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Outreach – Month-End Update

Having now reached the end of the sixth month of my year-long Foundations project, I’d like to share some reflections on this month’s focus: outreach.

In doing the reading for this month, I found myself impressed by the numerous associations between having strong and broad social ties and living well. Being connected isn’t just good for your career or happiness—it matters for your health too. The association between isolation and mortality is in the same ballpark as smoking a pack of cigarettes every day.

It was also while doing this reading that I realized my foundation here is weaker than I thought. I feel like I have fairly good close connections with my family and best friends. I’m also not terrible at meeting people or engaging in low-stakes small talk and socializing. However, I’m bad at managing the periphery of my social world—there are people I consider “good friends” who I see only once or twice a year.

Going through the reading, I also felt my initial focus for the month, emphasizing activities that allowed me to meet new people, was somewhat misplaced. Instead, I think my real weak point is one layer inward—all those people I sort of know, but don’t make enough effort to sustain a casual friendship.

At this point, it would be easy to trot out various excuses: I have good friends, so who needs acquaintances? (Except the two serve different purposes, and both are necessary for thriving.) I’m too busy as a parent with small kids to “hang out” as much as I used to. (Except that’s true of literally everything; if something matters to us, we make time for it.) I don’t like one-sided efforts to sustain weaker ties, and I’d prefer things to be spontaneous. (Except nothing else in life is like this—all good habits require some amount of effort and systems in place.)

Despite these obstacles, I’d like to be better with outreach than I am currently. This month was a good start but, given that the work here takes place over years, it’s hardly finished.

What I Did This Month

To start, I was pretty good about keeping my once-weekly commitment to participating in some kind of activity with new people. I went to a couple language meet ups and met some people at a birthday party.

The push to do some research to find activities was helpful. In the past couple years, I feel like I often missed opportunities to socialize not only out of busyness, but also because I hadn’t kept opportunities on my radar, so I didn’t have any potential activities to try during weeks when I was relatively free.

I also made efforts to spend some time with some old friends. I don’t expect to go back to pre-kids levels of socializing, but here too the once-per-week threshold seems like a doable minimum.

Finally, I decided to make following up with friends and colleagues at regular intervals a more structured habit. Creating a list of people I know with recurring reminders to contact them and putting it in my productivity system nudges me to reach out to people. I’m also putting birthdays and other events in the same list so I can keep track of those, too, now that I no longer use social media.

The month wasn’t perfect. As I write this, it is December. (I write these updates three months in advance to give my team and myself lead time in preparing the course.) My family and my in-laws visited, which meant this wasn’t the ideal month to focus on outreach. But that hiccup aside, I’m confident that I’ll be able to sustain the roughly once-per-week habit in the coming months.

Plans for Ongoing Outreach

With a weekly habit, one month really isn’t long enough to make something routine. So I’m going to need to consciously monitor and make an effort here for at least another few months.

Given my assessment of my weak point here, I’m also modifying the keystone habit I’m going to try to sustain: Instead of focusing on meeting new people, I’m going to try to split my efforts evenly between trying activities with new people and sustaining existing friendships with people I don’t interact with automatically. 

One step I have not taken, but feel might be important, is joining or belonging to a more formal organization or group. Putnam’s Bowling Alone really sold me on the idea that there’s a benefit to belonging to something beyond an informal circle of friends. I suspect this is something I’ll revisit in the last foundation: service.

Updates to Previous Foundations

Of course, my goal with this project isn’t simply to focus on one habit for a month and then move on, but to sustain my commitments in all the previous months. Here are some updates for the previous five foundations:

Fitness. Still going strong. My running speed has improved, with my 10 km time getting down to 52 minutes. That’s a major improvement over a few months ago when it was a challenge to run that distance in under an hour, and an even bigger improvement from before this project began when I hadn’t run for more than 30 minutes in almost a decade.Productivity. The system I reworked during the month is still holding, although I still struggle with keeping up with household chores. Still, the amount of things that slip my mind has dropped considerably, which means the system is doing its job even if I still don’t have time to do everything I’d like.Money. Also solid. My term life insurance policy was approved, so I can finally check that box after applying for it months ago. I also started the process of setting up educational savings funds for my kids. Since it’s December when I write this, I plan to do a bigger annual review in January as well.Food. There was some predictable backsliding here during the holiday season. I was fine with this, but it will be important to get back to my defaults next month. I’m now about 15 lbs. lighter than my weight at the start of my project, which is probably close to my ideal weight, so at this point I’m trying to avoid both over- and under-eating, especially as I’ve been exercising more.Reading. With eight books read this month, I’m mostly back to my normal reading routine. This month was a little lighter than usual, but the holidays cut into work-related reading. Still, I fully expect to be on track to read 100+ books for this project by its end.

That’s it for this month. Next week, I’ll share an update for the next foundation: sleep.

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Here are 8 Books I Read on Making Friends This Month

As I write this, I’m wrapping up the sixth month of my year-long foundations project. This month’s focus is outreach—making and maintaining friendships. In this post, I’ll share lessons from the eight books I read on this topic. Next week, I’ll share my personal reflections on this month’s work.



For those interested, my notes from the previous months are available here:

1.     Fitness: Start, End, Books.
2.     Productivity: Start, End, Books.
3.     Money: Start, End, Books.
4.     Food: Start, End, Books.
5.     Reading: Start, End and Books.

1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

Here are some quick takeaways from the eight books I read:

Good friends keep you healthier. People with better social networks live longer, and the health impacts of loneliness and isolation are in the same ballpark as well-known dangers such as smoking cigarettes.Acquaintances matter too. Although the focus for most of us is on having deep friendships, there’s a whole literature on the role of “weak ties,” or people you rarely see, being *more* important for finding job opportunities or word-of-mouth opportunities.Friendship isn’t fast. Estimates on the time required for people to become friends is on the order of 60+ hours of in-person contact. This threshold explains why you can socialize frequently, yet still fail to make friends—if you don’t have sustained opportunity to socialize with the same people over and over, many potential friendships drop off before they hit the 60+ hour threshold.It’s better to be interested than interesting. People are egocentric. We like people who like us, who take an interest in our interests and who really want to listen.Democracy itself may be at stake. Since the 1960s, community and civic life have withered from their post-WWII peak. This decay of social infrastructure may be a major reason for our collective distrust and polarization.

Overall I found this topic much deeper than I had expected, leading to some personal realizations which I’ll discuss next week. Now, some notes on each of the books I read…

8 Books on Making Friends1. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Every once in awhile, a self-help book becomes so popular that it becomes a free-floating meme, detached from its actual content. Carnegie’s classic belongs in that rare genre of books which you probably feel like you’ve read—even if you haven’t.

While the book has dozens of chapters articulating specific strategies for dealing with people, they all basically boil down to a simple observation: most people are egocentric. If you can adopt the other person’s perspective, and give them what they genuinely want, you’ll have smoother social interactions than if you focus directly on what you want.

The book definitely shows its age in a few places, such as a charming anecdote about a manager complimenting his secretary’s appearance, but the advice needs few updates because human nature hasn’t changed since Carnegie first wrote it.

2. Friendship by Lydia Denworth

I enjoyed this wide-ranging book discussing the science of friendship. The topics covered are eclectic, so it’s difficult to summarize adequately. Denworth’s investigation of friendship ranges from in-depth discussion of monkey communities, to the health impacts of loneliness, to whether or not Facebook is good or bad for society.

3. Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

Duhigg, a journalist whose previous work includes bestsellers on habits and productivity, tackles social skills in Supercommunicators. The idea is drawn from the observation that some people are consistently better in their ability to make friends than others, and that this skill is learnable to some degree.

A central idea of this book is that essential communication depends on understanding what kind of conversation the other person wants to have and ensuring you match them in that desire. Duhigg argues for three broad types of conversations: practical (What are we going to do?), emotional (How do we feel about it?), and identity (Who are we?), and that attempts to dialogue often derail when people don’t successfully synchronize this.

4. Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi

I first read this book shortly after it came out in 2005. I think Ferrazzi does a good job of practically explaining how super-networkers, such as himself, manage to meet so many people and maintain so many relationships. One key insight I enjoyed revisiting was his explanation that relationships are muscles which strengthen through use, not bank accounts where favors can be saved up for a rainy day.

While I found this book useful, it’s probably not the best book to persuade someone of the value of networking if they already find the practice off-putting. I think guides that focus on friendship and service are probably better to adopt as a mindset than the ambition-orientation that suffuses this book.

5. We Should Get Together by Kat Vellos

Vellos writes about how hard it is to make friends in big cities. People are abundant, yet genuine connection is often rare and fleeting. 

This book was interesting, although probably aimed more at an earlier chapter in my life when I was often newly in a big city with ample time for socializing but struggling with the revolving door of temporary friendships.

Still, I think Vellos addresses a genuine need for a lot of people, and her advice is practical and useful.

6. Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton

Negotiation is a central part of all relationships. From diplomatic conferences to deciding where to go for dinner, we’re always in a delicate dance of conflicting interests and desires. 

The authors argue that most people make the mistake of bargaining over positions, like hagglers at a street market who keep stating their “best price” until they either make a deal or walk away. The uncomfortable conflict this creates causes some people to go hard, trying to squeeze the other person at the risk of the relationship, or go soft, trying to accommodate at the risk of failing to get what you really want.

Instead, the authors suggest we should negotiate on principles, not positions. Separate the people from the problem; focus on your interests, not your position itself; look for options for mutual gain; and when you have to compromise, look for objective standards and principles to determine fairness.

7. The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

A good book opens you to a new way of thinking. Parker’s book definitely did that for me. Before reading this, not once had I ever considered hosting a dinner party or social event with the mindset Parker espouses.

Parker’s key to throwing successful parties is to define a clear (and debatable) purpose and have everything tailored to that outcome. That means the venue, guest list and even the rules of the party (she thinks a good host should have and enforce them) should all work to achieve the gathering’s stated purpose.

Definitely a must-read if you want to have an important event and aren’t sure the right way to go about it.

8. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam

Civic participation and communal life in America have been declining for decades, and the decay in our social infrastructure is showing.

 Armed with hundreds of charts and statistics, Putnam walks through various measures of social decline from club membership, church attendance, volunteerism, political activism, and even picnics. Across the board, people are spending less time connected to their community than they were during the heyday of communal life in the 1960s.

This decline is epitomized in the title of the book: at the time of its writing, more people than ever were bowling, but there were far fewer bowling leagues.1

In this decline, Putnam sounds a warning about the health of American society. Places with lower measures of social capital have worse social outcomes: less civic participation, trust in government, higher crime and worse health. Communal interaction builds generalized trust, which acts as a social lubricant making transacting with strangers easier and safer.2

Unfortunately, it hardly seems like we’ve reached the nadir of Putnam’s social capital decline. Putnam blaming the entertainment value of television for causing the decline in social gathering now seems almost quaint when we have always-on, algorithmically-mediated entertainment in our pockets at all times.

While the message may be a bit of a downer, I still found this book enormously useful in reshaping my perspective on socializing. There’s value in belonging to communities, not merely circles of friends. Clubs and organizations that bring people together from different strata of society are both valuable and necessary.

_ _ _

That’s it for books this month. Next week, I’ll share some personal reflections on I’ve improved my own outreach this past month as well as my plans for the future.

The post Here are 8 Books I Read on Making Friends This Month appeared first on Scott H Young.

Should You Quit? Ask These Four Questions First

A lot of advice focuses on what to do, but advice focusing on what to quit is comparatively rare. Every path taken necessarily implies another path ignored, so the two must matter equally.

In some ways, choosing to quit is harder than choosing to take action. We all know we should exercise, read, meditate, socialize, work hard, spend time with family, and drink eight glasses of water every day. But when that list inevitably becomes unmanageable, it’s hard to say what we ought to stop.

Another reason the importance of quitting is less often discussed is that worthwhile pursuits are often challenging, and it is tempting to surrender to early difficulties. “Never give up” is an unrealistic slogan, but it may serve us well in situations where we’re tempted to give up on our dreams and watch Netflix instead.

Because we devote more time to thinking about projects we should undertake, rather than those we should abandon, the latter tends to occur impulsively. We quit because we’re tired, bored, or because something else seems more appealing. 

I think this is a mistake. Thinking more deliberately about when to give up might improve our decisions more than simply choosing more tasks to add to our to-do list.

Here are four questions you can ask yourself to help make the decision.

1. The past is done. Do the future benefits outweigh the costs?

It’s often helpful to start with figuring out what an ideally rational person would do in your situation. If you could consult an oracle who never gets tired or frustrated, and could calculate the right decision, what would she tell you to do?

Oracles don’t exist, so we’ll have to settle for economic theory. A key concept is sunk costs. This is the idea that when making a decision in the present moment, past investments don’t matter. All that matters is how much you anticipate investing in the future, and whether those investments will pay off.

Suppose you’ve invested three years working toward an accounting degree in college. But if you could go back, you’d study engineering instead. Should you quit accounting and switch majors or stick it out?

It’s tempting to analyze this decision by considering it as a whole: “Do I want to study accounting or engineering?” But this isn’t correct. The better question is, “Will it be better for me to invest one more year and get an accounting degree, or switch immediately and start four years studying engineering?”

The previous three years are sunk costs and thus shouldn’t be weighed in your decision about whether to quit. The only thing that matters is future costs and future benefits. Perhaps you decide that having an accounting degree for only one more year of work is worth it, even if you want to study engineering after that.

In this case, an analysis of sunk costs discouraged us from quitting early, but it can easily go the other way.

Suppose you’ve spent three years working on a business idea. Initially, the market looked promising, so you quit your job and spent three years trying to build a company. Now, however, the forecast looks gloomy. You think it will take another three years at least before you can make a go of it—and there are other opportunities that might be better. Should you stay the course, or switch?

Once again, the past three years don’t matter. Even if those turned out to be a waste of time, they shouldn’t change your decision overall. All that matters is whether the future time (and money) you will invest is better spent continuing or quitting.

An economic perspective encourages detachment. The question is not “Would I undertake this project if I had to start again?” instead it’s “What’s the value of continuing versus quitting (compared to my alternatives)?”

Sometimes a half-finished project you’re no longer excited about makes more sense to finish because there’s little work needed to complete it. Sometimes a pursuit you poured your soul into needs to be thrown out because the future investment needed to make it work isn’t worth the payoff.

2. Don’t rush to act. When’s the best point to re-evaluate your exit?

The economic perspective is useful, but it’s only one part of the story. After all, if we could easily make dispassionate decisions about whether to stick it out or give up, deciding what to do—or to quit—wouldn’t be so tricky. The real difficulty is that we alternate between feeling unable to let go of projects and abandoning projects for shiny new pursuits, in neither case explicitly weighing the merits of our choice. Emotion, not reason, looms larger in our decision-making.

