Scott H. Young's Blog, page 7

How To Be Well Rounded

The world of advice-giving is populated by outliers.

When we want money advice, we look to Mr. Money Mustache, who retired at thirty. Or Warren Buffett, whose investment skill has earned him over $144 billion.

When we want fitness advice, we look to Olympians, famous bodybuilders or ultraendurance athletes.

For dating advice, we look to the most charismatic or beautiful. For career advice, to CEOs and Nobel laureates. For spiritual advice, to the monks and gurus who have abandoned all material desires.

Overall, this is a decent strategy. Being the best is more stringent than meeting the middle. By focusing on outliers, you eliminate a lot of medicore advice.

But there’s a drawback to this focus on outliers. Very rarely is a successful person’s outsized accomplishments in one domain matched with equivalent success in others:

Extreme professional success is often achieved by being an absent parent or spouse.Extreme athletic success directs time and money away from one’s day job.Extreme frugality makes it hard to recognize opportunities when spending more can lead to better nonfinancial outcomes.Life Rewards the Circle, Not the Spike

For most domains of life, being well-rounded is far more useful than being an extreme outlier. Pretty much all areas of life show a classic diminishing returns curve for investment. The person who doesn’t exercise at all benefits more from adding an extra 30 minutes of movement to their day than an elite athlete will.

The only exception to this is within certain professions, where true mastery of your specialty can reap outsize rewards. But even here, there’s diminishing returns on career success as it applies to your life more broadly. Being the world’s best surgeon won’t bring much comfort to your personal life if your spouse leaves you and your kids won’t talk to you because you only cared about work for your entire career.

If your goal is personal satisfaction, not becoming a best-selling advice-giver, then your life benefits the more it looks like a circle—with a decent level in all your foundations—rather than a spike:

The Best and the Rest

My motto for dealing with the overrepresentation of outlier success is simple:

Learn from the best, but fit it in with the rest.

In other words, you want to study the very best in a field. By all means, read the ultramarathoner when you lace up your shoes, study the world’s top investing expert and listen to the person who has read every scientific study ever conducted on your topic.

But, after you’ve done that, you need to integrate that advice into the rest of your life. Find the advice with the best ratio of rewards-to-efforts, and ensure you stick with it. Don’t worry about achieving greatness in everything you do—but be content that you’ve moved yourself to a level where basic problems won’t trip you up.

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My 12-month program, Foundations, is opening Monday, September 23rd. In this course, we’re going to treat each month as a mini-project, both to extract the highest-value expert advice for each foundation, and then to convert those into stable keystone habits that will endure for years to come.

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Where’s Your Blind Spot?

One of the questions I’ve gotten from people interested in my Foundations program (opening next week!) is whether they need to work on all their foundations.

A pretty typical response has been like this:

“I feel pretty good about my gym routine and my finances. It’s my relationships that aren’t doing so well.”

Or,

“I’m good with my family and friends, but I haven’t been exercising much lately.”

In other words, when assessing their overall foundations, most people can see some areas that are in obvious need of repair as well as some that they feel okay about.

Something that looks a bit like this:

There’s nothing wrong with that picture. Life is dynamic and ever-changing. So while a good habit or system can last longer, there’s always going to be disruptions that set you back. And, for some of us, we may feel like we’ve never adequately figured out some aspects of our life, and so they remain sticking points.

But I’d argue that this picture is missing something important. It’s not simply the foundations that obviously need work that cause problems. Instead, the ones that seem fine but are secretly cracking are the most dangerous.

Blind Spots and Hidden Weaknesses

The inside of your eye is backwards. Instead of the wiring for your retina running directly toward your brain where it becomes vision, it first projects outward and then bundles back into the optic nerve. This little detour creates a spot in each eye where you can’t see: your blind spot.

The thing about your blind spot, though, is that you never see it! It’s not as if we walk around with gaping holes in our field of view. Instead, your brain automatically “fills in” whatever it thinks should be there to create a seemless picture.

(Don’t believe me? Try this demonstration to prove it to yourself!)

Something analogous occurs when we think about how our life is going. Essentially, we run into three different observations of any area of our life:

Life is going well. The foundation in my life is supporting me, and I’m not concerned about it.I’m facing obvious problems. Your foundation has slipped, and now you’re facing a clear challenge.I think things are going well, but I’m actually facing problems. These are your blind spots, all the areas of your life that seem fine only because you aren’t really paying attention to them. Like the missing parts of your field of view, you don’t notice them, but the problems they create don’t immediately redirect your attention.What are examples of foundational blind spots?The person who is a “bit” out of shape. In truth, their health has deteriorated, but they don’t notice because they rarely exert themselves.The relationships that have gone stale. You blame life stress, work or simply wanting different things in life without realizing you’ve been making steady emotional withdrawals from your relationship bank account.The professional who feels like work is a little chaotic. However, she’s already been removed as a candidate for raises or promotions by upper management. If economic times get tight, she’s the first to go.The person who isn’t sure whether he’ll have enough to retire. But, really, he has multiple outstanding loans and doesn’t have nearly enough savings. The thought of calculating it out feels distressing, though, so he ignores it.

Having foundational blind spots is not a moral failing anymore than visual blind spots are. Every one of us has blind spots. They’re unavoidable because life is complicated, and if an area isn’t causing us major problems right now, our attentional system is unlikely to surface it.

But it’s exactly because of these blind spots that a holistic program to assess all our foundations has value. Prevention is far less costly than a cure. Fixing a problem before it becomes a crisis is one of the best investments you can make.

Fixing the Problems You Know About (And Those You Don’t)

This is one of the reasons I’m so excited to work with a group of students for a year-long, well-rounded program. While I’m sure everyone who signs up is going to have a list of foundations that need work and those that do not, I’m even more excited about the possibility of working with people to improve things they hadn’t even anticipated.

Nor is the process limited to “fixing” a weakness. Sometimes, you’re on a perfectly typical path, but you simply don’t realize a much better option is available. For instance, the person who struggles to exercise the minimum might end up realizing they can run a marathon, or the person who isn’t sure they can save enough to retire might find a way to retire decades ahead of time.

In brief, working on a holistic program of foundations is helpful precisely because it focuses you on the things that don’t seem to obviously need improvement. By detecting cracks before they crumble, and allowing you to aim at previously unimagined goals, you can reap a much larger benefit than simply by fixing the problems you already know you should.

