Scott H. Young's Blog, page 27

It’s Time to Reclaim Your Mind

Next week, Cal Newport and I will hold a new session of Life of Focus. The course is a three-month training program to help you achieve greater productivity and peace of mind.

We held our first session last fall. It was a resounding success. Students reported making major strides in their work, wresting back control over time and reducing their stress.

I even put myself through the same training regimen. It was a major factor behind me finishing my most research-intensive essay ever. As a new parent, the return to focus also helped me create more time to relax with my family.

The full course is a serious endeavor. Three months, divided over three different challenges to achieve focus in work, life and mind. Yet, even a little extra focus can go a long way. Therefore, for the next week, I’m going to be sharing four lessons drawn from the course to help you live a more focused life.

Let’s begin…

What is a Life of Focus?

The idea behind a life of focus is simple: the quality of your life is, to a large part, determined by the direction of your attention.

In your work, it’s not the speed in which you do everything, but the choice of what to focus on that brings the greatest returns. Doing the hard things that truly matter outweighs years of busyness spent on things that don’t.

In your life, do you spent your time constructively? In ways that make build new skills, lasting memories and deeper bonds? Or does it get sucked away into your phone, leaving you bored, numb or anxious.

A focused life isn’t a commandment, but a choice. A choice to align how you spend the limited time you have on earth doing things that actually matter to you.

Finding Depth in a Distracted World

Focus is difficult. Our minds weren’t made for modernity. Office jobs, smart phones and 24-hour news cycles all hijack our attention in ways our ancestors never anticipated.

That is why we have an urgent need both for a philosophy of focus and a system for sticking to it.

You need a philosophy of focus. A deliberate decision about what matters in your work and your life. How can you make doing the important things easier? How can you prepare yourself so that the default leans toward deeper, more satisfying activities?

You need a system to stick to it. Just the intention to focus isn’t enough. The forces that demand your attention are powerful. They’re not going away. (If anything, they’re only getting stronger.) You need habits, rituals, metrics and tools that will keep you on track.

A system take time to build and test. Part of the reason we teach Life of Focus over three months is that any less time and the changes are mostly superficial. It’s easy to rush headlong with a burst of enthusiasm. But only when you change the underlying system do you change your results.

Take Action Now

Each lesson this week, I want to encourage you to take one small action to improve your focus. Today, I want you to start making your philosophy of focus explicit:

Try to visualize what a focused working life would mean for you. Which activities would make a difference five years from now? Which activities would you omit?Next, try to visualize what a focused life in your personal time would be. What would you spend your free time doing? What distractions would you cut down on?Write, in the comments below, your vision of the focused life.

Visualizing isn’t enough, obviously. Making focus a reality takes careful planning, modifying the systems in the background of your life that currently make things difficult. But, having a vision of what life could be like is an essential first step.

In the next lesson, I’ll talk about how to start thinking about your life’s work. Not simply getting more done, but focusing on the activity that is both hard and meaningful.

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Ten Ideas That Have Shaped My Life

Ideas are powerful. Arriving at the right time, they can alter the entire direction of your life.

But ideas also hide in the background, acting as assumptions. Quietly influencing your decisions, whether they’re true or false.

Looking back, I can think of a number of ideas that shaped my life. Some are only obvious in retrospect. Others I took great pains to learn. Below are the ten that had the greatest impact on me.

1. Reality is Malleable

Steve Jobs, here in a 1994 interview with the Santa Clara Historical Society, presents one of the ideas that changed his life:

Most of us will have far less impact than Jobs did. Yet in the smaller spheres of our own lives, there is impressive flexibility. Ideas can only change your life if you first accept the idea that life can be changed.

2. Most Actions are Automatic

The vehicle for change is not ideas, but actions. Merely thinking up a new life for yourself does no good.

An important realization, then, is that much of our actions are performed without reflection. We repeat the same patterns endlessly, and in that repetition, create our lives. Real change rarely arrives from a single exertion, but from rewriting our scripts.

One of the first ideas I really ran with was the 30-Day Trial. The idea being that you commit yourself to a particular daily habit, for at least a month. Long enough to make the habit feel comfortable. Short enough that you can commit to ambitious efforts.

Two books worth reading in this regard are James Clear’s Atomic Habits, an excellent summary of the science of behavior and David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which provides a system for coordinating all your efforts.

3. Ambitious Goals Increase Effort

Edwin Locke pioneered the experimental study of goal-setting. His rigorous research remains a pillar in our understanding of human motivation. Through these experiments he found two things:

Harder goals produce better results, provided they’re committed to.Specific targets work better than vague suggestions to “do one’s best.”

Ambition itself has a high return. Economists Stacy Dale and Alan Kreuger sought to calculate the return to attending a selective school. They found that, when you control for the average SAT score of the school you applied to and the number of applications you submitted, the premium was negligible.

However, what this study also found was that applying to more difficult schools had an impressive return. Having the ambition to apply to lots of good schools, even if your own SAT score was mediocre, has a surprisingly high return.

All of this suggests that setting difficult, ambitious goals and committing to them has a bigger impact than many people realize.

4. Some Progress Slows, Others Accelerate

A naive view of progress is to extrapolate in a straight-line. Yet our efforts tend to be dominated by two different trends: diminishing returns and compounding growth.

Diminishing returns happen when efforts crowd each other out. The first hour of studying is your most energetic. The fifteenth is exhausting. As efforts become increasingly unproductive, a key realization is often to know how good is good enough.

Compound growth occurs when each past improvement helps further growth. What initially looks like a trickle will end in a torrent. The problem is often one of patience. Since the beginning efforts seem unrewarded, they’re often abandoned before they can really start to work.1

Understanding what kind of growth you’re facing prepares you for progress. In general, we underinvest in compound growth because it looks like a waste of time. We overinvest in diminishing returns, trying to renew past accomplishments.

5. Life is Largely Positive-Sum

For most of recorded history life has been overwhelmingly zero-sum. Living standards were stagnant, innovation was invisible and the only way to improve your life was to make someone else’s worse.

Injunctions against striving and wealth were common in many ancient philosophies. Jesus argued that the rich man could not get into heaven. Laozi preached non-doing as the supreme virtue. Some of this is a counterweight to our normal human egoism. But it partly reflected the situation of the time—most of the roads to worldly success came at the expense of other people.

In modern times, however, the major way that we have become rich isn’t through plunder, but through invention and service. Our lives are dominated by positive-sum activities—we improve our lots largely by making life better for others.

