At the start of 2025, I dubbed this “The Year of Profitability,” and now that it’s come to a close, I can say we successfully fulfilled that intention.

We ended the year with 2.15M in gross revenue, and $650,000 in net profit, for a 30% gross margin. That’s our second-best year ever as a business! Behind only 2021 at the peak of the pandemic.

There were 3 main things we did to make it happen:

1. Launched a high-ticket, high-margin program that tapped into the surge in demand for AI training among business owners
2. Kept the team intentionally small and lean, with no new hires
3. Continued cultivating existing revenue sources, such as the Second Brain Membership

Some of the other wins from the year include: 

• Launched the official Second Brain Notion Template, which sold over 2,350 copies this year (update coming soon)
• Grew our Circle community to over 13k members and launched our BASB app for easier access
• Doubled our publishing cadence to weekly on our YouTube channel, which grew to 373k subscribers and received over 4.8M views in 2025 (consuming a mind-blowing 48 years of combined viewing time)
• Hosted the seventh edition of our Annual Review program, including beta access to the manuscript of my upcoming book, Life in Perspective
• Reached 400,000 lifetime sales of my book Building a Second Brain, which is still in the process of being released in more languages and countries

I think what makes me especially proud of these milestones is that we did it all with such a small team. We recently got together for our annual retreat in the town where I live in Mexico (missing Rebecca and Sasa, unfortunately):

In this review, I’ll share the full story behind our financial turnaround – from YouTube’s explosive growth to the unexpected success and subsequent wind-down of my involvement in Second Brain Enterprise. I’ll also cover the challenges we faced across our ecosystem, our pivot toward AI for 2026, and some major personal milestones, including becoming a gym rat and preparing for baby number three.

Keep reading or watch the video version of this annual review:

YouTube

More than 3 years after I decided to make Forte Labs a YouTube-first company, our YouTube efforts really came into their own in 2025.

We had our first massively viral video, on Google’s NotebookLM, breaking the 1M view mark for the first time. This one video led to 31,000 new subscribers and a staggering 145,000 hours of watch time.

But YouTube came into its own not just in terms of attracting attention, which it’s been doing for awhile, but as a sales channel. Most of the $1.5M in sales we made from our new AI program, Second Brain Enterprise, came from just a handful of videos there, and we proved that people will make major purchases directly off the platform.

We are now clearly a YouTube-first business, with 53% of our audience growth and 36% of customer discovery happening there. I’m so happy that I decided back in 2022 to pursue it as our main platform, as we wouldn’t have much of a business right now if we hadn’t. 

This graph tracking our following across all our platforms shows how YouTube (in red) is in a league of its own when it comes to attracting new followers, due to the power of the algorithm in finding new audiences.

Despite all these positive signals, there were also some negative ones as well:

• Our average clickthrough rate (a measure of how many people see our thumbnails and decide to click on them) was 4.3%, which is low compared to a target benchmark for best-in-class educational channels of around 8%.
• Although we gained a lot of subscribers, the percentage of returning viewers (which I’m learning is far more important than subscribers) was down 27% due to our changed focus on B2B content that wasn’t relevant to most subscribers.
• Average Percentage Viewed, a measure of how long people watch on average, was down slightly from 24% to 20% (this was partly due to our videos becoming quite a bit longer, but is also worrisome as it’s one of the main numbers that the algorithm looks for).

Most of these negative signals can be attributed to a pivot we made mid-year to B2B-centric AI topics, to support the launch of our Second Brain Enterprise program. That sharp shift in focus led to a lot of churn, confusion, and aversion from our typical viewership. More on that below.

In light of all this, we’re doubling down on YouTube yet again and strengthening the foundation for next year by increasing our publishing cadence to weekly as of this past October. In 2024, we released 31 videos, in 2025 it was 37, and in 2026 we’re aiming for around 46-48. It’s taken us several years to slowly build up the team and the capability to move at this speed, but I’m expecting the higher cadence to give us more opportunities to learn, iterate, and double down on what’s working. 

Website, blog, and email list

The picture for our older ecosystem – which I think of as our website, blog, and email list working together – is less positive.

Part of it is that I’m writing much less on the blog, having released only 21 articles in 2025. That’s partly because I have less time overall since becoming a father, and partly because any concentrated writing time I do have goes to writing books now. 

But a major external factor is that the landscape of online attention is rapidly changing. Blogs are all but dying in the face of competition from algorithmic platforms and Substack. And SEO is being undermined by LLMs that stop people from even searching for things in the first place by giving them the straight up answer.

The blog still attracted 952k visits in 2025, though that is 25% less than the year before. The U.S. accounts for 38% of our website visitors, but we saw an 80% increase from China, which I assume is due to my books being released there. LLMs already account for 3.5% of all visitors, despite the fact that we haven’t done anything to optimize or encourage that. I can see in the coming years AI coming to dominate how people find content online.

Lead magnets are also becoming much less effective, I assume because AI now allows you to create something similar in seconds. Every single source of traffic to our website shows a 40-94% decline in subscription rates, regardless of whether traffic went up or down. This means that organic email subscriptions are way down over the last few years: from 237 per day in 2022 to 115 per day in 2025, a 50% drop. We’re becoming more dependent on “events” such as webinars, viral YT videos, and partnerships and having to work harder to convince people to join our newsletter.

Despite those headwinds, 63k people subscribed to our newsletter this year, representing a 4.23% subscription rate. Once they’re there, engagement is strong, with 48.6% open rates and 3.8% click rates.

Incredibly, in 2025 the average time someone was on our email list before purchasing was only 3 days, which reveals that they don’t necessarily need a lot of nurturing first. The smaller number of people who sign up are also more committed. The total conversion rate from our email list to all products was a healthy 2.75% – which means 1 in 36 people who join our email list end up buying something.

Second Brain Enterprise

This was the big one this year. In last year’s goal-setting, I had a vague intention of launching some kind of AI course in 2025, but had no idea at the time what it would look like. I was open to serendipity, and that serendipity arrived when I met a serial entrepreneur named Hayden Miyamoto who happened to live in the same small town in Mexico. We connected over paddle tennis, and the idea was born out of our shared obsession with AI.

We committed to a 6-month experiment: we would teach 3 cohorts of a brand-new program that we’d create from scratch based on our experience, research, and experimentation. It would be designed for business owners and leaders, prioritize implementation and practical results, and be priced at a level that would make it a significant business investment.

I can now say that that experiment was wildly successful, with almost 200 participants from more than 150 companies having completed the program.

It was so successful, in fact, that it created a bit of an identity crisis for me. It made sense to run the first few cohorts through our existing team and infrastructure at Forte Labs, but for it to reach its potential, we realized it needed its own team, its own infrastructure, and actually a whole new company completely centered on this market. So Hayden has started a new company, EMPOWER Labs, to do just that, and I’ll no longer be involved with it.

This was a difficult decision, but there were many valuable lessons I learned through this collaboration:

• Long-term joint ventures don’t suit me. I don’t like coordinating with another co-founder to reach consensus on decisions, even if they are perfectly reasonable and aligned with my values. I originally became self-employed to maximize my autonomy and creative freedom, and that continues to be my main priority today.
• I realized that although B2B implementations of AI interest me, it isn’t where my experience and expertise are rooted. I haven’t started and don’t run multiple profitable businesses, and therefore didn’t see myself as the best leader for a program designed to serve those needs.
• Through creating this new program, I discovered anew how strong my personal brand is, how much trust people place in me, and how valuable BASB is as a brand and ecosystem perfectly positioned as a stepping stone into the world of AI. But all of that trust and reputation wasn’t built on B2B positioning, and I saw that I’d have to largely abandon much of what I’ve built in order to pursue this new direction, and wasn’t willing to do that.
• I saw how effective a sales team can be, and how feasible it was to recruit, onboard, and train facilitators for the cohorts. These are things Hayden does routinely. But I had never seen so many key functions handed off to new people so quickly and effectively. In the first 3 cohorts, we had 5 separate facilitators, an eye-opening example of the power of delegation. I plan on replicating this model in the future to make cohort-based education more sustainable for me.
• I saw clearly the tangible benefits of a high price point. It benefitted us, by making the customer service burden small and profitability high. But I’m certain it also benefitted our customers, as it inspired such a higher level of commitment from them and their teams.

An underlying doubt I’ve had over the last few years is what education and training would look like in the AI era. So many people have declared the “death of content” or the “death of courses” and I think I bought in a little too much into that doomsday perspective. Second Brain Enterprise demonstrated for me that there’s more need than ever for education around how to use AI effectively, and showed how coaching, interaction, community, and implementation can all serve as moats and differentiators in this new era.

Most of all, I saw that in order to fully pursue this new market, I’d have to dramatically change my focus, what I was working on, my goals and incentives, and I wasn’t willing to do that. I value the total freedom and eclectic mix of random projects I currently pursue too much. That was a valuable realization in itself.

