Scott H. Young's Blog

Ten Books on Doing Good

This is the last month in my year-long Foundations project. The focus of this month was service. In this post, I’d like to share some takeaways from the ten books I read this month. Next week I’ll share my reflections on trying to improve this foundation in my own life.

Those interested can also check out my reading lists from the previous foundations: fitness, productivity, money, food, reading, outreach, sleep, reflection, connection, focus and organization. (102 books in total!)

The 1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

The facts are striking:

Giving is good. Helping makes you happier and healthier, and givers rank at the top of many of life’s success ladders.We could give a lot more. While we tend to emphasize domestic inequality in our media coverage, global inequality truly striking. Most Americans are in the top 10% of the global income distribution—and you don’t need to feel particularly rich to be in the top 1%. Obligations aside, it’s definitely possible that people in Western countries could give significantly more than the 1-2% they typically do.Our giving could be a lot more effective. Of what little we do give, a lot of it is wasted. Not so much through outright fraud, but because we are lazy thinkers when it comes to charity. A lot of well-meaning ideas don’t work particularly well, and the most effective ones are orders of magnitude more helpful than the rest.

In brief, it seems like we not only fail to be sufficiently generous for others’ sake, but even for our own sake. Altruism is undersupplied.

The 3-Minute Summary of What I’m Still Confused About

While the facts are clear, the philosophy is not. This month’s reading raised more questions than it answered.

Fortunately, at a practical level, I don’t think it matters much. The typical person (myself included) can do so much straightforward good that getting the philosophy right isn’t the most pressing issue. However, since what it means to help others is, in part, a question about what makes life good and meaningful itself, the questions are not mere academic pedantry.

Some questions I don’t have a great deal of certainty about:

How much should we value ourselves versus others? Impartial utilitarianism, which doesn’t give room for favoring oneself or one’s friends or family, seems excessively demanding, both in comparison to our commonsense morality (in which our duties to others rarely go beyond our immediate vicinity), as well as compared to what seems psychologically achievable for most people.How much should we value friends versus strangers? Domestic versus global giving has become a hot-button topic, but, like the weighing of self-interest, it seems difficult to give a clear answer to the question of what we owe our neighbors versus people far away.How much should we value animals versus people? And what kinds of animals count for more (or for less)? Intuitions vary widely here, and it seems hard to come up with a clear answer. Perhaps we should treat animals better (maybe even much better) than we currently do. But it seems almost absurd to argue that saving shrimp matters more than global poverty.How much should we value future people? Economists are often at odds with altruists, noting that while redistribution benefits us now, extremely high levels of taxation may retard growth, which is ultimately the only thing that has really caused societies to escape long-term poverty. What we owe future people is a surprisingly thorny issue, especially if our actions today mean that totally different sets of people will end up being born as a result.

One possibility is that these questions simply don’t have an objective answer. Philosophy is a conversation we’ve been having for over two millennia, and perhaps we’ll keep having it without arriving at any answers that have ultimate justifications.


Another possibility is that, as hard as it may be, these questions may be answerable, but we simply lack some of the knowledge or intelligence to answer them today. Perhaps morality is waiting for its Newton to unite the theories both in Heaven and on Earth.

Quick Reviews of the 10 Books1. Doing Good Better by William MacAskill

MacAskill opens with the story of an engineer who watches a poor woman working vigorously at a hand pump to get water from a well. He gets the idea to turn the hand pump into a play set. The kids will get to play, and the townspeople will get water without laborious effort. The idea is lauded and raises millions, including prominent celebrity donations.

Except the idea sucks. The women prefer the hand pump and the kids don’t want to play on the set. It breaks frequently and can’t be repaired except by technicians from the charity.

In contrast, deworming kids—something that can be done for only a few cents—creates enormous gains to health and education.

When we spend money for ourselves, we tend to be fairly rational. Yes, we sometimes waste money on junk or fail to learn about products that might benefit us. But, on the whole, we are strongly motivated to get the most for our money. However, when we spend money on behalf of others, we often fall victim to the play-pump problem—we hear good-sounding stories and open our wallets without asking if it actually helps anyone.

MacAskill, one of the founders of effective altruism, thinks we can be much better at helping. By evaluating the impact of altruistic causes, we can identify charitable efforts that do much more good.

2. A Year of Living Generously by Lawrence Scanlan

Scanlan spent a year volunteering, Each month, he worked for a different charitable cause, ranging from helping the homeless, to teaching First Nations youth, to rehabilitating criminals, to helping in a nursing home.

This book’s first-person storytelling was a good contrast to MacAskill’s detached economic analysis. It’s clear that even if volunteering is less “efficient” in terms of cost-benefits, directly helping others is probably good for forming one’s character and cultivating bonds that bridge groups and circumstances. For that, I applaud Scanlan.

At the same time, I found myself disagreeing with a lot of Scanlan’s arguments. He frequently disparages those who give financially, either because they have a lot (and therefore ought to have been taxed heavily instead) or because they feel proud of their generosity (which condescends those who are needier). At the same time, Scanlan shrugs off predatory behavior among those who ask for help, such as one person who lies to the operator of a food bank about needing money for an emergency, but then simply pockets the money instead.

I think the heart of our disagreement comes down to whether you believe the system we live in our society is a net positive (as I do), and we need to make incremental reforms to help the people who miss out; or whether you believe our current system is fundamentally corrupt, and thus one’s successful participation in it is a sign of one’s sins.

Despite our differing worldviews, I still found Scanlan’s survey of volunteerism to be a useful guide to understanding how we might cultivate a more service-oriented personality.

3. Give and Take by Adam Grant

Measure performance among a group of people: students, salespeople or professionals. Then give them a personality inventory that probes their reciprocity style: are they generous givers, competitive takers, or tit-for-tat matchers?

What you’ll find is that the givers tend to be on both the bottom and the top of such rankings. Despite their reputation for being doormats, generous givers actually do quite well in the cutthroat world of business and professional life.

Generosity is a strategy that pays of in the long-term. In the short-term, helping can undermine your own work. But, over time, it cultivates friends and allies that end up being worth far more than the effort required to generate them.

A highly-competitive “taker” strategy tends to be short-sighted. But so, too, are the cautious “matchers” who seek to help when they can clearly perceive your ability to reciprocate. This approach is too cautious, akin to the start-up investor who is only willing to give money to companies that are already turning a profit. By giving generously when a reciprocated favor is not on the horizon, givers manage to cultivate deeper networks that win out in the long run.

4. What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill

We live in a hinge point in history. It’s not implausible to imagine that, perhaps centuries from now, our descendants will colonize the stars, and we may number in the trillions. At the same time, catastrophic climate change, rogue AI, bioengineered pandemics and nuclear war all threaten to bring our species’ story to an abrupt end.

While such speculations may seem like the stuff of science fiction, MacAskill makes the case that, to the extent that we have some control over the direction the future takes, those actions may have, in moral terms, far, far greater impact than anything that helps a person alive today.

In addition to existential risk, MacAskill also discusses the potential contingency of moral attitudes. He gives the example of slavery, arguing that, had it not been from the early advocacy of Quaker abolitionists like Benjamin Lay, the world’s oldest institution might have legally continued up until the present day. While Lay was hated and ridiculed in his own time, if his actions nudged the moral arc of the universe, it may have been one of the more beneficent actions any human has ever taken.

I enjoyed this book, but it was certainly more speculative than Doing Good Better. In the end, the reason to care less about the future may not be that it matters less, but simply that there is too much uncertainty in our ability to reliably cause a better future.

5. Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen

Cowen makes a similar case to MacAskill that we ought to value the far future much more than we do presently. However, unlike MacAskill’s science fiction hypotheticals, this mostly boils down to Cowen’s commitment to the idea that we ought to maximize sustainable economic growth, constrained by some minimal set of human rights.

Economic growth, not international aid, after all, is probably the only thing that has ever sustainably lifted people out of poverty.

I don’t think that’s an argument against giving strategically. Deworming, for instance, doesn’t just make children healthier, it also raises educational attainment which is conducive to a more economically productive society.

 However, it is, perhaps, an argument against actions that might help people today at the expense of future growth, such as discouraging foreign direct investment or boycotting factories abroad on account of their working conditions.1

6. The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith

While Smith is best known for launching the field of economics with his book The Wealth of Nations, his first major work was about the origin of our moral intuitions.

