Tiago Forte's Blog

I recently set aside some time to do my mid-year review, a ritual I complete around July each year, and noticed that I felt some resistance to it.

In fact, I realized that I’ve always somewhat resisted it. Since I’m currently writing a book on the subject, I decided to explore why.

My first guess is that it comes down to the background soup of emotions I’m typically feeling around the halfway point of the year. It always feels like the first six months passed far too quickly, like I haven’t made nearly as much progress as I’d liked, and that I need to hurry and “catch up” to a timeline racing further and further beyond my grasp.

In short, I resist doing my mid-year review because it forces me to admit I’m behind my own expectations. I resist it because spending the hours of sitting, journaling, thinking, reflecting, and writing it typically requires puts me even further behind!

This year, I realized that AI has finally reached a point of sophistication that I can use it to kill three birds with one stone: 

To condense my mid-year ritual into a shorter amount of timeTo do it while walking instead of sitting at a deskAnd to shape it into a dynamic and free-flowing conversation instead of an extended writing exercise.

I’m talking, of course, about the new “voice modes” recently released by the leading AI companies, including ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode and Claude’s Voice mode (the latter of which is currently in beta and only available on the mobile app).

The limits of voice interaction…until now

I have to admit I’ve always hated every form of voice interaction with computers. I always found it incredibly buggy, error-prone, and mechanical versus writing.

It takes so little to make a voice interaction fall apart. If it misunderstands even one word, it might miss the context of the whole rest of the conversation. If it interrupts me because it thinks I’m done talking, it completely breaks the flow of the conversation. If I talk for several minutes and then a network error causes it to glitch and lose what I’ve said, I’m gone. Absolute dealbreaker.

Which makes it all the more surprising how good I found ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode to be. I was shocked that it was not only perfectly accurate, but also fluid, natural, engaging, and even warm. These were qualities I didn’t even know I wanted from an AI conversation partner.

There were thoughtful pauses, subtle inflections and intonations, and I genuinely felt listened to and supported by its warm, understanding, even affectionate tone. I couldn’t help feeling the glow of approval as it affirmed my reflections.

And most importantly, across two hours of conversation in a very noisy environment – walking the streets of Long Beach – there was not a single “real” glitch. At most, it would pause because of loud background noise or a passing conversation, but then resume, just as a human would.

The response time, which was such a problem with earlier voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, was indistinguishable from talking to a human. It was around 2-3 seconds, as you’d expect from a person taking a moment to reflect on what you’ve just said. The only delay happened when it had to reference external sources, such as my blog post with the projects and goals I planned on taking on in 2025.

I said there were no glitches, but there was a limitation: at the one-hour mark, I hit the daily limit currently in place for Advanced Voice Mode, and only had the option of continuing with Standard Voice Mode. I don’t typically hit limits on AI usage, and this was the first time I can remember feeling genuinely disappointed that I couldn’t continue.

The setup: Testing Claude and ChatGPT

Claude recently released a beta version of its voice mode, available only in the mobile app for now. I started there because we use Claude primarily in the business, but found it quite disappointing. The interface is less intuitive and seamless, requiring me to tap a button, say my piece, and then hit “send,” a clunky experience that reminds me much more of earlier voice transcription apps.

The tone of the voice was colder, more mechanical, and more monotone, making me feel like I was talking to a robot. The sensitivity of the audio capture was also too high, and it kept interrupting me or sending my message mid-sentence, which is baffling considering it could simply wait for me to hit “send” once I was finished.

Here’s what the interface for Claude’s voice mode looks like:

I decided to switch to ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode instead.

The crucial thing to understand is that ChatGPT’s voice mode isn’t simply speech-to-text transcription, like earlier technology. In other words, it’s not transcribing your words into written text and then sending that text as a message. That would save you a few seconds from not having to type it yourself, but otherwise not be any different.

ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode does something altogether different: it provides the audio directly to a multi-modal AI model that can take it directly as an input, rather than having to convert it to text first. What that means is the AI gains access to much richer information – the pauses, the tone of voice, the speed and cadence of your words – and can therefore output much richer information in return, including its own tone and style and cadence.

I used wired Apple Earbuds, which I’d recently noticed lead to much better audio quality on calls than wireless AirPods, to make sure it was getting the highest-quality audio from me. With the earbuds plugged into my iPhone 16, I put my phone in my pocket and went on an hour-long walk without needing to look at it once.

To start the conversation, I created a new project within ChatGPT, added a link to my annual goals from the start of the year as a source, as well as instructions for the purpose of this project:

“This project is for completing my mid-year review, in which I check in with goals and projects I planned at the start of the year, revisit any intentions or themes I’d committed to, and generally connect with my deeper self and the wants and needs that are arising midyear. I’d like to use a back-and-forth coaching format where you surface insightful questions and ask me anything you think will surface important realizations and perspectives as I envision the second half of my year.”

Here’s what the project looks like in the mobile interface:

Problems and limitations with the AILack of thoroughness

The first issue I noticed, just minutes into our conversation, was the AI’s lack of thoroughness.

Thoroughness – dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s – is something I value highly in my work, because it allows me to trust the results of my past efforts and proceed confidently knowing I’ve left no stone unturned.

The reason I provided my goals from the beginning, including all the comprehensive and highly detailed context around each and every project I intended to take on this year, was so that it would help me review them one at a time!

Instead, I found that the AI repeatedly tried to gloss over certain projects, or skip certain goals entirely, or “jump to the end” of the past-facing part of my reflection and pivot to the future instead.

It was as if it had a system instruction to summarize or distill any source it was given. Even after numerous requests “to cover every project and goal in my review without skipping any,” that bias was too strong, and it was never really able to. Every time I asked, “Were there any elements that you missed?” it would apologize profusely and admit that yes, there were several more.

Reluctance to access the web

I also noticed it seemed to have an aversion to accessing external sources, such as the blog post I provided a link to at the start. Only when I explicitly directed it to reference my source did it grudgingly comply. I wonder if perhaps this is OpenAI’s attempt to limit the bandwidth, computing power, and time it takes to access the web. In the future, I’ll try adding the text of my source directly as an attachment to see if that helps.

Sycophancy and lack of good questioning

Another tendency I noticed was the sycophancy that’s been so widely reported this year among many AI tools. It would always strongly agree with, affirm, and encourage any thought, idea, conclusion, or insight I came up with, even if it wasn’t a good one. 

Relatedly, it didn’t ask follow-up questions, point out dysfunctional patterns or inconsistencies in my thinking, or offer new perspectives or frames on anything I said, which is the main thing I’d expect from a good human coach.

At one point, I realized that its failure to act as a good coach meant I was missing out on the main value of conducting a mid-year review, which is to rethink, challenge, and reevaluate my goals. So I had to course correct…

When we turned to my most important project of the year, the launch of our new AI educational program called Second Brain Enterprise, I asked it to “Ask me 3 provocative questions to provoke insights about this project.” It complied, but they were quite generic, like “What expectations did you have about the project that weren’t met?”

I noticed that the AI’s sycophancy had another, much more insidious effect: I really didn’t trust or place much value in any of its advice or recommendations. Even if it made its strongest case for an idea, I knew that if I simply asked it to change its mind and give me the opposite advice, it would do so without a moment’s hesitation.

In other words, my AI interlocutor had zero skin in the game. It had nothing at stake, nothing to lose, and no true commitment to any particular point of view or opinion. This made me realize that a crucial factor in how much stock we put in someone’s opinion isn’t due to the correctness of their logical arguments – it has more to do with their personal level of exposure to the risks of their advice. 

We essentially treat a person’s advice as a “bet” that they’re placing on a future outcome, and the larger the bet, the more we believe them. That certainly makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: people who keep making large bets on false positions will soon find themselves broke and unable to make any more.

Daily 1-hour time limit

I typically review my year (and mid-year) in three steps, corresponding to the Past, the Present, and the Future. After about an hour, we had covered the first two, but just as I was turning my attention to the future, I hit the 1-hour limit. This is actually a major issue, as in some ways I felt the conversation was just building momentum and reaching some interesting takeaways.

Here’s what it looks like when you reach the daily limit:

This limitation meant I had to save the last part of my review for another day. By the time I was able to return to it, a week had passed, and I’d forgotten much of the context, especially since I hadn’t written anything down! It’s clear that the technology itself is ready for prime time, but not until the limits are raised can it become an integral daily tool.

Length limit on each chat

When I picked up the conversation a week later, I found that I couldn’t continue in the same chat because I had reached another limit: the total length limit for any individual chat.

I had to restart a new chat within the same project, and even though OpenAI claims that context is shared between chats in a project (i.e., the contents of one chat should carry over and inform other chats in that project), my experience makes me doubt this is the case.

In our second conversation, the AI didn’t reference anything from our previous one. It retained the same project source file containing my goals, but the meandering context we’d built up over an hour of conversation was lost, which was disappointing.

Lack of documentation

By the end of our conversation, we’d hit upon a number of valuable takeaways, despite the limitations mentioned above. This was where yet another limitation arose: there wasn’t really a record of the conversation.

When you communicate via text, the conversation is “self-documenting.” You or anyone can simply scroll back through the entire conversation and review any part of it, with the same level of detail available to the people who engaged in it in the first place.

But audio is very different. What makes it so natural and fluid – that it’s effortless and ephemeral – also means that there’s no record that’s easy to review. Even if you make a full audio recording, it isn’t easy to search for specific segments within it.

I addressed this problem by asking the AI to create a summary of our entire conversation, including all the conclusions, insights, takeaways, and action steps we’d identified, which I’ll unpack in more detail in the final section below.

Problems and limitations with meNot having my Master Prompt

My team and I use Claude as our AI daily driver, which means we have the full context of our business uploaded as project knowledge across all our chats. I call that upfront context the Master Prompt, and it’s quickly become an essential, non-negotiable component of my AI usage.

Right away, I noticed that my interactions with ChatGPT were much less rich, less context-aware, and less specific because it lacked my Master Prompt. I soon realized this is a much bigger problem when interacting in voice mode, because it required me to explain the most basic details of my business on the spot. With text input, you could give it a link to your website to bring it up to speed, or copy and paste a long document with context about your business right into the chat box, but with voice, you’re limited to one word at a time.

This isn’t a limitation of ChatGPT, to be clear. I can easily move my Master Prompt from Claude into ChatGPT and add it to the project as a project file, but I hadn’t thought of that in advance.

Not trusting it

I noticed that I didn’t fully trust the AI at first, and spent some time tentatively testing its abilities. I would overexplain things initially to make sure it really understood what I was talking about, but soon realized that wasn’t necessary and I could provide only minimal explanation.

I was wary of the limits of how much input it could take in at once, and found myself speaking in unnaturally short segments and waiting to see if it would understand. As my trust grew, I found I could speak for many minutes at a time without any problem. The AI seemed to have a highly accurate short-term memory, though again it would usually gloss over some of the small but important details, or fail to dig into unclear or contradictory statements.

Retaining human conversational courtesies

I found that one of my limitations in fully utilizing the tool was, paradoxically, treating it too much like a human, with all the social conventions and courtesies that entails.

For example, I hate being interrupted and strive to never interrupt others. That makes sense in human relationships, but at one point, I realized that I could interrupt the AI at any time, and it would never take offense.

In fact, I found that my patience quickly dwindled to nothing, and I started correcting the AI immediately and sharply changing direction, since there was no value for either of us in it continuing to ramble on in the wrong direction.

Another example is that I kept trying to answer immediately, as you would in a human conversation. But then I realized I could just say “Let me think” and it would wait for as long as needed, while I thought about my answer. Though I suspect even these silent periods count against your daily usage limit.

Was it valuable to do a mid-year review as a conversation?

I would say the “voice-only” approach to my mid-year review was an interesting experience, and I accomplished my goal of conducting it in a casual, conversational format while getting some exercise.

Where this method falls short is in terms of its thoroughness, depth, and ability to surface contradictions, blindspots, and unexamined assumptions in my thinking and behavior. 

ChatGPT is designed to “solve the problem” as efficiently as possible, not lead you on a meandering, introspective journey. OpenAI thus doesn’t optimize for engagement or time spent – since they make the same amount of money regardless of how much you use their service, their incentive is actually to keep interactions short and to the point.

But the purpose of any kind of review or reflection isn’t to get to the end as quickly as possible. It’s to ponder, to contemplate, to reconsider, to reframe. The value comes from the time you spend noticing your own thinking, and thinking about your own thinking. And the value in a coaching interaction comes from your conversation partner having the skill and willingness to challenge, question, notice, and reflect back.

In the future, I plan on using AI’s voice mode as an occasional complement to my review processes. I think with some more involved prompting to slow it down and have it act more as a coach, this will turn into a powerful new mode of self-reflection as time passes.

Below you can find the full summary ChatGPT created at the end of our conversation, which I consider excellent, including a concise to-do list of action items at the end.

Here’s a complete written summary of all insights, decisions, takeaways, and action items from your mid-year review conversation, organized into key domains. I’ll also place this into a separate canvas in this chat for easy access.

Strategic Focus & Role DefinitionDecisions:Your presence in the next three cohorts of Second Brain Enterprise will be structured as follows:
Present for the first and last session of each cohort.
Deliver one or two special “Tiago-only” sessions per cohort.
Focus the rest of your time on creating reusable content and scalable assets.
Insights:This balance allows you to maintain influence and connection without overextending.
You’ve moved into a strategic role in the business with a focus on vision, storytelling, and growth through YouTube and thought leadership.
Takeaways:Delegation is key: continue handing off direct delivery and execution.
Preserve your “spark” by focusing on high-leverage contributions.
Marketing & Customer SuccessDecisions:You’ll focus your energy on top-of-funnel (YouTube, brand, awareness) and bottom-of-funnel (customer success, testimonials) — the two bookends of the customer journey.
Insights:This “first and last mile” strategy amplifies impact without requiring you to manage the middle of the pipeline.
Strong customer results will reinforce word-of-mouth and lead gen organically.
Takeaways:Invest in systems and team to manage operations, onboarding, and program delivery.
Prioritize quality and resonance in content over scale for now.
Second Brain Enterprise & Forte LabsDecisions:Maintain Forte Labs as a stable base while using most new energy for Second Brain Enterprise.
Define a clear time allocation model (e.g. 70/30 or 80/20) to avoid unintentional drift.
Insights:Your identity is expanding beyond Forte Labs — and that’s a healthy sign of growth.
As the new business matures, roles and responsibilities will likely shift again.
Takeaways:Continue building “execution muscle” on the team.
Systematize Forte Labs so it requires minimal creative overhead.
Home Life & SupportDecisions:Move forward with hiring a nanny and driver to increase time flexibility and reduce logistical friction.
Explore acquiring a second car for household and travel needs in Valle.
Insights:Increased household support = more energy and presence for work, family, and health.
Clarifying expectations and scheduling will be key for smooth household operations.
Takeaways:Formalize schedules and responsibilities for new hires.
Use this extra capacity to invest in family connection and personal renewal.
Health, Fitness, and HobbiesDecisions:Schedule resistance training 2x per week as a non-negotiable calendar item.
Supplement with hiking, yoga, and other light aerobic activities.
Insights:Structure and convenience (e.g., a nearby gym) are critical for consistency.
Fitness is an investment in long-term energy and emotional stability.
Takeaways:Try adding a multivitamin (Thorne Men’s Multi 50+) as part of your daily routine.
Stick to time-boxed workouts to preserve mental and physical bandwidth.
Family Activities & HobbiesDecisions:Explore biking as a shared father-son hobby — purchase a bike for you and Caio in Valle.
Look into a local biking route or destination you could make a weekly ritual.
Insights:Outdoor, physical, hands-on activities are the sweet spot for recharging and connecting with kids.
You don’t need a perfect hobby — just one that’s good enough to enjoy and repeat.
Takeaways:Pick one small, recurring family activity to turn into a weekly rhythm.
Track how it feels over a few weeks to iterate and improve.
Action Items SummaryBusiness: Schedule and confirm your cohort presence for the next 3 rounds.
Outline 1–2 “Tiago-special” sessions per cohort.
Begin scriptwriting or delegation for scalable cohort content.
Define and document time allocation between Forte Labs and SBE.
Finalize marketing funnel strategy (YouTube + testimonials).
Home: Hire nanny and driver with clear scope and availability.
Price and acquire second vehicle in Valle.
Add Thorne multivitamin to daily supplement regimen.
Health: Schedule resistance training on calendar 2x/week.
Plan 1 outdoor activity (e.g., hike or run) per week.
Family: Buy bikes for you and Caio.
Choose an accessible route and try it out together.

