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The Key Lessons from 10 Important Books on Productivity

I’m nearing the end of the second month of my Foundations project—a year-long effort to improve twelve different foundations for living well. This month’s focus was productivity. If you’re curious, you can read my essays on the first month, fitness, here, here and here.

Next week, I’ll share some of my reflections on the month, but this essay is devoted to what I learned from my reading. Each month, I’m doing a deep dive into some important books and research on each topic. This month, I finished ten books.

Productivity is a familiar topic for me. I read most of the classic books on the topic years ago. Before starting my second book, I even briefly flirted with writing another Complete Guide on the topic and spent a couple of months researching the roots of the thinking in this area. As a result, a lot of the books I tackled this month were re-reads—books that were major influences in my youth and which I wanted to view again from a fresh perspective.

The 1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

Here are the basic takeaways from this month’s research:

Enthusiasm is the key to productivity. Happy workers are productive workers. Stress as a vehicle for producing great work is overrated.

Productivity is a key to happiness. Despite productivity’s much-maligned image as a metric of capitalist oppression—most people want to contribute meaningful work and to feel effective in their professional lives.

Managing energy and motivation beats managing time. We treat ourselves like machines, rather than biological systems, ignoring the importance of recovery.

Simple cognitive scaffolding can significantly enhance results. Checklists and simple tools for tracking work can offload the psychic burden of work, freeing us up for exceptional performance.

How much you work is a personal choice based on priorities. Regardless, productivity should be a central aim since it is, at its core, about aligning our human needs with our desire to do meaningful work.

Brief Notes on the 10 Books I Read

My favorite book was a re-read: Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Despite the somewhat cheesy title and folksy way Covey writes, this book is a profound meditation on what it means to be an effective person and how we should strive to live.

For those interested in a practical system that can deliver immediate results, you can’t go wrong with David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Re-reading this book was a pleasure, as it has enormously influenced my thinking about productivity.

Finally, for an entertaining read that has immediate value, I suggest Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto.

1. Getting Things Done by David Allen

Getting Things Done is a cult hit among productivity junkies for a reason: this system forever changes how you think about getting work done.

The central idea is to create a full-capture system in which all of your tasks, appointments, ideas and projects reside so you can fully focus on your work and not be distracted by worrying about whether you’re forgetting something.

2. The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

Managing energy, not time, is the key to peak performance. We should work the way athletes train, oscillating between periods of intense focus and deep recovery.

The opposite pattern, linearity, is more common in our working lives. We’re expected to perform continuously, without rest, for days, weeks and even years. Our foundations of energy begin to crumble as we feel crushed by the burdens placed upon us.

The solution is to redesign all the aspects of our lives, from fitness and diet to our purpose and life’s goals, so that we can adopt more natural rhythms that allow us to maintain high levels of energy and enthusiasm.

3. The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker

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

Peter Drucker is the guru’s guru on productivity. He coined the term “knowledge worker,” and pretty much every idea about working effectively in modern society can be traced, directly or indirectly, to his thinking. I enjoyed re-reading this book, whose central ideas of tracking your time, focusing on your contribution (rather than the work), and emphasizing strengths remain relevant today.

4. The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer

Harvard professors Amabile and Kramer conducted a large study looking at tens of thousands of daily work diaries of employees in several firms and industries. They concluded that a positive inner work life is essential to workplace performance and that, in turn, the feeling of progress is the most important ingredient in a positive inner work life.

This may seem obvious, but in surveys, most managers ranked “supporting progress” dead last in the list of factors influencing morale, and many still hold to the view that high-pressure environments bring out the best performance.

5. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I’ve read a lot of Csikszentmihalyi’s academic work, so it was interesting to re-read his magnum opus on the role of optimizing conscious experience in the pursuit of the good life.



On the one hand, I find many of his examples and arguments persuasive. On the other hand, I feel like I understand flow less than when I started—since this concept appears to encompass not only the feeling of absorption while engaged in deep tasks and hobbies but also all sorts of other life conditions Csikszentmihalyi describes positively. Perhaps it’s just my expectations being violated here, but I had been under the impression that flow was a much more rigorously defined academic construct.

6. The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Checklists save lives. Yet many professionals resist using them, feeling that, as highly trained experts, something as simple as ticking off a box is beneath them.

Gawande argues persuasively that we need the cognitive safety net checklists provide precisely because we live in a time of such intensive expertise. Our work has become increasingly complicated, and following “best practices” perfectly is beyond the capabilities of even the smartest of us.

7. The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, Jim Huling, Beverly Walker and Scott Thele

Most business training is in strategy, but execution is what trips up most projects. 4DX is a great resource for how to make execution happen in big organizations—and for yourself. The four disciplines are:

Choose a single focus, a “wildly important goal” you’ll try to achieve above and beyond the day-to-day whirlwind of your working life.Track your progress on the goal. In particular, separate the lag measures you care about from lead measures you can actually influence.Put up a scoreboard so everyone can see your progress.Stay accountable through a weekly meeting where you see how you can make progress happen.

This book has an “in the trenches” feeling, covering many nuances that have come up in applying this framework to hundreds of organizations.

8. The Now Habit by Neil Fiore

Why do we procrastinate? Psychologist Fiore argues that the beliefs and self-talk we engage in keep otherwise top performers from consistently engaging in their best work. By rescripting our inner dialog, we can stop ourselves from destructively delaying doing the things we need to do.

I particularly like Fiore’s suggestion of an “unschedule” or booking, in advance, your guilt-free time off. Too often, we procrastinate, feel there isn’t enough time, and then commit ourselves to a hypothetical schedule of unending work. Yet this schedule is so unappealing that we unconsciously rebel and procrastinate on starting, thus exacerbating the underlying problems that caused us to propose the onerous schedule in the first place.

9. Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker

This book is quite short, more of a long essay rather than a book. (As more books should be.)

Perhaps the biggest takeaway I got was Drucker’s advice on managing the midlife crisis. He argues that a person who has reached the apex of their career, which often happens in one’s 40s, will likely feel bored. The solution, he argues, is to cultivate secondary hobbies and volunteer pursuits that will sustain engagement in the second half of life.

10. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Most books are clever. Few are wise. Covey’s is one of the latter.

I first read this book as a teenager. Perhaps because I now have children of my own, the interpersonal lessons in Covey’s book struck me as particularly relevant. Covey himself had nine children and frequently references parenting in his examples.

If there’s a central idea in this book, it is that being good precedes being great, and conducting yourself in ways that demonstrate true character must take priority over tactics that merely get a result.

Moralizing self-help is unfashionable these days. Perhaps it smells too much like organized religion, which has been undermined through culture-warring and the well-publicized failings of many organized sects. As a result, there’s a bias to present value-neutral tactical advice—strategies for achieving results that are agnostic to deeper motivations.

Maybe it’s just me getting older, but I’m increasingly convinced that doing what’s right and doing what’s effective cannot be separated, and that strategies to maximize our desires, without first asking whether those desires ought to be maximized, are ultimately self-defeating.

_ _ _

That’s it for my notes this month. Next week, I’ll provide a recap of how this month’s efforts to improve my productivity systems went, before I embark on the third foundation in my year-long project: money.

