SecondBrain SuperPowers
3 Weeks
·Cohort-based Course
Unleash the power of your second brain and consistently ship your best work
SecondBrain SuperPowers
3 Weeks
·Cohort-based Course
Unleash the power of your second brain and consistently ship your best work
Course overview
Break Through the Barriers Keeping You from Shipping
How did you use your second brain system today?
😱 Did you create or share anything new, or did you spend your time polishing your system by organizing your notes, making it look prettier to look at without actually making any progress on your creative goals?
😱 Is your second brain system collecting dust like a bookshelf full of once-cherished books in an abandoned mansion?
😱 Are you an avid learner who’s taken all the second brain productivity courses, followed the latest productivity and creativity YouTube and TikTok influencers, read the latest productivity books like Atomic Habits, Flow, and Designing Your Life, built a beautiful second brain system, but still haven’t tapped the Publish button as often as you’d like, if at all?
If this sounds like you, you’re not alone!
In fact, after years of serving as mentors and facilitators for Tiago Forte's Building A Second Brain and David Perell's Write of Passage, as well as other productivity and creativity programs, we’ve seen student after student get started and make progress with dealing with information overwhelm. However, too many fail to overcome the biggest challenge: crossing the Maker's Threshold. This is the muddy moat of uncertainty, self-doubt, and perfectionism that keeps you from moving from divergent thinking to convergent thinking—the essential transition to closure and shipping your best ideas.
Collecting new notes and organizing them feels good and comforting, like a cozy bed that begs you to hit the snooze button over and over again. But in reality, you're still stuck, still procrastinating, never converging, never shipping.
That’s why we created SecondBrain SuperPowers.
😀 We saw which students were actually successful at crossing that threshold.
😀 We studied and documented which ones broke through that barrier and why.
😀 We’ve refined our insights into a course that teaches you how to actually make creativity a habit.
This course is different because you’re not learning a new productivity system, a new note-taking system, or a new tool…
You’re learning how to use the science and art of flow, and the note-taking system you have today, to be more creative.
We work with you to develop a new creativity mindset that helps you consistently reach your optimal creative flow state, where new connections and ideas are so inspiring they almost feel like they've been delivered from the great beyond.
We help you cross the Maker’s Threshold and ship!
This Course is For:
01
Creatives struggling to find their unique creative identity, make their creative work a habit, and consistently deliver their best work.
02
Knowledge workers struggling to focus, express their ideas, and reliably produce the work they know they are capable of.
03
Entrepreneurs struggling with overwhelm and the stress of constantly feeling their business isn't getting high quality attention it needs.
We Will Teach You How To:
Consistently enter the flow state—the ultimate state of consciousness for creativity, productivity, and learning.
Did you know that certain types of challenges actually increase your likelihood of entering a flow state? This is just one of the facts about flow and the flow wave you'll learn as we teach you how to optimize your life, work, and environment for flow.
Stop judging your creative ideas.
Learn how to stop struggling with your inner critic and use your domain knowledge and critical judgement to further your creative work, not block it.
Identify your unique creative fingerprint.
The loops, arches, and whorls in your creative fingerprint are shaped by the impulses that drive your creativity, your creative personality traits, and your aesthetic. Learn the contours of your unique creative fingerprint and how to use those traits to drive your creative work.
Transform uncertainty into inspiration.
Risk, opportunity, and failure overlap with one another. Risks create opportunities, but they may also lead to failure—and failing scares us. Learn how to use the Experimenter's Mindset and "small bets" to navigate and eventually overcome uncertainty.
Use your second brain to nurture your ideas and bring them to life.
Your second brain should be more than just an archive of your tasks, projects, and notes. It should be a source of inspiration. Learn how to use your second brain to nurture ideas and consistently produce finished work.
Enhance your creativity with the latest generative AI tools.
ChatGPT, MidJourney, and other generative AI tools are changing the creative process. Learn how you can use these powerful new tools to enhance your creativity and workflow.
Recover from flow.
Breaks and recovery are an essential part of the creative process (and success in life). You'll learn the essential recovery cadence to maximize your time in flow.
SecondBrain SuperPowers
Meet Your Instructors
Cliff Guren
Cliff writes about personal productivity, creativity, and technology. His insights draw on his lifelong passion for the arts and his substantial professional experience managing award-winning content development teams at industry leading companies including Apple and Microsoft.
