James Clear's Blog, page 2

How to Automate a Habit and Never Think About It Again

This article is an excerpt from my book, Atomic Habits. 

John Henry Patterson was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1844. He spent his childhood doing chores on the family farm and working shifts at his father’s sawmill. After attending college at Dartmouth, Patterson returned to Ohio and opened a small supply store for coal miners.

It seemed like a good opportunity. The store faced little competition and enjoyed a steady stream of customers, but—for some reason—Patterson's shop still struggled to make money.

Eventually, he learned why: his employees were stealing from him.

In the mid-1800s, employee theft was a common problem. Receipts were kept in an open drawer and could easily be altered or discarded. There were no video cameras to review behavior and no software to track transactions. Unless you were willing to hover over your employees every minute of the day, or to manage all transactions yourself, it was difficult to prevent theft.

As Patterson mulled over his predicament, he came across an advertisement for a new invention called Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier. Designed by fellow Dayton resident James Ritty, it was the first cash register. The machine automatically locked the cash and receipts inside after each transaction. Patterson bought two for fifty dollars each.

Employee theft at his store vanished overnight. In the next six months, Patterson’s business went from losing money to making $5,000 in profit—the equivalent of more than $100,000 today.1

Patterson was so impressed with the machine that he changed businesses. He bought the rights to Ritty’s invention and opened the National Cash Register Company. Ten years later, National Cash Register had over one thousand employees and was on its way to becoming one of the most successful businesses in America.

The Best Way to Change a Habit

The brilliance of the cash register was that it automated ethical behavior by making stealing practically impossible. Rather than trying to change the motivations of his employees, Patterson used technology to make the preferred behavior automatic.

There is an important lesson within this story that we can apply to all habits and behaviors. The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impossible to do. And the best way to create a good habit is to automate it so you never have to think about it again.

Typically, when people think about automating something, then imagine technology or a piece of software. And, certainly, this is a great way to automate a habit. You can save for retirement with an automatic deduction from your paycheck. You can curtail social media browsing with a website blocker.

Technology can transform actions that were once hard, annoying, and complicated into behaviors that are easy, painless, and simple. It is the most reliable and effective way to guarantee the right behavior.

But there are also many ways to “automate” your future decisions that don't necessarily involve a piece of software.

Onetime Actions That Lock In Good Habits

One of the most practical ways to automate good habits is to look for onetime choices require a little bit of effort up front but create increasing value over time.

I’m fascinated by these single choices that can deliver returns again and again. Not long ago, I surveyed my readers on their favorite onetime actions that lead to better long-term habits.2

Here are a few of the popular answers…

Nutrition: Use smaller plates to reduce caloric intake.
Sleep: Remove your television from your bedroom.
Productivity: Delete games and social media apps from your phone.
Focus: Permanently set your phone in Do Not Disturb mode.
Happiness: Get a dog.
Health: Buy better shoes to avoid back pain.
Finance: Call your service providers (cable, electric, etc.) and ask for a lower rate.

These onetime actions only require effort once and make it easier to get better sleep, eat healthy, be productive, save money, and generally live better.

The Upside of Automation

The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”

Today, technology and automation can handle an increasing number of daily tasks. Meal-delivery services can go grocery shopping for you. Healthcare services can automatically refill your prescriptions and ship them to you. IUDs can manage birth control on autopilot.

Each habit that we hand over to the authority of technology frees up time and energy to pour into the next stage of growth. When you automate as much of your life as you possibly can, you can spend your mental energy on the tasks machines cannot yet do.

Automation is particularly useful for behaviors that happen too infrequently to become habitual. Things you have to do monthly or yearly—like rebalancing your investment portfolio—are never repeated frequently enough to become a habit, so they benefit in particular from technology “remembering” to do them for you.

The Downside of Automation

Of course, the power of technology can work against us as well.

Binge watching becomes a habit because it takes more effort to stop looking at the screen than to continue doing so. Instead of pressing a button to advance to the next episode, Netflix or YouTube will autoplay it for you. All you have to do is keep your eyes open.

Technology often creates a level of convenience that enables you to act on your smallest whims and desires. At the mere suggestion of hunger, you can have food delivered to your door. At the slightest hint of boredom, you can get lost in the vast expanse of social media.

When the effort required to act on your desires becomes effectively zero, you can find yourself slipping into whatever impulse arises at the moment. The downside of automation is that we can find ourselves jumping from easy task to easy task without making time for more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding, work.

Personally, I often find myself gravitating toward social media during any downtime. If I feel bored for just a fraction of a second, I reach for my phone. It’s easy to write off these minor distractions as “just taking a break,” but over time they can accumulate into a serious issue. The constant tug of “just one more minute” can prevent me from doing anything of consequence. (I’m not the only one. The average person spends over two hours per day on social media.3 What could you do with an extra six hundred hours per year?)

During the year I was writing Atomic Habits, I experimented with a new time management strategy. Every Monday, my assistant would reset the passwords on all my social media accounts, which logged me out on each device. All week I worked without distraction. On Friday, she would send me the new passwords. I had the entire weekend to enjoy what social media had to offer until Monday morning when she would do it again. (If you don’t have an assistant, team up with a friend or family member and reset each other’s passwords each week.)

One of the biggest surprises was how quickly I adapted.

Within the first week of locking myself out of social media, I realized that I didn’t need to check it nearly as often as I had been, and I certainly didn’t need it each day. It had simply been so easy that it had become the default. Once my bad habit became impossible, I discovered that I did actually have the motivation to work on more meaningful tasks. After I removed the mental candy from my environment, it became much easier to eat the healthy stuff.