The post The Key Lessons from 10 Important Books on Productivity appeared first on Scott H Young.

Is Speaking Multiple Languages Overrated?

I’ve long been a fan of language learning. In college, I studied abroad for a year to learn French. Later, I spent a year traveling with a friend picking up Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and some Korean. I’ve learned a bit of my wife’s native language, Macedonian, and worked through some phrasebooks while traveling in Italy and Japan.

With advances in artificial intelligence and machine translation, it’s easy to wonder whether language learning still makes sense.

My answer is: For monolinguals who live within their own country and have no desire to travel or immerse themselves in a foreign culture—probably not. But I don’t think the cost-benefit calculation has changed much for those who want to or do spend considerable time in another culture. Automatic translators may help on a weekend stop in Paris, but they’re not an effective substitute for learning the language if you plan to live dans l’Hexagone.

Instead, I’d like to consider a different question. For a linguistic enthusiast, does it make more sense to learn one language or many?

Speaking Multiple Languages is Comparatively Overrated

Given my own investments in learning multiple languages, I’m going to play devil’s advocate today and argue why, despite the seeming appeal of speaking several tongues, most people are probably better off sticking to fewer.

1. Each language needs maintenance.

Benny Lewis was one of my first introductions to the online polyglot community, a group of people who are dedicated to learning multiple languages. Benny speaks about a dozen languages, but some people have gained a degree of fluency in thirty or more.

When I first met Benny, he had recently finished a stint in (I believe) Poland and had picked up some Polish over his three-month stay. I congratulated him on adding a new language to his repertoire, to which he replied, “Oh, but I’m not going to maintain it.”

To me, this seemed wild! How could he spend months learning a language and be so flippant about maintaining it?

Now, I realize I was being naive. Maintaining a language is hard work. Maintaining multiple languages is a lot of hard work.

Languages are enormously dependent on fluency, but fluency is the first thing that degrades if you aren’t using a language—even after intensive practice. Extensive practice over decades can help with this, as can intensive practice on high-frequency words. But the tip-of-the-tongue feeling that is an infrequent nuisance for native speakers becomes a source of constant frustration if you don’t practice regularly.

Maintaining multiple languages has all the difficulties of maintaining each language on its own, as well as adding the problem of interference.

To oversimplify, language learning is largely a process of building associations between an intended meaning and a linguistic form that communicates that meaning. But one of the most well-studied phenomena in memory research is that when you associate one input with two different responses (for example, apple is both “pomme” and “manzana”), it creates a lot of interference.

Interference tends to be more severe with speaking and writing than with listening or reading because language → meaning is a consistent mapping, whereas meaning → language varies depending on which language you’re trying to produce. Interference can be overcome through regular practice that alternates between languages. However, this type of practice significantly increases workload.

2. Lower proficiency is less valuable in non-immersive contexts.

All else being equal, the same amount of time split among several languages will result in a lower proficiency than if that time was invested in one.

This means that the choice isn’t usually between speaking one language perfectly or several languages perfectly; it’s between speaking one language better or multiple languages worse. My desire to learn multiple languages has definitely drained energy I could have spent mastering just one.

An observation I quickly made after my language learning trips was that while speaking the local language was beneficial at almost any level of ability, speaking a foreign language had limited uses at lower ability levels. The reason is simple: if you live in an English-speaking country, almost everyone knows some English, so to communicate with someone in a different language requires you to speak that language much better than they can speak English.1

This observation applies to more than just conversational ability. While living in Spain, being able to read menus and printed instructions in Spanish (which requires a fairly low level of fluency) is enormously useful. In contrast, outside of Spain, the situations that benefit from understanding Spanish are things like reading literature or watching international news clips—things that require a much higher level of ability to appreciate.

Now, the division of effort doesn’t imply that the division of proficiency is equal. You need to learn a relatively small set of words to move from not knowing a language to having simple conversations, but to move from intermediate to advanced levels of a language means massively expanding your vocabulary. How often words are used falls off in frequency according to a power law—with common words being used very frequently and less common words being used barely at all—but the effort needed to learn words is basically flat. Thus, going from intermediate to advanced levels of a language is much harder than getting to simple conversations from scratch.

That distinction notwithstanding, if you’re not planning on traveling frequently, knowing multiple languages is less useful at home than being more proficient in a single language.

3. Multiple languages make cohesive social networks harder.

When I came back from my year abroad in France, I gravitated towards other French exchange students both because of my recent cultural experience and a desire to practice French.

However, when I came home after spending a year learning multiple languages abroad, I realized it would be much harder to do the same thing with four languages. Finding friends who speak Mandarin, Korean, Spanish or Portuguese typically requires joining four completely different social groups.

Dedicated events, like meetups for particular languages, can get around this problem somewhat, but it’s just harder to get consistent practice in multiple languages with the frequency you might achieve if you focus on a single language.

One of the key rationales for Vat and my no-English rule was that semi-monolingual social bubbles tend to form naturally. If you move to a place where you don’t have a strong grasp of the local language, it’s easiest to create a social network of people who can speak your native language. This makes it much harder to spend a significant amount of time using the language you are trying to learn.

4. The bragging rights aren’t worth it.

I remember meeting a guy in college who spoke three languages. Three! That was really cool, I thought. Later, when I was in Europe, I met people who spoke four or five. That was even cooler! So I was surprised to realize that I basically never bring up my year-long trip to learn languages when I meet people. (Obviously, this blog, which centers around my learning projects, is different!)

Some of this might be because of maintenance headaches. I haven’t spoken Korean in probably a year, and while relearning is faster than starting fresh, it’s probably going to take me at least a few sessions before I can speak it comfortably again—and bragging about speaking languages that you cannot immediately produce is pretty weak.

But the bigger part is that bragging is generally overrated. Outside of job interviews or other social contexts where listing your accomplishments is expected, conspicuously bringing up personal accomplishments is not a great way to win friends.

Thus, I think any motivation to learn multiple languages has to come from within. If you’re just doing it to seem cool, you’re probably better off getting a tattoo.

Why Might Learning Multiple Languages Be Worth It?

That something is overrated doesn’t mean it’s without value—just that it’s likely worth less than the hype.

There are good reasons for learning multiple languages, and if I had to go back and do it again, I would still do the same projects:

Each new language opens more cultures and places to you. The motivation here is the same as wanting to travel and learn one language instead of just sticking with your mother tongue. Vat and I started with wanting to do a world trip—we added language learning later on.

For short-term travel, speaking poorly is often sufficient. Even low levels of ability are often appreciated by native speakers when you’re traveling. Thus, if your main goal is to travel a lot, learning a number of languages poorly may be more useful than mastering one.

You get a better understanding of languages, in general. Metalinguistic awareness may not be your cup of tea, but I’ve found that learning multiple languages has given me a much more generalized picture of languages and learning than I had when I had only learned French.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with learning multiple languages to a basic level and focusing on making more progress in one. This was what I decided to do with Mandarin Chinese after our trip—I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get to an upper-intermediate level in Chinese while I’ve been happy to stay at a fairly low level with Korean and Portuguese.

Do you speak multiple languages? Do you think it’s better to learn one or many? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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Productivity – Opening Update

Productivity is the second foundation in my year-long project (and course) to improve the universal elements essential to a good life.