6. Fear is Overcome Through Exposure

When I was a child, I had a strong fear of heights. Glass elevators put my stomach in knots. Yet years later, I have been both skydiving and bungee jumping. The change came from exposure.

Exposure therapy is one of the most successful psychiatric therapies we have. It works to reduce an irrational fear by exposing you to the object of your fear combined with safety. Research suggests up to 70% of people may be helped.

Public speaking, talking to strangers or taking tests can all create a paralyzing anxiety. Knowing how to dial them down, even if it takes more work than flipping a switch, can make a big difference.

7. Success is Stamina

Philosopher James Carse made the distinction between finite and infinite games. A finite game, like chess, is one which you play for awhile and then you either win or lose. An infinite game, in contrast, never ends. To win means to keep playing.

Most of the activities we care about in life are infinite games. Businesses don’t “win” the market and quit. Health isn’t over once you’ve reached your weight-loss goal. Even knowledge decays and renews as you learn more things.

Conversely, if you can keep going you haven’t lost. Apple was on the brink of disaster just over two decades ago. Yet the game kept playing and they wound up as the most valuable company in the world. At least for now.

Stamina is the central virtue in a world full of infinite games.

8. Attention Determines Your Direction

The quality of your life is, to a large extent, determined by what you pay attention to. Yet most of what grasps at our attention isn’t very high-quality.

Like weeds overrunning a garden, much of our minds’ space gets filled up with things that neither improve our lives nor prepare us for danger. Often it isn’t even pleasant, which could be an excuse for useless thoughts. Anxiety and anger about things we cannot control.

But like a prudent gardener, you can choose what you let grow in your mind. The conversations you have, books you read and news you follow are all seeds you can choose to water.

9. We’re Fundamentally Free

In my favorite novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, the protagonist, Edmond Dantes, is unfairly imprisoned for fourteen years in Chateau d’If. He spends most of the time brooding, raging and eventually attempting suicide. He is stopped from finally following through by the digging of his prison neighbor, the Abbe Faria who accidentally reaches his cell rather than escape.

Faria, who has been imprisoned longer than Dantes, has instead spent his captivity improving his mind—practicing languages, developing tools and reconstructing manuscripts from memory.

Freedom, in the sense of being able to do whatever you want is possessed by varying degrees by different people. Perhaps the situation of your life is quite constrained, or you’re confronted only by choices you don’t like very much. Increasing our options (and the options of other people) is part of what makes the good life.

Yet there’s a more basic sense of freedom, one understood by Alexandre Dumas as he wrote about the character of Abbe Faria. This freedom isn’t always pleasant to contemplate. Jean-Paul Sartre even described it as nauseating. As such, we often try to rid ourselves of it. Yet, if we accept it and make our choice there’s joy on the other side.

10. Happiness is in the Pursuit, Not the Possession

It’s obviously true that life is better when you have friends, money and status. But it’s not that much better. Most often the absence of problems simply feels like nothing. Even when you achieve your dreams, your mind creates problems to fill the gaps. New pangs of hunger that you never felt before.

This can be a depressing realization or a liberating one. Depressing, because it means that many of the things you think should provide enduring happiness often fail to do so. Life has no happily ever after, simply more life.

But it’s also liberating because it suggests that we are what we do, much more than what we have. Engaging in meaningful pursuits, that help yourself and others, is a more satisfying way to live.

Seeing this, you can adapt your posture even if you feel like there are still many goals you have yet to reach. Instead of striving to attain some ideal of life, you can organize energy around pursuits that matter. In doing so, you can realize that ideal right now.

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What’s the Best Way to Learn Biology?

Recently, I’ve had an interest in learning more biology. Some of that curiosity is pandemic-inspired. Biology is playing an outsized role in all of our lives these days.

Yet much of the interest predates our current crisis. As a teenager, I really enjoyed books like The Selfish Gene and The Red Queen. Evolutionary biology revealing a hidden pattern in the universe.

Last year, I stumbled across a course in Systems Biology taught by Uri Alon. Biology is often portrayed as something unfathomably complex. Yet this course showed it in a different light—clever systems for performing particular functions.

My favorite example involved Type II diabetes. Why do we suffer from this? The answer, it turns out, is a downside of an otherwise ingenious design:

Our body needs to maintain stable glucose levels. Too little and our cells run out of energy. Too much, however, is toxic.Insulin moderates these glucose levels, being produced by the pancreas.Yet the insulin levels needed per person range by orders of magnitude. How can our cells both produce enough insulin to respond to momentary fluctuations, but also cross the vast ranges long-term?The answer is that when we need more, our pancreatic cells multiply to accommodate the demand.But herein lies the problem. With exponential growth, there’s always the chance a cell will mutate and incorrectly sense the glucose levels. If it senses the level is too high (even when it is normal), it will rapidly out-divide the normal-sensing kind. This, in turn, would lead to too much insulin, and kill us.To prevent out-of-control mutants, then, our body has a safety switch. If a pancreatic cell senses the glucose level is way too high, it assumes something has malfunctioned and the pancreatic cells self-destruct. The problem is that with our modern, sugary diet, this safety value is more likely to accidentally fire and so we end up with more diabetes.

Biology is full of interesting designs like this. The immune system is another. How do you create a system that can recognize any possible foreign invader, but ignore all of your own cells? The answer is ingenious, yet comprehensible.

Exploring The Spaceship

Bert Hubert provides the perfect analogy for describing why biology ought to be fascinating:

Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.

This is biology.

This analogy neatly links biology with one of my other interests, computer science. Our world is increasingly driven by computers. Understanding code, even if you’re not paid to write it, is increasingly going to be something we all need to make sense of the world.

But biology and computer science aren’t so different. They both involve systems based on information, transforming inputs into outputs and dealing with problems of design. The difference, it seems, is that computers are man-made while biology isn’t.

Practical Upsides of Learning More Biology

Beyond the intrinsic interest, there’s practical benefits to knowing more biology. Every day we make decisions about what food to eat, which medicines to take and weigh the risks of different impacts on our bodies.

Yet misinformation is prevalent. At best, a failure to understand biology means we waste time and money on diets that don’t work and eschewing products that do no harm. At worst, ignorance leads to illness.

As a citizen, biology intersects politics. Which vaccines should we approve? Are GMOs safe to eat? Gene editing, life extension, DNA patents are new problems where laws are still being written. If we decide badly, as a society, we may cause incalculable harm both from delaying progress or enabling disaster.