However, I still believe in the program and am confident it’s going to be better than ever. It’s essentially Second Brain principles, infused and leveraged by AI, and applied at a company level – capturing, organizing, and leveraging organizational knowledge the same way individuals do with personal knowledge.

Cohort 4 launches on January 26th, 2026. I’m an affiliate and advocate, and encourage you to join!

Pivoting BASB toward AI

Every few months, I revisit and update the numbers related to my book sales, and every time I do, I come to a new appreciation of what an area of strength this is.

Building a Second Brain has now sold 400,000 copies worldwide, an amazing milestone that I can barely wrap my head around. It continues to sell about 115,000 copies per year (9,500 per month, 2,200 per week) like clockwork. As time goes by, this is increasingly an outlier, indicating that it’s becoming a “category of one” driven by word-of-mouth. Such a book is more like a business asset than a piece of content, and will likely reach half a million copies sold sometime in 2026.

I find myself in the incredible position of standing at the edge of the breaking AI wave, with a sizable audience of early adopters, and a brand and ecosystem built around the “second brain,” a name that seems like it was destined for AI like no other. Everything that’s happening with AI seems like the perfect continuation and expansion of what I was trying to accomplish with my book, except now far more leveraged and accessible.

In 2026, I plan on creating another cohort-based program, this time centered on the needs of individuals – professionals, freelancers, creators, entrepreneurs, and executives who are adopting AI deeply into how they think and work. In other words, we’re going to officially pivot BASB to be AI-first, and do our best to create a curriculum that democratizes this technology and way of working, the same way we did for Personal Knowledge Management.

More to come soon!

 

Life in Perspective book

I’m in the home stretch of this project, which has dominated my time for the last two years and especially 2025.

It’s been a more challenging project than I expected. There are a number of tricky framing and positioning issues, such as the connotation of “annual reviews” as being about performance reviews at work, which most people hate. I’ve had a few crises of faith, where I doubted whether this book was really needed in the world or had something truly unique to offer. 

In contrast to BASB, which was introducing a new methodolgy, annual life reviews are largely about tried-and-true methods that have been around a long time. My contribution is fourfold: 

1. To make it more emotion-centered, embodied, and intuitive, rather than strictly analytical
2. To add technology to the process as an enabling force
3. To center it on an appreciative lens that values what’s good, rather than what’s missing
4. To create a community of practice where people can learn from and with each other, enabled by the Internet

This book also represents a diversification of the topics I’m associated with, including goal setting, visualization, gratitude, presence, intuition, long-term planning, and even spirituality. There are pros and cons to this kind of diversification, I’m learning. On YouTube, for example, mixing so many topics together on one channel may send confusing signals to the algorithm as certain groups are turned off by topics they’re not interested in. 

But ultimately, I believe that annual life reviews are a powerful force for good in the world, I think many more people can and should take advantage of them, and AI is going to make them radically more doable and useful. And the upsell from the book to the live program, which we’ll continue to offer annually, I’m confident will become a pillar of the business. 

For now, the most surprising development has been using a platform called HelpThisBook.com. It allows you to upload a manuscript, and then invite “beta readers” to leave comments and reactions in a simple interface. We invited 600 participants in the current Annual Review 2026 program to share their feedback on it, and so far over 500 of them have done so, leaving over 3,200 reactions and comments across 21,000 reading sessions, which is just remarkable. 

This would be totally overwhelming to review and absorb, except for the fact that most of those are simple emoji reactions (including “I like this,” “This is confusing,” “This part is slow,” and “This is useful”). There are some sentences with 20+ positive reactions, which tells me clearly that the idea is resonating and should be emphasized more or moved earlier in the book. This kind of data is priceless for an author, and will dramatically shape how the book is written and marketed.

2026 Projects

Here is the full range of projects we’re considering taking on in 2026:

The ones in bold are the ones we plan on pursuing:

1. Release v2 of the official Second Brain Notion template – my goal is for anyone seeking to build their Second Brain in Notion to have a useful template as a starting point.
2. Launching a new cohort-based course teaching people how to build a Second Brain with AI – my goal is 200 participants, 1 million in revenue, and $500k in profit in the first year.
3. Pivot the Second Brain Membership to become AI-centric – my goal is to cover all our fixed and recurring expenses with recurring revenue from it.
4. Redesign our self-paced courses to incorporate AI personalization – my goal is to make our courses more effective and impactful for those seeking support.
5. Redesign the Forte Labs website – my goal is to modernize our main website and make it the main portal for discoverability of all our content, products, and services.
6. Host an AI virtual summit – continuing a tradition from past years, I want to host a free virtual summit bringing together experts on how to use AI for human augmentation and leveraging knowledge.
7. Launching my next book Life in Perspective in Nov. 2026 – my goal is 15,000 pre-orders and 100,000 sales in the first 6 months.
8. The Annual Review program 2027 – my goal is to make this the best source of guidance and accountability on successfully completing an annual life review, based on the material in my book.

Overall, I’d love to replicate the financial results of this year again next year.

Open questions for 2026

As usual, these are the open questions I’m holding as we begin the new year. If you have any ideas for potential answers let me know!

• What should the community we build around annual life reviews look like?
• How can we reinvent the self-paced course format with AI personalization?
• How should our web presence be organized across Forte Labs, BASB, and the new Life in Perspective book?
• Which direction should we take our BASB app?
• How can we more deeply use AI in our internal workflows and automations?
• How can we create and protect time for open-ended experimentation?

My personal life

New baby

The big news on the family front is…we’re expecting a new daughter, due in early June.

I was going to write a separate post on how and why we decided to have a third child. In a funny way, two kids feels normal, but three seems kind of extreme and almost demands an explanation! But I think it’s actually quite simple: there is nothing in our lives that produces anywhere near as much joy, fulfillment, and meaning as our kids, so why wouldn’t we want another one?

We have the blessing of being able to afford it, not just financially, but because we have large families that can help us. Part of our motivation is ensuring that our children continue to have that same blessing – of multiple siblings – as it’s priceless.

The other major enabling factor is living in Mexico. The slower pace of life centered around community, a kid-friendly culture that welcomes and cherishes them, and of course, our full-time help at affordable prices all make this so much more feasible and natural. We’ve noticed that many, if not most, of the families at our school have three kids, and that’s no accident.

I became a gym rat

My proudest accomplishment in 2025 on the personal front was that I became a gym rat! After spending our first 9 months in Valle complaining about the lack of good exercise options, and suffering through all kinds of aches and pains, I finally found a solution that works exceedingly well. 

According to my exercise tracking app, Fitbod (which I love and recommend), I lifted over 500,000 pounds this year, across 52 workouts, mostly in the latter two-thirds of the year. That is definitely the most consistently I’ve ever exercised, and I’m now in the best shape of my life by far. 

Exercise has been my “white whale” – my biggest unresolved problem – for as long as I can remember. Every year in my review, I identify it as my greatest area of weakness and need. And what I’m surprised by as I look back is just how long it took to find a sustainable answer:

• Finding a nearby gym that was open and empty during the middle of the day when I like to workout (I was surprised to realize how much a full gym discourages me)
• Hiring a nanny who picks up the kids from school and watches them in the afternoons (which I’ve found is the ideal time for me to work out, as a transition from work to family time)
• Buying a second car so that I could work out during the hour that she’s picking up the kids (so I don’t lose out on either work time or time with the kids)
• Downloading a workout app (Fitbod) that generates customized workouts each day for me (this has been so helpful to consistently build strength while also providing variation and rotation)

Besides these practical measures, the background effect of aging as I hit 40 this year provided me with a whole new set of reasons and motivations for staying in shape. I’m in pain now whether I work out or not, so the only choice is whether I want to be in pain from gaining strength, or from losing it. I’ve also been noticing that I can no longer reliably get into deep focus with my work unless I exercise, which provides yet another source of motivation.

At the start of the year, I asked the open question “How can I make irreversible decisions to preserve my willpower?” The best one I found this year ended up being hiring a nanny specifically to watch the kids every day, just so I could exercise. That turned out to be a better source of accountability even than hiring a personal trainer, because once she arrived at the house, I wasn’t about to sit around and do nothing.

When I look in the mirror, I’m amazed to see someone who actually craves going to the gym, who looks forward to lifting heavy weights (of all things). I don’t recognize myself, in other words, and that’s the best feeling in the world. The better physique and strength is just icing on the cake compared to that. 

At the same time, 2025 was also the sickest year I can remember. I got bad colds twice, and the flu twice, which meant days at a time in which I was knocked completely offline. I know it was partly due to living in an unfamiliar environment in Mexico, partly from having small children, but the lesson I’m drawing from this is that it’s time for me to take other parts of my health as seriously as I took weight lifting this next year.