As I write this, today is the first day of my month-long productivity challenge, although you’ll probably be reading this in the newsletter around a week later.1 I didn’t want to publish my month-end fitness update and my first-day productivity update back-to-back, even though that’s how I’m writing them. Here are some links in case you are interested in seeing my plans, results and notes from books I read during the first foundation.

Why Be Productive?

It’s a mistake to think of productivity as merely your ability to get things done at work. It’s an even bigger mistake to think of productivity as the speed of getting work done.

Instead, productivity is your capacity for doing the things you intend to do. That includes your work or studies—but it also includes your household and personal responsibilities, hobbies and interests, relationships and more. Anything you intend to do that actually gets done counts toward your productivity.

The mistake of focusing exclusively on work when we think about productivity is that it leads to a lopsided definition. Since only work output is being tracked, you can feel a kind of superficial sense of productivity simply by prioritizing work.

It’s even worse when we define productivity as the speed of work completed. This turns you into a widget cranker—someone who churns out material without giving thought to quality, importance or impact.

Taken broadly, however, productivity is an essential foundation. Having the capacity to do the things you intend to is a prerequisite for accomplishing any other goal.

My Productivity Strengths and Weaknesses

Productivity has been a central theme in my writing for this blog for almost two decades. Thus, you might think it should be something I’ve mastered, and I no longer need to think any more about it.

Unfortunately, foundations don’t really work that way. We all need tune-ups to our foundations every once in awhile. I’m no exception.

When I reflect on my past productivity, some strengths emerge:

I’m pretty good at getting important, challenging, long-term projects done. I’m self-motivated and good at sticking through intensive efforts, such as writing books or my full-time learning challenges.I rarely drop the ball when it comes to work tasks. It’s rare that I miss an important work email or forget to do a task that’s important for my working life.Most of the time, my working life is pretty low-stress. While my career has been punctuated with some more stressful periods, I generally don’t operate in crisis mode, and the vast majority of my attention is on projects chosen for sustaining the long-term growth of my professional life rather than firefighting.

But, in doing my review, I can also see some key weaknesses:

I’m bad at following through on low-priority errands, especially those that are not work-related. I delay dentist appointments and haircuts. I’ve been meaning to get a new family doctor for years, but haven’t done it. I let quick home-improvement projects, like hanging pictures or reorganizing drawers, linger for months without any decision about when to do them.I haven’t always been great at coordinating with my family over commitments. In my work, I have a system of calendars to automatically schedule appointments, to-do lists for my own work and tools for managing my staff. But I still need to check in frequently to confirm kids’ birthday parties or other non-work events scheduled by my wife.Additionally, there have been a number of more substantial home-improvement projects that linger, in part, because we haven’t assigned responsibility and priorities, preferring the, “oh yeah, we should probably get that fixed,” approach to dealing with household issues.

In short, while I’m good at focusing on the big stuff, particularly at work, tasks at the periphery or at home have often been less well organized.

Refurbishing My Productivity Systems

My plan for this month has two parts:

Make sure all tasks, commitments and ideas—no matter how peripheral—are recorded.Make sure those tasks are regularly reviewed.

I started by doing a full audit of my existing productivity systems. Some of them were falling apart—represented by lists full of outdated tasks I had either completed or decided not to do.

I think this reviewing problem is the weak link in the chain for household tasks. I’m often tired after working all day or busy with my kids, so I don’t even check to see what tasks need to be done. This is in contrast to my working life, where I’m frequently reviewing my outstanding to-do items and calendar.

In doing this audit, it became apparent that many of the tasks holding me up were ones I had recorded, but I had created too many lists, and the tasks were buried in lists I don’t review often.

The second weakness has to do with family responsibilities. I decided to separate these from my main to-do lists and make sure these are shared with my wife, with any bigger project clearly assigned to one of us. Additionally, I’ll set up a shared calendar so my wife can directly add family commitments or her appointments that require me to be with the kids, so there’s no additional step of me replicating these events on my personal calendar.

Finally, I decided to shift my overall list structure to be closer to David Allen’s GTD-centric setup of inbox/projects/next actions/someday lists, rather than my more ad-hoc system which allowed peripheral tasks to get shuttled into rarely-reviewed lists.

My Plan for the Month

All of this reorganization took me only a couple of hours. So, unlike the previous month’s keystone habit which necessitated an ongoing daily commitment of time and energy, this month’s scheduled time is essentially complete.

However, I think it’s a mistake to set up a new system and then, because the major work is finished, skip ahead to a new priority. I want to spend the next month being highly sensitive to what kinds of friction and difficulties I notice from the current setup. These kinds of systems usually degrade not by being totally unusable, but by being ever-so-slightly inconvenient or untrustworthy so that they end up falling into disuse.

Thus, in addition to reviewing each aspect of the system daily, I will be trying to implement small tweaks throughout the month that will make it more stable and useful in the long haul.

Want to Improve Your Productivity Foundation This Month?

Although I’m working on a lot of lessons for the students in the Foundations course, anyone reading this is free to join as well.

This month’s goal is to create a full-capture productivity system that will store and hold all the tasks, appointments, ideas and projects you’re working on. Then, spend the month monitoring it. If you’re unsure how to build such a system, David Allen’s Getting Things Done is perhaps the best book ever written on this topic, so I’d recommend you start there.

At the end of the month, I’ll provide some reflections on how this month went, as well as share some notes from the books I read (and re-read) on the subject of productivity.

The post Productivity – Opening Update appeared first on Scott H Young.

Fitness – Month-End Update

As I write this, I’m concluding the first month of my year-long foundations project.1 The first month’s foundation was fitness.

You can read my opening update here and my post covering all the books I read this month here. In this essay, I’ll be focusing on how the first month went for me personally, as well as my long-term plans in the future.

My wife and I also decided that we’d record some conversations about each month of the project as they progress. Feel free to watch on YouTube below, or listen on my podcast:

Exercising Every Day for One Month

The keystone habit for this month was to do at least thirty minutes of daily exercise. I’m happy to say that I was able to hit every day this month without exceptions.

Perfect attendance is always nice to strive for, but it’s also something you shouldn’t beat yourself up about if you can’t reach. It’s far better to be the kind of person who misses a day and gets right back up the next day, than the kind of person who says they “failed” and gives up due to a single misstep. Still, it was nice that nothing prevented me from being able to go every day.

I had some worries about the 6 am workout slot, especially since I haven’t been a consistent morning exerciser in the past. But now, a month in, I can see this is clearly the best habit for this stage of my life. My kids already wake up around this time, so it wasn’t as if sleeping in was an option. Starting the day with a workout also dramatically reduces the amount of ad-hoc scheduling I need to do to fit it in later.

In addition to hitting my basic daily workout goal, I also managed to balance my cardio and resistance training, another weakness of my previous approach. In the past, I’ve tended to go through bouts of doing almost entirely weights to doing almost entirely cardio without enough balance between the two. But my plan of doing weights every third day (rotating through push/pull/legs) has worked out pretty well.2

Side Effects of the Fitness Focus

In addition to the central aims of the month: reading a lot of books, plus sticking to my minimum daily exercise commitment, I found there were a lot of spillover effects of my challenge.

