Scott H. Young's Blog, page 8

The sweet spot: Why more effort is not always better

I recently finished listening to Rich Roll’s memoir, Finding Ultra, on audiobook. Hearing about a guy who completed five Ironman triathlons in a single week is great motivation to not wuss out when you’re in the middle of a run.

But while Roll’s story is undoubtedly inspiring, it got me thinking about a central question in my pursuit of building better foundations: how much is good enough?

Fitness, like most foundations, has ample benefits. It makes you healthier, increases energy, boosts cognition and helps you live longer. Yet it seems our brains didn’t evolve to make us like to exercise, so as a society, we’re chronically out-of-shape.

The benefits of exercise form a classic diminishing returns curve. People who do zero exercise benefit tremendously from moving a little. People who meet recommended minimums still benefit from exercising more, but it’s a smaller improvement than going from no exercise to some. The common advice amongst fitness advocates seems to be, “Some exercise is good; more is better.”

Data drawn from p. 284 of Daniel Lieberman’s Exercised

But there’s more to life than just staying in shape.

Even Roll, for all his incredible accomplishments, noted many of the drawbacks his intensive training initially generated: his focus on training led to the decline of his legal practice, putting his family through financial challenges, and his wife had to manage a larger share of the household work. Roll turned his success into a best-selling book and popular podcast. But for the rest of us, fitness is a side-hustle, not a career.

The question isn’t limited to exercise. Several years ago, I went on a ten-day meditation retreat. When the retreat finished, it was impressed upon us that the way to maintain our newfound mental clarity was to meditate for two hours every single day.

How do you get the balance right? How do you decide how much to invest in a foundation, and when do you decide you’re already doing enough?

Here’s The Wrong Way to Answer This Question

Let’s start with how we typically make decisions of this kind: we look around us, see what other people are doing, and make a decision based on what kind of investment seems “normal.”

Delegating decisions of this kind can be adaptive in many areas of life. The cultural evolution hypothesis argues that cultures can adopt beneficial practices without necessarily having a good rationale for their existence. 

Indigenous farmers learned to mix small amounts of ash into corn when cooking it, which prevents niacin deficiency. Europeans who brought corn back as a food crop often suffered from pellagra owing to their lack of this technique. Yet neither group knew anything about vitamins. Cultural practices evolve, and thus, social norms can embody wisdom.

However, cultural evolution and the slow embedding of wisdom into practices take a long time, and our environment has transformed quickly. Continuing the example of fitness, few traditional cultures share our modern concept of exercise, despite the overwhelming evidence that most of us ought to do more of it. Until recently, daily life was enough to keep in relatively good shape.

Thus, looking around you and seeing what others are doing, while a good long-run strategy, will fail in exactly those circumstances where our environment has changed too rapidly for biological and cultural evolution to catch up. For each of the foundations I listed last week, there’s such a story that explains why we underinvest.

What’s a Better Way to Decide How Much is Enough?

The correct way to make these kinds of decisions about tradeoffs comes from economics. The formula is relatively simple, even if the quantities involved are harder to calculate:

Add up all the benefits of investing an additional unit of time, effort, attention or money.Add up all the costs of spending those resources, including the opportunity cost of doing something else.Continue investing more in the foundation until additional costs equal additional benefits.

To consider this, let’s go back to our fitness example. What are the benefits of exercise? Health is the most obvious, but there’s also increased energy, cognition, mood and, of course, looking good.

Physical health is perhaps the easiest to quantify since there are many studies looking at mortality rates, coming from epidemiological work looking at cohorts of individuals who vary in their fitness levels.1

To this curve, we need to add the other benefits of exercise. Simplifying it a bit, we get something that looks like this—each additional minute of exercise brings a lot of benefits at first, slowing down over time as the quantity increases:

What about costs? Exercise enough and the willpower needed to exercise becomes quite modest. While you can get injured during exercise, regular exercise also prevents injuries by strengthening bones and joints, so as long as the workouts don’t ramp up too quickly, this is probably a net benefit rather than a cost. This leaves the main cost as the time required to work out.

Although the benefits of exercise are relatively universal, the cost equation does change for different people. If you work two jobs, have six kids and study on weekends, an additional half an hour for anything is incredibly costly. Conversely, if you’re single and only work part-time, you may find it easy to spend hours a week on television or video games without much impact on the rest of your life.

Costs tend to go up as you spend more. Doing one minute of exercise per day requires almost no sacrifice. But the price gets higher as you need to cut into more valuable alternative activities to find time. For a busier person, this rise is steeper, since there is comparatively less “slack” in her schedule:

Finding Balance

Actually calculating the optimal crossover point where additional benefits equal costs is difficult to do in practice. Many of the costs have no shared standard of measure, and it may be hard to get accurate figures for, say, the exact impact of an extra ten minutes of exercise on brain health.

But just because we can’t find an exact result doesn’t mean this analysis is useless.

Instead, I’d argue that we can do an informal version of this thinking whenever we make decisions about how much we should, ideally, invest in each foundation:

What is the additional benefit of doing more in this foundation? What is the opportunity cost? What would I have to stop doing to make that investment?Is the trade worth it in the long-run?

Long-run costs and benefits are what’s most crucial to this calculation. Most foundations have substantial upfront investments, even if the ongoing costs are quite reasonable. This can be because it takes awhile to get a system up and running, such as when you start a new productivity system or start investing. But, typically, the initial costs are high because investing in that foundation isn’t a habit and thus requires a lot of attention and self-control to implement.

However, once you pay those fixed costs, you can reap the benefits of strong foundations for the much more modest “maintenance” costs. Most people who have a good productivity system, solid financial portfolio or healthy eating habits aren’t expending a lot of time and energy to sustain them.

One justification I can see for engaging in a serious effort to build foundations over time is that it enables you to push closer to the true optimal point. Once you get over the initial barriers of setup and habituation, you can reap the rewards with much less effort. 

The post The sweet spot: Why more effort is not always better appeared first on Scott H Young.

The Twelve Foundations for a Good Life

Last week, I discussed the importance of foundations, the essentials in life we all need, simply by virtue of being human.

I also hinted at my upcoming project. I am taking a year to strengthen my own foundations, while working with a group of people who want to do the same. 

One year is twelve months. So, if you spend a month focusing on building each foundation (plus doing maintenance the rest of the year to ensure it is stable), there is enough time to focus on twelve different foundations.