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The post The Voice-Only Mid-Year Review: Testing the Limits of ChatGPT Voice Mode appeared first on Forte Labs.

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 ChangeThe 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

In 1842, the U.S. Congress passed a law requiring businesses to conduct annual performance reviews of workers. By the 1940s, 60% of companies used them; 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 improveThe same study found that reviews made performance worse about one-third of the timePsychologists 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 PatternA 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 lessHave a more cheerful dispositionRecommit to GodLive 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-settingRoman festivities to Facebook celebrationsReligious confession to data-driven assessmentAgricultural cycles to fiscal quartersCommunity 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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The post A Brief History of the Annual Review appeared first on Forte Labs.

I lifted my eyes from the journal I was writing in on the balcony of my hotel room, just in time to witness a towering block of ice split in half, splintering along its length with a thundering crack.

The iceberg it was part of shuddered, throwing off a shimmering coat of frost from its finely etched surface. For a moment, the block hovered in midair, seemingly unaware of its newfound independence. There was a moment of silence as it slowly began to pick up momentum.

After a few dramatic seconds, the wall of ice began to topple to the side, breaking up into several pieces that tumbled end over end as they crashed into the icy water with an immense splash.

My hotel room happened to be on a cruise ship crossing the most dangerous ocean passage in the world – the Drake Passage – on our way from the southern tip of South America to Antarctica on a 10-day voyage in December 2024.

Thirty-foot waves and seventy knot winds pummeled our ship from all sides as we plowed forward. The ship pitched from side to side, throwing our belongings off the table in our suite and making us seasick. The sea was a minefield of icebergs increasing in size and frequency with each passing hour.

The external environment of the cruise was accompanied by something equally special on the inside – a curated educational program on modern space exploration, organized by the advocacy nonprofit Future of Space.

The purpose of this voyage was to educate and inspire a group of 260 leaders from around the world on two of the most pressing issues of our time – climate change and space exploration – including how they might intersect and inform each other.

Ocean exploration pioneer Jacques-Yves Cousteau once said: “We only protect what we love, we only love what we understand, and we only understand what we are taught.”

We traveled to the edge of the world to discover how we could protect the planet, as well as potentially leave it.

Leaving the human world

We departed Los Angeles on December 17, flying to Buenos Aires via Miami. We stayed the night in the Argentine capital, before departing early the next morning on a charter flight to Ushuaia, a pioneer town perched at the very tip of the South American continent.

There we boarded the expedition vessel Seabourn Venture, along with 260 other guests who shared our dual fascination for Antarctica and outer space.

The program was made up of various luminaries, experts, scientists, and astronauts, including William Shatner, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, journalist Ann Curry, former NASA astronauts Scott Kelly, Charlie Duke, and José Hernández, Céline Cousteau (daughter of the famed explorer and a prominent environmentalist in her own right), UK artist Stephen Wiltshire, and physicist and author Brian Greene.

These speakers filled our days with a constant stream of educational talks, interviews, documentary film screenings, panels, and presentations, encompassing both the deep past and the far future. Those talks were also livestreamed on the Future of Space YouTube channel, where you can watch the recordings.

Why run a space exploration conference on an Antarctic voyage?

Because Antarctica is the closest analogue on Earth to the harsh conditions we face in space. It is the last uncolonized continent, thus serving as a laboratory and testing ground for how we’ll go about exploring and colonizing new worlds.

At the same time, Antarctica is the ultimate bellwether for how climate change will shape the Earth. It is ground zero for the warming that is driving all other kinds of environmental change. The deteriorating condition of its glaciers directly impacts the lives of millions of people along all the world’s coastlines.

I wanted to visit Antarctica to experience one of Earth’s rarest and most quickly disappearing environments. I had recently learned that since 1970, the Earth’s temperature has spiked faster than in any comparable period in recorded history, and I wasn’t sure how long the continent would last.

I also wanted to see if immersing myself in such an utterly different and alien environment could give me a new sense of perspective for my annual review, at the tail end of a difficult year.

I was there to explore a triple frontier: humanity’s relationship to its home planet, our exploration of outer space, and my own inner world of goals and dreams for the future.

The itinerary

Each day, we’d arrive at a new destination, board a series of small, nimble Zodiac-style inflatables in small groups, and spend a couple of hours cruising (and sometimes landing) along the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out from the continent in the direction of South America like an inviting bridge.

We had many close encounters with vast colonies of charismatic penguins, and watched them comically run, jump, dive, and play like children at a water park.

We visited historical sites, such as the barren beach on Elephant Island where Ernest Shackleton’s men famously sheltered for 4 harrowing months in 1916, after their ship Endurance was crushed by encroaching sea ice on the way to the continent.

I was amazed to learn that, until the first landings by seal-hunting parties and explorers in the 19th century, it’s unlikely that any human had ever set foot on Antarctica. The Drake Passage was simply too forbidding, and the technology to endure it didn’t exist.

Antarctica is thus halfway to being a foreign planet, like a way station physically located on the same surface as all the other continents, but psychologically, a world apart.

As we traversed the peninsula, I could feel a version of the Overview Effect kicking in – the famed perspective shift reported by many astronauts upon first seeing the Earth from space. 

We had a half dozen former astronauts aboard, and they described in vivid detail how that shift had affected them. They had realized firsthand how fragile and alone humanity is, clinging to its ball of dirt hanging in space. They’d been overcome with a sense of gratitude, awe, and humility at the miracle that is life on our planet. 

Antarctica is so bare, so starkly devoid of any sign of human life, that I could easily perceive that we were skirting the edges of a polar ice cap, stuck to the side of a planet, hurtling through space with nothing but a thin band of atmosphere protecting us. The sun never quite set, demonstrating that its rise and fall each day is just a side effect of our particular location on the planet.

An imaging satellite from Planet Labs circling overhead took this photo of our ship as it was moored:

I was overwhelmed by a sense of isolation, of aloneness, despite being surrounded by my fellow travelers. I’d never realized how much comfort and security I’d derived from human structures, human affordances, and human-made environments my entire life. I hadn’t grown up on Earth – I’d grown up in a series of insulated bubbles that humans had created to shield themselves from the Earth.

We made a dozen stops on our journey, including Half Moon Island, Whaler’s Bay and Deception Island, Trinity Island, Brown Bluff, Neko Bay, Lemaire Channel, and Palmer Station, one of three US-operated year-round research stations on the Antarctic Peninsula.

At Neko Harbour, I went ashore and officially fulfilled a lifelong dream: setting foot on all 7 continents. In one sense, it was fulfilling, while in another, I realized how foolish such a goal was. As if setting foot on a continent taught you anything about such a vast, diverse place.

A council of teachers

I learned so much from the invited experts on the ship; it was like an intensive course and conference unto itself.

Céline Costeau shared fascinating stories about her work creating documentary films, trying to preserve both nature and the human cultures that existed in close communion with it. She is multi-hyphenate – a documentary film director, producer, explorer, artist, public speaker, brand ambassador, designer, author, and workshop facilitator – and I saw that my career could be similarly multi-faceted and pluralistic.

We watched A Million Miles Away, the documentary about the life of astronaut José Hernández, who was present and answered questions about what it had taken to become one of the first Latinos, and the first migrant worker, to go to space. I saw how meaningful it was to break through a glass ceiling for one’s people and create new possibilities for them through your personal example.

Former astronaut Scott Kelly told us about his record-breaking year in space, and how it had been inspired by the intrepid adventures of Ernest Shackleton a century earlier. I was deeply moved by the model of perseverance even through heartbreak and failure, of personal sacrifice in service of humanity.

Neil deGrasse Tyson regaled us with tales of black holes, the potential of time travel, pulsars, and updates on the recent mission to explore the environs of the sun.

The last astronaut to walk on the moon, Charlie Duke, told us what it was like to plant his feet on another planetary body.

Tom Mueller, employee #1 at SpaceX, told us some incredible stories about what the early days of the company were like – a bunch of nerds firing toy rockets in the deserts of California – in pursuit of a far larger dream that today is finally being realized.

I was inspired by the crew, who were made up of experienced scientists, researchers, explorers, guides, and naturalists who worked so hard to provide us with life-changing experiences while also keeping us completely safe.

Gaining a new perspective

As I sat down to complete my annual review, I had real trouble with it. All my projects and goals seemed so trivial, so pointless, in the face of the immensity surrounding me on all sides. My awareness had expanded to a timeline so vast, it made even the most ambitious accomplishments I could imagine seem totally insignificant.

I found that all my problems and worries were put into perspective. Our margins in the business were lower than I’d hoped for last year – who cares? The vast, unfeeling vistas of ice that stretched as far as I could see didn’t know or care about that. All of humanity, with all its achievements, was almost a non-event from the perspective of the glaciers inching forward across the millennia.

I couldn’t shake the idea that about 70% of the Earth’s water is frozen here in ice sheets nearly three miles thick, and that if all that ice melted, the world’s oceans would rise by 200 feet, completely inundating my hometown. My mind could scarcely grasp the tenuous but direct connection between the integrity of these glaciers I was seeing and my life in sunny Southern California.

It was disorienting to vacillate between the inhuman harshness of the ice in one moment, to the sumptuous luxury of our cruise as soon as I entered back through a doorway. All-you-can-eat buffets and round-the-clock room service on one hand co-existed in bizarre juxtaposition with windswept ice fields on the other. Outside, a world devoid of any trace of humanity; inside, a rich agenda of in-depth knowledge about humanity’s most advanced scientific fields.

There were extreme contrasts everywhere, and I almost felt whiplash as my perspective hurtled from one point of view to another.

The landscape outside was in constant change. Everything made of ice is temporary, as winds, heat, rain, and undersea currents continuously reshape it. But at the same time, the landscape is ancient, like a time capsule from across the eons.

The majesty and seriousness of ice cliffs looming above us contrasted with the hilarious silliness and jovial banter of the penguins.

There was one moment I’ll never forget, at Melchior. It was bitterly cold, with wisps of snow drifting slowly from the sky. A small group of us boarded an inflatable boat and set out among the ice floes.

We entered a narrow inlet between massive ice structures, and found ourselves in a pool of water with walls of ice shooting straight upward on all sides. It felt like a natural cathedral – sacred, majestic, peaceful. I hadn’t felt such a presence of the divine since the church of my youth. 

I felt distinctly that Antarctica, and all the other continents, belong to all of us. They belong to humanity. I could foresee a future in which the whole world, and even other planets, might be governed the same way Antarctica is: collaboratively, through consensus, according to the long-term interests of all humans, even ones not born yet. 

I could sense my allegiance shifting, that I wasn’t and couldn’t be loyal to one country above the others. We are citizens of the world, and for a brief moment perched atop an Antarctic glacier, I experienced what that was like.

Here’s a video depicting some of the key moments of the experience, which I recommend to anyone:

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The post Finding Perspective at the Edge of the World: 10 Days in Antarctica appeared first on Forte Labs.

I’ve noticed that psychedelic medicine has been on the rise in California and other parts of the U.S. over the last few years, and have heard reports from a handful of friends and acquaintances about the incredible results they’ve had from ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin. 

In our new home of Valle de Bravo, Mexico, I’ve also been surprised how psychedelics are just a normal part of everyday life. They’re something you talk about at kids’ birthday parties or with other parents in the pickup line at school. 

I don’t know if it’s the ancient heritage these plants have in Mexico (with evidence of their use dating back to 14,000 B.C.) or the hippie vibe of this particular town (it was the site of the Festival de Avándaro in 1971, the Mexican equivalent of Woodstock), or a combination of both.

Besides San Francisco, I’ve never encountered any other environment where psychedelics and other healing modalities are not only spoken of so freely, but are really “no big deal.”

That created the perfect setting for me to explore it for myself.

Micro-dosing

I decided to start my exploration of “magic mushrooms” with micro-dosing, which is typically defined as 5-10% of a standard psychoactive dose. For psilocybin, this means between 0.1 and 0.3 grams (100 to 300 mg) of dried Psilocybe cubensis.

According to this comprehensive guide:

“The intention [of micro-dosing] is to achieve subtle enhancements in mood, creativity, focus, and emotional resilience while maintaining the ability to engage in normal daily activities like work and socializing.”

I found a local cafe in Valle that openly sells branded psilocybin-infused chocolate bars, and I picked one up for my experiments.

I trusted the product because it’s made in-house by a local business owner known to the community, is nicely branded and packaged (suggesting there was at least a little quality control), and multiple people I trust have taken it and vouched for it.

It was a standard-sized, 100-gram bar containing 5% “functional mushrooms.” With 20 squares, that comes out to about 0.25 grams of mushrooms per square. Standard psilocybin content averages 1%, so there was probably around 0.0025 grams (or 2.5 milligrams) of psychoactive compounds per square.

I had never tried mushrooms before, nor micro-dosed anything, and therefore decided to start small: I took 1 square at 10 am on a weekday, about an hour before a Zoom workshop I was scheduled to teach for our Second Brain Membership.

These virtual workshops, which I do monthly, are typically quite challenging for me, since I have to keep a lot of material in mind and communicate it compellingly, while also taking into account the time left, people’s needs and questions, activity in the chat, the broader goals of the membership, etc.

It requires a lot of parallel processing and mixing different kinds of thinking, as well as keeping the objective in mind while remaining highly adaptable, which I often find difficult. I wanted to see if this chocolate could help me handle it with more ease.

Within about 15 minutes, I started noticing the effects, which were similar in magnitude to about 1-2 alcoholic drinks for me, i.e., a feel-good warmth without the negative side effects of heavy drinking.

The recurring pain in the right side of my throat that has plagued me for almost 20 years was already feeling relieved at this point. A line of tension down the right side of my neck (probably corresponding to my vagus nerve) felt soothed and even kind of buzzing with energy.

I started feeling a tingling, “glowing” sensation throughout my shoulders, neck, throat, and lower part of my head, as well as relief from a daily headache I’d had for weeks since recovering from a bad flu, which makes me think there were some pain-relieving effects.

As the workshop started, I felt noticeably more emotionally fluid, open, joyous, playful, and expressive, in place of the usual low-level anxiety I feel on group calls.

My wife Lauren, overhearing me from the other room, later said I sounded “really into myself,” which is a great description! I felt like the hot girl at a crowded bar, if that makes sense, open to and inviting attention from others, which is unusual for me.

During the call, I noticed I had a much easier time navigating the tension between sticking to a pre-formulated plan and adapting to changing circumstances. This was mostly because I more or less abandoned the plan – we only covered 1/3 of the agenda – which was a good thing because it was more important to discuss and integrate the material than plow ahead with all my slides, which is my usual tendency.

I felt much more attuned to the people on the call, warmer, more aware of their signals and body language, more curious about them, more interested in and welcoming of their questions and comments (which I can sometimes interpret defensively as veiled criticism, I’ve noticed).

We ended the last 15 minutes of the call with a very deep and personal discussion of what it means to be responsible adults and to conform to external expectations in the real world, without abandoning our interests, passions, aliveness, and sense of self.

That question was only loosely related to the technique I had introduced, but took a turn toward a more meaningful discussion than it would have otherwise.

Right after the Zoom call, I turned my attention to assembling a wooden playground structure for my kids, which I’d been doing the last few days in the afternoons after work. 

Surprisingly, this was extremely challenging! It was comically difficult for me to hold in mind obscure part numbers, search for them, count the numbers of screws and washers we needed for the next step, etc., a kind of task I normally find very easy.

I could tell my working memory was hampered – I repeatedly failed to hold in mind a 4-digit part number for more than a minute and had to keep starting over! I also handed my friend the wrong parts or the wrong number of parts. I don’t recommend doing construction on psilocybin, as studies have shown that it can hamper complex working memory.

I also found, both during my Zoom call and the subsequent construction task, that I cared much less and had much less fluency with anything numerical, abstract, technical, or conceptual, which normally feels like my “home territory.”

Instead, I felt drawn to nature, things physical and concrete, and thinking about my friends, family, and people I love. 

About 4.5 to 5 hours later, the effects had mostly subsided, and I was left with a pleasant afterglow like the morning after a fun party with friends (though my headache returned). I then left home to pick up the kids from school, and when my son got into the car, I felt a strong sense of spontaneous joy and almost broke into tears. I felt very connected to him and his innocence in that moment and throughout the afternoon.