First, while my commitment was only to exercise for thirty minutes, putting it in my calendar daily meant that there were plenty of times I worked out more—it just wasn’t mandatory. I ran for quite a few of my cardio days for the month, and as my endurance went up, I found myself running longer just for fun. My longest run of the month was a little under 12km (7.5 miles)—a distance I don’t think I had run since I was a teenager.

Second, I ended up walking a lot more. Again, it wasn’t something I felt pressured to do; it just made sense. The weather was nice, and I had a lot of audiobooks to get through for research, so I started walking to work instead of taking the train. My average daily step count was around 17,000. I don’t have any specific plans to sustain that long-term, but it was a nice bonus.

Third, I started eating healthier. While the dietary foundation isn’t for a few months, it felt natural to eat a bit better and be more mindful of that during this month as well. I think it can sometimes be a mistake to commit to too much all at once. But sometimes, when you focus on one thing, you’ll see multiple changes happening simultaneously, especially if they’re encouraged by a similar mindset.

The major cost of my fitness habit seems to be needing to go to sleep a bit earlier. I used to go to sleep between 10 and 11 pm, but now I’m getting to sleep closer to 9:30 or 10 pm. It’s not a bad trade-off overall, but I want to be aware of it, especially as I focus other months on relationships and spending time with friends or my wife.

One-Month Results

My concrete outcomes for the month (as opposed to behavioral change), were relatively modest.

I lost about 4 or 5 pounds, but I didn’t do any body fat composition tests, so it’s hard to know what the change in lean mass was. Given that my goal wasn’t to lose weight, nor was I trying to reduce my food intake in any specific way, I consider it a nice bonus.

My running endurance and speed went up modestly. But given the short duration of most runs, this wasn’t something I was optimizing for during training. Additionally, while I did make improvements in my strength, I would attribute almost all of that to the “beginner gains” associated with starting a new lifting program.

Subjectively, I feel fitter and healthier. I have more energy, and I’m sleeping better. I think these are substantial effects, but I’m also aware of the placebo effect in sudden changes like these, so I’m hesitant to fully ascribe them to the exercise itself. Still, placebo or not, it’s a good affirmation of why I wanted to strengthen this foundation in the first place.

Ultimately, I’m happy with the results, but I don’t actually care so much about the short-term outcomes. The real test of this month’s challenge isn’t whether I can lose weight or get stronger in a short period of time but whether I can clearly see a bend in the long-term trend line of my overall fitness a year or two from now.

Plans for the Long-Term

Overall, I like the morning exercise habit. I never thought I would be, but I guess I’m now one of those guys who wakes up early to go running every day.

My exercise habit feels fairly stable now, so I’m not too worried about switching gears to the next foundation. But I’m also aware that my fitness habit isn’t at the point where I can totally relax and not worry about things slipping. One month is enough to make a change feel normal, but I’ll probably need 6 to 12 months before it’s so automatic that I could take a week off without worrying about it.

So my plan is to try to be strict about the daily rhythm for at least another few months, aiming to exercise each morning, even if I’m on vacation or plan to do different physical activities later in the same day.

Additionally, while I’ve been enjoying outdoor runs, I’m not sure they will continue as the weather worsens. While I know plenty of rain-or-shine runners here in Vancouver, I don’t want to make my plan hinge on waking up at 5:45 am to run in the cold rain come January. So it may be that I switch to a treadmill or stationary bike at the gym those days to make it easier on myself.

While the first month’s foundation is officially done, the real test of whether the new changes worked will only be evident at the end of the year. Thus, I’ll try to keep an update on this foundation and the others as I go into future months.

Next week, I’ll share my opening update for the next month’s foundation—productivity.

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

What I Learned About Getting in Shape After Reading 13 Books This Month

As I write this, I’m wrapping up the first month of my year-long project to improve my foundations. This month was focused on fitness, where I concentrated on establishing a daily, thirty-minute exercise habit.

Next week, I’ll share an update on how my first month went. But today, I’d like to focus on the other side of my year-long challenge: using each month to do a deep dive into the research and expert recommendations for each topic.

To that end, I finished thirteen fitness-related books this month, including two textbooks.1 Below, I’d like to give some of my takeaways, favorite recommendations and some notes on each book.

The 1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

To summarize, in a few words, what I learned about fitness this month:

Regular exercise is essential for your health—probably more so than you think!

Going from zero exercise to some has steeper benefits than going from some to a lot…

…but outside of athletes and physical laborers, most of us are well below the threshold where benefits from increasing exercise plateau.

The recommended minimum of 150 minutes of weekly cardio and twice-weekly weight training is a good baseline (although even more would probably be better).

Cardio is probably most important for health and weight management. However, strength training has benefits you can’t easily achieve through aerobic activities alone, so you should probably do that, too.

Fortunately, the practical advice for exercise is largely uncontroversial. This meant I got to spend a lot of time reading fun and interesting books this month rather than trying to get to the bottom of endless debates.2

Brief Notes on the 13 Books I Read

My favorite book was a re-read: Daniel Lieberman’s, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Both Healthy and Rewarding. It’s informative and hype-free while covering pretty much anything you’d like to know. 



For someone who wants to be inspired to exercise, I recommend Peter Attia’s Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity. It’s an entertaining read and really sold me on why fitness is one of the best investments we can make, not just to live longer but to enjoy those added years.

For a weird/interesting/fun read, my favorite was Christopher McDougall’s book, Born to Run, a.k.a. the book that convinced everyone to run in those weird-looking gecko shoes. It’s a wild, gonzo adventure that’s bizarre and exciting.

Now, I’ll turn to some notes from each book:

1. American College of Sports Medicine’s Complete Guide to Fitness and Health edited by Barbara Bushman

I like reading textbooks when encountering a new field because they generally represent the expert consensus well and give you a baseline for evaluating more provocative claims in other works.

This guide argues in favor of a four-component model to fitness: cardiovascular training, resistance training, flexibility and neuromuscular (a.k.a. stability and dexterity). The first two are important for overall health, and the latter two help you avoid injury and achieve all-round functional fitness.

2. Exercised by Daniel Lieberman

We never evolved to exercise. For almost all of human history, just getting enough calories to stay alive was effortful enough, so we wouldn’t burn them without a good reason. Both hunter-gatherers and preindustrial farmers lived effortful lives, with physical activity levels much higher than the average today.

Yet because additional physical activity was rarely necessary in the past, we didn’t evolve mechanisms to encourage us to be active. Indeed, the tribespeople Lieberman encountered thought it was strange that he went running for no apparent reason, just to stay healthy.

My favorite book of the month, Exercised explains why exercise is helpful, and why we often struggle to stick to it.

3. Finding Ultra by Rich Roll

An alcoholic and former competitive swimmer, Roll finds redemption in endurance training and a vegan lifestyle. The journey is impressive, with Roll first pulling himself out of alcohol dependence, only to later realize as a middle-aged dad that his heart was pounding just getting up the stairs.

Roll then transforms himself into an ultra-endurance athlete, culminating in completing five iron-distance triathlons in one week. This is definitely a good audiobook to listen to if you’re thinking about calling it quits on a short run!

4. National Strength and Conditioning Association’s Essentials of Personal Training edited by Jared Coburn and Moh Malek

This was the second textbook I read. I have no intention of becoming a trainer, but I figured a textbook that trainers use when studying for certification would have to give me some pretty good background knowledge for my own fitness.