With this project in mind, here is the list of foundations I plan to cover, as well as the keystone habits that will support them, and my first guess at the books I want to read (or re-read) during the month:

1. Physical Fitness

Keystone Habit: Exercise for thirty minutes every day.

Fitness is a paradigmatic example of a foundation. While not everyone needs to be an Olympian, we all benefit from being in shape. Being in shape comes with an enormous list of benefits to health, mood, longevity and even cognition. 

But being in shape is not something you can “bank” through an intensive project and not worry about later. You need to maintain good habits and attitudes to ensure you’re getting enough physical activity by default—even when you’re not “trying to get in shape.”

Reading List:

Exercised by Daniel LiebermanOutlive by Peter AttiaAmerican College of Sports Medicine’s Complete Guide to Fitness & Health edited by Barbara BushmanThe Health Habit by Amantha Imber2. Productivity

Keystone Habit: Build a full-capture system so no task, appointment, project or idea is forgotten or misplaced.

In a recent conversation I had with Cal Newport, he brought up the importance of being seen as a reliable, productive person—not someone who works furiously to complete tasks, simply someone who doesn’t drop the ball.

Productivity, and the reputation that goes with it, is a foundation that allows you to (somewhat paradoxically) push back against a culture of burnout and overwork. If everyone knows you’re organized with your time and to-do list, and you say you don’t have space for more work, they’ll believe you. If they think you’re scattered or lazy, they might assume they can get more from you just by squeezing harder.

Aside from grand achievements or not mindlessly working extra hours, this is why a foundation in basic productivity systems is so important. If you have your act together, you’ll be much more able to work in ways that make sense for you.

Reading List:

Getting Things Done by David AllenThe Effective Executive by Peter DruckerThe Checklist Manifesto by Atul GawandeThe Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz3. Money

Keystone Habit: Track your spending.

Not everyone will be rich. But everyone should feel good about their finances.

Like other foundations, the core of personal finance is relatively simple: spend less than you earn, save and invest adequately for emergencies and retirement, avoid consumer debt and spend money on the things that matter to you (not what social scripts say you should).

Reading List:

The Psychology of Money by Morgan HouselI Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit SethiThe Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John BogleThe Simple Path to Wealth by J.L. Collins4. Food

Keystone Habit: No junk food for a month, followed by clear personal guidelines for exceptions.1

After fitness, healthy eating is probably the best investment you can make in your body. Yet eating right can be really challenging.

For starters, our brains evolved to overconsume. We live in an environment with an abundance of calories, but our instincts are geared toward the threat of future starvation.

Second, nutritional advice is confusing. Should you eat low-fat or low-carb? Is butter good for you? Eggs? Yet despite the seeming flip-flopping of nutritional science,2 the core of healthy eating is fairly obvious—we just don’t do it all the time.

Finally, diet is hard because it isn’t one habit but many. It’s a decision about what breakfast to eat, whether to snack at work and how much to indulge while staying with family over the holidays. Each decision a complex trade-off between health, enjoyment and social obligations.

Reading List:

The Hungry Brain by Stephan GuyenetEat, Drink and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating by Walter Willett and Patrick SkerrettIn Defense of Food by Michael PollanUnderstanding Nutrition by Ellie Whitney and Sharon Rady Rolfes5. Reading

Keystone Habit: Read a book for ten minutes nightly before bed.

Few practices are as important for bringing high-quality ideas into your life as reading more books. This foundation has weakened for the average American—the number of books read has declined precipitously since the invention of smartphones and social media.

While blogs and courses can teach you things, there’s something special about books. To write a book, the author has to spend at least a few years thinking deeply about a topic. Reading a good book gives you the concentrated output of years of thinking from a smart person on a topic. The same probably can’t be said for the average Instagram story.

We all know we should read more, but we don’t always have the foundation in place for doing so.

Reading List:

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van DorenHow to Read a Paper by Trisha GreenhalghOutsmart Your Brain by Daniel WillinghamWhy Read? by Mark Edmundson6. Outreach

Keystone Habit: Once per week, engage in an activity that allows you to meet new people.

Our quality of life depends on the quality of our relationships. You can have a perfect body and tons of money but be miserable if the human connections in your life are lacking or absent.

I think of relationships with people as two separate foundations: outreach and connection. Outreach is meeting new people and reconnecting with people you already know but don’t see often. Broadening your social network gives you new opportunities to make friends, get to know colleagues or find romantic partners.

Reading List:

Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl RazHow to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale CarnegieSuperconnect by Richard Koch and Greg LockwoodSupercommunicators by Charles Duhigg7. Sleep

Keystone Habit: Stick to consistent sleep and wake times. (Even on weekends.)

Sleep fills out the trifecta of health-oriented foundations, following fitness and diet. While seemingly the simplest of the three, it’s tricky to get right.

As a parent with two small kids, I can attest to the difficulty (and importance) of getting adequate sleep, particularly in the newborn phase when waking up multiple times a night is a part of the package.

But sleep is more than just unconsciousness. The rhythms for your falling asleep and waking up define your day, determine your energy and dictate what sorts of activities you’ll be able to excel at. There’s a reason entire books have been devoted to the topic of waking up early—a change in sleep rhythms can be transformative for the rest of your life.

Reading List:

The Sleep Solution by W. Chris WinterThe Sleep Prescription by Aric PratherThe 5 AM Miracle by Jeff SandersMake Your Bed by William McRaven8. Reflection

Keystone Habit: Write for ten minutes daily.

If regular reading shapes the flow of information into your head, regular writing shapes the ideas that are already there. Journaling, whether documenting events, planning for the future or trouble-shooting life’s many problems, is a foundation for more thoughtful, deliberate decisions.

Reflection is a foundation that, for many of us, ends up in disrepair because of the urgency of many of the typical tasks we face. We’re so busy that we don’t have time to sit down and think about our goals, problems and motivations. But this frenetic pace encourages us to be impulsive in our decision-making, rather than thoughtful. It can exacerbate the frazzled busyness that made us forego contemplation in the first place!

Reading List:

Bird by Bird by Anne LamottCognitive Behavior Therapy by Judith BeckAltered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard DavidsonThe Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli9. Connection

Keystone Habit: Have one genuine conversation with a close friend per day.

I’ll never forget the advice an older friend gave me upon hearing that I was about to become a father: “Don’t listen to people who say they spend ‘quality time’ with their kids. When it comes to your kids, quantity time is quality time.”