Where to Go From Here

When working in your favor, automation can make your good habits inevitable and your bad habits impossible. It is the ultimate way to lock in future behavior rather than relying on willpower in the moment.

By utilizing strategic onetime decisions and technology, you can create an environment of inevitability—a space where good habits are not just an outcome you hope for, but an outcome that is virtually guaranteed.

This article is an excerpt from Chapter 14 of my book, Atomic Habits.

Footnotes

“John H. Patterson—Ringing Up Success with the Incorruptible Cashier,” Dayton Innovation Legacy, http://www.daytoninnovationlegacy.org..., accessed June 8, 2016.

James Clear (@james_clear), “What are one-time actions that pay off again and again in the future?” Twitter, February 11, 2018.

“GWI Social,” GlobalWebIndex, 2017, Q3.

Absolute Success is Luck. Relative Success is Hard Work.

In 1997, Warren Buffett, the famous investor and multi-billionaire, proposed a thought experiment.

“Imagine that it is 24 hours before you are going to be born,” he said, “and a genie comes to you.” 1

“The genie says you can determine the rules of the society you are about to enter and you can design anything you want. You get to design the social rules, the economic rules, the governmental rules. And those rules are going to prevail for your lifetime and your children's lifetime and your grandchildren's lifetime.”

“But there is a catch,” he said.

“You don't know whether you're going to be born rich or poor, male or female, infirm or able-bodied, in the United States or Afghanistan. All you know is that you get to take one ball out of a barrel with 5.8 billion balls in it. And that's you.” 2

“In other words,” Buffett continues, “you're going to participate in what I call the Ovarian Lottery. And that is the most important thing that's ever going to happen to you in your life. It's going to determine way more than what school you go to, how hard you work, all kinds of things.” 3

Buffett has long been a proponent for the role of luck in success. In his 2014 Annual Letter, he wrote, “Through dumb luck, [my business partner] Charlie and I were born in the United States, and we are forever grateful for the staggering advantages this accident of birth has given us.” 4

When explained in this way, it seems hard to deny the importance of luck, randomness, and good fortune in life. And indeed, these factors play a critical role. But let's consider a second story.

The Story of Project 523

In 1969, during the fourteenth year of the Vietnam War, a Chinese scientist named Tu Youyou was appointed the head of a secret research group in Beijing. The unit was known only by its code name: Project 523.

China was an ally with Vietnam, and Project 523 had been created to develop antimalarial medications that could be administered to the soldiers. The disease had become a huge problem. Just as many Vietnamese soldiers were dying from malaria in the jungle as were dying in battle.

Tu began her work by looking for clues anywhere she could find them. She read manuals about old folk remedies. She searched through ancient texts that were hundreds or thousands of years old. She traveled to remote regions in search of plants that might contain a cure.

After months of work, her team had collected over 600 plants and created a list of almost 2,000 possible remedies. Slowly and methodically, Tu narrowed the list of potential medications down to 380 and tested them one-by-one on lab mice.

“This was the most challenging stage of the project,” she said. “It was a very laborious and tedious job, in particular when you faced one failure after another.”5

Hundreds of tests were run. Most of them yielded nothing. But one test—an extract from the sweet wormwood plant known as qinghao—seemed promising. Tu was excited by the possibility, but despite her best efforts, the plant would only occasionally produce a powerful antimalarial medication. It wouldn’t always work.

Her team had already been at work for two years, but she decided they needed to start again from the beginning. Tu reviewed every test and re-read each book, searching for a clue about something she missed. Then, magically, she stumbled on a single sentence in The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies, an ancient Chinese text written over 1,500 years ago.

The issue was heat. If the temperature was too high during the extraction process, the active ingredient in the sweet wormwood plant would be destroyed. Tu redesigned the experiment using solvents with a lower boiling point and, finally, she had an antimalarial medication that worked 100 percent of the time.

It was a huge breakthrough, but the real work was just beginning.

The Power of Hard Work

With a proven medication in hand, it was now time for human trials. Unfortunately, there were no centers in China performing trials for new drugs at the time. And due to the secrecy of the project, going to a facility outside of the country was out of the question.

They had reached a dead end.

That’s when Tu volunteered to be the first human subject to try the medication. In one of the boldest moves in the history of medical science, she and two other members of Project 523 infected themselves with malaria and received the first doses of their new drug.

It worked.

However, despite her discovery of a breakthrough medication and her willingness to put her own life on the line, Tu was prevented from sharing her findings with the outside world. The Chinese government had strict rules that blocked the publishing of any scientific information.

She was undeterred. Tu continued her research, eventually learning the chemical structure of the drug—a compound officially known as artemisinin—and going on to develop a second antimalarial medication as well.

It was not until 1978, almost a decade after she began and three years after the Vietnam War had ended, that Tu’s work was finally released to the outside world. She would have to wait until the year 2000 before the World Health Organization would recommend the treatment as a defense against malaria.

Today, the artemisinin treatment has been administered over 1 billion times to malaria patients. It is believed to have saved millions of lives. Tu Youyou is the first female Chinese citizen to receive a Nobel Prize, and the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award for major contributions to medical science.

Luck or Hard Work?

Tu Youyou was not fabulously lucky. My favorite fact about her is that she has no postgraduate degree, no research experience abroad, and no membership in any of the Chinese national academies—a feat that has earned her the nickname “The Professor of the Three No's”. 6

But damn was she a hard worker. Persistent. Diligent. Driven. For decades she didn't give up and she helped save millions of lives as a result. Her story is a brilliant example of how important hard work can be in achieving success.