For the rest of the day, I felt much more patient with the kids than usual. Normally, afternoons feel like they’re passing too slowly. I can find myself bored in comparison to the exciting pace of my workday. 

Next, I took the kids grocery shopping. I expected this task to be challenging, since it involves finding all the items on a list, but by this point, the cognitive effects had worn off and my working memory had returned. 

I felt more spontaneous, with my inner critic dormant and not filtering my words as much. This could also be described as “impulsive,” though, and my wife said I was “on one” all afternoon, and more blunt with her than usual.

In the evening, we went back to school for an all-school meeting, which took place in a forest next to the school. These all-school meetings are usually a bit stressful for me, with a flurry of faces and names I can’t quite remember, and all in Spanish. I felt noticeably calmer and more at ease this time, and about 50% warmer toward others (which made me about average for Mexicans!)

I had vivid dreams all night, one after the other, all warm and fuzzy and related to people I cared about. Besides the potential rudeness to my wife, the only downside I noticed was feeling thirsty. I had little appetite and didn’t eat much all day.

My conclusion from this first experiment was that this was a wonderful, enlightening, moving experience overall, and I definitely wanted to try it again. Micro-dosing felt very promising as an ongoing practice, as I seemed to be able to gain many mindset-altering benefits while still going about my day.

Overall, it strongly biased my mind and emotions away from abstract concepts and toward people, nature, my body, feelings, intuition, and my physical surroundings. Those are ways of being that I normally find hard to access, so this is extremely useful!

I did around half a dozen micro-doses, spaced out around once per week, as an initial foray into the world of magic mushrooms, and deeply appreciated their ability to shift me into a more grounded, calm, joyful, and connective state of being.

Macro-dosing

For the second phase of my experiment, I decided to go deeper with mushrooms and take a “macro-dose” (typically defined as approximately 2–3 grams, equal to roughly 25 mg purified psilocybin) under the supervision of an experienced professional. 

I recently met another father at our kids’ school who is a psychotherapist and administered psilocybin and MDMA-assisted therapy sessions on the outskirts of our town. We had a lot of mutual friends, and after getting to know him at a local sauna, I decided to work with him.

The process was surprisingly pedestrian: a Calendly booking link to schedule my session, plus a preparation call a few days beforehand, and a post-integration call a few days after. On our prep call, he asked me about my childhood history, my past experience with psychedelics and other mind-altering substances, my work and family situation, and any risk factors like mental disorders or addictive tendencies. He gave me guidelines such as not eating meat or drinking alcohol in the week leading up to our session, and asked me to water fast on the day of.

Most of all, we talked about my intentions for the sessions – what I wanted to see, hear, learn, and discover about myself. 

The intention I settled on was to explore my relationship with my father and how that affected my relationship with my son. My son and I had been going through what felt like a period of conflict and friction lately, as he explored his willfulness and the limits of parental boundaries. I’d felt distant from him, like an authority figure enforcing the rules rather than a friend going on a journey, and wanted to get to the root of the anger and frustration I’d felt toward him as he provoked his sister or made messes at the dinner table.

In previous psychedelic experiences, my father and my son had been at the forefront of my mind the entire time, and in retrospect, I can see that I just sort of assumed that would be the case again. Much of my personal growth journey has been about healing my past with my father, and I realize I had almost resigned myself to continuing to do so indefinitely. But plant medicine has intentions of its own, and I would find that not to be the case.

Set and setting

On the day of my scheduled session, I had a slow morning and, around 9 am, hailed a taxi to the therapist’s house, about 20 minutes away. His home was in a heavily forested area outside town, surrounded by nature, with a small office on the corner of his property seemingly purpose-built for these sessions.

It was a single room with an attached bathroom, decorated with all kinds of spiritual paraphernalia – incense, altars, totems, crystals, and images of Eastern spirituality. A large pullout sofa bed with a thick comforter occupied the center of the room, with a desk in one corner and two chairs facing each other in the other.

I took off my shoes and silenced my phone, and had a seat in one of the chairs. We spoke for about 15 minutes, revisiting my intention for the day and covering what I should expect over the coming hours. There was relatively little orientation needed: I would drink a small cup of dried mushrooms dissolved in water, with some lemon added to counter the bitterness, put on an eye covering, and lie in the bed under the covers for about 3-4 hours, to see what the mushrooms had to teach me.

I drank the liquid, which amounted to 4.3 grams of dried mushrooms (which at a 1.5% concentration meant about 40 milligrams of the active ingredient), and we talked for another 10 minutes, waiting for the medicine to start taking its effect. I started to feel its effects after about 15 minutes, and at that point went to the bathroom and then took my place under the covers. The therapist would stay with me throughout the entire 4-hour experience, making sure I was okay and supplying tissues and water as needed.

The first effects were visual – colorful tendrils of light swirling in the air above me. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was how mushrooms saw the world. After about 20 minutes of this, I went to the bathroom again, as the mushrooms had an effect on my bowels similar to coffee. 

Wrestling with an inner force

As I settled back into the bed, the experience shifted abruptly as a rising tide of discomfort quickly overtook me. It was a mix of nausea, muscle aches, and a kind of mental discomfort as thoughts and feelings I typically avoid rushed to the surface.

The next hour was physically intense for me – I writhed in the bed, flailing side to side, clutching my shirt and the bedspread, as the nausea got stronger and stronger. I broke out into a sweat, moaned and groaned and whimpered and snarled and breathed loudly in and out. It felt like I was wrestling with a powerful adversary, but that adversary was inside me, struggling to get out as I struggled to keep it in.

Throughout this part, many images flashed vividly through my mind, but I was surprised to find that they were mostly related to my daughter Delia. I saw her anguished face as she cried over a fight with her brother, and felt her kicking legs and pushing arms as she fought being put to bed. Suddenly, I was in her place, lying in her crib, crying and thrashing against the insurmountable force of my parent. I saw and felt it all viscerally from her perspective.

Eventually, I could sense the nausea was rising to a crescendo, and I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I felt the irresistible urge to yell, and gripping the sheets with my fists, I let out a couple blood-curdling roars at the top of my lungs, and could feel something moving through me and leaving me, like an exorcism. 

I could tell it was something related to my daughter, but I can’t say exactly what. As I lay on the bed, my legs propped up in exactly the birthing position, it was almost like I needed to “give birth” to her at a metaphorical or consciousness level, in the same way my wife had given birth to her physically. At 2 years old, her personality and will have emerged in full force, and it was as if I had to change my attitude and relationship to her from that of a helpless baby, requiring mostly feeding and changing, to a full-fledged person whose voice and opinions deserve an equal place in our family.

I told the therapist that I needed to throw up, and he brought a small bucket to the bedside so I could do so. Later, he told me that vomiting was uncommon, but not unheard of, during these sessions – happening with maybe one in every 30 people. As with ayahuasca, fighting the nausea and trying to keep the medicine down, I believe, was therapeutic. It provided a physical metaphor for the internal struggle, and the physical act of vomiting functioned as a symbolic act of expunging or releasing a force, entity, or energy that had been repressed inside.

The experience from that point onward was much calmer and more sublime. With my stomach empty but the psychoactive compounds fully absorbed into my bloodstream, I was free to go on an inner voyage. The music being played took center stage, a mix of soft contemplative instrumental tracks and adventurous, rousing anthems that sounded like a Hollywood epic.

Witnessing the women in my life

I found that, in contrast to my stated intention, my voyage was mostly about the women in my family. I thought of my mother, her intense love for me piercing my heart like it hadn’t in years. I felt the grief of her recent breast cancer recurrence, the helplessness I felt toward it, and how sorry I was to not be able to help her during this time, after all the years she dropped everything to care for me.

I thought of my wife Lauren and witnessed her essence as a divine, transcendent being that I was privileged to be with. The most clear message I received the whole time was that she was “the universe’s gift to me.” That she represents the universe’s most sincere act of pure generosity, I could never deserve nor repay. I felt the grief and sadness of all the times I didn’t treat her that way, neglecting to give her the attention, care, and respect her divine nature deserved.

I felt the deep sadness of not always treating my kids as the gifts they are. Of the times I’ve treated them as obligations, as hurdles to get past on the way to what I want. All of their emotions I hadn’t fully allowed – their rage, frustration, complaints, pride, annoyance, neediness, jealousy – came rushing up toward me from the pit where they’d been festering, unseen and unloved. It was hard to bear, the full weight of all that emotion. Like a white hot flash flood rushing past and through me on all sides. 

And again I thought of and felt my daughter – her emerging emotions of anger and sadness, her strong will and stubbornness, her vibrant personality, and the unique role she was starting to play in our family as peacemaker, caretaker, and comedian. It’s hard to explain, but each of these memories, realizations, ideas, and stories weren’t so much “thought” as “felt,” as if they were striking deep into the soft places of my heart. I cried more or less continuously, the tears completely soaking my eye mask and pillow. 

What was interesting about this part of the experience is that it was relatively free of “stories.” My daughter is so young, and our relationship so simple and pure, that I didn’t really have strong narratives about her that I had to let go of. The process was mostly somatic, like my body just needed to let go and process something I couldn’t fully explain, and both the logical explanations and the accompanying emotions took a backseat.

Holding this lineage of women in my mind, I was overwhelmed with the awareness of how much love they had poured into me my entire life. All the care, the thoughtfulness, the sacrifice. I felt the full weight of that care and how it had shaped me into the person I am now, capable of caring for so many others in turn. I saw how crucial, how all-important that warmth and love were to who I was; so much more important than the intellect with which I normally identify.

Tangentially, I also saw how important that direct, human caregiving is going to be in the new AI-driven era we’re entering. How important it’s going to be that we see each other, know each other, look out for each other, and help each other through the torrent of change we’re all facing as AI reshapes society. 

I saw that I could play a role not only in the intellectual, analytical, process-driven implementation of AI, but just as much in the education, the personal growth, and the human compassion that will need to accompany it. I had such a clear vision of the community we could create to help people grapple with the immensity of what AI would mean for them, and provide that human care and warmth that we all need to welcome the future with openness and curiosity.

The neuroscience of psychedelics

My psychedelic experience proceeded in stages or waves. They were almost like mini-trances, or a succession of dreams, as my mind flowed from one scene or sequence to the next. 

I found that I could choose when I wanted to “switch” from one line of thinking and feeling to another, almost like switching the channel on the TV. All I had to do was turn my head from one direction to another, and all of a sudden, my focus shifted. This was the first time I felt I had some control over the direction of my experience – I could choose where I wanted to go, what I wanted to focus on. And any person, relationship, memory, or part of life I focused on would yield insights.

I was reminded of this pair of images I came across in Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind, showing the connectivity of the human brain in a normal state, compared to the hyperconnectivity of a psilocybin-induced state (based on this study):

The researchers found that: “This supports our idea that psilocybin disrupts the normal organization of the brain with the emergence of strong, topologically long-range functional connections that are not present in a normal state.” In other words, psilocybin temporarily allows distant parts of the brain that don’t normally communicate to talk to each other.

Psilocybin effectively “shakes up” the brain’s modular structure, temporarily breaking down entrenched communication patterns (i.e., the Default Mode Network) and thereby promoting mental flexibility and new associations.

I also know that psychedelics have the effect of “turning down” the activity in the pre-frontal cortex – the site of our high-order reasoning, as well as our inner critic and self-manager. I conceived of the experience as the authoritarian father figure (the pre-frontal cortex) stepping out of the room for a while, and the rest of the family coming together for a meeting in which they could talk to each other freely, share their experiences, and remember their love for each other.

The value in seeing through others’ eyes

One of my favorite aspects of the experience was the ability to see the world from anyone’s perspective. I saw the world from my wife’s perspective, and instantly all her words, actions, and decisions made perfect sense. I saw it from each of my children’s perspectives, and their pure innocence was so clear and palpable, even in the midst of their worst tantrums and “misbehavior.”

I think as a parent, one of the most important things to keep in mind is your children’s essential innocence. They, like you, are just a sweet, innocent being who was dropped into this chaotic, painful world without their knowledge or consent. They, like you, are just trying every day to survive, to get their needs met, to make sense of the information flooding their senses, and to find their agency and power in an unforgiving environment. 

That remembrance of their innocence is the key to everything – to treating them with compassion no matter how flagrant their behavior seems, to seeing every moment as an opportunity for love and connection, to teaching them with patience how to navigate life, to not taking their actions personally or making it about you. Yet it’s hard to see the innocence of your children when you’re not connected to your own innocence and inherent goodness. That awareness is what I was overwhelmed by once I could see life from their point of view.

I thought of other people as well. My uncle Gary, who passed away a few months ago, and I hadn’t been able to grieve. Somehow, the Spanish language we’d been using throughout the session helped me to feel it. I wept with the phrase “Mi tío, mi tio” echoing through my head, as all the memories of his generosity and humor filled my memory.

Finally, my attention turned to my father, and what I encountered there was so surprising: nothing but an overwhelming, profoundly deep sense of gratitude. I could see the world from his perspective, too, and what I instantly grasped was how hard it had been for him. How much he had had to endure as a father of four, what it had taken to maintain a marriage and a household and a career and a life all at the same time, and still maintain his integrity and sense of self.

I saw how important it was that he’d been a strong father, modeling principles and boundaries and an unshakeable commitment to order and stability in our home. I’d often resented him for that, wishing he’d been more flexible or forgiving or gentle. But from my own perspective at 40 years old now, I could suddenly see how that strength had protected us, shielded us, given us a stable foundation from which we could strike out into the world with confidence.

I sensed that I’d reached a resolution with my father, that I had made peace with him and healed the essential rift between us. That realization triggered a new flood of gratitude and joy, because that same healing and connection is what I want for my relationship with my own kids. The doubt that I’d ever find it with my father meant I could never be sure I’d find it with my children.

And that made me realize that this was the first intensive healing experience that I had undertaken from the perspective of an adult. I had always felt like a child, like a boy, healing some foundational wound in the hope of finally “growing up.” But not this time. This time I could allow my vulnerability, tenderness, and heartbreak to come to the surface without abandoning my identity as a father, husband, and leader. 

The aftermath

I wrapped up the session around 2 pm, and took a taxi to a nearby nature spa for my integration and recovery. I felt like a newborn, raw and incredibly sensitive to every sensation, internal and external.

I had little appetite, but ate a mushroom soup in honor of the plant. I then spent a couple of hours rotating between a sauna, cold plunge, and jacuzzi at a local hotel we visit frequently, nestled in the green forest amidst the soft rainfall of the wet season.

Returning home that evening, I was overcome with joy and happiness seeing my kids. Their beauty and perfection were just so vivid, so palpable. The same with my wife – there almost seemed to be a halo over her head, her beauty radiating outward like the sun.

Over the next week, my interactions with my kids felt so different. Suddenly, they seemed more patient, caring, thoughtful, curious, and cooperative, in stark contrast to how I’d perceived them in recent weeks. I knew that the change had to have been in me, not them, and all the same, I couldn’t believe how much more easeful, meaningful, and fun our time together was. I think they sensed my openness and safety, and expressed so many new thoughts, feelings, and questions to me. It was as if I was getting to know them for the first time.

Long-term effects

As expected, I found the effects of my mushroom journey slowly wore off over the following days.

During the next week, I had a highly elevated mood, and found so much joy in the most mundane everyday routines. I was far more patient and present with the kids. An all-day travel day back to California, 4 days later, was not only much more tolerable, I actually found it fun! Normally, my wife and I take turns managing the kids for the 4-hour flight, but this time I happily played with them the whole time.

Visiting my parents a couple of days after that, we had a series of lovely conversations, talking about what I had seen and experienced. I was moved to tears again at the privilege of being able to share my insights with them and how much I appreciated their role in my life.

Surprisingly, I found my desire to drink alcohol dropped to zero. I’d never really enjoyed the taste or the experience, and used it mostly to help me slow down at the end of a stressful workday. It’s been more than a month since my session and the desire hasn’t returned.

At work, I felt much greater emotional fluidity and warmth toward my team and customers, emphasizing our shared values and the bigger picture of our work, which is increasingly about helping businesses adopt AI. I can already see that I’m going to emphasize community and the human-to-human connection much more as a result of this experience.

Takeaways

It’s now been over a month since my magic mushroom experience, and I’m left with several takeaways.

Healing can progress and reaches resolution

Looking back on this experience, I realize that I had long operated under an assumption: that healing was never-ending. I had expected to never really reach resolution. I assumed I would just keep uncovering new forms of psychological damage for the rest of my life, like an infinitely deep well.