Our key relationships, with our family, partners, and best friends are obviously important. Often, we fail to shore up this foundation regularly. We chase far-off ambitions while neglecting the nearby relationships that underpin our happiness. 

Phones and digital distractions have made this worse. We can now be physically in the same room with others, yet utterly disconnected.

Reading List:

The Course of Love by Alain de BottonBowling Alone by Robert PutnamFind Your People by Jennie AllenSocial by Matthew Lieberman10. Focus

Keystone Habit: Carve out time for daily deep work.

The first foundation of productivity is being organized with your tasks—being the kind of person who gets stuff done and doesn’t drop the ball.

The second foundation of productivity is getting the right things done. Deep work, a term coined by my friend and frequent collaborator, Cal Newport, is a good proxy for the sustained concentration we need to do work that actually matters. Not all work is deep, but the deep work is usually what gets undersupplied in our daily lives.

Reading List:

Deep Work by Cal NewportFour Thousand Weeks by Oliver BurkemanThe 80/20 Principle by Richard KochFocus by Daniel Goleman11. Organization

Keystone Habit: Initially, reorganize one small space per day (could be a drawer, shelf or computer folder). Later, ensure that everything has a home (so the organization system is sustainable).

Organizing our tasks is central to productivity—if we keep misplacing tasks and appointments, we won’t be very effective.

A parallel exists in our physical environment. If our physical space is cluttered and disorganized, we have a hard time making use of our stuff.

Getting organized, however, is daunting. There’s a large fixed cost to decluttering, which can mean we live with the mess rather than fix it. Poor organizational systems tend to revert to chaos relatively quickly if they don’t serve the functions of our lives.

Reading List:

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondō10-Minute Declutter by S.J. Scott and Barrie DavenportDaily Inbox Zero by S.J. ScottMinimalism by Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus12. Service

Keystone Habit: Volunteer at least once per week.

All the foundations I’ve listed so far are largely self-centered. 

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Having your life together is probably the most important precursor to living altruistically. If we neglect our financial foundations, we can become the friend who’s always broke and needs to borrow money. If we neglect our productivity foundations, we can become so frazzled at work that we can’t contribute. If we neglect the foundations of our relationships and interests, we can find ourselves stuck at home because of years of inactivity. Neglecting foundations tends to make us less able to help others and more dependent on others for help.

But a purely self-centered attempt at securing greater foundations is self-defeating. Ultimately, we’re not just living to maximize our own self-interest; we’re working to make life better for the people around us. Service is the foundation for a meaningful life.

Reading List:

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor FranklThe 8th Habit by Stephen CoveyAltruism by Matthieu RicardThe Last Lecture by Randy PauschWhat about Spirituality, Creativity or Flossing?

This list is not complete. There are dozens more plausible things that could have made it onto the list—creative self-expression, time in nature or mindfulness. Heck, even dental hygiene is underrated since failure to floss actually increases your risk of heart attacks.

Perhaps the biggest omission from this list is explicitly devoting a month to some kind of spiritual or religious practice. The replies from my previous essay seem to indicate that this was a major foundation for many that I was overlooking.

However, spiritual practices are diverse and harder to universalize across people of different faiths and belief systems. Still, I think many of the foundations listed above can be put in a more spiritual direction (reading can be aimed at religious texts, reflection can become prayer or meditation, service is a component of most world religions).

Similarly, other important aspects of life, such as trying new things or creative self-expression are manifold in the ways they can integrate into our lives, so while they certainly matter, they are less supported by universal, concrete behaviors.

But you should probably floss.

Adding Up the Foundations

All of these foundations, put side-by-side, look like a lot. But the total daily and weekly commitment isn’t nearly so grand. 

The long-term effort required to sustain all twelve of these foundations is on the order of one hour per day, and many of the foundations don’t require any extra daily time carved out.3

The short-term effort of getting set up is higher, but this is why focusing on each foundation for a month makes sense—it can take some time to get to a position where lightweight habits can sustain you for years into the future. Setting up a good personal finance system, for instance, can take some research and effort but, after its done, shouldn’t require more than a brief, monthly check-in.

What do you think? Which foundations do you think I’m neglecting in the above list? In evaluating your own life, which foundations are strong for you and which ones need more work? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

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The Universal Foundations for a Good Life

I’ve been thinking a lot about foundations lately.

So much of modern life relies on specialization. You become an accountant, programmer or doctor. You choose to ski, paint or play basketball for fun. You’re a fan of Jane Austin, Frank Herbert or Stephen King. We all make our choices based on our unique tastes, interests and personality.

But there’s a core in life that is relatively universal. Things we all need to do simply because we are human beings.

Consider exercise. Outside of a few medical exceptions, we all should be exercising, at least a bit. Exercise is good for keeping strong, of course. But it’s also linked to improved cognition, mood, health and longevity.

Exercise is a foundation. Regardless of your career, hobbies or personality, exercise is good for you.

Reading is another foundation. The world is full of knowledge that would benefit  each one of us, whether we’re academics or an athletes.

Having basic systems for productivity is another foundation. Our primate brains didn’t evolve to keep track of doctor’s appointments, work projects and to-do list items. Even if the exact details of your productivity system are up for debate, pretty much everyone is better off if they can keep an organized calendar and to-do list.

Diet, sleep, relationships, self-reflection and personal finances are also good candidates for foundations. Everyone benefits from eating better, being well-rested, connecting to others, self-awareness and financial health. 

There are a few observations we can make about these foundations:

1. Our foundations cannot be outsourced.

“Focus on your strengths” is a common mantra for self-improvement, but it only applies when the weakness we’re avoiding can be delegated or ignored. I can hire a car mechanic to make up for my lack of automotive repair skills, but I can’t hire someone to exercise for me.

The inability to outsource this work means that the quality of your life is bounded by your weakest foundation, not the strongest. If you’re in great physical shape but terrible with money, your problems in life tend to be financial. If you have an excellent career but terrible health, your worries center around your body.

2. A solid foundation is not the default.

We didn’t evolve to go to the gym to exercise. Our ancestral environment was sufficiently physically taxing that there was no need to push ourselves to run, lift, climb or swim without a pressing reason. Modern life is more leisurely, but it means we default to moving too little.

This mismatch also explains some of the other foundations: Our brains aren’t equipped with a mental to-do list and calendar because life on the savannah didn’t have appointments. Similarly, we overeat because food is now abundant, sleep poorly because of artificial lighting, and make poor financial decisions because concepts like compound interest are not a part of our hardwired intuitions.