Just a minute ago, it seemed reasonable that the Ovarian Lottery determined most of your success in life, but the idea that hard work matters feels just as reasonable. When you work hard you typically get better results than you would with less effort. While we can't deny the importance of luck, everyone seems to have this sense that hard work really does make a difference.

So what it is? What determines success? Hard work or good fortune? Effort or randomness? I think we all understand both factors play a role, but I'd like to give you a better answer than “It depends.”

Here are two ways I look at the issue.

Absolute Success vs. Relative Success

One way to answer this question is to say: Luck matters more in an absolute sense and hard work matters more in a relative sense.

The absolute view considers your level of success compared to everyone else. What makes someone the best in the world in a particular domain? When viewed at this level, success is nearly always attributable to luck. Even if you make a good initial choice—like Bill Gates choosing to start a computer company—you can’t understand all of the factors that cause world-class outcomes.

As a general rule, the wilder the success, the more extreme and unlikely the circumstances that caused it. It's often a combination of the right genes, the right connections, the right timing, and a thousand other influences that nobody is wise enough to predict.

As a general rule, the wilder the success, the more extreme and unlikely the circumstances that caused it.

Then there is the relative view, which considers your level of success compared to those similar to you. What about the millions of people who received similar levels of education, grew up in similar neighborhoods, or were born with similar levels of genetic talent? These people aren't achieving the same results. The more local the comparison becomes, the more success is determined by hard work. When you compare yourself to those who have experienced similar levels of luck, the difference is in your habits and choices.

Absolute success is luck. Relative success is choices and habits.

There is an important insight that follows naturally from this definition: As outcomes become more extreme, the role of luck increases. That is, as you become more successful in an absolute sense, we can attribute a greater proportion of your success to luck.

As Nassim Taleb wrote in Fooled by Randomness, “Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”

Both Stories are True

Sometimes people have trouble simultaneously holding both of these insights. There is a tendency to discuss outcomes in either a global sense or a local sense.

The absolute view is more global. What explains the difference between a wealthy person born in America and someone born into extreme poverty and living on less than $1 per day? When discussing success from this angle, people say things like, “How can you not see your privilege? Don’t you realize how much has been handed to you?”

The relative view is more local. What explains the difference in results between you and everyone who went to the same school or grew up in the same neighborhood or worked for the same company? When considering success from a local viewpoint, people say things like, “Are you kidding me? Do you know hard I worked? Do you understand the choices and sacrifices I made that others didn’t? Dismissing my success as luck devalues the hard work I put in. If my success is due to luck or my environment, then how come my neighbors or classmates or coworkers didn’t achieve the same thing?”

Both stories are true. It just depends on what lens you are viewing life through.

The Slope of Success

There is another way to examine the balance between luck and hard work, which is to consider how success is influenced across time.

Imagine you can map success on a graph. Success is measured on the Y-axis. Time is measured on the X-axis. And when you are born, the ball you pluck out of Buffett's Ovarian Lottery determines the y-intercept. Those who are born lucky start higher on the graph. Those who are born into tougher circumstances start lower.

Here's the key: You can only control the slope of your success, not your initial position.

In Atomic Habits, I wrote, “It doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”

You can only control the slope of your success, not your initial position.

With a positive slope and enough time and effort, you may even be able to regain the ground that was lost due to bad luck. I thought this quote summarized it well: “The more time passes from the start of a race, the less the head-start others got matters.”7

This is not always true, of course. A severe illness can wipe out your health. A collapsing pension fund can ruin your retirement savings. Similarly, sometimes luck delivers a sustained advantage (or disadvantage). In fact, one study found that, if success is measured by wealth, then the most successful people are almost certainly those with moderate talent and remarkable luck. 8

In any case, it is impossible to divorce the two. They both matter and hard work often plays a more important role as time goes on.

This is true not only for overcoming bad luck, but also for capitalizing on good luck. Bill Gates might have been incredibly fortunate to start Microsoft at the right time in history, but without decades of hard work, the opportunity would have been wasted. Time erodes every advantage. 9 At some point, good luck requires hard work if success is to be sustained.

How to Get Luck on Your Side

By definition, luck is out of your control. Even so, it is useful to understand the role it plays and how it works so you can prepare for when fortune (or misfortune) comes your way.

In his fantastic talk, You and Your Research, the mathematician and computer engineer Richard Hamming summarized what it takes to do great work by saying, “There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn't. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.” 10

You can increase your surface area for good luck by taking action. 11 The forager who explores widely will find lots of useless terrain, but is also more likely to stumble across a bountiful berry patch than the person who stays home. Similarly, the person who works hard, pursues opportunity, and tries more things is more likely to stumble across a lucky break than the person who waits. Gary Player, the famous golfer and winner of nine major championships, has said, “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.”

In the end, we cannot control our luck—good or bad—but we can control our effort and preparation. Luck smiles on us all from time to time. And when it does, the way to honor your good fortune is to work hard and make the most of it.

Footnotes

Buffett has told this story on multiple occasions. The quotes in this section are a combination of his versions from the 1997 Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting and a speech he gave to students at the University of Florida in 1998. The quotes have been lightly edited for clarity. Also, I'd like to thank J.D. Roth as I originally discovered this story through his site, Get Rich Slowly.

5.8 billion was the number of people in the world in 1997. Today, that bucket would contain over 7.6 billion balls.

