity on what a project is, and how to stay focused on it.
BASB has already impacted my life in more ways than I could have imagined. Now, I feel like an authority and I am not worried about expressing myself. My biggest win was participating as a moderator and getting to learn more about the leading practices at Forte Labs. It has allowed me to witness the hard work and attention to detail that goes into creating an exceptional experience.
BASB is the best online course I've taken so far. It's helping me sort through all my mental, emotional, spiritual blockages.
My Second Brain has allowed me to free up my poor biological first brain! This has been profoundly calming while also supporting greater possibilities of expression to build over time.
BASB was a transformative experience for me. It is totally game-changing. I believe that my professional life as well as personal life will be tremendously fulfilling in the future, thanks to BASB.
I have to say this has been an amazing immersion and experience. BASB is very dense but worth 10X the investment. Without a doubt. After so many years of GTD practice and intense productivity management, I thought I was a “productivity ninja.” Well, BASB has questioned and challenged all my stuff on productivity and it’s taking it to a next level. PARA is game changing and it’s adding massive clarity and order to my stuff across all the platforms I use. Key differentiators of this program versus others out there that I think provide a competitive advantage, include: the merging of deep philosophical concepts with the pragmatism of the program; incorporation of randomness and serendipity to the process — for example, via random notes; and the merging of divergence and convergence.
@fortelabs That's why I loved taking both Building a Second Brain and Write of Passage. I now have 5,264 notes and 89 posts, and am organizing many of my best ideas into my first book! Took both classes in 2019! Thank you! I've met so many awesome people through my posts!
BASB got me from 0 to a knowledge management system that makes me more effective by the day! As I learn new skills, write tutorials and blog posts, and record presentations, my second brain keeps that knowledge around long after my first brain forgets. This is almost an unfair advantage!
This was my 2nd time through the program and I am again blown away! The principles Tiago shares are really life-changing and priceless for peace of mind and creative expression. I am such a fan and highly recommend the BASB program to anyone searching to have for organization and clarity.
Building a Second Brain has given me the permission to dive deep into my own personal data. The things I know, the things I care about, the things I love. And that I can do it in a way that works for me and my life. There's permission to do it my way -- not the one way that works for everyone.
I cannot overstate how much BASB has helped me. I am an administrator and faculty member in higher-education and am constantly trying to manage multiple streams of input, while managing many projects, staffing, budgets, my own research and ideas, and more. Until I took this course, I was often literally holding my breath, hoping to remember all the moving parts, hoping to not show up and be too unprepared, and dreaming of the day when I would have more time to work on my own projects. Now, within the span of 6 weeks, I feel completely different not just about my projects and creative output but about all of my work. There is a clear delineation for me before and after I started this course. It is just what I needed. And just in time. The class has not only been a lifeline for me, it has been spiritually and emotionally rewarding. I don’t feel defeated or like I’m always playing catch-up. I know what I need to do and I have the tools and ideas to accomplish it well.
I feel much less overwhelmed than when I started Building a Second Brain. I believe I will be much more productive with my scientific writing in particular this year as a result of taking it.
BASB has had a huge internal impact by changing my perspective. I know have a doable process for creative knowledge work that previously felt illusive or nearly impossible for me. I expect that it will be a gamechanger for outer expression work I'd like to take into the world. The possibilities seem endless!
BASB has encouraged me to create material in areas that I would previously have approached passively as a consumer (e.g. writing a review about Hamlet instead of just reading the play). BASB was an enriching experience. It provides a framework in which 'write about what you read/watch/hear/see' becomes operational and integrated with life more widely.
Building a Second Brain has allowed me to have more clarity of thinking, more discernment about what I want to use my time for, and helped me acquire powerful tools to harness my productivity and creativity so that I can transcend them and simply live a joyful life.
BASB has greatly impacted my life and given me new found hope that I can take years of frustration around productivity and creativity and turn it into the joy of completion and expression. I am deeply grateful to Tiago, his team and the mentors for providing so much air that we can use to lift ourselves on our own.