But this experience taught me a different perspective: that while the overarching journey of personal growth may be infinite, there is a possibility of reaching true resolution along the way. I was surprised to find such resolution with my father, who had been the focal point of my healing thus far. I was so happy to find I could undertake this journey from the perspective of an adult, feeling in control and empowered even in the most vulnerable moments.

Most of all, I loved being able to walk away from this experience without feeling like I had to fundamentally reshape my life. I quite like my life. This was more like a firmware reset, putting me back in touch with my values and sense of self, without demanding that I make dramatic changes as a result.

Healing does progress, and it does reach resolution even as it extends to the distant horizon.

The role of psychedelics in an age of AI-driven change

We are pivoting the business strongly toward AI, especially its implementation in small and medium businesses. And the more I think about it, the more I believe that psychedelics and other forms of healing are going to play a crucial part in the AI era. 

The defining feature of this new era we’re entering is going to be ever-accelerating change. The condition of “future shock” first described by Alvin Toffler in 1970 is only now truly coming to fruition, as we enter a literally inhuman pace of change.

Humans are going to need new ways of adapting to change at every level of society and the economy. They’re going to have to “unlearn” old patterns, old ways of thinking, old paradigms, and old assumptions at breathtaking speed. That unlearning may be an even greater challenge than learning the new.

One definition of “grief” is “the sudden realization that a form of value is ending.” That’s the case when someone dies, and the realization of the love you feel for them hits you in full force. It’s the case when you miss out on a hoped-for opportunity, or a season of life abruptly ends, or a tragedy strikes in your family or in the world. As humans, we tend to quickly get used to the status quo, including what is good, valuable, beautiful, and true. Often, we realize its full worth only once it disappears.

It isn’t easy to grieve on command. As humans, we tend to do everything we can to avoid it. But perhaps these substances could be a medium for releasing our grief more reliably as the world shifts under our feet. Maybe psychedelics are emerging into the light at this moment in history because now is the time we need them to evolve our human consciousness at the speed that AI, a new form of consciousness, is demanding. 

The gift of a safe, accessible tool for healing

This wasn’t my first encounter with psychedelics. I’d previously experimented with LSD at Burning Man and completed a 3-day ayahuasca retreat in the mountains.

I count those as some of the most meaningful, impactful experiences of my life. And yet in retrospect, I realize that I’ve always operated under the assumption that in order to have the most valuable experience, I had to go to the furthest extremes.

But why should that be the case? Why should someone have to travel to the furthest reaches of the Peruvian jungle, or skirt the law, or risk their reputation, or spend a lot of money, or take multiple days off work, or take the most powerful dose, to receive love and truth?

If healing is a universal phenomenon and a universal human need, which is what I believe, then we need to find more affordable, accessible, risk-free, and scalable means of accessing it. For so long, tools for healing have been illegal, socially sanctioned, or at least labeled weird and taboo. Modern society has long considered it too dangerous to venture into the unconscious, the repressed, and the traumatic.

How fortunate that that taboo is now passing, and that we’re starting to open up avenues for healing in a format that is so incredibly accessible. Almost anyone can take a day off work, consume some plants, and lie on a bed for a few hours. What a time to be alive, when we can pursue deep forms of healing without disrupting our normal routines.

I’ve become a believer and advocate for psychedelic-assisted therapy, and intend to use my influence to make it more accessible in the world.

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.

The post Mushroom Trip: My First Experience with Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy appeared first on Forte Labs.

I remember the exact moment I was radicalized about climate change. 

Standing on the front porch of our new home in Southern California in the summer of 2020, I watched the sky turn a burnt orange as wildfires blazed in the inland summer heat. The particles of smoke didn’t just fill the air—they filled our lungs. I coughed and wheezed throughout the day and night, unable to think or work effectively, as my body’s systems were overwhelmed by an atmosphere suddenly hostile to human life.

Far more worryingly, my wife Lauren was pregnant with our first child at the time. Every parenting book I’d read emphasized the importance of clean air for fetal development, and here we were, trapped in a toxic cloud. We sealed the windows and doors on the worst days, bought half a dozen air purifiers, and cranked the AC as high as it would go. But still, I laid awake at night, feeling powerless against a force far beyond my control.

It was that summer when climate change stopped being an abstract concept and became viscerally personal for me. I realized that this wasn’t a one-time freak event—every summer we could expect deteriorating air quality from rampant wildfires. It had become part of the backdrop of our lives in Southern California, as predictable as June gloom and earthquake tremors.

Picture how this scenario is likely to play out over the next twenty years: You’re trying to work from home on a sweltering afternoon when the power flickers. Your computer monitor goes dark. The air conditioning sputters to a stop. Within minutes, the room temperature climbs from a comfortable 72 degrees to an oppressive 85, then 90. Your body starts producing sweat faster than it can evaporate. Your thinking becomes sluggish. The careful systems you’ve built—both digital and physical—begin to break down.

This convergence of physical heat, failing infrastructure, and human vulnerability isn’t just a temporary inconvenience. It’s a preview of the fundamental challenge that Jeff Goodell explores in The Heat Will Kill You First, a book that forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth: all our routines for productive living and working are built on the assumption of a stable climate. It no longer makes sense for me to teach people how to build productive systems without taking into account the increasing instability of our wider environment.

So many climate debates still focus on abstract concepts like emissions targets and policy frameworks, or expend tremendous energy trying to forecast the exact degree of temperature rise decades in the future. But an increasing number of people are discovering what I learned that smoky summer of 2020—climate change is already here, already personal, and already reshaping our daily lives.

Goodell’s book zeroes in on perhaps the most immediate and universal manifestation of that change: the direct impact of heat on human bodies, communities, and ecosystems. 

As someone who thinks constantly about how we capture, organize, and act on information, I found myself reading his work through a unique lens. The climate crisis isn’t just an environmental problem. It’s fundamentally an information processing challenge. We’re drowning in data about rising temperatures, yet struggling to translate that knowledge into meaningful action. It’s the ultimate test of whether we can build a “Second Brain” not just for ourselves, but for our entire civilization.

In this piece, I’ll share the insights from Goodell’s book that surprised me the most, challenged my assumptions about human adaptability, and revealed why heat—not hurricanes, floods, or wildfires—represents the most profound threat to how we live and work in the 21st century.

The Invisible Killer Among Us

Here’s the fact that permanently shifted my understanding of climate risks: Heat kills more people than all other natural disasters combined.

A study in The Lancet estimated that 489,000 people worldwide died from extreme heat in 2019. That’s more than hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and earthquakes put together. It’s also more than deaths from guns or illegal drugs. Between 260,000 and 600,000 people die each year just from inhaling smoke from wildfires—a secondary effect of heat-amplified fires.

Yet heat remains largely invisible in our collective consciousness. We name hurricanes. We measure earthquakes on the Richter scale. We have sophisticated early warning systems for tornadoes. But heat waves? They pass through our communities like silent predators, leaving behind a trail of death that often goes uncounted and unnoticed.

This invisibility isn’t just a measurement problem—it’s a fundamental flaw in how we process information about gradual versus acute threats. Our brains, evolved to respond to immediate dangers, struggle to recognize slow-moving catastrophes. It’s the same reason we procrastinate on long-term projects while responding instantly to urgent emails.

Since 1970, Earth’s temperature has spiked faster than in any comparable forty-year period in recorded history. The eight years between 2015 and 2022 were the hottest on record. In 2022 alone, 850 million people lived in regions that experienced all-time high temperatures.

But numbers alone don’t capture what this means for human bodies and systems.

Researchers project that by 2100, half of the world’s population will be exposed to a life-threatening combination of heat and humidity. In parts of the world, temperatures will rise so high that simply stepping outside for a few hours “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.”

This isn’t a distant future scenario. It’s a reality that’s already emerging in unexpected places.

In western Pakistan, where only the wealthy have air conditioning, it’s already too hot for human survival several weeks each year. Holy cities like Mecca and Jerusalem, where millions gather for religious pilgrimages, have become what Goodell calls “caldrons of sweat.”

The scale of it already defies comprehension. In the summer of 2022, nine hundred million people in China—63 percent of the nation’s population—endured a two-month extreme heat wave that killed crops and sparked wildfires. One weather historian declared: “There is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable to what is happening in China.”

The economic toll is also staggering. Researchers at Dartmouth College estimate that since the 1990s, extreme heat waves have cost the global economy $16 trillion. But the human costs go far beyond GDP:

Heat lowers children’s test scoresIt raises the risk of miscarriage in pregnant womenProlonged exposure increases death rates from heart and kidney diseaseWhen stressed by heat, people become more impulsive and prone to conflictRacial slurs and hate speech spike on social media during heat wavesSuicides riseGun violence increasesSexual assaults become more frequent

In Africa and the Middle East, studies have found direct links between higher temperatures and the outbreak of civil wars.

Heat doesn’t just kill our bodies. It kills our civilized selves.

The Machine Inside: Understanding Our Thermal Limits

Humans are heat machines. Just being alive generates heat. 

Every thought, every heartbeat, every breath produces thermal energy that must be dissipated. When you move a muscle, only about 20 percent of the energy goes to the actual contraction—the other 80 percent is released as heat.

This biological fact creates an absolute temperature ceiling for human survival: a wet bulb temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius). Beyond that threshold, our bodies generate heat faster than we can dissipate it, regardless of shade, fans, or how much water we drink.

Drinking water by itself doesn’t actually cool your core body temperature. While dehydration can exacerbate heat exhaustion, you can be fully hydrated and still die of heatstroke. The only effective treatment is rapid cooling of core body temperature, through ice baths, cooling the palms and soles where blood circulates close to the surface, or other direct cooling methods.

As a systems thinker, I’m fascinated by second and third-order effects—the cascading consequences that ripple out from initial changes, like the spreading ripples in a pond. Goodell’s exploration of how heat is redrawing the map of disease distribution revealed consequences I hadn’t imagined.

For example, we know that the heat-loving Aedes aegypti mosquito is expanding its range northward and to higher altitudes. By 2080, five billion people—60 percent of the world’s population—may be at risk of dengue fever. 

Mexico City, historically too cold for these mosquitoes, has always remained mostly free of yellow fever, dengue, and Zika. But as temperatures rise, Aedes aegypti is moving in, bringing these diseases to 21 million unprepared residents. I’ve personally noticed the uptick in mosquitoes in Mexico City from 2019, when we first lived there, to today. 

Nepal, nearly free of mosquito-borne diseases until recently, saw dengue cases explode from 135 in 2015 to 28,109 in 2022.

Even more alarming, an estimated 40,000 viruses lurk in the bodies of mammals, of which a quarter could infect humans. Climate scientist Colin Carlson estimates that coming decades will see about 300,000 first encounters between species that normally don’t interact, leading to roughly 15,000 spillovers of viruses into new hosts.

The pattern extends beyond mosquitoes. Lyme disease cases in the US have tripled since the late 1990s. It’s not just the heat expanding tick ranges, but also increasingly fragmented landscapes. As forests are carved into suburban developments, fox and owl populations decline, leading to explosions in white-footed mice populations—the main reservoir for Lyme disease. Young ticks feed on infected mice, then spread the disease to humans.

We’re not just heating the planet—we’re creating a massive biological experiment with unpredictable results.

Antarctica: The Doomsday Glacier and Our Coastal Future

Of all the places on Earth, Antarctica might seem the least connected to our daily lives. Yet what happens to the ice sheets there will determine the future of every coastal city on the planet.

Goodell takes us on a research expedition to Thwaites Glacier—nicknamed the “Doomsday Glacier”—one of the largest glaciers in West Antarctica. The question driving their research is stark: Is the West Antarctic ice sheet on the verge of unstoppable collapse?

A stable ice sheet means coastal cities have time to adapt. An unstable ice sheet means goodbye to Miami, New York, Shanghai, Mumbai—virtually every low-lying coastal city in the world, including our hometown of Long Beach, California.

To understand the risk, consider this: Seventy percent of Earth’s water is frozen in Antarctica’s ice sheets, some nearly three miles thick. If all of Greenland melted, sea levels would rise 22 feet. If Antarctica melted? Two hundred feet. The world’s coastlines would be obliterated.

Three million years ago, when atmospheric CO2 levels were similar to today and temperatures only slightly warmer, sea levels were at least 20 feet higher. This suggests massive melting is already “baked in” to our future. The only question is how fast it happens.

The mechanism of potential catastrophe is elegant in its terrifying simplicity. Large parts of West Antarctica’s glaciers lie below sea level, resting on ground that slopes downward inland—imagine a giant soup bowl filled with ice. Warm ocean water can penetrate under the ice, melting it from below. As the glacier retreats down the slope, more ice is exposed to warm water, accelerating the melt in a feedback loop that scientists call “marine ice sheet instability.”

The False Promise of Technological Salvation

As someone who advocates for using technology to augment human capabilities, I was particularly struck by Goodell’s analysis of air conditioning—our primary technological response to heat.

Here’s the uncomfortable reality: Air conditioning is not a cooling technology at all. It’s simply a tool for heat redistribution, moving thermal energy from inside to outside while consuming massive amounts of electricity.

The global spread of AC is accelerating climate change even as it provides temporary relief. In China, 75 percent of homes in Beijing and Shanghai now have air conditioning, up from near zero twenty years ago. Over the last decade, 10 percent of China’s skyrocketing electricity growth has been due to cooling—in a country still largely dependent on coal.

As one researcher put it: “Comfort is destroying the future, one click at a time.”

Pakistan produces about 0.5 percent of global CO2 emissions, and the average Pakistani is responsible for less than one-fifteenth the emissions of an American. Yet Pakistanis suffer disproportionately from extreme heat they didn’t create. When the power fails—as it often does—the consequences are deadly. In Sahiwal, eight babies died in a hospital ICU when extreme heat combined with a power outage shut down the air conditioning.

The Montreal Protocol, adopted in 1987, offers both a model of hope and a reason for caution. When scientists discovered that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, the world acted swiftly. Within two years, an international treaty cut CFC use in half. Today, they’re outlawed by 197 countries, and the ozone layer is slowly recovering.

But we replaced CFCs with HFCs—chemicals that don’t harm ozone but are greenhouse gases up to 15,000 times more potent than CO2. Every solution can create new problems.

Heat as a Hyperlocal Phenomenon

One of Goodell’s most important insights is that heat waves are more like stories than meteorological events. Each has its own setting, cast of characters, and dramatic flash points.

A 99-degree day in Buffalo is fundamentally different from a 99-degree day in Las Vegas—not just meteorologically, but sociologically. Buffalo residents are less likely to have air conditioning, less experienced in dealing with extreme heat, and less connected to social networks that check on vulnerable neighbors.

The U.S. National Weather Service ranking system reflects this confusion. Heat watches, warnings, and advisories have no standardized definitions—local offices decide what each category means in their area.

Nobody should die in a heat wave. People die because they are alone, lack resources, don’t understand warning signs, or fear losing their jobs if they stop working. They die from ignorance about basic heat safety: whether to open windows, how much water to drink, when cold baths help or hurt, what a racing heart means.

The 2003 European heat wave killed 15,000 people in France in less than two weeks. Nearly a thousand lived in central Paris, many in top-floor apartments where heat built up beneath zinc roofs, literally cooking residents as if in an oven. It took weeks to recover all the bodies. Entire buildings had to be evacuated due to the pervasive smell of death.

Yet France now has one of the world’s best heat warning systems. Answers exist if we choose to implement them.

The Great Adaptation: Engineering for a Superheated World

Reading Goodell’s prescriptions for urban adaptation, I recognized parallels to the challenges we face in personal knowledge management and artificial intelligence. Just as we need to retrofit our thinking systems for information abundance, we need to retrofit our cities for thermal abundance.

The challenges are twofold:

First, how do we ensure new growth happens in heat-smart ways? Another fifty years of suburban sprawl would be catastrophic. Cities need density, public transit, green space, trees, water features, shade, and thermally intelligent design. Every new building should be both efficient and survivable during power outages.

Second, how do we fix what already exists? The vast majority of current buildings are ill-suited for extreme heat—poorly insulated, badly sited, dependent on air conditioning. Do we tear down and rebuild? Retrofit? How do we add green space to crowded cities? How do we banish concrete and invite nature?

Trees are climate heroes, but they’re also climate victims. In 2011, combined drought and heat killed 10 percent of urban trees in Texas—six million died in months. Analysis suggests that in a midrange warming scenario, three-quarters of urban trees could die from heat and drought by 2050. Globally, we’re losing ten billion trees annually while planting only five billion.

