Building a Second Brain – The TV Show

This is a proposal I wrote for a television show based on my bestselling book Building a Second Brain.

If it resonates with you and you’re in a position to make a TV show happen, please let me know by emailing hello@fortelabs.com. I’m open to a variety of formats, funding sources, routes to production, and distribution platforms for this project.

Introduction

Have you ever felt drowned in a sea of ideas, struggling to recall that one crucial piece of information when you most needed it? Have you ever spent hours scrolling social media, or consuming content online, only to find yourself unable to remember even one useful takeaway?

Imagine a world where your mind is freed from everything you’re trying to remember and keep track of, while every important detail and inspired thought remains safely tucked away and easily accessible within seconds. Welcome to the possibility of building a Second Brain – a digital extension of your mind that remembers everything, so you can accomplish anything. 

This isn’t just about storing information; it’s about reshaping the way you approach life. You are offloading your thoughts to technology so you can think more clearly and calmly. By organizing the digital realm where you likely spend hours every day you enhance your focus instead of splintering your attention. Aligning your online habits with your values and goals transforms the time you spend consuming content – from merely passing the time to compounding your learning and growth over time.

By creating a Second Brain, you’ll have a dedicated, digital space you can step into anytime you want to focus your energy on what truly matters to you. Rather than relying on your scarce self-discipline or willpower, you’ll have a cognitive exoskeleton designed to propel you forward into taking action on the goals and projects that could transform your life.

Inspired by the revolutionary concepts from my books Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method, which have sold over 300,000 copies worldwide, and the transformative experiences of thousands of my students, readers, and followers, I’m excited to bring the power of the Second Brain to television. Let’s dive deep into the world of digital organization, redefining the way we engage with information and using it to unlock the best version of ourselves.

The Show

I propose an intervention/makeover/personal transformation style unscripted show revolving around people’s digital organizational habits and creative projects. 

This genre typically shows an expert or “guru” who comes into a person’s environment, and shines a light on an aspect of their lives that they are ashamed about, in pain from, or that is holding them back in some way. 

For example:

• Marie Kondo and people’s closets
• Ramit Sethi and people’s bank accounts
• Queer Eye and people’s wardrobes
• The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning and people’s possessions
• The Biggest Loser and people’s waistlines
• Dream Home Makeover and people’s homes

These are all domains that are crucial to our well-being and thriving, but that many of us feel disempowered or embarrassed by. 

There have been many such shows, but I’ve never seen one that deals with people’s digital life – their notes and documents, emails and text messages, web favorites and bookmarks, photos and videos, books and reading, YouTube videos and social media posts, etc. In my experience, most people would rather open up their homes or their bank accounts than show you what’s on their smartphones or computers, and that’s why we will find so many touching, hilarious, and ultimately meaningful stories there.

Why now?

Over the past decade we’ve become a digital-centric culture. 10 years ago, as of 2013, Americans spent more time on digital devices than watching TV. We consume digital media over 7 hours per day, with 44% of 18- to 49-year-olds saying that they go online “almost constantly.” Millennials (currently aged 24-41) are now the dominant economic, political, and cultural force in our society, and their experience of life is fundamentally shaped by the digital world. 

The Internet isn’t a thing anymore, it’s a place – the primary place we go to for education, entertainment, community, connection, and so many other needs and wants. Our digital lives are rich, fruitful landscapes where our hopes, dreams, and creative visions can come to life before our very eyes, as long as we have the will (and the tech-savvy skills) to see them through. 

Yet where is the authentic portrayal of that digital realm that has become such an important part of our experiences? At most, we’ll see a character in a TV show briefly sending a text message on a 5-year-old phone. Where is the self-discovery, the stories, the drama, and the life-changing inspiration that we find online every day?

The Stories

A starting point could be my story of struggling with a debilitating neurological condition that plunged me into a world of pain and shut down my ability to speak, ultimately leading to the realization of how crucial self-expression is to life (and inspiring my writing and teaching on this subject). 

