Scott H. Young's Blog, page 26

Inspiration is Overrated

Next week, I’ll be reopening my course, Make it Happen!, for a new session. This course is about mastering the invisible systems that help (or hinder) you in making progress on your goals. Before that, I’ll be sharing a free four-part lesson series. Let’s get started…

There are two dominant stories about how success happens. The first is the one you’ve seen in movies and television. A challenge arises, and you rise to the occasion. There’s a flash of insight that triggers of a heroic effort, followed by victory.

The second story is a lot more boring. You start saving in your mid-twenties and have a hefty retirement account by the time you’re sixty-five. You start a business, grow it steadily for ten years and eventually you’re rich. You work out every day for years and you’re in great shape.

The first story is exciting. The second is downright dull. Success in the second case is largely invisible because it doesn’t feel like anything. It’s just invisible systems working in the background to create a result. 

Despite the numerous retellings of the first story, it’s the second that is far more common. Success is boring, not exciting; cumulative, not sudden; systems, not inspiration.

Which Story Do You Want to Tell?

Inspiration can get you started. But it’s not the mechanism for getting results. Instead, it’s the boring, invisible chugging away of your background processes that make progress.

On one side, this makes the problem of success much easier. If we don’t need movie-worthy moments of inspiration to make progress, then a lot of mundane goals can really be achieved. Getting in shape, starting a business, building wealth—none of these need an extreme flash of motivation.

But, on the other side, this makes the problem harder. Inspiration, if not always there when we want it, at least is simple. Systems that operate in our peripheral vision often aren’t. Consider some of these questions of design:

Should you go to the gym every day or three times per week?If you have multiple goals, should you work on them in parallel, or sequentially? How long should you focus on one before switching to the other?Should you set aside time to plan out your business? Or is that just procrastination and you should really just get started?When you feel burned out, three months into your plan should you take a break? Or keep going and risk exhaustion?

Unlike inspiration, which assumes that the surge of motivation will overcome obstacles, these are not easy questions. Each of them is about an underlying system—habits, attention, research, energy—that has numerous settings that need to be tweaked. Success results from choosing the right settings for these systems, but the correct choice is rarely obvious.

Motivation as a System

Trying to paint the picture of success as being inspiration vs systems is itself an oversimplification. The reason is that motivation is part of the very systems I’m trying to contrast it with.

As I’ve documented in my Complete Guide to Motivation, our motivation is itself under the push and pull of numerous invisible factors. For instance:

To take action consistently, those actions need to be reinforced. Unfortunately a lot of work on our goals is hard, and so we get steadily de-motivated with time.Feelings of control greatly influence your motivation. Many of the goals we struggle with are really introjected, external motivators. As a result, they motivate us only inconsistently.We’re much better at rationalization than rationality. The reasons for our behaviors are often not things we can inspect easily, so we struggle to diagnose why our motivation is getting sapped from self-reflection alone.

If you can stand back, and view your motivation itself as being a kind of system, you can start to ask yourself how you can make tweaks to guide it in the direction you want.

Success is Invisible

Whether you want to achieve great ambitions, or simply make modest improvements, the factors that create success are largely invisible. Instead of grand epiphanies leading to a torrent of action, it’s subtle systems that accumulate results over time.

Faced with this reality, the attitude we need is curiosity, not just courage. We need to try to understand ourselves, both when we’re at our best and when we fail to do what we say we should. Success is largely the product of careful design, not heroic effort.

[image error]

Make it Happen! is a six-week course which offers daily lessons giving you new insights into the invisible systems that drive your results. Through the course, you’ll learn a framework for making more consistent progress on any goal you’ve wanted to set, whether it be for your health, learning or business. I’ll send out registration information next week, in the meantime, I hope you enjoy the free lesson series!

The post Inspiration is Overrated appeared first on Scott H Young.

My 10 Favorite Free Online Classes

I tend to prefer courses to books. Although the best books definitely beat mediocre courses, there’s a few reasons why a great course can leave a lasting impression.

For starters, courses tend to teach foundational topics. Most books try to be original. But much of what’s worth knowing is actually fairly old.

Courses tend to be more balanced. A professor teaching a basic course will try to explain most of the major viewpoints. Yet a popular book written by the same professor might be completely one-sided, as they try to make the strongest case for their views. Polemical works can be useful, but they can be misleading if you mistake a contentious issue for an open-and-shut case.

I also just like watching courses. Reading is good. But so are listening and watching. If you do all three, you’ll probably learn more than if you just stick to text.

Here are my picks for the best free online courses to watch.

1. Justice – Michael Sandel (Harvard)

Honestly, this course is worth watching just to witness one of the best teachers of all time. Sandel teaches moral philosophy, not always known for being the most gripping topic. Yet the lectures are compelling, as students debate real-world examples that illustrate philosophical principles.

What impresses me most is Sandel’s ability to teach esoteric points through Socratic dialog with his students, using their own reactions to illustrate the philosophical principles he wants to teach. There’s a reason this class is one of Harvard’s most popular among incoming freshman. Now you don’t need to attend Harvard to take it.

2. Physics – Walter Lewin (MIT)

Walter Lewin’s physics lectures (both classical and electromagnetism) were the ones I followed during the MIT Challenge. They’re some of the finest classes I’ve ever taken online. Lewin manages to explain deep concepts about how the world works through exciting experiments. He’s also really good at drawing dotted lines.

Unfortunately there was a bit of a scandal on MIT’s open platform which resulted in MIT removing any affiliation with Lewin for the course. Thus the lectures are harder to find online than they used to be. But since nothing ever truly gets removed from the internet, I think they’re still worth watching if you want to learn physics.

3. Learning How to Learn – Terrence Sejnowski and Barbara Oakley (UCSD)

Coursera’s most popular course, this one also happens to be taught by my friend, Barbara Oakley. The course is engaging and easy to follow, using neuroscience and psychology to illustrate the principles for studying better.