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Foundations will be open for registration next week. If you want to join us, however, you need to do it next week—after that, we’ll be starting the program, and it will be closed for new registrations, probably for at least a year. I hope I’ll have the chance to work with you!

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12 Obvious (and 12 Not-So-Obvious) Tips for Living Better

Next week, I’m going to be opening registration for Foundations, my new year-long program designed to help you build stronger foundations for your life.

Given the twelve foundations we’re going to work on for the following year, I wanted to distill some of the best advice I’ve received in each, both the obvious advice that everyone should follow, as well as the not-so-obvious strategies that make it all work.

1. Fitness

Obvious advice: Get your 150 minutes per week.

Not-so-obvious advice: Exercising 7x per week is easier than 3x.

Virtually every expert body suggests a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate cardiovascular activity (or 75 minutes of vigorous activity) per week. Add to that two weekly resistence training sessions and you’ve got the essential expert recommendations for health.

Despite that, few people meet the minimum. A surprising strategy to make it stick is to commit to exercising every day, rather than only a few times per week. While this sounds harder, it can actually make it easier to form a habit since the pattern is consistently reinforced.1

2. Productivity

Obvious advice: Track your tasks.

Not-so-obvious advice: Productivity comes from happy work.

The first step to being productive is to get control over all your work. You can’t work effectively if you don’t have it organized. Getting Things Done has been a life-changing book for many, because it helps you get the worries about work off your mind and into a system.

The second step to being productive is actually doing the work. Positive emotions help more than negative ones. The best way to cultivate positive feelings about the work? Organize your work to maximize the chance of making meaningful, visible progress every day. Progress leads to positivity, which leads to productivity.2

3. Money

Obvious advice: Save 10%.

Not-so-obvious advice: Less thinking = better returns.

Most of us will need to save if we want to retire some day. Experts typically recommend putting away at least 10% of your after-tax salary, although higher savings rates may be necessary if you wish to retire sooner.

Where should the money go? Here the research is clear: Simple investing works better. Putting your money in a low-cost index fund, investing the same amount, regardless of the ups and downs of the market, and not touching your money until retirement beats 85%+ of the portfolio wizards clamouring to take your money.3

4. Food

Obvious advice: Eat more veggies.

Not-so-obvious advice: Healthy eating comes from planning, not deprivation.

Consuming nutritional advice online ought to come with a warning label. Despite online misinformation, however, the scientific understanding of nutrition has been relatively stable: eat more veggies, swap saturated for unsaturated fats, replace refined carbs for whole grains and maintain a healthy weight.

But, despite decades of dietary guidance, the typical eating pattern is far from ideal. Part of the problem, however, is how we conceptualize healthy eating. Instead of focusing on deprivation, which is impossible to sustain, we need to focus on planning ahead so we have the option to eat healthy, rather than just eating junk because it’s most convenient.

5. Reading

Obvious advice: Always have a book.

Not-so-obvious advice: You read faster by reading more.

The easiest way to read more is to always have a book with you. I aim to have three: a Kindle edition on my phone, an audiobook through Audible, and a paper copy in my backpack or by my nightstand.

The surprising key to reading faster is that your speed depends critically on how much you already have read. Background knowledge is the greatest facilitator of future learning, and the only way you get background knowledge is by reading a lot.

6. Outreach

Obvious advice: You have to ask.

Not-so-obvious advice: Persuasion is listening, not talking.

You can’t make friends if you don’t meet people. You can’t go on dates if you don’t ask people out. You can’t make sales if you don’t ask people to buy. You can’t receive if you don’t ask.

But once you ask, listen. It’s a myth that the greatest salespeople are charismatic talkers. Instead influence is built on having a deep understanding of the other person’s perspective.

7. Sleep

Obvious advice: No screens before sleep.

Not-so-obvious advice: Spend less time in bed to sleep better.

The blue light produced by LED screens, we’re often told, is a major reason for insomnia. That’s probably an exaggeration. The reason to avoid screens is simpler: you can get sucked down an internet rabbit hole long past when you otherwise would have gone to bed. Read a book instead.

Interestingly, however, spending too much time in bed can lead to worse sleep. If you struggle with falling asleep, it’s often better to restrict your time in bed. That way you only sleep in bed and your mind doesn’t also associate it with other activities like reading or watching television.

8. Reflection

Obvious advice: Writing affirms your commitments.

Not-so-obvious advice: Writing makes you smarter.

A daily habit of journaling can be incredible for sustaining your commitment to your goals. Simply writing down what you’ve done in the day and planning what you’ll do tomorrow, can reinforce the vision of yourself you’d like to cultivate.

But writing isn’t just affirmation. It’s an expansion of your ability to think. Working memory, the narrow bottleneck of consciousness, is fundamentally limited. By writing things down, you can think more complex thoughts than would be possible from self-talk alone. Problems that seem unresolvable in your head can quickly be attacked when put to paper.

9. Connection

Obvious advice: Decide who you care about. Make time for them.

Not-so-obvious advice: Save everyone’s birthdays in your calendar.

In an ideal world, we’d allocate our time with others based on who we care about. Who are your deepest friends, closest family members or most supportive colleagues? In practice, we tend to spend time with people simply because they’re near us.

Getting deliberate about your social life means sustaining connections. One of the best strategies for this is to gather up any dates that are important to people you care about: birthdays, anniversaries, graduation dates or upcoming vacations, and put reminders in your calendar to reach out. It may feel mechanical, but it’s always appreciated.

10. Focus

Obvious advice: Track your deep work.

Not-so-obvious advice: Good projects drive achievement.

One of the best tools for focus is to track your deep work hours. Simply set a start time on a piece of paper whenever you decide to work on something important, then write a stop time whenever you give up or get interrupted. For progress on difficult tasks, few metrics matter more.

But having something that requires depth is an important prerequisite. If you don’t have a well-designed project that requires depth, it’s easy to get stuck in a loop of checking off trivial to-do list items that won’t matter a decade from now.

11. Organization

Obvious advice: Give every item a home.

Not-so-obvious advice: Store less than you can fit.

Tidiness depends on giving every object in your house a home. Clutter exists when items are effectively homeless, floating back-and-forth to various shelves and cupboards because you haven’t decided their resting place.

Just because you can fit something somewhere, doesn’t mean you should. If a system is jam packed, it will take much longer to take stuff out and put it back again. This is effecitvely a tax every time you use it, which will cause it to quickly revert to a maximally disorganized state.

