714: Tiago Forte - How to Reflect on Your Year & Plan the Next One: Annual Review Questions, Gratitude Lists, Building a Second Brain, and Goals as Learning Experiments

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www. LearningLeader.com https://www. LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming www. LearningLeader.com/Becoming https://www. LearningLeader.com/Becoming Join 10's of thousands of Learning Leaders all over the world and sign up for "Mindful Monday https://ryanhawk.kit.com/profile." Connect on Social: Twitter/X - @RyanHawk12 https://x.com/RyanHawk12 Instagram - @RyanHawk12 https://www.instagram.com/ryanhawk12/?hl=en LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanhawk12/ This is brought to you by Insight Global https://insightglobal.com/learningleader/. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: Tiago Forte is the best-selling author of Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method, which have reached more than half a million readers in over 25 languages. Through his company Forte Labs, he has trained more than 10,000 students from over 70 countries. He has done an annual life review every year since 2008, and his new book is Life in Perspective: The Art and Power of the Annual Life Review. Key Learnings Curiosity is just another way of saying motivation for learning. And learning is the most important skill in a world of this much change. Without a deep curiosity about how the world works and how people work, you end up too fixed and too rigid to keep up. Becoming a father changed his mind about ambition. Specifically, the limitless, empire-building kind. He's largely let it go. He also notes these realizations tend to crystallize during his annual review. The value is in leaving a paradigm, not in which one you land in. Tiago left the evangelical faith he was raised in at 20. His father, still devout, said it sounded exactly like his own conversion out of Catholicism. Same threshold, opposite directions. "What is the truth in this?" His filter for anything inflammatory, instead of sorting it into true or false. Even if the answer is one percent. The same question is applied to the viral claim that great founders don't have time to reflect, which he considers ludicrous. You can do too much reflection. The person permanently in therapy who never changes a relationship. The one who reads every self-help book and changes no habits. The one who journals endlessly and does nothing with it. Which is why he does almost none of it during the year. No quarterly, no monthly, no weekly. He'd rather move on what he's committed to, let a year pile up, then block several whole days to work the backlog. ARC: Appreciate the past, Reflect on the present, Create the future. Most people start with the future, launching into goals while ignoring everything behind them. Start in the past and build momentum forward. Prep is two things: protect the time and gather your stuff. If you don't defend the hours, there's no space for this to happen. Calendar synced, project material in one folder, paper journals pulled out. You don't want to be mid-reflection hunting for something. The past section is mostly cataloging, because you forget. Your wins and where you grew. The risks you took. The mistakes and what they taught you. Top five memories. Who most influenced you? It started with a near-death experience at 22. Studying abroad in Rio, Tiago was held at gunpoint and briefly abducted in a favela. He hadn't been a reflective person before that. The first review happened on a beach on January 1st, which anchored it to the new year. Each time horizon has an upside and a matching downside. Future orientation makes you good at planning and delaying gratification, and means you're never present. The past gives you patterns and lessons, and lets you give too much weight to what already happened until continuing it seems like the only option. There is information available only in the present. A relationship that's brand new and consuming your attention. The sense that something which worked before won't anymore. Neither is reachable from the past or the future. His present section is the opposite of his past section. The past is material: photos, calendar, journal. The present means nature, no screens, and talking to people. The rest of the review is intensely solitary. This part is social, because a conversation is close to the definition of presence. The question he has people ask: "What can you depend on me for and what can you not depend on me for?" It works because people have an answer to both halves. The feeling you're chasing is in the chase. A coaching client revisited goals he'd hit and realized the fulfillment was present the whole way up, which is why he got there. Not discipline. The paradox: arriving ends the chase, the feeling switches off, and you get the quiet "oh, that's it?" There's nothing wrong with that, but learn from the moment. Some people decide this is how they're built and embrace it, expecting the letdown. Others realize they sacrificed too much health or too many relationships, and that next time they could have the same chase without paying the same price. Treat every goal as a learning experiment. Goals have taken a beating for a decade, and you still need one to know which direction to walk. Tiago's test is brutal: "you are just as happy for the goal to fail as to succeed." Because failure teaches you more. Which flips the reason to be specific. Not so it's measurable, so there are more ways for it to go wrong. "Grow revenue twenty percent" teaches nothing. "Launch a flagship program that raises lifetime value by this much, hits these margins, delivered by facilitators we recruit" is five hypotheses, each one falsifiable. Growth is gated by demand. His team doubled the number of cohorts they ran, expecting to double revenue. It halved the students in each one. Twice the work, no more money. At the moment of a launch, you have the demand you have, and nothing you do that day changes it. The deeper misdiagnosis: he thought the company was operations-led. Businesses are finance-led, operations-led, or marketing-led. All three exist everywhere, but one is the bottleneck that decides whether you win. For an online content business, it's the content and the audience. Obvious in hindsight, invisible at the time. A second brain holds your memory, ideas, and research so your first brain is free to be creative, present, and rested. With AI, it matters more, because context is the one thing AI can't produce for itself: your knowledge, your experience, your way of doing things. But no system can tell you what you want. People build second brains and point AI at the problem, hoping it will set their priorities and name what matters to them. AI can lead you down so many paths so fast that knowing where you want to end up matters more than ever. PACE: 4 rules that counter the high achiever's traps. Pleasure over sacrifice, because the people most likely to attempt a review turn it into something grueling. Appreciation over criticism, because most people's only model is the corporate performance review, so they grade themselves and dissect their failings. Then concrete over abstract, and emotion over analysis. Concrete over abstract, learned from design thinking. At a San Francisco consulting firm with clients like Fiat and AT&T, half the work was getting everyone in a room and making everything visual. One idea per Post-it, almost childish. Then the pattern is obvious. Anyone who spends the day on a screen needs to get out of their head. Emotion over analysis, and the gratitude list is the way in. You can analyze your life to death without ending up happier or wiser. One or two things you're grateful for does nothing. The full catalog is different: "my rational mind can no longer deflect and avoid the feeling once it's all there in front of me." "There are no failures until you stop telling stories." The difference between a success and a failure is a narrative, and narratives can be retold and reframed. "Always be discovering them, never knowing them." If Tiago ever decided he fully knew his wife, that there were no surprises left, that's the day it goes stale. Never-ending discovery is what keeps a relationship alive. You are your ancestors' wildest dream. Tiago saw it on a T-shirt, and says borrowing an operating principle is allowed. His mother is Brazilian of Italian descent; his father is American and half Filipino. If those people could see the smallest ordinary detail of his day, their minds would break. He keeps it close for when he's discouraged. Collect all year so the review isn't a cold start. A project called "annual review 2026" in his task manager and another in his notes app. A story, a memory, an idea, dropped in as it occurs. At year-end, he goes through what's there. Tiago's champagne moment a year from now: nothing to do with the book. His third child, five months old at the time of this conversation, reaching a year and a half of health, happiness, and thriving. Action Put your annual review on the calendar right now, a full day or more in December, and gather your calendar, photos, and notes before you sit down. If you enjoyed this conversation with Tiago Forte, check out Episode #690 with Austin Kleon https://learningleader.com/austinkleon/, who explains his analog desk: no screens allowed, and a place to make something of what's swirling inside your head. Podcast Chapters 00:00 Meet Tiago Forte 01:29 Insight Global 02:25 Curiosity Is Motivation for Learning 03:55 What Changed His Mind 06:53 Should You Publish Your Review? 08:30 Appreciate, Reflect, Create 10:33 Prep and the Past 13:58 Held at Gunpoint in Rio 15:06 Can You Reflect Too Much? 19:01 What Only the Present Can Tell You 22:57 Building Goals on Evidence 25:20 "Oh, That's It?" 27:37 Treat Goals as Experiments 30:27 Twice the Work, No More Money 32:45 Operations Led or Marketing Led? 36:45 What AI Can't Tell You 38:29 PACE: Four Rules for a Better Review 42:49 The Gratitude List 45:17 No Failures Until You Stop Telling Stories 46:41 Always Be Discovering Them 49:23 Your Ancestors' Wildest Dream 50:42 Collect All Year 52:20 The Champagne Question 53:19 Mexico, Then Brazil 55:02 EOPC