I have to admit, when this course first came out, I was a little nervous since my income depends a lot on my own, paid learning course. But, I’ve since come to appreciate that learning better is a pretty broad subject, so there’s always going to be more to teach (and learn). Nonetheless, I recommend this course as a useful resource!

4. Machine Learning – Andrew Ng (Stanford)

This course started the MOOC explosion, with Ng leaving his Stanford teaching position to launch Coursera. This course has gone through multiple iterations, first as recorded lectures from an actual Stanford class, later as a simplified MOOC and now as a full-blown machine learning educational platform.

I’ve linked to the original Stanford class, as I prefer to embed YouTube. The Coursera version is also a little unclear as to whether it is actually free, or whether there’s a small fee. However, you may prefer the MOOC version here since it is more recent.

5. Quantum Mechanics – Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman is my all-time intellectual hero. He does a brilliant job here of explaining quantum mechanics—without using any math. I would have thought it was impossible, but somehow Feynman manages to pull it off. (And barefoot, no less!).

While I highly enjoyed Allan Adams MIT quantum physics class, the math requirements are fairly steep. The amount of people who both have the math and physics requirements, but somehow didn’t study quantum mechanics in their undergraduate education, might be fairly limiting so I didn’t include it here. (That said, the first lecture of the class is math-free and very well done, so I recommend it, even if you don’t know calculus.)

6. Medical Neuroscience – Leonard White (Duke)

This course is the best one I’ve found on neuroscience. White gives a detailed walkthough of how the brain works. He even shows actual human brain tissue on camera, along with copious diagrams and slides.

The course is tough, especially if you want to pass the exams. I even made flashcards for it while I was studying it to keep all the anatomy straight. That said, if you just wanted to audit the class I think you’d still learn a lot about how the brain works.

7. Organic Chemistry – Michael McBride (Yale)

This was a course I just finished watching recently, after a reader suggested it for my effort to learn more biology.

I found the course really engaging, especially the first semester. While organic chemistry is often one of those feared courses for memorization and complexity, McBride manages to convey the fundamental ideas through the lens of scientific discovery.

Considerable time is spent showing how certain ideas in chemistry were discovered, starting with Lavoisier, to Wöhler and Kekulé. I enjoy science classes that show how we managed to figure things out, rather than encouraging you to simply accept it as true just because the teacher told you so.

8. Immunology – Alma Novotny (Rice)

A four-part course series on the immune system, I coincidentally started taking this one shortly before the coronavirus pandemic began.

The immune system is much more interesting than I had realized, prior to taking this course. Just how can your body develop cells that can recognize and remove completely novel pathogens, without harming any of your own tissues? How do you defend against viruses that hijack your body’s cells or bacteria that replicate rapidly and evolve around your defenses? Why do we get allergies or suffer from autoimmune diseases?

This course builds a great foundation for these topics. The cute illustrations of various immune cells too are also a plus, as someone who likes to communicate ideas visually can appreciate.

9. World History – John Green (Crash Course)

Beautifully animated and tightly scripted, this is a course specifically developed for a YouTube audience. I enjoyed this course immensely when it first came out, giving a good overview of many different historical events.

Crash Course now has many courses on different topics, so they’re a great resource if you prefer this style to chalkboard or PowerPoint lectures.

10. Microeconomics – Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabbarock (MRU)

Economics is probably the subject I use most in my daily thinking. If you’re keen on learning mental models by which to see reality, economics is a really good place to start.

Cowen and Tabbarock write the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and teach at George Mason University. Their foray into online education has produced some truly stellar video courses. Their micro and macro courses are quite good, and they manage to convey complicated ideas about the economy without veering into too much abstraction.

Honorable Mentions

I realized, after creating this list, how many good courses I’ve taken that couldn’t fit. So here’s a short list of some honorable mentions:

Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Steven Strogatz – The math behind the Butterfly Effect and why reality can be inherently unpredictable.Systems Biology by Uri Alon – Fascinating machinery of human cells, from gene regulation to why we get Type II diabetes.Programming Paradigms by Jerry Cain – One of my first-ever online courses. Part of the impetus to do the MIT Challenge.Intro Biology by Eric Lander – Great lectures on biology, especially those taught by Lander. The only annoyance is that this course is stitched together from multiple segments rather than complete lectures. Nonetheless, the sections on genetics are really well done.Poker Theory and Analytics by Kevin Desmond – Fun class on the math behind poker betting. I took this when working on a poker programming project.Being and Time by Hubert Dreyfus – Dreyfus has a ton of audio-only courses on Contintental philosophers. His one on Heidegger is the best.

What are your favorite online courses you’ve taken? Are there any greats that I’ve missed? Share your suggestions in the comments!

The post My 10 Favorite Free Online Classes appeared first on Scott H Young.

Could You Learn Every Subject?

A personal goal of mine is to get a basic understanding of every major intellectual area: physics, philosophy, history, and so on. I thought I’d share a little bit about my motivation, the feasibility of achieving it and how well I’m making progress.

The first difficulty in learning every subject is, what counts as a subject?

A naive way to approach this problem would simply be to consider all the undergraduate departments in a typical university. But this is unsatisfactory for a few reasons.

Consider languages. Language families typically get their own department. Would learning every subject require learning all major world languages? A major topic, like physics, would be utterly dwarfed by linguistics under such a scheme.

Another issue is that this assumes “has its own university department” = “important.” Some departments seem to teach more universal insights than others. While making direct comparisons between the value of different fields is often considered impolite, a reasonable metric for valuing subjects might have you going far deeper into some than others.

Still, I think using “typical major subjects as taught by universities” as a starting point isn’t so bad.

Why Try to Learn Everything?

Funnily enough, I don’t think it’s particularly useful to aim to learn so widely.

If your goal were professional success, a narrower specialization is almost certainly more profitable. Being the best programmer, accountant or surgeon is much more valuable than having a little knowledge about a lot of subjects.