Smith argues that our moral sentiments come primarily from “sympathy” (what we today would call empathy). By putting ourselves in the other persons’ situation, we respond to it as they do and judge their behavior accordingly. Through socialization, we not only learn to empathize with others, but to reflexively empathize with a hypothetical, impartial bystander who might witness our case and, in doing so, moderate our instinctive tendencies to exaggerate our own self-importance.

Some philosophers, owing to their analytical natures, read almost like Martians—observing humanity with near-alien detachment. Smith, despite his bookish personality (scholars debate whether he died a virgin), was the complete opposite: an incredibly keen observer of human nature, picking up on subtleties in our feelings and conduct. He wryly observes the incredible egotism baked into human nature:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment.

…

The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but provided he never saw them, he would ignore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him than this paltry misfortune of his own.

7. Against Empathy by Paul Bloom

Bloom thinks empathy is a morally corrosive force, and we’d be better if we stopped using it.


Bloom argues that empathy distorts, biases, neglects scope and discourages reflection. Compassion and reason are better guides to altruistic behavior.

My first impression, especially as I read this book immediately after Smith’s Sentiments, was that Bloom was deeply wrong and mistaken. Empathy is the grounding for our moral intuitions, and while it may be imperfect, being coldly rational seems like a straight path to becoming a cruel psychopath.

But Bloom largely won me over. He makes a good case that empathy is not, in fact, what underpins much of our moral behaviors. We frequently do good things where there is no victim to empathize with. Feeling a suffering person’s pain is not necessary to cure it, and can frequently get in the way.

8. Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit

Parfit is considered one of the most important moral philosophers of the 20th century, and Reasons and Persons is perhaps his greatest book.2

Parfit carefully works through arguments to arrive at the following conclusions:

We should reject self-interest. The theory of self-interest, namely, that it is rational to do whatever is best for one’s life, is collectively self-defeating (because of game theory) and indirectly, individually self-defeating (because we might live better if our motivations weren’t so self-interested). It is also difficult to defend the notion that it is irrational to do what would harm one’s future self, but rational to do what would harm another person.Personal identity is less than it seems. There is no Cartesian ego. What it means to be a person, extended over time, is the continuation of many psychological factors over time. This means we shouldn’t fear Star Trek-style teleportation (should it one day be invented). But it also means we’re less than 100% identical with our future selves, and more than 0% overlapping with other people, and should fear death less than we do today.Deciding what’s best over the long-haul is hard. Every action causes not just benefits and harms to the future, but also creates completely different sets of people who would be born in the world. It is difficult (perhaps impossible) to construct a theory of what we should do that deals with this fact, and also avoids the repugnant conclusion that a sufficiently large world of people whose lives are barely worth living is better than a world with the same population as ours that lives in utopia.9. Ethics in the Real World by Peter Singer

This is a collection of essays by Singer. It covers a range of controversial issues in ethics:

Do insects feel pain?Is adult incest necessarily immoral?Should we allow people to sell their kidneys?Were vaccine mandates a violation of personal freedom?Do citizens of Western countries have a moral obligation to give much of their income to charity?


Thought-provoking, even if I don’t always agree with Singer’s conclusions.

10. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

As a young psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl and his entire family (including his pregnant wife) were deported to concentration camps. Only Frankl survived.

Man’s Search for Meaning is half an analysis of the psychology of camp life, from the almost unimaginable brutality of the guards, to the even more despicable behavior of prisoners who collaborated. The other half is Frankl’s theory of psychology, which posits that human beings ultimately seek a meaning for their actions, not merely pleasure (pace Freud) or power (pace Adler).

Despite the horrors, Frankl decides that there is a potential meaning in every experience, and it is our task in life to find it. The concentration camps, then, serve as an extreme test case for this theory of life—of our ability to find meaning that will allow us to transcend our circumstances.

Frankl writes:

“We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly.

…

Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus, it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. “Life” does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life’s tasks are also very real and concrete.”

_ _ _

Next week, I’ll share some personal reflections on my own month of service, and how I tried to apply some of these ideas, however imperfectly, in my own life.

The post Ten Books on Doing Good appeared first on Scott H Young.

12 Things I Changed My Mind About After Researching for Foundations

Last week, I talked about my process for doing intensive research combined with building new habits that I’ve been using this past year in my Foundations project.

One question that sometimes comes up when I emphasize the value of doing research is whether reading a lot of books is necessary. Did you really need to read books to tell you that exercising was important? Or that you shouldn’t eat junk food? That you should get to bed on time?

I think this “I know that already” problem infects a lot of areas of self-improvement. In brief:

Hindsight bias is strong. Everything is obvious once you know the answer. The value of research is usually in telling you which of two plausible theories is true, or which advice from different, seemingly sensible approaches works best.Reading is attentional, not just informational. My heavy reading lists didn’t just teach me new things about each topic, they also forced me to think about those themes for the entire month. Since much of improvement is simply focusing on something long enough to make a change, this shift in focus is much easier to sustain if you do a lot of reading.

However, even if I think we rarely overhaul our entire belief system upon deeper research of a topic,1 I wanted to talk about some areas where I changed my mind during the last twelve months of research.

For each foundation, I’ve picked the belief that I changed my mind about that made the biggest difference in my actual behavior.

1. Fitness: Cardio matters more than lifting weights for health.

As I mentioned in my fitness day one update, for years I had largely done strength training. Some of this was the classical vanity of a skinny twenty-something kid wanting to bulk up. But part of it was also that, at the time, I enjoyed lifting weights more than running or cycling.

Coincident with that preference was the belief that exercise was exercise. You should exercise to be healthy, but otherwise the choice was up to you.

Now I largely believe that while both strength training and cardiovascular exercise have benefits for health, the benefits are largely distinct. Strength training helps build bone and muscle mass, something that is especially important as you age. But cardiovascular exercise has the stronger relationship with health and reduced mortality outcomes.

2. Productivity: Happiness, not stress, leads to productivity.

We’re taught a confusing mix of messages about work and productivity. We need to hustle, but also to have balance. We need to lean in, but also practice self-care. Results come from straining ourselves in deliberate practice, but also from flow.

I now think a lot of strain is overrated. The research shows that people are most productive at work when they have more positive emotions. And that positive inner work-life comes largely from feeling like they are making progress.

In other words, forget the masochistic talk about grinding and hustling. Focus instead on the steady drip-drip-drip of making incremental progress towards your big tasks.

3. Money: Bonds are riskier than stocks in the long-term.

Most investors shouldn’t be picking individual stocks. I’d even go further and say that most investors shouldn’t even be putting their money with experienced advisors who pick stocks. Buying a low-cost index fund is the right choice for most people.

But even though I’ve long been persuaded of the efficacy of index investing, which was amply confirmed doing the research that month, one area I changed my mind with had to do with asset allocation.

Traditionally there’s an understanding that you should hold a mixed portfolio of stocks and bonds. Stocks tend to be riskier, but also higher return. So, for younger investors with more time until retirement, a high-stock portfolio is best. But this should slowly add in more bonds, as this leads to greater security (at the price of lower returns).

Interestingly, I’ve now become largely convinced that, in the long-run, stocks don’t just perform better, they’re actually less risky than bonds. Bonds have some undesirable features so that, even if their volatility is lower, the actual risk of holding them goes up over longer time horizons. 

Practically speaking, this didn’t change my actual portfolio. But it does suggest that the reason to hold a mixed portfolio should depend much more on your time horizon rather than your risk tolerance.

4. Food: Saturated fat is still bad for you.

Until this project, I had mostly a passing interest in nutrition. From that, I had basically imbibed a pretty common message about the changes in research-grounded advice that goes something like this:2

Way back in the dark ages, scientists thought saturated fat was bad for you.Because of this, we made everyone switch from butter to margarine.Except later we learned all this margarine has trans fats, which are even worse!In addition, new research says that maybe saturated fat isn’t actually bad for you!Scientism at its finest, the nutrition advice we were all following for years actually made us fatter and unhealthy.

But after doing the research for this month, I’ve realized this is basically false. Saturated fats are still bad for you, and the evidence base in favor of lowering saturated fat is one of the strongest in all of nutritional research, including not just epidemiological work, but controlled feeding trials, mechanistic work and more.

It is true that public health was behind the ball on trans fats. But this issue is basically moot because they’re not really in the food supply anymore.

It is true that public health messaging has changed. The low-fat advice was deemed overly simplistic, dietary cholesterol doesn’t have much impact on blood cholesterol (so egg yolks are largely fine) and added sugars and refined carbs are being elevated in their concern for contributing to the obesity epidemic.