I believe Buffett is paraphrasing a moral theory known as the “Veil of Ignorance” and originally proposed by the philosopher John Rawls. Buffett (and Rawls) use this thought experiment as a way to discuss what the types of social systems we should build in society. Buffett finishes by saying, “Now, what kind of world do you want to design? You're going to want a system that does not leave behind the person who accidentally got the wrong ball and is not well-wired for this particular system.”

2014 Letter to Berkshire Shareholders by Warren Buffett.

“From branch to bedside: Youyou Tu is awarded the 2011 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for discovering artemisinin as a treatment for malaria” by Ushma S. Neill. September 12, 2011.

“Chinese Scientist Wins Nobel Prize in Medicine; China Hails the Laureate with Reflection” by Luxiao Zou. October 6, 2015.

Tweet from @mmay3r. May 26, 2017.

“Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure” by Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, A. Rapisarda.

This is an adaptation of a quote from Matt Ridley, “One of the peculiar features of history is that time always erodes advantage.”

The same can be said for bad luck. The particular hardship you go through is bad luck and random, but that you experience some hardship is not. Life comes from everyone at some point. This is one reason why it is important to practice inversion and prepare for hardship even though you do not know which form it will take.

I believe this idea of “increasing your surface area for luck” originally came from The Startup of You by Ben Casnocha and Reid Hoffman, but I heard about it through Greg Nance.

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

The economist J.K. Galbraith once wrote, “Faced with a choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof.”

Leo Tolstoy was even bolder: “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

What's going on here? Why don't facts change our minds? And why would someone believe a false or inaccurate idea anyway? How does going against the facts serve us?

The Logic of False Beliefs

Humans need a reasonably accurate view of the world in order to survive. If your model of reality was wildly different from the actual world, then you would struggle to take effective actions each day. 1

However, truth and accuracy are not the only things that matter to the human mind. Humans also seem to have a deep desire to belong.

In Atomic Habits, I wrote, “Humans are herd animals. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and to earn the respect and approval of our peers. Such inclinations are essential to our survival. For most of our evolutionary history, our ancestors lived in tribes. Becoming separated from the tribe—or worse, being cast out—was a death sentence.”

Understanding the truth of a situation is important, but so is remaining part of the tribe. While these two desires often work well together, they occasionally come into conflict.

In many circumstances, social connection is actually more helpful to your daily life than understanding the truth of a particular fact or idea. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker put it this way, “People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.” 2

We don't always believe things because they are correct. Sometimes we believe things because they make us look good to the people we care about.

I thought Kevin Simler put it well when he wrote, “If a brain anticipates that it will be rewarded for adopting a particular belief, it's perfectly happy to do so, and doesn't much care where the reward comes from — whether it's pragmatic (better outcomes resulting from better decisions), social (better treatment from one's peers), or some mix of the two.” 3

False beliefs can be useful in a social sense even if they are not useful in a factual sense. For lack of a better phrase, we might call this approach “factually false, but socially accurate.” 4

When we have to choose between the two, people often select friends and family over facts. This insight not only explains why we might hold our tongue at a dinner party or look the other way when our parents say something offensive but also reveals a better way to change the minds of others.

The Spectrum of Beliefs

Years ago, Ben Casnocha mentioned an idea to me that I haven't been able to shake: The people who are most likely to change our minds are the ones we agree with on 98 percent of topics.

If someone you know, like, and trust suggests a radical idea, you are more likely to give it merit, weight, or consideration. You already agree with them in most areas of life. Maybe you should change your mind on this one too. But if someone wildly different than you proposes an outlandish idea, well, it's easy to dismiss them as a crackpot.

One way to visualize this distinction is by mapping beliefs on a spectrum. For example, in politics, conservative beliefs would be on one side and liberal beliefs on the other.

If you divide this spectrum into 10 units and you find yourself at Position 7, then there is little sense in trying to convince someone at Position 1. The gap is too wide. When you're at Position 7, your time is better spent connecting with people who are at Positions 6 and 8, gradually pulling them in your direction.

When it comes to changing people's minds, it is very difficult to jump from one end of the spectrum to the other. You have to slide down the spectrum. The beliefs that are closest to our position on the spectrum are the ones we have the highest likelihood of adopting.

The closer you are to someone, the more likely it becomes that their beliefs will bleed over into your own mind and shape your thinking. The further away an idea is from our current position, the more likely we are to reject it outright.

Why False Ideas Persist

False ideas persist for one reason and one reason alone: People continue to talk about them.

Silence is death for any idea. An idea that is never spoken or written down dies with the person who conceived it. Ideas can only be remembered when they are repeated. They can only be believed when they are repeated.

I have already pointed out that people often repeat ideas to one another to signal that they are part of the same social group. But here's a crucial point most people miss:

Criticizing an idea requires you to repeat it. Before you can criticize an idea, you have to reference that idea. You end up repeating the ideas you’re trying to get people to forget—but, of course, they can’t forget them because you keep talking about them. And the more you repeat a bad idea, the more likely people are to believe it. 5

Let's call this phenomenon Clear's Law of Recurrence: The number of people who believe an idea is directly proportional to the number of times it has been repeated during the last year—even if the idea is false. 6

Each time you attack a bad idea, you are feeding the very monster you are trying to destroy. As one Twitter employee wrote, “Every time you retweet or quote tweet someone you’re angry with, it helps them. It disseminates their BS. Hell for the ideas you deplore is silence. Have the discipline to give it to them.” 7

Your time is better spent championing good ideas than tearing down bad ones. Don't waste time explaining why bad ideas are bad. You are simply fanning the flame of ignorance and stupidity.