This is probably true even if your ambitions are something that benefit from breadth. Being a polymath is overrated in terms of productivity. A lot of famous polymaths are more specialized than they first appear. Leonardo da Vinci is the original Renaissance man, but pretty much all his accomplishments were in design and painting.

My career as a writer, and sort-of public autodidact, is an unusual exception in that I benefit from breadth more than most. Part of that is by design, allowing me to align my wider interests with my professional life. Had I chosen a career in academia or industry, I’d probably have been forced to be more specialized than I am today.

That being said, there are diminishing returns on this even for me. Learning more psychology or history is probably going to be more valuable for me than learning chemistry simply because the former has a higher chance of working its way into my writing. But chemistry is cool, so I’d like to learn it anyways.

Thus my motivation to try to learn broadly is intrinsic. I’d like to know a little bit about everything because the world is an interesting place.

Which Subjects Should I Consider?

Knowledge can often be viewed as trees. At the trunks, you have major disciplines: physics, economics, religious studies. As you go up, there are more and more branches and sub-disciplines: solid-state physics, econometrics, Tibetan Buddhism.

The right way to start, it seems to me, is to figure out what the trunks are. What are the starting points for knowledge, in the broadest sense?

Here’s a possible list, adapted from Wikipedia:

“Hard” SciencesPhysicsChemistryBiologyEarth SciencesSocial SciencesAnthropologyEconomicsPsychologySociologyPolitical ScienceApplied SciencesEngineeringManagementMedicineMathematics and Computer ScienceHumanitiesArtHistoryLanguagesLawPhilosophyReligion

Each of these, of course, has many subtopics.

Depending on how high a bar you set for “knowing X” and how finely you want to distinguish subtopics, the task of learning all of them is clearly impossible. But even if a goal is impossible to complete, it can still be directionally useful.

What I’m really after is doing some kind of breadth-first search of this space. Trying to cover widely enough to get the core insights of most of the major fields, perhaps with more depth in the subtopics I find more interesting.

Evaluating My Progress

Self-evaluation is notoriously fraught. We don’t have introspective access to our memories in bulk, so when asking “how well did I learn X”, we end up having to substitute that for easier questions like, “do I remember taking a class about X” or “does this topic seem familiar to me?”

This is particularly true when evaluating knowledge at the broadest level. Even figuring out what subjects should be on the list wasn’t obvious, so evaluating how far along I am in each is much harder.

Keeping these difficulties in mind, I’d like to guesstimate my relative knowledge in different disciplines. The rough benchmark I’m using is:

~10 = taken an intro class or read a couple books.~30 = taken several classes or read a dozen books.~50 = invested substantial time over many books/classes.~100 = roughly the amount I learned doing the MIT Challenge or my undergrad.

Keep in mind, these scores are totally subjective and only make sense for the purpose of evaluating my relative progress in different areas. I’m not actually testing myself, so it’s impossible to validate these numbers against an actual curriculum.

Examining the list again from above:

“Hard” SciencesPhysics – 50Chemistry – 20Biology – 30Earth Sciences – 5Social SciencesAnthropology – 10Economics – 65Psychology – 90Sociology – 10Political Science – 10Applied SciencesEngineering – 30Management – 100Medicine – 20Mathematics and Computer Science – 100HumanitiesArt – 30History – 25Languages – 100Law – 15Philosophy – 30Religion – 20

Looking at this map, I think there’s a few obvious “big” fields I know relatively little about. I know very little geology and environmental science. I could learn a lot more anthropology and political science. Law is also an area I could go a lot deeper in.

Some of these numbers mask important gaps. I’ve spent a lot of time learning languages, for instance, but I haven’t studied linguistics much on its own. I have read some history, but it’s such a vast field that there are still many important gaps.

How Should I Learn More?

I have a few strategies I’ve found helpful for tackling this project. The first is to try to find courses online. Big intro courses, taught by top universities and viewable online are good starting points. The Great Courses on Audible also tend to be fairly good, especially since they tend to cover more in the humanities which tends to be sparser in public course offerings.

Next would probably be textbooks. These offer good coverage of material and have a higher standard of rigor than most popular books written on a topic. Popular books tend to replace the real idea with a cartoon version that omits any hard math or reasoning. While this may be good for getting the gist, it often makes it impossible to move up to more difficult work because you’re missing the actual language in which the ideas are discussed.

Practicing knowledge is also important. Studying art and actually being able to paint are very different skills. In most cases, my practical outcome would be “could follow a conversation about this field” as opposed to actually making, inventing or discovering something. Thus I’m okay with not going into a laboratory to do experiments, as long as I have the gist of the results.

That said, some fields knowing and doing are intertwined. Math is a good example, where it’s almost impossible to really understand it without also being able to do it.

I do care about practical knowledge as well, but my goals to learn to ski, paint, write and speak Mandarin better are somewhat separate from the ones I’ve listed here. Having a broad knowledge base is useful for practical activities, but if your goal is only to perform a skill, taking a bunch of university classes isn’t typically the most direct method.

What about you? What are your lifelong learning goals? Are there any subjects you’d like to learn more about that you’re currently missing? Are there any you feel I’ve overlooked? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

The post Could You Learn Every Subject? appeared first on Scott H Young.

How Hard Should You Work?

Last week, I shared the idea of a “productive frontier.” When you’re below the frontier, you can usually get more done simply by optimizing your systems. Cut out the waste and be more productive. When you’re at the frontier, getting more done comes at the expense of other things—like your time off.

One wrinkle I didn’t address in that essay was the role of effort. This matters greatly because a lot of our up-and-down struggles with productivity come from it.

Put simply, for most types of work you can increase your output, without increasing your hours, by upping the intensity of your work. No more watercooler chats. No more lingering over emails as you break a little before getting on with the next task. Just put in a relentless focus on deep work.