After taking the BASB course, everything has changed for me. It really helped with note readability. I used to capture a lot and some of the notes weren't easy to understand. The concept of progressive summarization and intermediate packages has helped with this immensely. This system is GENIUS and I'm so excited to read the book!
This is the best investment I’ve made in improving my personal output, productivity, and knowledge management. All of the materials taken together are phenomenal, and I’m really happy with what I’ve learned from the course.
The BASB course has made me more confident in handling what life throws at me and being more effective in expressing myself. It will continue to be part of my overall productivity kaizen.
BASB proved to be an amazing linkage between true brain dynamics and a system that increases the likelihood of connecting ideas and creative thinking. This new version of BASB builds on the already highly useful system. Connecting ideas in a framework external of the brain is difficult, but this system gets as close to how the brain functions as I’ve ever found. Learning how the brain connects ideas has been a lifelong quest of mine. I’ve wanted to create an opportunity to connect more ideas by how I organize physical data and ideas outside the brain. Using this system has greatly increased my ability to efficiently connect ideas and bring more creativity to my thinking. This new version is a positive iteration on an already awesome system.
My Second Brain means I have less mental stress around finding important information, and ensures I have more creativity in the future.
After BASB, my thoughts are clearer and my writing has improved. It's already allowed me to create things I never would have considered before this course.
The Second Brain is a living database. It is a method for storing and organizing information for reference and re-use…Instead of spending hours researching the same topic months from now, with the Second Brain, all of the information is only seconds away.
Now that I have a Second Brain, I have a trusted system to deal with information. It's changed my ability to go from just consuming information, to actually making something out of it.
Building a Second Brain has been a complete f**king gamechanger. It's given me actionability at the centre of my workflow. Now I can match my mood with my work. I've now got a solid foundation that I can build my entire life off of.
I had a lot of AHA moments during the BASB course. It has had a huge impact on how I work and manage my life. Finally, I have more structure in all areas of my life. Thanks Tiago & Team.
Creating this second brain was super fun and I would definitely recommend taking Tiago’s program if you are looking for a new way to boost your productivity and creative breakthroughs…Keeping track of everything in a system that won’t be compromised means you will never forget a thing again!
As a long-term collector of information that often sat unread and unused, BASB has changed my approach to information and the possibilities are just beginning to unfold. This was life-changing.
BASB has opened up my mind to new possibilities. The pearls of wisdom that Tiago sprinkled throughout the course --not directly related to notes or productivity -- were golden.
BASB has brought more clarity, focus and a sense of control. The course helped me organize the data and resources I have, converting them into constructive resources so I can contribute more to society.
I rarely complete my personal projects and I really couldn't understand why until BASB. It clicked that as a recovering perfectionist, I had never risked failure. BASB has totally reframed "failing" for me and I'm now excited about it lol! The live sessions and Q&A were my favorite part. I loved when Tiago crowd-sourced answers from the chat. There was so many awesome suggestions!
I was overwhelmed with the amount of information from a wide variety of sources (i.e., email, teams, social media, text messages). Building a Second Brain allows me to manage the information through organization and storage it so it's easy to access when needed.
Because of the Building A Second Brain Course, I’m less anxious and have tools to manage my relationship with information.
I want to put in a huge thumbs up for Tiago Forte’s online course Building a Second Brain. On the surface it’s a course about the art of capturing, organizing, and retrieving digital notes — which is perfect for anyone (like myself) who makes their living researching and utilizing large amounts of information — but under the surface it’s a course that will change your life in many profound ways. Tiago’s class deeply changed my life in at least two ways: I now have a working system for keeping endless emails, overwhelming numbers of research notes, and confusing writing projects clearly organized and searchable; and for the first time in my life I have a clear understanding of what it means to be a “knowledge worker” and “content producer” in a rapidly changing world where those are powerful ways to make a living. Tiago is a formidable and highly respected thinker whose insights into productivity and creativity are having a huge impact. His class was generous, warm, and personal, and well worth every penny because he shares so much and is completely available for questions and insights that matter to you.