Cliff’s writing, teaching, and coaching on productivity and creativity is focused on the development of the "creative's mindset"—a particular type of mindfulness that’s focused on understanding and revealing the possibilities in life and developing the discipline required to realize those possibilities in the work you create and share with others. He's also a Senior Mentor in the Forte Labs' Building a Second Brain program.
Cliff holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University.
"Creative work (making things) gives us an opportunity to break through our self-limiting beliefs and discover unforeseen possibilities that surpass even our boldest intentions."
Glen Lubbert
Glen is a CEO, entrepreneur, and founder as well as a certified performance, sleep & recovery, and habits coach. He’s an expert in the science of the flow state and a member of the Flow Research Collective.
He’s also an expert in behavior design and co-founder of Be Your Own Best Coach, using behavioral science and solution-focused coaching to help train self-leadership skills and habits.
He’s a productivity expert and Senior Mentor for the personal knowledge management program Building A Second Brain as well as a mentor for the online writing course Write of Passage. Glen is also a certified coach for Thrive Global and is currently the founder of Stamina Lab, building tools and programs to help people improve their performance and enhance their wellbeing.
"Dropping into creative flow is about following a checklist, a routine. Flow is achievable on-demand and is a skill anyone can master."
Course Syllabus
01
The Maker's Threshold
Creative flow is the optimal state of creative productivity. To consistently work in creative flow, you need learn how to navigate uncertainty. At the end of this session you'll know:
- The four types of creativity and how to clarify your creative ambitions.
- The stages of the flow activation wave.
- How uncertainty helps us cross the Maker's Threshold.
02
The Science and Art of Flow
Consistently entering into a flow state takes practice. At the end of this session, you'll know:
- How to assess you're ability to drop into flow
- The triggers you can use to consistently transition into the flow state.
- How to align your life with your dreams and goal/motivation stack to unleash your intrinsic capacity for entering the flow state.
03
The Creative's Mindset
The Creative’s Mindset is a way of understanding and connecting with the sources of your creativity. In this session, you’ll learn how to:
- Decode your unique creative fingerprint.
- Use your inner critic to further your creative interests.
- Discover, develop, and apply your personal aesthetic.
04
Creating Your Optimal Flow Activation Routine
In this session, you'll learn how to build your own Flow Wave Activation Routine, including how to:
- Use a science-based behavior change model to consistently establish new flow-inducing habits & routines.
- How traverse the flow blockers that keep you stuck in the struggle phase.
05
Make to Know
We all struggle to bring our creative ideas to life. The Make to Know model of creativity can help you transform uncertainty into a strength. In this session, you’ll learn how to:
- Manage your way through the tricky gap between divergent and convergent thinking.
- Identify your creative thinking style.
- Design your optimal creative workflow.
06
Second Brain Super Powers
Your second brain should be your idea studio: the place you go to unlock your creativity—your first brain super power. In this session, you'll learn how to:
- Transform your second brain into your ideal playground.
- Integrate the latest generative AI tools into your creative workflow.
- Use sleep to help your first brain become your genius lounge.
What Recent Students Say
IP S.
Olga M.
Jayne
Ray B.
Get into the productive creativity habit!
🚀 Focus on the goals that are most important to your long-term success, not just the demands of the day.
🚀 Learn how to use your second brain and the power of flow to increase your productivity, bring your creative ideas to life, and reliably deliver your best work.
🚀 Establish a new creativity mindset—one that helps you get past creative blocks, reliably get into flow states, and ship your best work.
Course Schedule
Approximately 3 hours per week
Tuesday & Thursdays
Noon to 1:30 pm Eastern
Two hour-long live sessions per week, plus an optional 30-minute Q&A after each session.
The cohort begins on Tuesday, May 23 and ends on Thursday, June 8.
Weekly projects
1 to 2 hours per week
We recommend that you allow one to two hours per week for pre and post-session reading and exercises.
"It's totally worth it!"
Former student Milena Teles
Frequently Asked Questions
More Recent Student Testimonials
Emaneuele S.
Scott W.
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Learning is Better with Cohorts
Active hands-on learning
This course builds on live workshops and hands-on projects
Interactive and project-based
You’ll be interacting with other learners through breakout rooms and project teams
Learn with a cohort of peers
Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you
"It's about enabling your internal capacity to be creative."
Former student Olga Milenko