And this usually works! We’re rarely working at our absolute maximum level of effort, so we can often squeeze more productivity out of our day by upping the intensity.

Some productivity systems readily admit this. Cal Newport recommends time blocking, which he argues makes about a 2x factor in the amount he’s able to get done. But, at the same time, he’s frank about the intensity—scheduling every moment of your working day takes effort.

In Favor of Working Harder

I tend to lean on the side of working intensely. My book, Ultralearning, is essentially a long argument in favor of more intensive studying methods to get better results.

An intense schedule almost always beats a long schedule for accomplishing the same work. I was able to keep evenings and weekends free during my MIT Challenge because I studied intensively from when I woke up until 5-6 pm.

We can repeat the analysis using Pareto efficiency from last week. Instead of considering just two variables: amount of work done and time off, we can add a third—effort.

Putting aside the difficulty of viewing a 3D graph on a 2D screen, if you squint you can see that as you shift up in effort the frontier expands (up to a point). I’d rather work harder than longer, assuming I can reap the benefits of that extra effort.

Why Do We Struggle to Work Hard Enough?

There are a few reasons we tend to fall into lower-than-ideal intensity schedules with our work.

One is incentives. If you’re paid hourly (or on a salary, with the expectation that you are at work from 9-5), then adjusting hours determines your pay. Work overtime or start working part-time and your pay adjusts instantly. Intensity, in contrast, may only manifest itself in your long-term promotability. Nobody pays you directly for working harder.

Frederick Taylor, whose controversial work in “scientific” management can be seen as an origin point for modern productivity discussions, noted as much in his initial studies. Factory workers often “soldiered” or found ways to work at a much more relaxed pace than was possible.

But this wasn’t irrational. Working harder often simply meant raised expectations. Even if they were paid a piece rate, higher productivity usually resulted in management lowering the piece rate so workers were worse off.

Taylor’s solution was to make sure high-wages corresponded to high output, and to have clearly investigated standards as to what level of output was actually possible. Whether workers always shared in the benefits of increased productivity is arguable, but Taylor’s intentions were noble.

Incentives can explain laziness, but they’re hardly the only factor. Students frequently use inefficient methods, even though they’re the ones who will suffer if they get bad grades. Freelancers and entrepreneurs can be notorious procrastinators, even though their lowered productivity directly translates to their income.

A Brief History of Working Harder

To understand the psychology of effort, we need to rewind the clock. Human beings have, for most of their time on this planet, lived as hunter-gatherers. This mode of living, then, has been the driving force in setting the defaults in our mental hardware.

Many of our modern ailments come about because these defaults no longer match our environment. In prehistoric times, sugar was rare and when it was found (such as in a honeybee hive), it usually had to be consumed all at once. Modern humans have an endless supply of sweets, so we struggle with our weight as an unintended consequence.

This discrepancy affects our effort as well. Compared to the farmers who largely replaced them, Paleolithic life was pretty relaxed. These prehistoric peoples were taller, had more nutritious diets and worked a lot less. Some researchers have even argued that agriculture was humanity’s greatest mistake—replacing the garden of Eden for a life of toil.

What this means is that we’re not designed to be particularly hard working. Farming societies overcame this default with cultural exhortations to work hard and social norms about when to work (and when to take time off). Plus, the relative poverty of pre-industrial humans made sure there was a strong incentive to work hard—if you didn’t, you often starved.

In our more recent affluence, our hunter-gatherer psychology is more assertive, and with it a relative disinclination for putting in hard work. We can overcome this when social norms push us to, but in less traditional environments, these cultural forces are often lacking.

The result is that we tend to work less intensively than we should, even if we expect to reap 100% of the rewards of our hard work.

Can You Work Harder?

Despite the tone of this article, I’m not actually optimistic that we can work harder simply by recognizing this fact. Our motivational hardware is largely unconscious. Conscious intentions are merely a ripple against a vast tide of habits and hardwired impulses.

What tends to result is a bobbing up and down of motivation. We feel guilty for not working hard enough, so we ratchet up the intensity for awhile, get a lot done and then, feeling satisfied, revert back to our lazier instincts.

Having a compelling reason to be productive can increase the intensity. When I was getting my business off the ground, I found it much easier to be intensely productive, simply because the goal was very compelling and a less productive effort might not have succeeded.

Big ambitions can result in greater productivity. This is a good reason to set big goals, but it also implies that when your ambitions are relatively modest (or the focus of your life is less on work) then getting the threshold level of intensity for optimal productivity can be harder.

Working Harder in Bursts

It’s natural to have cycles of productivity—moments where you increase the intensity, get a lot done and then have your intensity fade back. This tends to work better when you can take advantage of the slower phase by taking time off to relax completely. But scheduled vacations don’t always perfectly overlap with our effort.

Rather than resist this cycling, I think it makes sense to admit its existence and try to incorporate it into your plans. Daily, weekly and longer-term cycles of energy can be taken advantage of to make progress on projects. If you factor these into your goals, you can avoid feeling disappointed when heroic levels of effort prove unsustainable.

Making Effort Easier

Another strategy is to work on your systems so that effort becomes easier. Since effort is, at least in part, an implicit calculation of opportunity costs, we can make our harder tasks easier by minimizing the salience of alternatives. Reading books on your phone is a lot easier if you don’t have Instagram a swipe away.

Start-up effort costs in unpleasant tasks are also a major source of reduced intensity. If you can make it easier to get started with your deep work, you can get more of the benefits of intensity without requiring as much motivational juice to get started.

Limits to Working Harder

Increasing your working intensity to get more done is good. To the extent that you can reap the benefits of your hard work, you should probably try to do it. Optimizing your regular cycles of effort and designing systems that encourage it are strategies worth trying.

But the exhortation to work harder doesn’t escape the reality I mentioned before. Eventually, we all hit a productive frontier and optimizing hits diminishing returns. This mandates making hard choices about what to work on, what to ignore and which values are central to your life and shouldn’t be sacrificed.