The best thing that can happen to a bad idea is that it is forgotten. The best thing that can happen to a good idea is that it is shared. I am reminded of Tyler Cowen's quote, “Spend as little time as possible talking about how other people are wrong.”

Feed the good ideas and let bad ideas die of starvation.

The Intellectual Soldier

I know what you might be thinking. “James, are you serious right now? I'm just supposed to let these idiots get away with this?”

Let me be clear. I'm not saying it's never useful to point out an error or criticize a bad idea. But you have to ask yourself, “What is the goal?”

Why do you want to criticize bad ideas in the first place? Presumably, you want to criticize bad ideas because you think the world would be better off if fewer people believed them. In other words, you think the world would improve if people changed their minds on a few important topics.

If the goal is to actually change minds, then I don't believe criticizing the other side is the best approach.

Most people argue to win, not to learn. As Julia Galef so aptly puts it: people often act like soldiers rather than scouts. Soldiers are on the intellectual attack, looking to defeat the people who differ from them. Victory is the operative emotion. Scouts, meanwhile, are like intellectual explorers, slowly trying to map the terrain with others. Curiosity is the driving force. 8

If you want people to adopt your beliefs, you need to act more like a scout and less like a soldier. At the center of this approach is a question Tiago Forte poses beautifully, “Are you willing to not win in order to keep the conversation going?”

One of the best ways to continue the conversation is not through conversation at all.

Books Over Arguments

Any idea that is sufficiently different from your current worldview will feel threatening. And the best place to ponder a threatening idea is in a non-threatening environment. As a result, books are often a better vehicle for transforming beliefs than conversations and debates.

In conversation, people have to consider their status and appearance carefully. They want to save face and avoid looking stupid. When confronted with an uncomfortable set of facts, the tendency is often to double down on their current position rather than publicly admit to believing or doing the wrong thing.

Books resolve this tension. With a book, the conversation takes place inside someone's head and without the risk of being judged by others. It's easier to be open-minded when you aren't feeling defensive.

Arguments are like a full frontal attack on a person's identity. Reading a book is like slipping the seed of an idea into a person's brain and letting it grow on their own terms. There's enough wrestling going on in someone's head when they are overcoming a pre-existing belief. They don't need to wrestle with you too.

Facts Don't Change Our Minds. Friendship Does.

The British philosopher Alain de Botton suggests that we simply share meals with those who disagree with us:

“Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However, the proximity required by a meal – something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at the same moment, even asking a stranger to pass the salt – disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted. For all the large-scale political solutions which have been proposed to salve ethnic conflict, there are few more effective ways to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together.” 9

Perhaps it is not difference, but distance that breeds tribalism and hostility. The way to change people’s minds is to become friends with them, to integrate them into your tribe, to bring them into your circle. I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln's quote, “I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.”

Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe. If they abandon their beliefs, they run the risk of losing social ties. You can’t expect someone to change their mind if you take away their tribe. You have to give them somewhere to go. Nobody wants their worldview torn apart if loneliness is the outcome.

Facts don't change our mind. Friendship does.

Be Kind First, Be Right Later

The brilliant Japanese writer Haruki Murakami once wrote, “Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.”10

When we are in the moment, we can easily forget that the goal is to connect with the other side, collaborate with them, befriend them, and integrate them into our tribe. We are so caught up in winning that we forget about connecting. It's easy to spend your energy labeling people rather than working with them.

The word “kind” originated from the word “kin.” When you are kind to someone it means you are treating them like family. This, I think, is a good method for actually changing someone's mind. Develop a friendship. Share a meal. Gift a book.

Be kind first, be right later. 11
Footnotes

Technically, your perception of the world is a hallucination. Every living being perceives the world differently and creates its own “hallucination” of reality. But I would say most of us have a “reasonably accurate” model of the actual physical reality of the universe. For example, when you drive down the road, you do not have full access to every aspect of reality, but your perception is accurate enough that you can avoid other cars and conduct the trip safely.

Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles by Steven Pinker

Crony Beliefs by Kevin Simler

I am reminded of a tweet I saw recently, which said, “People say a lot of things that are factually false but socially affirmed. They're saying stupid things, but they are not stupid. It is intelligent (though often immoral) to affirm your position in a tribe and your deference to its taboos. This is conformity, not stupidity.” https://twitter.com/thestoicemperor/s...

The linguist and philosopher George Lakoff refers to this as activating the frame. “If you negate a frame, you have to activate the frame, because you have to know what you’re negating,” he says. “If you use logic against something, you’re strengthening it.”

Clear's Law of Recurrence is really just a specialized version of the mere-exposure effect. But hey, I'm writing this article and now I have a law named after me, so that's cool. Plus, you can tell your family about Clear's Law of Recurrence over dinner and everyone will think you're brilliant.

https://twitter.com/nathanchubbard/st...

Julia Galef’s soldiers vs. scouts talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/julia_galef...

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton

I found this quote from Kazuki Yamada, but it is believed to have been originally from the Japanese version of Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki by Haruki Murakami.

I have been sitting on this article for over a year. Many months ago, I was getting readiy to publish it and what happens? The New Yorker publishes an article under the exact same title one week before and it goes on to become their most popular article of the week. What are the odds of that? In the meantime, I got busy writing Atomic Habits, ended up waiting a year, and gave The New Yorker their time to shine (as if they needed it). I thought about changing the title, but nobody is allowed to copyright titles and enough time has passed now, so I'm sticking with it. Now both articles can live happily in the world, like an insightful pair of fraternal twins.