3. Most of the difficulty is behavioral, not intellectual.

We all know we need to eat well, exercise, get enough sleep, spend less than we earn, and read more books. The foundations are not mysterious—they’re just difficult to manage behaviorally in a busy life. 

That said, I don’t want to underrate the intellectual aspects. For instance, most popular investing books advocate for active strategies that are bad advice for most casual investors. Similarly, popular nutrition and fitness books are full of fads and quirky strategies that don’t have much evidence behind them.

The search for exotic strategies is compelling because it distracts us from the more basic—and often boring—difficulty of doing the things we need to do day in and day out. Sticking to an exercise habit long-term is challenging, so we try to overcomplicate things or find shortcuts.

4. Foundations need to be thought of holistically, rather than one-at-a-time.

A corollary of the behavioral, not intellectual, difficulty is that it’s a mistake to think of each foundation as a separate entity.

It’s not that hard to get the recommended 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise in per week if that’s your entire focus.

The challenge is that any particular foundation is rarely your sole focus. You have work tasks, family vacations, exam pressure, sick kids at home, hobbies you’re interested in, Netflix shows you want to binge and more.

Having a solid foundation means finding a way to fit all the pieces together: exercising, AND eating well, AND reading, AND sleeping enough, AND managing your money, AND having a productivity system, AND keeping up your friendships. The difficulty of having solid foundations lies in the necessity of having all of those “ANDs” that must exist simultaneously, not the intrinsic difficulty of any individual piece on its own.

5. Getting good enough matters more than perfection.

In our careers, excellence matters. Superstar programmers, doctors, lawyers or academics can have 10x the impact of their less-than-stellar colleagues. Even in less stratified careers, being good at what you do can make a big difference in your options.

Thankfully, foundations exhibit the opposite pattern. Going from not exercising at all to exercising a little gives a much steeper boost to your health than going from marathoner to ultramarathoner will. 

Investing in a solid foundation is a qualitatively different problem from becoming the best in a field. Diminishing returns means you don’t have to be “the best” at any of your foundations; you just need to get good enough in each of them. 

6. Most foundations are meta-stable.

Intellectually, you only need to learn the basic strategies for living well once. Many of them you probably already know.

Unfortunately, in practice, foundations are not something we set and forget. Most good habits are meta-stable, meaning they can persist for a long time, but they’re intrinsically more effortful than their inferior bad-habit alternatives.

This means that it’s easy for our foundations to slip. A short break from exercising becomes a year without setting foot in the gym. We get momentarily overwhelmed at work and stop being so disciplined with our productivity system. We realize we haven’t read a new book in several months.

Working on foundations should not be continuous. If you build them properly, they will last longer. But even strong foundations require refreshing—especially as your life grows and changes. 

One Year to a Solid Foundation

These considerations have me thinking about embarking on a new year-long project to work through and solidify my own foundations.

I have some personal experience with this kind of project. One of the early successes of this blog was a series I wrote called Habitual Mastery. The series shared some of the insights I gained from undertaking dozens of new habits over a period of a couple years.

When I undertook the Habitual Mastery series nearly 20 years ago, my motivation for building a solid foundation was its value in helping me achieve my larger ambitions—it’s difficult to do hard things when basic problems in your life keep tripping you up.

Today I am motivated to revisit those foundations for a different reason. Reflecting on my ambitions, I’m quite happy with how things have turned out in my life. I have a successful business, a nice family and plenty of interesting life experiences. From this perspective, it is the mundane things that determine my overall experience of life, rather than a desire to achieve something even bigger.

I suspect I’m not alone. Maybe you’re like me now—happy with your overall position in life yet wanting to make it better all-round. Or perhaps you’re more like I used to be—eager to take on bigger and better things, and recognize that a solid foundation will be necessary to reach higher heights.

In the past when I’ve done year-long projects, I’ve tended to do them alone. The MIT Challenge and Year Without English were personally motivated projects. I didn’t expect people to do them along with me.

But this project is different. Foundations are universal, so it seems like a project other people could benefit from. In addition to sharing ideas from the project on this blog, I’m contemplating offering it as a course, working directly with a group of people who are also keen to solidify the foundations in their life.

As I go deeper into this project, I’d like to share my thinking with you. In the meantime, I’m curious what you think.

What do you feel are the foundations for living well? Which ones do you feel you’re reaching adequately, and where do you think your weaknesses are? Would you be interested in a year-long effort to go deeper on them? Leave a comment below!

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Life of Focus is open for a special session

Life of Focus, the course I co-instruct with Cal Newport, is now open!

www.life-of-focus-course.com

This session is going to be a little different. In addition to the three-month curriculum, we’ve added new material based on Cal’s latest book, Slow Productivity.

The new material features an hour-long recording, where Cal and I share strategies for:

Deciding what work really mattersDoing fewer things—while accomplishing moreAvoiding burnoutHow to avoid getting stuck on impossible problemsMaking progress on big ambitionsPreventing bosses and colleagues from drowning you in busywork

We’ve also created a guided worksheet to help you implement these lessons. (If you’re already a Life of Focus student, you should get an email with access to this soon!)

Of course, this bonus recording is in addition to the three-month program we’ve developed to help you build a life of focus, in which we work step-by-step to improve your focus at work, in life and in your mind.

Life of Focus is our most popular course for a reason. Check it out here:

www.life-of-focus-course.com

Registration will close on Friday, June 28th, at midnight Pacific Time. Cal and I hope to see you in the class!

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You’re Trying to Do Too Much

We tend to add things, even when subtracting is both logically equivalent and more practically useful.

We want to get in shape, so we add exercise to our schedule. We want to succeed at a project at work, so we add it to our to-do list. We want to learn more, so we stack up more books.

What’s missing is that, given our finite time, every addition necessarily implies an equal subtraction. The thirty minutes you spend on exercise must, logically speaking, be subtracted from something else. The to-do list items you add must squeeze out other work. The books you queue up must push down the ones below them. To pretend otherwise is to engage in self-delusion.

This is human nature. When we look at a figure-ground illusion, we don’t see that the vase and the faces coexist—one part becomes the figure, and the other recedes into the background. Given a goal, it’s only natural to add work in, and neglect what necessarily must be subtracted.

Real Focus Means Doing Less

Combating this illusion takes work. My team and I have quarterly meetings where we discuss what to work on over the next three months. Invariably, the discussions center on what work we should add: Which essays should I write? Videos, courses, redesigns or workshops? 

