Tiago Forte — The Man who Changed Productivity Forever

The untold story of the productivity expert behind Building a Second Brain

On the 18th of November 2013, a guy named Tiago Forte delivered a talk in Silicon Valley. He wanted to show the audience some controversial results after spending 9 months tracking his personal productivity:

“I found that having more active projects, (more balls in the air), switching tasks more often, spending more hours working and spending more time on email were all correlated with higher productivity”

10 years later, he is now one of the most famous productivity experts in the world, with over 20 000 people taken his online courses and over 100 000 copies sold of his best-selling book, Building a Second Brain.

However, the road to success was not easy for him, as he suffered from excruciating chronic pain, memory loss, depression at times, and rediscovered many traumas from his past life.

This is the story of Tiago Forte, the man who changed productivity, forever.

Chapter 1 — The Mysterious Illness

Tiago was born in 1985 and raised in Orange County California but moved for several years in southern Brazil, where he came in touch with a different culture and a willingness to make a change in the world.

As a child he read tons of fiction books but was quite average in school. He didn’t care about his performance that much but instead spent most of his time just imagining stories in his head and being in his own world, something that would serve him well later.

But during his college years, he started to experience a tickle in his throat. He thought then that it would just go away like a normal cold but it became worse. It started to hurt a lot, so much so that he had intense headaches and struggled to both speak and eat.

Unfortunately for Tiago, nobody knew what it was. He went to multiple doctors, only to hear that there was nothing wrong with him. The only solution they had was a powerful anti-seizure medication who temporarily removed the pain but also removed all what he felt in his body during that time, and also removed his short term memory.