The post How Hard Should You Work? appeared first on Scott H Young.

The Productivity Frontier: Can You Get More Done Without Making Sacrifices?

Pareto efficiency is a concept everyone should understand. Named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto1, the idea refers to situations where you can (or can’t) improve something without trade-offs.

Consider designing a car where you care about speed and safety. You have one design that’s fast but dangerous, another that is slow and safe, and a third that both moves like a tortoise and has the tendency to spontaneously catch fire.

How should you compare these three designs? The third is obviously worse than the first two. Nobody wants a slow, dangerous vehicle. But between the other two is a question of values. Maybe a race car driver would prefer faster at the cost of some safety. Maybe the soccer mom wants safety over speed.

This is the idea of Pareto efficiency in a nutshell. A car design would be Pareto efficient if there’s no other design that allows you to get more speed or safety without getting less of the other.

Mapping Efficiency Frontiers

We can take this idea further by considering lots of designs instead of just three. Putting them all on a graph, we can see that any of the ones on the inside of the frontier are bad choices. Why? Because there’s always a car that’s somewhat faster or safer without making sacrifices.

Efficient frontiers reveal a general pattern. When you’re below the frontier, you can always improve simply by optimizing your choice. Just pick an option that has more of what you want. When you’re on the frontier, however, the only way to make the situation better is by deliberately making something else worse.

Productivity Frontiers

We can apply Pareto efficiency to your working life. A very simple trade-off is between getting stuff done and having time off. Now imagine all possible working schedules, habits and systems and chart your output and leisure:

This graph represents all your productive possibilities. It includes scenarios of working a lot or a little. It also includes situations where you get a lot of important stuff done and where you mostly spin your wheels.

Now we can ask if our situation is Pareto efficient. If we’re below the frontier, it means more improvements can still be made without facing trade-offs. We might choose to get more done without increasing our hours. We might choose to work less while keeping our workload constant. Either way, the focus should be on trying to shift to a less wasteful situation.

But if our position is on the frontier, the only way to improve is by accepting trade-offs. We might pursue an ambitious career move, but accept that this has us working nights and weekends. We might choose to spend more time at home, but accept that this makes the corner office less likely.

Are You On the Frontier?

Deciding whether you’re on the frontier is tricky. In truth, the frontier is always a bit of a lie. Even in engineering, we can always imagine some new invention or manufacturing technique will make possible faster and safer cars than exist today. The frontier can shift.

Similarly, in your work, there’s always the possibility for radical changes that might break the current frontier. Maybe you get promoted and now can have an army of assistants doing most of your work. Maybe you find a new technique that lets you get much more done in less time than you can currently.

Innovating to push the frontier forward is good. But, frontiers are still useful concepts because, in general, such radical improvements are much harder to come by than simply reorganizing among known alternatives.

Since the frontier is not an absolute concept, knowing when you’re on it can be tricky. But here’s a few guidelines I find helpful:

You’ve read and applied a lot of productivity advice. The person who doesn’t even keep a to-do list is probably far from the frontier. If you’ve read and tried everything, the chance that you’re actually quite far from the frontier is lower.When you look in your schedule, there aren’t a lot of things you could easily cut. If you do a timelog and find your day is mostly full of activities you wouldn’t want to do less of, you’re on a frontier. If you instead find it full of a lot of waste, there may be potential for easy wins.Do efforts to do more inevitably cause setbacks in other areas of life? Think back to when you have pursued new ambitions. If those always came at the cost of important things in your life, you’re closer to the frontier.Life at the Frontier

The mindset you need at the productive frontier is very different when you’re far from it.

Those far from the edge can focus mostly on optimizing. You can treat each element of your life in isolation and simply try to improve it. Want to improve your work? Just reorganize and get more done! Want to spend more time with your family? Just cut out the waste and have more quality time.

But once you’re on the productive frontier things are different. Now improvement comes from making hard choices about trade-offs. Would you rather have a clean house or more time to work on your project? Should you put in overtime at your job or reduce your ambitions to spend more time with your kids?

I think it can be difficult to shift into this mindset. If you’ve been through a period where optimizing had fairly high returns, there’s an assumption that this strategy can continue indefinitely.

What results is often a game of whack-a-mole, where you invest more time in one thing and find yourself disappointed and surprised when you suddenly lose time for something else that mattered to you. You switch back and forth, feeling guilty that you can’t get it all done.

Better to be explicit about the trade-offs. Stop and think about what you really care about and what you’re not willing to sacrifice. As you shift priorities, be explicit about what is being downgraded in importance to fill the gap. Making these decisions can be difficult. But doing so also releases you from the guilt of trying to do everything.

The post The Productivity Frontier: Can You Get More Done Without Making Sacrifices? appeared first on Scott H Young.

Smarter People Take More Risks

Recently I read Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman’s The Mathematics of Poker. Using sophisticated game theory, the duo analyze poker setups to figure out the optimal betting strategy.

One thing that jumped out immediately was simply how aggressive the correct betting strategy can be. There are common setups where it makes sense to go all-in, regardless of what is in your hand.

This runs counter to a common stereotype—that the people who know the most play it safe. It’s out of ignorance that most people make risky bets. In poker at least, it’s often the bad players who slowly lose money by missing out on bets that are slightly in their favor.1

Poker isn’t the only place I’ve noticed this pattern, however. The psychologists I know tend to be more likely to use mind-altering substances than average. Those with medical backgrounds tend to be more comfortable with drugs and vaccines. Biologists tend to think GMOs are safe, etc.

My point isn’t that we should all be taking more risks, because smart people (or mathematical analyses) take more risks. Rather, I think the pattern to note is that as you understand a system better you convert uncertainty into risk, and in doing so, are able to take on smarter risks (and avoid foolish bets).

Risk and Uncertainty

People typically use the words “risk” and “uncertainty” interchangeably. Technically speaking, however, they aren’t the same thing.