Starting to think about Brazil

One of the most amazing phenomena I’ve noticed from doing these reviews for 18 years now is how you can suddenly reach a certain milestone, and a whole new season of your life can suddenly come into view. Like exiting a mountain pass and surveying the vast valley that lies beyond it.

We’ve been living in Valle de Bravo for 18 months now, and all of the sudden I have a sense of how long we’re likely to stay here: another 3.5 years, until the summer of 2029. That will mean 5 years of living here in total, which I think is more than enough for the kids to acquire the language, create a connection with the culture, and for us to all form a true community. It also means we’ll have permanent residency in Mexico by then, and can return anytime.

That horizon, in turn, makes the next stage start to come into view: After Mexico, I want to move straight to Brazil and do the same thing all over again. Seeing how meaningful and fun it’s been for the kids in Mexico, I want them to have the same connection to my family’s homeland so we don’t lose that heritage. I’m thinking a small beach town along the southern coast of Brazil for another 5 years, which will put my oldest at 14 years of age in 2034.

I previously asked the question, “What experiences do I want to have with Caio and Delia over the next 10–15 years, while they’re small?” and the clearest answer I’ve arrived at is adventuring around Latin America. 

Built a community

The second proudest accomplishment of the year for me was building a community in Valle. At the start of the year, I asked myself, “What does my jealousy of other people tell me is missing in my life?” and the answer was: I was most jealous of people with deep friendships.

I invested a lot in that area this year, saying yes to almost every invite, finding a group of men who meet every month, and attending many birthday parties with the same families from the school every couple weeks. This is where true satisfaction in life lies: in feeling seen and known and held by a group of people who care about you. I plan on continuing to deepen that aspect of my life in 2026.

The problem of no problem

An interesting thing I noticed during this year’s review that I can’t remember ever feeling is that there was no single, obvious, pressing problem for me to resolve.

Last year, it was the profitability of the business, and we solved that in 2025. In past years, it was exercise, and that’s now also on solid ground. Across the landscape of my work and life, there is no looming threat or urgent crisis demanding my attention.

That is, of course, a tremendous blessing. Much of my 20s and 30s felt like having to work so hard, to build things, to advance and progress – maybe now I get to enjoy the life I’ve built? What a concept!

I have to say that it’s a bit disorienting, to be honest. It’s helpful to have a central issue to orient everything else around, and the lack of one is making me feel uncertain, unmoored, a bit at a loss. I think the main theme of my life is now about savoring and enjoying life, not conquering it, and I’m not completely sure how to go about that.

Suggestions from those who are further ahead on that path are always welcome.

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In the summer of 2005, when I was 20 years old, I sat down and wrote one of my first personal goals:

“Hold a position in the Associated Student Government of Saddleback College at start of Fall semester (August 22, 2005).”

I had just dropped out of college on the East Coast after burning through all my college savings in one year. I’d moved back in with my parents in shame and enrolled in a local community college to try and get my life back on track. Writing down this goal was my first tentative attempt at regaining a sense of control and agency.

I can remember it like it was yesterday – how daunting it felt to commit to this goal, despite the fact that the position was uncontested and there were no real barriers to my winning it in the upcoming student government elections!

Even such a small, easy commitment required me to confront limiting beliefs: that I wasn’t good with numbers or with money. Even entertaining such a small amount of ambition meant I had to shift my identity, since I didn’t remotely see myself as a leader.

I’m happy to say that I persevered through those fears, took on the position successfully, and it ended up being a very rewarding part of my college career. More importantly, it was the inception of my relationship with goals.

Reveling in this first small victory, I soon after decided to write down a series of other goals I had for myself – for the GPA I would attain, for the girlfriend I wanted, and for the 4-year college I wanted to transfer to.

I discovered SMART goals around that time, and decided to attach a target completion date to each of them. Looking back at that list, the furthest date I assigned to my most ambitious goal was in 2025, when I would turn 40 years old. At the fresh-faced age of 20, I couldn’t fathom being any older than that. It was the farthest my imagination could reach.

Now that I’ve arrived at that seemingly distant horizon, I want to revisit not only that first batch of goals, but all the goals I’ve formulated for myself in the 20 years since. I’m less interested in which ones I accomplished or didn’t, and more interested in what I discovered and who I became by aiming for them in the first place.

Let me take you on a retrospective journey through 20 years of goal-setting to find out what I learned.

Building the foundation of adulthood

Looking at the list of outcomes I said I wanted in the earliest days, I can see that I was struggling and striving to build the foundation of my adult life.

Some goals had to do with seemingly small projects, such as creating a website to promote my first business, fixing people’s home computers:

“Build a professional, full-featured website for Forte Computer Solutions by beginning of Spring semester (January 14, 2006).”

I remember I didn’t succeed because there were no user-friendly website builders at the time, and I didn’t have enough motivation to learn HTML. But it was my first personal experience with the challenge of building things with technology, a subject I’m still grappling with today.

Some goals had to do with deep mindset shifts I underwent, such as diving into the world of Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad:

“Complete Rich Dad’s curriculum: read and take notes on all Rich Dad books, master Cashflow 101 and 202, and read all books recommended by Robert Kiyosaki by end of Spring semester (May 20, 2007).”

I’d been raised by artists, and as useful as that was for my creative integrity, it didn’t give me any of the financial or business skills I needed. I spent over a year completely immersed, reading all Kiyosaki’s books, and many others he recommended, and even purchasing his financial education board game and playing it with my friends and family. 

Looking back, I can see how fundamental that experience was for giving me an abundance mentality toward money – that it could be reliably earned, leveraged, multiplied, and compounded, and in a creative and values-aligned way.

Other goals seemed quite random and incidental at the time, such as getting my first English teaching job in Curitiba, Brazil, where I was studying abroad:

“Get a job teaching English at an established school in Curitiba by end of March 2008.”

Yet I now realize that experience opened up the door to my entire career in education. I see repeated evidence that some of the biggest endeavors in my life started so small.

Other projects were clearly massive from the start, and I have no idea what I was thinking taking on something so ambitious:

“Write Beyond the Orange Curtain and have it published by New Year (January 1, 2011).”

That was my first book, and I took every conceivable shortcut I could find to make it real. The chapters of the book were just unedited posts from my travel blog. I used a service called Blurb to design the front and back covers on my computer, and uploaded it to Kindle Direct Publishing. I remember I couldn’t bring myself to charge anyone for it, so instead I made it a fundraiser and donated all the proceeds to charity.

Fast-forwarding a couple of years to the start of my career, my goals started involving higher stakes. I began making real decisions about where my life would lead, with irreversible tradeoffs.

Kicking off my professional career

I returned to the U.S. from my service in the Peace Corps in December 2011, and immediately dedicated myself to finding a job in San Francisco:

“Get a job in the technology or non-profit sector and move to San Francisco by April 30, 2012.”

A few months later, I found myself in that city interviewing for the two jobs I’d received offers for: a junior analyst job at a French consulting firm called Fabernovel, and a role on the fundraising team at the Wikimedia Foundation (which manages Wikipedia, among other projects).

These paths couldn’t have been more different: the former represented a sharp turn into the world of business and technology, while the latter would have continued my current trajectory deeper into the world of non-profits. But I was already wary of the non-profit world. I’d spent much of my 20s in it, and seen a lot of dysfunction, politics, and waste. I decided I wanted to try something new and accepted the consulting job.

At that point, I notice a gap in my running list of goals, and I think it was because for the 18 months I worked at the consulting firm, I wasn’t responsible for choosing my own goals. They were assigned to me, in line with the broader goals of the company. That was useful, to see what it felt like for my personal goals to be subsumed into a wider mission.

I see my own agency emerge again in early 2013, as I started thinking about leaving consulting. I wanted to work on technology more directly, and started planning how I would apply to a tech company like Google, Coursera, Evernote, Udemy, Autodesk, Uber, IDEO, or Tesla.

I had no real technical skills, however, and knew I would need a stellar resume to have any chance. I signed up for a Squarespace account and built my own website, with a portfolio showcasing my credentials and accomplishments:

“Publish an online professional portfolio with documented evidence of my accomplishments, in a beautifully designed format by July 1, 2013.”

That ended up not being nearly enough, and I failed to secure even one interview for any of the roles I applied for at those companies. 

A few months later, in June 2013, after yet another long night at the office banging my head on the keyboard and getting nowhere, I decided to call it quits. I was working too hard, for too little pay, and with too little control of my destiny. I would rather take my chances on my own.

Embarking on the journey of self-employment

As soon as my two weeks’ notice was up, I turned my portfolio website into a business website and threw myself into trying to make money any way I could think of. 