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Hawk?

  Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. Tiago Forte is the bestselling author of Building a Second Brain. That book has reached more than half a million people in over 25 languages. He's taught more than 10,000 students from over 70 countries how to think more clearly and live with more intention. His new book is called Life in Perspective. It lays out the method. He built over two decades

• 0:46Ryan Hawk?

  of doing annual life reviews. During our conversation, we discuss Tiago tells the story of the afternoon, a drug trafficker in Rio pressed a rifle into his back when he was only 23 years old, and how that moment prompted him to start writing an annual review. Then, how to treat every goal as a learning experiment so that you learn from both success and failure. And then, how much reflection is too much, and why great leaders keep reflection and action feeding each other. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Tiago Forte.

• 1:29Ryan Hawk?

  This episode is brought to you by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them. If you want to learn more about the CEO, Burt Bean, and Chief Revenue Officer, Sam Kaufman, check out episode 424. We had a fantastic conversation talking about my partnership with the great people at Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but

• 2:11Ryan Hawk?

  hiring the right person can be magic. Visit insightglobal.com/learningleader today to learn more. That's insightglobal.com/learningleader.

• 2:25Ryan Hawk?

  I sense a deep intellectual curiosity when I've followed your work over the years, written work, videos, and I feel like I've learned over the 11 and a half years of doing this podcast that I don't want to stack rank like attributes that you need to be an effective leader, but a deep intellectual curiosity is really high on that list. I'm curious what you think about that.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Especially these days, I feel like where the pace of change has accelerated so much. If you don't have this deep curiosity about the underlying nature of things, how the world works, how people work, how all that is changing, you're going to be too fixed, you're going to be too rigid. Curiosity is just another way of saying motivation for learning. And learning is the most important skill in a world of immense and rapid change.

• 3:18Ryan Hawk?

  As far as mind changing, I also think that shows signs of curiosity, of being open-minded, of, I think, a lot of security in oneself. Because like in the political landscape here in the States, if you change your mind, you're like a flip-flopper. And I think that is just so lame. I think that's the worst things to say about someone who's willing to be curious. And when better evidence presents itself, they change their mind. I think that is awesome. And I feel like, again, you're on that wavelength as well when it comes to changing your mind. Can you think about things that you've changed your mind about maybe over the past three to five years that's been helpful for you?

• 4:02Speaker 01

  I often arrive at things I'm changing my mind about through my annual review. That's sort of the moment that it crystallizes. But you said three to five years. That's exactly the range of time in which I became a father. And that has changed my mind about everything.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Everything from the importance of ambition, you know, the importance of, you know, always be pushing, always be striving, limitless, have limitless ambitions. I think I've largely just let go of that idea under the influence of my kids. At least like business ambitions, you know, like empire building ambitions. I mean, going back, the big one was really leaving the Christian faith that I was raised with. That was the ultimate. That happened when I was about 20. And I had been raised in this evangelical mega church in Southern California, like the hardcore ones you hear about. I wanted to be a missionary all through my teen years. I went on mission trips, one to Central America, one to Africa, one to

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Europe. Like as a teenager, like 15, 16, 17 years old, I was hardcore, and my family was hardcore. I'll never forget, I can still remember that feeling of like, of letting go. It was more than just a belief. You know, when you're raised that way, it's a whole worldview, a whole belief system. It touches every single aspect of reality. But the funny thing is, I later realized is, I told my dad about, you know, this sort of deconversion experience I had, and what it was like and all these things. He's still a devout Christian. And he was like, oh, yeah, that all sounds very familiar. It's exactly how I felt when I became a Christian. It was like my deconversion was just an exact reversal of his conversion.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  And what that made me think to finally get to answering your question is, it was almost like, we both, what we needed at a similar stage of our development was to leave our current paradigm, to have it shatter and break, and then to step into a new paradigm. That was the value. It almost didn't matter which paradigm we were going from and to. We just needed to cross that threshold. And I almost wonder if that's true of others. If we all need, or at least would benefit from, just leaving some existing paradigm to understand viscerally that there are other paradigms.

• 6:23Ryan Hawk?

  Was your dad upset with you?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  No, that was the weird thing, too. He completely understood.

• 6:28Ryan Hawk?

  Really?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  He completely understood because he had done the same thing. His, he was raised Catholic, and his transition was to evangelical Christianity, which to a Catholic family was as much of a sort of extreme radical act as going from an evangelical to like atheism.

• 6:46Ryan Hawk?

  Man, I did not expect to talk about any of this, but I appreciate you being willing to go all over the place. Okay, I actually, before we started recording, I told you about, I've grown to really love doing yearly reviews, and I publish them. And before we get into it, I want to dig really deep into all of the review stuff. Because again, it's become something, not only do I love to do, but I love reading other people's in a weird way. I don't know if you do, too. But I had this conversation with James Clear. He's an Ohio guy. I live in Ohio, and so we've been fortunate to do some events together. And I said, James, you stop publishing your yearly review. And that bums me out because I loved reading

• 7:28Ryan Hawk?

  your yearly review. I have for like, the first, I started reading him, you know, 15 years ago. He goes, at some point, dude, it comes across as bragging, or putting in people's face when things are going really, really well. And I thought, ah, yeah, that's a good point. What do you think of that?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  I've encountered this a number of times. My friend, Ali Abdal, the YouTuber, he stopped publishing, he would do these like, income reports.