12. Service

Obvious advice: Giving feels good.

Not-so-obvious advice: The best focus for your life is outside of yourself.

Altruism has great personal benefits. Helping other people connects you with friends and your community. You learn new skills and increase your social standing. The fact that selfish benefits derive from selfless deeds is one of the fortunate truths about the human condition.

But even deeper than the direct benefits are the psychic benefits from simply not thinking about yourself all the time. An excess of self-directed thoughts is the quickest path to misery. We achieve the blissful state of flow when our consciousness is directed toward missions and purposes that matter more than ourselves.

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Interested in improving your life? Starting next week, I’m going to be opening enrollment for Foundations. This is a twelve-month effort where we will not just give useful tips, but make concrete behavioral changes in each of the twelve foundations we just discussed.

Registration will open Monday, September 23rd, and close Friday, September 28th. I hope to see you there!

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The Foundations for Success and Happiness Are the Same

I recently listened to Dr. Tim Sharp’s Habits for Happiness on audiobook. Sharp, a psychologist who often goes by the nickname “Dr. Happy,” offers some useful advice on how to be happier.

While Sharp’s advice was sensible to me, it struck me as interesting that if the book had been called “Habits for Success” or “Habits for Achievement” the list wouldn’t have differed very much. Imagining your best possible self, setting clear goals, exercising regularly and getting enough sleep matter to both achievement and well-being.

This observation got me thinking about my Foundations project, specifically, the somewhat illusory tension between achieving in life and improving psychological well-being.

We’re used to thinking about achievement and happiness as being in tension with one another. After all, we talk about work-life balance, tell stories of the person who gives up their lucrative corporate gig to spend more time with family, and lionize (or demonize) the pundits who encourage us to “pay the price” required for success.

There exists a genuine tension between different goals in our lives. We have limited time, energy and resources. Doing one thing means not doing another so, all else being equal, we have to make choices about tradeoffs.

However, there’s an assumption lurking beneath all of this that most people have already maximized their life’s possible efficiency. That is, they’re at a point where trade-offs are the only move left, rather than moves that raise well-being and productivity, health and time with family, and so on.

The assumption is that we are, to use a technical term, at the “productive frontier” for any given trade-off of interest rather than some other point that we could improve.

How Close are We to the Productive Frontier?

There’s no simple answer to how much we need to consider trade-offs. Certainly, many of us are already working about the most we can work without making significant sacrifices. If you’re a diligent student, you may feel like you can’t study any longer (or better) without cutting something else. Maybe the same is true for other areas of life?

I suspect most of us could make some non-trivial optimizations in many areas of our life.

Consider exercise: the classic foundation people regularly assert they do not have time for. Yet, in all but the most extreme cases, I suspect it’s not true that there are literally no thirty-minute periods in the day where exercise would be possible. Even the busiest parent or professional probably has a few ten-minute chunks where a quick workout could be fit in.

Instead, there seems to be a circular problem of effort and energy. When exercising isn’t routine, we feel out of shape, so exercising is aversive. It requires a lot of effort and energy to do, but that same lack of routine also increases the self-discipline we need to exercise and drains us of the energy to move.

In short, if we could shift ourselves into exercising regularly, we would not only have enough time and energy to do it, but the habit itself would likely give enough returns to more than compensate for the habit.

The fact that most Westerners do not get the recommended level of daily exercise, therefore, is probably a trap we fall into rather than a genuine tradeoff. The trap is real, but the solution isn’t to exercise more by cutting back on other important things; it’s to make a dedicated effort to pull yourself out of the circular problem a lack of exercise creates.

There are plenty of examples of foundations where the problem can, at first glance, appear to be a tradeoff but is probably actually a suboptimal point for most people:

Food. It’s become almost a reflex to say that “healthy eating costs more,” as if poverty itself were the cause of poor eating habits. While it’s true that fresh kale and avocados generally cost more than potato chips, brown rice and lentils are dirt cheap and frozen veggies are as healthy as fresh ones. Instead, the problem is that healthy eating is more complicated and effortful than unhealthy eating, so we get stuck in the trap of eating junk regardless of our time or finances.Productivity. While there’s always a tradeoff point in how much you work, much of the research on what generates performance in workplace settings lists the same factors that improve morale and well-being. People like to be productive, and the biggest killers of productivity aren’t spending too much time with your family but toxic work environments that rob you of progress and meaning.Sleep. Nowhere is illusion of tradeoffs more prevalent than in people who sleep less to “do” more. While insomnia and sleep difficulties are real problems, the reason most of us sleep too little is simply that we don’t go to bed early enough. But the energy regained almost always pays for itself in terms of what you can accomplish the following day.Foundations for Happiness?

There are some inescapable trade-offs in life, and when you’re at the productive frontier in an area, you do have to think legitimately about what sorts of things you need to cut back on to do something else.

But, there’s a striking confluence of advice in wellness, productivity, happiness and health that basically all says the same thing. It’s not as if the management gurus are telling us one thing while the fitness buffs are saying the opposite. Instead, the practices we need to thrive as human beings appear to be largely harmonious across many different goals and pursuits.

This isn’t to downplay the difficulty of reaching the ideal point. If you don’t exercise regularly, moving enough is genuinely difficult. Similarly, if you have poor foundations in any part of your life, the fix is often not quick or effortless. The circular problem of suboptimal foundations often means change can be very hard indeed.

But, it does imply that the pursuit of the good life may be less one of inner conflict than we typically imagine, of carefully weighing the incommensurate goals in our life and finding the proper balance. Instead, it’s about raising ourselves to a higher standard, so we can enjoy happiness and productivity, health and wealth, ambition and connection. Regardless of the pursuits we choose in life, the foundations are essentially the same.

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A Solid Foundation is More Than Just Good Habits

I’m launching my new program, Foundations, in one month. It is a 12-month course designed to help you build or improve the essential building blocks we all need to live a good life. It’s also a learning project for myself, which I’ll be covering on the blog.

A common misconception I’ve seen since I first started writing about foundations is that having a solid foundation is, essentially, just a result of having good habits. 

Habits are essential, but focusing exclusively on habits can be misleading to both the short-term requirements for self-improvement as well as challenges in maintaining change long-term.

What Habits Are (And What They Aren’t)

Simply put, a habit is any behavior that has been at least partly automated. Habits are behaviors we can perform without significant effort, attention or thought.