Philosophically, biology teaches us deep lessons about ourselves. Questions of identity, ontology and even consciousness are informed by the inner workings of what makes us up. I don’t think you can pretend to care seriously about these questions if you’re not willing to look under the hood.

What Makes Biology Hard to Learn?

Having explained why I’m interested, let’s shift to the titular question: what’s the best way to learn it? In particular, why does biology often fail to inspire and why is it often a struggle to understand?

James Somers articulates the problem:

I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA.

…

In biology class, biology wasn’t presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing. We were nowhere acquainted with real biologists, the real questions they had, the real experiments they did to answer them. We were just given their conclusions.

I suspect the problem with learning biology has two parts:

The subject is dense. Biology combines the conceptual difficulties of physics with the voluminous details of a foreign language. Classes require understanding differential equations, as well as the alphabet soup of protein, gene and cell types.Because it is dense, teachers work hard to drill in the facts. There’s little time for curiosity-driven puzzle solving when you have to memorize a map like this one.

Dense subjects also tend to be more opaque. A reasonably smart lay person can open up a random social psychology paper and roughly understand what is being talked about. Yet even with a PhD, papers in biology or physics can be hard to follow if you leave your specialization.

When the scholarship is hidden behind years of prerequisite classes, it can be a formidable barrier to self-education.

How Should I Learn Biology?

Until this point, my biology education has been haphazard and scattershot. I’ve read a lot of books. I’ve taken a few courses. But if I were really interested in going further, what should I do?

Here’s some options:

Go through a standard curriculum, MIT-Challenge-style. This is a little harder given that biology is less well-supported with free material than computer science. But textbooks are always available, so following a rough curriculum should work, even if I’m not able to do all the tests.Pick a subtopic and dive deep. I could begin with a particular interest in mind, say DNA computers or neuroscience, and build outward from there. Along the way, I would probably get a lot of basics by backwards chaining the prerequisites.Visit labs or conduct home experiments. The risk of an entirely theoretical approach is that biology isn’t just a body of theory, but a lot of methods to get results. While taking on a full-time lab position isn’t an option for me, perhaps my approach to learning ought to explicitly include more time spent doing biology.

These are some initial possibilities, but I’m interested to hear from you. I know a lot of doctors, researchers and bio-majors follow this blog. What do you suggest for learning the field? Are there textbooks, online courses or guides you would recommend? Please share in the comments!

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How to Take Notes

Recently, I’ve gotten a lot of emails from students asking the right way to take notes. As I’ve been answering them, I realized that the question of note-taking neatly encapsulates a lot of deeper thinking about the right way to learn things.

Instead of explaining how to take notes, then, I’d like to explain how I think about taking notes. This, it turns out, has a lot to say about how to think about learning anything.

What are Notes For?

The first question with any learning task, be it reading a book, watching a video or doing practice tests, is to ask what you’re trying to accomplish with it.

The way I see it, notes serve two functions:

They record what you learned, for easy access later.They orient your attention, allowing you to remember more.

Most people focus on the first part. Admittedly, this used to be a much bigger problem. Information access was limited, so if you missed an important part of what a teacher told you during a class, you might never get access to it again. Thus notes that form an exhaustive record of what was taught were paramount.

In contrast, I think the second function of note-taking is much more important. What you pay attention to ends up determining the memories you make later. Psychologists call this “depth of processing.” Students who pay attention to deeper features of the material they learn perform better on later tests, than those who focus on superficial details.

Taking notes isn’t just a way of writing things down. It’s a way of orienting your attention so that you’ll build better memories—even if you never open the notebook again.

How to Organize Your Thoughts

What we’re trying to achieve when taking notes is to begin the process of organizing the information we’re receiving into a mental structure we can use later.

The question of how to take notes, then, gets replaced by a deeper one: how should you organize what you’re learning to make it easier to use?

The right way to organize something always depends on the purpose. You could organize your bookshelf by color, for instance, and that might be visually appealing. But it wouldn’t be very good for a friend browsing books who wants to find something by a topic.

Similarly, the way you take your notes is always dependent on how the knowledge will eventually be used. Organized well, and the correct memories will automatically pop up when you need them. Organized badly and you may struggle to retrieve what you need on an exam.

What Kind of Knowledge Structure Do You Need?

We can push our question even deeper: what kind of structure for knowledge do you need to organize?

I like to think of this graphically, like a flow-chart. The end point of learning is to have some kind of structure, so that when you receive certain inputs, you’re able to produce certain outputs.

For some subjects, this structure might be really simple. In a French class, for instance, you might simply have pairs of words.1 An anatomy class might have a diagram with blank spaces and the need to fill in the correct name of a body part.

Most subjects, even those that rely on a lot of rote memorization, have more complicated structures. Sometimes you need to remember groups of information. A historical event might need a place, date, people involved and significance, all linked together. A physics problem might go from determining an abstract problem type, the principles involved and connect to a large library of possible solution techniques.2

Subjects that require “understanding” or “intuition” are typically those with complicated flow-charts. Subjects that require memorization, in contrast, often look simpler but have a ton of elements to recall.

It’s not essential to get a perfect picture of this flow-chart. Indeed, for many classes, you might not even be able to draw one until you already have a lot of experience with the field.

What thinking about learning in this way does, however, is it asks you to try to anticipate how you’ll need to use your mind in order to take advantage of the knowledge you’ve gained. That, in turn, suggests how you should take notes.

Anticipate How You’ll Need to Use Your Mind

What we’re trying to do when learning often comes down to building the mental structures I’ve just described.

This doesn’t mean that you’re consciously working through a flow-chart whenever you speak French or solve a physics problem. Hopefully, if you’ve learned the subject well, the connections simply work automatically. You may even seem to skip over steps as you get better at the subject. Fluent speakers of a second language, for instance, jump straight from meaning to the word, without first bypassing through their mother tongue.

The brain is complicated and so what you’re actually doing when learning and performing is going to be more sophisticated than a flow-chart. But, as a simplification for what you’re trying to do, they often work pretty well.

Whenever I tackle a new subject, one of my first thoughts is what kind of structure am I trying to build. What would be the input situations that should cause me to remember this knowledge? How do I need to manipulate it, discriminate between similar-seeming situations, calculate or reason with it?