Here are some of the other (real) stories we’ve heard from the graduates of our course, viewers of our YouTube videos, and readers of my books:

• The Colorado pastor who interviews the families of the recently deceased in order to write their eulogies found himself overwhelmed by the quantity of information he was collecting and taking weeks to distill it. He began using a voice transcription app to record the interviews and summarize the key points in minutes, freeing up his time to spend with the bereaved. 
• The UK single mom trying to juggle homeschooling and work, whose depression had advanced to the point that showering and brushing her teeth was a struggle. She adopted digital habits that led to her learning to manage her life and even enjoy reading again.
• The Florida education professor who felt frazzled managing her job while taking care of the kids, before she started using digital notes apps to capture ideas and insights on the fly, which made prepping for speeches something she can do in little batches during the small windows of her busy day.
• A college student who realized he was addicted to video games and watching his life pass him by. Upon discovering the power of a Second Brain, he began using it as a way to learn and grow while activating the same parts of his brain that video games once did.
• The Managing Director for an automaker in Mexico, who after treating her depression with medication, found that she also needed to change her routines around managing emails, her schedule, and her to-do list to put her life and career back on track. Now she’s teaching her team the same techniques and seeing it lift the performance of the whole department.
• The oncologist at a world-renowned cancer clinic who uses my techniques to condense his reading about new clinical trials and patient notes so he can quickly reference the information he needs while spending more time listening to and being present with his patients.
• The manager, whose company was being acquired and position made redundant, decided to utilize digital platforms to document and systematize his company’s knowledge. This led to him being named the General Manager of the new combined business, a position with far more responsibility and compensation.

And these are some of the topics and issues we can touch on:

• The tension between personal productivity for succeeding in your career, and creativity as a means to personal fulfillment
• The epidemic of Information Overload and the crushing stress of all the information we consume and have to pay attention to every day
• Social media’s impact on our attention span, mental health, and ability to focus
• The explosion in freelancing, the creator economy, and remote work as powerful possibilities that require fluency in using digital tools to manage our work and lives to take advantage of
• ADHD and other neurodivergent conditions’ effect on how we think, and how to use technology to consume and interact with information in more effective ways
• Content consumption on online platforms as a major influencer of our thinking, while requiring more intentional habits to glean the most helpful ideas and insights from the noise
• Our digital habits and the platforms on which they take place as important avenues for self-expression, self-determination, and creative agency

Potential challenges

Here are some of the main challenges we’d face in creating such a show, which also represent opportunities if we succeed:

• How to represent digital spaces and virtual interactions in a visual, engaging, relatable way
• What to call this subject (common terms include second brains, digital organization/hygiene/fluency, personal knowledge management, tools for thought, and others)
• How to frame the “promise” of watching the show (commiserate with others struggling with information overwhelm, gain inspiration from others overcoming relatable challenges, get new ideas for how to approach the digital world, be moved by the stories of courage and vulnerability as people confront their fears, etc.)
• How to make the stories relatable, grounded, and easy to understand, since this topic can easily become convoluted and abstract

Ideas for portraying Second Brains on TV

Here are my initial ideas and notes on how we could portray digital environments and habits on the small screen:

• Feature digital notes that are more visual rather than purely textual, including graphics, photos, drawings, diagrams, screenshots, etc.
• Project computer environments onto walls or 3D spaces that we can point to, talk about, and walk around in (like Hans Rosling did on the BBC)
• In Ramit Sethi’s show How to Get Rich there are some good examples of using a combination of zooming in, on-screen animations, and over-the-shoulder shots to make the screen feel less two-dimensional
• Go out into the field and interview real people (architects, sex workers, casino owners, professional athletes, musicians, etc.) on how they use digital notes/second brains “in the wild” as part of their professions (a good example of this is the 1997 documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which profiled an animal trainer, topiary gardener, robot scientist, and biologist studying mole rats)
• Borrow ideas from Sherlock on how to film thoughts and subjective experiences
• Use virtual or augmented reality environments to make the digital realm more tangible; for example, using the Apple Vision Pro to provide a new interface for interacting with digital content on our devices
• Create in-scene animated objects that I can interact with and move around (such as Bradley Cooper’s character in Limitless), or immersive, full-screen animations that illustrate concepts and ideas, such as Steven Johnson does in How We Got to Now on PBS
• Create a “studio” or “lab” with tangible materials and tools that are used to “think outside the brain,” like Stanford does in their design school
• Here’s a short video highlighting some interesting recent experiments in depicting digital/online behavior on screen

If this resonates with you and you’re in a position to make a TV show happen, please let me know by emailing hello@fortelabs.com. I’m open to a variety of formats and distribution platforms for this project.

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