7 Ways to Retain More of Every Book You Read

There are many benefits to reading more books, but perhaps my favorite is this: A good book can give you a new way to interpret your past experiences.

Whenever you learn a new mental model or idea, it's like the “software” in your brain gets updated. Suddenly, you can run all of your old data points through a new program. You can learn new lessons from old moments. As Patrick O'Shaughnessy says, “Reading changes the past.”1

Of course, this is only true if you internalize and remember insights from the books you read. Knowledge will only compound if it is retained. In other words, what matters is not simply reading more books, but getting more out of each book you read.

Gaining knowledge is not the only reason to read, of course. Reading for pleasure or entertainment can be a wonderful use of time, but this article is about reading to learn. With that in mind, I'd like to share some of the best reading comprehension strategies I’ve found.

1. Quit More Books

It doesn't take long to figure out if something is worth reading. Skilled writing and high-quality ideas stick out.

As a result, most people should probably start more books than they do. This doesn't mean you need to read each book page-by-page. You can skim the table of contents, chapter titles, and subheadings. Pick an interesting section and dive in for a few pages. Maybe flip through the book and glance at any bolded points or tables. In ten minutes, you'll have a reasonable idea of how good it is.

Then comes the crucial step: Quit books quickly and without guilt or shame.

Life is too short to waste it on average books. The opportunity cost is too high. There are so many amazing things to read. I think Patrick Collison, the founder of Stripe, put it nicely when he said, “Life is too short to not read the very best book you know of right now.”

Here's my recommendation:

Start more books. Quit most of them. Read the great ones twice.

2. Choose Books You Can Use Instantly

One way to improve reading comprehension is to choose books you can immediately apply. Putting the ideas you read into action is one of the best ways to secure them in your mind. Practice is a very effective form of learning.

Choosing a book that you can use also provides a strong incentive to pay attention and remember the material. That’s particularly true when something important hangs in the balance. If you’re starting a business, for example, then you have a lot of motivation to get everything you can out of the sales book you’re reading. Similarly, someone who works in biology might read The Origin of Species more carefully than a random reader because it connects directly to their daily work. 2

Of course, not every book is a practical, how-to guide that you can apply immediately, and that's fine. You can find wisdom in many different books. But I do find that I'm more likely to remember books that are relevant to my daily life.

3. Create Searchable Notes

Keep notes on what you read. You can do this however you like. It doesn't need to be a big production or a complicated system. Just do something to emphasize the important points and passages.

I do this in different ways depending on the format I'm consuming. I highlight passages when reading on Kindle. I type out interesting quotes as I listen to audiobooks. I dog-ear pages and transcribe notes when reading a print book.

But here's the real key: store your notes in a searchable format.

There is no need to leave the task of reading comprehension solely up to your memory. I keep my notes in Evernote. I prefer Evernote over other options because 1) it is instantly searchable, 2) it is easy to use across multiple devices, and 3) you can create and save notes even when you're not connected to the internet.

I get my notes into Evernote in three ways:

I. Audiobook: I create a new Evernote file for each book and then type my notes directly into that file as I listen.

II. Ebook: I highlight passages on my Kindle Paperwhite and use a program called Clippings to export all of my Kindle highlights directly into Evernote. Then, I add a summary of the book and any additional thoughts before posting it to my book summaries page.

III. Print: Similar to my audiobook strategy, I type my notes as I read. If I come across a longer passage I want to transcribe, I place the book on a book stand as I type. (Typing notes while reading a print book can be annoying because you are always putting the book down and picking it back up, but this is the best solution I've found.)

Of course, your notes don't have to be digital to be “searchable.” For example, you can use Post-It Notes to tag certain pages for future reference. As another option, Ryan Holiday suggests storing each note on an index card and categorizing them by the topic or book.

The core idea is the same: Keeping searchable notes is essential for returning to ideas easily. An idea is only useful if you can find it when you need it.

4. Combine Knowledge Trees

One way to imagine a book is like a knowledge tree with a few fundamental concepts forming the trunk and the details forming the branches. You can learn more and improve reading comprehension by “linking branches” and integrating your current book with other knowledge trees.

For example:

While reading The Tell-Tale Brain by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, I discovered that one of his key points connected to a previous idea I learned from social work researcher Brené Brown.
In my notes for The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, I noted how Mark Manson's idea of “killing yourself” overlaps with Paul Graham's essay on keeping your identity small.
As I read Mastery by George Leonard, I realized that while this book was about the process of improvement, it also shed some light on the connection between genetics and performance.

I added each insight to my notes for that particular book.

Connections like these help you remember what you read by “hooking” new information onto concepts and ideas you already understand. As Charlie Munger says, “If you get into the mental habit of relating what you’re reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom.”

When you read something that reminds you of another topic or immediately sparks a connection or idea, don’t allow that thought to come and go without notice. Write about what you’ve learned and how it connects to other ideas.

5. Write a Short Summary

As soon as I finish a book, I challenge myself to summarize the entire text in just three sentences. This constraint is just a game, of course, but it forces me to consider what was really important about the book.

Some questions I consider when summarizing a book include:

What are the main ideas?
If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?
How would I describe the book to a friend?

In many cases, I find that I can usually get just as much useful information from reading my one-paragraph summary and reviewing my notes as I would if I read the entire book again. 3

If you feel like you can’t squeeze the whole book into three sentences, consider using the Feynman Technique.

The Feynman Technique is a note-taking strategy named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. It’s pretty simple: Write the name of the book at the top of a blank sheet of paper, then write down how you’d explain the book to someone who had never heard of it.