If the flow-chart is simple, I might focus on making flashcards. When it’s complicated and I’m not confident I have it figured out, I lean more on practice problems. When my end goal is mostly understanding, I want to try teaching it to someone else (or myself). When my end goal is to solve a practical problem, I should begin thinking about applications.

If the situations where you want to use the knowledge are diverse, I would try to expose myself to as many different examples as possible. If the purpose is going to be fairly narrow, aimed at a specific task, I might want to practice repeatedly to think of it whenever I see that situation.

How to Take Notes

Note-taking is often the first step in a process of learning. You’re usually taking notes when hearing about an idea for the first time or reading about it. The goal isn’t to master the subject completely, but start yourself along the path of figuring out what kind of structure you need to build and to begin building it.

One trade-off that’s immediately apparent is that, for difficult classes, it’s often really hard to keep up with what is being said. For slower, more boring classes, you might have more slack to start trying to mentally organize beyond what is immediately being said.

During a class that confuses me, I might focus more on copying down what is said closely. I expect that I’m going to have to review it when I have more time to actually learn it. On the other hand, a class I understand fairly well, I might want to spend more time thinking about other examples, applications or asking myself deeper questions about the material.

The right way to take notes, then depends on two factors: the structure you’re trying to learn and your ability to work on that structure during the first pass. If you have the structure you’re trying to build in mind, as you listen, however, you’ll be much more likely to pay attention to what you’re learning in a way that benefits you later.

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The Key to Making Risky Decisions

A reader emailed me about a difficult exam he was facing. The test was for a prestigious civil service job in his country. Get one of those jobs, and you’re set for life.

Unfortunately, competition was also steep. About four hundred people compete, and only the best scorer on the test gets the spot. Applicants spend around two years studying full-time for one of these positions, many of whom have access to expensive test-preparation services.

What should he do?

My advice here may sound like a bummer, but I told him to seriously consider whether he even wants to apply for the spot. Why?

When Second-Best Isn’t Good Enough

Compare the situation faced by this reader from a seemingly similar situation: an American high-schooler looking to write the SAT. Say she wants to go to Harvard, which has an acceptance rate of around 4.5%.

Already, we can see a big difference. Getting into Harvard is, proportionally, about 20 times easier than getting the civil service spot. Admittedly, the competitive strength of the applicant pool may be different. However, this data point is still useful to scale your intuitions.

However, even if Harvard’s acceptance rate were identical—only 0.25%—the situations here would be still quite different. Why?

The answer is that getting a good SAT score is still really helpful, even if you don’t get into Harvard. Suppose you were just shy of the cutoff value of getting accepted. In that case, you’d still be in a really good position to get into another good school. Even if you had to compromise and go to a somewhat less-prestigious school, that almost-Harvard SAT score would help.

My understanding of the situation given by this reader, in contrast, was that the exam was really only applicable to these rare, civil service jobs. If you got second place, the value of an almost-good-enough score is nearly worthless. It won’t help you get a different job in the private sector.

Mistakes When Thinking About Risk

There’s a certain, naive way of thinking about risky decisions that simply asks how likely it is that you’ll get what you want. When this is low, the effort is probably not worth it.

However, when we look at successful people, they’ve often taken many of these gambles and had it pay off. Thus, the world tends to be split between people who say that the successful are simply lucky, and the people who think that being successful requires believing in yourself and ignoring the odds. Both mindsets are wrong.

The problem isn’t that the odds don’t matter. Rather, the difficulty is that we often think about risk in an overly simplistic way.

The key difference between taking the SAT to get into Harvard, and taking the civil service exam to get a rare spot wasn’t just the difficulty. Instead, it was the fact that, in the first case, striving still pays off even if you fail to reach your original goal.

Consider another common risky decision: should you start a new company? Once again, a sober analysis reveals that failure rates are quite high. Most start-ups fail.

Once again, it seems like we’re torn. Either we think successful founders are like lottery winners—people who got lucky at an otherwise bad bet—or, we think the right approach is just to ignore the risks and do it anyways.

Yet this misses an essential fact about start-ups: most failures lead to better things. Many people I know who had “failed” start-ups, were able to translate those into new connections, better job opportunities or even another company. Yes, failing still sucks, but the median outcome isn’t nearly as bad as it seems.1

Model Your Decisions

The correct approach to thinking about risky decisions is not to ignore the odds, but to model your decision and explicitly include things like the benefits to coming in second place.

A good decision model ought to include:

What is the baseline likelihood of success? This can come from reported statistics for that kind of activity. (Say typical failure rates for start-ups, typical acceptance rates for Harvard, etc.)
What information do you have that makes you different from the average competitor? How far are you from the score you need? People tend to be overconfident, but this bias is a lot worse when it’s not confronted explicitly.
What are the outcomes for less-than-ideal results? What if you don’t get into Harvard? What if your start-up fails to return a profit for the investors? These can be less obvious, but they can easily turn a seemingly bad bet into a good one if the modal outcome for a “failure” is still pretty good.
What are the emotional and financial cost of going forward? The person who plays hockey seriously, hoping to join the NHL, may have a minuscule chance of success. But if he still really enjoys playing competitively, the time spent might not be wasted. In contrast, the person studying for an exam who expects the next couple years of effort to be miserable can’t say they did it for fun.

Now we can see that a lot of risky decisions look quite different from their probabilities of success alone. Even if the odds of your ideal outcome are low, if the outcomes for failure are still pretty good, the costs are minimal or you’re a stellar competitor, then the gamble is often totally reasonable.

Given these additional factors, I hope it makes sense why I told the reader to consider his decision to pursue carefully.

With a 1/400 shot of success, two years of arduous studying required, and few benefits for second place, he must believe he’s really quite superior to the typical competitor for this gamble to pay off. Even if he was in the top 10% of test-takers, his odds are still 1/40, which is still less than getting into Harvard. Top 1%, and his odds are a little better than rolling a die.

Of course, my modeling of his decision might be off. Perhaps there are benefits to second place outcomes that I don’t know about. Maybe many applicants take the test without studying because they know it’s a long-shot, and thus the denominator is inflated with low-value candidates.2 Maybe he can take the test several times with the same studying effort, making success increasingly certain.

My point isn’t that I have the right answer for his situation which, I admit, I know little about. Rather, I think being more explicit in modeling the risky decisions you face can make a huge difference in your life. The person who doesn’t bother applying to Harvard because “there’s no way I’ll ever get in” might be missing an opportunity.