• 7:54Ryan Hawk?

  I remember. Yeah, I watched them. And yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Right. And I asked him the same thing, the exact same question. He was like, dude, once you're like, at like, five million, there's no one that can relate to that. And the lessons that you're trying to share don't apply to hardly anyone. So he just stopped. I think there's something to that. At least when it comes to like, in both these cases, it's content. These people are producing content for their audience. So maybe that's part of why it sort of tops out. But it is true. The way that I try to counteract that is just sharing the failures and the mistakes and the downturns, you know, the business downturns, just as much as the successes.

• 8:30Ryan Hawk?

  So let's get into the process because your most recent book is focused entirely on this. Okay, you have these three stages, past, present, future, and some prep beforehand. And you call it ARC, A R C, appreciate the past, reflect on the present, create the future. Can we start high level, and then I'll start drilling down so that we can actually make this something that people start doing like, immediately after this, read the book, and then do it for yourself?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Totally. Let's do it.

• 8:59Ryan Hawk?

  Okay. High level, break it down. What's your mindset on, just as a whole, reflection, yearly reviews, planning for the future, goal setting? You know, let's just start high again, then we'll drill down.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Yes. Okay, so this is a great way of understanding why this book exists and what it's trying to accomplish. The way I always think about it is just like, the landscape, the cultural landscape. So in this case, you could say it's the cultural landscape of like, productivity, personal development, and achievement, right? And you can just like, look at the landscape. You just like, know if you read and you're active in this, in this genre. And looking across that landscape at what project I was going to do next, when I was first deciding what book to write, this is the big gaping hole. There's a big missing piece here. Most people, when they think about just the future, let's say, they

• 9:51Speaker 01

  think goal setting. There's a bunch of problems with goal setting. It's a quite old idea rooted in the 1950s management consulting culture that has flaws or limitations. The other big one is New Year's resolutions. It's good to periodically revisit what you want to change about your life, but most people just don't put anywhere near as much structure and intention into it. And so I'm kind of trying to simultaneously fuse those ideas, like tie goal setting to this annual cycle, but then also address all these flaws and pitfalls that I see, drawing from my experience of doing these for the past 16, 17 years, and then my teaching and coaching.

• 10:33Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, so let's start with the reflection of the current year. So we get to, whatever, December of 2026, let's say, and somebody has never done this before, or maybe they've done like, a little bit of thinking, and maybe a New Year's resolution, but that's about it. So if you come across a group of those types of people, where do you start? What's the process?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  It starts with really the preparation, things like setting aside the time. If you don't set aside the time, you don't protect it, then there will just be no time and space for this to happen.

• 11:07Ryan Hawk?

  So like, put eight to 16 hours on your calendar. Do it right now so that it's set and do this in December, you think?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  The end of the calendar year is the most common time.

• 11:18Ryan Hawk?

  Okay.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  I talk about in the book, some other common options, but I would say there's something about the end of the year that just has this kind of personal significance.

• 11:26Ryan Hawk?

  Right. Yours is the end of the year. Your wife's is different, though. Is that correct?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  She does the end of the lunar new year.

• 11:31Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, okay. But you're a December guy, right?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess I just conventional. I just like the end of the year. I feel like work kind of winds down and before it winds up again in January, I want to use that moment.

• 11:45Ryan Hawk?

  So what are we doing? What questions are we asking? What are we thinking about? How are we structuring this?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  So the other thing with preparation that I would note is just gathering your stuff. For most people, it tends to be just kind of all over the place. You know, getting your calendar, if it's digital, just synced to your device. So you can just look at your calendar like all at once. If you have any project material, gathering that in, I don't know, a folder in your computer. If there's anything on paper, journal entries, just like literally just gathering it together. Because you don't want to be at this moment of beautiful reflection and be like, oh, shoot, where, where is that one? You know, that one thing.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  So yeah, that's, that's the prep. And then the overarching structure that I recommend is just past, present, future. It's kind of straightforward. Study the past. Really try to extract those lessons and those memories. Then move into the present. What's alive for you now? What's exciting? What open questions do you have? What needs attention? And then move to the future, which is usually where people start. They just like launch into these goals and new year's resolutions while ignoring the past. To me, you want to start in the past and then build and, and create this momentum toward the future.

• 13:01Ryan Hawk?

  When you're doing the reflection, what are the questions you're asking so that you can reflect? And understand how the year went? What you loved, what you didn't, what you did well, what you could do better at? Like, what are the specific questions you like to ask?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of the ones that you, you just said, especially the past facing ones are largely about just like cataloging what happened. It's incredible how you just forget.

• 13:30Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  You just completely forget most of what happened. So yeah, what were your, your wins or the areas that you grew? What were the risks you took? What were any mistakes that you made and what did you learn from them? What were your top five memories? Who were the people who most influenced you? It's really just like, it's like a self questionnaire to pull out of your mind or out of your notes or journal entries, whatever. The answers to these questions before they disappear.

• 13:58Ryan Hawk?

  What got you started on this?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  What got me started? I mean, the very beginning was a near death experience.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  I was 23 years old and I was, I held up at gunpoint and sort of briefly abducted by this drug trafficker in a favela or a slum in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, where I was studying abroad and volunteering. It was this waking up moment of having a brush with my mortality and starting to ask deeper questions. I had not really been a reflective or introspective person. I mean, I was living in Brazil, like partying a lot, drinking a lot. And it just kind of woke me up to start asking things like, what do I want to do with my life? Where do I really want this all to go? Where do I want to end up? What do I want to look back and say that I did?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  And the natural venue for the, it just happened to be, the first time this, this really went down was the new year. I was on a beach in Brazil on, on the morning of January 1st. And so maybe it just got kind of sort of anchored to that end of year, beginning of year period. And I just followed it thereafter.

• 15:06Ryan Hawk?