I worked at random events, helped my friends with their projects as a subcontractor, and made my first online course on the GTD productivity method. That course ended up being an unexpected hit, and paid the bills for a while:

“Launch GSD.LAB on Skillshare and get 1,000 paying students signed up by Jan. 1, 2014.”

With a bit of financial breathing room, I had some freedom to experiment, and experiment I did. Looking back, I can see that many of the seeds of my future endeavors were planted around this time as seemingly low-stakes experiments. 

I volunteered to give a talk at a local Quantified Self meetup, which introduced me to the subculture of people using technology for personal development in a systematic way:

“Create and deliver an inspiring, moving, cutting edge talk on my QS experiments for the QS SV Meetup on Nov. 18, 2013.”

The Quantified Self community ended up being my gateway to an adjacent field – personal knowledge management – that would become my main focus in the ensuing years. That talk actually took place at the Evernote headquarters in Redwood City, foreshadowing my relationship with the platform that would be my tool of choice for building my “second brain.”

After the lucky success of my first online course, I found it very difficult to continue making that income stream work sustainably. It was too hard to build the following I knew I needed, while also creating more courses and other products, while also doing everything else involved in running a business. I saw the potential of that career path, but wasn’t ready for it, so I turned to corporate training at the invitation of a mentor:

“Sign a major corporate training contract for productivity/workflow design by Apr. 1, 2014.”

Those workshops were well paid, and gave me a financial lifeline for a couple of years. More importantly, they happened infrequently, giving me lots of free time to learn new skills and pursue new interests.

Setting goals for my personal development

The life of a freelancer was quite uncertain and stressful, and I turned to meditation around this time as a basic survival measure after seeing an introductory book on it mentioned on an online forum one night:

“Establish a daily mindfulness meditation practice by May 31, 2014.”

That would eventually lead me to join a 10-day silent meditation retreat:

“Attend a 10-day meditation retreat by August 31, 2014.”

That experience was so profound that I felt compelled to write about it, which became my first blog post on a fledgling site called Medium. The meditation retreat was free, requiring only 10 days of my time. And yet it was a seismic shock to my psychology, kicking off two of the most significant themes that continue to define my life to this day: writing in public and my further explorations of personal growth experiences.

My next such exploration was to join a weekend seminar called the Landmark Forum, which I’d heard several friends talk about:

“Attend a Landmark Forum program by Dec. 31, 2016.”

I can still remember how daunting it felt to spend $700 of my own money on a seminar. And yet again, the return-on-investment was incalculable. I spent two years immersing myself in the world of Landmark as a result, taking a series of their other courses and seminars, culminating in their 7-month leadership program along with my then-girlfriend Lauren.

I see so many examples of how saying “yes” to something that seemed inconsequential at the time opened up entire new worlds for me. As another example, I agreed to write a series of 5 guest articles for an obscure blog I followed called Ribbonfarm. That experience was my training for writing long-form thought pieces, which would deepen my writing and thinking, attract my first consistent following, and give me exposure to a vibrant community that was the perfect testing ground for my own emerging ideas about productivity:

“Write a 5-post guest series on Ribbonfarm, laying out my vision for productivity and recruiting a smart audience by Jan. 31, 2017.”

And sometimes personal growth was less about reaching some mountain peak of experience, but about taking the time to engage in non-goal-oriented activities. I’m certain, for example, that the time I spent sailing was really important for my mental health:

“Receive Junior Skipper certification from Cal Sailing Club by August 31, 2015.”

I turned to sailing in 2015 when I needed an outlet that had nothing to do with my work, gave me exercise and exposure to nature, and helped me make new friends. The Cal Sailing Club operating out of the Berkeley Marina was my lifeline in all those respects, and I’m so grateful I set aside the time from my professional pursuits to learn to sail there.

The rise of Building a Second Brain

As I saw my ideas start to gain traction, an earlier vision returned: of creating an independent career of reading, researching, writing, and teaching, like a freelance professor. 

I remember vividly in the fall of 2016 when a new goal emerged along these lines, which was intimidating, but also the perfect synthesis of everything I’d learned over the previous few years:

“Create a new online course on digital organization and creative execution, and deliver it to 50 people at premium prices, by Feb. 28, 2017”

As I reentered the online course space, I wanted to approach it differently from the “self-paced” course model that hadn’t worked for me previously. It’s agonizing to see evidence of how long it took me to arrive at that new approach! 

Like watching the main character in a movie stumble around and miss all the obvious clues, it’s all so clear with my 20/20 hindsight vision. I wrote vaguely about creating some kind of “bootcamp,” which would eventually give rise to the cohort-based course model and a whole new category of virtual education.

Around that time, I switched from single-sentence SMART goals to more narrative-style visualization that contained more detail and specificity:

“I run a regular virtual bootcamp, enrolling my most engaged followers in a high-quality, engaging, accountable learning experience using the latest ideas and tools. I have a system for updating and delivering these bootcamps with minimal recurring effort, dedicating most of my time to providing coaching, feedback, and support for their projects and businesses. This bootcamp helps me test and refine the key components of my new vision for productivity, generating testimonials, case studies, and examples for a book.”

My first small beta group ended up being only 15 people, mostly friends or acquaintances who agreed to be part of it for free, in exchange for providing their feedback. We met once a week for 4 weeks, and I recall creating the slides for each call immediately before it took place, based on the feedback from the previous one.

That feedback, thankfully, was excellent, and I went on to deliver a series of cohorts to slowly growing numbers of people, at slowly increasing prices. I can remember reaching the following goal, which finally confirmed that this was a sustainable model for me:

“Deliver BASB v3 to 80 people, generating $48k in revenue, by August 31, 2018.”

It’s astonishing to me to look back on this fledgling start and see what Building a Second Brain has become. In the 7 years since, it’s served hundreds of thousands of people via an ecosystem of books, courses, a membership, and a sea of content, created both by me and countless others. Yet it all began with a goal written down on paper.

It’s also amazing to look back on issues that once occupied a lot of bandwidth and stress, such as putting aside money for taxes and making estimated tax payments, which are now completely automated, and I don’t spend one second thinking about. Other concerns that once seemed unbelievably far in the future, such as saving for retirement, now feel much more relevant since reducing our tax burden has thankfully become our main problem!

What I learned from unfulfilled or delayed goals

I’ve recounted a succession of the goals that worked out and led to something greater, but I can also see many, many others that fizzled out, were off the mark to begin with, or would take far longer to come to fruition than I imagined.

In early 2017, I felt a desire to connect with other creators and entrepreneurs, since that lifestyle could be so solitary so much of the time. I had no idea what that could look like concretely, however, and you can see that lack of clarity in how I worded it:

“Establish a group of like-minded, ambitious, engaged people for mutual learning, accountability, community, and growth by June 30, 2017.”

That desire would persist and only grow over the years, before finally manifesting as the Wholesome Mastermind I would start 6 years later, in 2023. In retrospect, I can see that I wasn’t ready to host an event like that one until I’d reached a certain level of financial stability and gained enough of a reputation that other entrepreneurs would be willing to join.

Other goals seemed to take shape quickly, but would involve many iterations before I figured them out. In 2017, I decided to hire someone for the first time, as the BASB cohorts took off and I needed a course manager to handle the logistics:

“Establish a solid working relationship with a collaborator, significantly boosting my productivity and profitability by Dec. 31, 2017.”

I can still remember how scary that was, what an immense responsibility it felt like, and how hesitant and unclear my expectations were. I hired the first person who offered to work with me, without any semblance of a wider search. Eight years later, and after hiring probably 20 people in the interim, I’m finally starting to feel like I’ve achieved a balance of autonomy and accountability with my team.

The narrative style of goal-setting that I adopted around this time led to an unexpected side effect: it revealed a lot more detail about my mistaken assumptions around what would bring me happiness and fulfillment. The results are often insightful or funny.

In early 2014, I wrote: 

“I wake up after a restful night of sleep, which was tracked by QS devices for later analysis. I record my health metrics using a smart scale, activity tracker wristband, and other QS devices.”

LOL! At this time, I was neck-deep in the Quantified Self movement and related ideas, and believed that self-optimization was the path to self-fulfillment. If only I could achieve a high enough sleep score, fitness score, productivity score, etc., then surely I’d be happy!

That optimization mindset extended to my surroundings and the products I bought:

“My chair was chosen after in-depth research and perfectly supports my spine. I’ve also studied and practiced the best sitting techniques and ergonomic positioning, and use them.”

Thankfully, not long after this period, I would realize what a dead-end self-optimization becomes after a certain point. I learned to satisfice instead: to allow most parts of life to be relaxed and somewhat “mediocre” at any given time, so I could focus my energies on a few things that truly matter.

In 2014, I invested a lot of time and money launching my second online course, on habits, which would end up being a tremendous flop:

“I am teaching an online course on behavior design, teaching newcomers how to make a plan for designing and sustaining new habits, and how to execute the plan using the best ideas, methodologies, and tools out there.”