Both the pessimist, who sees all success as being the result of lucky wins from irrational risk-takers, and the optimist, who chooses to ignore the odds are making mistakes. If you take the effort to model the risks you face, you’ll make much better decisions.

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My Best Essays of 2020

It’s been quite a year. In January, I became a father. In March, the entire world went into lockdown. I also wrote some essays.

Here’s some of the best writing I did in the last twelve months:

Do the Real Thing. Success largely boils down to a simple distinction. It’s glaringly obvious once you see it, but also easy to find ingenious ways of ignoring it: do the real thing and stop doing fake alternatives.
An Interesting Book You Probably Shouldn’t Read. My deep dive into one of the most unusual philosophers of all time.
Two Types of Excellence. Is being the best more like winning a footrace or being a butterfly?
The 10 Foundational Practices for a Good Life. Where should you start in improving your life? I tried a lot of stuff when I first got started, but knowing what I know now, I’d recommend different practices.
The Surprisingly Narrow Path to Success. What does authoring a book, starting a company and becoming an academic have in common?
What’s Beyond Self-Improvement? Why does success often feel empty? What do you do after you’ve fixed the problems in your life?
Success is Stamina: To Win Means to Keep Playing. Life isn’t dominated by races with winners and losers, but by long stretches of road where some people keep on running.
How Fast Should You Be When Learning? Quick sketches, or extended studies? Slow down your process, or speed it up to get more feedback? Here’s how to think about an important consideration in your learning strategy.
How to Rebuild Your Confidence. Why rebuilding can be harder than doing something new, and what to do about it.
The Complete Guide to Motivation. My biggest piece in 2020, this is my review of scientific research on motivation. If you wanted to get an up-to-date understanding of what science thinks moves you to action, this is a good place to start.

My book Ultralearning crossed 1000 reviews on Amazon this year. It’s been gratifying to hear from all the people who enjoyed reading it. (Although it certainly makes the prospect of writing book #2 more daunting!)

For those looking to dive deeper, I also released a new course with Cal Newport this year, Life of Focus. We had an amazing first session. It was great to work with people over a full three months as they refocused work, lives and minds. If you’re interested, we’ll likely have a session in early 2021 (be sure to add your name on the waiting list to find out).

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The Value of Learning “Useless” Things

In my book, Ultralearning, I argued in favor of directness in learning. Given a concrete objective (speaking a language, passing an exam, becoming proficient at a particular skill), the way you practice ought to match the intended use. Transfer is hard. The more we can avoid depending on far-transfer to make our learning successful, the better we’ll do.

A reasonable-sounding extension of this idea is that learning broadly is itself a bad idea. “Useless” knowledge won’t transfer, so why bother with it?

But this isn’t true! While it is true that transfer is hard and directness helps—having a large knowledge base actually makes transfer easier. Since relying on transfer is unavoidable for some kinds of learning efforts, building your knowledge foundations across projects is incredibly valuable.

Is there a Contradiction Between Learning Directly and Building Foundations?

This may all be a little confusing, so let me articulate my position:

1. Given a particular goal, direct learning will work better than indirect learning.

Using my favorite example of language learning, suppose you’re trying to get better at giving business presentations in a new language. The direct approach would be to do mock presentations—perhaps joining a language-specific Toastmasters, or simply delivering presentations to a tutor.

There’s some clear advantages with this. First, the vocabulary and grammatical points you use will fit your usage. I remember having a business meeting in Chinese where I needed to learn the word “localization” (本地化). Luckily my Chinese interlocutor knew how to translate it for me. Watching television series at home, however, I probably would never have encountered this word—thus practicing actual business conversations homes in on higher-frequency words for this context.

Content-differences matter, but often skills differ between situations. Reading in a language and speaking it often involve the same content (words and grammar), but involve very different mental processes to be successful. So much so that there are Chinese language experts who can read Chinese fluently but cannot speak it.

The point here is that we tend to think of skills fairly broadly (knowing “Chinese”) but in actuality our skills are quite specific (knowing the translation for the word 本地化). Direct learning minimizes the chance that our efforts will be spent on areas unrelated to our actual goal.

2. Many goals in learning, however, require transfer.

As I also document in my book, the kinds of magical “intuition” for hard subjects displayed by people like Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman owe a lot to their extensive repertoire of saved patterns.

Intelligence no doubt plays a role, but knowledge base matters a great deal as well. Studies of chess experts show this, with masters having the ability to easily remember “natural” chess positions, but unable to remember “unnatural” ones that couldn’t occur during normal play. The difference between amateurs and grandmasters, then, often comes down to the latter having immense libraries of knowledge to draw upon.1

As the goal gets sufficiently broad, the need to rely on transfer increases. A specific endgame can be drilled until you know it perfectly. But chess is complicated, and very quickly competent players can reach positions that have never been seen before in the entire history of the game. Doing well, then, requires some transfer.

The broader and more varied the situations you need to perform in, the more difficult it will be to directly draw upon a past experience that matches the situation exactly. Since you need to transfer, having a more extensive knowledge base will help you think better.

3. Broader skills benefit more from theory and abstractions.

Direct practice isn’t opposed to getting a deep understanding. The problem occurs when we try to equate “direct” practice with practice that avoids learning any theory. While it’s true that this can benefit fairly narrow skills, it isn’t generally efficient.

A clear example of this would be with mastering physics problems. A naive, direct approach would be just to grind practice problems. But, perhaps the amount of practice problems is fairly limited, so we end up redoing the same kind over and over again. Maybe this even works for a final exam where the test questions match the limited subset of problems we were asked to solve in homework assignments.

Except, when you get into the real world, you realize that the range of problems needed to be solved is much greater than those you practiced. As a result you don’t have any deep structure for understanding the problems, you just have memorized solution patterns that are no longer applicable. This suggests a possible explanation of failures of transfer in physics students, for instance.

The only way to successfully learn physics, is to deeply understand physics. And that means really understanding the abstract ideas, not just memorizing how to solve specific problems. Sophisticated direct practice would recognize this, but occasionally theory gets tossed aside in favor of shortcuts.

What Kind of Foundations Should You Build?

If we accept that foundation building is important, particularly as you try to tackle broader skills, what kind of foundation do you need?

This is a hard question to answer because your knowledge base usually goes beyond a specific goal or project. In improving it, you’re not just optimizing for a specific goal, but all future learning goals you might set.