We need new approaches, new species, and new ways of thinking about urban ecosystems. It’s the greatest engineering challenge of our time.

From Information to Transformation

As I finished Goodell’s book, I kept returning to a fundamental question: Why do we struggle to act on information about slow-moving catastrophes?

The answer lies partly in how our brains process threats. We’re wired for immediate dangers, not gradual degradation. But it also reflects a failure of our systems for capturing, organizing, and acting on critical information.

Climate change is, I believe, fundamentally a knowledge management problem. We have the data. We understand the mechanisms. We even know many of the solutions. What we lack is the ability to transform information into action at the necessary scale and speed, and the motivation and consensus needed to do so.

This is where I think the principles of Building a Second Brain, especially when augmented by the latest AI models, could be useful. We can use such systems to:

Capture the full scope of climate impacts across all domains of lifeOrganize information in ways that reveal connections and dependenciesDistill insights into achievable objectives, actionable plans to realize them, and targets for advocacy and fundingCreate solutions in forms that motivate change, and express them in language and stories that resonate with more people

The heat crisis demands that we extend the principles of individual productivity and business growth that have shaped the modern world to the realm of collective survival.

Goodell’s book ends with a preview of our transformed future: “The tree you used to climb when you were a kid will die. The beach where you kissed your partner will be underwater. Mosquitoes and other insects will be year-round companions. New diseases will emerge. Cults of cool will celebrate the spiritual purity of ice. You’ll grill slabs of lab-grown ‘meat’ and drink Zinfandel from Alaska. Your digital watch will monitor your internal body temperature. Border walls will be fortified. Entrepreneurs will make millions selling you micro cooling devices. Fourth of July celebrations will become life-threatening events. Snow will feel exotic.”

This isn’t dystopian fiction. It’s the trajectory we’re already on.

But trajectories can change. The Montreal Protocol proved we can act swiftly when we understand the threat. The question is whether we can process information about heat—diffuse, gradual, unequally distributed—with the same clarity that allowed us to recognize the ozone hole.

What You Can Do Now

Knowledge without action is merely fuel for anxiety. Here are concrete steps you can take to begin adapting to our heating world:

For Personal Safety:

Learn the signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke—for yourself and loved onesUnderstand that hydration alone won’t prevent heat stroke; cooling is essentialCreate a heat emergency plan, including cooling strategies and communication with vulnerable neighborsNever take Tylenol or aspirin for heat-related symptoms

For Your Home and Work:

Assess your spaces for passive cooling opportunities (shade, ventilation, insulation)Create backup plans for power outages during heat wavesConsider heat resilience in any renovation or moving decisionsPlant trees and create green spaces wherever possible

For Your Community:

Advocate for heat action plans in your citySupport urban greening initiativesJoin or create networks that check on vulnerable neighbors during heat wavesPush for workplace heat safety standards

For Systemic Change:

Make climate action a non-negotiable criterion for your political choicesDivest from fossil fuels and invest in climate-friendly industriesSupport organizations working on climate adaptationShare knowledge about heat risks and solutions in your networks

The coming heat will kill—but it doesn’t have to kill you or those you care about. With the right information, preparation, and collective action, we can adapt to the thermal transformation of our planet.

The challenge isn’t just surviving the heat. It’s maintaining our humanity, creativity, and capacity for joy in a world growing hotter by the day. That’s a project worthy of our best thinking, our most innovative technology, and our deepest commitment to each other.

The future may be hot, but it doesn’t have to be hopeless.

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.

The post Life and Death on a Scorched Planet: What I Learned From “The Heat Will Kill You First” appeared first on Forte Labs.

You discover something fascinating—maybe it’s vibe coding, sustainable investing, or sourdough baking. Your excitement builds as you imagine mastering this new skill. But then reality hits: Where do you even start?

The internet offers endless tutorials, courses, and “ultimate guides.” Your bookmarks folder grows heavy with resources you’ll “definitely check out later.” Weeks pass, and you’re still stuck in planning mode, no closer to actually learning anything.

Someone asked me recently in our monthly Q&A session for the Second Brain Membership: “When you learn a new tool or skill, do you have a strategy to do it? Like different stages of exploring and repeating?”

After thinking through it for a moment, I realized I actually do have a systematic approach to learning new skills—I’d just never formally documented it. 

It’s worked for me for years across everything from productivity systems to personal development. And in this blog post, I will share it with you.

Here’s the key: The goal isn’t to become an expert at everything you try. It’s to efficiently identify what’s worth pursuing and what’s not.

Stage 1: Immersion – Get Maximum Exposure

The first stage is about orienting yourself in the new field. Think of your content consumption time as a portfolio that you’re actively allocating.

When ChatGPT first came out, I immediately dedicated 20% of my content consumption time to AI. Instead of watching random YouTube videos during breaks, I’d pick something AI-related. During walks, I’d listen to AI podcasts instead of my usual rotation.

What this looks like practically:

Subscribe to 3-5 newsletters or Substacks on the topicFollow key YouTubers and podcasters in the spaceReallocate existing content consumption time (don’t add more, just redirect what you’re already consuming)Focus on getting a general sense of the landscape rather than deep expertise

The key insight: You automatically start learning through mere exposure. Your brain begins building mental models and recognizing patterns without conscious effort.

How to Find Quality Sources in a Noisy World

One challenge you’ll face in this stage is finding the signal among the noise. Here are my strategies:

Ask for recommendations: Post on social media asking for sources, or ask around your friend group. Personal recommendations are strong signals, especially if you hear the same name mentioned multiple times.

Ignore popularity metrics: Subscriber count, view count, and virality usually lead to mediocre quality. The best content is often shared person-to-person, not algorithmically promoted.

Seek out obscure sources: Some of the best content exists as “janky PDFs” passed between practitioners. I started a subreddit called “obscure PDFs” specifically for this kind of hidden knowledge.

Match your consumption preferences: I prefer text over video and audio because I don’t have a commute. Work with your natural preferences and lifestyle constraints rather than forcing yourself into formats that don’t fit.

Stage 2: Building – Make Something Real

Here’s where most people get stuck in tutorial hell. Instead of consuming more content, you need to try making something as quickly as possible.

There’s a completely different set of lessons that only come from building. You can watch hundreds of hours of coding tutorials, but you won’t understand programming until you try to build an actual project.

When I wanted to learn vibe coding, I gave myself one Saturday to create something. I built a “death clock” calculator that predicts your exact day of death. In this blog post, I share what I learned from this real project with real constraints.

What this looks like practically:

Set a short deadline (one day to one week maximum)Choose a simple, concrete projectAccept that it will be messy and imperfectFocus on completing something, not making it perfect

The key insight: Building reveals the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. This gap is where real learning happens.

Stage 3: Structured Learning – Find Your Mentors

After you’ve gotten exposure and tried building, you’ll have a much better sense of who actually knows what they’re talking about.

Now it’s time for more structured learning—but with a crucial twist. Instead of trying to learn from everyone, pick just 1-3 people max to treat as your mentors.

For example, in the realm of self-development, I’ve gone deep with the teachings of Joe Hudson and the Art of Accomplishment. In marketing, I’ve learned from and worked closely with Billy Broas. In writing, I modeled my work closely after Venkatesh Rao. In tech news and analysis, I’ve read everything Ben Thompson of Stratechery has written in the last decade. Currently, I’m studying YouTube scriptwriting intently under George Blackman (though he doesn’t know it). I’ve learned a ton about embodied self-awareness and biomimicry from adrienne maree brown. 

I strongly believe that this focused approach enabled me to make leaps in growth that wouldn’t have been possible if I had just dabbled in a lot of different approaches.

What this looks like practically:

Choose teachers based on results, not popularityFollow specific instructions rather than cherry-picking from multiple sourcesUse them as a filter for all incoming informationInvest in their courses, programs, or coaching if available

The key insight: One focused teacher is worth more than twenty scattered resources. Use your mentors as filters to cut through information overload.

Stage 4: Connection – Build Real Relationships

The final stage is about tapping into our innate drive to share information and ideas with others. 

Some of the most transformative learning happens when you join a community of practitioners and even step into a leadership role. You might organize meetups, start a discussion group, or even host your own events around shared interests.

Every year, I host a mastermind-style retreat largely for this purpose—to turn online relationships into real friendships and collaborations. There’s nothing quite like that personal connection for accelerating learning.

What this looks like practically:

Reach out to people you’ve learned fromAttend conferences, workshops, or retreats in the fieldCreate collaborations or projects togetherHost or join communities around the topicTake on leadership roles in existing communitiesOrganize your own gatherings or events to bring people together

The key insight: Learning becomes exponentially more powerful when you’re part of a community of practitioners. And when you become a leader who brings others together, you accelerate not just your own learning but everyone else’s, too.

The Secret Ingredient: Cultivating Play in Learning

There’s one element that can transform every stage of this framework: playfulness.

As one community member beautifully put it during our discussion, “Anything that I can turn into a sort of boyish feeling of play speeds my learning and takes me more to the heart of whatever I’m feeling drawn to.” This wisdom about play isn’t just personal preference—it’s backed by compelling research.

In his book Free to Learn, developmental psychologist Peter Gray demonstrates that curiosity, playfulness, and sociability are the three natural drives that are inherently educational. These aren’t just nice-to-haves—they’re the fundamental biological mechanisms through which humans learn most effectively.

Gray’s research shows that play is nature’s way of ensuring children acquire the skills necessary for survival. When we approach learning with a playful mindset, we activate the same biological drives that make children such incredible learning machines before they ever set foot in a classroom.

How to cultivate playfulness in your learning:

Approach new subjects like a curious child – What would happen if you just started experimenting without reading all the manuals first?Give yourself permission to “waste time” exploring – Follow interesting tangents even if they seem unproductiveTurn challenges into games – Can you learn 10 new concepts in a week? Can you build something silly with your new skill?Embrace the “beginner’s mind” – Let go of the need to look competent or professional while learning

The beautiful paradox is that when we stop taking learning so seriously, we often learn more effectively. As Gray notes, the shift from exploration to play is one from a focused, serious facial expression to a more relaxed, smiling one—and it’s in this relaxed state that deeper learning often occurs.

This sense of play doesn’t diminish with age—it just gets “beaten out of us” by formal educational systems. But we can reclaim it. The next time you’re learning something new, ask yourself: How can I make this feel more like play and less like work?

The Hidden Truth About Learning

Here’s what might surprise you: Most of your learning attempts should fizzle out. And that’s not just okay—it’s optimal.

You have limited time and energy. Most interests are meant to be explored for a season, not turned into lifelong pursuits. The idea that you should finish every book you start or master every skill you try is a maximalist trap that actually prevents deep learning.

The real test of any skill isn’t how you feel about it—it’s whether you can produce externally verifiable results in the real world. Can you make a sale? Can someone exchange their hard-earned money or time for what you’ve created? That’s an exceedingly high standard, which is exactly why it’s meaningful.

Most importantly, give yourself permission to stop at any stage. If something doesn’t spark continued interest after Stage 1 or 2, let it go without shame. That’s not failure—that’s efficient filtering.

The skills worth pursuing to mastery will reveal themselves through this process. When something passes through all four stages and you’re still energized by it, you’ve found something worth serious investment.

I used AI to help draft this post based on my spoken insights, then edited it to ensure it captures my authentic voice and experience.

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.

The post My 4-Stage System for Learning Anything New appeared first on Forte Labs.

We’ve been living in Valle de Bravo – a mountain town a couple of hours outside Mexico City – for 9 months now.

I’ve lived in 5 countries for at least 6 months each, and traveled in another 20, and I think this is the most perfect place I’ve ever encountered for an expat family to live.

It’s so perfect, in fact, that I think it can actually serve as a template for finding other great places to live around the world.

After months of reflecting on what makes this place so special, I’ve identified 13 criteria (and one bonus criterion) that create the magic. 

What’s fascinating is that these aren’t just random qualities – they work together as a system, each element reinforcing the others to create something truly extraordinary.

1. Right Distance from a Major City

A 2-3 hour drive outside a major city is the perfect distance.

It’s close enough that you can drive in for the day or the weekend, yet far enough that people can’t commute daily. This creates a rooted community instead of a bedroom suburb.

We love being relatively close to Mexico City and everything it offers, but we don’t feel like we have to go there to access people, culture, or entertainment.

I’ve also met some of the most fascinating people ever here – artists, writers, poets, spiritual guides, entrepreneurs, permaculturalists, and creators working remotely.

2. Mountain Location

The mountains are objectively a wonderful place to live.

You get milder weather, fewer mosquitos, tons of nature, and cold nights to cozy up in bed. Plus activities like hiking, horseback riding, and camping.

The mountains also keep it from developing too much and maintain the region’s rural and outdoorsy character, with that small town feel.

Valle is a world-class destination for paragliding, waterskiing, and other outdoor activities, located in one of the few mountainous, temperate regions of Mexico.

3. Water Access

A lake provides recreational activities like swimming, sailing, powerboating, and waterskiing. It also creates beautiful waterfront views.

Research consistently demonstrates that proximity to water bodies leads to higher levels of mood improvement and stress reduction compared to other natural environments. The sights, sounds, and even smell of water provide a calming sensory experience that promotes a uniquely positive state of mind.

Valle is well known for its lake. Lots of people water ski most weekends throughout the year.

4. Tourism and Wealth

This may not seem desirable, but a certain level of tourist influx brings benefits.

There’s likely to be more investment in the town, interesting people coming and going, and more amenities like restaurants, grocery stores, and paddle courts than there’d be otherwise. People are also more likely to visit you.

All the more so if it’s also a wealthy enclave. Valle has a population of around 100,000 that doubles during busy weekends, since many people have weekend houses there. But it rarely feels crowded.

5. Few Foreigners

Our main goal in moving abroad was to immerse our kids in the Spanish language and Mexican culture. I know from living abroad before that this really only happens if there aren’t too many Americans around.

Valle has surprisingly few foreigners living there. It seems like it’s kind of an undiscovered secret for Mexico City families.

6. Warm Culture

Mexico has to be one of the warmest cultures anywhere. We’re constantly surprised by how completely open and generous everyone we meet is.

Especially the families at our kids’ school, who have become our closest friends.

It’s like rewinding the clock to a time before smartphones and the Internet. People greet each other, even strangers treat you like a human, everyone knows each other, and it’s easy to make friends.

At a restaurant, if a kid is crying, a waitress will pick them up and carry them around. They’re happy to give you an extra condiment without charging you for it.

I love that we’re raising our kids in a culture that teaches them how to be warm and open, with a background level of trust between people.

7. Airport Distance

You might think you want an airport nearby, but many of the positive qualities above exist because it’s not too easy to get here.

There’s an airport in Toluca, an hour away, but it’s not international. So you have to drive to one of the international airports in Mexico City, around 2-3 hours away.

8. Low Labor Costs

The single most life-changing part of moving to Mexico has been getting full-time help.

My wife and I save probably several hours a day because our help does all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and sometimes watches the kids.

We spend all this extra time on exercising, resting, sleeping, art, hobbies, socializing, and hanging out with the kids – all things we had much less time for living in Southern California.

We pay probably double the local going rate, and it’s still remarkably cheap for us. About $137 per week for 40 hours (or $3.40 per hour).

9. Slow Lifestyle

Part of our motivation for moving abroad was to deprogram ourselves from the work-centric life we adopted in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.

We found it simply impossible to do this living in Southern California. As long as everyone else was work-centric, there was nothing to do and no one to hang out with!

A core part of that work-centric mindset is an addiction to speed. We found we couldn’t slow ourselves down when everything around us was trying to speed us up.

Every place has a background tempo that dictates the underlying speed of everything within it. I think the only truly effective way to change your tempo is to change your environment.

Mexico, and especially small Mexican towns like Valle, operate at a fundamentally different pace than the US. The cultural emphasis is on relationships and enjoying life rather than maximizing productivity at all costs.

10. Similar Time Zone

If you’re from the US and do business there, you’ll probably want to be in a similar time zone.

This facilitates so many things, from scheduling calls easily to not having too much jet lag when you visit home.

It’s also a bonus if you can get back to the US in just a few hours and have connections to different places within the US. This means Mexico and Central America are ideal!

11. Strategic Inconvenience

In the US, we’re constantly driving toward efficiency, which mostly means removing people from the process. This results in a highly efficient society in which everyone feels alone.