We spend far less time asking which ongoing projects should be discontinued, which daily tasks don’t need to be done. Yet if we’re not going to work ourselves into burned-out husks, every addition must necessitate a removal.

The conventional strategy for subtraction is to do it by default: Procrastinate on everything that isn’t a priority. Rebel against the escalating commitments on your time. Opt out and ignore.

But this solution isn’t satisfactory. While goal-setting can have an additive bias, it is at least deliberate. While we might procrastinate on our least valuable tasks, often we procrastinate on work that is harder, ambiguous or frustrating. Ironically, in our unconsidered efforts to cut back, we often cut back the very tasks that really need doing.

The Goal of Creating Space

We can correct this bias in our thinking by temporarily flipping our perspective. Instead of seeing the vase in the middle, try to see the faces on the side. Instead of looking at the goals we’re trying to accomplish, look at all the things we do that suck up our time and energy and offer very little in return.

In our work, that means identifying shallow work and preventing it from proliferating, cutting back emails, meetings and back-and-forth text messages that could be resolved in a single phone call, or clamping down on busywork and phantom commitments that should “really only take half an hour” but end up taking days.

In our lives, that means stepping back from the automatic and the algorithmic—cutting back on activities that compel our attention rather than the things that we freely choose. The motivation here is not to live like a monk, devoid of modern entertainment, but to choose the things we pay attention to. Rather than scroll endlessly on Netflix, watch movies you’re actually excited about.

Subtractive efforts, on their own, cannot tell you what to focus on. But often they can help you realize that the things you need to focus on are already there.

A Special Session of Life of Focus

Long-time readers will know that Cal Newport and I have a course dedicated to this exact pursuit, Life of Focus. We take students on a three-month journey dedicated to subtracting out the stuff that doesn’t matter—so there is more room for the things you truly care about. There’s a reason it is our most popular course.

Next week, Cal and I are holding a special session of Life of Focus. This will include an extended conversation detailing how the ideas and research in our new books (Cal’s Slow Productivity and my Get Better at Anything) integrate with building a life of focus. Past and existing students will get access to the new module for free.

If you’re interested in giving yourself more space to do important work—and to accomplish it without burning yourself out—registration details will be sent on Monday. I hope to see you in the course!

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The Most Overlooked Way to Be More Productive

In ordinary usage the word “productivity” is virtually synonymous with “working hard.” The person who says, “I was really productive today” means that she worked hard and checked off a lot of tasks.

It’s interesting, then, that this is not how economists who study productivity think about the term. In some ways, the economic concept of productivity is the opposite of how we typically think of productivity! The people who work the hardest are often those whose productivity stats are abysmal.

Productivity, as economists define it, is a measure of outputs divided by inputs. Labor productivity is the economic value of goods and services produced, divided by the number of hours a worker needs to invest to achieve it.

Consider a worker in Burundi. The gross domestic product per capita in Burundi is only $240 USD.1. In economic terms, the labor productivity of Burundi is abysmal—but it’s certainly not because the workers there are lazy. Instead, they lack the physical and human capital that would let them perform more productive work.

While a particularly industrious person might perform two or three times as many tasks as a slacker, actual productivity differences among people worldwide differ by many orders of magnitude. In other words, the best way to improve your productivity is not to work harder, but to change where you work!

Relocating to Higher Productivity

Because the environment you work in determines so much of your productivity, it can be by far the most important factor in the effective productivity of your work.

Huge inequalities exist in the environment surrounding productivity:

Between countries. The United States is, on average, about 33% more productive than my home of Canada.Between industries. Japanese manufacturing is legendarily productive. Thus it might be surprising that Japan, as a whole, scores lower on productivity than the United States. The reason is that while car companies are incredibly efficient, the retail and agricultural sectors are not.Between firms. Top firms tend to be much more productive than middling competitors.

Choosing where to live and work is a big decision, so it makes sense that this element is often excluded in guides on how to “be more productive.” I don’t want to emigrate to the United States, even though I might benefit from networks that could accelerate my career. Limits to legal immigration, highly selective recruiting processes at top firms and the effort needed to switch professions may make moving to higher productivity impossible for some people. Nor is productivity all-important—wanting to live near family members or work in a profession you find interesting are important values, too.

However, the discrepancies in productivity are so large that these factors should not be overlooked. If you want to be more productive, the data are clear—where you work matters much more than how hard you work.

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The Science of Learning Movement Skills

One of my ongoing projects is to learn more about how research in learning is applied within specific fields. You can read my review of books summarizing the literature on language learning here and learning physics here.

To that end, I read Motor Learning and Performance, written by the eminent researchers Richard Schmidt and Craig Wrisberg.

This textbook is wide-ranging and full of interesting tidbits that don’t fit neatly into the overarching theory the authors propose. (For instance, did you know that movement accuracy tends to get worse as we move faster—except this trend reverses when muscles are above 70% of their peak force. Thus, if you want to strike a ball more accurately, surprisingly, you’ll do better if you swing your hardest!)

But instead of digging into exceptions, today, I’d like to review the central paradigm of motor skills argued for by the authors and suggest some implications for improving how we learn to move.

But First, What Exactly is a Motor Skill?

We all know that learning to do algebra is different from learning to play tennis. But what, exactly, is the difference?

In a sense, all skills we learn are movement skills. Even writing, hardly the typical domain of high-school jocks, is only possible through coordinated movement of your fingers to produce the pencil marks or keystrokes needed.

Similarly, few athletic skills are entirely devoid of intellectual content. Deciding how to return a tricky tennis serve or figuring out the best path to ski down a mountain all require fast, sophisticated judgements. Finesse, not just fitness, is central to athleticism.

Performing any skill, whether it’s athletic or intellectual, breaks down into roughly three components:

Perception. Information from the outside world and sensations from inside your body must be processed to interpret and understand the situation you face.Decision. Memory and information processing must combine to figure out what you should do.Action. The skill must be executed through moving the body, which can be as simple as uttering a command to a subordinate or writing the answer to a calculation, or as complicated as as playing a solo concerto.

The domain of explicit motor skills, then, involves situations where the third element is a substantial point of difficulty, because the action requires high degrees of speed, accuracy or physical strength.

My overall impression from Schmidt and Wrisberg is that there is an essential continuity between learning movement skills and learning other kinds of skills. Therefore, instead of reviewing all the elements of their theory that overlap with what I’ve discussed elsewhere, I’ll focus on the aspects more particular to motor skills.