I found the discussion of the biological systems underpinning exercise fascinating. I had known vaguely about the difference between anaerobic and aerobic exercise, but it was interesting to see that spelled out in more biochemical detail. Compared with the ACSM textbook, I found the discussions about optimal training for particular aspects of fitness (aerobic, strength, plyometric) to be useful as well.

5. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

What I liked most about this book was how ordinary Murakami’s motivations for running were. In his mid-thirties, he quit running a jazz club and switched to writing novels. Realizing his work was now much more sedentary, and he couldn’t keep off the weight, he started running. In the decades since, he’s run a marathon almost every year.

Murakami is quite clear about not trying to turn other people onto running. But, in doing so, I found his observations about running to be perhaps more inspiring than fitness gurus who scold you for not exercising enough.

6. Bigger Leaner Stronger by Michael Matthews

This book came up again and again in my research. Matthews has definitely cornered the market for people looking for a book about how to get shredded.

In terms of the advice, it was hard to fault Matthews for much. His prescriptions regarding diet and exercise mostly agreed with what I had read elsewhere, and his practical strategy seems like it would work.



This book didn’t resonate with me as much as it might have, probably because my motivation for improving this foundation in my life is much more about health and functional fitness than achieving a desired body. With that said, I can also understand why looking good is a stronger motivator for many.

7. The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman

Lieberman argues that we suffer from a large range of “mismatch diseases,” disorders caused by our current environment being different from our ancestral environment. Some of these relate directly to fitness—such as our sedentary lifestyles causing a range of health problems.

But many of his other points were totally new to me. Lieberman argues persuasively that impacted wisdom teeth are largely a function of not enough chewy food during childhood, that flat arches are probably caused by shoes, and that lower back pain is at least partially due to our desire for comfy chairs and beds, resulting in weaker back muscles that make injury more likely.

8. Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

Born to Run is a delightfully weird book. Jumping back and forth between tales of lone gringo hermits running through the Mexican countryside, a tribe of superhuman endurance runners, and the evils of the running-shoe-industrial complex, McDougall never fails to entertain.

I greatly enjoyed the book, although I also think reading it might have jinxed me, as it was around the time I was finishing it that my knee started to hurt a little after my runs. (It seems fine now.) I found the deep dive into ultrarunning to be fascinating, even if I don’t think I’m going to ditch my shoes for those gecko-sandals anytime soon.

9. The Health Habit by Amantha Imber

Since the actual recommendations for fitness are pretty straightforward (and, quite frankly, somewhat boring), it seemed prudent to read more about the behavioral psychology of getting and staying in shape. Imber’s book summarizes relevant psychology related to being healthier (Imber discusses diet and sleep, in addition to exercise).

From this book, I learned that studies show that giving yourself a “hall pass,” or permission to skip a day once or twice per week, improves long-term adherence to exercise, as does having a more flexible plan rather than a rigid one. These insights were important for me, since I tend to be stricter and more rigid when designing my own challenges.

10. Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe

As I mentioned in my opening for this month, lifting weights has typically been my primary form of exercise. I’ve done a lot of it over the years, but I’ve also been wary about bad form potentially leading to injuries, particularly in the squat.

Rippetoe’s book isn’t a good substitute for coaching, but his incredibly detailed discussion of the exact biomechanics of key barbell exercises was helpful for me as I go back to lifting weights more regularly. This book probably isn’t for most people, but for the people it is for, it’s helpful.

11. Spark by John RateyVersion 1.0.0

Ratey, a psychiatrist specializing in ADHD, argues persuasively that training the body is best seen as a side effect, and the real motivation to exercise is training the brain.

Ratey argues that regular exercise promotes learning and synaptogenesis, improves sleep, focuses the mind, and regulates hormones. He also contends that it can be used as a front-line treatment for depression and anxiety, as well as being a powerful auxiliary tool for dealing with ADHD.

12. The Joy of Movement by Kelly McGonigal

For fitness to last, it can’t just be the far-off reward of good health that keeps us going. We’re inherently short-sighted creatures, so sustaining the habit requires more than just benefits in the distant future; it requires rewards in the moment.

McGonigal’s book shares how fitness can make us happier. Part scientific how-to and part celebration of exercise, this book devotes chapters to the power of synchronization to form social bonds, music as an energizer, exercising in nature to uplift our mood, and endurance events to build self-efficacy.

13. Outlive by Peter Attia

Attia is an engaging writer, so it’s not surprising his book has remained on bestseller lists since its debut last year. While the focus of this book on longevity is not exclusively fitness (he also has sections on diet, sleep and emotional health), it’s clear that fitness forms the core of Attia’s prescription.

Beyond the normal health-promoting advice to exercise, I found Attia’s idea of the Centenarian Decathlon—a list of physical activities you’d like to be able to perform on your hundredth birthday—to be a powerful reframing of the motivation for staying in shape. If declines in aerobic conditioning and strength occur by default with aging, then you shouldn’t be training to do the things you want to do now; rather, you should train harder so you can still do them even when you’re much older.

The longevity space attracts a lot of quacks, but I think we can all agree that exercise is an important component to living longer and better.

_ _ _

That’s it for my notes. Next week, I’ll provide a more personal update, sharing how the first month’s challenge went and my plans for the future.

The post What I Learned About Getting in Shape After Reading 13 Books This Month appeared first on Scott H Young.

How to Form Habits in Real Life

I’ve been thinking a lot about habits lately. The students in my Foundations course are getting started with their daily fitness habit, and this has given me a lot of insights into the real barriers people have in creating habits that last.

The simple way of thinking about habits is as a cue, followed by a response. So, if you’re trying to start exercising, you might think of a habit as:

CUE: I finish work for the day -> RESPONSE: I go to the gym.
CUE: I wake up in the morning -> RESPONSE: I go for a run.
CUE: I finish putting the kids to bed -> RESPONSE: I do a home workout.

Over time, these cue-response relationships strengthen. This makes deciding to exercise more automatic and effortless over time. If you always work out right when you wake up, it may feel weird at first, but after three months, it feels totally normal.

This is the principle of classical conditioning, first discovered when Ivan Pavlov realized his dogs would salivate when hearing the dinner bell, even before the food the bell predicted showed up. Classical conditioning is ubiquitous in the animal world—even sea squirts do it—thus, it is as close to a universal principle of psychology as one can get.

At the same time, anyone who has actually started a new habit, such as exercise, knows that real life isn’t so simple.

The Problem with Habits in Real Life

The cue-response relationship is a good primitive mental model of habit formation. But real life is a lot more complicated.

For one, a lot of our “habits” aren’t consistent cue-response relationships. Even something as simple as daily exercise has an enormous amount of complexity:

What do you do when you’re on vacation?How do you handle work overrunning into your workout slot?What about when the gym is closed for repairs? Your car breaks down? Your running shoes wear out and you need to buy new ones?What about when you’re sore from one workout and need to do another one?

And this is for a relatively “simple” habit like exercise.1 Most foundations we want to improve involve much more complicated habits.