I feel like this is going to change everything. Moving forward, I can't wait to see where all this takes me!
Tiago has been at the forefront of discovering, and sharing, better ways of interacting with work and life for awhile now. As a participant in his BASB course, I finally learned the practical steps needed to implement his discoveries into my own workflow. The results have been profound, and immediate.
I absolutely LOVED the course. It’s changed the way I think. You have a gift of articulating thoughts & ideas…Your slides and visuals are amazing. The diagrams communicate the ideas and mental models at a totally different level. I’m a very visual person, and the visuals have been an invaluable aid in the learning. My biggest takeaways are the mental models that you shared. It’s changed the way I look at the world. It’s given me a completely different perspective on absorbing information, learning and creating. I now give more importance to information throughput and creating. My views on Deep Work have changed. I often got anxious on the seemingly infinite information out there. And I used to deal with it by shutting off sources of information. But with the mental model of stream thinking, I’m now less anxious about information overload. As long as I’m chasing what excites me and creating, the rest will fall in place.
Building a Second Brain gave me the tools to create a system that works for me. It has showed me the potential of using such a system with regards to creative output. It was a wonderful experience and I’ve not only made major changes to my life in terms of how and where I spend my time, but I’ve also been able to impact my clients in a greater way as well.
I feel like I finally have my arms around the massive amounts of information that comes my way each day. I didn't fully understand the goal toward "expressing," when I started the Building a Second Brain course. But I now have a completely new perspective on the purpose of my Second Brain. Yes, it is a repository of information, but it is also a tool for helping me develop my creative ideas and for preparing those ideas to be shared.
BASB has made my mind feel lighter. Now, my email doesn't scare me. My thoughts and ideas aren't just nebulous things I want to put out into the world but never get around to doing it. Now, I'm actually doing the things I said I would. I loved BASB so much after just one week, I upgraded my membership to premium because I wanted even more. The mentors inspired me so much that I want to be one too.
I loved the Building a Second Brain course. I wish I started 40 years ago. If I had, today, it would be one of my most valuable tools and possessions.
The Building a Second Brain course was a game-changer. In the past, all I did was collect and lose information. Now I have a system! Data is not isolated anymore and everything connects. I can feel how my creativity flows freely and my delivery is not only faster, my content is more complex.
After taking BASB, I feel 1000X more productive and have a system that gets a lot done for me. I think it is the foundation of a lot of growth for me and I'm excited about it.
After this BASB cohort, I picked up some new habits. I was able to launch a newsletter and a blog that I have been trying to get off the ground for over a year. I love BASB.
Building a Second Brain is life-changing. I feel more organized. I know where everything goes. It's cleared up my information hoarding and replaced it with buckets for distilled work. One example of how it's helped me: I had a meeting with a team about an upcoming presentation. I discussed my thoughts, recorded them during the meeting, distilled the content, pushed it to my VA. She drafted a presentation that took 15 minutes to edit! BAM!
For YEARS I had searched for an outlet, some way to store, collate, manage, keep track of all of my thoughts, ideas, tabs (!), work and personal notes, and it was all-consuming and overwhelming. BASB was truly a godsend and a life changer for me.
My favourite part of BASB is being in a community with other lifelong learners. Every time we interact on social media or in Circle, I learn something new. I'm learning that the true value of the course is the relationships you gain while learning with together.
BASB has made me feel much more confident in the projects and life goals I am pursuing. I used to feel overwhelmed by the amount of information on the internet but now feel like I have the tools to capture, organize, and distill that information.