  While we're still on the reflection part of this, before we get to the present and the future, there was a viral clip that went around, I think it was Marc Andreessen, who was talking about the fact that big time leaders, founders who are building big things, they don't have time for reflection. They're just charging forward. That's all they're thinking about. And again, I thought it was insane and stupid because I've done a 700, whatever, 15 of these now. And a commonality among the greats over the past 11 and a half years of my conversations is they all have some sort of process to reflect and think about what they did well, what they didn't, and how they could get better so that they could grow and improve. Literally like all of them. What do you think of that, when you saw that going around that, no, the big founders that make things happen

• 15:51Ryan Hawk?

  just charged forward and never stopped to reflect?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I, I was around for that too. I'm, I'm pretty active on X. And I mean, on the face of it, completely ludicrous, completely ridiculous. But you know, I think from having been on X so many years, I have sort of a, a lens that I use for moments like this that I find helpful, which is to ask, instead of trying to put it into the two categories, true or not true. Nothing is fully true or not true practically. I like to ask, what is the truth in this? Or what truth is this pointing to? Or even if it's just 1%, 0.1%. And I think if I apply that lens, there is something that Mark is pointing to that I think is interesting, which is

• 16:38Speaker 01

  if you reverse it, I think you can do too much reflection.

• 16:42Ryan Hawk?

  Yep.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  It's a funny thing to say after having written this book. But it's like, you know, we all know the person who's constantly in therapy and never changing anything about their relationships. We know the person who constantly, maybe we've been that person at times. I know I have, who reads every self-help book, but makes no tangible changes in their habits. Who journals endlessly, but doesn't seem to do anything with those insights into their inner life.

• 17:06Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  So I think there is something to the idea that there are times for action. This is the reason, by the way, that I put so much emphasis on the annual. Some people like to do quarterly or monthly or weekly, you know, reflection. I don't really. This is a weird thing to say, but I hardly do any structured reflection all year long. I feel like I'd rather just move forward what I'm committed to. And what that means usually is by the time I get to the year, I have a backlog. I have a whole year of sort of psychological cruff that needs examining, but great. I'll set aside several whole days to just work through that backlog.

• 17:44Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah, I like that. And you know, I wonder if you've had the same feeling as I've talked to more people over the years, especially high performers who are putting a positive dent in the world. We talked about changes earlier. One of the biggest changes that I've personally made is at the beginning of this, I kind of viewed the world as it's either this or it's that. It's black or it's white. There's rules. And as I've talked to more people and got exposed to all these different sets of life experiences, I realized the world is super messy. It's really gray and it makes you a more reasonable person. That even if maybe there's parts of what they said you don't agree with, or you think it's just flat wrong,

• 18:25Ryan Hawk?

  you start becoming more reasonable and ask a question like that of what's the truth in this? And then you find some of that. I think that makes you a more open minded person who has a chance to learn and improve. But you're right, then you also have to be someone who has a bias for action. Because the people who make things happen, the leaders especially, who are putting a positive dent in the world have a bias for action, probably mixed with a, a good reflection process. Again, which your book can help with.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, you need both. It's a balance. You need action and you need introspection. They each inform each other.

• 19:01Ryan Hawk?

  You said past, present, future. Let's get to the present. What are we focusing on when it comes to the present moment when you're doing this review?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  I would say some of the internal elements that often go overlooked, your emotions, your feelings, your intuition, your inner voice, what's alive, what's exciting, what is emerging inside of you. Each of the three dimensions of time has an upside, a certain unique benefit it provides, and also a downside. They're so clear. Like with the future, it's very positive. There's a clear upside to being future oriented. You're good at delaying gratification. You're good at envisioning and planning and strategizing. The clear downside of a future orientation is you're not present. You're constantly projecting yourself into these imaginary scenarios and not enjoying the life you have now.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  The past similarly, the upside is that you gain all these lessons and all the, you know, you see all the patterns and you extract insights. The downside is you can obviously become too anchored to the past. You can wait the past far too much. And so the three elements, they balance each other. Each one addresses the, the weaknesses of the other. If you only look at the past, you might think that that's all there is, or that all you can do is just continue what you've always been doing and just continuing the past. But I often find when you turn your attention to the present, which is just this narrow slice of time, there's a whole nother world available to you. You know, you find you're excited about a new relationship that is brand new, but is like just consuming your attention.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Or you're just feeling or sensing that something that was right for you in the past is no longer going to work for you. And that information, truly just information is only available in the present. You gotta, it's its own stage, its own world to zoom in on is, is just the present.

• 20:56Ryan Hawk?

  Do you have any tools, mantras, rituals that help you be good, living in the moment? Being appreciative of the moment, whether it's family time or other? What do you do to make sure you're present, fully alive, like in the moment and appreciating it?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  I definitely do for life in general, but in the context of a review, I do as well. So the past is very like material focused. I'm like always trying to look at things, not just like sit there and remember. I'm looking at materials, photos, my calendar, my journal, all these things. The present is almost the opposite. I try to get into nature, get away from all screens, all technology, which sort of inherently reduce presence. Try to spend time with people. It's the most social time. The other parts of my review are intensely solitary. The present is the time to talk to people. Cause the people in your life, your colleagues, your business partners, your family, your friends.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  There's something about conversations like that that automatically brings you into the present. I mean, a conversation is like the definition of presence, right? But then they also have this tendency to surface things. They just surface. If you ask them, and I have some examples in the book of questions you can ask them, you know, things like, what can you depend on me for? And what can you not depend on me for is a great one. Because people will have answers for both.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  And so I would say, yeah, presence sometimes is talked about as this sort of mystical thing that is, oh, presence, it's like the spiritual concept. But I think there's a whole series of very tangible things you can do. You can proactively bring your attention into the present through all those things I mentioned. And then, once you do, there's, I keep coming back to this, there's information, there's literal information available now in this moment that's passing, that's not available in the past or the future.

• 22:56Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, let's get to the future. New Year's resolutions, goal setting, right? These are the things that we hear about normally. What is your process to think about and to prepare and to figure out like the best way to set up your future for it to go how you want it to go?

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is sort of the culmination of everything. It's where most people start, but it's kind of where I like to end. So there's a couple of things. One is the goals or resolutions, or whatever you call them, are going to be so different when they are built on the evidence of the past, when they come from all the insights and realizations you've gained from the past and the present. Sometimes it's the same goal. Like, I'll sometimes work with someone in my coaching, they have a goal to grow their business so much percentage, they might arrive at that very same goal, the goal is no different, but they understand it in such a different way.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Like, for example, I have this one coachee in mind as an example, who I won't name, but in this situation, I had him look at goals he'd achieved in the past, both recent in the past, six months, 12 months, and long in the past, and really had him try to return to the feeling that reaching that goal had provoked. What feeling did you expect? It's usually something like fulfillment, satisfaction, pride, empowerment, meaning, happiness, and then what did you actually feel? The conclusion that he came to, which is kind of funny how universal it is, is that the feeling actually seeking was far more present in the chase all along the journey.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  It's kind of a cliche, right? It was the journey. So he enjoyed that feeling all along the way, which is the main reason he achieved it, not because he worked so hard and had so much self-discipline and grinded himself to dust, but because he enjoyed every little moment of the chase. But the paradox of this is, once you achieve the goal, the chase is over, and thus the feeling turns off. And so there's this very common feeling of a sense of almost disappointment. Like, you reach the goal, and it's like, oh, that's it? Which then inspires the creation of a new goal to restart the chase.