I tend to prefer learning from a large variety of different subjects. Right now, for instance, I’m following a course on immunology, reading a book about the mathematics behind poker and listening to the Iliad on Audible. These things have a slim chance of making their way directly into my writing, but they’re part of my long-term goal to understand the world better.

But I think it’s totally acceptable to have narrower interests. Certainly the world has favored specialists increasingly, so perhaps my desire to read broadly has hurt me. I probably won’t make an intellectual advance in any particular field, simply because my understandings are mostly at the undergraduate, rather than PhD level.

Therefore, the question of how wide a base to build really depends on the kind of knowledge structure you want to build on top. Is it a sprawling complex, requiring a wide base? Or a skyscraper that mostly needs depth?

How to Build Your Foundation

While I can’t answer the question of what kind of foundation you ought to build, I think there’s some useful tips for getting better at building one:

1. Read more textbooks, less popular books.

You should read more textbooks. Compared with popular books, they’re more rigorous and more likely to represent a body of knowledge in a balanced way.

Textbooks also focus you on foundations rather than novelty. A textbook is written to distill the important ideas from a field. This is quite different from most books, which are attempting to advance a novel perspective. The latter are only worth reading if you have the foundation to adequately evaluate them.

2. Take more online classes in fundamental topics.

I don’t think university subjects are a perfect map for human knowledge. But, that being said, you could do a lot worse for building a foundation than simply auditing every intro class for each university department. Biology, economics, chemistry, physics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, business—it makes sense to have a basic grasp of each.

Online classes, like reading textbooks, are often a lot better than just picking up random popular books. This is especially true for deeper subjects like math or physics, where popularizations avoid the calculating work that is necessary to really understand them.

3. When you can’t build higher, dig deeper.

Sometimes the need for better foundations comes from within a project itself. You may be hitting a ceiling with your improvement in a particular area. One for which the only way to get better is to do more foundational work.

In the public projects I’ve undertaken, I’ve often avoided this requirement. Either I already had the foundation needed to succeed at my goal, or the goal itself was low enough that doing more foundational work wasn’t required. But that shouldn’t give the impression that foundational work is unnecessary—I could never have done the MIT Challenge, for instance, if I wasn’t already comfortable with high-school math.

You don’t ever arrive at a book as a blank slate. You’re always approaching it from behind the hundreds of other books you’ve read that inform your thinking. Building that library up is an essential part of the long-term project of learning well.

Where do you feel your foundation is weaker? Do you prefer reading narrow topics or learning broadly? What will you do to strengthen your knowledge base? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Why You Procrastinate (with Leading Expert Piers Steel)

Recently, I published my Complete Guide to Motivation. The guide covers the research landscape on motivation from psychological, neuroscientific and economic perspectives. One of the key researchers I highlighted was Piers Steel, a leading expert on procrastination.

Since I found his research findings so helpful in my own understanding of procrastination, I invited him to sit down with me to chat about it. What follows is our deeper look into the research behind motivation and procrastination.

Listen to this article

Below I’ve highlighted a few parts of our conversation:

Why Do We Procrastinate?

On why we can’t seem to motivate ourselves:

At the simplest level, it’s three factors and one of them is the most important. …

Your self-confidence or self-efficacy. Your feeling that I have the ability to do this. If you feel like “Yeah, I got this,” that really helps. …

If you find the task unpleasant that’s another, of course, pretty obvious element in motivation. …

But the last one, and this is the one we miss most is time and your sensitivity to time. We’re very sensitive to when rewards are realized.

What does research show is the best way to deal with procrastination:

The easiest and fastest way, which most people don’t mind, is distancing temptations. … If we can delay our temptations by ten, fifteen, twenty seconds, that’s enough to take the oomph off of them.

What Steel calls the “nuclear option” that works really well (but nobody wants to use it):

That’s called precommitment. … If you really want to get something done and you’re willing to make a bet, and if you don’t do it, you give me $10,000 and if you do do it, you give me a handshake, that will get it done, 100%.

But can telling other people about your goals actually backfire? Steel explains:

If I’m telling other people, “Yeah I’m going to start exercising,” I’ve actually done myself motivational damage. Because it’s vague and non-specific and I get a certain satisfaction or virtue by saying it. And that actually satisfies my need to exercise somewhat. You might sort of think of this as motivational pornography, where the image or verbal takes the place of the real.

Self Control and the Right Way to Set Goals

Why we’re terrible at long-term planning (and why this wouldn’t have been a problem for our ancestors):

A week is actually, motivationally a long, long way off. A couple days, yeah, that’s pretty much it. And we’re the superstars of self-control of the animal kingdom. Our capacity to wait for a day or two is mind-blowing, compared to the animal kingdom. But when you have a semester-long paper or a retirement plan or a four year degree, two-days just don’t cut it. But it really matches well for when the panic comes in, when your natural discount has activated.

But this is all natural, if you went back to hunter gathering, you’d fit perfectly. There would be no procrastination.

Motivation comes with an eye-dropper when you want it, and a firehose at the end. What we want is a nice tall glass of motivation, but we don’t really have that. We have this really messed up system.

What does research say about the most effective way to set goals?

We know the mechanics behind proper goal-setting. I even tried to make a new acroynm to compete with SMART goals, CSI-Approach (Challenging, Specific, Immediate and Approach Goals).

One of the worst goals you can have is, “I’m not eating candy”, because how can you be “soon” not eating candy. You can’t. What would be better is, “I’m going to eat more salads.” or, “When I want to snack, I’m going to eat carrot sticks.”

From Temporal Motivation Theory we have expectancy, value and time. Challenging has to do with expectancy and value, and goal commitment which has been studied a lot. If you have a goal but you’re not committed to it, that really matters a lot. Do you feel committed to it? Can you reshape it so that you’re committed?

The Challenging part is to make it seem in the realm of the possible, but also to make it worthwhile.

Specific and immediate is the limbic system. Were trying to move it out of the realm of the abstract, into the concrete. “I want to do well” or “I want to lose weight” is really abstract. What exactly do you want to do, as if you’re giving someone else? You want to know where that finishing line is. Then you want to play with the immediacy. Limbic system if it’s short enough term, that’s what will keep the motivation up.

We need it to be approach because we can’t have deadlines around avoidance goals. We put all those elements together and we have a working goal.

[What matters is that] you can visualize yourself doing it. … Because otherwise you’re in slippery goal land. If you don’t have definite goals, in definite words or definite hours, then you’re not going to be moving forward on it.