I use the words “partly” and “significant” here because most real-life behaviors cannot be completely automated. This was one of the central findings of Shiffrin and Schneider’s original experiments on controlled and automatic processing.1

As we repeatedly perform a behavior, such as trying to form a habit or practicing a new skill, some parts of the skill get offloaded to areas of the brain that do not require conscious attention to operate. However, other parts of decision making continue to require conscious control.

Consider driving a car. When you first learned to drive, you needed to pay attention to everything—from which pedal was the gas pedal to how much to rotate the steering wheel to turn the car’s tires the right amount. Eventually, most of these things became mindless—you just drive the car without minding the details. But, even in these cases, we still need to pay attention while we drive, or we’ll get in an accident.

Similarly, when we build a new habit, such as regular exercise, healthy eating, or reading more books, some components of that action get automated, making it easier to do the right thing. But it rarely reaches a point where the behavior is completely on autopilot.

Habits alone are probably not enough for most people to sustain long-term changes.

What Else Do We Need to Make Changes Last?

If effortless habits aren’t enough, what else do we need to make long-term changes stick?

I can think of several different psychological processes that make behavior change last in the long term, including:

Knowledge. While knowing the right thing to do is not typically the bottleneck for most people, it supports motivation and decision-making. Someone who understands how investing works isn’t guaranteed to make wise choices with her savings, but she will be more likely to grow wealth than someone who thinks investing is just a form of gambling.Self-efficacy. While habits are unconscious biases toward certain actions, self-efficacy is a conscious belief in your ability to take those actions. I suspect many out-of-shape people stay that way because even the thought of exercising every day seems unmanageable. Forming habits helps, but a “fit” person—who trusts themselves to exercise regularly—can often switch to completely different exercise routines without difficulty because they believe exercising is fun and easy.Rules. We all cultivate rules for our own behavior, even if we can’t always consciously articulate those standards. A person might be completely self-indulgent with alcohol and junk food, for instance, but never consider taking hard drugs. A rule isn’t just a behavioral tendency but a standard you hold yourself to across disparate situations.Courage. As I share in my latest book, fears are largely provoked by unconscious threat-detection circuitry. These perceived threats bubble up into our consciousness as fears and anxieties, even though we often can’t rationalize their source. Exposure to the situations that trigger our fears without experiencing undue harm can make action easier.Systems. Using an explicit tool, like GTD for your productivity, index investing for your finances, or a calendar-based system for managing your professional commitments can offload some of the mental work of trying to make the correct decision all the time. Just as it’s easier to use paper notes than to memorize text verbatim, sometimes the best way to instill good behaviors is to avoid relying on your brain to execute those behaviors in the first place.Identity. How we see ourselves reflects the behaviors we consider appropriate. Identity is often a lag measure of behavior: we tend to see ourselves as the kind of person who does what we typically do. While there are exceptions to this, how we identify ourselves can be a potent sustaining factor for change even when habits have long broken down. Consider an athlete who has to take a year off training to recover from an injury. If he continues to see himself as an athlete, getting back into fitness underscores that identity and is a naturally compelling goal, not a forced behavior. 

In other words, we need a lot more than just automatic behaviors to sustain a change. We need knowledge to guide the right actions, self-efficacy to know we are capable of taking them, rules and systems for managing decisions, courage to overcome our fears and a shift of identity to sustain it throughout the innumerable disruptions that will occur in life.

Why Taking a Bigger Picture of Change Matters

This may all sound somewhat pedantic. After all, few people who advocate for habit change argue against doing the other things I suggest above. Nobody I know of believes that change occurs purely through automation. 

However, it’s important to recognize some of these complexities because they shape our understanding of how change can be motivated and sustained.

To take just one example, consider the complex skill of public speaking. Unless you’re giving the same speech over and over, it’s unlikely that much of this skill is going to be automated. This is especially true if you speak in many different situations and contexts.

Practicing public speaking dramatically reduces the fear associated with standing on stage. Thus, repeated exposure will make it much easier to do. 

The primary bottleneck to change in this example is courage, not habit, which gives us a clue as to what approach is needed. Exposure works best when you vary the context and cues to provide a robust signal of safety. This is somewhat the opposite of typical habit-setting advice, which argues for increasing consistency in order to accelerate automaticity. 

Similarly, since we aren’t aiming for an automatic habit but simply a greater feeling of ease, it probably makes more sense to go overboard in the beginning—doing a lot more speaking than one plans to sustain long-term, so that the feeling of fear can drop dramatically, rather than try to ration it out the way one would if you were planning a really long-term habit.

Public speaking isn’t a foundation I’m considering for my own twelve-month effort, but outreach, where the month’s focus is on creating opportunities to meet new people and build weak ties, is analogous in many ways. 

Another example could be productivity and personal finance, which are sustained by having good knowledge and systems. In both cases, a system that requires a lot of habits—rote actions you need to take regularly to keep the system running—is probably a sign of bad design rather than a virtue.

Sustaining Change

When discussing my Foundations project, a friend asked if I am giving up on the learning theme so prevalent in my blog. It’s the opposite. Having spent much of the last decade diving deep into the psychology that underlies motivation, learning and behavior change, I feel like that is my default lens for viewing any other topic.

It’s also a lens I hadn’t yet built when I embarked on my first foundation-building self-improvement decades ago. As a result, I often designed my efforts at improvement badly—either misunderstanding the nature of the change needed or failing to appreciate how all the above factors, not just habits, influence how we sustain long-term changes.

I’m excited, then, to apply this new lens to the upcoming project. Not only do I want to strengthen some of my own foundations, but it is also a meta-project exploring the practical art of making changes. Ultimately, the most crucial knowledge is self-knowledge—since its through it that all other learning is possible.

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I’m 36

Today is my birthday. Continuing a tradition I began half a lifetime ago, this is an update on my life over the last year and my plans for the year ahead. 

This year was a transitional one. My second book, Get Better at Anything, was published in May. It was a central project of mine for the previous four years. While the writing process largely ended last year, book publishing takes a long time, so I still had another year of editing and marketing to conclude the project.

Writing this book was the most challenging project I’ve taken on in my life so far. It started as a different book and became an odyssey into academic research. While likening the process to getting a self-directed PhD is an exaggeration, it was the first time I had to really stretch my research muscles, trying to go both broad and deep about a lot of questions I had about learning.