We can’t eliminate our emotions when making decisions. And we wouldn’t want to, even if we could. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio illustrates, patients with damage to emotional centers of their brain are not hyper-efficient Vulcans, rather they’re hopelessly lost—wasting hours on unimportant tasks because they can’t properly evaluate what matters most.

But there is a happy medium. One way we can tame some of our worst impulses, without undermining the real value our emotions bring to decision-making, is by creating structures that can influence our decisions.

One structure I find particularly helpful is to define your quitting points in advance. By setting up projects that have well-defined exit ramps, you can ensure you don’t make decisions based on momentary temptations.

For instance, I tend to work on learning projects in focused bursts, rather than making lifelong commitments. Part of the reason for this is that it’s much easier to commit to learning a new language for thirty days than to assume automatically that I’ll want, or be able, to invest in it lifelong. Thirty days is a relatively small commitment, so it’s easier to bolster my commitment even when I’m not feeling like it.

Another structure that can be helpful is creating an automatic delay or review period for any quitting decision. When you’re convinced you want to give up, set a reminder in one week or one month to re-evaluate. For bigger goals, you might want to set the reminder once you’re past a particularly stressful period—such as deciding whether to quit a job after a big project wraps up, or deciding if you want to switch majors after your final exams—so you’re making the decision from relative neutrality.

In both of these cases, the length of the pre-commitment period is crucial. Too short, and you’ll allow temporary impulses to drive your decisions. Too long, and you might not be able to endure, defaulting to an emotional response rather than a reasoned one.

3. The grass isn’t always greener. What’s the day-to-day reality of the alternative to my current course?

Frustration and stress are only one emotional factor. Distractions can be a far bigger issue. How often have you embarked on one goal only to find yourself pulled toward a new one that seems like a better opportunity?

Construal-level theory argues that we tend to evaluate decisions using different frames of reference: we view lofty goals idealistically, omitting their complications and details, and we view daily to-do lists pragmatically, with a focus on what’s expedient. But this sets us up for failure, because our current project gets the nitty-gritty treatment, whereas any new pursuit gets viewed through the hazy lens of idealism. Who wouldn’t want to switch under those circumstances?

One way to overcome this cognitive illusion is to give yourself a brief, realistic experience of pursuing your alternative. If you’re thinking about switching majors, take a full class (including homework and exams) from your potential new field. If you’re thinking about switching markets, make a prototype and try to pitch it. Low-key commitments often help us realize that the new pursuit has just as many obstacles and challenges as our current one and can temper the desire to switch.

If you’re unable to devote time to experience the new pursuit in full detail, it can sometimes be helpful to shift the current project back into the higher construal level to make a fairer comparison. Spend an hour or two journaling about your ultimate goals and values for the project. What originally got you excited about it?

Finally, a strategy I employ regularly is procrastination. When I get new project ideas, I deliberately put them in a “someday” pile on the back burner. Procrastination is often seen as a vice, but procrastinating on possible distractions means I end up completing more projects. Some of those “someday” projects will make it into reality, but many will be forgotten about entirely as they turned out to be momentary impulses.

4. Know your values. Which lines won’t you cross?

Emotions can sometimes lead us to quit impulsively, but they can also lead us to stay in situations we should walk away from. Sometimes, not quitting is the worse decision, because sticking around in a bad relationship, job or project can waste years of our lives with little to show for our time and effort. Indeed, while quitting prematurely has its costs, sticking out to the bitter end of a failed pursuit is the real tragedy.

Make clear, bright-line rules about when you’ll quit, even if you’re tempted to stay. Here are some conditions where I would advocate quitting:

The pursuit no longer aligns with your deeply-held values. For instance, if you start a job with one understanding of the work, but later realize that sticking through will require betraying your internal code of ethics or behaving in a way that’s contrary to your values, quitting is best.The costs of the pursuit clearly exceed its benefits, and there is no clear short-term exit. I often do push myself to finish projects which (mildly) fail the cost-benefit test if the end of the project is near, because I think a moderate degree of perseverance is worth cultivating. But if the costs are dramatically higher than the benefits, or if there is no clear natural exit for the pursuit, quitting is often necessary.You’re trying to recoup a loss that has already occurred. One place human nature tends to irrationally discourage quitting is when we’ve lost something and are desperate to “undo” that loss. Gamblers call this going “on tilt,” where a player is no longer making rational analyses because of bets that went bad.

Every decision is unique, so there’s no single right answer for when to quit. But if you have a process for thinking about those decisions, you’ll be more likely to land on a reasonable choice.

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Outreach – Day One

I’m now entering the sixth month of my year-long Foundations project. This month’s focus is on outreach. One of three socially-oriented foundations, outreach focuses on meeting new people and sustaining friendships with people you don’t see every day.

Two related foundations, connection and service, will focus on improving close connections and finding ways to help others in my day-to-day life, respectively.

Here are some links to the previous months’ notes, in case you missed it:

1.     Fitness: Start, End, Books.
2.     Productivity: Start, End, Books.
3.     Money: Start, End, Books.
4.     Food: Start, End, Books.
5.     Reading: Start, End and Books.

Why Outreach?

I don’t think I need to spell out how important relationships are to a good life. Pretty much all our great joys in life (as well as our deepest miseries) are built upon our connection to other people.

I chose to focus on outreach first because it is a logical antecedent to deeper connection. If you don’t have a lot of close friends or a romantic partner, then there simply might not be a lot of relationships in your life you have the opportunity to deepen. Therefore, meeting new people or strengthening “weak ties” comes first.

The logical necessity of needing first to meet people before you can be close friends with them isn’t a practical concern in my life now. I’m happily married with two kids. I have good relationships with my family, and I have a number of close friends, both personally and professionally.

However, I’ve definitely had times where this sequencing would have mattered. I moved around a fair bit in my early twenties, and I’ve had to rebuild a social world for myself from scratch several times. Thus, I know firsthand how important a foundation of outreach is in terms of social success.

I think it also makes sense to think of outreach as distinct from connection for another reason: the behaviors and skills that support each tend to be different. Deepening connection is largely a matter of spending quality time, being empathetic and being generous, but outreach relies on extraversion, self-confidence and openness to trying new things. From a practical perspective, it makes sense to consider outreach a separate foundation from the work of sustaining your existing close connections.

Reflecting on My Current Outreach

My foundation of outreach is weaker than I would like, although part of that is a comparison against previous eras of my life when it was relatively strong.

In my twenties, I had a social event almost every day. During the early days of my business, I spent a lot of time reaching out to other writers and entrepreneurs. And after moving to a new place, socializing to help me establish new friends (often in a language I didn’t speak very well) was often my main priority.

Today, however, my level of socializing with people I don’t already know is much lower. A big part of that is simply the current phase of my life. With two small kids at home, I have less time, and frankly less motivation, to seek out new friends. I often feel like I don’t have enough time to maintain a lot of the friendships I already have, never mind doing social activities with the express purpose of meeting new people.

However, it’s too easy to dismiss the need for outreach out of simple busyness. The same argument could apply to lots of other foundations. I don’t play sports and the need to maintain a certain physique is less prominent when you’re a busy parent—but that doesn’t make fitness unimportant as you get older.
Similarly, I think a total neglect of outreach could easily lead to a situation where, emerging from the isolated cocoon of early parenthood, I find myself with fewer friends and activities than I would like. An analogy might be a person who was an athlete in college, didn’t notice they were getting out of shape in their thirties and forties, and find they now have preventable health problems in old age. Better to fix a foundation before the weaknesses cause problems.