How can you motivate yourself better? Can you?

Sometimes you’re not dealt the best set of hands, but it doesn’t stop you from playing those cards the best you can. You’ve got to learn how to play those cards—your motivational repertoire—and maybe even know which cards you can kind of do better with. If you’re not getting enough sleep, … you can’t go wrong by improving your sleep. Are you eating well? These are all basic elements.

This kind of idea that you can have complete control over the outcome, you can’t. But, just like a poker game, you can maximize your chances.

Why We’re Bored, and Why Wanting Something Doesn’t Always Lead to Taking Action

On the evolutionary significance of boredom

If you had to design a creature, and you want it to disengage from an activity because it was no longer purposeful, what emotional state would you put in that creature? It might be called boredom. Boredom is our natural state of us saying “disengage, this has no significance” and unfortunately it gets activated for a lot of things that are, in the long-term useful to us.

Effortful attention is a difficult thing to do, because you’re trying to override a system that says that “this is not actually relevant.” Your energy level really determines how well you can pay attention to things. … If you can just reorganize your day to do your hardest work when you have the most energy, you’ll find you’re accomplishing more than your competitors and you’ll have more time off.

Effort is often contingent on how much energy we have. We tend not to respect our times of the day when giving effort is less effortful.

Motivational theories often rely on combinations of expectancy and value. These state that you’re motivated to the extent that you both value an outcome, and deem it likely you’ll achieve it. But, Steel notes that the research is actually split on whether confidence is an unalloyed good:

There’s this idea of goal choice versus goal striving. The motivations that get you to choose a goal aren’t the same as the ones that get you to strive toward it. You could want something, and want it quite badly, and still find it difficult to find the motivation to do it.

Entrepreneurs tend to be more confident, than the everyday. But they find the most confident entrepreneurs tend to be the least successful. You have to have confidence, but also respect for the competition. I can do this, but it won’t be easy. Balancing those two things works really well.

Do listen to the whole thing. And, while you’re at it, we now have 100+ podcast episodes. If you like it, please give it a rating so more people can find out about it.

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The Boring (and Vastly Underrated) Art of Planning

Sometimes the boring skills in life turn out to be the most important.

Case in point: the market for being really good at Excel is much larger than you think. I have a friend who does lucrative consulting work mostly on his ability to be better than you at Excel. Machine learning is trendy, but most organizations don’t need someone to run convolutional neural nets—they need someone to work spreadsheets.

Or consider another super boring skill that’s incredibly valuable: planning.

Most people are terrible planners. In fact, people are so bad at planning that psychologists have a name for it—the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy points out that people tend to be overly optimistic planners. Our projects take much longer and more effort than we anticipate.

Why Planners Succeed

We aren’t designed to be good planners. Our ancestors had little need for complex planning. Food couldn’t be easily stored, so you went looking for it when you were hungry. As such, nature didn’t make us great long-term thinkers.

One way our ineptitude at planning manifests is in what behavioral economists call hyperbolic discounting. The idea here is that when we need to choose between rewards right now and rewards in the far future, we’re much less patient than we ought to be.

Being able to restrain your impulses and think long-term is associated with success across many different metrics: health, wealth, education and more.

But the benefits go beyond simply thinking long-term. Life is complicated, and often what you need to do to have a better future is more sophisticated than a daily habit. If you want to advance your career, for instance, you may need to go to school or acquire skills, you may need to apply for new jobs or complete key projects. Each of these efforts requires considerable planning to achieve.

The 10% Rule: Taking Planning Seriously

The first step to becoming a better planner is simply to set aside more time for it. Since we’re evolved to be seat-of-our-pants doers, not patient planners, we need to counteract that urge by forcing ourselves to map out the path ahead.

Informally, I like to follow the 10% Rule, which says that you should spend, roughly 10% of the total time you anticipate for a project on planning the project. So if you were going to spend 100 hours on a project, you should spend about 10 hours planning it.

At first this seems crazy large. And, admittedly, this rule can be reduced for longer projects (especially those that might need intermediate planning as you learn more). Yet, for new project types where you lack experience, the time spent planning is often the most valuable.

Map Out Everything You Need to Do

Once you’ve dedicated the time to plan, the next step is to break down everything you need to do in order to move forward on a project. To be successful, the plan needs to be way more granular than most people make it.

For most people, a project like writing a novel gets a plan like, “Write 500 words per day.” This isn’t a plan, though, just a daily habit.

A novel-writing plan, instead, would start by asking what we’re trying to do. Are we trying to reach out to a publisher? Are we going to self-publish? Or is this just for the desk drawer for practice? If we’re publishing, maybe we’ll need an agent, editor or reviewers?

How are we going to structure the story? Define the main plot? Fill out the character backgrounds and make the setting believable? Maybe your novel is set in a different city, will you travel there to get experience or work from books to fill in the scenes?

These questions aren’t there to provoke anxiety (although planning often is uncomfortable, which is why we don’t do it). Rather, they’re there to show that the end plan for writing a novel is a lot more complicated than simply writing every day. It may have discrete milestones for research, character building and plot development, not to mention any stuff that goes into making the project a success outside of merely writing the thing.

Why bother with all this effort? Can’t you just cross those bridges when you come to them? Yet most projects like this fail. The key to having yours be a success requires a little bit more planning than feels automatic.

Put the Plan in Your Calendar

With a map drawn, you now need your itinerary. When will you start? How many days a week will you work? When do you expect to reach particular milestones?

All of this needs to be put in your actual calendar. You don’t need to break down a year-long project into daily increments, as this can be too tedious to update once there are inevitable changes. However, you should put down all of the key milestones. You should also include a weekly horizon showing your hourly time investments.

There are two main reasons for putting everything in your calendar.

The first is logistic. A lot of people start with a loose plan, “I’m going to do X over the next month.” But they fail to realize how many obstacles already exist in their schedule. Maybe they have a vacation coming up, or there are other deadlines that might interfere. If your plan never touches your calendar, you’re not forced to confront these conflicts until it’s too late.

The second is psychological. Actually putting the time in the calendar makes the plan real in a way that daydreaming doesn’t. Suddenly, a lot of vague and ambitious plans seem a lot more costly—“Oh wait, so I won’t be able to do anything in the evenings for six months to get this done?” This may seem discouraging, but pessimism in planning is actually good! If you see the difficulties in your plan and still want to go forward, you’re much more likely to stick to it than if the hardships show up belatedly.