But it is simply not the case that there’s been a reversal in scientific evidence on whether saturated fats are unhealthy. Butter isn’t a health food, sorry.

5. Reading: Paper beats ebooks.

Prior to the reading this month, I had largely believed that the medium didn’t matter so much when it comes to your ability to retain what you read: paper, ebook or audio recording were all about equally good, provided you paid attention to them.

However, I now think the balance of evidence does favor paper as a medium, even if it’s slight. As a practical matter, I don’t think this makes a huge difference—I’m rarely listening to an audiobook under the same circumstances when I would be reading, and practical considerations often encourage me to go for Kindle rather than paper. But, I do think if a book is difficult and important for you to study, you’re probably best off with a hardcopy.

6. Outreach: Friends help you live longer.

The health benefits of social connectedness are in the same ballpark as those associated with other well-known lifestyle improvements to health such as diet, sleep and exercise.

This finding surprised me. I guess I always felt like socializing was something ephemeral—how could it possibly impact your body?

But the proposed mechanism makes sense to me: social isolation causes chronic stress. Chronic stress raises blood pressure and suppresses the immune system, leading to greater infection and mortality.

7. Sleep: Trying hard to sleep perfectly is counterproductive.

Like many people, I was originally impressed a few years back by Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. At least until it was pointed out how sloppy Walker was with his reporting on the science.

Walker’s book had convinced me that not only was getting eight hours of sleep nightly a health imperative, but that we should probably take our sleeping as seriously as our exercise.

However, the full research I did that month painted a different picture. While getting enough sleep is important, actual sleep needs vary quite a bit, so it’s probably not the case that everyone needs exactly eight hours. Moreover, sleep differs from exercise in being a state that can only come about involuntarily—you can’t make yourself sleep, and putting too much pressure on sleeping well actually makes you sleep worse.

8. Reflection: A (little) delusion can be a good thing.

One of my longstanding assumptions has been that it is better for us to know the truth than believe a lie. Is does not imply ought, and so it is better that we have the best possible picture of the territory ahead of us, so that we can make better decisions.

I still (mostly) hold to this view, if only because I find the idea of wild self-delusion inherently unpalatable. But doing the research this month convinced me that, ironically, the case that some (mild) self-delusion may be adaptive is probably stronger than the norm of ideal rationality. Self-efficacy and mild forms of positive self-regard can become weakly self-fulfilling prophecies, and it is not obvious that the benefits of these are achieved at a fixed point.3

9. Connection: Being married (but not having kids) is associated with greater happiness.

As a parent, I had always been somewhat disappointed by the finding that people’s life satisfaction typically drops after they have kids. It’s not totally baffling—after all, taking care of a human being is a lot of work, and having children can increase economic and relationship pressures. But it would have been nice if the obvious love we have for our children would figure into the calculation as measured by psychometricians.

On the flipside, I was positively surprised to find out that the relationship between marriage and happiness is not only positive, but the magnitude is very large and robust to many possible confounds.

I still suspect this is correlation rather than causation, but it’s still a nice antidote to the stale jokes about “the old ball-and-chain.”

10. Focus: ADHD is best treated through medicine.

Until this project, I admit, I didn’t know much about ADHD. I had largely bought into the idea, commonly portrayed in the media, that we’re overprescribing drugs to kids, just because they can’t sit through boring classes and would prefer to have recess.

My textbook for this month by Russell Barkeley, one of the foremost experts on the disorder, painted a very different picture. In genuine cases, ADHD is mostly heritable, and behavioral interventions (such as those that work well with depression, anxiety, OCD and other mental health issues) don’t work particularly well. In contrast, pharmaceutical treatment works remarkably well, and squeamishness about prescribing them is robbing many kids of a normal childhood.

(Interestingly, the other contributors to the volume, while supporting Barkeley’s messaging on treating kids, echoed some more common concerns of overdiagnosis in adults. One of the contributors raised an eyebrow to the idea that many otherwise high-functioning adults have proper ADHD, arguing that impairment is the sine qua non of the disorder, so being particularly high-functioning was largely disqualifying.)

11. Organization: Decluttering is better done all-at-once rather than bit-by-bit.

This was one of my worst foundations going into the project, so it’s no surprise that some bad beliefs had held me back. 

In particular, I believed prior to the project that it was probably best to make decluttering a regular habit—something you do in little chunks here and there. Marie Kondo’s book, however, convinced me that this approach tends to be self-defeating.

The real difficulty with being tidy is having too much stuff. We have too much stuff because we have a hard time making a decision about what to throw out. This decision is hard to make about each possession in isolation, but benefits from seeing whole categories at once. In other words, that tattered sweater may seem reasonable to hang onto until you actually inventory all your clothes.

Decluttering this way is more work. But it works better.

12. Service: Empathy is overrated.

I went into this month thinking empathy was the cornerstone of our moral sense. Psychologist Paul Bloom’s book argues that empathy is not only unnecessary for moral sentiments, but actually counterproductive. I left reading his book largely agreeing with his point of view.

To understand, it helps to be precise about what empathy is: putting yourself in another person’s position and feeling, vicariously, what they feel. So empathy means recoiling your foot when you see another stub his toe, or imagining what it would be like to be sick, starving or alone.

Bloom contrasts this with cognitive empathy, which involves understanding a person’s emotional state without necessarily sharing it, and compassion, which is a more diffuse desire to help people without necessarily sharing in their miseries.

Bloom makes a long list of this narrower version of empathy’s flaws: it is innumerate (so we feel it equally for one person and one million people), it is biased (we feel more sympathetic to those like us than unlike us), it can encourage us to look away (does hearing about far-away suffering bum you out? It’s easier to ignore it than make a donation), and it can even encourage tribalism and violence by causing us to sympathize selectively with victims.

In contrast, Bloom argues that our moral sentiments are better founded on reason and compassion. Reason, because it can help us make the correct decision in complex situations. Compassion, because it allows us to help others without the need for burnout or bias.

The post 12 Things I Changed My Mind About After Researching for Foundations appeared first on Scott H Young.

The One-Month Knowledge Sprint: How to Read Books, Take Action, and Change Your Life

Over the last year, I’ve read more than 100 books. Moreover, I’ve put a lot of what I’ve learned from my reading into practice in the form of new habits. While I’ve been sharing the specifics of what I’ve learned in the monthly updates to my Foundations project, today I’d like to talk generally about the process of creating a structured reading project that results in changes to your life—not just a stack of books on your nightstand.

First, some notes on the relationship between reading and taking action:

1. No, reading books is not somehow “bad” for self-improvement.

A dangerous meme in the self-improvement space is that the typical person spends too much time “learning.” Somehow, the specious argument goes, the average person is reading too many books, and this is what is preventing action.

This is ridiculous. The average person reads shockingly little, and now reads even less than they used to.

Done properly, reading provides a solid foundation for knowledge in a domain. That knowledge ensures action is pointed in the right direction.

2. Action should take place alongside reading, not afterward.

While reading is good, not harmful, it can get in the way if you require yourself to “finish” your reading before you take action.

In general, the only time reading should be completed before taking any action is in cases where the action is relatively easy, but the cost of a wrong decision is high. So buying a house, choosing whether to quit your job, or having kids are all choices where initiating the action isn’t the problem—it’s making a wise decision.

However, for most areas of life, mistakes tend to be reversible. Thus, it’s far better to begin a project with a bad strategy and modify it based on your reading than to wait until you’ve formalized the “perfect” strategy to take action.1

Reading without action is impotent. Action without reading is ignorant. You need both.

Creating a One-Month Knowledge Sprint

The basic framework I’d like to suggest is the one I used for my Foundations project: pick a defined area of improvement, and make a focused effort at improving your knowledge and behavior over one month.

Why one month?

People tend to drastically overestimate their willingness to stick to long projects. Year-long projects sound cool, but few people have the stamina to reach the end of them.

A month, in contrast, is enough time to make substantial progress while being short enough to avoid some common pitfalls. Assuming you’re dedicated, you should be able to read one to five good books on a topic and cultivate new habits, systems or skills.

If it turns out one month is insufficient, you can follow up your month-long sprint with a second (or third, or fourth) one-month sprint. The one-month sprint imposes useful design constraints, but not artificial restrictions, for nearly any project you might care about.

I break down the process of conducting a month-long sprint into four parts:

Choose a theme.Take action.Get books.Adjust based on feedback.Step One: Choose a Theme

First, you need to choose a theme you’d like to work on. This could be something personal (such as improving your health, career, relationships or hobbies), or it could be related to acquiring a skill or field of knowledge (such as French, history or using AI in your job).