My choice of topic was spot on, as the meteoric success of Atomic Habits a few years later would demonstrate. But in retrospect, I can see exactly what didn’t work: what I was teaching wasn’t authentic to me. I’ve never been particularly committed to habits or a routine of any kind. I don’t even really believe in them, preferring to flex and adapt my choices to how I feel. That tension, between what I was recommending and how I lived, showed up everywhere and doomed the project from the start.

But even that failure taught me a profound lesson: that I shouldn’t chase the trends or try to do what was popular. I have to follow what is authentic to me, what I’m passionate and inherently curious about, even if it seems to lead somewhere random. I still follow that principle to this day.

Goals as a means to self-knowledge

I notice in my narrative goal-setting that I had a lot of beliefs about what my work “should” look like, many of which turned out to be misconceptions. 

For example, I kept returning to the idea of “one-on-one coaching,” since that has always been such a powerful trend in personal development circles in the San Francisco Bay Area. But I would eventually learn that coaching wasn’t a good fit for me, and I was much better suited to monetizing my knowledge through courses that could serve many people at once.

The same is true for public speaking. I wrote:

“I speak regularly at events and conferences around the world, using them as platforms to spread my message and impact people directly.”

And for consulting:

“I consult with the world’s most influential organizations, shaping the development of products and services that manifest human-centered design principles and what I’ve learned about human-centered work.”

I had other misconceptions around what was important in business. I put way too much emphasis on having a slick brand for Forte Labs in the early days, for example, pouring time into logos, business cards, and beautiful slides:

“The Forte Labs brand has been completely redesigned and refreshed, presenting a look and feel equal to the world’s most innovative brands. This brand is reflected in the website, all social media properties, and printed materials, providing a consistent and alluring experience with every interaction.”

With the benefit of hindsight, the brand didn’t matter at all and would only become important and clear when BASB came about.

Many of the goals I set for myself were most useful not because I successfully achieved them, but because I didn’t. They taught me what I truly wanted and didn’t want. That self-knowledge and self-awareness is far more valuable than whatever I would have gained by unquestioningly pursuing those goals to their completion.

I had so many fanciful ideas of what I thought I wanted, such as “having breakfast in a super modern, gorgeous kitchen.” It turns out that acquiring a “super modern” kitchen requires renting a super modern apartment, which is very expensive. I found that I much preferred to live in affordable places that didn’t stress me out when rent was due.

Another example is “frequent business travel,” which felt so luxurious and prestigious for a short period, until I quickly realized I wanted to avoid it at all costs. 

The runway is longer than you think, but the plane can soar higher than you imagine

Many goals I set for myself seemed so far out of reach, and were far out of reach! In my 2015 goal-setting, I dared to write:

“I’m generating $200,000 per year in pre-tax income.”

This felt like a totally audacious sum, and it would be 4 years until I achieved it in 2019. A couple of years later, as the pandemic fueled online business growth, our personal income would reach 7 figures, which my 2015 self could scarcely have imagined. I would give anything to travel back in time and see the look on his face as I delivered the news.

This is a case of a common phenomenon I can detect in retrospect: that many goals take longer to accomplish than I first imagined, yet once I do, their potential can greatly exceed my limited imagination. In other words, I tend to underestimate the “runway” needed for the plane to take off, but once it achieves liftoff, it can soar far higher than I can imagine.

Another example of that principle is my book advance. In 2015, I wrote: 

“I have a book deal with an upfront advance of at least $50,000.” 

You can sense in my language a kind of pleading tone – I really would have been happy with a book deal of any size.

It would, in fact, take me 6 years to receive the first part of that book advance, but when it came, it was $325,000, a sum that exceeded my combined income from my first 5 years of self-employment. Today, a decade after I wrote those words, I’ve made $1.85 million from the book and associated product sales, and project that number should reach $6.8 million in earnings over its lifetime. Astonishing.

It’s amusing to look back on some of my earliest goals, such as to “reach financial freedom,” which I defined as having enough passive income to meet my expenses:

“Become financially secure (passive income = expenses) by age 33 (May 4, 2018).”

I understand now that that goal was based on a misconception that work was something I should try to “escape.” From the vantage point of today, I wouldn’t want to stop working even if I had the choice to, as it’s one of my greatest sources of learning and fulfillment. And I know that the sense of security I was looking for isn’t found in a certain size bank balance, but in a holistic life of rich relationships, including a healthy relationship with risk and uncertainty.

The same is true for personal goals. Almost every year, I wrote down something along these lines:

“I perform some type of exercise every day, and vary my exercises to keep me in shape and support overall health.”

Over time, I tested out a variety of theories about health and fitness, such as Paleo-style diets, CrossFit workouts, high-protein breakfast, etc., that were making the rounds at the time. None of them ever really stuck for long.

Regular exercise has always been my “white whale,” and it is only over a decade later, in 2025, that I can say I’ve (more or less) formed that habit. I find that I’m able to do it now because I’m in a different life stage with different, more aligned motivations: not to get ripped or impress girls, but to avoid aches and pains and be more active with my children.

I see so many examples of just how long it takes many desires and intentions to come to pass. We tend to think in weeks, months, quarters, and, if we are really long-term thinkers, at the scale of a year. But I can’t help but conclude, as I look back at 20 years of goals, that most of my most meaningful pursuits took years to manifest.

Goals for the business

I see many examples in my business-related goals of a variety of theories and hypotheses I was testing at various points.

In 2020, I tried having “no meeting days”:

“Each day has a strong unifying intention, either free of appointments so I can focus on producing something, or open and spontaneous to make myself available to people who need me.”

But I would soon discover that a day was too large a block of time, and it fit my energy cycles much better to reserve all mornings free of meetings, and to spend the afternoons on calls.

I can see I consistently underestimated the impact of the economic and cultural environment on my business growth, thinking it all depended only on me instead of trends in online education and the economy:

“Forte Labs is growing explosively, not because of what I’m doing or pushing through, but because of who I’m being.”

I see other examples of my naivete, such as thinking I could “open source” all my content and still have a profitable business:

“Everything I know is open-sourced and available to help people create more freedom, pleasure, and impact in their work and lives, whether they ever buy from me or not.”

Some goals represented major initiatives that turned out to be completely misguided.

“I oversee an online course incubator, which regularly turns out new courses and other offerings that generate income and value for the people that have developed them. I provide every piece of knowledge, service, and counsel the participants need to develop their idea to fruition, and take a percentage while giving them a worldwide sales and marketing platform.”

We did pursue trying to build a platform and marketplace for multiple courses from other instructors for about a year, but that failed miserably as it wasn’t in line with our values or capabilities.

I laugh at how unclear my articulation of what I do has been:

“Our community is the world’s best source of conversations, curated resources, tutorials, and experiments on the future of work.”

I don’t think it’s that much better even today!

I’m also reminded, looking back at goals I’ve set, of just how diverse and wide-ranging my interests are:

“I oversee a portfolio of experiments pushing forward the boundaries of my field, such as group knowledge management, design thinking, science fiction prototyping, behavior change, self-tracking, art and music, crowdsourced collaboration, full-stack freelancing, online marketing, project management, community building, creativity, emergence, history, self-awareness, online learning, time-tracking, visual thinking, and writing.”

This exercise is a reminder to revisit some of those interests that I didn’t have time to pursue in the past, and perhaps resurrect them in a new form.

What I value today

Surveying the long arc of my goal-setting history, it’s clear that getting married and starting a family was the most consequential shift in my life. It changed every aspect of my life, including goal-setting.

One of the earliest goals I wrote down at 20 years old was this one:

“Get married to a beautiful, loving, intelligent, spiritual, sensitive woman who will make a great mother, in a wonderful gathering of our families that creates a community around us, by December 31, 2020.”

That wedding would take place in April 2019, and I couldn’t even imagine how meaningful, complex, and fulfilling that marriage would be.

I can see Lauren’s influence on my goal-setting earlier, however, such as in 2016, when I wrote:

“I respect the cycles of my body, mind, spirit, family, friends, community, nature, and nation, leaning into each season as an opportunity to bring balance to a new aspect of my life.”

She taught me balance, and nuance, and how to savor life in the present rather than only living for the future. I would never have written the following intention if it weren’t for her:

“I am ambitious but equanimous, driven but tolerant. I don’t go to unnecessary extremes, and accept moderation in most areas of my life at any given time.”

Some of the most meaningful, precious intentions for me these days are not the business milestones, but rather the mundane details of a calm and peaceful life:

“We go to bed early, reading and meditating, and fall asleep with a sense of peace and deep gratitude.”

How I set goals today

Around the birth of our daughter in 2022, I noticed that the list format for my goals that I’d kept for over 15 years at that point no longer resonated with me.