Still, given my life constraints and my currently ample supply of friends and family, I want to strike the right balance between an appropriate amount of time spent on outreach and maintaining my existing relationships and commitments.

Keystone Habit: Weekly Social Activity

Given the need for some amount of outreach, and my existing commitments, I think aiming for a habit of attending a social activity roughly once-per-week is probably ideal. Unlike my fitness habit, in which I aim for near total consistency, given the irregular nature of social events, I’m less concerned about the strictness of this habit. I think if I hit the ~1x/week average, that would be good.

My criteria for a social activity is that there is an opportunity to meet new people. This could be Meetups, classes or group activities where I don’t know anyone already. Or it could be activities I attend with my existing friends where I don’t already know all the people in attendance.

Once per week sounds like a pretty good minimal commitment. It’s hard to imagine a person for whom one outing weekly would be excessive, but I can definitely consider some people for whom a single weekly social activity would be too little. It definitely would have been too little when I was new to a city, was single, was trying to get a foothold professionally or was simply lacking friends in my life. So I don’t think this is a universal benchmark, although it might function as a reasonable minimum threshold for most people.

To reach this goal, I’m doing what I’ve always done: finding Meetups based on some of my interests, asking friends for activities they’re part of, and keeping my eyes open for opportunities. Since I’ve been running more lately, I may drop in on a running club or two and kill two birds with one stone by getting my daily exercise in, too.

I’m also keen to restart some language practice. This was something I enjoyed pre-kids, but with the pandemic cancelling all in-person meetings and the increased demands of having two babies, I dropped it almost entirely. So I’ll keep an eye on this as well.

Other Outreach Metrics

I’m prioritizing simply attending some social events on a roughly weekly basis for my outreach activity. This is partly because my needs in this foundation are pretty non-specific. As mentioned, I’m happily married, so the dating angle that motivates a lot of social activity isn’t there for me.

Similarly, while I can always do better in professional networking, this isn’t an area I’m prioritizing either. I’m always happy to meet people professionally, but I feel like I get enough opportunities organically at this point in my career that this doesn’t require a lot of extra work.

However, in addition to the weekly habit of socializing, I’d like to be more organized about keeping up and scheduling time with more distant friends. I’m not naturally good at this, and not being on social media makes it worse. While setting up CRM software for friends seems a little dehumanizing, I think I do need some system of reminders to at least check-in on those people so I don’t lose touch.

I haven’t decided exactly what system I want to use. In the past, I’ve experimented with recurring reminders and spreadsheets to try to solve this problem, but I always bristled a bit at their formality. Instead, I might try a more regular practice of checking in on people once a quarter or year to make up for my lack of awareness of people’s updates on social media.

As always, toward the end of the month, I’ll share some insights from my reading for the month as well as how my planned habit changes went.

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Reflections on a Month for Reading

I’m wrapping up this month’s focus, reading, in my year-long Foundations project. Normally, I split my final posts into one covering the books I read during the month and one discussing my personal experience and habit changes in the month’s focus area. However, since this month was *about* reading, I decided to merge the two.

Those interested in my previous months’ efforts can see them here:

1.     Fitness: Start, End, Books
2.     Productivity: Start, End, Books
3.     Money: Start, End, Books
4.     Food: Start, End, Books

Today, I’ll start with personal reflections, then move onto my reading for the month.

Reflections on Reading

As evidenced by my previous months’ book lists, I already read a lot of books. This is largely an occupational side-effect, but my reading volume isn’t something that concerns me.

Instead, my goals for the month were twofold:

To read, however briefly, right before bed. I felt like this habit would facilitate sleeping well, in addition to injecting another regular reading slot into my life.To expand the breadth of books I read. I wanted to spend more time reading literature, history and topics not directly related to my writing. (Though I admit such breadth will probably not be sustained outside of this initial month.)

For both goals, I was successful:

I managed to read every night before falling asleep, although on nights spent with company, my wife and I went to bed later, and I kept this reading brief. I will strive to continue this habit, especially when I approach the month when my project focuses on sleep itself. Books beat screens for improving sleep quality.

In terms of breadth, I was also successful. In particular, I focused on two books I have wanted to read that kept getting pushed out of my queue by more “important” books:

The Count of Monte Cristo. This is my all-time favorite novel. I’ve read it at least three times, and last summer I started listening to it as an audiobook in French. Given this month’s focus, I restarted where I left off and have nearly reach the end.Journey to the West. This Chinese classic has been sitting on my shelf since my first trip to China, but the Chinese text was too difficult for me. I’ve surrendered a couple times when attempting to read it in the original Chinese, only making it through a few pages at a time. Now, I’ve decided to read it in English first, following Anthony Yu’s unabridged translation.

Both books are excellent, but they’re hardly quick reads. The unabridged audiobook for Monte Cristo is nearly 50 hours long, and Yu’s translation runs nearly 2000 pages. Thus, in an ironic twist, the month focused on reading is probably the one in which I finished the fewest total books!

Reading about Reading: Notes on Five Books

In addition to my literary excursions, I read five books about reading for this month’s research, two of which were re-reads. This is a lot less than I normally read for Foundations each month. Part of this was owing to the amount of time I took to read longer books that were off-topic, as mentioned earlier. But a bigger part was simply that I have already read a ton of books on this topic as part of researching my latest book, so I didn’t feel compelled to research the topic as aggressively as I do the subjects that are new to me.

1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

First, some quick takeaways from this month’s research:

Reading relies on brain mechanisms that evolved to do different jobs, that are recycled to be applied to the evolutionarily-recent task of reading.Despite differences in scripts, reading in Chinese, English and Italian all use basically the same brain circuitry.Reading speed is mechanically and psychologically limited. Speed reading doesn’t work, and the upper limit on reading (without skimming or skipping stuff) is probably around 500 words per minute for most people.Knowledge is the biggest driver of comprehension and memory. The more you know the more you’ll remember from what you read. Ultimately this, not speed, is probably the biggest factor separating people who easily read dozens of books in a month and those who find one or two to be arduous.Reading is a virtuous cycle. In keeping with my fourth point, if you read more, you know more, which makes further reading easier and more enjoyable. Reading well comes from reading lots.Notes on Five Books1. The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham

I first read this when it came out. Now, having done a lot more background research on reading, I can appreciate just how good a job Willingham does in covering the basic cognitive science of reading.

Willingham carefully articulates the current standard model for how reading works, from moving your eyes, to decoding letters on the page, to the dual routes of sounding out words while accessing irregular ones through a mental lexicon, assembling words into propositions, determining what a book says and, finally, what it actually means. Along the way, he dispels many myths and misconceptions about this process held by educators and readers alike.

My favorite part of this book was Willingham’s discussion of how limited our field of vision is—and how unaware we are of this. Researchers using eye-tracking software transformed a page of text to replace every character outside a narrow range of vision with the letter “X”, quickly updating the display every time a person’s eye moved. Not only did this change have no effect on reading speed—subjects didn’t even realize there was anything strange about the text!

Truly, the things most familiar to us contain some of the greatest surprises.

2. How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren

This classic has long been recommended to me, but it never made its way out of my book queue. I figured this month was as good a time as any to actually finish it.

