‘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.
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 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.
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.
BASB has given me one of the best skills in my life and that is a living system that I can control. I am not overwhelmed anymore and I'm now more organised.
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!
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!
BASB has given me a roadmap of where I want my life to go. It's sparking some creativity in all my endeavors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Having a Second Brain has saved my behind. My parents passed away, and it has helped me immensely as the executor of their estates. I love this program and its amazing impact on my life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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 answers to our evolutionary need to rethink our way to exist online, how we consume and create with more intention and clarity. The course was thought-provoking, and I was impressed by the quality of the content (amazing production indeed!), the way it was structured, the solid teamwork, the curriculum- it really set a new standard in the online education space and as a course creator, inspired and humbled me. This is just the beginning but now I look at the future of digital era with more hope and trust, and from a place of empowerment. I know that I now have the tools and frameworks to turn the digital chaos into calm.
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.
Building a Second Brain has given me the tools to have less stress and anxiety. Having a system of finding things means I don't have to switch context and I'm now a producer more than a collector. My tasks now take 1/3 or 1/4 of the time and I'm able to have weekends, Friday mornings, and evenings free for my relationship, family and friends. I'm even enjoying my hobbies like cooking more!
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.
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.
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.
I am finding this course extremely beneficial and have actively taken a step back from my current projects to re-evaluate how I pretty much do everything (in a good way!!!). If anything, the course might be moving a little too fast as I am still finding flaws in my own unique approach (based off the teachings) to PKM and trying to address them while we are moving to the next phases of this course. But, I love how all of the information and lectures have remained up so I can always go back if I need help or want to re-visit a certain topic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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 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).
High-value knowledge work requires high-quality knowledge resources: abundant working knowledge capital, a reliable knowledge infrastructure, knowledge liquidity, and a differentiating knowledge value proposition, all coherently leveraged to provide a competitive advantage. Building a Second Brain has transformed my relationship to, and understanding of, personal knowledge capture and retention. The value to my business is significant; the value to me personally — immeasurable.
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!
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.
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.
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!
BASB is the best online course I've taken so far. It's helping me sort through all my mental, emotional, spiritual blockages.
I found wonderful people with amazingly creative souls that inspire me to keep moving forward. Thank you!
The programme teaches you actionable principles and habits on capturing, organising, synthesising and making use of knowledge. The biggest win for me was connecting the things I have to get done (deliverables, tasks) with the information needed to make these happen. As a result, I now have a system in place for moving the needle forwards on my projects with really effective ways of collecting and making use of knowledge that I capture (or create)! Before the programme I was half-heartedly implementing GTD and managing knowledge, leading to a lot of time spent trying to sort things out and never actually moving the projects forwards. With the new systems I set up during BASB I feel I can dig deeper in my projects and produce even better quality results, with less stress/effort.
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!
@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!
Before taking BASB, I never thought of myself as a writer. This course has really helped me find my voice and gave me confidence to share my knowledge with the world.
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!
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.
This course completely re-organized the way I consume content. It changed what I pay attention to and why.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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 🙏
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve got some big ambitious goals….I feel like I’ve got the tools to be able to take on longer-term projects and have them persist over a long period of time, and allow for that incubation period, and allow for serendipity, allow for ideas to marinate, allow different perspective… opening up that wheel and making progress every single day, has been very fulfilling and really just a life-changer as far as overall happiness goes.
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.
BASB opened up a whole new world of note-taking. I feel so much more productive and my brain physically feels better! It has changed my entire mindset around knowledge management.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
My second brain is one of the best resources I have because it gives me the freedom to easily consume information, organize it, and create a blog post…It taught me a fantastic way to simultaneously learn more, and archive information to be able to fully focus on one thing, all while keeping the information I have already collected readily available.