My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly Best-Seller! I think you’ll find it useful.

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, Life in Perspective: The Art and Power of the Annual Life Review, teaches the method he built along the way. He lives in Valle de Bravo, Mexico, with his wife Lauren and their three children.

You can also WATCH our conversation on YouTube.

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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, 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