Scope matters too. If you pick something too general, your reading will be diffuse, and getting a solid answer as to the right actions to take will require reading more books. If you pick something too specific, you risk allowing your preconceptions to distort the project, and may end up focusing on something that’s not relevant to your broader goals.

For example: the theme “better health” may be overly broad; there are many different relevant actions that would be difficult to fit into one month. On the other hand, “apply keto-specific dietary strategies to my running performance” is probably too specific—it takes for granted the efficacy of the strategy, and thus, makes it hard for you to learn something that might change your mind. Here, a better project might be “improving health through fitness.”

Step Two: Take Action

I like to invert the normal “read first, do later” approach that is commonly used in school-based learning. An action-first approach is how we’ve learned to structure our courses, as students usually find it more effective for most areas of self-improvement.

The reason is simple: virtually no one is a blank slate. You already have some general ideas about how you would go about improving within a given theme. So get started. What you read will then change your direction rather than provide the entire road map.

This is clearest with areas where you already have enough knowledge to get started. You probably already know enough about eating better to improve your diet without doing extensive research in nutrition. This doesn’t mean reading the nutrition books isn’t valuable—a lot of what you believe may be wrong!—but if the average person simply took actions they thought were useful, it would probably still be a positive change.

What about areas where you know nothing? Perhaps you want to learn a foreign language, programming or how to start a business, and you don’t know anything about it at all. In those cases, I suggest finding a workbook or practical guide as your first book and using it as your starting point—read while doing the exercises.

Step Three: Get Books

After you’ve started doing something in the domain you’d like to improve, it’s a good idea to pair that naive action with intensive study. This allows you to pivot toward something better if it turns out your initial plan was misguided. Even if your approach is basically solid, you can use what you learn to reinforce your commitment and fine-tune the details.

You should read books in this order:

Textbooks.Credible popular books based on expert consensus (not polemics).Interesting books that may not be consensus opinions.1. Textbooks

Textbooks should be your first choice for understanding a domain. I know, I know, nobody likes this advice, but I’m going to repeat it anyways.

Textbooks have many great properties. They’re aimed at learners (unlike academic monographs or papers), so you can usually read them even with minimal background knowledge. They are comprehensive, giving a full picture of a field. They usually present the expert consensus relatively well, with less bias than many popular sources.

Textbooks are also expensive. Get them from the library if you can, otherwise I generally rely on used copies of older editions which can often be picked up cheaply. Especially if the topic is big, you can usually find one or two that are modestly priced on Amazon.

Textbooks take longer to read than most books. That’s okay. If you only have time to read one textbook in the month, you’ll still probably end up ahead.

The only exception to this rule is non-academic subjects where there isn’t a good textbook. This is rarer than you’d think. In my recent 12-month Foundations project, for instance, Productivity and Organization were two months where the relevant academic research was too tangential to my goals to be useful, so I relied on self-help sources instead. But in Fitness, Money, Food, Reflection, Connection and Sleep, I started with textbooks, and in the rest I relied on academic books to ground my knowledge.

2. Credible Books Outlining Expert Consensus

If textbooks are unavailable for your topic, or you’ve already grabbed one and want to expand your reading list, the next books you read should be credible popular books that summarize a consensus opinion.

This can be hard to judge from the outside. Many books wear their defiance of expert consensus on their sleeve, so it’s easy to tell they represent a non-mainstream viewpoint. But given that popular readers often want what is “new” rather than what is “known” (even if they’re ignorant of both), even mainstream books often position themselves as heralds of a new way of thinking.

Credentials and prestigious academic affiliations are supposed to be barometers of expert consensus, but I find them fairly unreliable in practice. Many quacks have letters after their name, and plenty of people who attended Harvard have decidedly non-mainstream views. Conversely, there are smart, careful writers who lack credentials.

For better or worse the “style” of a book is often a better signal about its conformity to expert consensus. If it’s written in a hyperbolic tone, has nigh-unbelievable findings, or wraps explanations for dissent around dark conspiracies, that’s often a bad sign. (Although, there are exceptions to this too.)

One option for pre-vetting books I’ve recently been relying on is asking ChatGPT for the main arguments made in a book, and whether these are largely aligned with a mainstream perspective. It’s imperfect, of course, but this can be considered with other pieces of information about a book (pedigree, style, third-party reviews) that make it less likely you’ll go astray.

3. Interesting Books

The purpose of the first two steps isn’t to limit yourself to the mainstream, academic consensus for all fields. While I do believe you should just trust the experts for most things, I know a lot of people who are comfortable taking bolder bets with their knowledge base.

Instead, the purpose of reading textbooks and consensus-representing popular books is to give you a sense of what experts, as a whole, believe on the topic. This should be your prior belief in any field, even if you later choose to reject it.

In contrast, if you start with interesting, heterodox thinkers, you may end up down a rabbit hole of nonsense that’s difficult to recover from.

I don’t say this to be a condescending, finger-wagging “misinformation” type that seems to imagine everyone else is gullible and needs guardrails on their thinking.2 Instead, I say this as someone who has, time and again, accidentally gone down those rabbit holes of nonsense, only belatedly correcting my misconceptions after much hard work (and embarrassment).

Interesting books are, well, interesting. It’s tempting to read them first. However, if the interesting book you happen to pick up is decidedly against what more sober analysts think is true, you may end up worse off than if you hadn’t read anything at all.3

Step Four: Adjust Based on Feedback

The fourth step in the one-month knowledge sprint is to adjust what you’re doing in light of what you’re reading in the books.

Sometimes, this results in minor adjustments that don’t fundamentally alter your plan.

When I did my research for Fitness, for instance, I was enamored with the idea of daily exercise. I still think it’s a good approach for habit building, but it was through doing research that I realized daily exercise can quickly become unsustainable if you go too hard too fast. This lead me to modify my approach to incorporate “placeholder” activities like a walk or light stretching that helped keep the habit in place, but gave me time to adapt to the new routine.

In other cases, learning more about a topic makes you realize your previous approach was misguided.

When learning about healthy eating, for instance, my original plan was to temporarily eliminate junk food—phasing it back in after a month or so. I now think this approach is unhelpful. Junk food is hard to define. Instead, what really matters is the overall eating pattern—so positive goals like making half of your plate fruits and vegetables, or half of the carbohydrates you eat coming from whole grains, are probably more useful.

Similarly, when I was doing research on sleep, it became apparent that it was better to set a fixed wind-down time for the night rather than a fixed bedtime. Trying to sleep before you’ve built up enough sleep pressure can be counterproductive, and insomnia is often a problem of trying too hard to sleep well (rather than trying too little).

The proper attitude to take during your one-month sprint is one of experimentation and trying things out. It’s better to think things like “I wonder what would happen if I tried…” rather than “I must stick to this.” Flexibility and a willingness to change approach midway are hallmarks of a successful sprint, not a failure of discipline.

What Would You Like to Improve?

What is something you’ve always wanted to learn or improve in your own life? It could be something related to personal or professional development, a hobby, sport or an area of interest. 

In the comments section below the post, write out what your one-month knowledge sprint for this subject would look like. Be sure to include the theme, what actions you’d take (to start), and books you might read (or look for, if you’re not sure yet).

The post The One-Month Knowledge Sprint: How to Read Books, Take Action, and Change Your Life appeared first on Scott H Young.

Service – Day One

I’m now entering the final month of my year-long Foundations project.1

This month’s focus is service.

While the previous foundations have all focused on making one’s own life better, this one centers on contributing to the well-being of others. I thought service would be a good capstone for the project, a reminder that the point of life is not self-optimization, but to contribute in a meaningful way to the world at large.

For those interested, you can read the previous eleven months of foundations updates here:

Fitness: Start, End, Books.Productivity: Start, End, Books.Money: Start, End, Books.Food: Start, End, Books.Reading: Start, End and Books.Outreach: Start, End, Books.Sleep: Start, End, Books.Reflection: Start, End, Books.Connection: Start, End, Books.Focus: Start, End, Books.Organization: Start, End and Books.The Paradox of Altruism

Service is a component of nearly all of the world’s religions, and has long been considered a central part of the good life. Outside of a few cynics, nearly everyone agrees that helping other people is both good and good for you—we feel happiest when our lives are rich with meaningful pursuits.

But there’s a bit of a paradox when it comes to altruism.