While it was stylistically and substantively different from Ultralearning, I’m happy with how the book turned out. And now that it’s finished, I’m excited to free up my mental bandwidth for new projects.

My New Foundations Project

The other big news of this year was starting a new project—a year-long effort at self-improvement and self-education: Foundations. 

The essence of this project is twelve successive month-long focuses. Each focus tackles an essential, universal ingredient for a good life: fitness, productivity, money, food, reading, outreach, sleep, reflection, connection, focus, organization and service.

For each foundation, I’m working to establish new long-term habits. But I’m also treating each month as a chance to do a deep dive into the research and expert advice in each topic area—a series of mini-ultralearning projects designed to grasp the essence of the theory and practice.

In addition to a personal project I’ll be writing about frequently over the next year, this project will also be the basis for a paid course we will offer later this year. Needing to teach something is one of the best mechanisms to learn something deeply, and working with more people should help to generalize the experience beyond just my (admittedly weird) perspective.1

Some Quirks of Timing

In the past, when I’ve done big learning challenges, I’ve usually done them live. I announced my MIT Challenge as I started it and published my updates almost as soon as I recorded them. The Year Without English was similar, with the short recap videos being edited and published at the end of one country, just before we went to the next.

Doing projects live has benefits. You get to share updates with people and respond to feedback. My decision to incorporate programming projects into the MIT Challenge was a direct result of this feedback. (Originally, I was just going to do final exams.)

But also, it’s logistically challenging to produce content this way. It means all the research, filming, editing, and publishing must be done on a tight schedule that can be incredibly stressful. I remember Vat finishing the video edit for our three-month stay in Spain while we were technically homeless at the beginning part of our stay in Brazil. Despite the challenges of needing to speak a new language and finding a place to stay, we knew we couldn’t delay producing the video, or we’d be out of sync with the calendar.

Since this project is also going to be a course, I didn’t feel it would be in the best interests of the readers or students to operate on such a tight timeframe. I want the lessons of the course to be thoughtful, with time to reflect on each foundation, rather than slapped together just to hit a deadline. I also wanted the public updates to get the usual round of editing and polishing that we’ve built into our normal content production process.

This is a rather roundabout way of saying that I decided to “run ahead” of the course content and public blog updates about the project by about three months. Even though the course isn’t being offered until next month, and the “day one” update will be released on October 1st, I’m actually already in the second month of the project as I write this.

Despite this timing shift for logistical reasons, I’m still planning to publish my public updates about the project and the course content synchronously, with that three-month delay. For the personal updates, I’m writing the initial draft when the event occurs and not editing them for hindsight afterward, even though they will be published after a delay.

While it’s possible this delayed release schedule may impact some of the project’s spontaneity, the extra time will hopefully increase its longevity and, quite frankly, reduce the stress levels for me and my team in delivering a good course experience. 

Returns and Progression

When I wrote Ultralearning, it was with an awareness that the phase of my life that inspired the book was ending. I was no longer in my twenties, and the idea of dropping everything to study college courses or travel the world to learn languages was no longer as feasible or appealing as it had been.

I also felt that doubling down on my past efforts was risky. While my previous projects were hardly flawless, I was earnestly trying my very best during each of them. With new life responsibilities and constraints, trying to outdo my younger self seemed a losing bet. Still, there’s always a bittersweet feeling when an element of your life that provided passion and purpose is ending.

One reason I’m excited about this new project is that it genuinely feels like a way forward—a way to take on a new intensive learning project—that is appropriate for my current stage in life. 

Ironically, as much as this project is aimed at a new phase of my life, it also circles back to some of the earliest material of this blog. In working on my foundations, I’ll revisit many books and topics I studied extensively in my late teens and early twenties. So, while a focus on foundations feels appropriate as I am on the threshold of midlife, it is also a return to some of the identity-forming influences of my youth.

I honestly can’t say how all of this will be received. Maybe my project updates will be boring, and the course will prove unpopular. But, to me, the best projects I’ve undertaken on this blog are the ones I would have been excited to undertake even if I never shared anything about them. By that measure, I think this new project definitely qualifies. 

As always, I’m grateful to you, and all the rest of my readers and students, for your support over the years. That support is what makes projects like this possible. I hope you’ll join me on this next journey here or in the course.

The post I’m 36 appeared first on Scott H Young.

5 Ways to Increase Your Learning Throughput

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to learn more efficiently. Given the same amount of time and resources, how can we learn more?

While efficiency is beneficial, focusing too much on it can lead us to neglect the more important factor for learning success: the quantity of time spent learning.

Consider an activity like using flashcards to learn vocabulary in a new language. Focusing on efficiency, you would try to figure out the best way to learn each card. Should you study isolated words or embed each one in a sentence? One card or multiple per term? Use pictures or only words?

These are good questions to ask, but the gains from more efficient flashcards are dwarfed by the more important question of how many cards you study. 

While learning Mandarin Chinese, I set a target to do 100 new flashcards per day, plus reviews. I had multiple cards per word, but this approach meant I could add twenty to fifty new words to my vocabulary daily, which made it possible to get up to a conversational level more quickly during my short stay in China.

This more-is-better approach isn’t limited to flashcards. The value of increasing throughput for learning is apparent everywhere:

How many books you read per year (vs. trying to read the “right” books).How many essays you publish.How many practice exams you complete.How many times you rehearse a song.How many coding puzzles you solve.How many minutes of conversation you have in another language.

Efficiency takes the time available as fixed and assumes the best way to improve your learning outcome is by trying to find the most effective method. Throughput, in contrast, fixes the method and asks: how can I learn more?

While I typically fixate on learning efficiency, today, I’d like to consider some ways we can increase learning throughput.

1. Schedule large chunks of uninterrupted time.

The best method for doing a lot of something is to put it on your calendar. If you’re reluctant to put it on the calendar, you’ll be doubly reluctant to actually do the work. 

This factor is a bigger “secret” of my learning success than I often discuss explicitly. When I did the MIT Challenge, I wrote a lot about my thoughts on efficient studying—but I was also studying 10-11 hours per day with minimal breaks.

Similarly, while Vat and my No English Rule was a useful technique for immersive language learning, learning the language was our full-time job. I devoted several hours a day in China just to studying the language, and that was on top of all the incidental usage while traveling in the country.

I think about this because I occasionally get questions asking how someone could replicate one of my projects while also working a full-time job. The implicit assumption seems to be that working full-time on something else wouldn’t prevent them from otherwise hitting the same timetable. I always struggled to understand that perspective, but it makes sense if you don’t realize how much work was involved behind the scenes.

