Tiago Forte
Author of Building a Second Brain and creator of the PARA Method
Where to hear and read about Tiago Forte1 episode or test
Tiago Forte is the author of Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method, and a teacher of note-taking and writing. The most useful thing to learn from him is to alternate between making lots of rough material and distilling it, and to let the public test every idea before it goes into print.
I had a rule that I would not put anything in the book that had not been tested publicly.
Write More Productively (How to Start) | Tiago Forte | How I Write Podcast
Tiago Forte: the story and the lessons
1How Tiago Forte went from bookstore reader to author
Forte spent his school years reading for hours in a bookstore. His library got new books years late, so he sat in the aisle of the Barnes and Noble in Aliso Viejo, walking distance from his high school, for four to six hours at a time.
He wanted timely business, tech and self-development titles. He sat on the floor with a stack of books until a Starbucks cafe added a chair.
His painter father modeled discipline and imagination in one person. His father has painted since age five and once drew a hundred pineapples to train his hand, then made the perfect one in a single try.
Forte saw that anecdote only later confirmed by decades of data from studies of Toyota manufacturing.
Venkatesh Rao's invitation gave Forte his life's work. Rao invited him to write five long essays for $100 each, and Forte treated it as a chance to plan 20 to 30 years of work. The essays included Productivity for Precious Snowflakes and The Throughput of Learning.
Rao also recommended Forte's course in his newsletter before the first cohort had been taught. Eight years on, Forte says he has mostly been unpacking those essays.
Forte built the Write of Passage course in 11 days. David called in November 2018, they talked for seven minutes, and they met in Mexico City in February. Mornings were interviews sorted into seven modules, afternoons were filming.
A team reviewed each day's upload overnight, so new feedback arrived every morning. Forte says without that speed the result would have been slower and way worse.
He chose a traditional publisher to reach mainstream readers. Forte had self-published six or seven ebooks and thinks he will never self-publish again. He wants to reach the zero to one people who would not otherwise find these ideas.
He also ran a regression on public Amazon data and found new reviews per day was the metric that correlated most with sales. He plans to publish many more books.
The PARA Method came 14 months later and cannibalized his course. Readers still found the first book too complicated, so he took one technique and wrote a whole book on it. Course sales fell to 10 to 15 percent of before, because readers got the value for $15 instead of $1,500.
The course's high price had built the brand, so the book felt like great value. His lesson is to cannibalize your main product with your next one, and to expect it faster than he did. A version for fifth and sixth graders may come next.
2How Forte gets unstuck and protects his writing time
Forte switches from quality to quantity the moment he feels stuck. He treats quality and quantity as two tracks he can switch between at will, like a railroad. The warning sign is a sensation of slowing down, and he switches before he hits the block.
He learns something, compresses a new idea, and returns to the draft, where breakthroughs come as fast as before. "You hit that switch and you switch over to another track, which was the quantity track."
He tweeted one idea from many angles until one worked. His heaviest tweeting happened exactly when the book was stuck. He pictured the block as a rock in the road and attacked it analytically, intuitively and emotionally.
One angle usually worked, and he pasted the winning version into the manuscript. Sometimes he ignored the block, took a tangent, and came back on a different path.
Writing one book sentence means loading the whole book into his head. He had to hold the structure, what each chapter does, editor and reviewer comments, and his own realizations. Loading takes an hour or two, and then one paragraph leaves him exhausted.
Doing this day after day is why he says the book almost broke him.
He took expensive multi-day retreats to protect that context. A 30 to 45 minute call on Monday morning wastes the load, so he took retreats of three, four or five days in Temecula wine country, a Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey and a Malibu beachfront condo.
One retreat gave him the deepest flow of his life: seven or eight hours without eating, drinking much or going to the bathroom. "It's better if it's expensive. The more money I spend the better, because then I'm accountable."
Forte now guards one fixed two-hour writing window. He can write intensively for only about two hours, from 9 to 11 A.M. on weekdays. He schedules no meetings then and arranges childcare to keep it free.
He says leverage and protected time now matter more than intensity. One team call that sets a vision or removes a constraint can beat days of personal intensity, and intensity demands recovery, which costs more with children.
He notices that the tool and place change what he writes. Casual tools like Apple Notes make writing easier than heavier ones like Evernote or Scrivener. In the same app he writes different notes on a phone, an iPad and a computer.
He credits small affordances: what sits at the screen edge, and what posture or place the device invites.
3Forte's rules for editing and testing before print
Forte edits in many passes, each with a single filter. He read all of part one, four chapters and about 20,000 words, looking only at whether it sounded too geeky and technical. He says the writing is just getting something down and the editing is where all the work comes in.
Editing a book is harder than editing an article, because reviewers give disproportionate feedback to the beginning when 40 hours is hard to ask for.
