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Hey You,
By now we’ve talked about how to:
Build a Second Brain (email #1)
Organize it with PARA (email #2)
Design your day-to-day work (email #3)
Extend your mind beyond your head (email #4)
And yet — even with all that in place — there are still days where focus fades, creativity dries up, or progress stalls.
It’s not because the system is broken.
It’s because you are not a machine.
That’s what Tiago Forte explores in The Heart is the Bottleneck, his third volume in the Praxis series. The premise is simple:
After the mind is optimized… it’s the heart that holds us back.
Productivity Isn’t Just a Head Game
Tiago shares how, after years of building frameworks for managing knowledge, he hit a limit.
He realized that emotional bottlenecks — fear, avoidance, burnout, resentment — were what blocked him and his students more than a lack of tools.
He writes:
“When people focus only on their intellect, they soon plateau. The bottleneck becomes their ability to tap into their emotions and hear what their intuition is telling them.”
It’s about feeling aligned with your work — or noticing when something’s off.
Your Body Often Knows Before Your Brain Does
One of the most eye-opening takeaways from the book is how much our bodies hold unprocessed experiences.
Tiago talks about his own journey through pain, voice loss, and unexplained fatigue — and how note-taking, of all things, helped him track, make sense of, and heal.
When you feel stuck, it’s often not a cognitive problem. It’s your nervous system trying to protect you. Which means the solution isn’t more thinking. It’s more listening.
Growth Looks Like Letting Go
There’s a chapter in the book where Tiago writes about how real progress often comes from shedding old beliefs, identities, or expectations.
He says:
“Mastering the mundane tasks of everyday life seems to be a gateway to living an extraordinary life.”
It’s not the big breakthrough moments that change us most.
It’s how we respond to feedback, to resistance, to failure.
And what we choose to do next.
In other words: emotions are part of the system.
It’s a reminder that building a system is just the beginning. The deeper work is learning how to inhabit it fully — with both your head and your heart.
Until next time,
Piotr
P.S. If nothing else, try this: next time you feel stuck, ask yourself:
What am I avoiding?
You might be surprised how often the answer isn’t technical, but emotional.