It’s because our lives themselves had become non-linear: it was no longer about the steady march of piling one brick on top of another, or winning each leg of a race. We are now a family of 4, with a lifestyle and business that my younger self couldn’t have imagined. Life has become more about enjoying our days, finding meaning in them, and squeezing the juice out of everything life has to offer.

So I switched to a mindmap format to try and capture the non-linear, exploratory, and serendipitous way I think about goals today. The mindmap has three clear parts, reflecting how clearly I see the three main priorities in my life: Family, Health, and Work. 

Here’s the most recent version, as of the end of 2024:

For Family, everything revolves around our kids to an extent I wouldn’t have thought possible. Looking at the intentions in that part of the mindmap, I think we fulfill all of them to a great extent, except for buying an investment property, which is something Lauren and I have realized we don’t want to manage.

For Health, my longest-running goals of eating healthy and exercising regularly have finally been fulfilled, but not because of any newfound self-discipline. It’s because we hired a full-time housekeeper and cook who takes care of all our meals. I’m working out consistently, mostly because of the nanny who picks up the kids from school and watches them in the afternoon. In retrospect, the key to my results in these areas depended on getting outside support, not any sophisticated habit formation framework. There’s a lesson there, I think.

The one intention in the “Health” arena I can’t say I’ve fulfilled has been finding a solid hobby I’m dedicated to. It’s more like I have a variety of interests and hobbies that I turn to if and when needed. In retrospect, that fits me better. I think I was expecting to become passionate about something like woodworking, or gardening, or beekeeping, but the reality is, I don’t have much obsessive energy left over after my workday.

And for Work, I once wrote “Total freedom to pursue my interests,” but only recently realized how central that value is to me. This year, I walked away from a plausibly multi-7-figure business opportunity because I couldn’t stand the thought of having to buckle down and focus on one thing for a couple of years that wasn’t perfectly in line with my curiosity.

I also wrote in the past that I would be “at the creative edge of my writing,” but that looks quite different from what I expected. I’ve realized I don’t mainly value writing the most creative, soulful prose, nor pushing forward cutting-edge research. I value popularizing and spreading proven ideas that I know work to more people, who wouldn’t find out about them otherwise. That’s a different kind of “edge,” and I’m finding it requires traits like balance, wisdom, and a sense of perspective. Maintaining those qualities in my work is my own personal “cutting edge.”

These days, I face an abundance of opportunities, a plethora of possible paths forward. It feels much less like forging a path through an impenetrable jungle with my machete, and more like thoughtfully intuiting my way like an experienced explorer tracking an elusive beast.

Everyone has underestimated me, including myself

Looking back at the last half of my life, and how deeply it was shaped by the practice of goal-setting, a final lesson comes to mind: everyone I’ve ever met – including my parents, teachers, friends, professors, colleagues, mentors, and employers – has always underestimated me.

No one ever knew how much I was capable of, not even myself. No one understood or could have predicted how much hard work, courage, determination, and persistence I had inside me, least of all myself. I had to find it all inside.

This thought came to mind as I was driving in the car on the way to pick up my kids, shortly after writing a first draft of this article. It brought me to tears, as I felt myself acknowledging my younger self and giving him the trust and recognition that he so craved. 

Applying that same observation to others has led me to one of my core beliefs: that each person’s potential is inherently unlimited. That’s why I believe so much in education and its limitless ability to transform people’s lives. Why I’m such an advocate of personal development as a discipline that can be planned and pursued systematically. Why it’s so important to me to learn how to leverage AI as a force to unlock people’s talents and abilities. 

The next 20 years of my own journey, I can clearly see, are about helping others craft the life of their dreams as I have. I intend to use everything I know and everything I have to do so.

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My wife Lauren and I met at a co-working space in San Francisco in our mid-twenties. I was working an entry-level position at a creative consulting agency, at the bottom of the pyramid. Lauren was making $15/hour at an arts nonprofit, living rent-free with her aunt. 

We both saw no pathway to climb in our current jobs and chose two different paths to reaching for more.

I quit the creative agency to become an entrepreneur, designing my first online course. Lauren applied to grad school.

Neither path was easy, but both catapulted us from entry-level jobs to the careers of our dreams. What got us there wasn’t our qualifications, but our courage to go after something bigger than we were ready for.

Those leaps transformed us. We learned that you don’t wait until you’re qualified—you become qualified in the process of taking action. When you pursue something that stretches you, the journey itself develops the exact skills and confidence you need to succeed. 

Since then, Lauren and I have shared a mission of helping others take similar leaps. (If you hang out with us too much, you risk quitting your day job). We love helping people become active creators of their lives rather than passive participants in systems that don’t serve them.

What we’ve noticed is that both kinds of leaps—starting a business and applying to grad school—require the same underlying capacities. People without the ideal background, resources, or pedigree often overlook the soft skills that can propel them over perceived limitations. These leaps require courage and the ability to articulate a vision that moves you and others. 

But there is also a difference in our two approaches.

My work tends to resonate with people who have considerable autonomy—freelancers, creators, entrepreneurs, executives, and others who design their own career paths in the wild frontiers of professional independence. 

But the reality is that most people’s careers don’t unfold that way. They navigate through institutions—companies, universities, governments, and nonprofits. Their success depends on leveraging opportunities these organizations provide and successfully passing through gatekeepers who control access to advancement. This is where Lauren is the yin to my yang. 

While I’ve spent a decade helping people create freedom outside traditional structures, she’s mastered the art of navigating within them—and teaching others to do the same. Through her program Grad App Academy, she’s coached over 500 people from around the world into gaining admission to elite schools including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and pretty much any other top U.S. university you can name.

I’m incredibly proud and excited to share that she’s now distilled all that experience and knowledge into a new book, Beyond Acceptance: The Transformational Journey of Applying to Grad School.

The Hidden Curriculum No One Teaches

Her book reveals the “hidden curriculum” of applying to grad school – a series of rules, insights, and strategic levers that no one teaches you, and yet vastly increase your odds of getting into the school of your dreams. These tactics are crucial for standing out from the crowd of more than 1 million people who apply to U.S. graduate programs every single year.

As a co-founder of our company, Forte Labs, Lauren also weaves in many of the ideas and principles you may have seen in my content or books, but geared toward grad school applications.

Most people approach grad school applications by working harder: taking more classes to boost their GPA, studying endlessly for standardized tests, applying to dozens of schools hoping something sticks. They’re exhausted, scattered, and often end up with mediocre results because they’re spreading their energy too thin.

Lauren teaches the opposite approach: work smarter by being strategic and intentional.

Instead of applying to 15 schools, apply to 4-7 programs that truly resonate with your vision. Instead of trying to compensate for every perceived weakness, leverage your unique strengths. Instead of cramming more credentials onto your resume, craft a compelling narrative that helps admissions committees see the value you’ll bring.

The title captures what makes this book different from every other grad school application guide out there. Yes, it contains all the tactical advice you need—how to choose programs, craft compelling essays, secure strong recommendations, and navigate interviews. But more importantly, it teaches the transformational mindset shifts that will serve you for taking any big leap: 

Curiosity over Conditioning- Learning to follow what genuinely lights you up rather than what society tells you you should do.

Courage over Credentials – Taking action despite feeling unqualified, reaching out to strangers, and creating your own opportunities rather than waiting for permission.

Compassion over Criticism – Silencing your inner critic to see your unique gifts and tell your story powerfully.

Intuition over Information – Learning to trust your inner wisdom when facing uncertainty.

These aren’t just principles for grad school applications. They’re the capacities that allow you to navigate any inflection point in your life with confidence and clarity. They’re what allow you to stop letting gatekeepers determine your worth and start trusting yourself to create the future you envision.

Whether you’re applying to grad school this year or considering any other big leap, this book will help you develop the courage to go after what you deeply want—and become the kind of person who continues pursuing meaningful goals long after the acceptance letters arrive.

Lauren has seen her former students use the same skills she’s taught to win major scholarships, grant funding, and even get into start-up incubators like Y Combinator. 

Start With the Most Important Question

Most books on this topic focus narrowly on the “how,” taking for granted that getting a graduate degree is the right choice for you. Lauren’s process is much deeper, more personal, and more foundational. It begins with crafting a core vision you have for your life and then determining if grad school is the shortcut to that future, or a detour.

Starting with this foundation has so many powerful advantages. First, it may cause you to realize that grad school isn’t the right path for you at all, saving you years and many thousands of dollars. Depending on what you are trying to achieve in your life and in the world, she asks you to consider all kinds of alternative pathways that may be a much better fit, including:

• Learning the skills you seek through work experience (and getting paid for it!)
• Finding mentors in your field you could learn from directly
• Taking online courses, bootcamps, cohorts, fellowships, or other programs that more directly target your goal
• Starting an independent project or even an organization that teaches you through real-life experience

This is such a valuable, crucial step! Lauren often notices that many people go to grad school for the wrong reasons – because they don’t know what else to do, because it seems like the “next logical thing,” or to please their parents. Lacking a compelling vision for where they’re going, they casually walk into this multi-year, six-figure commitment without a plan for who they want to be on the other end.