The Conceptual Model of Motor Skills

Schmidt and Wrisberg’s textbook continually builds on a central diagram that illustrates the overall theory of how we perform motor skills:

There’s a lot to unpack in this image, but the basic idea is that movement involves three stages: perception, decision and action, which are embedded in various feedback loops with your body and the environment.

A key element in this diagram is the importance of timing. Signals about what you perceive and how to move must travel between your brain and muscles. Relaying this information takes time. These physiological limits restrict what kind of feedback and decision-making processes can take place during the execution of any particular movement.

Schmidt and Wrisberg describe multiple forms of feedback that occur at different timescales:

Spinal cord reflexes. The quickest loop occurs in the short-latency reflex (SLR, sometimes called the M1 response). Here an unexpected change in muscular contraction sends a signal up your nerve to the spinal cord, where a single synaptic connection sends back an appropriate motor nerve response. It takes only 30-50 milliseconds and is both unconscious and inflexible.Prepared reflexes. Taking 50-80 milliseconds, the long-latency reflex, sometimes called the M2 response, is slower than the SLR but more amenable to deliberate preparation. Here the instructions to “hold the weight steady” or “let go if you feel additional pressure” would modulate the response. But, like SLR, it is still an unconscious reflex with limited flexibility.Voluntary adjustments. After 120-180 milliseconds, information has time to travel to the brain and receive deeper processing. Hick’s Law, which relates the delay in reaction time to the number of possible choices, operates here, suggesting that cognition is now involved (even if the fastest actions may not have much conscious deliberation).

For skills that take place over a longer timeframe, like threading a needle, we can use a closed-loop system of feedback, where the full range of sensations can be used to adjust our movements while performing the task.

In contrast, for skills that take place over short intervals of time, feedback is too slow. Thus, our brains need to plan the entire action in advance, with limited possibility for adjustment if those actions turn out to be incorrect.

For instance, a baseball pitch can travel up to 90 miles per hour, meaning the entire time between the ball being thrown and it reaching the plate is less than 500 milliseconds. The batter needs 120-180 milliseconds for voluntary movement preparation and another 140-160 milliseconds to swing the bat. That means the batter must decide if and how to swing the bat before the ball has traveled halfway to the plate!

Planning Movements in Advance: Generalized Motor Programs

The timing constraints on open-loop movements imply that much of our movements must be prepared in advance. One theory for how we do this is that we construct motor programs. These programs act like little scripts telling our muscles when to move in order to produce the right actions.

If the motor program theory is correct, it also has major implications for learning motor skills. Since motor programs are the building blocks of skilled action, learning motor skills likely involves acquiring a large library of these programs (as well as the perceptual and decision-making facility to employ them in the right situations).

What exactly is a motor program?

One possibility is easy to rule out. If motor programs are the building blocks of skill, they are not organized in terms of explicit instructions for how to move each muscle.

Consider signing your name. This quick, fluent action is presumably stored in a motor program somewhere in your brain. The idiosyncrasies of this movement are what make your signature unique. If you sign your name in a checkbook and on a chalkboard, the two signatures maintain the same characteristics.

However, if you think about it carefully, the muscles involved in making the movements are completely different—writing on a checkbook mainly involves moving your fingers and wrist, whereas writing on a chalkboard mainly involves moving your shoulder and elbow while your wrist and hand stay largely fixed.

Thus, whatever a motor program is, it has to be more abstract than simple commands to contract particular muscles. It has to represent the idea or desired outcome of a movement, while presumably lower-level parts of the central nervous system are charged with implementing it.

Schmidt’s contribution to this theory was the notion of a generalized motor program. He argues that motor programs are stored in the brain as abstract structures. Some of the aspects of the programs are fixed, but there are also parameters that we can adjust on the fly to modify the movement for the current situation.

What aspects of motor programs are fixed, and which are free parameters?

We’ve already explained that the exact muscles involved in producing a particular movement are probably a free parameter (explaining the identical signatures on chalkboards and checkbooks). Amplitude is probably another (write the same signature big or small). Force, speed and trajectory are also factors that look like free parameters, rather than being fixed.

One element that potentially does appear to be fixed is the rhythm and relative timing of a movement. In one experiment, participants learned a task in which they practiced pressing keys in a particular order under specific timing requirements. After hundreds of trials, participants were then asked to produce the sequence of keystrokes as fast as possible. While they shortened the overall time to perform the trained routine, the rhythm of key presses remained the same (even though they were not asked to reproduce the rhythm learned in training).

This suggests that changes to the relative timing of a complex motor program may require learning a new motor program, rather than simply applying a different set of parameter values to an existing one. A coach who wants a person to use a different rhythm of actions to produce a tennis serve may have a much bigger job ahead than the coach who just wants the player to hit harder or higher.

How Can We Learn Movement Skills More Efficiently?

Given the conceptual model Schmidt and Wrisberg present, and the theory of generalized motor programs, what can we say about learning movement skills?

Variable practice beats repetitive training for flexible skills.

One area of active research in both intellectual and motor skills is the value of varied practice. In many studies, variable practice results in more durable or generalizable learning than more repetitive forms of practice.

Two types of variability deserve note:

Random practice (vs. blocked). Suppose you need to practice both a forehand and backhand tennis stroke. One strategy would be to drill forehand shots for a while and then switch to backhand shots. Another would be to randomize which shot you need to take, mixing both types of action together. Research generally supports the idea that the latter practice schedule will be more effective for learning, even if it tends to result in worse immediate performance.Varied practice (vs. consistent). In contrast to simply mixing together different types of tasks in training, varied practice involves changing up the aims of the trained movement. Consider hitting a golf ball at the driving range vs. playing a round of golf. At the driving range, you repeatedly hit the ball off the same tee, compared to hitting it from multiple locations to different distances along the course as you play. Varied practice tends to be more effective for generating more flexible motor programs that can adapt to new situations.

Random practice provides for more robust learning of the underlying program, and varied practice helps to generalize the motor program so it can be successfully parameterized in a wide variety of settings.

The main exception to this principle occurs in the very early stages of learning, when the movement is not yet fully understood. Cognitive load may be higher here, so adding extra complications may make it harder to grasp the underlying movement.

Identify the right amount (and kind) of feedback.

The importance of feedback is clear in the conceptual model Schmidt and Wrisberg discuss. For closed-loop skills and complex performances, we adjust our actions based on multiple loops of feedback from the environment.