In Mexico, they just throw people at every problem. It isn’t optimized, but there are so many people around, it’s way more fun!

Resisting that drive toward efficiency and convenience is nearly impossible as an individual, and even more difficult as a family, because you seem strange for actively resisting things being too easy.

I’m happy to be raising my kids in a place where there’s still friction, still humans you “have” to deal with, where you literally can’t go it alone to accomplish anything of significance. Relationships are the central element in life.

Part of this is also having a tolerance for risk. We live in a bubble-wrapped, liability-waiver, hyper-sensitive culture, especially when it comes to children. We’ve forgotten how to let them rough it up and find out for themselves.

Paradoxically, as my wife put it, we “overvalue” life to such a degree that we end up devaluing life, by refusing to allow our kids to face its risks.

It’s very hard to intentionally expose your kids to risk, though – you have to move somewhere where the environment provides it. We love that in Mexico, kids are an integral part of every activity. They’re not in a separate world where everything is anesthetized and infantilized.

12. Good Schools

This is probably the crux if you have kids, because good schools are hard to find anywhere. I would start your whole search for a location on this basis.

Valle has several great options, including (incredibly for such a small town) a Montessori and Waldorf school.

High school is harder, and some families move to Mexico City when their kids reach that age. But there are a couple of good options and additional ones on the way as more people settle permanently in town.

13. Good Weather

This is also a good starting point for your search, as weather defines so much of daily life. Obviously you’ll want somewhere without too many extremes.

Valle has year-round spring-like weather, except for an intense rainy season from June to September. But that just gives us the perfect excuse to travel in the summer, as many families do.

14. Artistic Culture (Bonus)

I don’t consider this essential, but Valle has a wonderfully artsy vibe. It was the “Woodstock of Mexico,” hosting a huge concert in 1971 that introduced rock ‘n roll to the mainstream.

This makes it unusually rich in all kinds of art, music, dance, and even psychedelic medicine. It’s more open-minded generally than most places in Mexico, all of which we enjoy immensely.

Finding Your Own Valle de Bravo Around the World

After thinking through these criteria systematically, I discovered dozens of other towns that fit this template. Here are some of the most promising options (courtesy of Claude 4):

In MexicoMalinalco, Estado de México 2 hours from Mexico City Mountains: Dramatic cliffs, mystical pre-Hispanic sites No lake but swimming holes and streams Wealthy weekend enclave for Mexico City families Very few foreign residents Traditional Mexican pueblo culture Labor costs comparable to Valle Extremely slow-paced, artistic community Good private school options emergingZacatlán de las Manzanas, Puebla 3 hours from Mexico City, 2 from Puebla Mountains: Pine forests, apple orchards Lake: Presa de Tenango nearby Mexican tourist destination (famous for apples/cider) Almost no foreign residents Warm provincial Mexican culture Very affordable labor Traditional, family-oriented lifestyle Growing educational optionsReal de Catorce, San Luis Potosí 3 hours from San Luis Potosí (with airport) Mountains: High desert mountain town No lake but stunning desert landscapes Mystical/spiritual tourism, wealthy Mexican visitors Few permanent foreigners despite tourism Deep traditional culture Very low labor costs Contemplative, artistic atmosphere Alternative education optionsTapalpa, Jalisco 2 hours from Guadalajara Mountains: “Pueblo Mágico” with forestsLake: Presa del Nogal Guadalajara’s weekend retreat Minimal foreign presence Traditional Jalisco hospitality Affordable labor Outdoor-focused, slow lifestyle Good local schoolsCuetzalan, Puebla 3 hours from Puebla city Mountains: Cloud forest, coffee region Waterfalls instead of lakes Cultural tourism but few foreign residents Strong indigenous Nahua presence Incredibly warm community Very low labor costs Traditional, market-town pace Local schools with cultural programsIn Central AmericaSuchitoto, El Salvador 1.5 hours from San Salvador Mountains: Overlooking Suchitlán Lake Lake: Lago Suchitlán (country’s largest) Arts/culture destination for wealthy Salvadorans Almost no permanent expats Warm Salvadoran hospitality Very affordable labor Artistic, slow-paced colonial town Emerging private school optionsGracias, Honduras 3 hours from San Pedro Sula Mountains: Celaque National Park Hot springs instead of lakes Honduran tourist destination Virtually no foreign residents Traditional Lenca culture influence Extremely affordable Quiet, colonial atmosphere Local schools improvingMatagalpa, Nicaragua 2 hours from Managua Mountains: Coffee highlands Rivers and waterfalls Nicaraguan tourist/coffee region Very few expats Warm mountain culture Lowest labor costs Coffee-farming lifestyle pace Several school optionsVolcán, Panama 1.5 hours from David Mountains: Volcanic highlands Streams and rivers (no lake) Wealthy Panamanian retreat Some retirees but families can find Spanish immersion Indigenous Ngäbe influence Reasonable labor costs Agricultural, outdoor lifestyle Good private schoolsSan Agustín Lanquín, Guatemala3 hours from Guatemala CityMountains: Limestone caves regionRiver: Cahabón River (turquoise pools)Growing eco-tourism, Guatemalan visitorsFew permanent foreign familiesQ’eqchi’ Maya cultureVery affordableNature-based, slow lifestyleCommunity schools with cultural programsIn the United States and CanadaNelson, British Columbia, Canada3 hours from Spokane, WA (airport)Mountains: Stunning Selkirk MountainsLake: Kootenay Lake (magnificent)Tourist/wealthy enclave: Vancouver families’ mountain retreatWarm Canadian mountain culture (surprisingly bohemian)Slow, artistic, non-work centric lifestyleGood Waldorf school + alternativesGreat weather (for Canada)Pacific Time ZoneMissing: Low labor costs, foreign language immersionSalida, Colorado, US2.5 hours from DenverMountains: Arkansas River Valley, 14ers all aroundRiver town (Arkansas River) rather than lakeWealthy outdoor enthusiast enclaveWarm, artistic community vibeDeliberately slow, “simple life” cultureGrowing alternative school scene300+ days of sunshineMountain Time ZoneMissing: Low labor costs, foreign culture, major language immersionJoseph, Oregon, US3.5 hours from Boise (a stretch, but worth it)Mountains: Wallowa Mountains (“Alps of Oregon”)Lake: Wallowa LakeTourist destination, Portland/Seattle wealthy retreatGenuine cowboy/artist culture mixExtremely slow-paced, no chain storesSmall but good schoolBeautiful weather, real wintersPacific Time ZoneMissing: Low labor costs, foreign culture, close to major citySandpoint, Idaho, US2 hours from SpokaneMountains: Selkirk and Cabinet rangesLake: Lake Pend Oreille (huge, gorgeous)Wealthy Seattle/California exodus destinationSurprisingly warm, outdoorsy cultureAnti-corporate, slow lifestyle ethosWaldorf school + good public schoolsFour real seasonsPacific Time ZoneMissing: Low labor costs, foreign cultureRossland, British Columbia, Canada2.5 hours from SpokaneMountains: Ski town in the MonasheesNo lake but close to Christina Lake (30 min)Weekend destination for Vancouver/Calgary familiesSmall, tight-knit communityExtremely slow, outdoor-focusedGood elementary, high school requires creativitySnowy winters, perfect summersPacific Time ZoneMissing: Low labor costs, foreign immersionThe System Behind the Magic

Strangely enough, the mountain town I lived in for a year when I was 14 – Campos do Jordão in Brazil – meets most of these criteria as well. It’s a few hours outside São Paulo, in the mountains, a tourist destination and wealthy enclave, with a warm and inviting culture.

The year we spent abroad there was so formative for me, I think I’ve subconsciously tried to recreate as many of those conditions as possible for my kids, but in Mexico.

What I’ve learned is that these criteria work together as an interconnected system. The distance from a major city creates the rooted community. The mountains provide the natural beauty and limit overdevelopment. The tourism brings investment and interesting people. The culture provides immersion and different values.

Each element reinforces the others to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

The real insight isn’t just about Valle de Bravo – it’s about understanding what creates the conditions for the kind of life you actually want to live, then systematically looking for places that provide those conditions.

What would your criteria be? What kind of life are you trying to create, and what environmental conditions would support that vision?

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.

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In 1997, a young hip-hop producer from Detroit named J Dilla did something that violated every rule in music: he programmed his drum machine to play “off beat.”

Not just slightly off, but deliberately off—breaking up the rigid timing that had governed musical performance in every genre.

What happened next confounded the music industry. Instead of sounding amateurish, the “wrong” beats created a revolution. They somehow felt more organic, more alive, and more expressive than anything else in electronic music up to that point.

Professional musicians couldn’t explain it. Hip-hop critics couldn’t categorize it. But listeners—particularly other producers and artists—couldn’t get enough of it.

And here’s the paradox that stopped me cold: Dilla used the most mechanical of tools—a drum machine—to create something that sounded profoundly, unmistakably human.

(I suggest listening to this playlist of J Dilla-produced songs on Spotify while reading the rest of this piece.)

I’ve been thinking about this story as I’ve watched the panic unfold around AI and creativity. Many cultural critics and artists paint a bleak picture. They warn of creative fields decimated by automation, of human imagination rendered obsolete, of a future where authentic human expression drowns in a sea of algorithmic content.

But what if they’re wrong?

What if new technology doesn’t destroy creativity but instead transforms it in ways we can’t yet imagine?

Recently, I found an unexpected source of insight into this question—a book about the life and innovations of that same hip-hop producer: Dilla Time by Dan Charnas.

As I learned about Dilla’s career, I couldn’t help but notice striking parallels to our current moment with generative AI. Here are seven insights drawn from the early history of hip-hop that challenge today’s techno-pessimism about AI and creativity:

1. Technology can create new creative forms that humans can’t

James Dewitt Yancey—known as Jay Dee and later as J Dilla—died in 2006 at the age of 32 from a rare blood disease called TTP, but his revolutionary approach to rhythm lives on. As Charnas puts it: “He is the only producer-composer to emerge from hip-hop and, indeed, all electronic music to fundamentally change the way so-called traditional musicians play.”

J Dilla’s innovation was impossible without the Akai MPC3000 drum machine. By deliberately manipulating the timing of drum hits, he created what Charnas calls “Dilla Time”—a style that juxtaposed even and uneven time-feels simultaneously, creating a pleasurable rhythmic friction that no human drummer could physically execute.

The parallel to generative AI is clear: while many fear AI will make creative work formulaic, it might instead enable entirely new forms of creative expression—forms that humans alone couldn’t accomplish due to our cognitive or physiological limitations.

2. The most innovative uses of technology often subvert its intended purpose

Drum machines were designed with a quantizing function to “correct” human timing errors using software. 

But J Dilla deliberately subverted this function. He turned off quantization or manually moved drum hits off a mathematically precise grid, creating beats that communicated emotion through “imperfect” rhythm.

This paradox—using a machine designed for metronomic perfection to create controlled imperfection—suggests that the most powerful innovations often come from subverting a technology’s intended purpose.

The most transformative uses of AI may similarly come from those who find ways to bend the technology, introducing controlled variations that make its output more distinctively creative and human.

3. New technology can reconnect us with ancient traditions

Surprisingly, Dilla’s innovation via digital technology represented a return to older forms of musical expression. His rhythmic approach reconnected with polyrhythmic traditions from West Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia that had been marginalized by the conventions of European classical music for centuries.

As ethnomusicologists noted, Dilla’s rhythms broke through the European frame that colonialism had forced on much of the world’s popular music.

This challenges the narrative that technology alienates us from our authentic human nature. In this case, the drum machine allowed musicians to reconnect with complex rhythms that had been all but lost to history.

Similarly, AI might not lead us into a posthuman future but instead return us to our primal roots, surfacing ancient aspects of our psychology that were repressed by industrial-age modernity.

4. Creative relationships with technology evolve from conforming to bending

Early hip-hop producers conformed their creative process to their drum machines’ limitations, trying to make audio samples fit neatly into the rigid 16-pad time grid. But Dilla took a fundamentally different approach.

As DJ Jazzy Jeff observed: “Everyone in hip-hop had heretofore been trying to cut, splice, and jam samples to accommodate the machine’s time grid… But Jay Dee did the opposite: he bent the machine grid to accommodate his sample sources, because he was focused on using those samples for their rhythmic and harmonic feel.”

This evolution from conforming to technology’s rigid constraints to bending it to human intention is instructive. The earliest AI-generated art shows creators conforming to algorithmic limitations, but as these tools develop and creators’ technical understanding deepens, we’ll see more instances of the technology being bent to accommodate our visions.

This evolution from conforming to bending seems inevitable in every creative-technological relationship. It’s not a question of if professional creators will bend AI to their will, but when and how they’ll discover the equivalent of turning off quantization in their generative workflows.

5. New technologies create new creative specializations

J Dilla’s innovation created an entirely new category of musicianship. He wasn’t a traditional percussionist but what audio technology pioneer Roger Linn called a “sequencer player”—someone whose primary instrument was the programming of rhythmic time itself through digital interfaces.

Dilla made microsecond timing variations in ways that were impossible for human drummers, creating a new art form that required a new type of technical virtuoso.

We’re seeing the same pattern with generative AI. These tools are giving rise to new creative specializations: prompt engineers, AI image directors, model fine-tuners—emerging roles existing at the intersection of human aesthetics and machine capability.

Just as many classically trained musicians initially dismissed “sequencer players” as not being real musicians, we see traditional creative professionals dismissing these new AI-adjacent creative roles.

But these new creative forms don’t replace existing ones—they expand the total landscape of expressive possibilities. They are additions to our creative ecosystem, not wholesale substitutions within it.

6. Technological innovations transform how we value information repositories

Hip-hop pioneered sampling—taking segments of existing recordings and transforming them into new compositions. J Dilla elevated this practice using sophisticated digital techniques to chop, stretch, and manipulate audio samples into entirely new sonic arrangements.

This practice made certain information repositories—warehouses of obscure vinyl records from defunct labels—skyrocket in commercial value. Producers spent countless hours digging through dusty crates searching for unique drum breaks and bass lines no other producer had discovered.

We’re seeing this same pattern with generative AI, where specialized datasets have suddenly become incredibly valuable for training and fine-tuning. Collections of information previously overlooked in the pre-AI economy now hold tremendous monetary and strategic value.

This raises profound questions about creativity itself: Has human creativity ever truly been about creating from nothing? Or has it always involved recombining, transforming, and recontextualizing what came before us in novel ways?

7. Machine innovations feed back into human creative practice

Perhaps the most powerful lesson from J Dilla’s story is how his machine-enabled innovations transformed human musicians’ techniques. 

Professional performers like Questlove of The Roots and neo-soul keyboardist D’Angelo meticulously studied Dilla’s machine-made rhythmic patterns and learned to replicate them with traditional acoustic instruments, fundamentally rethinking their relationship with music in the process.

As Charnas describes: “Jay Dee could shift a drum’s position in time by programming it, and there it would remain. But Questlove had to counteract a lifetime of physical reflexes, to retrain his body to do things and feel time differently.”

A machine-made innovation forced one of the world’s most accomplished drummers to unlearn years of muscle memory and develop entirely new techniques. The drum machine wasn’t replacing the human musician—it was pushing human creativity into previously unexplored territories.

J Dilla’s innovations extended beyond hip-hop, influencing jazz orchestration, classical composition, and mainstream pop production. His work has been interpreted by symphony orchestras at Lincoln Center and studied in university music conservatories.

This pattern suggests something important about our AI future: the most significant impact of generative AI on human creativity may not be direct replacement of jobs, but how it challenges professional creators to develop new capabilities and aesthetic perspectives they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

Embracing the Meta-Creativity of the AI Era

If the evolution of music production technology and electronic instruments teaches us anything, it’s that new tools don’t eliminate human creativity—they transform it, often in ways that expand rather than contract the range of human creative expression.

But this technological transformation requires a specific creative approach.

J Dilla didn’t set out to revolutionize rhythm—he simply explored the creative possibilities of his MPC3000 with extraordinary dedication and meticulous attention to detail. His daily creative routine, as described by Charnas, involved rising at 7 am, cleaning his Detroit studio while listening carefully to newly-acquired vinyl records, and then making beats from 9:00 a.m. until noon. He created them “quickly, one after the other, finished them, and then moved on.”

I find this aspect of his disciplined practice particularly illuminating for our AI moment.