• 25:18Ryan Hawk?

  What do we do about that? I think this is a very common thing in high achievers, high performers, is it doesn't feel like you thought it would. Becoming a bestselling author is one where it kind of comes and goes when you fought for it for years. I mean, there are other ones. Winning a championship in sports, even sometimes, it's cool with your buddies, I know that feeling, but then it almost still like, all right, maybe it's better on a team, actually, now that I think about it. But the individual goals are not nearly as gratifying as I always thought they would be. Is this just a thing? What do we do about that?

• 25:53Speaker 01

  There's nothing inherently wrong with it.

• 25:56Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  I mean, we sort of depend on the progress of human civilization, on people who go at...

• 26:03Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah, I mean, it keeps us hungry, right? We get the thing to eat and give it to our family, and we're like, all right, well, we gotta go get something for tomorrow, you know?

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. What's that quote? "All progress depends on the unreasonable man, on the person who can't be satisfied", who's just, yeah, exactly, he's always hungry. What I would say, though, is what's important is to just learn from that moment, to look back on it. So you did the chase, you reached the goal, take a moment, could be right then, as you achieve the goal, at some later point, at the end of the year, during your review, because you can come away with, and people do come away with very different conclusions. Some people's conclusion is, yes, this is how I made up, this is my psychology, I'm just gonna embrace it, I'm just gonna expect that the chase is the reward, there's gonna be a sense of disappointment when I achieve, it's just embrace it, which has value, and

• 26:56Speaker 01

  just like, accepting that side of you. But often, there's other conclusions, like, sometimes people conclude, and this is the reason I, the course that I teach on annual reviews is live, delivered over Zoom, is I want to hear these stories. These stories are the best, right? Sometimes people conclude that they sacrificed too much. They sacrificed too much of their health, maybe their personal life, their relationships, their mental or spiritual life. And that's also important to just see and take into account. Maybe next time, you could have the chase and get that feeling that you're going after without sacrificing so much. That might just be a decision you make or require a different approach.

• 27:36Ryan Hawk?

  Let's get into goal setting. Let's, again, start at a high level. Where are you at? How do you feel about setting goals?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Yes, I think goals are valuable. There's been a trend the past 10 years, I'd say, of either criticizing goals or attacking goals, you know, you hear people say, sort of attack, you know, hustle culture and the grindset and different things. And again, there's truth, there's truth in those criticisms. But goals, I mean, just from a basic mechanical perspective of just knowing what to do next, knowing what direction to walk in, like, you have to have a goal, all the more so when other people are involved, and other people are involved in most significant goals, right? To just set the direction that the group is going, you need goals.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  I just think it needs to be balanced, needs to be balanced with self-knowledge, knowledge of what's worked in the past, knowledge of your intuitions and your emotions, to sort of counterbalance that tendency to just like, be too much into the hustle mindset.

• 28:41Ryan Hawk?

  How do you personally set goals? What do you do? What are examples of some of them, whether it's personal and/or professional?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  I feel like there's a very different way of approaching goals, which is to treat them as learning experiments. And you know that the ultimate test of whether a goal is a learning experiment is very simple, which is, you are just as happy for the goal to fail as to succeed. Because typically, when an endeavor fails, when a goal fails, you learn much more. You learn much more in failure than success. And what's odd about this is it kind of leads to goals that on the surface, sound the same. You know, like, even the whole thing about being specific, which I agree with, I recommend being very specific with your goals. With this lens of treating it as a learning experiment, the reason you want the specificity is because there's more ways for it to go wrong.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  So, for example, in my business, instead of saying, okay, we want to grow top line revenue 20%, that's not a very helpful learning, learning goal. A better one would be to make it much more specific. You know, we are going to launch a new flagship program, which is going to raise the lifetime value of a customer by this much, lead to these margins, and it will be delivered by these facilitators that we're going to recruit. That specificity has so many ways of going wrong, it's like five hypotheses wrapped up in that goal, each one of which could be proven wrong and teach us something.

• 30:07Ryan Hawk?

  Do you have a good example of a goal you set that you missed and you were happy because it was a good learning experiment for you?

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, my gosh, so many. Most of our business goals, I would say, fit this shape. We set a goal for how much we want to grow, which usually has to do with revenue or profit. And then we have almost like a list of assumptions, a list of hypotheses over how that's going to happen. And I would say, most years, most of those assumptions are invalidated. So, an example, one year, we doubled the number of cohorts. We say, we're going to double, this is a great one, we're going to double the number of cohorts that we run, and therefore double revenue, right? That's how business works. What instead we found was doubling the number of cohorts simply cut in half the number of students that we had in each cohort.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  We had twice as much work and made no more money.

• 31:09Ryan Hawk?

  Why? How did that happen? Why did it happen that way?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Well, it was the lesson that came out of that, which to this day is one of the best lessons I've learned, which is that growth is completely gated by demand, which you don't control. Like, demand, which you could say is the number of qualified leads, to put it in business speak. If you don't have the qualified leads, then no amount of pitches and offers and new products and new offerings are going to make any difference.

• 31:37Ryan Hawk?

  Well, but growth definitely is gated by demand. You do have control over demand and that the more value you put out into the world, the more likely it is that your demand will be higher. For example, if this book sells a million copies within the next six months, your demand is going to be a lot higher. It already is high, but it's going to be a lot higher in six months than it is right now. And you don't fully know, however, you've, I assume, based on reading and prepping for this, you've worked really, really hard for this book to be as good as it could possibly be on a topic that is very important, that could help lots and lots of people.

• 32:20Ryan Hawk?

  You don't have full control over how many people choose to buy it, but you're going to go on podcasts and do the, you know, marketing type stuff to help get the word out. So that if somehow it goes viral, like Psychology of Money or Atomic Habits, then your demand will skyrocket. So you do have a say, even though not all of it is within your control, on the demand for what you offer.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Totally, totally, yeah. So what I would say is, at the moment of the launch, like, right there, we're launching a product today, we have the demand that we have. On that day, at that moment, there's nothing that we can do to expand demand. But you're right, that realization, basically, that the big realization that this, this whole thing led to, which sounds so obvious in hindsight, it's incredible, is that my company is marketing-led. I thought at the time that it was operations-led, that it was operation-centric. If we just increase our operational delivery, our operational excellence will grow, right? No. We are a marketing-centric business.

• 33:26Ryan Hawk?