Given the importance of feedback, it might seem that more is always better. But this is not the case. Schmidt and Wrisberg note a few constraints on feedback, noting where it can do more harm than good:

Concurrent and instantaneous feedback may distort performance. Feedback provided during the execution of a skill may result in a different skill being learned than the one intended. As the authors write, “concurrent visual feedback is usually disastrous for learning,” adding, “completely different neural pathways are used.” Similarly, feedback that is given instantly after a performance (rather than after a few seconds of delay) may inhibit performers from learning and processing intrinsic signals from the environment directly.More feedback is better, but not on every attempt. Higher absolute levels of feedback tend to improve performance, but higher ratios of feedback to no-feedback attempts don’t always do so. Better results often occur with external feedback on only a portion of trials.Simpler tasks benefit from sparser feedback. Summary feedback, where feedback is aggregated over multiple trials, often outperforms feedback given after each attempt. The degree of aggregation, however, depends on complexity—novel or highly complex skills benefit from less aggregation, whereas simpler skills benefit from more.Only one piece of advice at a time. Corrective suggestions should be kept as simple as possible, so as to not overwhelm a performer’s limited working memory bandwidth.Focus your attention outside your body.

Since the motor programs that form the basis for skilled movements embody an abstract “idea” of the movement, not specific commands to individual muscles, paying too much attention to your movements can be counterproductive.

A wide range of studies find that an external focus of attention, i.e., paying attention to the goal of the movement rather than the movement itself, is more successful for learning many different motor skills. For instance, in one study, golfers told to focus on the movement and weight of their club did better learning to make a chip shot than golfers told to focus on their grip and arm movements.

Despite this generally valuable advice, there’s still some uncertainty in the research literature about exactly which elements of the external focus deserve more attention. In one study, golfers learned to swing better when focusing on the movement of their club, rather than the resulting movement of the ball. Yet, in a different study tennis players learned better when they were told to focus on the trajectory of their shot, rather than the movement of the approaching ball.

Further Thoughts and Reading

Overall, I found Schmidt and Wrisberg’s textbook to be a good resource covering many basic principles of motor skills, especially in emphasizing some aspects that differ from the more academic and intellectual skills that I typically write about.

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Talking About Getting Better

One of the fun things about writing a book is that you get a chance to talk about it in a lot of different venues. I had a lot of fun chatting with people to promote Ultralearning, and my new book, Get Better at Anything, has been no different.

I wanted to share some of those discussions today. (Also check out the guest essay I wrote for Nir Eyal’s website on the research behind overcoming anxiety.)

The Talent Equation – A longer conversation, with a focus on athletic skills. In particular, we go deep on the Tiger Wood’s story from the book, with contrasting interpretations of what’s involved in reaching new levels of athletic skills.James Altucher – James’s podcast was one of my first-ever podcast appearances—in the early days right after the MIT Challenge. We go deep on learning, ask about how learning changes as you age and discuss James’s current projects to get better at chess.The Art of Manliness – Brett and I dig into how to build motivation to learn, the secret to our success as a species and what we can do to improve our improvement efforts.The Rational View – I chat learning with physicist, Dr. Al Scott.Deep Questions – Cal brings me on-board his excellent Deep Questions podcast to answer some guest questions for the podcast.

Some additional appearances:

The Dad MindsetLifeBlood with George GrombacherSecrets of SuccessInside Personal GrowthDuct Tape MarketingSomething You Should KnowPersonal Knowledge ManagementContraMindsGame Improvement GolfThe Hidden WhyMillennial Investing

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The 7 Reasons You Stop Improving (and How to Keep Getting Better)

My new book, Get Better at Anything, came out two weeks ago. Thanks again to everyone who has bought it so far! For those of you who have already dived headfirst into the book, I would greatly appreciate a review on Amazon—reviews make a big difference in helping new people discover the book.

The central idea of my new book is that three factors determine how quickly we can learn: seeing examples from others, doing practice ourselves, and getting feedback on our work. These ingredients may seem simple, but getting them right is often tricky.

Based on the research I explain in my new book, this post outlines seven common reasons why our efforts at improvement stall—and how we can get unstuck.

1. You don’t know the right technique.

Almost everything we know comes from other people. Science, art, business and culture are all cumulative efforts that build upon the hard-won methods and insights of the past. Therefore, the most fundamental difficulty we encounter in improving is not knowing (or not having access to) the best methods for solving a problem.

Consider solving a Rubik’s Cube. The possible combinations of the 3×3 cube are vast—over 43 quintillion possible configurations. Assuming each move takes a second, trying them one by one would take longer than the age of the universe. But with the right technique, any configuration can be solved in under twenty twists.

The starting point for any improvement effort, therefore, is to figure out how people who succeed with the skill already do it.

2. You don’t have enough background knowledge.

The difficulty of skills and subjects isn’t fixed. It always depends on what you already know. 

If you only know English, a lesson taught in Japanese would be mystifying, no matter how smart you are. Yet the same lesson might not be difficult for a kindergartener from Tokyo.

That’s an obvious example, but the influence of background knowledge can be much harder to spot. Knowing more about a subject, for instance, impacts how much you remember from a text more than raw reading ability or intelligence does.1 This makes the relative contribution of raw ability and prior experience harder to untangle—are you really lacking talent, or do you just have less experience with the prerequisites?

The key to building high is to secure a solid foundation. Figure out what the prerequisite ideas, knowledge, procedures and skills are in a domain, and make sure you’ve truly mastered those whenever you get stuck on a challenging class or problem.

3. You’re not getting enough practice time.

Practice tends to speed skills up and make them more automatic, fluent and accurate. In intellectual domains, increased practice can reduce the amount of cognitive load needed to perform a skill, meaning you can handle more complicated tasks than you could when you started.

The power law of practice suggests that this improvement in performance from repeated practice follows a curve that starts out steep and slowly flattens over time. Even so, the number of repetitions needed to achieve mastery can take a while to accumulate—in one experiment, cigar rollers continued to get better, even after tens of thousands of repetitions.

No clever method or hack can make up for a lack of practice.

4. You’re practicing the wrong skill.

Practice helps, but it’s not a panacea.

Transfer, the measure of how much practice on one task improves performance in another, has frequently been shown to be narrower than people assume. This means that ample practice on the wrong skill, in the wrong environment, or with the wrong supports can result in minimal improvement in the skill you are trying to improve.

