Writer Enough

Your story is worth telling, your name worth remembering. You have always been writer enough for all of it and so much more.

I have long believed that the things keeping you from writing are worth writing about. In articulating what you’ve been avoiding, you begin to inform and affirm a better way. It’s been a while since my last letter. I’m ready to share why.

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In 2020, I published my essay, ‘Mindset Over Toolset in Building a Second Brain.’ 

Earlier that year, I had attended Tiago Forte’s ‘Building a Second Brain’ course, then was invited to join as a mentor. Sharing my own experiences and reflections on productivity, note-taking, and knowledge management—reframing the broad topics as a mindset, more than a toolset—which I detailed in my essay.

In 2022, Tiago came out with his book, ‘Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential.’ Reading, I found similar passages between the book and my earlier work, published two years prior. Re-reading, I could find no mention of my name nor of my essay. Online, readers had begun sharing quotes from the book that stood out to them. Some, attributing my words back to Tiago.

Since then, I have been actively seeking a resolution from the author and his publisher that addresses what has happened. In the following, I retrace my discovery of the events as I have observed them (at times after the fact), through information readily available online or with a library card:

A few of the resulting posts I have come across. Personal details have been blurred, with annotations added in red. The bolded quotes are mine:

“What does it take to move from mindless consumption to mindful creation?”

“The goal is to take note of what moves your projects forward, not get a PhD in note-taking. And if ideas are best preserved through execution, what doesn’t bring you closer to making progress on your projects may be detracting from it.”

“Your process can look like chaos to others, but if it brings you progress and delight, then it’s the right one. There is no single right way to build a second brain.”

Over the past two years, I have spent time, energy, and money—including having to hire a lawyer—trying my best to protect my work. Trying to protect that young writer and the sense of joy and expansiveness that she found in creating and sharing her writing. For a while, I hoped that it would be enough.

From what I have been able to find, credit—where eventually added—appears inconsistent, incomplete, and limited to the following passages:

• “The goal is to take note of what moves your projects forward, not get a PhD in note-taking. And if ideas are best preserved through execution, what doesn’t bring you closer to making progress on your projects may be detracting from it.”

• “Your process can look like chaos to others, but if it brings you progress and delight, then it’s the right one. There is no single right way to build a second brain.”

1. In the online endnotes, updated from a previous revision, showing the reworded passages as they appeared in the book:

   

2. In the endnotes in a recent printing of an English hardcover book:

   

3. By name and with quotation marks for a passage in a revised Google Books limited preview:

   

4. And this year, a section of the ‘Building a Second Brain’ course sales page was revised:

   

It is important to me that writers—especially young writers, those who are starting out—know your rights and how to advocate for them. How to stand firm in the worth of your words, the value of your voice, the insights in your own intuition. To know that you do not have to navigate these kinds of experiences alone or in silence. Though there may be moments that leave you feeling outnumbered or overpowered, your story is worth telling, your name worth remembering. You have always been writer enough for all of it and so much more.

I still come across the passages from time to time. Familiar words under an unfamiliar name. In time, I tell myself, I will rewrite what I first wrote. Repeat what I wish to reclaim. Reclaim what I wish to repeat. Take the words to where only I know they are headed.

I am learning that I am not here to merely monitor, defend, to justify my work as I have had to do. I have been meaning to spend this brief time creating my art, sharing my art, being moved by the memory of it all. I hope you get to do the same.

Talk soon,

Christina