  Describe the difference between an operationally-led business and a marketing-led business.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so this led me down a rabbit hole and I, I learned, I can't remember where I learned this from, but that you can think of businesses as finance-led, operations-led, and marketing-led. I mean, they all matter, all businesses have all of them, but it's sort of like, what is the heart of the business? What is the, the bottleneck? What is the main function that's going to determine the success of that business? And you see examples, clear examples, operational, finance, marketing. And I read this article and, or book, or whatever it was, and realized that we're marketing-centric, which, which as an online content creator is kind of, again, is so obvious in hindsight. Of course, our growth depends on the content we create, the audience we build, and the people we bring into our ecosystem, but somehow that wasn't clear to me at that time.

• 34:17Ryan Hawk?

  Why not?

• 34:19Speaker 01

  You know what I think it was? Pre-pandemic, we were so tiny and grew so slowly. It's just like this perfectly even line, because we were just so tiny. Then the pandemic started and the business like 10xed from one year to another, from 2019 to 2020. And suddenly, we were of a size that we had to think about things like this. We had to think of business, I had to think of business in a systematic way for the very first time. And I just had never had to. I was more or less, kind of more like a freelancer with a couple contractors before that. And 2020 with the pandemic introduced me to business, basically.

• 34:58Ryan Hawk?

  Do you think it was just the shift that people were on screens more and were out into the world? And that's why you guys blew up?

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Yes, and that was another very painful lesson around 2022, when the business that had 10xed started 10xing the other way and collapsing.

• 35:17Ryan Hawk?

  I'm glad we can laugh about it, but that's not, not very funny in the moment.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  It was not funny. Oh, my gosh, it was a catastrophe. I had to let go, I had to hire this, you know, 2020 and 2021, I saw this line starting to go exponential. And of course, I just thought, oh, that, this is what you hear about in the startup movies and the stories. It just keeps going, right? It just, it just gets extrapolated. But I learned in 2022 and 2023, I had to let go of this big team I had hired, unwind all these investments I'd made. And the lesson there was, I really saw how unique the circumstances were of the pandemic that had led to so much growth.

• 35:54Ryan Hawk?

  Well, you became known as the second brain guy. I think you're still known as that, probably, to a lot of people online. Do you like that?

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, it's increasingly the, this was sort of the direction that came out of that crisis period. Now, it's the AI second brain. It's the same idea, but with AI at the center.

• 36:14Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah, so it's, this book is kind of a departure from that? Like, there's a little AI in here, but I've noticed the AI second brain stuff. I'm curious about it, dug into some of the work. And then, when your team sent this book, I go, oh, okay, this is cool. I wonder what Thiago's doing. So how does this all flow together with this, doing the reviews, the annual reviews, the second brain stuff, the AI second brain stuff? Like, how does it all flow together?

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, in my mind, so clearly.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  But I think I have some work to do to kind of frame it all.

• 36:44Ryan Hawk?

  Okay.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  So, something I noticed, you know, I spent about a decade focused on, on the second brain.

• 36:50Ryan Hawk?

  Can you define the second brain real quick?

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yes, it's an external system, a piece of software, where you offload and you externalize your memory, your ideas, your insights, the work that you do, your research, so that your first brain, your human mind, is free to be creative, to be present, to rest. And pre-AI, that meant really digital note-taking or personal knowledge management, PKM. With AI, it's sort of all been supercharged, because now, what is the most important thing in getting value from AI? The thing that AI cannot produce itself is context. It needs context, it needs to know your knowledge, your expertise, your experience, the way you do things, your personal details.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  And so, over those years, working on the second brain, I just noticed that people don't know what they want, and they don't know what direction they want to go in. It's almost like they're creating all these technological systems and a second brain and AI, and now AI, to try to tell them what is important to them, where their lives or their career should be going, set their priorities for them, tell them what they believe. And that just doesn't work that way, really doesn't work that way. I think with AI, AI has this ability to lead you down so many paths so quickly, that it's become more important than it ever was to know exactly where you want it all to go

• 38:15Speaker 01

  and to bring that intention and that goal, or that, that direction to AI, so that AI is helping you go there, rather than expecting AI to tell you, you know, the answers to these fundamental questions.

• 38:29Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, I'm gonna get back to some of the review stuff. I like these rules, I believe this is in chapter three, you call them PACE. Pleasure over sacrifice, appreciation over criticism, concrete over abstract, and emotion over analysis. Can you go a little bit deeper on PACE and these four rules for all of it?

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Those four principles are meant to counteract some of the biggest pitfalls that I notice in my coaching and in my teaching. The high achiever, who is really the person most likely to want to do something like an annual review in the first place, tend to fall into this series of traps. The first one's sacrifice. They think, oh, everything worthwhile is the result of just hard, grueling effort. And so, they make this annual review into this painful, grueling, self-flagellating, self-critical thing, and that's just the very opposite of what makes an effective review.

• 39:26Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, so we got pleasure over sacrifice, appreciation over criticism.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of related, but in different language. There's this idea, which I think comes from corporate performance reviews, which is really most people's main exposure to something like this, right? They get that idea that they experienced or were subjected to as part of a corporation, and they think, oh, now I'm just gonna do that on myself. And then they grade themselves and rate themselves, and essentially criticize and dissect their mistakes and failings, which, again, is the absolute opposite of what this thing's about.

• 40:03Ryan Hawk?

  Just got a little bubble popped in my head of, of sitting with my manager. I was a sales rep for 12 years and manager and director and all that. And I remember I had like, a really, really good year, where I finished at the top of the stack rankings, all this, and you got rated one to five, and a one was the best you could do. And I remember, like, every goal, they were just destroyed, you know, number one in the company, and he gave me a two, and I said, Based on every metric, you know, not only did I beat it, but destroyed it. Why didn't I get a one? And he's like, well, we just don't give ones. I go, well, then what's the point of having the number scale? If you don't give a one? And he's like, well, it's just how we do it. I just like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Like, I was so mad visibly and let him know

• 40:47Ryan Hawk?

  that I just, if I ever had a chance to be in charge of something like that, I would never have a scale where you don't actually use the scale, you know? So, yeah, I like this idea of pleasure over sacrifice, appreciation over criticism. How about this? Concrete over abstract.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that one, I noticed that people who spend much of their day manipulating information on computers, which is a very abstract thing to do, or they're very smart and so they can create these mental models and these structures in their head all appear, right? That person especially needs to get out of their head. They need to get big pieces of paper and draw, need to put up post-its. They need to just feel their senses and feel physical things or see them. Because there's just a whole nother series of insights that are available through concrete mediums rather than abstract ones.

• 41:40Ryan Hawk?