This course offers a highly adaptable method for building your own digital brain. What? Yes. How? PARA + constraints. Why? Tiago offers a loose set of standards which you can start extracting long term, compounding interest on all of your work. I’ve never explicitly valued my attention, but I found myself regretting how much I’ve forgotten about the 100s of articles I read monthly — 100s of hours of attention, wasted! At work, I couldn’t easily find materials for my current projects — much less my previous projects. My attention was scattered. Tiago’s system strikes isn’t complicated or strict, which allows you to grow your very own personalized digital cortex. Now I can match my work to my mood and add value to my projects no matter what the week throws at me. In the two months since starting, I’ve produced three blogposts, planned three backpacking trips, decluttered my room, created an enterprise workshop, and got admitted into a developer conference. All using the *SAME* system! I’m living the PARA lifestyle now, and I’m never going back. This way lies not just productivity, but happiness and ease of mind. I started with no experience with GTD. I didn’t understand constraints. I never used a notetaking tool. I used my inbox as my todo list (starred messages). In other words, a total productivity degenerate. Take this course to start to feel agency in the world of infinite information and filter failure!
BASB has literally changed my life. Every time I take this course I get a new job, that's more specialized and better aligned with my goals and beliefs. As a Researcher, being able to build a Second Brain is invaluable. I'm now able to connect different data points and have everything in one place. I went from being a generalist UX designer to becoming a researcher, specialized in designing futures.
There is nothing on the web that will arm you with the perspectives encompassed within Building a Second Brain. This course tackles the paradigms of note-taking as we know it and will completely shift your ability to leverage the digital world with creative force. With exposure to ideas such as manipulating traditional ‘flow’ states, how to become interruption-proof and getting a grip on your projects — the course is comprehensively transformative. Tiago assisted in fundamentally changing the way I operate and interact digitally. Personally, the biggest impact was the creation of a literal ‘second brain’ via techniques of capturing, applying multi-layered summarisation and re-packaging information into intermediate packets of work. These ideas have allowed me to triage my consumption into shareable and productive outputs. Coupled with an *extremely valuable community group*, you are free to experiment with ideas, share and implement techniques and get valuable feedback. Whether it’s a complete mindset shift, a new way to use tools, defining and re-organising your projects, seamlessly capturing information, the ability to use rather than simply consume, or allowing for spontaneous connections — Building a second brain creates a space in your digital life which turns chaos into a bespoke system and approach to the digital landscape which optimises for creativity.
BASB has improved my consumption system in a way that I've never imagined possible. I'm very grateful for this knowledge, Tiago and the team.
Thanks to Building A Second Brain, I am now more confident to be able to handle big projects and remember and use everything that I have learned. I know where to store things. I have become curious about incoming information rather than dreading it.
BASB has provided me with clarity and focus in my personal knowledge management practice. The energy from everyone was amazing and I felt really privileged to be able to attend. The delivery was very polished and smooth. Well done!
Building a Second Brain is helping me create mental clarity and focus in a cluttered digital environment. Practically speaking, it's helping me prepare to start a business and train for a new career.
The Building a Second Brain program brought me into contact with the exact people I was hoping to meet. It has been a phenomenal experience. Diving deeper into BASB's CODE methodology helped me identify and troubleshoot bottlenecks in my workflow, and helped me complete multiple projects concurrently. I believe wholeheartedly in Building a Second Brain.
Tiago is a downright master at breaking down the challenges of knowledge work. Ever since college, I fumbled with incorporating something like “Progressive Summarization” into my notes and reviews — I never felt like I could trust my digital systems. With each lesson, Tiago gave me context and terminology to actually understand my problems and design meaningful improvements to my approach. The only reason not to take the course is if you’re allergic to “Aha” moments. Seriously.
BASB taught me how to think more critically about my knowledge management approach and has given me the tools to overcome my biggest hurdles that were preventing me from getting more out of my previous PKM system.
Building a second brain has given me new skills to gain deeper understanding and make sense of things, in a quicker and more organized way than before.
Because of Building A Second Brain, my repetitive tasks are easier and I'm able to focus on cooler stuff at work. I'm able to make connections, collaborate with others, and more easily capture their insights. It's made me more geared towards action and expression.