For one, many of the benefits of service, such as meaningful goals, social approval, and avoidance of excessive self-rumination, come from the selfless intention behind the acts. If you only join a charity to get networking contacts, you won’t feel as good about your time there as you would if you were genuinely motivated by the cause.

Conversely, many of the most socially-beneficial activities don’t seem to align neatly with what affords the greatest psychic benefits of service.

There’s a case to be made that the most altruistic thing you could do would be to earn the highest possible salary and donate as much as you can to charities that assist the desperately poor. This means a hard-driving lawyer who takes on high-paying corporate work and donates most his income may actually be contributing more than a public defender who devotes her career to helping (relatively) well-off first-world clients.

Similarly, while volunteering your time may seem more charitable than earning an income through work, it may be the case that your paid work contributes more than your unpaid labor. Taking care of family also seems to straddle the divide—hardly a selfless act, but also contributing to the common good.

Given these debates, what should “count” as service? Does working a nice job and giving some excess money away count? Or must you volunteer your time and energy? Does volunteering that benefits you in some way you count? Or must the act be entirely selfless? What about helping friends and family? Does that count, or is true service given only to anonymous strangers who couldn’t plausibly reciprocate?

My own perspective for this month is to cast a wide net: to assume that the motivations for helping are pluralistic, and so different kinds of service probably accrue different kinds of benefits. Still, I want to be mindful of the differences of service among being an attentive father, volunteering to community causes, and philanthropy aimed at maximizing the benefit of each dollar donated.

How Selfish Am I?

In assessing my own altruism, I definitely feel a gap between my ideal and my actual behavior.

I don’t currently volunteer anywhere. I volunteered quite a bit while in university, but since then I haven’t volunteered regularly. Also, if I reflect on my past volunteering, much of it was with student organizations and community events, rather than helping the genuinely needy.

In terms of philanthropy, I used to donate more of my income than I do now. Some of that seems due to the increased financial pressures of raising children and living in an expensive city. Some of it was probably due to some not-entirely-irrational fears about the longevity of my business and current livelihood. But, given my actual life circumstances, the reduction in charity seems miserly.

In terms of a more direct impact I make with my career, it’s hard to say. I’d like to believe that my work benefits people, but the net benefits of online punditry are hard to pin down. After all, if I’m ultimately wrong about my beliefs or the core advice I offer people, my work’s net contribution to society might actually be negative. Thus, I think there’s more uncertainty in estimating my work’s impact than there would be for say, a doctor, teacher or accountant.

I’d like to think I’m fairly generous with friends and family, but this too, seems to blur the distinction between service and self-improvement.


Even the ethics of my consumption choices is debatable. I’ve long believed that some form of vegetarianism is probably2 better for the world, but I eat seafood, eggs and dairy. The ethics of those choices are unclear to me, and it may be that my choices make the world worse off—depending on how you count it, eggs and shrimp contribute more to suffering than beef.

All of this is to say that the gap between the potential good I could do and what I actually accomplish seems unconscionably large.

Low-Hanging Fruit

The flip side of having a large potential-actual gap in a foundation is that improvement tends to be quite attainable. It’s easy to make significant improvements to your health if you never exercise, but it’s much harder to increase your VO2 max if you already run daily.

Thus, while my self-assessment is ego-bruising, I am hopeful that I can improve my overall service contribution with some effort.

Some things I want to do:

1. Donate more money.

Given my relative abundance, I should donate more to charity, especially to charities that are highly cost-effective in terms of the benefits they provide. From an effective altruism standpoint, this is probably the most beneficial thing I can do.

2. Volunteer regularly.

I’d like to start volunteering more. I think my ideal would be a once-per-week commitment, but that may be tricky in the beginning since it may not line up neatly with the needs of different organizations.

3. Be more generous with friends, family and community.

While helping close contacts is not an entirely selfless act, I do think it is an important part of cultivating a more service-minded personality. I think I could take a more active role in seeking out ways to help people around me.

4. Improve the likely impact of my work.

This one seems hardest, but it is potentially one of the more consequential aspects of my service.

To me, the most important factor is the overall quality of my advice and ideas. If my ideas are better than the most-likely substitute, then my work benefits the average reader. If my ideas are worse than that, my work makes my readers worse off.

I don’t think this is a trivial assessment. In my mind, the online ecosystem is full of bad ideas turned into popular content. I have been wrong about important things, and I think that wrongness made my advice worse than it could have been (and possibly worse than nearby alternatives).

Since I’d never knowingly share bad advice, the problem I face is ignorance. How can I improve the ultimate, unknowable value of my work?

 I suspect the best answer is to adopt good epistemic and communication practices, things like being honest and transparent, doing my homework, and deferring to people who likely know more than I do about a topic. I can’t guarantee this will result in the best advice, but it does seem likely to help.

Still, I suspect a big factor that will ultimately influence the quality of my work is the quality of my learning. If I learn more, and can increase the quality of my advice and ideas, then the chance that my career is a net positive goes up.

_ _ _

Given these more nebulous ambitions are too large to implement in just one month, I’m going to focus most of my efforts on the first three: getting back into the habit of charitable giving, attempting to find volunteering opportunities in the following month, and trying to be more active about helping out in my home and community.

Toward the end of the month, I’ll share some reflections from my research in this topic, as well as how my attempts at service went over the month.

The post Service – Day One appeared first on Scott H Young.

Organization – Month-End

At the start of this month, I shared some reflections on my poor organizational skills, and how I’d generally like to be a tidier person. Today, I’d like to share a little bit about how my efforts at getting organized went, as well as some ideas from the five books I read this month on the topic.

Those interested can also read my updates from the previous ten foundations I covered: fitness, productivity, money, food, reading, outreach, sleep, reflection, connection and focus.

Quick Summaries of This Month’s Reading

The books I read this month were:

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Pretty much the go-to book on tidying. I found her strategy worked, but, as I’ll discuss, it’s also intensive.Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things. A fascinating deep-dive into the psychology of people who collect too much stuff and why it remains incredibly hard to treat.How to Keep House While Drowning. An antidote to the poisonous idea that if your home isn’t perfectly tidy at all moments, you’re a failure in life. The author has good tips for how to keep your place functional, even when life circumstances make cleaning up feel like an impossible chore.Happy by Design. A book on how lighting, decor, plants, access to nature, and good architecture can promote well-being.Wellness by Design. A design book for cultivating a space that is healthy and health-promoting.3-Minute Summary of What I Learned

While this month was less research-intensive than others, I learned a lot about staying organized from both my reading and my intensive decluttering (more on that later). Here’s what I took away from this month of organizing:

Toss first, store later. Difficulties with staying tidy are largely due to having too much stuff. If you start with trying to sort or store things, you’ll switch away from asking the difficult question: “Do I really need this?”When in doubt, throw it out. “Keep everything that might be useful” sounds like a good maxim, but it results in keeping a ton of junk that you’ll never actually use.Organize by category, not place. Sort your clothes, not your closet. You can’t get a full understanding of what you own unless everything belonging to a category is put in the same place.Keep everything of the same category in the same place. Having multiple storage locations for the same kind of object increases the cognitive burden of knowing where to put things. This matters more than the physical effort of walking a bit farther to access something or put it away.Store less than you can fit. Totally full containers make it hard both to access things and to put them away. This increases the effort you need to maintain organization.Store things so you can easily see them. Try to keep things as vertical as possible in their space rather than stacking them on top of each other, so, for instance, you can easily see the contents of a drawer by opening it.Boxes, boxes, boxes. Subdividing large spaces by using square boxes without lids prevents small items from scattering across larger containers and helps keep everything visible.Most paperwork is garbage. Most of the mail you get is garbage and should be thrown out as soon as you look at it. This includes bills that have been paid, receipts for things you can’t return, bank statements and random letters. Only a handful of documents need to be preserved.Give everything a home. Every object you keep should have one, and only one, place it goes when you put it away.It will get worse before it gets better. Getting tidier, ironically, generally involves getting a lot messier first. For much of the month, my house had bags for donation, recycling, and garbage crowding the floor, as well as loose items that remained unprocessed strewn about. This can feel dispiriting because it looks like you’re moving away from being tidier. However, if you trust the process, the end result is that each organized space becomes much easier to maintain.Personal Reflections on This Month’s Decluttering

This month ended up being the hardest month of the project so far.1

My original plan to take a few days off to complete the initial declutter turned out to be wildly optimistic. It took the entire month, working in the little chunks of time I could find between work and family, to go through all of my things. Even then, I wasn’t able to go through all the kids’ stuff—so the decluttering work is not completely finished.

