Tiago’s class Building a Second Brain solved many problems that I had been encountering over and over again in my productivity workflow. And it also solved many problems I was not aware of. It has allowed me to create a system that will work easily so that I can spend time on what’s important: creation.
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.
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!
Tiago was great at reminding us that the way we approach BASB is how we approach many other things in our lives. If we want things to be perfect, and put things off generally, that is how we will approach BASB. It gave me the push I needed to get out of my comfort zone and just jump in. This will help not just with BASB but other aspects of my life.
This course completely re-organized the way I consume content. It changed what I pay attention to and why.
I’ve really loved the course. It’s been a great accelerator for me. It made me feel more deeply connected to my purpose. And at a time when I really needed that. THANK YOU!
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.
After taking BASB, I'm less overwhelmed by information overload. I now know that nothing is too big to tackle.
@gregoryjhickman @fortelabs All joking aside, if @fortelabs lets you give him money, you should do it. BASB totally changed how I store and access knowledge and I can’t even begin to calculate what that’s been worth to me.
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.
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 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!
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 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.
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.
BASB taught me that I don't need to have more information but rather be able to relate to this information in a healthier way.
Building a Second Brain has changed the way I think about my work. I've learned how to recover my time with better notes and develop an intuition of what truly interests me. Seeing my notes together in my Second Brain has allowed me to cluster my interests to produce and express my ideas more fluently.
Being able to catch ideas as they come to you is one of the most important things you could perfect…I will be building my second brain every single day for the rest of my career. This is not a static database but is rather a living, breathing system of information and knowledge management.
BASB gave me solutions for problems I didn't even know I was struggling with, but which were big frictions in my work. Having a Second Brain has freed me from brainfog. I have a precise view of my projects and an amazing system of not just „getting things done“ but „GTD with a happy brain!" I am happy to be part of this amazing community.
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.
The BASB course has helped me with my creative output. It allowed me to generate new business and has given me a clear process that is oriented towards output, not just input.
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.
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.
With a Second Brain, the chaos now lives in an external system. Which means my first brain is free of anxieties and is a much better place to be. My relationships with others (and myself) are better for it too.
I started BASB with a generalized hopelessness and the distinct feeling that I've been getting stupider as time passes. I felt discouraged, overwhelmed, and fatigued under the continuous effort of inefficient work and used ineffective strategies, like trying to keep *everything*, which made things worse. This course changed my life the way that finally getting glasses at age 13 did; I have so much more focus, everything looks beautiful, and I'm astounded at how much I was missing. If you're even considering taking this course, chances are it's because you need to be here. Take the plunge you are certain to come away with all sorts of discrete & existential gains.
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 given me a more "action oriented" approach to my knowledge management. This will help me both produce and gather information more selectively. I also appreciated the scholarship that you made available as it meant I could afford the course as part of my professional development budget.
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.
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.
BASB has set me on a path where I feel less overwhelmed and more hopeful about organizing my digital life and producing high-quality outputs more easily. The inspiring people I met and the community that continues well after the course is over are no doubt among the highlights of the program, too.
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.
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!
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.
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.
BASB is more than just tools, it's a real life concept. I was looking for tools and process and I've discovered a real concept that I'm applying to my life!
Honestly, since I got a hang on it — I’ve had quite a few WTF?! cognition melting and folding moments — cognitive reboot…That clarity of delivery obscured the depth of possibilties, which became casual tools-to-play-with after I had crossed the chasm, but were confusion-inducing earlier. The remaining confusion is actually a more sensitive perception, a place of possibility and momentum.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@fortelabs thank you tiago , now i have perfect second brain 🧠🥳🤩 You have changed the concept of how humanity deals and manages with knowledge, you are a great man What you're doing is revolutionary 🙏
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.
Because of the Building A Second Brain Course, I’m less anxious and have tools to manage my relationship with information.
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 started this course to achieve 2 things. One, somehow collect all the stuff I consume daily to an easily accessible place. Two, use these to produce new content. I love how easily can I make new content using progressive summarization. Feel less overwhelmed and ready to be consistent with creating content.
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.
The sensation of certainty – that I knew that whatever had peaked my interest, I could capture it so easily – and there was a well thought out framework where it ended up, just waiting to be used towards achieving my dreams – that sensation was a real feeling of having gotten smarter. This in turn gave a noticeable boost in self-confidence and energy towards working on my projects. It’s hard to understate the sense of growth of who I am – of what I’m capable of achieving. It has profoundly altered my outlook on life and what I dare to aspire to.