The book is well-argued. It articulates a demanding form of “analytical” reading to be applied to the close reading of particular books. The authors argue from the point of view of a reader determining, solely from his or her own efforts and without relying on external commentary, what a book means.

On the one hand, it’s hard to fault much of the advice given in the book, which I found beneficial. And it certainly helped me reflect on my own research process which mirrors the “syntopical” reading they discuss near the end.

And yet, through my research over the past few years, I’ve become more inclined to believe in the “knowledge-centric” view of reading competency rather than the “skills-based” view, especially in light of educational evidence that excessive reliance on skills training has pretty sharp diminishing returns and that what students generally need most is more knowledge.


Still, I think Adler and Van Doren’s book is a classic for a reason, and it outlines a useful strategy for tackling books that might otherwise seem too daunting even to consider.

3. How to Read a Paper by Trisha Greenhalgh

I first read this when embarking on my research project for my first book, Ultralearning. While aimed at medical practitioners, the advice in this book is useful to anyone who wants to make sense of, or apply recommendations from, quantitative research.

There’s a danger in becoming halfway educated on a topic and, as someone who is halfway educated about many things, I’m well aware of the risks. It’s all too easy to see a study cited or read a single book and feel like that’s the end of the story on a contentious topic. It rarely is.

Still, I think we live in a media ecosystem which increasingly requires us to understand scientific work in order to evaluate claims in health, education, politics and beyond. In short, we’re all unavoidably doing the kind of amateur research that often backfires into overconfidence in shoddy opinions.

From this perspective, I think Greenhalgh’s book should be mandatory reading for everyone. She outlines the right way to think about published research. As Richard Feynman once remarked, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Knowing how to read a paper cannot substitute for years of study, but perhaps it can help you avoid fooling yourself.

4. Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

A good complement to Willingham’s The Reading Mind, this book, authored by one of the leading neuroscientists in his field, covers the neuroscientific perspective on reading.

It was from this book I learned the surprising fact that nearly all readers, in all languages, read in nearly the same way. I found this surprising because of my time spent learning Chinese, which has a script that seems utterly unrelated to the alphabetic code we use in most European languages.

5. Why Read? by Mark Edmundson

A stirring apologia for the humanities, Why Read? provides perhaps the best rationale I’ve heard for reading more (and better) fiction.

Edmundson is critical of critics, those literary types that tackle a great book with excessive theorizing, close reading, psychoanalysis and other forms of dissection that, to him, serve to show off the analytical skills of the reader rather than the purpose of great literature. And what is the point of reading great literature? To be changed by it. To have the themes and descriptions give you tools for deciding how to live. This sort of explanation would have caused me to raise my eyebrows not too long ago. Wouldn’t it be easier to read philosophy, which directly tackles such questions, rather than an entertaining work that merely reaches them obliquely? The idea that someone could read The Iliad and derive from it a way of life borders upon the absurd. (The epic, you shall recall, begins with Achilles’ temper tantrum over the forfeiture of his war-won sex slave.)

Yet, I think Edmundson did a good job arguing his point. Stories are felt in ways that arguments are not. Reading The Count of Monte Cristo in my youth did more to shape my feelings about the idea of committing to a long and patient plan than any rational analysis about such an approach did.

Therefore, while I think direct instruction and books that plainly tackle one’s questions are the best way to answer them, I think good literature and philosophy can help you ask better questions of your life in the first place. For that, they deserve a place in your library for more than mere entertainment.

_ _ _

That’s it for this month. Next month, my focus is shifting to Outreach, the first foundation for maintaining and building connections with more people. I’ll share some thoughts on that in the next update!

_ _ _

P.S. – Quick Update on Fitness

I decided to redo my original fitness test from ~5 months ago. Some progress:

1.5 mile run test. Original: 11 minutes. Now: 9 minutes, 20 seconds. (Estimated VO2 max: 47.4 → 55.3 mL/kg*min.)Consecutive pull-ups. Original: 3. Now: 10.Consecutive push-ups. Original: 24. Now: 49.

The post Reflections on a Month for Reading appeared first on Scott H Young.

Just Trust the Experts

Last month, I shared the reading list from my month-long effort to better understand nutrition. After reading about a dozen books (including two textbooks), I frankly admit there’s a lot I still don’t know. And also, I feel like I gained a decent understanding of the current mainstream scientific perspective.

Predictably, and disappointingly, a lot of the replies I got to that article looked something like this:

“But have you read so-and-so? They wrote a book explaining why the experts are all wrong!”

It’s predictable because it’s easy to see how ideology, misinformation, and the complexity and uncertainty of doing fundamental science make nutrition one of the more contentious fields out there.

However, it’s also disappointing because none of the readers I spoke with seemed to disagree with me that their favored stance wasn’t reflected in the dominant scientific perspective—they simply thought the dominant scientific perspective was wrong.

This, to me, reflects a more fundamental disagreement I have with those readers—not one of nutritional advice1 but of how we should form beliefs in the first place.

My fundamental worldview is that:

If you want to have more true beliefs, you should simply believe the experts who study the topic, most of the time.

In short, if you want to have an accurate worldview, you should avoid being a contrarian almost all of the time and simply accept whatever people who have studied a topic extensively think about it.

Why We Should Believe Experts

The rationale for defaulting to believing experts in almost all cases is simple:

An expert is, by definition, a smart person who knows a lot about a topic.The typical expert has more true opinions than the typical non-expert because they have more knowledge with which to form an opinion.The most common expert opinion is even more accurate than the typical expert. This is because each expert has a different subset of all available knowledge on a topic, so the average view is a better “best guess” than any individual’s opinion.The majority expert opinion may be wrong. But contrarian opinions are even more likely to be wrong. The value of this perspective is probabilistic: expert consensus will fail sometimes, but it fails less often than the contrarian alternative. It is therefore a strong default presumption to hold.

I forget exactly where I first heard this argument, but I find the logic difficult to reject. Experts are more accurate than non-experts. The expert consensus2 is more accurate than any particular expert.

Despite the logic of this argument, the advice simply to believe the dominant scientific viewpoint on an issue has a lot of dissenters. Indeed, even though we could easily recognize its accuracy, if a viewpoint doesn’t “feel” right, isn’t it kind of brainless to just accept whatever some group of experts tells us to think? Shouldn’t you make up your own mind and come to your own conclusions?

Objections to Simply Trusting Expertise

There are many objections to the anti-contrarian epistemology I’m supporting here, and I’d like to review a few of them. While I do think some of these arguments can be legitimate, they need be invoked carefully. Successful contrarianism is like successful gambling—possible in theory, but it frequently leads to losing your shirt.

1. “Experts ignore X.”

The most common cry of the skeptic is that the experts ignore valuable evidence. In this view, because the expert opinion fails to sample some part of the useful knowledge needed to form an opinion, the conclusions aren’t to be trusted.

This is undoubtedly true, but I would argue it is a virtue rather than a vice. A lot of seeming evidence isn’t reliable for forming conclusions, and simpler theories often lead to better explanations than ones that try to account for everything.

A physicist may assume an object is a perfectly rigid cube lying on a frictionless plane. A nutritionist may simplify foods into a collection of chemicals. An economist may assume people behave as rational utility-maximizing agents.

The omissions made by these models are not haphazard—experts themselves debate about which factors are important. Models and theories must necessarily be simpler than reality; a map as large as the territory it describes would be useless.