If you find yourself stuck or if you see that there are holes in your understanding, review your notes or go back to the text and try again. Keep writing it out until you have a good handle on the main ideas and feel confident in your explanation.

I’ve found that almost nothing reveals gaps in my thinking better than writing about an idea as if I am explaining it to a beginner. Ben Carlson, a financial analyst, says something similar, “I find the best way to figure out what I’ve learned from a book is to write something about it.” 4
6. Surround the Topic

I often think of the quote by Thomas Aquinas, “Beware the man of a single book.”

If you only read one book on a topic and use that as the basis for your beliefs for an entire category of life, well, how sound are those beliefs? How accurate and complete is your knowledge?

Reading a book takes effort, but too often, people use one book or one article as the basis for an entire belief system. This is even more true (and more difficult to overcome) when it comes to using our one, individual experience as the basis for our beliefs. As Morgan Housel noted, “Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what's happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. We're all biased to our own personal history.” 5

One way to attack this problem is to read a variety of books on the same topic. Dig in from different angles, look at the same problem through the eyes of various authors, and try to transcend the boundary of your own experience.

7. Read It Twice

I'd like to finish by returning to an idea I mentioned near the beginning of this article: read the great books twice. 6

Ideas need to be repeated to be remembered. The writer David Cain says, “When we only learn something once, we don’t really learn it—at least not well enough for it to change us much. It may inspire momentarily, but then becomes quickly overrun by the decades of habits and conditioning that preceded it.”7

Additionally, revisiting great books is helpful because the problems you deal with change over time. Sure, when you read a book twice maybe you'll catch some stuff you missed the first time around, but it's more likely that new passages and ideas will be relevant to you. It's only natural for different sentences to leap out at you depending on the point you are at in life.

You read the same book, but you never see it the same way. As Charles Chu once wrote, “I always return home to the same few authors. And, no matter how many times I return, I always find they have something new to say.” 8
Where to Go From Here

Knowledge compounds over time.

In Chapter 1 of Atomic Habits, I wrote: “Learning one new idea won’t make you a genius, but a commitment to lifelong learning can be transformative.”

One book will rarely change your life, even if it does deliver a lightbulb moment of insight. The key is to get a little wiser each day.

Now that you know how to get more out of each book you read, you might be looking for some reading recommendations. Feel free to check out my book summaries or my public reading list.

Footnotes

See tweet on December 2, 2016.

I'd like to acknowledge Simon Eskildsen, who also wrote about the idea of choosing books that are relevant to your interests and current life circumstances. You can read his thoughts on reading here.

Writing about a book also forces you to practice spaced repetition. Maybe you started reading a book a few days ago and writing a summary a few days later is a natural way to employ “spaced repetition” and reinforce the concepts.

“How To Read” by Morgan Housel

“Ideas That Changed My Life” by Morgan Housel

Nassim Taleb has an even stronger rule: “A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.”

“If It's Important, Learn It Repeatedly” by David Cain

It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read by Charles Chu

Introducing Atomic Habits

Today, I have an exciting announcement: After three years of research and writing, my first full-length book will launch this fall.

The book is called Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound). It will be published by Penguin Random House on October 16th.

I believe Atomic Habits is the most comprehensive and practical guide on how to optimize your habits and get 1 percent better every day. The book draws on proven behavior change ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience and explains them in a way that is easy to understand and apply. It also includes dozens of new stories and insights that I've never written about before.

I'm writing today to ask for your help. For years, I have shared articles for free on jamesclear.com and now I need your help to make this book a success.

If you are interested in supporting the book, here are 4 ways you can help:

1) Pre-order the book: The biggest thing you can do to help is to order the book now (Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound). (And if you know someone who would appreciate the book, I would be extremely grateful if you ordered one for a friend or family member too.)

2) Introductions: If you know someone in the media or someone who has a platform that reaches over 100,000 people (think: podcasts, email newsletters, radio, television, etc.) and you'd be willing to introduce us, fill out this form.

3) Interviews: If you have an audience of more than 100,000 people and you want to help promote the book, please fill out this form.

4) Bulk orders: If you are a leader on a team or in an organization and would like to consider buying copies of the book for each member of your group, fill out this form.

If none of those apply to you and you still want to help, stay tuned. I'll be sharing more information about the book and how you can help in the coming weeks.

Thank you so much. There is no doubt that Atomic Habits is the best thing I have ever created. I can't wait to share it with you.

James

P.S.

I asked a few best-selling authors to read an early version of the book.

Here's what they said…

“A supremely practical and useful book. James Clear distills the most fundamental information about habit formation, so you can accomplish more by focusing on less.”

—Mark Manson, #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

“James Clear has spent years honing the art and studying the science of habits. This engaging, hands-on book is the guide you need to break bad routines and make good ones.”

—Adam Grant, New York Times best-selling author of Originals, Give and Take, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg

“A special book that will change how you approach your day and live your life.”

—Ryan Holiday, bestselling author of The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy

I think you'll enjoy it just as much as they did. I'd be extremely grateful if you simply preorder the book (Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound) for you or a friend.

Introducing Atomic Habits (Plus, How You Can Help)

Today, I have an exciting announcement: After three years of research and writing, my first full-length book will launch this fall.

The book is called Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. It will be published by Penguin Random House on October 16th.

I believe Atomic Habits is the most comprehensive and practical guide on how to optimize your habits and get 1 percent better every day. The book draws on proven behavior change ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience and explains them in a way that is easy to understand and apply. It also includes dozens of new stories and insights that I've never written about before.

I'm writing today to ask for your help. For years, I have shared articles for free on jamesclear.com and now I need your help to make this book a success.