He cut Silicon Valley jargon to widen the audience. Early Second Brain served technical PKM nerds. Phrases like order of magnitude, Overton window and leverage turn normal readers off.
He asked of every sentence whether it pulls readers deeper or makes them bolt, since one bad or bombastic page can make someone abandon a book.
He printed nothing that had not been tested in public. Everything went through the blog, Twitter or live teaching first. A book is printed many times and translated into many formats, so he wanted hundreds, if not thousands, of people to have said an idea works.
He compares it to a startup testing a product before spending millions. His Godfather research went from research to a few thousand words on his site, then into a shorter book version shaped by public responses.
He teaches live because faces give the fastest feedback. Blog comments arrive slowly. On Zoom in gallery view he sees a flicker cross people's faces the moment an idea lands or fails.
"There's no form of feedback that I've ever encountered that is anywhere close to that fast."
His team debriefs every cohort with brutal feedback. After each session the team reviews what worked and what didn't, even telling him his favorite story flopped. Teammates cross-check his view of the Zoom thumbnails against the chat, which he can't watch while teaching.
Slack, the forum and support tickets feed the same distillation.
Many of the book's stories came from a crowd of contributors. About 12 sections began as texts or conversations with Perell. Taylor Swift's Blank Space story is one example, aimed at mass appeal rather than books like Principles of Product Development Flow.
Forte calls the book the accumulation and then distillation of dozens of people's thinking.
He learned to write the offhand line instead of a framework. His YouTube scripts are written by Mark, who makes him sound lighter. Where Forte would have laid out a five-part framework, Mark wrote something like going through your emails one at a time.
Forte says that one comment did what a thousand words of intellectual explanation would have, and worked better.
4How Forte distills ideas and what he knows about it
Forte summarizes sources in layers to find the best 1 to 5 percent. He highlights on a first pass, then asks what is the very best within the best, and repeats. Information follows a power law, so a small share of any book matters most.
He spends far more time distilling other people's ideas than most writers, which lets him express his own efficiently.
He writes summaries first so he can link to them mid-draft. In the flow of writing he needs to cite a complex idea in three sentences without losing his train of thought. Venkatesh Rao taught him that the hyperlink replaced the footnote, because a link can carry proof at any length.
He calls summaries building blocks, not the artistry. "I'm not proud of summaries." The vision is expressed later, in the writing.
He accepts that every act of compression costs depth. Compressing gains accessibility and understanding but loses context, nuance and subtlety. He calls the trade-off a sword to the chest and says it has to be made for his goal.
Five essays that took 50 hours each have fed eight years of simplified work since.
He hunts for the moral framing in a subject and removes it. Borrowing from Rao, he asks which moral lens he is looking through: religious, good or bad, or high or low status. It sorts reality into two buckets, and the framing is hard to see because it is a fish in water.
Applying it to manufacturing, which knowledge workers scorn, led him to Toyota and the theory of constraints. That gave data for his belief that quality leads to quantity and quantity to quality.
Forte stopped capturing notes and started using what he had. His capture phase ran five to seven years while he formed his worldview. With about 7,365 hand-curated notes, one more adds little.
Now he explains ideas better, translates them for more people and explores implications. "I need to just capitalize on the information and knowledge I already have."
He tells beginners to curate before trying to be original. At the start you know nothing, so choosing what to consume is how you learn, and sharing it is nearly the same work. Picasso's faces show his curation of African art.
Forte says nothing is truly original, and all creation is refined curation.
He borrows process from Coppola and Michener. Coppola cut pages from the Godfather novel, pasted them into a notebook, and annotated them, saying he could have made the film without a script given that notebook. Forte sees an early form of progressive summarization.
From James Michener he took years of immersion in a place and a habit of mixing documented fact with conjecture. "I mix what I know to be true, what can be documented and proven with what is conjecture and speculation."
5Forte's weaknesses and how he reviews his life
Forte calls his biggest weakness being too intellectual and thorough. Throwing away context felt like killing his darlings, and he took it personally. For other people, distilling is easy and fun.
He counters it by immersing himself in pop culture, researching reality TV for an unscripted show. Duck Dynasty sold over 1000 licensed products, including sleeping bags, caps, shoes and truck decals.
He admits he has no team that produces great content without him. Despite his teaching and publishing success, he says he still hasn't built a team that reliably produces excellent content without him.
He runs a deep annual review and shares it publicly. A year is the right gap, because questioning core values takes months and is a little destabilizing. He starts sensing misalignment in autumn and digs in around mid-December.
He changes environment, eats lighter and spends time in nature to reach a monk-like state. Insight is not the goal, change is, and publishing the review forces him to follow through on actions he would otherwise skip.