Scheduling huge chunks of time for projects that aren’t central to my work or family life isn’t easy for me these days, but when a project demands it, I still schedule it first. I read over 100 books and more than 600 scientific papers for my new book, Get Better at Anything. I did this mainly by sitting down and reading all day for months and months.

2. Be aggressive about using fragmented time.

What can you do if your big chunks of time are already scheduled?

The next step is to make use of your unscheduled time. There are two major ways you can do that:

1) Swap your phone activities for something else.

Being on a smartphone (or other device) consumes a lot of our time, often when there aren’t easy replacement activities. We check our phones while waiting in line at the store, when a friend leaves the restaurant table to use the bathroom, when sitting on the bus for our commute. That time isn’t usually allocable to the deep learning activities I mentioned in the first point, but it’s not entirely useless either.

Figuring out what you can do with that time—and being disciplined about using it—can add up to a big difference. Before Vat and my trip to China, I put in almost 100 hours learning Chinese, despite only scheduling about a dozen hours of actual studying time. Most of my practice came from using time fragments to study my flashcards.

Similarly, having the Kindle app on your phone can greatly increase the number of books you read, and downloading lectures to watch later on your phone can increase the number of lessons you view.

Typically, the main obstacle to achieving this is all the other things on your phone. If you have X (formerly Twitter) or Instagram, you’re not going to review flashcards. Thus, the best way you can plan out your time here is to cull any distracting apps so that the only things you can do with your phone to kill time are the things you actually care about.

2) Make projects and activities ready to go.

The other time fragments we can reclaim are periods of downtime during the day when we could be learning but aren’t inclined to. These are the times when we could watch Netflix, but could also read or practice programming or drawing.

The obstacle here is usually that the projects we might engage in have high energetic or logicstical costs to getting started. Once you are into the project, the learning task is often enjoyable enough to motivate you to keep going. But if you can’t get over that initial bump, especially if you’re tired at the end of the day, you’ll end up investing a lot less time.

You can fix this by making your activities ready to go. Having a dedicated space in my home for art projects has made it a lot easier to keep working on them (compared to when I had to set up and put everything away for each session). Similarly, I like to keep programming project windows open continuously when I’m working on a project, so all that’s required is a click to the working area. Finally, keeping lecture videos paused wherever you left off saves you from having to find the video—and where you left off—again. These things may sound trivial, but they can add hugely to how much you do.

I should note that my personal policy is to avoid this strategy for projects that are already heavily scheduled. If you’re already putting in several hours of deliberate studying, it’s best not also to imply that you could study whenever you have free time, as that tends to suck away energy from your actual schedule.

3. Make each iteration more efficient.

In an industrial context, a big part of increasing throughput is eliminating even trivial amounts of waste that occur on each assembled item. One of Henry Ford’s great insights was to switch the process from workers moving between cars, assembling each part, to having the cars move to each worker—the conveyor belt of the assembly line minimized the amount of time workers spent walking around.

Similarly, there are often steps you can take to reduce the inefficient, non-learning parts of your learning process.

Consider:

Time spent choosing materials. This could be choosing what to draw, which words to memorize, which books or articles to read, or which practice problems to solve. A significant source of wasted time is simply deciding what to learn next. If you set up a queue and fill it with materials, you can avoid this kind of waste.Time spent idling within tasks. An underpainting needs to dry before you can touch it up. A machine learning model needs to be trained before you can debug it. You must wait your turn to ask the professor a question. You can eliminate these gaps with concurrent tasks or, if that’s not feasible, an alternative activity that complements what you’re working on (say, switching from practicing to reading).Time spent preparing materials. Creating flashcards, organizing your notes, downloading a developer environment, and printing off reading material are all part of the job of learning, but they don’t involve any active thinking that leads to learning. You can optimize these by batching similar tasks together, creating templates for future work or even ignoring the task entirely (for instance, I used to print papers to read them; now I do everything on my computer to save time).

An important caveat here is that while we want to make our learning cycles more efficient, we won’t do that by shortcutting the learning process. Memorizing a solution you don’t understand, rushing through a process quickly and carelessly when your goal is accuracy, or using materials with mistakes without taking the time to fix them can lower your learning throughput, even as you superficially accelerate the pace.

4. Make learning more enjoyable.

There’s a basic connection between fun and throughput: It’s easier to motivate yourself to do enjoyable tasks than those that feel grinding or boring. Since motivation, not time, is most often what’s in short supply, making learning more fun can automatically increase involvement.

I’ve written a separate essay on how to make learning more fun without sacrificing efficiency. Briefly, optimizing difficulty for a high success rate, finding ways to make the subject more meaningful, and rewarding yourself frequently are all ways to make an activity pleasurable enough that it doesn’t require excessive discipline to execute.

5. Decide what you’ll do less of, in order to learn more.

Discussing trade-offs between different, worthwhile activities is taboo in self-improvement advice. The implication is that you should be exercising, socializing, meditating, journaling, hustling, traveling, spending quality time with your family and drinking sixteen glasses of water every day.

Except that’s impossible. You can’t actually do everything, and the people who appear to be doing everything usually aren’t either.

Instead, the decision to learn more is always a decision to do less of something else. While sometimes this trade-off doesn’t cause meaningful value conflicts (I don’t miss social media at all, for instance), that’s not always the case. The decision to spend more time reading books, for example, might mean less time spent following the news. Or the decision to learn a language might mean there aren’t thirty minutes in your day for meditation.

Sometimes the trade-off is between the things you intend to learn. After having kids, I deliberately chose to stop scheduling regular conversation practice for the languages I had learned. I felt bad about it, partly because maintaining a conversational level in these languages was important to me. However, if I insisted on scheduling multiple hours a week to maintain my prior learning projects, I would prevent myself from learning other things, which I value more.

The need to accept trade-offs is one reason I like learning projects with defined timelines, rather than habits that continue indefinitely. It’s easier to commit to working on your French, JavaScript or public speaking skills if the timeframe is four months rather than a perpetual commitment.

Still, I think more of us would be better off if we make these trade-offs explicit, rather than making them thoughtlessly and feeling guilty about it afterward.