This combination of structured daily practice, deep listening to source material, and rapid iterative experimentation mirrors what the most innovative creators are now doing with generative AI tools. The truly groundbreaking uses of AI aren’t coming from those who simply prompt a model to create something and uncritically accept whatever it produces. They’re coming from those who engage in a sustained dialogue with the technology, who develop deep technical understanding of its capabilities and limitations, and who have a clear creative vision that transcends the particular tool itself.

What would a “J Dilla approach” to generative AI look like in your specific creative field?

What we should be looking for (and investing in) are not just incremental improvements in AI model capabilities, but the emerging meta-practices that leverage AI to create new forms of human-machine creative collaboration. These emerging practices might involve using AI to rapidly explore creative possibilities, to overcome specific technical obstacles, to challenge established aesthetic assumptions, or to handle routine aspects of production work so that human creators can focus on higher-level creative decisions and emotional subtlety.

The story of J Dilla reminds us that when a new technology enters a creative field, the most interesting developments often happen not at the center of that technology’s intended use but at its experimental edges—where innovative humans push it beyond its manufacturer’s instructions, bend it to their unique artistic vision, and in the process, discover entirely new dimensions of creativity.

Rather than fearing that AI will replace human artists, we should be asking more specific questions: What new forms of meta-creativity will emerge in the AI era? What new patterns of thought and creation – what new harmonies between human aesthetic intelligence and machine computational intelligence – might become possible through thoughtful collaboration?

The answer to these questions won’t come from the technology itself, but from the James Yanceys of our era—those visionary creators and artists who see in our new digital tools not a threat to human expression, but an invitation to expand it in ways we’ve yet to imagine.

And perhaps, just perhaps, that creator could be you.

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.

The post What J Dilla and Early Hip-Hop Teach Us About AI and the Future of Creativity appeared first on Forte Labs.

I’m proud to introduce Death Clock, a life expectancy calculator that predicts the day of your death based on 17 personalized variables.

Give it a try for free!

This is not only the first “app” I’ve ever created myself, but also my first experience with AI-assisted coding, which has become known as “vibecoding.” 

I can definitively say this was one of the most eye-opening, impressive encounters with technology I’ve ever had, and it opened my eyes to a vast horizon of possibilities that I think AI-assisted coding will open up going forward.

Here are my observations and insights based on my first few hours of vibecoding.

Finding an entry point

One of the first things I look for when trying to learn a new skill is a good “entry point.”

Simply typing the topic into Google or YouTube is not smart, as it only results in a flood of mediocre-quality, clickbait-driven results. Instead, I look for a single, in-depth piece of content or a course taught by a qualified instructor with a strong track record of quality. Ideally, there’s also an accompanying community or discussion forum associated with it, so I can see what others are doing.

All these criteria were fulfilled when I signed up for my friend Nat Eliason’s new course, Build Your Own Apps with AI. One recent Saturday morning I started watching the instructional videos while my wife and the kids were sleeping in.

The course recommends the coding program Cursor. As I downloaded the desktop app and created an account, the complex-looking interface was already starting to intimidate me. I had downloaded IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) before, but since I have virtually no technical ability or knowledge, I always felt overwhelmed and confused by the unfamiliar interface and quickly gave up.

Here’s what the interface looks like in Cursor:

As I watched Nat’s videos, it soon dawned on me how incredibly straightforward and easy it was to create functional code using Cursor, for one simple reason: it draws on the formidable powers of leading LLMs.

As I began experimenting, I found that it wasn’t necessary to interact with any part of the software except for one: the ongoing chat with the AI. Although you can directly manipulate the code, navigate around the various project files, approve or reject individual edits, and issue commands in a terminal window if you want, none of that is strictly necessary. The AI can take all the actions itself.

Building Death Clock v1

After watching the first module of the course, I decided to go right ahead and try building something I actually wanted: a life expectancy calculator. 

I’m in the midst of writing my new book, on the art and practice of completing an annual life review, and I’m finding that one of the main themes of the book is reckoning with one’s mortality and limited time on the planet. It’s quite hard to take on that longer-term perspective day to day. But at least once a year, I think it’s incredibly valuable to do so. I was looking for a way to give readers a visceral, felt sense of how short life truly is.

I can write thousands of words about mortality and its ability to put our lives into proper perspective, but no volume of words compares to the power of a personalized, interactive tool that calculates your own expected date of death. It’s the difference between generic advice and an expiration date that takes into account your own unique life circumstances.

Living in Mexico has also exposed me to a very different attitude toward death than I’m used to in the US. Instead of something to be feared and the mention of it avoided, death is a much bigger part of the culture, from the ofrendas of Día de Muertos to the ubiquity of skeleton iconography to the constant awareness of ancestors. I want to make death something that people can talk about more openly.

And lastly, I turn 40 next week, so let’s just say that mortality is on my mind

Working with the AI

I started my project by creating an empty folder, loading it up into Cursor, and asking it to “Build a web app that calculates someone’s life expectancy based on lifestyle factors.” That was it. There were no technical specifications, no feature requests, and no tech stack. Just a simple request made in natural language.

Cursor gives you the option to select which LLM you want to use, including all the leading models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. I kept it on “auto-select,” which means it decided which model to use depending on the situation.

It proceeded to immediately build a full-fledged React project, which took several minutes and involved creating an entire structure of multiple interlinked files. I asked it to open the app in my web browser, and it prepared the file, which I just needed to double-click.

Here’s what that very first version looked like:

So the app now existed, but with one tiny problem: there was no way to input any personal information! I asked it to add input fields for each of the lifestyle factors, and in a couple of minutes they appeared. I put in my own information as a test, and it spit out the results:

After only about 5 minutes, I already had a functional web app! This alone is astonishing, as I would have probably needed hours to get even this much up and running on my own. I thought back to my early web design efforts using Microsoft FrontPage as a teenager in the 90s, and how that experience was so daunting that I gave up on the endeavor altogether.

I spent the next several hours adding features, which amounted to no more or less than asking for them in the AI chat window and waiting. Here’s what I changed, one element at a time:

Added a total of 17 questions, encompassing various aspects of a person’s life that influence their life expectancyAdded an in-line BMI calculator, based on a person’s height and weightAsked the AI to create a logo of an hourglass and place it at the top of the pageHad it try out a couple of styles, settling on a muted, grey and blue color schemeAdded some interesting outputs and observations related to life expectancy to the “results” page, based on the answers to the questionsAdded a pie chart visualizing a person’s remaining lifespan (which required Cursor to download and install a new library, which it handled on its own)Added a call to action to check out my website at the endSet up a repository on GitHub and published the app using GitHub Pages, so I can share it with others

All this took about 3-4 hours, but I would estimate around half that time was spent waiting for the AI to do the work, or for the new version to deploy, so I could view it in a browser. While all this was happening, I hung out with the kids, washed dishes, took a shower, and got some reading done. Instead of requiring an all-encompassing, immersive day of obsessive learning, which is what I would have expected, I actually had quite a relaxing, balanced day!

There were only a couple of hiccups I encountered during this project. At one point, there was a bug that would make the whole screen go blank when I clicked the “Calculate Life Expectancy” button. Cursor asked me to copy and paste the error message from the console into the chat, but before I even did that, it guessed what the problem was and proceeded to fix it by itself. Here’s what that interaction looked like:

I sometimes had to perform actions beyond just clicking “accept all,” such as typing “y” into the command line to allow it to proceed, or typing in my computer’s root password to allow it to install something, so I did have to pay a bit of attention and look out for next steps.

A few times, a new feature didn’t work correctly the immediately, and required follow-up fixes, such as this first attempt at a pie chart:

One of the most surprising parts of working with an LLM in a coding environment is that the AI has context and knowledge about many, many domains that have nothing to do with code. For example, at one point, I got stuck with the GitHub settings, so I just pasted a screenshot of what I was seeing into Cursor, and got a precise diagnosis of what was wrong, plus step-by-step instructions on how to fix it.

But it also goes beyond software. At one point, I asked Cursor to tell me how robust or evidence-backed a question about income level was, and in seconds, it pulled in an academic paper that examined exactly this question. It still had to simplify the correlation between income and life expectancy into a multiple-choice question, but knowing there was at least some validity to this question gave me the confidence to move forward.

I kept assuming I would hit a roadblock and have to switch to a “real” LLM to do more serious research, planning, or structuring of questions. But that wasn’t the case: the LLMs that Cursor is drawing on are exactly the same ones you’d have access to via ChatGPT or Claude, so there’s no need to leave.

That also means that Cursor can do design work. I asked it to create a visual style reminiscent of the blocky, 8-bit graphics of early Nintendo games, but with a death-themed, macabre look. It instantly understood the assignment, using red and black to convey the right feeling:

I decided that look wasn’t quite right, so I had it pivot to a cleaner, more modern style. Here’s what that interaction looked like, replacing probably hours of work:

The ability to pivot on a dime like this and effortlessly try out a completely new direction is astonishing. Small experiments and whimsical curiosities can be indulged and tested without expending significant time or effort.

My 4 takeaways from vibecoding

This first experience of a few hours of vibecoding left me with 4 takeaways:

Learning to code is now optionalThe new bottleneck is how you spend the time that’s savedSoftware is the new frontier of book publishingWe’re entering a more impressionistic era of creationLearning to code is now optional

Over the years, I’ve considered whether I should build an app many times. I live in the world of tech and software, and in many ways, the ability to create a new software tool is the pinnacle of agency in that world.

Yet every time, I’ve decided not to pursue building an app, either because I lacked the time to learn it myself, or didn’t want to spend the thousands of dollars it seemed to require to even build something basic.

But now, in a matter of hours and at almost zero cost, I can build something that’s genuinely useful. I didn’t learn anything about coding, but I think that’s overall a good thing. Learning can be fun and is certainly useful, but it isn’t always inherently good or necessary.

Why should the ability to leverage software be limited to those willing to spend months or years studying arcane details of technical implementation? Why should someone’s vision or mission require them to know the low-level details of how a webpage gets rendered? And now, nearly all of the details are “low-level.”

Learning coding is now optional, but I think AI tools will also make it easier to learn to code for those who decide they want to. At any point, you can bring in context from any part of the codebase and ask the AI to explain it to you at any level of detail you want. You can even have it explain things outside that environment, such as the many external systems and interfaces you’ll need to get a full-fledged website working.

This is such a remarkable level of accessibility for a technology that was previously very hard to use, and it’s difficult to predict how the world will change when everyone can wield the power of software.

The new bottleneck is how you spend the time that’s saved

It’s so fast to create and edit code this way that the bottleneck starts to become how fast you can move your mouse, the speed of your internet connection, how long it takes to deploy a new build, the speed of refreshing the page, etc.

I predict we’ll see a variety of efforts to speed up every little step involved in coding, the same way that factories once invested millions in reducing the time it took to switch a production line from one activity to another, as that became the bottleneck.

But more broadly, the true limiter on the quality of software that people will be able to produce using Cursor and similar tools is how they spend the time that AI frees up for them. 

You could spend it chilling by the pool or watching TV, but you have to remember that everyone else is also having all their time freed up, so the level of competition will increase like a rising tide. Many web apps that people will build this way are hobbies, or experiments, or complements to other projects. Still, many will have some kind of competition or alternative, and the only way to compete effectively will be to invest the time saved in new dimensions of quality.

Maybe you spend that time exercising and meditating, so that you can ground yourself and bring wiser, more holistic decision-making to the AI. Maybe you spend it reading and researching, so the knowledge underlying your app is richer and more nuanced. Maybe you spend it hunting for obscure sources or offline archives, so that you can incorporate context that the LLM doesn’t already know. Maybe you spend your time talking with potential customers, so your choices more accurately reflect what they want.

All of these are valid choices, and they will all become important dimensions of competition and quality, even more so than they already are today. The true scarce resource continues to be the time and attention of other people, and I only expect the battle for that attention to keep heating up.

Software is the new frontier of book publishing

One of the domains I’m most excited about applying these new tools to is book publishing. Books have changed so little over time, and increasingly suffer in comparison to other, far more interactive and engaging forms of media.

I don’t think bemoaning this fact and lecturing people on the importance of reading is helpful, but I do believe interactive web apps like this could make a tremendous difference. What if, every time you finished a book, or even a single chapter, you were presented with a link to a free, interactive, personalized web app that directly applied the ideas you just read to your own situation?

Instead of trying to guess how to apply a book’s ideas, or get upsold to a course, or have to get expensive support from a coach or consultant, you would have a self-serve piece of software you can immediately engage with.

The value of a book is that the author has taken an extraordinary amount of time to research and think deeply about an important issue, topic, or skill. That’s a rare thing in our hype-driven online world of disposable headlines. But that same slow-moving, timeless quality makes it very difficult for books to recommend or prescribe any given form of implementation. There’s just too much variation between individuals to offer a one-size-fits-all solution, and long publishing timelines mean that any solution printed in the pages of a book is likely to be obsolete by the time it hits the shelves.

This is a way to combine the best of both worlds: to deliver the timeless, wise, holistic wisdom of books, accompanied by a suite of personalized, customizable, up-to-date digital implementation tools, accessible in one click or tap. This is how you save the culture of reading – not by resisting change but by embracing it. I plan on making extensive use of this approach in my next book.

We’re entering a more impressionistic era of creation

One of the most continuously surprising aspects of AI-assisted vibecoding is how brief, imprecise, informal, and vague my instructions can be, and still be understood. I could almost always just say “Fix this” with a screenshot, or “Make this look better,” or even just “Improve the question,” and AI would figure it out.

This is so different from past technologies that require you to be extremely exact, specifying what you want with mathematical precision. Even a single wrong character in a codebase of thousands of lines could result in a catastrophic error.

My unclear instructions often resulted in better results, because the AI would misinterpret my intentions and make improvements I hadn’t even thought of. Some of the best ideas came from the AI, either because I asked it for ideas or because it contributed them spontaneously as it guessed what I was trying to achieve.

Like the transition in painting style from the Realism of the mid-19th century to the Impressionism of the late 19th century, driven by painters’ desire to capture changing qualities of natural light, fleeting moments, and spontaneous experiences using quick, expressive brushwork rather than carefully finished compositions, we’re going to see a similar transition in software design.

Interestingly, what sparked the transition back then was technology – the advent of photography meant that scenes could be captured with nearly perfect realism, which devalued that ability by humans. Human artists pivoted in reaction, exploring a new frontier of perception, novel color combinations, and everyday life.

I think we’ll soon see our technological creations becoming much more impressionistic, based on ambiguous premonitions, subtle feelings, or vague notions that we can’t fully articulate. We’ll see people create various kinds of software as artistic expressions, or to capture a fleeting memory, or to convey a single message. Software will become its own mode of creative expression for a much wider range of people now that the price of entry has plummeted to near zero.

4 tips for using Cursor

Despite my lack of commitment to learning anything in particular, I found that I did end up learning a few things about how to work effectively in Cursor:

You don’t have to deploy a new version with every new feature you build, as that takes a few minutes. But it’s a good idea to do so anytime you get a major new feature working, as you’ll be able to “roll back” to that point if you mess up anything in the future.It’s always helpful to bring in the relevant context to any interaction with the AI chat. Cursor makes this very easy by including an “add to chat” button both in the code window and in the terminal, which are the two places you’d want to draw on for contextPasting screenshots into the AI chat is remarkably helpful, as it allows the AI to see exactly what you’re referring to. Often, you don’t even need to say anything – the AI understands what’s working as soon as it sees how it’s appearing.

You can check out Cursor with a free trial at https://www.cursor.com. I signed up for the paid version for $20 per month to build my first app, though you’ll have access to a lot of functionality for free. I recommend their “getting started” documentation to learn about the basic features, which are more than enough to allow you to build your first simple app.

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The post Introducing Death Clock (And My First Experience with Vibecoding) appeared first on Forte Labs.

In the early 1700s, Central Europe faced a crisis: the forests were running out.

An explosion in mining, shipbuilding, and early industry had devastated old-growth forests that had stood for many centuries. Meanwhile, the population was exploding as well, creating demands on forests that clearly couldn’t be sustained for long.

The kingdoms of Prussia and Saxony decided to apply the emerging methods of science to the problem, developing what would eventually become known as Scientific Forestry. In order to maximize timber production for the state, forestry officials turned their wild and messy woodlands into outdoor timber factories.

They began by meticulously cataloguing every tree in the forest by species and size. They analyzed growth rates and wood quality to identify the most productive species, settling on Norway spruce to yield the maximum volume of timber per square foot. They then cleared the existing forests and turned them into monocultures – endless rows of evenly spaced, identically sized spruce.