Still, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far. My clothes, books, kitchen, bathroom, documents and hobby stuff are all well-organized. My office is clutter-free for the first time, as are my nightstand, bookshelf, closet and bathroom.

Already, I can tell that the new setup will be much easier to maintain than my old organizational system. While there’s always some work needed to keep things tidy (especially with small kids at home), when the spaces where you put things are well-organized and everything has a place it belongs, the effort becomes much less.

Putting things away has always been a bit of a sore spot for me. I realize now the deeper problem was that many objects did not have a designated spot, and when they did, that spot was often jam-packed and thus couldn’t easily accommodate another item.

I also realize that I need to be more aggressive about throwing things out. A pattern I’ve noticed is that when I would buy a replacement for an old pair of jeans, a backpack, a spatula or a frying pan, I would keep the item I was replacing with the idea that the older one might be useful as a backup. But this results in too much stuff and makes it impossible to maintain things in an organized state.

Will the changes I’ve implemented last? Or will I backslide to a messier state? It’s hard to say for certain, but I hope that if entropy does eventually win out, I will be able to repeat the process I used this month in a targeted manner to bring things back to a more organized state.

_ _ _

That’s all for today. Next week, I’ll share my reflections on starting the twelfth and final month of the project: service.

The post Organization – Month-End appeared first on Scott H Young.

I’m 37

Today is my birthday. Every year, since I turned 18, I’ve written a blog post with some personal reflections on the previous year and some plans for the future.

This year was notable for the conclusion of my twelve-month Foundations project, which I technically finished last month. I decided for logistical reasons to work on and write about my own Foundations project three months ahead of the Foundations course and articles published here. So even though this year was largely centered around the project, to avoid confusion, I’ll save my thoughts for when the course wraps up at the end of September.

I had a good year. I traveled to Mexico and North Macedonia, which gave me a chance to use my Spanish and Macedonian again. I ran my first marathon. I read over a hundred books.

More than anything, this year had a good work-life balance. Since having kids, I’ve definitely softened in my ambitions. Many of the potential achievements that would have been enticing in my early twenties now feel like traps in disguise. I’m reminded of a quote I heard somewhere that, at the end of your career, the only people who are going to remember you worked overtime are your kids.

At the same time, I’m acutely aware that balance is a luxury. I have friends with businesses similar to mine who have had to downsize considerably. Good fortune, as much as hard work and smart decisions, matters in this line of work. I’m grateful that mine has continued thus far.

Plans for the Next Twelve Months

I have a number of projects I’m hoping to finish over the next year.

For work, one of my biggest is going to be holding the second session of Foundations. We’re planning on running the course to line up with the 2026 calendar year, letting in students in November. Last time the course felt like it started a bit abruptly, so this extra time should help us properly prepare the students.

This time, we’re also trying to create a book/journal/habit-tracker with some of the vital information about the project to accompany the course. We plan to make it available for those who are unable to join, so they can follow along.

I also have some future course projects I’m going to start researching for next year. While the Foundations launch was a great success that propped up our business over the last year, it’s clear that we waited a bit too long between offerings—Life of Focus, my previous offering with Cal Newport, is almost five years old.

Outside of work, I’m going to continue running. I’m hoping to run the Vancouver half marathon next year, along with a local 16 km race that starts at sea level and winds up at the top of a mountain. I’d also like to try a triathlon at some point. I feel fairly confident with swimming and running, so it will mostly be a matter of building more confidence on the bike.

Intellectually, I’m hoping to use this year to expand my breadth in reading a bit. I had set such a high bar for my reading within the project last year that it made it hard to find time for off-topic books.

I’m also hoping to cycle through the Foundations project for a second time, pushing myself in a few of the areas I want to deepen and firming up a couple of the areas where I want to do a better job.

More than anything, I feel incredibly grateful. My life has been good, and I know that I owe a lot of that to the support from readers like you. I hope you’ll continue to follow me next year, and I’ll do my best to share whatever I learn with you!

The post I’m 37 appeared first on Scott H Young.

How to Motivate Yourself to Do Hard Things

I spend a lot of time thinking about how motivation works. You can even read my in-depth review of some of the relevant scientific literature on motivation.

My rationale for studying motivation is simple: motivation seems to explain a lot of divergent results we see across people’s lives. Successful people almost universally appear highly motivated, and even those without particular gifts or talents seem to live decently if they’re sufficiently conscientious and hard-working.

This isn’t to say that motivation is everything. Talent, resources and simple luck are important factors as well. But it seems hard to deny that motivation plays a causal role in the kind of lives we lead.

Given the importance of motivation, it seems like we should strive to understand how it works. Yet motivation is often mysterious! I have received countless messages from readers whose problems, in their own words, seem to result directly from difficulties of motivation: procrastination, aimlessness, lack of persistence or low energy. Motivation matters, but it’s tricky!1

Below, I’d like to hash out the mental model I have of motivation—and the key insights it suggests for cultivating motivation in practice.

My Mental Model for Motivation

My working theory for how motivation works could be summarized in a simple formula2:

Motivation = Value x Probability x Return on Effort / Distance

Let’s break down each of those things:

Value. This is the amount we desire the object of our actions. If we value something more, all else being equal, we’re more motivated to pursue it. A complete theory of motivation would explain value rather than take it as a given, and it would try to figure out why some things have value and others don’t. But, in keeping with the motivational literature, I’m going to skip that step and take value as a given. There’s no real mystery as to why we don’t pursue things we don’t value; most of our motivational frustrations occur when we value something but don’t put effort toward it.Probability. The likelihood that an action will lead to success influences how motivated we are to take that action. Probability can be broken down into outcome expectations and self-efficacy expectations. Outcome expectations are the things we believe will likely follow taking a particular course of action. Self-efficacy expectations arise from our internal assessment of our ability to execute the course of actions.Return on Effort. It’s not just the value of the object we strive for that influences our motivation, but the amount that that our effort increases the value we will get. For instance, I value oxygen more than I value having a successful business, but, unless I’m underwater, the former comes sufficiently without conscious effort. This helps explain some paradoxes of motivation, such as that decreasing expectations of success can motivate people more, or that more difficult goals inspire more effort than easy ones.Distance. This is a combination of Piers Steel’s Impulsivity and Delay variables in his Temporal Motivation Theory. The idea is that we are more motivated by the here and now, and distant goals in the future inspire less effort. However, we’re not entirely rational in how we conceive of time, making a big distinction between the current moment and near future, but little distinction of the same interval when it takes place much later.

This formula suggests a few levers we can adjust to increase motivation:

Increase the perceived value. The more valuable something is, the more motivated you’ll be to get it. While some aspects of value are fixed, attention is limited. This suggests why some kinds of visualization-oriented goal-setting and affirmations might be motivating: by focusing your attention on a valuable goal for a period of time, you raise its perceived value compared to other alternatives you are not attending to, even if your values themselves are relatively fixed.Increase the likelihood of success. This can come from making the outcome more likely, such as solid planning, research, and emulating successful models, but it can also come from increasing your sense of self-efficacy in executing the action. This is why building conscientious habits can be so valuable—when you believe you can stick with a difficult course of action to the completion of a project, it automatically raises your subjective assessment of how likely you are to achieve your more ambitious goals.Increase the return on effort. One paradox of motivational research is that the probability of success has opposing impacts on goal choice and goal striving. We are motivated to choose goals with higher likelihoods of success, but we’re more motivated to work hard when achieving a goal is less likely. I think the easiest explanation is that the marginal value of effort differs. Complacency is a rational result when a goal is too easy, since the effort might be better spent elsewhere.Reduce the psychological distance. The more immediate your goal feels, the more motivating it will be. It’s easier to motivate yourself to study for an exam tomorrow than one two months away. However, many of the goals we struggle to motivate ourselves toward are in the far future. This might be why productivity strategies that shift timelines and work on our goals closer to the present are effective. Soft deadlines, regular reviews, daily habits and other productivity devices can fail if you don’t invest any psychological reality in them, but they can inspire effort toward your goal by shifting the object of your motivation closer to the present moment.Debugging Our Motivational Hardware

While the above formula is a simplification, I think it captures a lot of the everyday frustrations we have about motivation. The key to motivating yourself is to diagnose what in the formula is going awry, and then take steps to improve it.

For instance:

1. Problems of not having a good goal to work on.

Sometimes the issue is simply not having something that’s valuable enough to inspire effort. Goals and courses of action are something you have to imagine before they can motivate you. Therefore, even if you have a vague sense that you’d like life to be better, unless you can form a concrete image to direct action toward, it’s difficult to sustain effort in a particular direction.