  So you're a big fan of like the Austin Kleon analog desk, right? He's got the analog and then the digital one.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, where this came from too is design thinking. I worked for a boutique consulting firm in San Francisco for a few years. And it just amazed me, like, we'd have clients that were like big automakers, like Fiat, or like big multinational corporations, Toys R Us, AT&T. And I swear, half the time, we would just get everyone into a conference room and just make everything visual. Like, what was that idea? One idea proposed it. It's like childish almost, right? And then, once you get everything tangible and visual, suddenly they all go, oh, well, the answer is clear. You just connect this pattern to that. It's just like, that's half the battle, I think, is just making things tangible.

• 42:23Ryan Hawk?

  I think I personally need that as much as anybody. Cause I'm so tied to my note-taking systems and Google Docs and everything that get to the analog desk. My thing is like, you gotta have the patience though, right? Like you said, that takes a little bit of time to write one note on a post-it and then post a hundred of them. And before you know it, at the end of the day though, you look around and your brain's like alive because you've seen so much going on. I like that a lot. Then how about emotion over analysis?

• 42:52Speaker 01

  This is the fourth pitfall. You know, most of my, the students in my courses, they're in tech or tech-adjacent roles, information-intensive roles. Roles or, or kinds of work that they have to use their analytical mind a lot. And I almost find that among that group, it's almost like the analytical brain has become overgrown. It's become overpowered. And they get to their year-end review and they're trying to analyze. And there's a place for analysis. It's not wrong. It's just, you know, you can analyze your life to death and not be any happier or not have any more wisdom about what's missing. You have to bring it to the heart level. The heart knows things. The heart is the place.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  It's where the feelings are arriving that we're, that we're seeking in the first place. That's it. That's the ultimate thing to listen to around what we want out of life and how to get it.

• 43:48Ryan Hawk?

  So are you asking a question like, how do I feel about that? Or how am I gonna feel? Or how do I wanna feel? Like, are you talking about happiness? Like, what are you doing to get to the emotion over the analytics?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  There's a whole set of ways. I think it starts with the environment, like music for me. I recommend music strongly. It's almost like, and I think for a lot of people, one of the main gateways to their emotions. Stepping away from screens and getting more into your senses, more into your body, more in touch with nature. It's part of that too. And the funny thing is, there's systematic ways of accessing your emotions, which is kind of a funny way of thinking about it. Such as the gratitude list. The very first exercise I have people do at the very start of their review and that I do. There's something so unique about making a massive list of all the things you have to be most grateful for. Like, it's really funny.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  It's almost like, one or two, you can be like, okay, yeah, I'm grateful for that, I'm grateful for this. But when you see them all in one place, it is almost this overwhelming sensation of, my God, my life is just overflowing with blessings. You can't, at least I can't help but feel it. When I see, but there's something about the comprehensive list, like full catalog, where all the evidence, my rational mind can no longer deflect and avoid the feeling, once it's all there in front of me, I have to feel that sense of appreciation.

• 45:15Ryan Hawk?

  Big time proponent of that. Okay. The operating principles though, I liked reading yours. On failure, quote, "There are no failures until you stop telling stories." Can you say more about that?

• 45:30Speaker 01

  That's one of my, my personal operating principles, which is a step that I have people do. They don't necessarily have to make sense to anyone else. They're really written for your personal benefit. So maybe that's one reason they're not completely clear. But that one to me really comes from the idea that the difference between success and failure is a story. It's a narrative. And narratives can be retold, they can be edited, they can be reframed. It's kind of a, it's kind of my own way of wording a familiar idea that I think is, you know, has been around for a long time, which is, it's not the event, it's what you do with the event. It's the meaning that you decide to take away from the event.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  I like stories because I'm a storyteller at heart. Most of what I do is telling stories. Which also kind of reminds me that like, my best stories, my best content always comes from my mistakes. So there's like a part of my brain that like, when I see the mistake or the failure or the shortfall, it's a little part of my brain that can just be like, well, this will make an amazing YouTube video or an amazing story in a future book.

• 46:40Ryan Hawk?

  I love it. On your deepest relationships, quote, "Always be discovering them, never knowing them." What does that look like in practice?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that really was something I discovered through my relationship with my wife. And I don't know exactly how we discovered this, but it was this idea that if I ever thought I fully knew her, if I ever started assuming that I, I'd seen it all, knew all her stories, knew every part of her, there were no surprises left, nothing left to discover, I kind of feel like that's the day their, their relationship would die. Or at least that it would become stale. I think that never-ending discovery is the heart of, of the most alive and vibrant relationships.

• 47:32Ryan Hawk?

  Being genuinely curious about somebody else and their stories and what makes them them. I think, and maybe I'm projecting a bit, I think it is one of the most purest ways to show love.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:49Ryan Hawk?

  When you're actually, not in a performative way, but you're actually into them. And this could happen anywhere, anytime, everywhere with anybody, if you have a mindset of being, I wonder what their story is. I wonder, again, I, I think about this at my, my, my kids' sports games when I meet parents. Cause that happens all the time now with the stage of life that I'm in. And showing up with just a brief pause before I get to the sideline or to the court or whatever and say, you're probably gonna meet somebody today or see somebody that you see kind of in passing. What if you approached them with like a genuine interest? And what makes them them? It's wild how you could

• 48:34Ryan Hawk?

  build genuine, kind of really cool relationships with people that you didn't previously know. That combined with, yes, your wife always being curious about them and their stories and what it is about them that makes them them, I think that's an incredible way to show love.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 48:52Ryan Hawk?

  Did you have to learn that? Or have you been, are you more innately like that?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  I had to learn it.

• 48:58Ryan Hawk?

  You weren't innately, you don't think you're an innately curious person?

• 49:01Speaker 01

  I think I am curious, but that attitude of intentional curiosity towards people.

• 49:07Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  I'm such an introvert. All my attention and curiosity tends to be like inward-directed.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  And I have to be, I have to remind myself like, oh yeah, there's other people who, each of them is their own world and has their own reality.

• 49:20Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm with you, I'm with you. How about this one? On your heritage, quote, "You are your ancestors' wildest dream." What does that mean?

• 49:31Speaker 01

  I saw that on a T-shirt one time. You're totally allowed to borrow your operating principles from elsewhere. And the way that I interpreted it, I have this multi-ethnic family. Like, my mom is Brazilian but of Italian descent, just a couple of generations back. And then my dad is American but half Filipino. And even the Filipino is mostly Chinese. My mom is really into genealogy, and so she's traced all the family branches. And so we know quite a bit of their stories. We know the story of coming over from China to the Philippines, the story of immigrating from Italy to Brazil. And the more I learn about these stories that in some cases go back centuries, I'm

• 50:13Speaker 01

  just like, if these ancestors could see me today, we just live in a totally science fiction universe. Like, their minds would just be completely blown by the smallest daily detail, you know?