Risk is precise and quantifiable. Take flipping a coin. You can’t know whether it will come up heads or tails, but assuming you trust the coin, you have a fair idea about your probability of winning.

Uncertainty, in contrast, occurs when the underlying system producing randomness is not understood. You’re given a business opportunity to invest in that you know nothing about. Here the problem isn’t calculating whether the risk is worth it, but the fact that you have no idea what the risk even is.

Knowledge can convert uncertainty into risk. If you learn about probability, it’s easy to take classic casino games and see that they tend to be a bad deal for your money. You lose a little on average. But, if you did see a spot where the odds were in your favor, you could make a much larger bet.

While few domains of real life reach the mathematical certainty of card games, knowing more about a subject converts many uncertainties into risks. If you don’t know anything about physics, for instance, the idea that WiFi might cause cancer because it uses microwave radiation sounds plausible. Yet, if you know a bit more you can see that this worry is silly—microwaves are fantastically weaker than the light from an average lightbulb.

Coping with Uncertainty

The way to cope with risk is to calculate. Figure out the odds and you can optimize your decision.

This doesn’t work with uncertainty, however. Even if you were competent with the math, uncertainties don’t have any numbers to calculate. You can estimate, of course, but sometimes the ranges are simply too large to make an intelligent guess.

Since our ancestors largely lived in an uncertain, as opposed to a risky, world, our brains have evolved coping mechanisms to deal with uncertainty.

One of those is to maintain the status-quo. Since many areas of uncertainty have more downside than upside (should you eat this unknown mushroom?), the policy of only doing things others have done in the past makes sense.

This tends to restrict people to repeating experiences they’ve had personally, or others they know closely have experienced. As a way of reducing the negative effects of uncertainty, this makes sense. But it also seems like it can create a trap where you avoid good opportunities just because nobody you know personally has tried them.

Uncertainty and Framing

Uncertainty tends to favor certain framings of the risk. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s work on prospect theory finds that people are often willing to take riskier actions to avoid losses than to make gains—even when the situation itself is identical (just differently described).

From the perspective of risk this makes no sense. A 30% chance of allowing a death and a 70% chance of saving a life are just different ways of describing the same thing. But from the perspective of uncertainty, such an approach appears more rational. What matters is where the status-quo is being set—is the presumption that this person will live, and the uncertainty is taking an action that might cause death? Or is the presumption that this person will die, and the uncertainty is that this action to save them might not work?

When uncertainty is involved, whatever is taken as the “default” will exert an irrationally strong influence on the outcomes. Sometimes that default is pretty good, but in other cases it’s terrible and taking more chances is actually wise.

Risk and Arrogance

Once you understand a system, you can convert some of the risk into uncertainty. Sometimes you’re able to do this completely, as with the probabilities of a poker game. In other cases, you can restrict your ranges of uncertainties to a level where making a prudent calculation is possible.

More knowledge allows you to make more precise bets. These bets will often look overly aggressive or foolish from the perspective of someone without that knowledge. Conversely, a smarter person also avoids the foolish status-quo bets that ordinary people make to their detriment.

Belief in knowledge can sometimes be misplaced. You might think you understand a system you actually don’t. This is a major takeaway of Nassim Taleb’s body of work—people often think they understand systems that they really don’t. This seems particularly true in finance where bad incentives and mathematics PhDs combine to create an epistemic arrogance that can explode spectacularly.

But while Taleb is correct that we can overestimate our ability to transmute uncertainty into risk, I don’t take the position of the extreme skeptic that argues that all understanding is ultimately an illusion. Mistakes in any gamble run both ways. Betting when you should fold and folding when you should bet are both errors. Similarly, believing you know when you’re actually clueless and pretending you cannot know when knowledge is possible are both errors. The goal should be to minimize errors overall, not simply pick only from one flavor.

Taking Smarter Risks

Uncertainty casts a layer of fog over many of our decisions. This makes us tread cautiously, as if any step might take us over a cliff. Broadly speaking, this is wise, as falling down cliffs is really bad. Yet most of the decision terrain isn’t nearly so fraught. Things that look risky often aren’t, and things that seem ordinary and safe often are!

The solution is to learn more. Spend more time trying to understand things. As your knowledge grows, the fog recedes and the treacherous paths separate themselves from the gentle passages.

The post Smarter People Take More Risks appeared first on Scott H Young.

Life of Focus is Now Open

Life of Focus is now open for registration for a new session. Registration will be open until Friday, February 12th (midnight Pacific time):

www.life-of-focus-course.com

The course takes place over three months, each designed to enhance one area of focus in your life.

During the first month, we get focused in work. Deep work is hard, but it’s the key to a rewarding career. After the first month you’ll be getting more done and making progress at what matters most in your profession.In the second month, we improve our personal lives. We’ll cut down on screen time and start making it easier to engage in meaningful pursuits. Whether you want more time for your family, more interesting hobbies or just mental space to relax, we’ll create it together.Finally, in the third month, we’ll work on improving how we think and learn. Focus in your mind is about your capacity to do hard things, and we’ll share science and strategies to keep you sharp.

If you’re interested in joining (or just want to know whether it’s right for your situation) don’t hesitate to send me an email and I’ll do my best to reply directly: personal@scotthyoung.com!

The post Life of Focus is Now Open appeared first on Scott H Young.

How to Stay Focused

This week, in anticipation of the second session of Life of Focus, I’ve been sharing lessons about centering your life back onto what matters. For those who missed the previous lessons, check them out here.

Today, for the final lesson, I want to talk not about making changes, but about making them last.

Productivity is especially prone to bursts of enthusiasm followed by burnout. You get an idea for a new working routine, schedule or system. Maybe you even stick with it for a couple weeks. But, before long, everything has regressed.

How can you make focus last?