My Second Brain means I have less mental stress around finding important information, and ensures I have more creativity in the future.
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.
I found wonderful people with amazingly creative souls that inspire me to keep moving forward. Thank you!
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.
BASB has made me feel more confident with information and being in the environment. Now, I can take action to create tangible things to share.
BASB has given me a roadmap of where I want my life to go. It's sparking some creativity in all my endeavors.
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!
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 improved my consumption system in a way that I've never imagined possible. I'm very grateful for this knowledge, Tiago and the team.
I got much more than my money's worth before I even started the Building a Second Brain course. One of the biggest benefits I've received has been about connecting with so many amazing, super smart people from around the world including the mentors and peers. The Circle is easily one of the best resources for tapping into high-quality peer-created and curated content that I will continue to use for years to come.
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.
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).
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.
The Building a Second Brain course was life changing! I've been more mindful to capture, organize, distill, and express information. It helped me get aligned with my goal to balance information consumption with production.
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.
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.
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.
This course has honestly transformed my life! I’ve always struggled with being organized and keep track of my many obligations and interest, but after taking the course and applying the material learned, I now find myself exciting to wake up in the morning to enjoy this new life this course has helped me put together.
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.
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.
It’s easy to fall into the thinking that what Tiago teaches is merely knowledge and concepts. That will be a headfake. Through the knowledge and concepts he provides in both courses, Tiago is also indirectly showing you his philosophy of being an executive or an entrepreneur in this new millennia. It is this philosophy presented as note-taking productivity advice that is truly going to be pivotal for the average executives and entrepreneurs given the upcoming upheavals of massive information and automated workflows. The saying, “Ideas are cheap. execution is everything” by now is a cliche. While the bottleneck to creative output is no longer the supply of ideas, the bottleneck is not execution either. More precisely, it’s the clarity of thought that has become today’s executives and entrepreneurs bottleneck. Without clarity, you will get mired in bad execution. Tiago is training us to be warriors not of facts or activity, but warriors of clarity. Through clarity, comes productivity.
Tiago has completely shifted the way I think about learning in a digital world. After taking the class, I have a reliable system to actually retain, organize, and use the best of what I read rather than just relying on memory alone. Former “needle in a haystack” tasks like topic research and tracking down citations now feel like child’s play. The community is well-curated with thoughtful discussions from a wide variety of professional experience — I learned almost as much from the other participants in the class. Have taken quite a few online courses and Building a Second Brain stands up to any that I’ve done in terms of value delivered per dollar and hour spent.
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.
It's been a few months since BASB has ended but I'm still reaping the benefits of having this system. Having a Second Brain is so, so, SO important. Just the other day, I misread a deadline for some case studies, and it was already 9:30am!!!! But since I had a Second Brain, I was able to whip one up because I already had my testimonials, social proof, and screen shots all in one place. Funny enough, I was commended because my case study submission was apparently super clean and well thought-out. So this is what you meant when you said people will think you're some sort of "genius", when really you just know how to manage the stuff in your head.
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 feel like this is going to change everything. Moving forward, I can't wait to see where all this takes me!
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 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!
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!
BASB mentor sessions had the biggest impact on me. They allowed me to see the diversity of perceptions from people with different life experiences.
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.
BASB has given me a sense of peace and comfort to know it's easy to find things without remembering where I put them. I plan to attend future cohorts to keep learning and applying what I know.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I came into the course thinking that BASB would be teaching a cookie cutter method, one size for all. But it was a pleasant surprise how it focuses on building a system that works for you. I love how Tiago would bring in the high-level concepts/principles, and show his way of going about it. The mentors would also show their perspective, this really was gold. I absolutely loved BASB. The biggest impact is how it triggered a reflection on my existing systems and patterns, not just to notetaking, but on a broader perspective. BASB has been so much more than another PKM course.
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.
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.
BASB sharpened my grasp of the basic concepts of PKM and pushed me to shift my focus to express/create rather than hoard information. This will allow me to create/publish more. I feel super excited for what's to come.
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.
Imagine being able to recall all the really interesting things you’ve ever read, seen and done. How good would that be? Any problem, any piece of creative work boosted with a library of relevant material right there at your fingertips. That’s powerful. Well, this course helps you do just that. It’s fast-paced, expertly taught and full of examples, exercises and discussion that help you organise all the really interesting, useful stuff in your life into a system that allows easy access. I wish I had done it years ago.