He writes his future in concrete detail to steer daily choices. His guest room was covered in a detailed future, down to the light and the morning coffee or tea. He says specificity shapes perception and daily choices.
His top five values are freedom, power, recognition, love and impact, and he says they emerge slowly from deep within.
Write More Productively (How to Start) | Tiago Forte | How I Write Podcast
Tiago Forte explains how he writes books and essays by moving between making lots of rough material and distilling it, and by testing every idea in public before it earns a place in print. The most useful takeaways are his one-filter editing passes, his habit of switching to quick volume when stuck, and his rule that nothing goes in the book untested.
Forte spent his school years reading for hours in a bookstore. His library got new books years late, so he sat in the aisle of the Barnes and Noble in Aliso Viejo, walking distance from his high school, for four to six hours at a time.
He wanted timely business, tech and self-development titles. He sat on the floor with a stack of books until a Starbucks cafe added a chair.
His painter father modeled discipline and imagination in one person. His father has painted since age five and once drew a hundred pineapples to train his hand, then made the perfect one in a single try.
Forte saw that anecdote only later confirmed by decades of data from studies of Toyota manufacturing.
Venkatesh Rao's invitation gave Forte his life's work. Rao invited him to write five long essays for $100 each, and Forte treated it as a chance to plan 20 to 30 years of work. The essays included Productivity for Precious Snowflakes and The Throughput of Learning.
Rao also recommended Forte's course in his newsletter before the first cohort had been taught. Eight years on, Forte says he has mostly been unpacking those essays.
Forte built the Write of Passage course in 11 days. David called in November 2018, they talked for seven minutes, and they met in Mexico City in February. Mornings were interviews sorted into seven modules, afternoons were filming.
A team reviewed each day's upload overnight, so new feedback arrived every morning. Forte says without that speed the result would have been slower and way worse.
He chose a traditional publisher to reach mainstream readers. Forte had self-published six or seven ebooks and thinks he will never self-publish again. He wants to reach the zero to one people who would not otherwise find these ideas.
He also ran a regression on public Amazon data and found new reviews per day was the metric that correlated most with sales. He plans to publish many more books.
The PARA Method came 14 months later and cannibalized his course. Readers still found the first book too complicated, so he took one technique and wrote a whole book on it. Course sales fell to 10 to 15 percent of before, because readers got the value for $15 instead of $1,500.
The course's high price had built the brand, so the book felt like great value. His lesson is to cannibalize your main product with your next one, and to expect it faster than he did. A version for fifth and sixth graders may come next.
Forte switches from quality to quantity the moment he feels stuck. He treats quality and quantity as two tracks he can switch between at will, like a railroad. The warning sign is a sensation of slowing down, and he switches before he hits the block.
He learns something, compresses a new idea, and returns to the draft, where breakthroughs come as fast as before. "You hit that switch and you switch over to another track, which was the quantity track."
He tweeted one idea from many angles until one worked. His heaviest tweeting happened exactly when the book was stuck. He pictured the block as a rock in the road and attacked it analytically, intuitively and emotionally.
One angle usually worked, and he pasted the winning version into the manuscript. Sometimes he ignored the block, took a tangent, and came back on a different path.
Writing one book sentence means loading the whole book into his head. He had to hold the structure, what each chapter does, editor and reviewer comments, and his own realizations. Loading takes an hour or two, and then one paragraph leaves him exhausted.
Doing this day after day is why he says the book almost broke him.
He took expensive multi-day retreats to protect that context. A 30 to 45 minute call on Monday morning wastes the load, so he took retreats of three, four or five days in Temecula wine country, a Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey and a Malibu beachfront condo.
One retreat gave him the deepest flow of his life: seven or eight hours without eating, drinking much or going to the bathroom. "It's better if it's expensive. The more money I spend the better, because then I'm accountable."
Forte now guards one fixed two-hour writing window. He can write intensively for only about two hours, from 9 to 11 A.M. on weekdays. He schedules no meetings then and arranges childcare to keep it free.
He says leverage and protected time now matter more than intensity. One team call that sets a vision or removes a constraint can beat days of personal intensity, and intensity demands recovery, which costs more with children.
He notices that the tool and place change what he writes. Casual tools like Apple Notes make writing easier than heavier ones like Evernote or Scrivener. In the same app he writes different notes on a phone, an iPad and a computer.
He credits small affordances: what sits at the screen edge, and what posture or place the device invites.
Forte edits in many passes, each with a single filter. He read all of part one, four chapters and about 20,000 words, looking only at whether it sounded too geeky and technical. He says the writing is just getting something down and the editing is where all the work comes in.
Editing a book is harder than editing an article, because reviewers give disproportionate feedback to the beginning when 40 hours is hard to ask for.