Why Focus Fails

Part of the problem is simply that the initial commitment to focus needs to be long enough, to have a chance to sustain long-term habits. One reason Cal and I chose to make Life of Focus a three-month course was to give students the time to build a solid foundation.

Studies of habit changing bear this out. While twenty-one or thirty days is often cited as the “correct” time to make a new habit, researchers that studied this found the average was actually over sixty days.1 And this was only an average, harder habits required almost a year before they felt effortless.

The lesson is simple: if you care about making a change in your life last long-term, you need to make it a priority for your life for more than a few weeks.

Snags in the System

It’s true that time makes a big difference in the transition between new ways of life. The reason willpower is needed initially is that the old behavioral patterns get triggered automatically, and they require conscious reflection to override.

Yet, I would argue that this is actually not the most important factor in whether a change lasts.

Instead, the problem is that most new systems we dream up and implement for our lives are actually broken. They have broken parts that snag when we try to use them. With effort, you can use them for a while. But eventually they break down and you retreat back to an easier default.

Redesigning for Better Results

Let’s look at a concrete example: A few years ago, I decided I was using Twitter too much. I’m off it now, but at the time it mattered for my work and so I didn’t want to drop it entirely. What should I do?

My first plan was simply to limit my total time for checking the service. I installed Leechblock on my computer and had it shut off the website whenever I used it for more than five minutes in a four-hour period. Now I’m only able to use it for around half and hour per day, which was about how much time I thought was appropriate. Good idea, right?

For awhile this worked. Except, I found myself frustrated when I would open up a browser, try to check the website and it was blocked. This happened often enough, that one day, a couple months after I started, I simply removed all the restrictions.

What went wrong?

My plan wasn’t unsophisticated. It even lasted for a few months, which is much better than most people’s half-hearted promises to “use my phone less.” Yet it didn’t last.

In retrospect, one of the major problems was simply that the context for checking Twitter was never restricted. Since any moment in the day could potentially be a time to check (as long as I hadn’t used up my five minutes), then checking was always salient. The impulse was always there and this created a snag that pulled at my plans.

These days I’m not using Twitter at all. But suppose I did want to keep up about twenty minutes a day for work purposes, what system could have worked better?

If I had decided, instead of random five-minute intervals, to enable Twitter only at very specific times a day (say right after work or during lunch), then my impulse to check the service would be more likely restricted to those contexts.

A Life of Focus Requires Careful Design

The decision of when to check social media (or even whether to use it in the first place) may seem trivial. Certainly such a small difference can’t matter much?

A small snag may not matter if its only encountered once. But repeated every day, for months at a time, and even small differences in friction can grind your plans to a halt.

This suggests a change in mindset is required. Willpower and motivation matter, certainly. But in the long-run they’re eclipsed by making the correct design choices.

Take Action

In the last homework for this lesson series, I want you to consider your own plans for focus. How are you trying to guide your attention? What are the systems that allow you to do that?

Try this:

Pick one change you’ve made (or attempted to make in the past).If the change was to do something less (e.g. check your phone less), ask yourself how you could restrict the number of different contexts that might trigger your behavior.If the change was to do something more (e.g. read more books), ask yourself how you could expand the contexts that trigger your behavior.

In Life of Focus, we guide you through a process of redesigning the systems that govern what you pay attention to and why. All of this, of course, is to give you more power over how you spend your time and energy—back onto things that you really care about.

On Monday, Cal and I will be opening registration for the second session of Life of Focus. I hope you’ll join us!

The post How to Stay Focused appeared first on Scott H Young.

Get the Most From Your Limited Free Time

The value of focused work is obvious. Yes, deep work is often neglected. But, at least most of us agree on the importance.

Yet, I think our personal lives, even more than our working lives, are in need of a focused tune-up. Employers and clients put pressure on us to be productive at our jobs. Our personal time, in contrast, is much more easily wasted.

In the first part of this series, I explained why we need to develop a philosophy of a focused life. What does your spare time look like, ideally? How would you spend your hours if you allocated them deliberately, rather than impulsively?

A Vision of the Focused Life at HomeListen to this article

The goal of the focused life at home isn’t to be perfectly productive, wringing optimization out of every second of the day. Such would be the life for a machine, not a human being.

A life of focus simply means choosing where to spend your time. Do you want more time with family? More time for creative hobbies or side projects? Reading books, taking walks or doing yoga?

Unfortunately, our off-hours fail to live up to our ideal. Instead, we get caught in what I call the low-quality leisure trap. Our time gets sucked into easy and available distractions like phones, television and social media, rather than the pursuits that actually matter.

The Low-Quality Leisure Trap

From a first-person perspective, we all know the low-quality leisure trap quite well. You get a notion in your head that you’d like to be on your phone less, spend more time with your family, dedicate yourself to exercising regularly or finally learning French.

Except the day ends, you’re tired, and all of that stuff you valued seems too difficult. So you zone out for awhile, until it’s time to go to bed. You’re not satisfied with this state of affairs, but the alternatives seem too difficult.

If this were the whole story, it might simply be a sad and unfortunate truth. We want to do more meaningful things with our precious spare time, but it’s too much effort.

The Paradox of Effort

Imagine that you’ve been transported back in time two hundred years. There’s no smartphones, television or even electricity. What would you do for fun?

With many of the modern distractions unavailable, you’d probably read more books. Maybe start painting, knitting or playing an instrument. Or maybe you’d play card games with friends.

Do you suppose that these activities would be exhausting? Of course not. People did those things for fun because they were fun, and there weren’t any other alternatives.

Now I’m not suggesting that you attempt to return to a pre-modern existence. But rather recognize that the effort embedded in your leisure activities isn’t intrinsic. There’s nothing intrinsically exhausting about reading a book or painting a picture. You could spend all of your time doing activities you find most meaningful and not burn yourself out.

But if this is true, why does it feel effortful? Have we just gotten lazier?