If you decide that grad school is indeed the right choice for you, then starting with your vision will be just as important, since the lack of one is the single biggest mistake that Lauren has seen in the over 1,000 essays she’s reviewed.

As she writes in her book:

“Instead of “I want to work in renewable energy,” I want to hear “I want to accelerate the transition to clean energy in rural communities that have been economically dependent on fossil fuel industries.” Instead of “I want to get into tech,” I want to hear “I want to develop technologies that democratize access to high-quality film special effects.”

Once you’re clear on your vision, Lauren then takes you through a strategic, targeted, and proven process for developing the best possible application you can, including dozens of insights and tricks she’s gleaned from seeing who gets in and who doesn’t.

For example:

• How to reach out to current students to get insight into what it’s actually like to be in the program you’re applying to, and what unwritten rules determine who gets in
• Revealing essay prompts that help you uncover the stories, milestones, and paradigm-shifting moments that made you who you are today
• Guidelines on when and how to use AI to save time, and when to avoid it at all costs
• How to prep your stories and examples in advance, so you’re not scrambling during an interview
• How to draft your own letters of recommendation to make it far more likely you’ll get them submitted on time
• How to negotiate your funding with the university you got accepted to, instead of just settling for whatever they offer you

Lauren started her business because she was the first in her family to go to college. She witnessed the many built-in disadvantages for people like her trying to ascend through the halls of elite institutions. At UC Berkeley, she served on an admissions committee and taught as a Graduate Student Instructor, and saw firsthand how unfair and opaque the entire admissions process could be.

She has spent the last year pouring her love and wisdom into this book to make her knowledge more accessible to others, especially anyone who doesn’t have the perfect resume or the most pristine pedigree.

Her mission is to serve those who didn’t go to the most prestigious schools, are applying from outside the U.S., received a low GPA, or are switching into new fields they haven’t previously studied. 

For all these people, applying to schools and programs of various kinds is still one of the most reliable paths to upward mobility, financial stability, and impact. This book contains the best advice I’ve ever seen on how to take that path confidently and successfully.

The reason it’s called “Beyond Acceptance” is that the skills you gain, the story you tell, and ultimately the person you become as a result of applying to grad school, or applying to anything, will continue to serve you for the rest of your life, whether in business, parenting, advocacy, relationships, or in retirement.

Lauren writes that “Your purpose isn’t something you do; it is something you are, a state of being that can’t be taken away by getting rejected from grad school.”

Perhaps the most fundamental thing of all that you’ll take away from this book is how to believe in your vision, whether or not traditional systems of power recognize it or not. What that ultimately requires is learning to listen to your inner compass, no matter what society conditions you to believe.

I encourage you to pick up a copy on Amazon.

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Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

When I began writing my next book more than a year ago, on the topic of “annual life reviews,” I assumed that the practice was a fairly recent invention.

Maybe it came from the self-help movement of the 1970s. Or from corporate performance reviews. At most, I figured it might trace back to Ben Franklin or some other Enlightenment-era optimizer.

Yet, as I dove deeper and deeper into its history, I realized that I couldn’t have been further off the mark. What we think of as a modern productivity practice draws from three completely different traditions that have been evolving for thousands of years.

The English word “review” comes from the Middle French revoir, literally “to see again.” Every time we conduct an annual review, we’re participating in an ancient human ritual: the act of turning around to look at where we’ve been before continuing forward.

Fittingly, learning about the history behind the annual review caused me to see it in a whole new light. It fulfills a need so fundamental that nearly every culture in human history has developed some version of it.

Once you see these patterns, you can’t unsee them. Let me take you on a journey through time to show you what I mean.

The 4,000-Year-Old Productivity Hack

It’s 2000 BCE in ancient Babylon. 

Spring has arrived, farmers are planting their crops, and the entire civilization is engaged in a 12-day festival called Akitu. The Babylonian new year begins in mid-March, when they mark the milestone by planting their crops, crowning a new king, and most importantly for our purposes, making promises to their gods to pay back debts and return borrowed objects.

These are the first recorded “annual resolutions” in human history.

What strikes me about this ancient practice is how sophisticated it was. The Babylonians understood something that behavioral scientists are just now proving: combining practical actions (paying debts) with sacred meaning (promises to gods) creates powerful behavior change. They weren’t just organizing their finances—they were aligning their human affairs with cosmic order.

And they were doing this 4,000 years before anyone had heard of GTD or bullet journaling.

The Two-Faced God Who Saw Everything

Fast forward 2,000 years to ancient Rome, where things get even more interesting and recognizable.

By 153 BCE, the Romans had made January 1st the official start of the year, using that milestone to inaugurate their leaders, known as consuls. Over the next century or two, they developed a series of elaborate New Year rituals around that we continue in many ways to this day.

Those rituals weren’t just for commemorating another passing year. They constituted what I can only describe as ancient behavioral design. They believed that everything you did on New Year’s Day would set the pattern for your entire year. So they wore their best clothes, avoided quarreling, exchanged gifts, and performed symbolic acts of what they intended to do throughout the year.

As one classical text describes: “People took care that all they thought, said, and did, was pure and favorable, since everything was ominous for the occurrences of the whole year.”

Sound familiar? It’s a 2,000-year-old version of “fake it till you make it.” Millennia before modern psychology, the Romans had already discovered that acting “as if” could create one’s reality. They also incorporated “supernatural spring cleaning” and vows of renewal—combining physical clearing with psychological fresh starts.

The Romans dedicated January 1st to Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings, doors, and transitions. His two faces weren’t a sign of deception—they represented his ability to simultaneously see the past and future (If you’ve ever done an annual review, you know exactly what this feels like).

As I began to follow the thread of religious attitudes to temporal milestones, I discovered that spiritual traditions had developed some of the most sophisticated annual review systems, each one adding unique insights to the practice.

The Sacred Architecture of Change

The Jewish Innovation: Preparation Before Declaration

The Jewish High Holy Days offer a particularly refined approach. The ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur create a structured period for reflection and renewal. But my key takeaway came from what happens before: Jewish tradition includes a full month of preparation (Elul) before the new year even begins.

This addresses one of the fundamental challenges with modern resolutions—the unrealistic expectation that change happens instantly on January 1st. The Jewish calendar builds in time for gradual implementation, so new patterns are already taking root when the new year arrives.

The ritual of Tashlich—symbolically casting away sins by throwing breadcrumbs into flowing water—provides a physical action to represent internal transformation. The Machzor (High Holy Day prayer book) offers specific liturgies for self-examination. It’s a complete system for transformation, refined over millennia.

The Christian Watch Night: Collective Transformation

In 1740, Methodist founder John Wesley introduced Covenant Renewal Services on New Year’s Eve. These “watch night” services combined prayer, singing, and public resolutions for better Christian living.

The tradition gained historical significance on December 31, 1862—”Freedom’s Eve”—when enslaved people gathered in watch night services waiting for the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect and grant them freedom. This moment linked personal transformation with collective liberation, demonstrating how annual reviews can operate on both individual and societal levels.

The Christian tradition also offers an important linguistic insight. The Greek word metanoia, often translated as “repentance” in the Bible, actually means “a change of mind, a reorientation, a fundamental transformation of outlook.” Renowned Biblical scholar A.T. Robertson called the translation of metanoia as mere repentance “a linguistic and theological tragedy” and “the worst translation in the New Testament.”

As Robertson explains: “John’s call was not to be sorry, but to change mental attitudes and conduct.” This distinction was a revelation for me, having been raised in a Christian household. Year-end rituals aren’t about feeling guilty or admitting your faults—they’re about reorientation.

The Eastern Path: Physical Clearing, Mental Renewal

Asian religions and cultures developed many practices that use physical actions to create psychological change.

China: During Lunar New Year, families thoroughly clean houses to sweep away bad luck, settle all debts, and perform rituals for prosperity. The Book of Rites (Liji) contains detailed renewal ceremonies. The emphasis is on removing negativity from the past year so the new year begins with positive energy.

Japan: Japanese culture offers multiple practices. Kakizome—the “first writing” of the year on January 2nd—involves writing auspicious characters in calligraphy that encapsulate annual themes. These are displayed publicly, creating accountability through visibility.

The practice of misogi goes deeper. Practitioners make pilgrimages to sacred waterfalls, performing preparatory fasting and prayers. They enter freezing water while chanting “harai tamae kiyome tamae rokkon shōjō“—asking the kami (spirits) to wash away impurity from the six elements that make up human existence. On New Year’s Eve (ōmisoka), temple bells ring 108 times to dispel earthly desires.