Just like the invention of the telephone was a necessity for the development of the skyscraper, I can feel that BASB has changed something inside of me that continues to morph and evolve. Having gone through the course reminds me of the final scene(s) of the original Total Recall. The glass ceiling has been shattered and the proverbial Mars, that is my understanding of PKM, has been terraformed. The sky is quite literally the limit and I feel ready to soar!
‘Building a Second Brain’ was just the class I was looking for to help me take my work in education philanthropy to the next level. Not only did I learn how to build a system to organize my sources and notes, but I also learned a technique to process this information to keep it alive. Now I know how to add value by growing the resources I collect into actionable ideas to take back out into the field.
Having an established second brain system has allowed me to become more productive, creative, and valuable than I have ever been before. It has not only allowed me to optimally manage my workflow but has allowed me to become a resource to others. Now, when I’m in conversation with others, or when people have questions on a specific topic, I typically have a note or two in my second brain that I can use to add to the conversation or answer someone’s question.
Building a Second Brain has freed me up from needing to keep everything inside of my mind. It's made me think like a CEO and made me a better professional.
BASB has confirmed and consolidated my knowledge. It’s giving me a ‘honed’ approach. It’s made me more rigorous. It’s even given me a sense of intention and confidence. I think, above all, it’s going to make me more creative.
BASB transformed the way I organize my information and look at my workflows. It opened up my perspective to new ways of doing things. Especially regarding creating and expressing, and how it's important to have the outcome in mind while going through all subsequent steps.
BASB has given me practical tools that I can use in my professional and personal lives. Now, I feel I can move forward. Prior to the course - I was stuck.
The BASB community and the Forte Labs team are amazing. They've inspired me to take on challenges I've never thought were possible. You've done it again Forte Labs team! This is the best cohort yet! Thank you for all your passion and hard work to make this a wonderful experience.
I’ve tried various knowledge management systems but the ones taught in Building a Second Brain are the only ones that I’ll definitely stick with. It’s simple yet it’s the most effective at helping me generate value from my knowledge repertoire.
BASB was a form of therapy for me. It's encouraged me to make more & better notes, and lean into the realisation that my future self will thank my current self for doing so.
The Building a Second Brain course helped me accomplish many things, including how to start new projects, organize information, and manage complex creative projects. Organizing is no longer overwhelming, I have more space in my calendar and brain, and the projects I'm excited about are now "both and" instead of "either or". I can now fully trust my personal knowledge management system.
BASB has had a huge impact on my life. It has been one of the best decisions I've made in the last few years. The support of the course and the community will allow me to continue on a great path.
I'm receiving so much value already from the course. I had a hunch that I needed this skill but I never knew how badly I need this skill in my work and personal life. I have started building systems in my work but this is the conduit or connective tissue I need to propel those systems forward. Thank you for this gift of catalyzing my self-actualization pursuit in reaching my God-given potential to execute on my purpose in life. You all are the best.
I feel as though I have increased my IQ by 20 points. Of course this isn't true, but it feels this way because I am thinking so much more clearly and with so much more relaxation and concentration. I am no longer improvising my knowledge capture as much, making it all up as I go along. The consistent techniques make my PKM habits more effortless by getting them out of my way so I can focus and think about the actual information.
Managing multiple projects was always scattered. Now I’m able to work on a project with confidence that I’m not forgetting something. I can easily capture thoughts and to dos without feeling harrassed. Building a Second Brain has been a game changer for me.
BASB is the answer to information and project overwhelm. You aren’t here to ‘do tasks’ – you are here to create and accomplish. Most productivity systems are about better managing your to-do list which predictably lend themselves to expediting the easy over the important– i.e. send email over, write book. But at best, that only serves us to make us more and more efficient at lower value work, if we can even call it that. BASB is about making the information you consume your own so you can better do what only you can do: create. It’s something you might not even fully realize you want or should do until you see it. A true gamechanger. If I could put it more simply, BASB is NOT an ‘organization’ system, it’s a THINKING system.