Those are my suggestions—what are yours? What do you do to maximize the amount of learning in your life? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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The Three Gaps

As I prepare for my upcoming foundations project, I’ve been doing a lot of reading. One of the best books I read on nutrition was Walter Willett’s Eat, Drink and Be Healthy. 

Willett is one of the world’s most cited nutritionists, and the book comes with a seal of approval from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In short, pseudoscientific crash diet book, this is not.

But as anyone who even casually follows nutritional advice knows … the field is kind of a mess. Popular recommendations for diet seem as varied as they are extreme. Some people insist a strict vegan diet is the only way to be healthy. Others encourage us to subsist entirely on butter and red meat.

Even within academia, nutritional research is often criticized as being low-quality and underpowered, thus providing fodder for countless clickbait news pieces about how chocolate—or blueberries—or kimchi—is the secret elixir for life.

As I read Willett’s book (he advocates for basically a Mediterranean diet, by the way), I started thinking about the three gaps in knowledge that define the quality of our lives.

The First Gap: Omniscience and Science

The first gap is between what a God’s-eye view of the question would take as the answer and the current scientific understanding. In other words, if all the difficulties and methodological limitations inherent to dietary research could be fixed, and we had a billion researchers studying humanity for a thousand years, what advice would they converge on?

Of course, the omniscient perspective is inherently unknowable. But we sometimes get clues when scientists flip their advice when new evidence comes in. If the cutting edge of expertise changes its paradigms frequently, it’s a sign that there’s a large gap between what we know now and what we could potentially know someday.

Despite the much-ballyhooed flip-flopping of nutritional advice, Willett’s book led me to believe the issue is due more to stumbles in science communication than changing science. Experts advocated a low-fat diet for years, in part because of the finding that saturated fats lead to increases in “bad” LDL cholesterol and thus are damaging to the cardiovascular system. 

But Willett implies that this misleading recommendation (which encouraged people to go for refined carbs and sugars, rather than healthier fats and oils) was not a failure of expert knowledge but rather expert knowledge failed to trickle down to public recommendations, in part because of political influence on the USDA in their food guide, and also in part from those compiling recommendations oversimplifying the science. A better recommendation, Willett argues, would have been to encourage us to replace saturated fats with unsaturated ones—swapping butter for olive oil, beef for fish—while discouraging refined carbohydrates.

Still, in his book, Willett continues to recommend that moderate alcohol intake is healthier than teetotaling, a previous consensus opinion that now appears to be shaky. So it’s far from the case that nutrition has been “solved.”

The Second Gap: Science and Common Sense

The second gap is much easier to measure: how much does the average person know about nutrition compared to the experts?

The average person knows astonishingly little about virtually any field that matters. This is repeatedly demonstrated with comic effect by man-on-the-street video segments where people seem to have a shockingly inaccurate picture of the world.

Thus, measured in terms of factual and conceptual knowledge, there’s a startling gap between what most people know and what experts know in nearly every field. After all, it takes years to get a PhD and years further to become eminent in your field. Learning at that level takes a long time.

Yet, the practical difference between popular understanding and the frontier of science is much smaller than the knowledge gap implies. No, the average person probably can’t tell you what the differences between unsaturated, saturated and trans fats are—but they have probably heard before that trans fats are bad for you.

The average person knows that whole grains are healthier than refined grains, that they should eat lots of fruits and vegetables, and that drinking a lot of sodas and beer isn’t good for their health. 

Some of this gap is because knowledge often has diminishing returns for practical importance. A nutritional expert must master a huge body of knowledge as well as esoteric research techniques, whereas an ordinary person needs only to follow the much more concise expert recommendations. 

However, even in a misinformation-soaked media ecosystem, expert recommendations still usually pervade the popular culture, even if the knowledge needed to assess or understand their evidence base is totally lacking.

That said, there probably is a real gap here, even practically speaking. I became a vegetarian in my late teens, partly because I was utterly convinced by T. Colin Campbell’s arguments on nutrition, even I now think some of the science he used isn’t very good. But I didn’t have to read a book on nutrition to know that donuts aren’t good for you.

The Third Gap: Common Sense and Action

The third gap is probably the most significant: between what we know we should do and what we actually do.

We know we should eat healthier. 

Even though our idea of what it means to “eat healthy” is necessarily limited by the current state of the science—and perhaps even more limited by our impoverished understanding of that science—the biggest gap in our lives is usually between what we think we ought to be doing and what we actually do.

This isn’t limited to nutrition. Most people understand the basics of personal finance—spend less than you earn, invest the rest, and put aside money for retirement and emergencies. We know that focus largely boils down to making sure we have a distraction-free space to do what matters and building up our patience by sticking through harder work. It’s not a secret that good relationships require putting in the time and really trying to listen.

While the gap between what we know and what we do is the most practically significant, it’s also the greatest possible opportunity. If we can shift ourselves closer to what we think is ideal, even if that’s far from what’s optimal from a scientific or objective standpoint, we can still greatly improve our lives.

What Creates the Knowledge-Action Gap?

Why is there such a big gap between what we know and what we do?

Eating is a good example because it’s an area where we struggle to stick to our own advice. Healthy eating is hard for a bunch of reasons:

We enjoy a lot of foods that are bad for us.We have an innate desire to eat more than we should, leftover from when food was scarce.Healthy food takes more time to prepare than junk food.Food is communal, and we want to enjoy eating together, even if that means compromising on personal nutrition.Nutrition may not be the focus of our lives, putting most eating decisions on autopilot.And so on …

It’s easy to blame our lapses on failures of motivation or willpower. But, in many ways, resolving these problems depends on a different kind of expertise, not expertise in the domain in question, but deep knowledge about yourself, how you think, behave and manage some of these trade-offs. The person who plans ahead by packing healthy snacks so they don’t scarf down a bag of potato chips during a mid-afternoon hunger pang isn’t exhibiting greater willpower; she’s solving a tricky behavioral problem before it becomes an issue of willpower.

The first study in self-improvement, therefore, is understanding our own psychology: how we think, learn, form habits and break bad ones; our unique strengths and weaknesses that enable us to succeed in some situations and not others. 

Only if we can close that gap do we have any hope of closing the others.

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Rapid Learner is Now Open for a New Session

About once per year, I offer a new public session of my course, Rapid Learner. This is a six-week program that is designed to make you a better student, professional and lifelong learner. If you’ve found my essays on the science of learning helpful, or found my learning projects interesting, this course shows you how to do it.

Click here to sign up for Rapid Learner.