Claiming that a body of expertise is wrong because it systematically ignores some factor is simply a restatement of the contrarian claim that “factor X is important, but mainstream expert opinion says it isn’t.” In other words, this argument doesn’t work on its own. You’d need an additional explanation for why experts ignore X, even though it is evidently important.

2. “Experts are biased.”

Although my rationale for believing experts is based on the idea that experts are simply smart people who know a lot about a topic, that isn’t quite accurate. In reality, experts are social groups that carefully draw boundaries between members and non-members.

This social reality influences expertise, and anyone who has spent time with experts can attest to how much social factors influence which beliefs take root in expert communities.

If researchers are ideologically committed to a particular position, or they find certain conclusions of their research unpalatable for non-epistemic reasons, or even if they are disproportionately drawn from a group that is likely to hold strong prior beliefs, these can all be reasons to question expert conclusions.


As an example, I find it difficult to wholeheartedly accept a lot of the science done by meditation or psychedelic researchers. These fields have a selection effect where many of the researchers begin with strong beliefs that those things ought to work, so there’s a greater chance of finding false positive effects for the usual reasons science can go wrong.3

However, while bias is real and potentially a ground for legitimate contrarianism, we must also turn the mirror on ourselves. We, too, have biases that predispose us to be favorable to some perspectives rather than others. Casually discarding expert opinion because of bias is the pot calling the kettle black. If you’re going to dismiss the majority opinion of a field because of bias, you need strong evidence that you yourself are more likely to be impartial—a high bar that few contrarians can surmount.

3. “Those experts are fake.”

Perhaps the biggest indictment of a field is simply to decry that the brand of expertise they practice is fake. If the knowledge the field has amassed is utter garbage, then there’s no real reason for believing any of the claims it makes.

This claim is easiest to see with the benefit of hindsight. Of course scholastics who believed in Aristotle’s four-elements theory of physics were fake. Of course doctors who used blood letting and leeches as cure-alls were fake. Of course alchemists, astrologers and fortune-tellers are fake. We see those fields, and the knowledge they accumulated, as largely worthless enterprises today—the average person would have been better off staying at home than visiting a doctor who would likely bleed them to death for a minor ailment.

Of course, the idea that economics, theoretical physics, finance, nutrition, cognitive science or social psychology are fake fields with fake expertise is popular among contrarians of all stripes. After all, if you can reject the legitimacy of experts, you can discount their consensus opinions wholesale.

I’m sympathetic to this claim. Like most people, I have my preferences for evidence and my hierarchy of fields I’m willing to believe more strongly—and those I’m more likely to roll my eyes at.

But, the argument for believing specific claims of expert opinion extends to believing in specific fields of expertise. Intellectual life doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Different groups of experts all vie for supremacy on most topics—there are many questions that are simultaneously tackled by social psychologists, economists, anthropologists and humanities scholars. If an intellectual argument clearly “wins” in the court of opinion among intelligent observers, then that field gets a larger share of the intellectual marketplace and the less-successful intellectual group withers.

Indeed, the reason it’s easier to point to past groups of experts as being clearly fake is because their paradigms did not survive the intellectual evolutionary process. Alchemy was outcompeted by chemistry. Aristotle’s theory was outcompeted by Newton’s. Modern evidence-based medicine outcompeted bloodletting and folk remedies.

In short, the rationale for accepting the legitimacy of a field are the same as the rationales for accepting a specific claim made within a field: If there were a better, more intellectually satisfying approach, the likelihood is that the better approach would dominate the current paradigm—from another community of experts if not from within.

4. “Trusting experts is intellectually lazy. You should review the evidence and come to your own conclusions.”

A final objection doesn’t rest on the weakness of expert opinion, rather on the supposed intellectual vice that simply trusting experts creates. In this view, being the kind of person who follows along with the mainstream consensus is cowardly and lazy: you should bravely think for yourself—even if you sometimes get the wrong answer.

But this, to me, is a fundamental misconception. Trusting expertise is not an intellectually simple task. It takes enormous work to bring your worldview even partly in line with what experts think. Deep understanding requires you to review much of the knowledge that experts possess—hardly a task for the intellectually lazy.

Instead, it’s typically the reflexive contrarians who are intellectually lazy. They would prefer to read one flashy book that supports a worldview they are already predisposed to believe rather than wade through multiple dense textbooks that slowly build the consensus perspective.

Simply parroting the conclusions of experts is not enough. To really understand an expert conclusion, you need to develop for yourself the mental models used to generate it. That’s hard work. It’s why getting an advanced degree in a field takes so long—mastering the tools and models needed to accurately simulate the expert opinion in a wide range of scenarios within a single field takes years, and that must happen before the student can do their own meaningful work in that field.

Truly smart contrarianism not only has to articulate an opposing view, but provide a deep explanation for why that viewpoint is not widely accepted by other smart people with similar knowledge. Few experts in a given field ever reach this position, never mind casual readers commenting on a topic outside of their specialty.

Some Final, Moderating Factors

My original advice was:

If you want to have more true beliefs, you should simply believe the experts who study the topic, most of the time.

I would add a few moderating factors to that generalization:

1. Experts can tell you what to believe—not how strongly to believe it.


The quality of evidence used to form expert beliefs varies widely. Despite this, experts, on the whole, are highly confident of their own opinions. Since making decisions in life depends on not only what the “best guess” beliefs are, but how likely they are to be correct, this lack of calibration is a problem for my simple model of trusting experts.

I have much more faith in basic physics than basic nutrition, for instance. I would be extremely surprised if the principles of quantum mechanics turned out to be wrong, but it wouldn’t shock me if nutritional researchers flip-flopped on the link between saturated fat and heart disease.

This lack of confidence calibration means that while it’s not usually justified to say, “the experts are all wrong, you should believe X instead,” it’s not always incorrect to say, “the experts are wrong, you shouldn’t have any opinion on X.” Skepticism of the expert view in shaky fields is consistent with the position I’m advocating for, even if true skepticism (rather than ardent belief in even more dubious propositions) is quite rare.

2. If your goal isn’t to maximize true beliefs, contrarianism can be justified.

Somewhat ironically, the individual experts aren’t necessarily incentivized to maximize the truth value of their beliefs. Expert consensus is a kind of smudgy, bland version of a particular worldview; it’s what’s left after averaging out of all sorts of unique or unusual perspectives.

In contrast, a scientist or pundit aims not just to be right about the stuff everyone already agrees on, but to be surprisingly correct—to hold a belief that later turns out to be perceived as more plausible, thus changing the consensus viewpoint.

Indeed, this may even be a good thing. An intellectual environment where all experts followed my “just trust the experts” maxim would result in excessive conformity of opinion, making bias more likely. We should want to live in a world where experts don’t agree, and instead debate each other, as this raises the average quality of their opinions.4

An analogy is investing. The average investor is better off putting their money in a low-cost index fund rather than picking stocks. Most investors (including professionals) fail to beat the market consistently. And yet, we do want at least some amount of (mostly deluded) contrarians trying to actively beat the market, since it is this very activity that determines values in the market.

Final Thoughts

While I first heard this argument for believing expertise ages ago, I don’t think its logic alone is what made me attempt to follow it more rigorously in my life.

Instead, it’s the experience of having been persuaded by a contrarian expert, being fully convinced and, years later, being dissuaded from those original views as I encountered more evidence. And unlike the boy who touched the fire, it took being burned more than a few times before I developed the reflex.