• 50:28Ryan Hawk?

  Yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  It's just a reminder to keep that in mind when I get discouraged or depressed.

• 50:33Ryan Hawk?

  That perspective is really helpful, especially when you're feeling sorry for yourself or something doesn't go your way, you're facing some sort of adversity. The time here flew by. I've got a couple more questions here. One of them is, what's the next step? People listen to this, they've got a high-level feeling of some of the annual review stuff that you write about in your book. There's, you know, we touched on like 3% of it, so there's so much more to learn and to then to actually go and do. By the way, that's one thing I really like about this book, is it sets you up to be extremely practical, meaning to go do the thing instead of just have this new idea or like an academic. It's like, no, this is how you actually do it. So I think that's really good. So what would you suggest? What would you say to someone, say, "All right, Tiago, I got a good feeling. I'm gonna read the book.

• 51:18Ryan Hawk?

  What should I go do next?"

• 51:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I would say pick up the book, for sure. And really, it's what you said exactly. All the insights come from just actually doing your review. You can read all sorts of other people's reviews, all the concepts, the history, the lessons learned. None of that is necessarily relevant to you. You have to just go through the experience yourself.

• 51:40Ryan Hawk?

  Have you started collecting anything for yours? Or no? Do you wait all the way until the end of the year to do all that?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I'm collecting it all year long.

• 51:47Ryan Hawk?

  All year? How do you collect it all year long?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  I have a project in my task manager. The two kind of main places that I capture are my task manager, which is called Things, and then my note-taking app, which is mainly Evernote. So I just have a project in each of those two places that is Annual Review 2026. And as I come across, often it's like little snippets, a story here, a memory, an idea, a question, I just drop them in there. And then at the end of the year, I pretty much just go through what I've collected there, and that's everything.

• 52:19Ryan Hawk?

  Love it. Okay. It's funny I'm asking you this question because it applies maybe to you more than anybody I've asked it to. I've asked it a lot now. It's called the champagne question. Have you heard of this by chance?

• 52:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 52:29Ryan Hawk?

  Okay. We're meeting exactly one year from today. One year, okay? And you are surrounded by the people that you love, and everybody with you is popping bottles, they're spraying it all over you and everybody else because you guys are celebrating like crazy. I am curious, what are you celebrating?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  It's nothing to do with, you know, the success of the book or anything. I think it's my, we just had a kid about five months ago, so I guess it would be their, it's not quite a birthday, they're one and a half, one and a half years of just health, happiness, and thriving.

• 53:10Ryan Hawk?

  Your third, correct?

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Our third, yeah.

• 53:12Ryan Hawk?

  How is adding a third to the mix, how's it been for you?

• 53:15Speaker 01

  It's insane. It's insane.

• 53:19Ryan Hawk?

  Do you guys, do you think you'll move back to the States?

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're starting to think about this. I think we'll probably spend another two years in Mexico, which means we would return back to the US in the summer of 2028.

• 53:30Ryan Hawk?

  What made you move and what makes you want to come back in a couple of years?

• 53:34Speaker 01

  We moved for a whole variety of reasons. The main one was to give our kids an experience of just feeling Mexican and learning Spanish. My wife is Mexican-American but wasn't raised speaking Spanish, so she always had kind of this like hole in her soul, like she was Mexican but didn't truly have access to the culture. And the fact that we can work remotely meant it was, you know, much easier. The other reason was I just find, maybe this is just Southern California or just the suburbs of LA, but we lived for four years there, we made no friends. It's so hard to make friends in the US, or at least in Long Beach where we lived. Not through the school, didn't meet neighbors.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Like, we just found the social environment there so difficult, whereas in Mexico, I mean Latin America and Mexico is just like, every day you see like five people you know. It's just the social life is at a whole different level. So that was, that was the other thing that we were looking for, was a more active social life. And the main reason to go back, honestly, is just to do it again. We're gonna spend the summer in the US and then, you know, if everything turns out, leave within a few months to Brazil and do the whole thing, spend another three or four years living in Brazil.

• 54:49Ryan Hawk?

  Oh, wow. So go back to the US, then go to Brazil?

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:53Ryan Hawk?

  What part of the US are you gonna go to?

• 54:54Speaker 01

  We'll go home. We kept our place in Long Beach, which is also where our families are.

• 54:58Ryan Hawk?

  Okay, got you. Wow. What a cool experience for your kids. Um, okay, the book's called Life in Perspective: The Art and Power of the Annual Life Review. Really appreciate you sending me a copy so I could prep, as well as, I write a review, but it's gonna be much more in-depth. Personally, I won't publish all of it, but I'm still gonna publish something similar to what I've done in the past. But the Life in Review, because of this book, is going to be much more in-depth for me, and I'm gonna be doing it with my wife coming up, when I've normally just done it by myself. So I really appreciate this work, Tiago. It's been cool seeing all the stuff and how just kind of honest and transparent, open you've been over the years. I remember started following you pre-COVID stuff, so it's crazy that it's been this

• 55:43Ryan Hawk?

  long, but really appreciate this ban and would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Incredible. Thank you so much for taking that on and for having me on. It's been a pleasure, Ryan.

• 55:56Ryan Hawk?

  It is the end of the Podcast Club. Thank you for being a member of the End of the Podcast Club. If you are, send me a note, [email protected]. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Tiago Forte. A few takeaways from my notes. Put your annual review on the calendar right now, block a day or more in December. Before you start, gather your calendar, photos, and any notes from the year so you aren't hunting for them once you sit down to write it. Then, once you finish writing your review, I would love to read it. Send it my way, [email protected]. Next, write your own operating principles.

• 56:39Ryan Hawk?

  Pick a few one-sentence rules you want to live by, drawn from lessons that keep showing up in your life. Some of Tiago's are. On failure, quote, "There are no failures until you stop telling stories." On his deepest relationships, quote, "Always be discovering them, never knowing them. That's all about curiosity and how that shows love." And then on his heritage, quote, "You are your ancestors' wildest dream." It's a great one for perspective and gratitude. The next, understand the nuance between reflection and taking action. Too much reflection turns into overthinking, and too much action leaves you running sometimes

• 57:25Ryan Hawk?

  in the wrong direction. Look at your calendar and ask which one you've been short on lately, and then schedule some time for it. Always being mindful of balancing both reflection with action. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, "Hey, you should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with Tiago Forte. I think it'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that and you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts and you subscribe to the show. You write thoughtful reviews, you rate it hopefully five stars." By doing all of that, you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis, and for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.