This is the new edition of the course, which includes 20+ newly recorded lessons, deep dives, walkthroughs and more. If you’re looking to get better at learning difficult things, this course is the place to start.

If you have any questions about the course at all, please email me directly and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Registration will only remain open until midnight on Friday, August 02, 2024 (Pacific time).

The post Rapid Learner is Now Open for a New Session appeared first on Scott H Young.

No, AI Doesn’t Mean You Won’t Need to Learn

Note: Rapid Learner—my six-week course that teaches you the best way to learn anything—will reopen on Monday for a new session. If you like my books or challenges and want to master the art of learning yourself, I recommend checking it out.

Perhaps the biggest change in the podcasts I’ve been doing for my latest book, Get Better at Anything, compared to the interviews for my previous book, Ultralearning, has been the focus on AI. Just a few years ago, the topic was rarely brought up, now including a few questions about AI has become almost obligatory.

It’s easy to see why. Generative AI is incredible, and its abilities would seem near-miraculous to machine learning researchers transported here from even just a decade ago.

Yet despite AI’s transformative powers, I’m skeptical that AI will fundamentally alter how we learn and, in turn, the kinds of efforts and strategies we use to learn things well. To be fair, generative AI enables a lot of new tactics, but the fundamentals haven’t changed much.

The Case for (Moderate) AI-Education Skepticism

The safest way to reason about future changes is to look at past changes. While it’s always tempting to say, “this time it’s different,” most of the time, it really isn’t. 

Looking at the numerous fads that have come and gone in educational technology, one thing is striking: Despite the enormous promise of dozens of technologies, the changes to both actual education as practiced in schools and how training and learning operate in the ideal, frankly, have been disappointing.

Video recordings were supposed to obviate the need for teachers. The internet supposedly turned students into digital natives. Computerized tutoring was supposed to accelerate the acquisition of problem-solving skills. Giving out free laptops was supposed to enlighten an entire continent. DuoLingo was supposed to make the iPhone generation multilingual.

I certainly haven’t been immune to the hype. I thought open courseware was going to change higher education. But more than a decade later, I can honestly say it hasn’t changed much at all. Weirdos like me might make use of it, but most people either don’t or can’t.

Given this history, I approach any new educational technology with a dose of skepticism. Of course it’s always possible that things really are different this time, and the way we teach, learn and educate will be forever transformed. 

But I doubt it. 

Why Doesn’t Educational Technology Do More?

You could tell several stories about why educational technology isn’t generally more transformative. Perhaps learning is a red herring, and education is just a signaling contest that isn’t enhanced by greater efficiency. Or it could be that the human element is truly central to learning, and technology that tries to replace it is doomed to fail. 

While those explanations have their merits, I gravitate toward the view that learning isn’t altered so radically by (most) technology, because the true work of learning well hasn’t actually changed much. While technology can tweak processes and change things around the margins, it doesn’t fundamentally alter what you need to do to learn because learning takes place in the brain, and brains haven’t changed all that much.

A person who wants to be a skilled programmer, for instance, can certainly benefit from the fact that ChatGPT can explain code, help with debugging, and guide you to resources. At the margins, I expect it to be somewhat easier for a serious student to learn the skill since there are fewer genuinely “stuck points,” such as spending days hunting down an elusive bug or code failing to compile because the programming environment isn’t set up correctly.

But I don’t expect ChatGPT to fundamentally alter what you need to do mentally to learn to code because learning is still going to involve mastering the key concepts, developing procedural fluency in the language, and searing syntax into your brain. 

Similarly, apps like Duolingo don’t fundamentally alter the work needed to learn a language. You still need to learn all the words and grammar and practice speaking and comprehension until you’re fluent. These tools, at most, can smooth some of the rough edges off of learning. (More typically, however, students will use them to smooth off the necessary roughness of learning and thus never actually learn what they wanted to.)

AI Won’t Reduce the Need to Learn

Just as I don’t believe AI is going to radically change how we learn, I don’t think it will radically alter the need to learn, either.

It’s difficult to make predictions about the most extreme case where we rapidly reach superintelligence, and the machine mind can do everything the human mind can do and more. Perhaps we’ll all live in an AI-generated utopia, or maybe the world will be turned into grey goo.

But in the more reasonable case that AI powers continue to grow, exceeding human beings in some dimensions but not others, we’ll likely be in a collaborative system where both AI and human contributions to useful work are important.

In this case, I see no reason to think AI fundamentally differs from other information technologies. Tools enable human minds to offload some cognitive work while expanding the returns for other kinds of cognitive work. The invention of writing, for instance, reduced the need for verbatim memorization while also vastly increasing the amount of knowledge one could encounter. 

The uncertainty about AI’s eventual cognitive abilities means we benefit from being more flexible about our skills. Since it’s not clear exactly which skills, domains and professions will be most heavily transformed, the smart bet is developing the flexibility to learn well into the future.

The Fundamentals of Learning Well Haven’t Changed

Given the uncertainty of what skills will be most useful in an AI age and the high probability that learning will continue to rely on the same processes in the near future, I think that’s as good an argument as any for spending some time learning how to learn.

The human brain is (still) the most sophisticated learning machine on the planet. Unfortunately, it does not come with an instruction manual.

This lack of instructions can cost us. Many of our intuitions about learning are wrong. We think we’ll retain more if we re-read our notes, even though practicing recall is better. We feel like repetitive practice is more efficient than mixing things up (it isn’t). And we continue to cram, even though that’s the surest way to forget everything right after the test.

Worse, we’re terrible self-directed learners. While many of us manage to piece together a decent strategy to pass a test after years of formal schooling, most of us are at a loss when we need to learn new skills after graduation. The art of designing effective learning projects, gathering materials, choosing strategies—and actually sticking with it!—is woefully undeveloped.

A New Session of My Course, Rapid Learner

As many of you know, I teach a course, Rapid Learner, that aims to fill these gaps. I have been teaching this course for nearly a decade. On Monday, I’m opening the course for a new session.

The course is different from my books. While my focus in my published books is to try to introduce useful ideas about learning to a broader audience, there’s a lot I can do in courses that is hard or impossible to do with a published book. That includes pacing the course over six weeks—so you have time to turn it into action, using interactive worksheets—so you can apply the advice step by step, and having the opportunity to interact with students via comments and replies—so you can ask questions and get feedback.

If you’re ready to build the timeless art of effective learning, I hope to see you there!

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