While I doubt this argument will bring any dyed-in-the-wool contrarians or conspiracy theorists to my worldview, I do hope it will nudge a few people into giving more weight to the dominant expert perspective, and a bit less weight to the voices of persuasive-sounding contrarians.

Because, ultimately, having true beliefs does matter. Your beliefs inform how you invest, eat, build your career, raise your kids and take care of your health. And if your fundamental worldview isn’t optimized for gathering true beliefs, you’re bound to make mistakes.

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Reading – Day One Update

I’m just beginning the fifth month of my year-long Foundations project.1 The focus for this month is reading. In case you’re interested, here are the previous months’ content:

Fitness: Start, End, Books.Productivity: Start, End, Books.Money: Start, End, Books.Food: Start, End, Books.

I picked this focus as one of the twelve because I believe a regular habit of reading, particularly from books, is one of the best foundational habits you can have in life. It’s also one that people do less frequently than they used to: most adults read fewer books than they did in decades past, no doubt a trend caused by the rise of smartphones.

However, reading books is something I’m fairly good at. I’ve regularly read at least 10 books for each month of this project so far, typically including at least two college-level textbooks for each topic. While my reading volume tends to go up and down depending on my projects, I can easily read a hundred books in a year when such reading is central to my work.

Therefore, my personal goals for the month will be a little different than the habit I’m encouraging other people to build this month, which is to always have a book. I’ll touch on this general recommendation more at the end of this post, but otherwise I’m focusing here on what I’m doing in the month ahead.

Two Goals: Bedtime Reading and Increased Breadth

I have two goals for this month. The first is to get into a regular habit of reading before going to sleep. I do this sometimes, but not consistently. My hope here isn’t to increase my reading volume, rather I want to use the habit to encourage better (and earlier) sleep.

I’m not setting a minimum threshold for bedtime reading, since that would quickly become a burden if I stay up later than usual owing to social events. But I think having the habit of reading before sleep, even if only for a minute, will encourage me to wind down faster than looking at a screen.

My second goal for the month is to spend more time reading books outside of my usual non-fiction focus. While I enjoy literature and off-topic non-fiction books, they definitely take a back seat when I’m working on a research project. I probably won’t be able to sustain this breadth as I shift to future months, but I will use this month to plan some longer-term reading lists in areas I read less than I’d like.

Here are some of the categories of books I’d like to read more of:

Classic literature. Ever since reading Hirsch’s book arguing for cultural literacy, I’ve been encouraged to expand my reading with more classic works of fiction.Religious works. I’m not religious, but I think religion is a topic worth reading more of both for its cultural significance and its lessons for everyday life.History. I’ve read quite a few biographies, often while researching for my books, but I’m less well-informed about a lot of history on its own. Given that history knowledge tends to be voluminous, I’d like to make some efforts to expand here.Books in other languages. I don’t do nearly as much conversation practice in other languages as I used to; it was one of the necessary sacrifices I made to save time when I became a parent. But reading more in the languages I want to maintain is easier to fit in and something I’d like to cultivate.

I already have some books in each of these topics, probably more than enough for the month ahead, but I’ll use this month to prepare some longer-term lists, so I’ll have more books to choose from when those initial ideas run out.

AHAB: Always Have A Book

The keystone habit I’m encouraging people in my Foundations course to cultivate for this month is simpler than my personal goals. It comes from the observation that a major obstacle to reading more is simply not having anything you’re excited to read right now.

The practice to solve this can be summarized in a simple acronym AHAB, or “Always Have A Book.”

The goal is to have a book you’re interested in reading with you at all times. This doesn’t mean you need to lug around large paperbacks with you everywhere you go. With Kindle and Audible apps, you can now keep an entire library on your smartphone.

Setting this up means getting quite a few books—either buying them or borrowing them from a local library.

It also means prioritizing books you’re keenly interested in reading. A common mistake people trying to read more make is trying to finish whatever boring book they’ve already started. Then, because they don’t actually want to read it, they spend more time on social media.

If you’re already a voluminous reader, you can challenge yourself with harder books. But if you don’t regularly read at least one book per month, I encourage you to build a habit of picking books you enjoy and not feeling even a twinge of guilt about failing to finish any book that no longer interests you.

I’ve long practiced the AHAB habit, but even I slip occasionally. I’ll have periods where I have a few paper books, but no Kindle books—which means I check the news on my phone rather than read. Or I don’t have an audiobook I’m listening to—which means I can’t listen to anything other than music or podcasts even if I want to listen to a book.

Therefore, as part of my own challenge, I’m aggressively stocking all of my go-to book places, so I have plenty of books ready at my office, nightstand, Kindle app and Audible.

As an aside, I’m also hoping to use this month to relax a little bit in the project. The start of the Foundations course, plus the research-heavy food and money months, made my workload a little high over the previous two months. Since I’ve spent the last several years of my life reading books about learning, my reading-about-reading book list will probably be a little lighter this month, and I’ll use that downtime to read or listen to more off-topic books.

As always, I’ll share how this focus went for me at the end of the month, as well as some of the books I enjoyed.

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

Food – Month-End Update

I’m wrapping up the fourth month in my year-long foundations project. This month, my focus was on food. You can also read my opening update, and my book notes for the month. Previous months centered on fitness, productivity and money.

You can also watch my wife’s and my conversation about how this month in the ongoing project went:

Eating Better and Healthier

This month was a bit unusual because I made most of the changes I wanted to make to my eating habits during the fitness month, which was the first month of my year-long project. Although I read a lot more and deepened my knowledge of many of the aspects of nutrition I was unclear on, behaviorally speaking, I was already pretty happy with my eating habits when this month began.

My focus for the month, then, was on tracking my food intake. In particular, I was curious to see how my actual eating habits conformed to both dietary guidelines and my own subjective sense of how healthy I have been eating.

As an experiment, I found tracking my food intake for the month to be informative. In terms of nutritional information, I learned:

I almost always get more than the minimum recommendation for fiber.I’m typically under the threshold for saturated fat.I consume more sodium than I should. I’m typically over, and this may be an undercount as my tracking might have missed some added salt in home-cooked dishes.My protein intake is above the DRIs, but can be lower than what is considered optimal for strength training if I’m not intentional about including it in every meal.

I would have liked to learn more about micronutrients in my diet, but the software I used couldn’t track these well. Too few foods reliably list things like omega-3 or other micronutrient content to really know whether my diet, which abstains from red meat, is low on zinc or iron, for instance.

In addition to nutritional information, I also got a lot of behavioral data:

I tended to overconsume food when eating at restaurants or having guests over and cooking large dinners. When I cooked my own food and ate with my family, eating moderate portion sizes was pretty easy to do.I don’t drink often, but drinks caught me off guard for empty calories.Some of My Early Results

Of course, most people don’t track food intake to gain insight; they track to lose weight. I wasn’t aiming to lose a lot of weight this month, but the app I used (MacroTracker) required it to set up the goals. Despite my ambivalence about sticking to the calories it recommended, I did end up adhering most of the time and lost about 4 lbs. from the start of the month.

While I mostly credit the fitness and dietary changes I started four months ago, rather than the specific efforts of this month, I’m quite happy with my progress in my overall body composition. I’m now around 165 lbs., down from a peak of around 178 lbs. shortly before the project started.

I haven’t been consistent in measuring my waistline, but that has shifted too: it started around 37” sometime during the first month of the project and is around 33” now. Given I’m in the “healthy” BMI range, I’m going to pay more attention to this metric over the long-term, since muscle gains and losses will blur any effect of weight loss per se.

