We're wrapping up the AI Second Brain cohort, with one live session left.
What's been most exciting is seeing real wins roll in.
Members are posting in Circle about how they're using AI to unlock things they couldn't do before: pulling insights from years-old voice notes, rebuilding stalled projects, getting unstuck on problems they'd given up on.
This is what we want: People moving from learning about AI to using it on the things that matter most.
We also spent time on Obsidian, a notetaking system that works with AI. Your notes stay in plain markdown, so you and your LLM can both read and edit them.
Want to join the next cohort in the fall? Join the waitlist here.
The CODE Challenge Begins: 3 Strangers, 30 Days, One Method
Can the CODE Method hold up under real deadlines and real pressure? In Episode 1 of The CODE Challenge, three Second Brainers put it to the test for 30 days.
You'll meet Carolina, a Basel-based finance trainer with less than a month to architect a 4-day AI workshop in Notion. Edvardo, a writer in Fort Lauderdale using Obsidian to finish a manuscript on burnout while battling his own perfectionism. And Ethan, a 27-year-old founder in Los Angeles building a Pokemon card vending business out of Google Drive at 18-hour-day pace.
Three projects. Three breaking points. One shared system: Capture, Organize, Distill, Express. This episode sets up the 5-part series. The next four episodes go deep on each step of CODE.
From Action-Oriented to Object-Oriented Productivity
Pull up your to-do list right now. Look at the items on it: Look up train schedule. Finish my slides. Write a blog post. Evaluate life insurance.
Notice anything? They're all verbs. They're all actions. That's how David Allen taught us to think, and for decades it worked.
But hand any of those tasks to AI and watch what happens. It'll tell you it doesn't have web access, or ask for your login, or stall out on permissions. AI is bad at human-centric actions.
What AI is good at is producing objects. Artifacts. Standalone things that exist.
So the shift I've been making is from action-oriented to object-oriented productivity. Instead of writing "Create a new course I can sell to my followers," I describe a future state: a course exists that fits these criteria, hits this revenue target, and serves this audience.
You're not listing steps. You're describing the thing that needs to exist.
Pick one task on your list today and rewrite it as an object. What thing needs to exist? Reply and tell me what you came up with.
(Btw, I already wrote about this concept in 2017 in my blog post on the 5 Steps to Building a Personal Productivity Network.)
AI and The Return to Being Human: Art of Accomplishment Podcast
My longtime mentor and friend Joe Hudson hosts one of the best podcasts I know of.
He's been quietly coaching the founders building the AI labs you read about every week, and his show is where a lot of his thinking shows up first. A recent 40-minute episode stood out.
Joe's argument: as intelligence gets outsourced to AI, wisdom becomes the skill that matters most. And wisdom, in his words, is being good at being human — making the hard decisions, having the difficult conversations, seeing patterns in yourself and others.
He also makes a point worth sitting with: we're raising AI, and AI is raising us. How we choose to interact with it shapes who we become.
Join Us for “Master Prompt May”
This May, the Second Brain Membership is going deep on the Master Prompt.
This came directly out of our first AI Second Brain cohort. It was the piece that made everything else click.
A Master Prompt tells your AI who you are, how you work, and what matters to you. Once it's installed, you stop re-explaining yourself every time you open a new chat.
In four implementation sprints, you'll draft, install, and test your own. Each Tuesday, we co-work through it live together.
If you've been meaning to set up your AI properly, this is the month to do it.