Healthy eating, for instance, is much more complicated than fitness. Instead of a simple cue-response, eating well relies on building myriad habits: What do you eat for breakfast? Sack lunch or eating out? How do you handle holiday treats? What about office happy hour?

Despite these complexities, many people manage to form effective, lifelong behavioral improvements in these areas. It’s probably not through simply strengthening a cue-response association, so what’s really going on?

Habit-Formation as Problem-Solving and Skill Learning

Psychology has another mental model we can look at for behavior change: the science of problem-solving and the acquisition of expertise.

Problem-solving is all about dealing with unique circumstances in appropriate ways. Is the way forward a dead end? Find a detour. Did something interfere with your plan? Throw it out and draft a new one. Unlike classical conditioning, problem-solving is a capacity unique to more complex organisms, reaching its highest expression in humans. With it, we don’t learn only through cue and response, but can form plans, strategies, intentions and alternatives.

As we continue to solve problems, we acquire expertise. Expertise is, in many ways, an elaboration of the cue-response associations possessed by simpler organisms. As we repeatedly encounter a variety of different scenarios, we develop well-worn solutions.

But expertise is more than just a collection of habits. We also have ideas and mental models that guide our actions. Seeing the car brake in front of you suddenly and slamming on your car’s brakes is a habit. Recognizing that you’re driving at highway speeds and giving the car ahead of you more room in case you need to brake is expertise.

Learning a New Habit

What does this somewhat altered perspective say about the habits we want to form to sustain our lives? I think it suggests that something more sophisticated is going on when we “condition” a new habit. Yes, we do form cue-response associations, but we also do more than that.

First, we set goals and intentions. We choose to set higher standards to hold ourselves accountable. Problem-solving is goal-directed—we decide a kind of behavior we want to have in our daily routine, and we hold that intention in mind as we try to find ways to solve it in each set of unique daily circumstances.

Second, we create strategies. Strategies are more than just cue-response associations. For one, they’re conscious. “I’ll wake up in the morning to exercise” does establish a cue-response, but it also encourages you to be mindful of your previous intention when you wake up.

Third, we learn to deal with specific problems. As our “conditioning” progresses, we deal with unique challenges and figure out custom solutions. What do you do when you’re tired? Sore? Sick? On vacation? When the gym is closed or the weather is bad? There are no “right” answers, but if you solve these subproblems successfully, you’ll improve your ability to stick to the intention you set and the strategies you articulated.

The cue-response framework is helpful, but sometimes it can enforce an overly rigid perception of what is going on when we successfully implement behavior change. The reality is that making a new behavior part of your life is fundamentally a learning challenge—a process of successive problem-solving until you have found ways to resolve most of the issues you face in your daily life.

The result is not one habit, but many. Not a cue-response relationship, but a collection of flexible strategies that deal with most scenarios reality throws at you. When you’ve done that, you’re acquired a kind of expertise—not of a subject, but of yourself.

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5 Tips for Staying Focused (When You’re Stressed)

Focus is essential to productivity. But it’s tough to stay focused when you’re anxious.

This is a dilemma I’ve faced quite a bit in my own work. As I’ve written before, I’m a somewhat anxious person by nature—and that can wreak havoc when I’m worried about the things I need to work on.

Worries deal a double whammy for our success with difficult cognitive work:

Anxiety encourages avoidance. If you’re afraid of doing badly on a test, bombing a presentation, or getting your submission rejected, one strategy to avoid those negative feelings is simply to avoid working on the project that is causing you to feel anxious. This avoidance itself, however, can perpetuate anxiety by preventing you from experiencing that those worries were most likely overblown. Anxiety uses up mental bandwidth. Worried, intrusive thoughts are distracting. More technically, they use up your working memory capacity, leaving you less capacity for your tasks. This can be disastrous for deep work or intensive learning as we need every bit of working memory capacity we can muster.

Below are a few strategies, culled from psychotherapeutic approaches for dealing with stress, that have helped me:

1. Apply Socratic questioning to your reflexive thoughts

Cognitive behavioral therapy (which I review in-depth here) is the gold standard for psychotherapy for anxiety disorders. A basic tenet of this therapeutic approach is that a combination of situational factors and our background beliefs triggers automatic thoughts. If you’re stressed, those thoughts often fixate on potential dangers that are out of proportion to the actual risks. For instance, a moment of frustration with a work task may lead immediately to the thought, “I’m no good at this,” or “I’m never going to get done in time.” Those automatic thoughts trigger anxiety and further worried thinking.

One way to break this cycle of anxiety spurred by reflexive thoughts is to question the content of those thoughts. Notice a thought you’re having, and give yourself some reasons it might be true and some reasons it may not be. Ask yourself if you think it’s 100% true, 0% true, or somewhere in-between.

Questioning our reflexive thoughts can help stop irrational behaviors we often fail to interrogate. “I’m never going to pass this test, so why bother studying?” or “I only have an hour left in the day, so it doesn’t make sense to start this unpleasant task,” are probably not things we’d assent to if we gave them much thought, so we need to catch ourselves before we mindlessly accept them.

2. Treat your task as an experiment

Exposure therapy is a method developed for treating phobias that has since found wide applications in all sorts of anxiety disorders. The basic tenet is that exposure to a feared situation—without experiencing significant harm—tends to reduce the intensity of emotional reactions in the future.

This can be relevant when the work itself is what is stressing you out. You may anticipate a negative reaction to your work, “My boss isn’t going to think I did a good job,” or you may worry about your ability to handle the task, “What if I make a terrible mistake?”
In these cases, pushing forward with the work itself can often be an internal struggle since you’re dealing with both the difficulties of the task and the difficulties of managing the emotions stirred up by the task. One strategy that can help is reframing parts of the task as an experiment. In this case, the goal isn’t to achieve a particular result; rather it’s to see what will happen if we try. If we feel incompetent, we might start working on a task to test that belief. If we worry about a negative reaction, we might ask for preliminary feedback when we don’t think our work is good enough yet.

3. Make completing the next step your entire goal

Recently, mindfulness has been validated as a therapeutic treatment for anxiety. There are varying mindfulness practices, including focusing on a particular object (your breath, bodily sensations) or simply trying to notice your subjective experiences without judging or controlling them.

One takeaway from mindfulness practices is that most of our worries are future-oriented. Stress and anxiety tend to disappear when we’re focused exclusively on the present moment.

We can apply that same mindset to working when stressed. Break down the task you’re sweating over into only the next single step and make completing that step your entire focus. Deliberately try not to pay attention to any planning or problem-solving beyond that one step. Once you’ve completed that step, you can move on to the next step after it, but not until you’ve finished that one.

4. Use implementation intentions when planning your work week

Implementation intentions are a goal-setting technique proposed and researched by social psychologist Peter Gollwitzer. The basic notion of an implementation intention is that instead of simply setting a goal, “I want to finish my essay by Friday,” we envision scenarios where we face likely obstacles and then come up with specific intentions for how we will cope with them, “When I’m tired at the end of the day and don’t feel like writing, I’ll set a goal to finish just one sentence.”

If you have a stressful workweek ahead, visualizing the week and setting implementation intentions can overcome impulsive responses to give up or procrastinate when you face frustrations.

5. Reward input over output

Under normal circumstances, we tend to judge ourselves by our accomplishments. If we spend an hour and finish all our work, we feel good. If we work for an hour and get stuck, achieving nothing, we feel bad.