It’s nice to be a bit leaner, closer to my college-era weight than I have been for the last several years, but I’m also doing my best to not fixate on it. I’m chastened by the pessimistic data on weight regain, so I’d rather focus on sustaining health and fitness over the long-term.

Why I’m Not Tracking Long-Term

While my experiment with tracking food was informative, it’s not a behavior I want to sustain in the future. Tracking was annoying in the beginning, but now it’s fairly well-automated as a habit, so I don’t find the act of tracking to be the main problem. Instead, I think tracking what I ate had a few unwanted side effects that distracted me from how I’d really like to eat:

Tracking encourages you to eat easy-to-track foods rather than healthy foods. While tracking discourages some poor food choices, such as junk food with a lot of calories, I find it also subtly encourages eating foods with nutritional labels, which ends up increasing processed foods rather than whole foods.Tracking encourages a focus on calories (or macros) rather than other aspects of nutritional quality. This could be a side-effect of the app I was using, but I found that gamifying things like calorie count or grams of protein/fat/carbs encourages you to use that lens for viewing nutrition—but this approach wasn’t really supported by my overall research. Such an emphasis encourages you to see whole wheat bread and white bread as being basically the same nutritionally, when they’re really worlds apart.Tracking encourages paying attention to numbers rather than internal sensations. The month of tracking gave me renewed appreciation for the more mindful way of eating I had been following the previous three months. When you focus on calories, you eat more when you have “room” and you hold back, even though you’re hungry, when you’re over. This may be good if you’re struggling with overeating, but I found it discouraged me from listening to my own sensations of hunger and satiety, instead taking the app for ground truth.

While the research on tracking tends to be fairly positive in terms of its overall effectiveness, for the sake of my diet long-term, I’m going to focus on generally eating high nutritional quality food, being as physically active as possible and being mindful that I’m eating enough—not too much or too little.

Food, Beyond Nutrition

I’m leaving this month feeling good about how I eat. One disappointment from the month was that the act of tracking preoccupied more of my time than anticipated, so I feel like the month ended up being more about nutrition (and less about other aspects of food) than I had initially intended. I had wanted to also focus on cooking more, exploring new recipes and finding more ways to make healthier eating more satisfying on a regular basis.

Now that I’m taking a pause on tracking, I think I’ll be able to resume some of these other aspirations, and I’ll certainly get to revisit them when this essay gets published and I’m working on this foundation along with everyone in the Foundations course.

Overall, I’m satisfied with how this month went. I gained some insight into my eating habits, recommitted myself to the changes I started four months ago, and even managed to lose a few pounds.

Update on Fitness, Productivity and Money

Some quick updates on my continued progress in the previous three foundations I covered:

For fitness, I continued to make major strides. I did two long runs of 21km, a half-marathon distance, and by far my longest runs ever. I can now do 9 pull-ups in a row, compared to 3 when I started. I’m still below my peak strength on major lifts, but I’m inching closer.

For productivity, I can’t say that much has changed. I’m better at tracking and coordinating a lot of non-work related tasks with my wife, but time is still limited, and staying on top of low-priority chores is still hard. I’m accepting that there will always be more to do than time to do it in, and trying to feel good about what I am able to accomplish.

For money, I’m actually a little behind with my monthly expense tracking. This was largely a side-effect of creating a new tracking template and thus needing to go through and relabel the past year of transactions before moving forward. Given I’ve been tracking my expenses for nearly two decades already, I’m not too concerned, but I’m hoping to get caught up.

This month was also incredibly busy. Because I write these updates three months before we cover each topic in the class and they are published here, this was also (for me) the first month of the Foundations course with the new students. I love teaching, but it definitely adds to my workload compared to just doing a solitary project. Additionally, my wife broke her foot which forced a reorganization of many of our day-to-day habits and childcare tasks.

Next month’s focus will be on reading, a foundation I’m already quite content with, so I’m hoping it will act as a little bit of a breather on my end.

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Life of Focus Is Now Open for a New Session

Life of Focus, the three-month training program I co-instruct with Cal Newport (author of Deep Work), is now open for a new session. We will be holding registration until Friday, January 31st, 2025 (midnight, Pacific time). 

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to join

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Lesson Four: How Life of Focus Works

On Monday, Cal Newport and I are reopening Life of Focus for a new session. Before we do that, I’d like to take this chance to explain how Life of Focus works—since it is a little different from what most people have come to expect from online courses—and share how I think about designing courses to encourage behavior change.

The classic course is all about providing information. There’s a syllabus with a list of content; a bunch of lectures where the ideas, facts and concepts are conveyed; and finally, there’s an exam to test if you remember everything you were taught.

There’s nothing wrong with this model for many subjects. In many fields, information is what’s missing, so taking some time to learn is the best action.

However, from nearly two decades developing online courses, I’ve often been disappointed with how the classic approach to structuring a course translates to action. The problem is that a lot of information, on its own, rarely translates to concrete behavioral change. A course on nutrition, for instance, will give you tons of useful concepts and ideas about eating better—but it may not actually change how you eat, which is the ultimate goal of most people.

When Cal Newport and I started designing Life of Focus, we knew this was going to be a potential issue in our course. Cal had recently published Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. Most of our prospective students had either read these books or followed Cal’s blog or podcast and were already familiar with his calls for increasing focus in work and life.

We knew that people attending the course didn’t need more exhortations to turn off their email when doing deep work or lessons about the neuroscience of attentional processing. Instead, we designed the course to guide them through specific steps to create new working behaviors, and to have follow-through so those behaviors could become lifelong habits.

The Format of an Action-Centered Course

As a result of this, Life of Focus (and my more recent course, Foundations) follows a different model than what we typically think of as a course.

To start, the course is organized into three monthly challenges. Rather than putting the lessons first with the homework as an optional bonus (let’s face it, most people who take online courses rarely do the assignments), we put taking action to improve our focus first, and then provide regular lessons to remind and reinforce those actions as they are already underway.

The three challenges for Life of Focus are:

Tracking your deep work hours Conducting a digital declutter, and Engaging in a focus-building project to make or learn something new.

As another inversion to the typical course format, we start each month with a guided worksheet. This helps students come up with step-by-step actions they can take to begin each month-long challenge with the best footing. Only once students start working on the challenge do we start providing lessons to fine-tune, remind, motivate and redirect students as they go through the month.

On top of this, we add a lot of direct community support and coaching so students can quickly address sticking points as they come up, before they fall off the challenge or get discouraged.

In brief, the format of Life of Focus is more like a personal trainer at the gym than a university class on exercise science. By encouraging action from the get-go, the lessons and feedback support behavioral changes as you’re making them.

While Cal and I were unsure how such a novel course format would work with students, we have been pleasantly surprised, and many students have told us Life of Focus is their favorite course they’ve taken with us. Many students have even taken the course multiple times since they first enrolled, treating second and third passes as a chance to further refine their process using the three-month structure it provides.

Life of Focus Opens Monday

I wanted to explain this course format because, in running this course and others over the last few years, I’ve forgotten how different this approach can be for many people. It can be hard to explain why joining a structured three-month program to improve focus is different than simply reading a book or listening to podcasts. But our focus on taking action first, and then supporting that action with learning, is designed to help our students make real changes—not just think about making them.



I hope you’ll join us on Monday so you can see it for yourself!

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