Translate to Daily Actions

The final step of any good plan is that it should tell you what you need to do today. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Today.

Our hyperbolic discounting means that anything that’s more than a couple days in the future isn’t useful for motivating immediate action. And immediate action is the only kind that gets anything done.

You can go a step further and commit to particular hours for your plan. This is more useful when your schedule is already congested, and so a missed opportunity to take action might mean you fail to stick to your plan at all. When I’m busy, telling myself I’m going to exercise today is far less useful than telling myself I’m exercising right after I finish work, before dinner.

Still, at the very least, your plan should tell you what you have to do today to move forward. If you’re relying on a deadline that’s weeks away to motivate, you’re not going to stick with it.

These are just the basics. I haven’t covered some other useful steps, like implementation intentions, interviewing experts, metrics, precommitment and all sorts of other strategies. (For those interested in mastering this skill, consider my course, Make it Happen!) But even getting the basics right makes a big difference.

Planning, Not Procrastinating

If planning is so important, why does so much advice point in the opposite direction. We’re told to “just do it” rather than sit down and think it through.

I suspect the reason is that most people don’t do any planning. Instead, what they call planning is really just procrastinating. Musing about an idea instead of concrete action.

I hope, given the above description, you can see that the kind of planning that works is far from procrastinating. It’s an active process that requires research, scheduling and often facing up to the uncomfortable realities of real world achievements. If anything, planning is what’s being procrastinated on—you avoid figuring out what the real thing you need to do is, because it’s safer to daydream about it instead.

Making plans may not be the most exciting skill, but it’s one of the most important. Ultimately, the future belongs to those who plan for it.

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How to Become More Curious

Learning is a lot easier when it’s interesting. And it’s interesting, to a large extent, because you’re curious about the subject. Yes, the carrot of career opportunity and stick of exam failures can motivate. But if you really want to learn something, nothing beats curiosity.

Yet it’s boredom, not curiosity, that dominates student life. Research shows that students report feeling bored much of the time in class. This makes it harder to pay attention and more painful to learn.

How can you boost your curiosity for a new subject?

The Science of Curiosity

Curiosity remains an under-studied phenomenon. Early research focused on now mostly discredited drive-reduction accounts. Curiosity, like hunger, was envisioned as an aversive state that we were driven to reduce. But, if this were true, why would anyone read a murder mystery novel?

In 1994, George Loewenstein offered a more modern take in his information-gap theory. This theory argued that curiosity was driven from the gap between what you know and what you’d like to know. While this definition may seem almost tautologically true, there were a few key predictions:

Curiosity is susceptible to framing effects. Like a figure-ground illusion, if the situation emphasizes a single missing piece, you’re much curious than if you think you haven’t assembled most of the puzzle.
Insight-based problems evoke more curiosity than accumulative ones. If you need a single idea to make the entire idea snap into relief, you’ll be more curious than if the answer is only to be found by acquiring a mountain of facts.
You need to believe you can solve the puzzle. Social psychologist Albert Bandura’s influential self-efficacy account of motivation argued that to be motivated (or curious) we need to believe we can be successful. If you think a lot of investigation won’t result in an insightful payoff, low curiosity is likely to result.

There isn’t a magic formula for curiosity. But there are a few strategies we can apply to make things more interesting.

You Need to Know More to Ask Better Questions

An implication of Loewenstein’s theory was that more knowledge should lead to more curiosity. The person who knows 47 of 50 states is more likely to be curious about which ones she’s missing than the person who only knows three.

Research confirms this by noting that knowledge about a topic predicted curiosity for new knowledge. One reason for this is simply that you need to know something before you can ask good questions. Since good (unanswered) questions are the raw material for curiosity, it’s difficult to be curious about something when you can’t ask any questions.

Researchers Naomi Miyake and Donald Norman summarize the importance of knowledge base to curiosity nicely in the title of their paper, “To Ask a Question, One Must Know What is Not Known”:

“At a research seminar on computer techniques, we noted that beginners at programming (to whom the seminar was addressed) asked few questions and generated few comments. More expert programmers, however, had many questions and, eventually, dominated the discussion.”

This means learning itself creates a positive feedback loop. The more you know about a topic, the more likely you are to have unanswered questions that drive curiosity. Read more books and the books get more interesting.

Start Asking Questions

Curiosity is susceptible to framing effects. Which means you’ll be far more curious when you have a concrete, unanswered question that seems like it shouldn’t be too hard to solve.

The problem is that knowledge is often presented in a way that actively stifles this question-generating approach. Rather than creating a mystery, for which new knowledge is needed to unravel, most subjects are presented as already solved: “Go ahead and memorize this. Don’t worry, we already proved it’s the correct answer.”

To be more curious, you have to reframe what you’re learning in terms of the key mysteries it was developed to decode. What were the burning questions that kept people up at night as they tried to solve the puzzle?

One way to start is simply to ask questions about more things that you’re asked to take as a given. Why does DNA need to be translated into RNA before it can make things? Why is there a minus symbol in this equation? Why do profits maximize when marginal revenue equals marginal cost?

The attitude that leads to more question-asking, and thus more curiosity, is one which recognizes that the world is deeply strange. Only with the benefit of hindsight do the answers we’ve discovered seem obvious. To be more curious, you need to recapture the spirit of those who puzzled over them when they were still unsolved.

Know Where to Get the Answers

If the response to a question is simply, “that’s just the way things are,” or worse, “shut up and memorize,” the outcome is frustration, not curiosity. Thus, the art of asking questions needs to be paired with actually finding the answers.

Luckily, this is easier than ever. Online forums, like Quora or Reddit’s Ask Science, offer ways you can ask questions and get expert replies. For many questions, teachers, peers and people around you can often answer questions you’ve missed.

Figuring out the answer for yourself is also satisfying. Some of my greatest joys in math have been getting that breakthrough insight that makes sense of a confusing problem. It can take a little bit of time and playing around, but suddenly having the reason why it must be that way snap into view can be immensely gratifying.

Learning is Dialog, Not Consumption

The attitude that creates curiosity is to see learning as principally driven by asking questions and coming up with answers, not consuming information. While we don’t always have a choice in how knowledge gets presented to us, if you see that there’s always a deeper layer of questions and answers, mysteries and insights, then even seemingly dull topics become a puzzle waiting to be solved.

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