This can create a real bind for stressful work where success is uncertain. We might finally summon the motivation to work on a challenging task, only to get stymied for reasons outside of our control and end up feeling miserable.

The key is to shift your mindset toward input rather than output in your tasks. If you make your goal to show up and put in the time you planned to, rather than achieving a particular result, you can detach yourself from some of the worries you might have about the outcomes of your work.

When I’ve struggled with writing difficult chapters in my books, for instance, I’ve often made it a goal to give myself credit just for sitting down for my writing sessions. This way, I don’t punish myself for failing even if I end up getting stuck over how to tell a particular story or what research to include because I met my goal of showing up and doing the work.

Note: This strategy works best when there’s a lot of friction to getting work done. When the work is coming fast and easily, focusing on results can be more effective in helping you slow down and execute the tasks that matter most.

Is it a Temporary Strain or Toxic Workload?

My advice above assumes, of course, that your situation is the result of a temporary strain or irrational anxiety, not a toxic situation that you should extricate yourself from at the nearest juncture. Knowing the difference between the two can be tricky.

My rule is that a challenging situation worth sticking with is one that:

Is aligned with your long-term values. For instance, if you are struggling in medical school but still want to be a doctor, the struggle may be worthwhile. But if you are struggling in medical school, don’t want to be a doctor, but feel like you can’t do anything else without disappointing your parents, the struggle probably isn’t worth it.Involves people who treat you with respect. If the stress is due to employers or coworkers who are not respectful, trying to diminish stress may be less helpful than directly tackling the relationship in question—either getting it into a healthier state, or finding an exit ramp if the personalities involved are unwilling to adjust.Is anticipated to be temporary, rather than perpetual. If a situation is temporarily stressful, such as a short-term heightened workload, insufficient experience or sudden changes, then enduring through stress is often good. In contrast, if the stress becomes chronic, even when you’ve had a chance to adapt to the changes, it may be better to look elsewhere.

Our emotions affect our productivity, but how we handle those emotions is vital. Focusing when stressed may be challenging, but cultivating persistence under strain can be a powerful asset.

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Fitness: Day One

Fitness is the first foundation I’m addressing in my year-long project to improve those things that are essential to thriving as a human being.

Exercise isn’t something we evolved to do. We’re hardwired to avoid unnecessary effort. For the vast majority of our species’ existence, simply living was exertion enough to keep our bodies functioning well. Today, though, my livelihood doesn’t depend on hunting gazelle or tilling a field. I make my living typing on a computer most of the day.

As a result, I need to exercise.

The benefits of exercise are overwhelming. It boosts your mood, mind and mobility. It reduces the risk of dying from heart disease, diabetes, cancer and dementia. It increases your energy levels and provides a foundation for a vigorous life.

Current guidelines recommend a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, combined with at least two resistance training sessions every week.

Unfortunately, it’s a target most of us don’t hit.

Today, I’d like to share my fitness history, the goals I’ve set for the month ahead, and what I’m doing to solidify this essential foundation in my life.

Does Becoming a Father Require a Dad Bod?

I’ve never been an athlete. I swam as a kid but never posted great times. I ran in high-school but was never fast enough to win races. I was awkward at tennis and lousy at basketball. It’s a cliché to say it, but I was a bookish kid who was lousy at sports.

As a teenager, I finally found the first kind of physical activity I liked—lifting weights. Perhaps my interest was because I was naturally scrawny and thus drawn to the promise of getting more muscular. Or perhaps it was because lifting heavy objects didn’t require great dexterity.

Throughout my teens and twenties, going to the gym and lifting weights became my main source of exercise. A fast metabolism and relatively low-protein diet (I was vegetarian for most of my twenties, pescatarian today) meant I never got particularly big, but I can at least say there were some periods when my muscular fitness was pretty good—at one point I could even do twenty-five pull-ups in a row without stopping.

Things changed after thirty. Shortly after my wife and I welcomed our son, Thomas, into the world, COVID-19 happened, and suddenly all the gyms were closed. While the lockdown didn’t last forever, every trip to the gym required irritating sign-up sheets that meant racing to book my slot online in advance. I resorted to climbing the stairs at our apartment—climbing up and down in the concrete cocoon of the fire escape.

At the same time, the era of my youthful inability to gain weight was finally over. I was getting flabbier—mostly from overeating, but also from the pressures of the pandemic and parenthood, making it harder for me to stick to a regular gym routine.

The pandemic went away, but my solid gym habits never quite returned. Sure, I’d go to the gym once or twice a week and use the stair machine (a holdover from my pandemic-era exercise solution). My fitness level was “okay.” But if I’m honest, I probably wasn’t hitting the recommended minimums for exercise most weeks. And I wasn’t lifting weights at all anymore.

I don’t want to exaggerate my story for dramatic impact. In many ways, I think I’m pretty much the default case: someone who tries to exercise, does so at least some of the time, but not with the consistency that I think I should.

My Goals for the Month

I have two main goals for the month:

Consistency. Ideally I’d like to be more active than the minimum. But I want to re-establish a strong, default exercise habit so that even when there are periods when it’s far from my central focus, I’m still putting in enough.Breadth. In my twenties, I mostly did strength training with little cardio. In my thirties, that switched to only cardio and no weights. I’d like to fix that by making sure my routine incorporates cardio, strength and flexibility.

My longer-term goal is to try to get closer to the fitness and energy levels I had when I was younger. I don’t imagine I’m going to transform myself into an elite athlete. But I think I had accepted some of my general fatigue and sluggishness as being an inevitable byproduct of being older, rather than a sign that I was getting out of shape.

Losing weight is not a particular focus for this month, but I feel I’m at least 15 pounds heavier than my healthiest weight—possibly more, given the fact that my lack of resistance training has probably involved some degree of muscle loss.

Following the ACSM’s Complete Guide to Fitness and Health, I decided to do a few measurements of my fitness level to use as a baseline. I don’t expect huge leaps after one month, but I’m looking forward to checking back throughout the year to see if there are any improvements.

As of writing this, I:

Ran the 1.5 mile run test in 11:00 minutes. (Estimated V02 max = 47.4)Could do 24 consecutive push-ups with good form (chin to ground, back straight).Could do 3 consecutive pull-ups with good form (no swinging).

My Plan of Action

Finding a good time to exercise has been tricky with kids. My ideal time to work out was late afternoon. That’s usually when I have the most energy and enthusiasm to work out, and my work productivity is often dropping somewhat, so it makes sense to switch gears and hit the gym.

This was the strategy I had been using for the last couple of years. I’d bring my gym clothes to the office and catch a workout before heading home for the day.

 Unfortunately, this time was highly vulnerable to disruption. If work pushed late (which it frequently did) I would feel guilty about staying later to exercise since the hours around dinner at home were the ones where things were most hectic. Additionally, I would work from home sometimes, which basically ruled out exercising that day since my gym was close to the office but far from my house.

This month, I’m trying something different. I’m going to wake up at 6 am to get a minimum thirty-minute workout in before starting the day. I’ve picked a new gym closer to my house for weight training, and I plan to run outside when the weather is good.

