Last week was my 41st birthday, and next month is the 4-year anniversary of the release of my first book, Building a Second Brain.

There's one thing I want to ask of you to commemorate both occasions: to send me a photo of someone reading one of my books in public.

I still have never seen a reader "in the wild" like that, even after close to 500,000 copies sold worldwide. This is something I'd so love to witness, even second-hand via a photo.

Would you please keep a look out for someone reading Building a Second Brain or The PARA Method in public, snap a photo, and send it to me?

(I won’t share them publicly, for privacy reasons. And no staged photos, please. Only real ones)

That would be such a wonderful gift.

CODE Challenge. Episode 2 - Capture

What do you save, and what do you skip, when you're starting a real project on a tight deadline? In Episode 2 of The CODE Challenge, three Second Brainers begin capturing, and three completely different patterns take shape.

Capture is the first step of the CODE Method, and it's the one many get wrong. They treat it like a checklist: save the article, clip the quote, move on. But week one of the CODE Challenge shows what capture looks like in the wild, with messy notebooks, seven-year-old notes, and AI tools doing things they weren't built for.

We’re looking at three completely different capture styles with one shared method. And by the end of the week, three piles of material ready for the next step: Organize.

You Are Now a Context Architect

Last week, we wrapped up the final live session of The AI Second Brain with a concept I've been calling the context architect.

Here's the core idea: AI performance is an environment problem. The quality of what you get out depends entirely on the quality of what you put in. A context architect takes that seriously.

That means three things in practice:

1. Curating context: Especially tacit knowledge. Your expertise, preferences, decision-making frameworks, and hard-won lessons. The things that live inside you and have never been written down.
2. Designing an environment: The structure, information pathways, and maintenance routines that allow AI to do its best work, not just produce plausible-sounding output.
3. Managing cognitive load: Learning to give AI exactly what it needs for a given task. Too little, and it fills the gaps with wrong assumptions. Too much, and it loses focus.

This is a shift in identity, not just technique. And we're going to go much deeper on all of it in Cohort 2 this fall.

If you want to be notified when we announce the dates, join the waitlist here.

5 Questions to Help You Navigate Uncertainty

The world feels more uncertain than it has in decades, and our ability to sit with that uncertainty is shrinking just as fast.

This week on the blog, writer Simone Stolzoff shares a piece adapted from his new book, How To Not Know.

He opens with the story of a founder who walked away from millions to chase a hunch, then breaks down five questions you can use to build your own uncertainty tolerance.

If you're standing at a crossroads, these questions might be the nudge you need.