Any attempt at improvement needs to start by getting clear on what—exactly—you’re trying to get good at, breaking down vague abilities into concrete tasks, methods, ideas or judgements. Once you’ve done that, you can tailor your practice more directly to those parts that matter to you.

5. You’re not able to learn from your mistakes.

Without good feedback, improvement is often impossible.

The great psychologist Edward Thorndike discovered this in an early experiment. Participants attempted to draw lines of a particular length while blindfolded.2 Being unable to see how long their strokes were, they made no improvement even after thousands of trials.

While it may seem silly to draw lines with your eyes closed, many of us do something equivalent when we try to improve in areas of our lives. We recruit candidates, but never track how well the people we turn down do. We estimate project lengths, but never check whether our past efforts were on time and on budget. There’s a large body of scientific literature documenting the rather mediocre performance of domain experts in decision-making tasks with weak cues and poor feedback.3

Tons of experience can lead to overconfidence, not expertise, if your practice isn’t informed by clear, calibrating feedback.

6. Your environment is too challenging—or not challenging enough.

An extremely difficult challenge doesn’t maximize learning. As with the Rubik’s Cube, if you face a problem without knowing the best methods, you can waste years and never figure them out on your own. Tackling a complicated challenge may make it harder to infer the basic principles.

It’s better to build from a strong foundation. But even with the best foundation in relevant background knowledge and skills, increased challenges are needed to keep making progress. This is for two reasons:

First, if we continue working only on easier tasks, we may never reach the heights we really want to perform at. If you stick to flashcards when learning a language, you may never graduate to having a conversation. If you only write essays, you may never finish a book. Many skills are a continuum of complexity, and if the goal is to do something impressive, we need to keep making progress through that range.

Second, we tend to adjust our performance only when we get feedback from the environment indicating something is insufficient. If we stick to the same difficulty level, we may find a solution that “works” but isn’t ideal. Repeated practice, then, tends to make our performance smoother and more automatic, but we may never get the nudge to up our game.

7. You don’t have the right mental model for how learning works.

As with anything in life, your ability to troubleshoot depends on having an adequate mental model to explain how something works. You can’t fix your car, computer or even your career if you don’t know what really underlies progress.

The research on learning is vast and complicated, but the basic mental models that underlie how learning works can be understood by almost anyone. Having an accurate understanding of a field you are learning or a goal you want to achieve makes a big difference since it can help you diagnose mistakes before you become immovably stuck.

Part of my motivation for writing Get Better at Anything was to try to provide those mental models. If you want to learn more, click here to get a free chapter of the book!

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Ultralearning or Get Better at Anything: Which Book is Better?

When I decided to write another book about learning, I knew an obvious question would come up: How is this book different from your last one?

The truth is, I could write a dozen books on learning. Even when working on this one, I realized how many areas I couldn’t explore sufficiently: mental models, connectionism, background knowledge, declarative versus procedural learning, motor learning, nootropics, intelligence, explore-exploit tradeoffs, aging and more. Each topic could be its own book!

I took care not to repeat too much from my previous book when writing this one. Some repetition is unavoidable, as I didn’t want to make reading Ultralearning a prerequisite for Get Better at Anything, but I wanted the main concepts, stories and practical takeaways to be fresh.

At a high level, both books make a similar pitch: to help you get better at difficult skills and subjects, but they differ in significant ways. Today I thought it would make sense to explain how the books differ and what you can expect from each.

What’s the Difference?

The biggest difference between the books is the focus. Ultralearning is centered around intense, self-directed learning projects. While many of the principles of this book apply beyond that particular context, these impressive projects form the core of the book, and everything is organized around them.

Get Better at Anything, in contrast, centers on the concept that the combination of learning from other people, practicing for yourself and getting feedback are vital for improvement across many different disciplines, domains and pedagogical techniques.

The central figures of Ultralearning are impressive individuals—polyglots who speak dozens of languages; solo game developers who do the art, music and coding all on their own; chess prodigies and Scrabble savants. 

For Get Better at Anything, I wanted the approach to learning itself to be central. So when I discuss the training of poker players, jazz musicians, science-fiction authors or Air Force pilots, it’s not to point out a particularly gifted individual, but to demonstrate the basic ingredients of learning through concrete examples.

Ultralearning was also a much more personal book, as debut books tend to be. I wanted to consolidate much of what I learned about effective learning strategies from the big public challenges that helped establish me as a writer into a single book.

In contrast, with Get Better at Anything, I challenged myself to write a more objective, research-driven book. While it’s impossible to avoid one’s own opinion, even when talking about science, I wanted to write a book that grappled with a wider range of expert opinions.

Has Your Advice Changed Between Books?

My core beliefs about learning haven’t changed much between the two books. The minor updates to my views since writing Ultralearning are reflected in Get Better at Anything, namely:

The importance of clear examples vs. pure practice. Because of its focus on self-directed learning, I emphasized problem-solving and practice in Ultralearning. While I still believe that practice is important, I’ve come to think that the effort required for learning by problem-solving can be excessive, particularly if good examples are available.1The value of foundational learning before direct practice. Directness, the idea that you should practice the exact skill you want to get good at, was a core principle of Ultralearning. I still think this approach is valuable, but it’s now clearer to me that many complex domains are easier to learn after a preparatory phase spent learning their core components and background knowledge.The value of early access to teachers and coaches. Again, partly because of the emphasis on self-directed learning in Ultralearning, I didn’t emphasize the value of good coaches and teachers. I’m now convinced that access to good instruction and corrective feedback is essential for efficient learning. 

Overall, the changes are more a matter of emphasis rather than a reversal of opinion. My advice on learning evolves, in large part, because I’m continuously trying to improve my own understanding of it. While it might seem more convenient to come up with an idea and spend the rest of my writing career defending it, I’d prefer my writing about learning to reflect my philosophy of it—which will shift as I continuously work to refine my thinking.

Which Book Should You Read?

Both!

All kidding aside, the two books are complementary—reading one isn’t a substitute for reading the other.

But if you only have time for one book about learning, I’d recommend Get Better at Anything. It offers a broad range of practical advice for learning and improvement, while drawing on a deeper base of ideas about learning grounded in cognitive science.

Of course, time will tell whether readers agree with that assessment! Perhaps if this book comes close to the success I’ve had with Ultralearning, I’ll be able to write a third book about learning, covering a few more of the dozens of important ideas I wasn’t able to fit into my first two.

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