(2019-01-29) Forte A Vision For Escola Pura

Tiago Forte: A Vision for Escola Pura

At the end of every year I perform an “annual review.” (Yearly Review)

I decided to do it differently this year. Under the guidance of my friend Ting, I took on a process of looking more deeply into my desires, dreams, and hopes for the future

Instead of my usual analytical checklist, laid out in a neat grid in a spreadsheet, I took on a process that was more about discovering the future than planning it.

I gave my talk at a hotel at the edge of the Yale University campus

Seeing the centuries-old buildings dedicated to learning and scholarship, I started to get in touch with something that had been dormant for a long time: the power of place for learning.

I visited the main library

This serendipity is what online education is missing, I realized

I downloaded Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind.

I learned that we are currently perched on the edge of a “psychedelic revolution.” After several decades of stigma and prohibition, psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin are making a comeback

psychedelics were banned in 1972 because of the fear that they would “corrupt the country’s youth.” From then on, a small underground community of enthusiasts, advocates, doctors, shamans, artists, writers, scientists, and therapists kept it alive.

I felt for perhaps the first time ever that I was a part of history

I didn’t know it was possible to get a contact high from reading, but I think that’s what happened

I started to see the closest thing to a “vision” I had ever experienced while sober. I saw a school building, nestled in the Serra da Mantiqueira mountains of Southern Brazil.

It was called Escola Pura, I somehow knew. “Pure School” in English. There we would teach everything they didn’t teach in normal school: productivity, effectiveness, organization, and project management to start. But also yoga, meditation, breathwork, and emotional intelligence. I would share everything I had learned in exclusive, expensive programs in Silicon Valley, like Landmark, Tide Turners, and Vipassana. (cf TheCraft)

Escola Pura will train a new generation of Brazilian leaders, equipping them with every practical superpower mankind has to offer, in service of whichever cause they care about

I have no idea what path Escola Pura will take

What I do know is that this path will take many years, will require resources and skills far beyond what I can supply myself, and will draw on a vast number of people whom I haven’t met yet.