A compelling theory of effort proposed by Kurzban et. al. provides a potential answer.1 They suggest that the feeling of effort is a sensation of opportunity costs. When you’re doing anything, and an alternative activity promises to be easier and more immediately rewarding, the activity feels effortful.

This explains why people could spend all their time reading in earlier eras. They could do so because this activity didn’t need to compete with cheaper stimulation.

Thus, if you want your free time to more closely resemble your imagined ideal, you need to make the alternatives less salient. Reading will be hard when Netflix is always an option. Family time will seem boring if your phone is always within arms reach. Easier will beat better if it’s always available.

“Why Wasn’t I Doing This Years Ago?”

A common reaction among the first students of Life of Focus was to wonder why they weren’t doing this ages ago. Refocusing their personal lives meant greater time and space for meaningful activity. With the right system, you can avoid the low-quality leisure trap and spend more of your free time doing things that actually matter to you.

Yet the design of such a system is more subtle than most realize. Most of us don’t want to give up all modern entertainment, we simply want to limit it to a reasonable proportion. A stable system requires careful design much more than willpower.

Take Action Now

Today’s homework isn’t going to be a complete reworking of all your time off. Instead, let’s look at a simple change you can make.

Pick an activity you wish you did more.Pick an activity you feel you do too much.Now, ask yourself how you could restrict the second activity to a narrow context. For instance, if you want to cut back on online news, you could restrict yourself to checking once in the morning. If you make this a habit, it won’t feel as obvious to check news in the evening, because they rely on different contexts.How could you inject the activity you’d like to do more in the time you’ve taken back?

Write your thoughts in the comments!

In the last lesson of the series, coming next, I’ll share what it takes to make a life of focus stick. For those interested in diving deeper, we’ll be opening for the second session of Life of Focus next week.

The post Get the Most From Your Limited Free Time appeared first on Scott H Young.

On Doing Your Life’s Work

Peter Drucker, the renowned management thinker who first coined the term ‘knowledge worker’ perfectly summarized the problem of focus in work:

Most discussions of the executive’s task start with the advice to plan one’s work. This sounds eminently plausible. The only thing wrong with it is that it rarely works. The plans always remain on paper, always remain good intentions. They seldom turn into achievement.

Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.1

Drucker’s advice to the busy executive is true for us all. We all have good intentions about getting work done. But we rarely stick to them. Instead, distractions eat away at our time, until there is none left.

In my previous lesson, I articulated the need for a philosophy of focus. We need to choose what is worth paying attention to. But this is just the easy part. For without a system for focus, such intentions are just daydreams.

A key element of this system is keeping track of deep work. Knowing where your time goes, as Drucker notes, is an essential first step to taking control over it.

Shallow and Deep Work

Cal Newport, my co-instructor for Life of Focus, first argued for the distinction between shallow and deep work.

Shallow work is all of the routine activities that accompany work, but don’t particularly require skill or concentration. Answering emails, responding to Slack chats, attending meetings, routine tasks and paperwork.

Deep work, in contrast, is what you’re paid for. It’s the hard-to-do, attention-demanding activity that delivers value. It’s writing essays and crafting code. Planning a new business strategy and conducting research.

Those who can spend long chunks of time engaged in deep work get more done. Not only that, but they end up doing the things which are truly meaningful. Accomplishing your life’s work won’t come from attending a lot of meetings.

The Difficulty of Depth

There are two major difficulties to doing deep work: quantity and quality.

We don’t do enough deep work. Shallow work is usually easier and appears more urgent. Some of this is inflicted from the outside as colleagues and managers add to our to-do list without thinking of the costs. But much of it is self-inflicted. We fail to do the deep work that creates a legacy because it’s easier to toss emails back and forth instead.

We don’t do deep work for long enough. Large, uninterrupted chunks of time are what we need. Drucker himself recognized this fact:

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

Yet, as Drucker observed, plans and intentions aren’t going to work. It’s easy to chastise yourself about not getting enough deep work done. But it’s another thing to consistently do it, week after week.

How to Consistently Perform Your Best Work

The system we recommend in Life of Focus is simple, yet surprisingly effective: always track your deep work hours. Every day, whether you intended to work deeply or not, you should track how many hours were spent concentrating.

Keeping this record can be eye-opening. Like the executives that Drucker advised, you may find that only a quarter of your available working hours are spent on deep tasks.

Even if you do manage to put in enough time, the quality and consistency may be poor. Interruptions may be frequent, or you may find that you have bursts of productivity followed by bouts of shallowness.

In keeping your record, there are three essential features to keep in mind:

Track in the moment, not in memory. Whenever you set the intention to do deep work, note the starting time. When you get interrupted or stop, note the ending time. Tallies based on your recollection of the day are bound to exaggerate.Don’t count tiny chunks. Extended concentration is what we’re after. Small chunks shouldn’t count toward the total. Thirty minutes is a good minimum length, but an hour or ninety minutes is even better as a typical chunk.2Add up deep tasks, not just shallow work done without interruption. Deep tasks should require concentration and skill. Each job will have its own, but you should decide in advance which ones count. Don’t inflate your total simply by relabeling shallow work.Take Action Now

In Life of Focus, we spend the first month working through all the details of getting enough deep work. However, starting a simple habit of tracking your deep work hours can go a long way. Here’s what to do:

Today, whenever you set the intention to do focused work, write down the time on a piece of paper. When you stop or get interrupted, note the ending time.At the end of the day, tally up the total amount of time. Ignore chunks shorter than thirty minutes.

Deep work hours is a simple metric. But encapsulated within it is much of what makes our work meaningful. A working life where you spend your time fully using your mental abilities is one you can be satisfied with at the end of the day. The opportunity to do your life’s work happens each hour of the day. Don’t waste it.

In the next lesson, I’ll shift from depth at work to the focused life at home. A quick reminder that next week, Life of Focus, will reopen for a second session. I hope to see you there!

The post On Doing Your Life’s Work appeared first on Scott H Young.