In other cases, the problem isn’t a lack of goals, but a lack of goals with personal value. Goals imposed by teachers, parents, spouses or friends may not inspire a great deal of commitment if they aren’t also personally valuable.

If you are struggling to figure out which goals you should set, increase your exposure to possible inspirations, and spend time thinking deeply about what resonates with you.

2. Problems of having low personal self-efficacy.

Sometimes motivational problems are due to not believing that you can take the action. A lack of self-efficacy can form a vicious circle where momentary setbacks and failures can grow into perpetual discouragement.

It may be that some forms of sustained behavioral inhibition and negative self-beliefs contribute to things like clinical depression (even if there likely are biological factors contributing as well). Cognitive behavioral-therapy, the gold-standard psychotherapy for depression, works to rebuild self-efficacy and get patients unstuck from cycles of low motivation leading to low effort, leading to low predictions of future motivation and effort.

I think when you’re stuck in such a cycle, whether a temporary funk or a long-term persistent state, the key is to start small and build on success. Pick small goals, stick with them, and encourage yourself whenever you deviate from your low-motivation cycle.

3. Problems of procrastination.

Survey research on procrastination shows it is most associated with impulsiveness, not anxiety or perfectionism. Thus the major cause of procrastination is simply that the work is unpleasant and far off in the future—the problem is the variable of “distance.”

Any technique that can reduce the psychological distance of action will help with procrastination. If you’re procrastinating on writing an essay, it’s much easier to motivate yourself to write one paragraph, or one sentence, or simply open a Word document and sit with the blank page for five minutes.

Much of the value of a productivity system lies in creating an organizational structure around your work, so that the work that needs to be done is psychologically near. A good system should make clear “this is what you need to work on in the next five minutes,” rather than the status quo of “these are some things that it would probably be good if you did in the next five years.”

4. Problems of distractibility or lack of commitment.

The motivational formula above doesn’t apply to any pursuit in isolation. Instead, it’s a constant tug-of-war between all of the different possible things you could be doing. Too much motivation has the same consequence as too little if it’s spread diffusely over many different goals.

There are a few different ways you can change the calculus to ensure you stick with one goal long enough to achieve a desired outcome, rather than vacillate endlessly between them while achieving nothing:

Increase the salience of one goal over others. This is the value of daily goal visualizations or affirmations; you want to constantly bring the chosen goal to the surface, so you’re reminded of its value rather than getting distracted by shiny new objects.Increase the difficulty of the central goal. Harder goals inspire more effort because they increase the marginal difference in outcome based on the effort you exert—or don’t. Goals that are too easy, paradoxically, may induce distractibility because you believe you can add another goal to your calendar without adverse effects.Decrease the timeframe of the pursuit. Many, equally-distant goals will suffer from motivational neglect. Thus, making one goal the central focus for a shorter period of time will increase motivation since it will draw that goal closer to you than other alternatives. E.g., “I want to learn French, painting, programming and history.” vs. “I want to speak French by the end of this summer.”Increase the distance for alternative goals. Another strategy for reducing distractibility is to deliberately place a non-focal goal in a well-defined and distant timeframe. “I’m going to start a business next year,” is a recipe for procrastination, but that might be a good thing if you first need to pass your exams and graduate. Maintaining “to learn” and “future project” lists is another way to place non-focus goals in a hazy future so that they don’t draw your immediate attention.Reconciling Conflicting Motivational Advice

One benefit of the above model is that it helps make sense of motivational conflicts where people offer opposing advice:

Should you set harder or easier goals? It depends on the problem. Harder goals increase the marginal value of effort but lower self-efficacy expectations. Which matters more really depends on your situation!Should you focus on a burst of effort or on long-term habits? Habits can be great tools because they shift the benefit of an activity closer to the present (e.g., you’re establishing an exercise habit this month, versus wanting to get in shape over the next few years). Habits can also reduce (but not eliminate) the effort needed for complex behaviors by partially automating them, which can make the cost of the behavior lower and, thus, its net value higher. But excessively long-term habits can lower motivation if the object of a habit is too psychologically distant or if there are too many competing long-term goals that distract motivation away from a particular target.Should you rely more on discipline or enthusiasm? In my mind, this is a false dichotomy. Discipline is almost always needed because the motivational landscape for any goal rarely funnels you into investing a maximal effort in a serious pursuit. Procrastination, distractibility, and fickleness are the default—not the exception. Furthermore, discipline cannot override the above equation—you cannot, long-term, sustain effort on goals that are low-value, low-probability and psychologically distant. Thus, all goals that require discipline also require some enthusiasm as well.

Knowing how motivation works does not guarantee us a path to earnest striving, but it does provide the first step—diagnosing what’s going wrong when we don’t feel particularly driven—and suggests which sorts of techniques might be helpful.

The post How to Motivate Yourself to Do Hard Things appeared first on Scott H Young.

Organization – Day One

I’m heading into the eleventh month of my year-long Foundations project. This month’s focus is organization—getting a handle on your physical stuff to maximize the benefits those things provide while minimizing their ongoing costs in terms of tidying, storage and money spent. Those interested can check out my previous ten months here: fitness, productivity, money, food, reading, outreach, sleep, reflection, connection and focus.

My Weakest Foundation

I have been nervously anticipating this foundation since I announced the project last year.

While I’m far from expert in many of the previous foundations covered, my baseline in most of them wasn’t terrible. For instance, I’ve made incredible strides in my fitness over the course of this project, but the measurements I took before I began were still somewhat above average for my age.

In contrast, I’m a disaster when it comes to being tidy and organized. 

It’s not entirely from lack of trying. A few years ago, I grew frustrated with how frequently I was searching for books on my bookshelf, so I decided to organize them alphabetically, by author. This worked well. But then, as the books kept coming, I eventually ran out of shelf space.


Many of my books for this project are in a loose pile on the bottom shelf. Frustratingly, I even lost one of the textbooks on relationships I read—I had to resort to probing ChatGPT for the the original research references when I was preparing lessons for the course since I couldn’t locate the book!

Books are the tip of the iceberg of stuff I can’t seem to keep organized. My nightstand at home typically has stacks of books, notebooks and sketchpads. The crawlspace under our house has some neatly organized boxes of documents and old books (again, more books!), but next to that is piles of old baby stuff, unused decorations and random attachments to devices I no longer own.

My paper documents are another case in point. While I have gone through occasional purges and reorganizations, the default state is a pile of mixed documents, most of which should probably be shredded. When I actually need one of them, my first instinct is to try to find the document online again, so I don’t need to go through the pile.

Why Can’t I Tidy Up?

Reflecting on this manifest weakness of mine, I can think of a few key causes:

I keep too much stuff. While I don’t have a problem throwing things out, in the past when I’ve gone to declutter, I’ve defaulted to “keep” when I’m not sure what to do with things. The result is that most of my tidying attempts shuffle the mess rather than get rid of it.I don’t have dedicated spots to put things. As a result, many objects that live in my house are vagrant, wandering from desk to shelf as the question of where to put them while tidying doesn’t have an obvious answer.I’m generally bad at prioritizing low-urgency household tasks. As discussed in my productivity foundation, keeping things tidy is only one of the minor chores I struggle to stay on top of. I also let minor household repair chores linger for months, and I delay doing home errands that aren’t urgent.

One explanation I’ve considered is that it’s hard to keep tidy because I share my space with my wife and kids now. Many of the items in our house are shared, and I feel reluctant to throw out shared household items or old kids’ toys. I may have different priorities for shared spaces, so sometimes I’m eager to get rid of things that my wife values and vice versa.

Upon reflection, I have to reject this as the cause of of my disorganization. While it’s true that I need better policies for tidying up items that aren’t exclusively my own, I’m still messy with stuff and spaces entirely under my control. My office, for instance, is full of clutter even though I’m the only person working there most of the time.

If anything, my wife is better at tidying than I am, so it’s doubly unfair to push blame away from myself. When we have done partial reorganizations, she has almost always been the one spearheading the effort. Were it all up to me, I’m sure the mess would be even worse!

Some Cautious Optimism

I don’t want to prematurely declare victory over my messiness. But I also suspect that the problem is far from unfixable. Instead, I suspect my own disorganization stems from a set of bad habits, plus not giving this area of my life the concerted attention it needs.