He cut Silicon Valley jargon to widen the audience. Early Second Brain served technical PKM nerds. Phrases like order of magnitude, Overton window and leverage turn normal readers off.
He asked of every sentence whether it pulls readers deeper or makes them bolt, since one bad or bombastic page can make someone abandon a book.
He printed nothing that had not been tested in public. Everything went through the blog, Twitter or live teaching first. A book is printed many times and translated into many formats, so he wanted hundreds, if not thousands, of people to have said an idea works.
He compares it to a startup testing a product before spending millions. His Godfather research went from research to a few thousand words on his site, then into a shorter book version shaped by public responses.
He teaches live because faces give the fastest feedback. Blog comments arrive slowly. On Zoom in gallery view he sees a flicker cross people's faces the moment an idea lands or fails.
"There's no form of feedback that I've ever encountered that is anywhere close to that fast."
His team debriefs every cohort with brutal feedback. After each session the team reviews what worked and what didn't, even telling him his favorite story flopped. Teammates cross-check his view of the Zoom thumbnails against the chat, which he can't watch while teaching.
Slack, the forum and support tickets feed the same distillation.
Many of the book's stories came from a crowd of contributors. About 12 sections began as texts or conversations with Perell. Taylor Swift's Blank Space story is one example, aimed at mass appeal rather than books like Principles of Product Development Flow.
Forte calls the book the accumulation and then distillation of dozens of people's thinking.
He learned to write the offhand line instead of a framework. His YouTube scripts are written by Mark, who makes him sound lighter. Where Forte would have laid out a five-part framework, Mark wrote something like going through your emails one at a time.
Forte says that one comment did what a thousand words of intellectual explanation would have, and worked better.
Forte summarizes sources in layers to find the best 1 to 5 percent. He highlights on a first pass, then asks what is the very best within the best, and repeats. Information follows a power law, so a small share of any book matters most.
He spends far more time distilling other people's ideas than most writers, which lets him express his own efficiently.
He writes summaries first so he can link to them mid-draft. In the flow of writing he needs to cite a complex idea in three sentences without losing his train of thought. Venkatesh Rao taught him that the hyperlink replaced the footnote, because a link can carry proof at any length.
He calls summaries building blocks, not the artistry. "I'm not proud of summaries." The vision is expressed later, in the writing.
He accepts that every act of compression costs depth. Compressing gains accessibility and understanding but loses context, nuance and subtlety. He calls the trade-off a sword to the chest and says it has to be made for his goal.
Five essays that took 50 hours each have fed eight years of simplified work since.
He hunts for the moral framing in a subject and removes it. Borrowing from Rao, he asks which moral lens he is looking through: religious, good or bad, or high or low status. It sorts reality into two buckets, and the framing is hard to see because it is a fish in water.
Applying it to manufacturing, which knowledge workers scorn, led him to Toyota and the theory of constraints. That gave data for his belief that quality leads to quantity and quantity to quality.
Forte stopped capturing notes and started using what he had. His capture phase ran five to seven years while he formed his worldview. With about 7,365 hand-curated notes, one more adds little.
Now he explains ideas better, translates them for more people and explores implications. "I need to just capitalize on the information and knowledge I already have."
He tells beginners to curate before trying to be original. At the start you know nothing, so choosing what to consume is how you learn, and sharing it is nearly the same work. Picasso's faces show his curation of African art.
Forte says nothing is truly original, and all creation is refined curation.
He borrows process from Coppola and Michener. Coppola cut pages from the Godfather novel, pasted them into a notebook, and annotated them, saying he could have made the film without a script given that notebook. Forte sees an early form of progressive summarization.
From James Michener he took years of immersion in a place and a habit of mixing documented fact with conjecture. "I mix what I know to be true, what can be documented and proven with what is conjecture and speculation."
Forte calls his biggest weakness being too intellectual and thorough. Throwing away context felt like killing his darlings, and he took it personally. For other people, distilling is easy and fun.
He counters it by immersing himself in pop culture, researching reality TV for an unscripted show. Duck Dynasty sold over 1000 licensed products, including sleeping bags, caps, shoes and truck decals.
He admits he has no team that produces great content without him. Despite his teaching and publishing success, he says he still hasn't built a team that reliably produces excellent content without him.
He runs a deep annual review and shares it publicly. A year is the right gap, because questioning core values takes months and is a little destabilizing. He starts sensing misalignment in autumn and digs in around mid-December.
He changes environment, eats lighter and spends time in nature to reach a monk-like state. Insight is not the goal, change is, and publishing the review forces him to follow through on actions he would otherwise skip.
He writes his future in concrete detail to steer daily choices. His guest room was covered in a detailed future, down to the light and the morning coffee or tea. He says specificity shapes perception and daily choices.
His top five values are freedom, power, recognition, love and impact, and he says they emerge slowly from deep within.