I can say with certainty that I never thought I’d be a 6 am workout kind of guy. I had tried in the past to stick to morning gym routines and failed. But the kids usually wake my wife and me up around that time anyways, so it’s not as if the alternative is sleeping in. And working out first thing in the morning is probably the closest thing I have to a time slot that is guaranteed not to be interrupted by work or family obligations.

In terms of the workout itself, I’m trying to be as flexible as possible. I want to use the month to try a variety of different workouts, both to see what strategy I like best and also to avoid injury.

My basic plan is to do cardio for two days, followed by a day of weights, alternating between push/pull/legs. As the weather is nice right now, I’m mostly running and cycling outdoors, but I expect that to shift to a treadmill or stair climbing machine in the winter.

I’m thinking of trying to fit in flexibility/stability exercises while playing with my kids. I’m also going to keep that as a backup workout option for days when I’m feeling sore, sick or tired.

I want to try to be consistent with the 6 am slot, both for habit-forming reasons and so that the routine gets more firmly established in our household so my wife and kids can come to expect it and plan around it. However, the aim of the month is just to get thirty minutes of exercise in regardless—so if something comes up that makes the 6 am slot unworkable, I’ll try to do a backup exercise later in the day.

A Side Note on Timing

As I’m writing this, I’m on the fifth day of my first month-long challenge. But as you are reading this, I’m already working on the fourth month of the year-long foundations project.

Why the discrepancy?

While I have done “live” projects in the past, the need to create content while simultaneously doing the challenge can be tricky. Now, I have a team supporting me with editing, filming and video, so the best way to ensure high quality content is to make sure everyone involved has time to do their jobs properly.

Additionally, unlike my past year-long projects, I’m also running a course alongside this one. Doing the challenges ahead of time seemed like the best option for the participants since it would ensure I’ve had a chance to do a deep dive on the research and iron out kinks in the advice before I get anyone to begin the project themselves.

That being said, for the rest of the year, despite the publication delay, I’m writing about each challenge as it is happening. I’m also going to avoid the temptation to edit any of these personal entries after the fact if it turns out I was wrong about my initial plan of action or predictions. I just wanted to make that clear, for transparency’s sake.

Care to Join Me for This Month’s Fitness Foundation?

While I’m preparing a lot of content specifically for those in my Foundations course, anyone reading this blog is welcome to follow along more informally. All you need to do is try to exercise for thirty minutes, every day, throughout the month.

Toward the end of the month, I’ll share some thoughts on how the month went, as well as some highlights from all the books on my reading list.

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Foundations Is Now Open For Registration

Foundations, my new 12-month course designed to help you improve twelve essential elements for the good life, is now open. You can sign up here:

​https://join.ingeniumcourses.com/foundations/​

Registration is open until Friday, September 27th, 2024 at midnight Pacific Time. After that, we’ll be closing to begin the program.

How Does the Course Work?

Every month, we’ll open a new module focusing on a different foundation. Each foundation begins by guiding you in creating and establishing a new keystone habit, taking the best expert advice and fitting it to the unique circumstances of your life. Then, for the rest of the month, we’ll have three lessons per week:

Idea. Central concepts for mastering that month’s foundation.Action. Subtle strategies for making change stick.Book. Reviews of the best books.

Lessons for each foundation will last four weeks, after which we’ll shift gears to start working on the next foundation.

The pace is designed to be manageable, even with a busy schedule, but due to the duration of the course, we’ll still be covering a lot—over 150 lessons guiding you through 12 new keystone habits that will support your life.

In addition, for those interested in extra help, I’m also offering a coaching package for the first time ever. If you sign up for coaching, you’ll get access to weekly live calls (recordings available), one-on-one attention through office hours, and be assigned a personal support coach.

Everything you need to know about the course is available on the registration page:

​https://join.ingeniumcourses.com/foundations/​

Registration will close on Friday at midnight. I hope we’ll get to work together to build stronger foundations in the year ahead!

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What Could You Change in a Year?

On Monday, I’m opening my new course, Foundations, for enrollment. It is a year-long program designed to help you build better habits and practices around twelve universal pillars of the good life.

It’s always difficult to tell exactly how much someone can benefit from a course like this one. That’s not because the benefits can’t be enormous—they can be. It’s simply because every person is different, and different starting points necessarily imply different ending points.

So, instead of talking about how the course might benefit you, I’ll talk about how the experience that inspired this course—my first effort at improving my foundations—benefitted me.

How Working on Foundations Changed My Life

My first experience with this kind of project began twenty years ago. It was around this time, that I first learned about the “30-Day Trial” technique from Steve Pavlina.1

The basic concept was simple: pick a change you want to make and stick with it for thirty days. At the end of the month, the behavior will be much closer to a habit, and you’ll know enough to evaluate whether you wish to continue it.

Learning about this technique set off a flurry of behavioral experiments. In the space of just a few years, I changed my diet, started exercising, began using a productivity system, read several books per month, joined Toastmasters, wrote a journal regularly, began waking up early, tried mediation and much more.

Those few years ended up being so transformative that they became the inspiration to start writing this blog. My article series I wrote about the experience, Habitual Mastery, was the first to bring visitors to my website.

 Building those foundations made possible everything else that followed in my life. They allowed me to graduate from university with a straight-A GPA. They allowed me to build a full-time business doing what I love. They gave me the background systems to undertake projects like the MIT Challenge and The Year Without English. They helped me make friends, meet my wife and create the life I now have today.

My case is an outlier. I don’t expect that everyone will literally change every aspect of their life from spending a year focusing on foundations. What I can say is that, in my case, I certainly did.

What I’ve Learned Since

I was successful in improving my foundations twenty years ago. But it wasn’t easy. I made a lot of obvious mistakes that I wouldn’t make again today.

I chose behavior changes that sounded good on paper, but were impossible to sustain in practice.I focused on the wrong changes to make, neglecting changes that would have been easier to implement with bigger benefits.I often failed to integrate the changes with other areas of my life. I set habits to wake up at 5:30 a.m. in college, for instance, when my major goals were to make friends and meet people.I made behavioral change mistakes. In some cases, I was overly rigid—making change unnecessarily painful. In other cases, I was too loose—preventing good habits from taking root.Finally, I lacked a framework. Instead of being systematic, I jumped around, working on whatever caught my attention at the time.

Thus, despite the ostensible success of my early efforts, I could have done a lot better. I wished I had access to a structured program that could guide me toward the best habits, the best books, and the most concise expert advice.

Foundations is the course I wanted for myself twenty years ago.

It’s also the program I’m following today. As many of you know, I’m going to be taking this course right alongside the students, working through exactly the same steps I’m asking you to undertake. Because I believe the only way you can have solid foundations is by maintaining the attitude of the perpetual student—always open to learn and experiment with trying things in new ways.

A lot has changed for me in the last twenty years. The habits that were right for me twenty years ago are not the same as those I need to sustain my life today. But while the exact habit, system or tool may change, the foundations themselves and the laws of behavior change are universal.

On Monday, I’m going to be opening enrollment for those of you who would like to build better Foundations. Whether you’re just getting your life figured out or you’re already experienced and just in need of a tune-up, I believe the year ahead has the potential to be transformative. I hope you agree and that you’ll join me next week for a new adventure.

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