My initial plan, when I started thinking of this project a year ago, was to spend the entire month tidying up bit-by-bit. However, as I started reading Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up a few days before the month began, I was struck by her strong prescription against this. She argues that tidying needs to be done completely in one shot, or it won’t last.

In keeping with this advice, I’ve decided to devote at least a few consecutive days to doing a complete reorganization and declutter.1





Fortunately, this month also happens to overlap with when I planned to move offices, so the need to pack everything and move provides a natural motivation and opportunity to completely reorganize my space and ensures a fresh start.2

Can I Become a Tidy Person?

As mentioned above, the foundation where I’ve seen the biggest transformation was with fitness. While I wasn’t terribly out of shape before beginning, the idea of being someone who is in great shape was not a key part of my identity. It wasn’t that I thought exercising was unimportant, but it seemed peripheral to what I felt my life was about.

I think the biggest changes for me have occurred not simply from exercising more regularly, but from a shift in this identity. While I don’t ever expect to be a serious athlete, the gains I’ve experienced this past year have shifted something that was previously on the periphery into a more central part of how I see myself.

If this month is to work, it can’t just be a one-time declutter. Instead, I need to shift some of my beliefs about myself. I need to see myself as a fundamentally tidy person who doesn’t keep junk and clutter.

Staking out an identity that feels so far from where I am currently is a little alien. Indeed, until I actually succeed in doing the initial declutter, I don’t know whether it will even be achievable. But I do think the end result has to include the idea of becoming consistently tidy, rather than doing a one-time challenge or reorganization effort.

Will it work? I’m not sure, but as always, I’ll let you know how it goes!

The post Organization – Day One appeared first on Scott H Young.

Focus – Month-End

I just finished the tenth month of my year-long Foundations project. This month’s topic was focus. You can read my initial thoughts here, and summaries of the eight books I read here.

For those interested, you can also check out my previous nine months’ efforts here:

1.     Fitness: Start, End, Books.
2.     Productivity: Start, End, Books.
3.     Money: Start, End, Books.
4.     Food: Start, End, Books.
5.     Reading: Start, End and Books.
6.     Outreach: Start, End, Books.
7.     Sleep: Start, End, Books.
8.     Reflection: Start, End, Books.
9.     Connection: Start, End, Books.

The Keystone Habit: Daily Highlights

This month was, ironically, more scattered than previous months. I didn’t have a clear idea of what the keystone habit ought to be going into this month. So, for the first time in the project, I didn’t begin the month working on the habit I recommend in the course.1

Eventually, I settled on the habit of choosing a daily highlight—a practice suggested in Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s useful book, Make Time—as being closest to my original intentions for the month.

Having a “highlight,” as opposed to a focus, a Most Important Task, or even an ordered list of priorities (all techniques I tried out this month), seemed to better capture the inherent tension between wanting to emphasize and make room for one thing in your life, while also accepting that you’re never going to have a blank calendar from which to operate.

I found the daily highlight helpful as a practice, too. It allowed me to feel good about my day even when getting everything done turned out to be impossible. Additionally, the act of choosing the daily highlight helped to reveal my priorities, stretched out over time. I could see which things I consistently highlighted which, in turn, revealed what my actual priorities are.

Finding Focus in an Increasingly Distracted World

A recurring theme throughout the various foundations is the idea of evolutionary mismatch. We didn’t evolve to exercise; ancestral life was strenuous, so we never developed an instinct to run around unnecessarily. Now, staying alive requires little physical effort, so we move less than we need to be optimally healthy.

Similar stories could be told about diet (modern foods encourage us to overeat), sleep (indoor lighting keeps us awake) or friendship (TV and video simulate social interaction).

This is particularly clear with focus. Our attentional environment overwhelms us to the point where it can be difficult to concentrate: Incessant emails, texts and other messages. Social media and algorithmically-optimized outrage. Always-present phones ensuring we never experience a moment of boredom.

But whereas the changes in most other domains of life have been decades (or centuries) in the making, this onslaught to our attention is incredibly new.

This suggests to me that many of the self-control devices and environmental modifications we need to optimize our focus either haven’t been invented yet or aren’t widely adopted. Perhaps, as we begin to recognize these dangers, we’ll develop more tools to push back against distraction.

 Still, it’s hard not to be pessimistic. The failure rate of traditional dieting for weight loss shows that the majority of people can’t unilaterally modify their food environment sufficiently to maintain a healthy weight. Perhaps we’ll end up in the same boat with focus—simply accepting that, for the majority of people, the endless barrage of attentional junk will crowd out slower-paced activities like books, hobbies or deep thinking.

Updates to Previous Foundations

Here are some updates on my previous nine foundations:

Fitness. I had a bit of a dip in fitness last month owing to being sick. It took me longer to recover my usual running pace and energy than I had expected. But I now seem to be back on track.Productivity. Largely unchanged. This is fully automatic now. The system itself works well, but there’s always more to do than time to do it, so some tasks end up getting delayed.Money. Also unchanged. The nice thing about having a passive investing strategy is that you can basically ignore the moves of the market which, as I’m writing this in April, have been jarring!Food. I’ve definitely gotten more relaxed here than I was a few months ago. I still think I’ve improved from my diet a year ago, but I’m less stringent than I was when this was my focus. My weight has remained stable at around 15 lbs. less than my weight last year.Reading. I’ve managed to keep up the pace of reading 7-8 books for the project each month, and even managed to sneak in some “off-topic” reading. Still, I expect the forcing function of this project is keeping my reading artificially high. I expect my natural reading rate is closer to 4-5 books per month.Outreach. This foundation is more seasonal than I had realized. Now that the weather is getting nicer, I’m finding it much easier to meet people spontaneously.Sleep. I’m less strict than during my initial month—sometimes I have a second coffee (although rarely in the afternoon), and I have been breaking my self-imposed 9:00 pm screen-time “curfew” more often than I’d like. Still, my average minutes of sleep have not gone down and continue to be above my average from last year, which suggests there are some durable improvements here.Reflection. I journaled less this past month, but I’ve been making up for it by sketching more (a different kind of reflective practice). Additionally, I’ve been dialoging with AI to do some of the kinds of problem-solving that would have been entirely solitary in the past.Connection. Keeping my phone out of arm’s reach while at home with the family has been a consistent priority. Still, it’s amazing how automatic this distracted behavior is—if I have my phone nearby I’ll start using it without really realizing that’s what I’m doing. This month’s topic was a further reminder that much of our attention is not governed consciously, and of the need for changes to our environment rather than simply demanding we exert more self-discipline.

Overall, I’m feeling pretty good about the previous foundations. To be clear, most of them have regressed somewhat from when each was my primary focus for a month. That’s to be expected. What I’m evaluating myself on is both the overall sustainability of the habits, as well as how the current behavior compares to my baseline before starting the project, which is improved for all of them.

Now, as I embark on the final two months of the project, my goal is to finish strong and not let these last two months go to waste. Next month I’ll be focusing on organization. I’ll share my opening update for that next week!

The post Focus – Month-End appeared first on Scott H Young.

Life of Focus is now open for a new session

Life of Focus, the three-month training program I co-instruct with Cal Newport (author of Deep Work), is now open for a new session. We will be holding registration until Friday, July 25th, 2025 (midnight, Pacific time). 

This course aims to help you achieve greater levels of depth in your work and life. How would it feel to have more time and energy for the things that really matter to you?

We split the course into three, one-month challenges. Each challenge is a guided effort to help you establish and test new routines, alongside specific lessons to deal with issues you might face. Those challenges are:

Month 1: Establishing deep work hours. We all know we could get a lot more done with less stress if we had more time for deep work, but actually achieving this regularly can be tricky. The first month focuses on finding and making the subtle changes you need to get in more deep work—without working overtime.Month 2: Conducting a digital declutter. Technology can be great, but it can also make us miserable. Having endless distraction within arm’s reach, it’s hard to engage in meaningful hobbies and have deeper interactions with our friends and family. This month helps you cultivate a more deliberate attitude to the digital tools in your personal life.Month 3: Taking on a deep project. In the final month, we’ll reinvest the time we’ve created at work and at home in a project that engages you in something meaningful. This can be learning something new or actually creating something instead of just passively consuming. Lessons will help you learn how to integrate deep hobbies into your busy life.

Life of Focus may be the most popular course we’ve run—and one in which students have reported some of the strongest results. This is because Life of Focus is action oriented—not just consuming information, but making sure you form lasting changes to your life.

Registration is open now. If you’re interested, click below. Registration is only open until Friday:

Click here to join

The post Life of Focus is now open for a new session appeared first on Scott H Young.