Iran: Persian Nowruz marks spring’s first day with khaneh tekani—thorough house cleaning that serves as both practical preparation and spiritual renewal. It’s amazing to see how many cultures thought it was important to connect annual rituals to natural cycles.

When Business Reinvented the Wheel

In modern times, the reflective practices born in a religious context migrated to the arena of business.

From Shareholders to Self-Development

The corporate world’s contribution began with the Dutch East India Company in 1602—the first corporation to issue shares and provide annual reports to shareholders. They created the very first model for public corporate accountability.

By 1837, the New York and New Haven Railroad produced one of the first modern annual reports with detailed financial statements and performance commentary, introducing the idea of an accompanying narrative to explain and frame business results. 

U.S. Steel’s more transparent 1903 report established the template still used by businesses today.

The Performance Review Evolution

By the 1940s, 60% of companies used annual performance reviews of workers; by the 1960s, this rose to 90%, becoming a fixture of global business culture.

A performance review might include an employee’s key deliverables, competencies like teamwork and communication, training needs, and career aspirations.

The evolution of these reviews reflects changing philosophies about human nature and motivation. Early reviews were straightforward, top-down assessments mostly used for pay decisions. By the 1980s, Jack Welch at GE popularized “forced rankings”—stack-ranking employees against each other, often accompanied by dismissal of the lowest performers.

Recent research has revealed significant problems with the traditional approach to performance reviews:

• One survey found that only 14% of employees strongly agreed that their performance review inspired them to improve
• The same study found that reviews made performance worse about one-third of the time
• Psychologists Meyer, Kay, and French have found that critical feedback in an annual appraisal often harmed subsequent performance, mainly because it put employees on the defensive

That last study identified one reason performance reviews may not work: combining multiple goals in one conversation—evaluating for pay while coaching for development—can create conflicting purposes.

Influenced by new management thinking like Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y (emphasizing employee empowerment), reviews have evolved to include goal setting, career development, and coaching. Many companies have now moved away from annual reviews toward continuous feedback models, focusing on two-way dialogue and future-oriented development.

The Agile Revolution

A significant innovation came from software development in the 1990s and 2000s. Agile methodologies formalized “retrospectives”—regular team meetings following each work sprint. The Agile Manifesto (published in 2001) popularized retrospectives as an integral part of its iterative approach to building software.

These retrospectives, drawing from influences like After Action Reviews in the military and Japanese Kaizen principles, ask straightforward questions:

• What worked well?
• What didn’t work?
• How can we improve?

The military’s “After Action Review” was another influence. It offered a structured approach to review the results of key missions, emphasizing transparency and learning from both successes and mistakes even in high-stakes scenarios.

This shift from individual judgment to collective learning transformed thinking about reviews. This idea of regular, systematic review and refinement was later adopted in a wide variety of other industries, emphasizing that ongoing reflection can drive productivity and innovation.

The Modern Media Transformation

Most recently, the reflective practices that were once private or at least internal to a company became pieces of media that were openly shared, published, and celebrated.

When Reviews Became Public

The phrase “year in review” appeared in print as far back as 1888, and by 1897, it was used in business reports to describe a recap of the year’s accomplishments. But it was only in the 21st century that they became a widespread cultural phenomenon.

Facebook’s automated “Year in Review” videos (which compile a user’s most popular photos and posts) and Spotify’s “Wrapped” playlists (summarizing a user’s music listening habits for the year) brought the year-in-review to the individual level, turning personal reflection into shareable content. Annual reviews shifted from private exercises to public performances.

Annual reviews combined with life coaching and positive psychology became a popular fixture online, with content creators, entrepreneurs, and other public figures commonly sharing narrative-style “year in review” blog posts, sometimes as letters to their future or past selves. 

They perform personal SWOT analyses and apply KPIs to personal goals (“I aimed to read 20 books and read 15; that’s 75% of target”). Habit tracking apps provide year-end summaries of one’s progress, and photo books can be printed on demand. AI tools can now digitize your handwriting from a journal or diary and make it available for further analysis using Large Language Models.

Academia contributed its own tradition—”annual reviews” are scholarly articles that summarize a scientific field’s progress over the past year, helping experts catch up with cumulative knowledge. This tradition contributed the idea that annual reviews could be used as a teaching tool, to share insights with an interested community of peers or colleagues.

The Eternal Human Pattern

A Century of Familiar Themes

Historical records reveal that the resolutions people were making 100 years ago were remarkably similar to the ones we commit to today. Early 20th-century postcards include examples of people resolving to:

• “Cultivate cheerfulness”
• “Repel promptly every thought of anxiety”
• “Use the most up-to-date selling methods”
• Swear less
• Have a more cheerful disposition
• Recommit to God
• Live a “sincere and serene life”
• “Repelling promptly every thought of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, impurity, and self-seeking”
• “Smile when you fall down and out”
• “Keep a diary”

A 1911 cigarette ad suggested men “Stop kissing other people’s girls.” Journalist Ida Wells ended the year 1887 with a relatable feeling: “I am so overwhelmed with the little I have done for the one who has done so much for me & I resolve to … work for the master [i.e. God].” (She apparently stuck with it, too, teaching Sunday school in her hometown of Memphis for much of her life.)

Anne Halkett, a writer and Scottish aristocrat, titled a page in her 1671 diary “Resolutions,” coining the term for the first time, and pledging to “I will not offend any more.” By 1813, when a Boston newspaper coined the full phrase “New Year resolutions,” it observed skeptically that people “will sin all the month of December, with a serious determination of beginning the new year with new resolutions… with the full belief that they shall thus expiate and wipe away all their former faults.”

The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette concluded in 1913: “The mischief is that this fascination doesn’t as a rule last longer than the first twenty-four hours! … Frail is human nature!” 

Apparently, the phenomenon of setting ambitious resolutions only to forget about them 24 hours later was already well-known a century ago!

The Seven Universal Patterns

After studying these traditions across cultures and millennia, seven consistent patterns emerge:

1. Temporal Landmarks Create Fresh Starts

Every culture ties reviews to natural cycles—spring planting, winter solstice, lunar calendars. These markers create psychological breaks with the past, making it easier to change one’s thinking or behavior and make it stick.

2. Physical Clearing Enables Mental Renewal

From Roman “supernatural spring cleaning” to Chinese debt-settling to Japanese waterfall purification—lasting traditions include physical actions representing internal transformation. External order facilitates internal clarity.

3. Preparation Beats Declaration

Effective traditions include preparation periods: Jewish Elul, Chinese pre-New Year cleaning, corporate planning cycles. Real change begins before the official “start date.”

4. Public Commitment Drives Private Change

Whether Babylonian promises to gods, Japanese calligraphy displays, or Instagram posts—visible commitments increase follow-through. There are fewer forces more powerful than social accountability.

5. Individual Transformation Requires Collective Support

Strong traditions—African American watch nights, agile retrospectives, Japanese group purifications—recognize that personal change amplifies in community. Isolation undermines resolutions; connection sustains them.

6. The Practical and Spiritual Must Integrate

Successful year-end rituals combine concrete actions (paying debts, setting goals) with deeper meaning (values alignment, spiritual renewal). Neither element alone suffices. The Babylonians understood this 4,000 years ago, yet we’ve largely forgotten it today.

7. Honesty and Hope Must Balance

Every tradition combines a clear assessment of the past with an optimistic vision for the future. It requires neither harsh judgment nor wishful thinking, but clear-eyed hope.

What History Teaches Us About Change

This 4,000-year history shows how each era adds sophistication while maintaining the essential core. We’ve evolved from:

• Babylonian debt-settling to financial goal-setting
• Roman festivities to Facebook celebrations
• Religious confession to data-driven assessment
• Agricultural cycles to fiscal quarters
• Community rituals to online accountability groups

Yet the fundamental human need remains constant: to periodically stop, see where we’ve been, and consciously choose where we’re going.

Annual reviews aren’t a modern productivity hack—they’re a fundamental human practice refined over millennia. Every culture discovered the same truth: we need structured moments to “see again,” to close one chapter and open another.

The question isn’t whether annual reviews work—4,000 years of human behavior suggest they serve an essential function. The question is: How can we design them to actually create the change we seek?

That’s what I’ll be exploring in my upcoming book. For now, consider this:

When you sit down for your next annual review—whether using my template, a journal, or quiet reflection—you’re not just doing a productivity exercise. You’re participating in an unbroken chain of human practice stretching back to ancient Babylon. You’re honoring the deep human need to periodically see again, to witness where you’ve been, and to choose where you’re going.

In that lies both the courage to acknowledge what was and the hope to imagine what might be.

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Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.