When I started my career, all the work I was doing felt like a giant blob labeled “work.” The tasks I was responsible for stretched out before me toward an endless horizon. No matter how hard I worked or how many hours I logged, that horizon never seemed to get any closer. But eventually I…
I first became self-employed in the spring of 2013, after quitting a promising consulting job that I could no longer tolerate (that’s a story for another time). I had no plan and no savings, and for quite a while my only goal was to pay the next month’s rent. Since I didn’t have a clear…
One of the most important milestones for a born-again Christian is to tell your “testimony.” A testimony is your personal story of how you came to the faith. It often includes the problems or challenges you were facing in your life at the time, how lost or confused you felt, the person or experience that…
Our vision is that every single person in the world has the opportunity to create a Second Brain – a personal system of knowledge management – of their own. Everyone should have the chance to gather information and ideas, turn them into valuable knowledge, and use that knowledge to improve their own lives and the…
Every year since I was 21, I sat down each year to write down my personal goals for the year. This was my most important ritual for over 15 years, a realignment on the True North of my deepest values, principles, and dreams. This year I sat down to do it once again, and noticed…
2021 was the hardest year of my life. It all started, as so many things these days do, in 2020. Our entire lives changed within the span of a few months that year, from moving back to the U.S. from Mexico City in March, to buying and moving into our first home in May, to…
One of the most useful exercises I perform each year is a “mid-year” review in June or July. It’s great to set ambitious goals at the start of the year, but that plan often doesn’t survive contact with the real world for more than a few weeks. We’re like newborn babies flush with excitement for…
Drawing from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of my 2020 year-end review, here are my business and personal goals for 2021. Business Goals Grow my email newsletter list to 100k This is an ambitious, but achievable goal based on the results I’ve seen from email-based marketing over the past 18 months. As I’ve written and talked about…
In the summer of 1964, a young engineer at NASA named Gary Flandro was assigned a seemingly mundane task: to study ways of exploring the outer gas giants of our solar system. These planets didn’t get as much attention as our near neighbors, and remained largely unknown. As he researched the possibilities, Flandro made a…
On January 9th, 2021 we’ll kick off our third annual workshop The Annual Review, which we’ve just opened for purchase. It is a virtual workshop taking place over two days, Jan. 9 and 10, where David Perell and I will lead you through the process we’ve developed over more than 10 years of combined experience. Doing a…
As I start writing this year-end review, the latest in a long line of year-end rituals, I’m filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Even more than usual. In 2020 so many people around the world got sick, lost their jobs or businesses, or their lives. I want to start this ritual grounded in that…
This is the first year I decided to do a thorough mid-year review. It’s usually enough for me to review my goals once a year, at the beginning of the year, and then spend the next 12 months powering through them. But the first 6 months of this year brought tremendous, unexpected changes for us….
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