What had once been an impossibly complex tangle of diverse kinds of vegetation – oak, beech, fir, and countless others – became a “planned forest.” It was the biological equivalent of a spreadsheet, with straight rows of trees laid out in a precise geometric grid ready for bureaucratic regulation.

At first, it worked beautifully. Forestry officials could now predict with extreme accuracy the exact yield of every patch of forest. The new plantations produced more lumber, at a faster pace, to a more precise standard. Harvests came in on schedule and in uniform sizes ready for sawmills. Logging boomed and the revenue flowed into state coffers.

But something strange began to happen after the second or third generations of trees were planted. The first generation had flourished in the absence of competition for soil and nutrients, but in the following generations, those same ecosystems collapsed, with dramatic production losses of 20-30%.

In order to make the forest more productive, the underbrush had been cleared of smaller trees, bushes, and shrubs. That underbrush had fertilized the soil with decomposing leaves and wood; without this undergrowth, the soil soon became depleted. The disappearance of fungi, worms, and insects caused pollination and soil aeration to crash.

Pests like the pine looper moth and bark beetle raced through identical strands of trees, encountering no obstacles or predators. Storms damaged vast swathes of the forest, toppling over the shallowly rooted spruces like “bowling pins.”

It turned out in retrospect that the messy diversity of the forest had been the source of its resilience. When stresses such as storms, disease, drought, fragile soil, or severe cold struck, a diverse forest with its full array of different species of trees, birds, insects, and animals was far better able to survive and recover. A windstorm that toppled large, old trees would typically spare smaller ones. An insect attack that threatened oaks might leave lindens and hornbeams unaffected. The rigidity and uniformity of the system meant that failures were not small and contained but systemic. 

By the late 19th and early 20th century, forest plantations had become “a pale shadow of their previous ecological richness.” After all the effort and resources invested, the forests of Central Europe were now producing less timber than the wild forests they had replaced. All these changes culminated in what Germans grimly came to call Waldsterben, or “death of the forest.” 

The supposedly “scientific” management of forests led to ecological problems so severe that multiple generations of restoration ecology have been needed to restore the previous diversity in insects, flora, and fauna. Germany continues to struggle with the lasting effects of monoculture forestry to this day, most recently in 2018 due to the mounting effects of climate change.

This story is recounted in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, and in his book, Scott notes that far from being a unique or isolated incident, scientific forestry was one incidence of a far broader movement, which he dubs Authoritarian High Modernism. 

Across many facets of the modern world, from urban planning to public health, from transportation infrastructure to online social networks, we’ve sought to “rationalize” and “optimize” the messiness and complexity of the world. From the way we organize our cities and homes to how we manage the economy, all the way down to the systems and routines we create for our personal productivity, we’ve tried to impose rational order on complex systems based on a narrow vision of efficiency.

In this piece, I’ll argue that the results of that effort have been disastrous, and it’s time to return those systems to their natural, messy state.

An optimal level of mess

I first read the story of scientific forestry in a blog post by Venkatesh Rao in 2014. It was a paradigm-shifting moment for me. I saw in myself much the same attitude as 18th century German forestry officials – an unquestioned belief in order, reason, and systematic thinking.

I had always believed that anything I wanted to achieve in life was to be found on the other side of “getting organized.” My assumption was that there was one “best” path to achieving any goal, which was to follow a highly specific, structured, step-by-step plan with objectives and metrics. It was the “one true way,” as universal and unquestioned as my childhood religious faith.

Yet, in my early 20s, I began to run up against the limits of my blind faith in order. I began to see more and more examples of how it failed – in my own life, the lives of my friends and peers, and even in the business world and in society. The pitfalls and weaknesses of highly ordered, rationalized systems started to become ever more glaring, especially in a world that seemed to be changing faster and becoming more ambiguous and uncertain.

What if, I began to wonder, the costs of being neat and organized outweighed the benefits? What if there were hidden advantages to being messy, informal, loose, and even chaotic?

Last year, I picked up a book called A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, that finally addressed my longstanding question. Their striking conclusion after studying dozens of disciplines was a strong affirmative yes: that “moderately disorganized people, institutions, and systems frequently turn out to be more efficient, more resilient, more creative, and in general more effective than highly organized ones.”

They argue instead for an attitude toward organization that takes into account its costs, by asking yourself: Will more effort spent organizing be worth what it costs me in time and other resources? They suggest that there is an “optimal level of mess” for any given person and every given situation…and that it is just as common for people to err on the side of overorganization as underorganization.

This assertion is akin to heresy in our productivity-obsessed world. And for me personally, as someone who’s dedicated my career to teaching people how to be more efficient and organized, it felt like the portal to a hidden, subversive world.

The surprising benefits of disorder

This may seem counterintuitive, but you can think of “mess” not as simply the absence of order – like a vacuum of nothingness – but as a phenomenon in its own right, with its own qualities.

You can even conceive of mess as a valuable resource you can draw on or a strategy you can proactively apply when needed.

To understand when and where we might want to employ messes, we need to identify its unique benefits. Abrahamson and Freedman suggest six of them: flexibility, completeness, resonance, invention, efficiency, and robustness.

Messes are flexible in that they can adapt and change more quickly, more dramatically, in a wider variety of situations, and with less effort than would be required by highly ordered, formal systems. 

For example, the messiness of a jazz ensemble enables improvisation, as any musician can shift at any moment to address any other, whereas a symphony orchestra has to play the music as written. Neat systems struggle to fight off randomness, and when randomness inevitably leaks in, the system is thrown off.

Messes are more complete (or comprehensive) since they can comfortably tolerate an exhaustive array of diverse entities. 

Neat systems tend to whittle away at the diversity of their elements (as we saw in 18th-century German forestry). As another example, Thomas Edison tried any and every material in his quest to invent a workable lightbulb with a long-lasting glow, without regard to elegant theories as to why they might work. His approach to experimentation was wide-ranging and messy.

Messes are resonant, as in they facilitate surprising connections between overlapping, heterogenous elements. 

Alexander Fleming happened upon the discovery that led to the invention of the first antibiotic, penicillin, because his lab was notoriously messy. A small, ragged circle of mold had invaded one of his petri dishes, but the staphylococci culture it contained seemed to steer clear of the mold, his first clue that the bacteria couldn’t tolerate it.

Messes facilitate invention by randomly juxtaposing many elements in unexpected, unconventional ways. 

Neatness tends to limit novelty and the unexpected and sweeps them aside as aberrations when they do occur. A sobering example: a major reason modern terrorists are so hard to fight and defeat is because they are constituted by loose, constantly shifting, non-hierarchical, i.e., messy groups.

Messes are efficient, able to accomplish goals with a modest consumption of resources. 

Consider the “productivity” of the wild forests before scientific management took root – they produced immense value for a wide variety of human and non-human species, despite the complete lack of an organizing scheme. Neatness tends to require a constant expenditure of resources just to maintain itself.

Messes are robust in that they tend to weave together and interlace many disparate elements, making them more resistant to destruction, failure, and imitation. 

For example, competitive runners benefit from “inconsistent” workouts that mix up the speed, length, difficulty, frequency, and inclination of their running routines, leading to muscles that are more adaptable. Mixed-breed mutts are often hardier than purebred dogs thanks to the random interweaving of genes from their unlike parents. Neat systems, in contrast, tend to be more brittle and more easily disrupted or copied.

Later in the book, Abrahamson and Freedman introduce a seventh benefit: messes can be fun!

Consider the joy of sorting through antiques and doodads at a flea market, browsing a stack of random magazines, or spelunking through a messy collection of notes and finding something you didn’t even know you were looking for. Messy situations inherently include many qualities we find enlivening and interesting: surprise, delight, exploration, and discovery.

Adding disorder to a system can make it more effective

It’s one thing to believe that messes have some intriguingly positive qualities in theory. It’s quite another to realize those benefits in real life.

Let’s get one level more concrete and look at practical ways we can use the benefits of disorder in our daily lives.

Specifically, let’s see how disorder can make for more creative environments, allow information systems to contain more information, make the human brain smarter, enhance one’s personal productivity, and allow us to make more consistent progress on our projects and goals.

Disorder makes for more creative environments

In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson highlights many surprising examples of how disorder has led to new ideas and inventions throughout history. In his research, he found that innovation is often driven by “the collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space.”

Perhaps the most classic model for such a space is the eighteenth-century coffeehouse, which Johnson notes was the hotbed for Enlightenment-era innovations that transformed our world: everything from the science of electricity to the insurance industry to modern democracy itself. 

Sigmund Freud famously hosted an intellectual salon on Wednesday nights in Vienna, where physicians, philosophers, and scientists came together to discuss the emerging field of psychoanalysis. The legendary Homebrew Computer Club in 1970s Silicon Valley was made up of a ragtag group of amateur hobbyists, teenagers, entrepreneurs, and academics, who together somehow sparked the personal computer revolution.

Berkeley psychology professor Charlan Nemeth began investigating the relationship between noise, dissent, and creativity in group environments more than thirty years ago, and her research offers a clue as to why noisy cafes and amateur hobbyist clubs might have fostered so much creativity: she found that “good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error,” ranging from mock juries to corporate boardrooms to academic seminars.

Maybe the best environment for our creativity is not sitting in a minimalist cafe, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, with an all-consuming focus on a tiny screen. Maybe there are times we’d be better served by immersing ourselves in randomness instead.

Disorder makes for more information-rich systems

Steven Johnson, in his book, introduces the field of Descriptive Complexity Theory, a branch of information science that has found that the more randomness in a system, the more information it can hold.

This may seem paradoxical, but imagine the case of two professors: one with a perfectly tidy, neat office with not a paperclip out of place, and one with a messy office full of personal items strewn all over the place. Which one provides you with more information about what kind of person the professor is? Clearly the messy one, since too much neatness and order tends to hide away the idiosyncratic details that distinguish one person from another.

Now imagine a digital notetaking app such as Notion, Obsidian, Tana, or Evernote. You might imagine that perfectly organizing your notes app – with neatly formatted text, seamless folders, comprehensive tags, and uniform headings – might allow you to fully maximize the potential of your knowledge.

But then again…maybe not. Maybe it is the very messiness that we tend to despise that makes our notes personal, intimate, and unique to us. A perfectly organized set of notes could belong to anyone, whereas a messier collection might contain all sorts of hidden clues about your unique desires and interests.

Disorder makes for smarter brains

In a 2007 study on the brain activity of children, neuroscientist Robert Thatcher and his team found that there was a correlation between the IQ of individual children and the amount of time their brains spent in “chaotic mode” (in contrast to “phase lock,” which is a more ordered and focused state of mind).

Every extra millisecond spent in chaos added as much as twenty IQ points, whereas time spent in phase lock was correlated with reduced IQ. Their conclusion is astonishing: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are likely to be.

It turns out that the human brain relies on disorder for its basic functioning at multiple levels, from the processing of raw sensory data to the interplay of abstract ideas. Our brains evolved to navigate a messy world, and perhaps when we insist on organizing its activity, we rob it of that essential ability.

Consider how too much silence in a group dinner can be uncomfortable. Or that kids can knock out homework in a noisy home. Or that jiggling a telescope can help an observer’s eye pick up a faint celestial body. We are designed to thrive in chaos.

Disorder makes for higher productivity

Jane Jacobs, the famous urban planning theorist, noted a similar phenomenon at work in the design of cities. 

She noticed that planners had a tendency to substitute superficial visual order for true functionality. In other words, whether a neighborhood “looked right” became more important than whether it worked for its inhabitants. The assumption seemed to be that if an arrangement was visually pleasing, that automatically meant it would function well.

I see this tendency run amok in the personal productivity space as well: people tend to love visual order, manifesting as pleasing symmetry, clean lines, perfectly squared little boxes, and severe minimalism. Yet all too often, this order and elegance comes at the expense of functionality – Does the thing actually work? Does it work sustainably for the long term? Does it fit how your mind works? Does it provide more value than it requires in upkeep?

It’s far easier to make something superficially pretty than to answer such questions. It’s much easier to compulsively switch to a different app that promises to instantly sweep aside the digital disorder than to figure out what we’re truly trying to accomplish. It’s much easier to organize things than to decide which of those things actually matters.

No doubt some situations call for a more structured approach – think of checklists used by an operating surgeon or an airline pilot. But most of us don’t face such high-stakes situations in our daily lives and would benefit from less formal tools.

Disorder helps you make progress

We normally think of “organizing” a collection of physical, visual, or digital elements, but it also applies to how one structures one’s efforts, including goals and projects.

In Tim Hartford’s book Messy, he found in his research that the top scientists tend to switch topics frequently: “Over the course of their first hundred published papers, the long-lived high-impact researchers switched topics an average of forty-three times.” 

We are normally taught that in order to achieve something great, we have to focus maniacally on a single pursuit. Yet by cultivating a variety of projects at different stages of fruition, leading scientists clearly gain four benefits:

Multiple projects cross-fertilize, with the knowledge gained in one sometimes unlocking key insights in another.Diverse pursuits provide variety that captures our attention, whereas a single-minded pursuit can become monotonous and boring.Each project provides an “escape” from the others, giving you something to turn to when you face an impasse, instead of it becoming a crushing experience.Turning our attention away from a project gives us a chance to process it subconsciously, which some scientists believe is an important key to solving creative problems.

This last benefit was designated by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard as “crop rotation.” One cannot use the same field to grow the same crop indefinitely. Eventually the soil must be refreshed by planting something new or simply giving it a break.

This agricultural metaphor brings us back full circle to James C. Scott’s ideas in Seeing Like a State, where he makes an intriguing observation: “The rule seems to be that the more rigid and exclusive is the specialist’s boundary, and the stricter the control within it, the more disorder rages around it.”

In other words, you can’t really ever eliminate disorder; you can only move it around. So perhaps the greatest cost of creating a highly organized environment is that everything just outside its borders – which includes the rest of your life, your body, your family, other people, the natural environment, and human society generally– becomes flooded with externalities for the sake of that perfect system.

Practical takeaways for your productivity

So what does all this mean for our personal approach to order and organization?

Here are some actionable takeaways I can offer based on the findings and examples above:

1. Don’t feel guilty about putting off organizing

The authors of A Perfect Mess note that there’s an advantage in putting off organizing: it’s more efficient to organize a larger batch of items all at once than to do it a little at a time. 

This is known as “batch processing,” and I tend to save it for my weekly, monthly, and annual reviews, when paradoxically, the more stuff that has piled up, the better!

Don’t feel guilty about postponing your organizing to a later date, or only doing it occasionally, because in the meantime, you’re benefitting from all the advantages of mess I highlighted above.

2. Notice and embrace the odd, eccentric ways you tend to organize

Many people say they don’t have time to get organized, but in reality, they are constantly engaging in a wide variety of ingenious organizing strategies. Our propensity to seek shortcuts, find the path of least resistance, and expend as little time and energy as possible to achieve an outcome are some of the most reliable ways to find little tips and tricks that may seem eccentric or odd but work for us.

Abrahamson and Freedman present multiple examples of how most people, since they aren’t aware of the ways they naturally stay organized, tend to misjudge how a technology system might help them. They assume that the laid back, informal methods they already use are suboptimal and that they need a piece of software that only adds a lot of burdensome formality.

3. Satisfice instead of maximize

One of the subtle implications of the ideas in this piece is that we don’t ever truly have control. If we try to fully organize our surroundings, we fall into the traps and pitfalls noted above. If we instead accept the messiness, then we don’t have full control over it either.

What’s left then is to accept the reality: that we are all careening through a chaotic void, with at most brief moments of stability and fleeting periods of agency. Instead of trying to order and control our lives, we can use this inherent randomness as an excuse to satisfice, which has long been recognized as an essential ingredient for happiness.

As Nicholas Nassim Taleb puts it, “Having some randomness in your life can actually increase happiness: it forces you to satisfice, instead of maximize. Research shows that those who live under self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.”

Living in the balance

It’s all a balance, all masculine and feminine, yin and yang. When the benefits of order start running out, it’s time to switch to disorder. And vice versa – when disorder starts careening out of control, try adding a little structure to the problem. 

There are no “right” ways that work universally in all situations; only tools that work better or worse depending on the job.

It’s not that order, reason, and efficiency are bad – it’s that they are sometimes extolled as inherent virtues when, in fact, their opposites can be just as valuable and useful.

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