If you are interested in supporting the book, here are 4 ways you can help:

1) Pre-order the book: The biggest thing you can do to help is to order the book now. (And if you know someone who would appreciate the book, I would be extremely grateful if you ordered one for a friend or family member too.)

2) Introductions: If you know someone in the media or someone who has a platform that reaches over 100,000 people (think: podcasts, email newsletters, radio, television, etc.) and you'd be willing to introduce us, fill out this form.

3) Interviews: If you have an audience of more than 100,000 people and you want to help promote the book, please fill out this form.

4) Bulk orders: If you are a leader on a team or in an organization and would like to consider buying copies of the book for each member of your group, fill out this form.

If none of those apply to you and you still want to help, stay tuned. I'll be sharing more information about the book and how you can help in the coming weeks.

Thank you so much. There is no doubt that Atomic Habits is the best thing I have ever created. I can't wait to share it with you.

James

P.S.

I asked a few best-selling authors to read an early version of the book.

Here's what they said…

“A supremely practical and useful book. James Clear distills the most fundamental information about habit formation, so you can accomplish more by focusing on less.”

—Mark Manson, #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

“James Clear has spent years honing the art and studying the science of habits. This engaging, hands-on book is the guide you need to break bad routines and make good ones.”

—Adam Grant, New York Times best-selling author of Originals, Give and Take, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg

“A special book that will change how you approach your day and live your life.”

—Ryan Holiday, bestselling author of The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy

I think you'll enjoy it just as much as they did. I'd be extremely grateful if you simply preorder the book for you or a friend.

My 2017 Annual Review

We have officially closed the door on 2017, which means it's time to share my Annual Review with you. This will mark the fifth year in a row I have conducted my Annual Review, and I've found the process useful every time.

As always, this Annual Review will answer three questions.

What went well this year?
What didn’t go so well this year?
What did I learn? 1

If you'd like to spend some time reflecting on your year, you're welcome to use a similar format for your own Annual Review.

1. What went well this year?

Okay, here's where I succeeded this year.

Book writing. I wrote a book! (Well, mostly.) In last year's review, I shared that my biggest failure during 2016 was not finishing my book. Naturally, completing the manuscript became my primary area of focus for 2017.

I finished the first draft of the manuscript in November, and we're working on edits now. There are still many improvements to make and, truthfully, a few months of work left, but it feels really good to see literally years of work all coming together.

Writing this book has been the most challenging professional project of my young career. My brain seems to be good at doing things on shorter time scales (e.g. going to the gym each day, writing weekly articles), but maintaining focus on the same project month after month is not natural for me. I've learned a lot about my strengths and weaknesses during the process, and I'll be sharing more about that once it's all said and done.

Systems building. Because I spent nearly all of my time writing the book, I had virtually no time to work on the other aspects of my business, which, you can imagine, also happen to be fairly important. Thankfully, my business still had a great year because, with the help of my assistant Lyndsey, we have built a variety of systems that enable the business to run without constant attention from me. These include systems for selling The Habits Academy, sending out email newsletters, driving new traffic, and more.

As a result, we had a great year. Here are some quick stats…

216,415 new email subscribers this year
327,105 total email subscribers as of December 31, 2017 2
9,333,641 unique visitors this year
26,044,115 unique visitors since launching on November 12, 2012

I work on this business every day, but some of these numbers still surprise me. Twenty-six million people have read my writing in the last five years. That seems impossible. Of course, before I get too self-congratulatory, I should point out that I have friends who get more visitors in one month than I got all last year, so there is still plenty of room for improvement. But still. I never thought my ideas would have an audience like this. It's crazy.

Weightlifting. Exercise is a core part of my life. Regular readers will know that I have a background as a college athlete and that I've been training regularly in the gym for almost a decade now, but this past year was my most consistent year yet.

In 2017, I exercised 188 times for an average of 15.7 workouts per month. My typical training session lasts about 45 minutes to 1 hour. My focus remains on building strength, and every training session includes lifts like the squat, bench press, deadlift, and clean and jerk. I've written about my process for recording my workouts previously and I'm still following that format.

Workouts per month in 2017:

January – 19
February – 19
March – 19
April – 16
May – 18
June – 9
July – 14
August – 15
September – 17
October – 15
November – 17
December – 10

My best lifts of the year were:

Back Squat – 425 lbs (192 kg) for 1 rep
Bench Press – 305 lbs (138 kg) for 1 rep
Deadlift – 495 lbs (224.5 kg) for 1 rep

The squat and bench press numbers are lifetime PRs for me, which feels great to say. At my strongest point in 2017, I hit 390×5 on squat, which might be more impressive than 425×1. I'm getting close to a benchmark I've always had in the back of my mind: the elusive 300-400-500 club for bench, squat, and deadlift. Technically, I'm already a member (I deadlifted 501 in 2016), but I always thought it would be cool to do all three in one workout. Maybe in 2018.

Twitter. For years, I basically ignored social media and focused only on writing great content and sharing it with my email newsletter. In 2017, I finally spent a little more time on social media. In particular, I focused on Twitter and started posting tweetstorms—a thread of tweets on a related topic. A few of my favorites are on comparison and success, inversion and better thinking, entropy and disorder, first principles thinking, and deliberate practice.

2. What didn’t go so well this year?

Alright, where did I slip up this year?

Blog writing. Because I spent so much time working on my book, I had very little time left over to write new articles. I wrote 10 new articles this year, which is my lowest total since launching JamesClear.com in 2012. What I missed most was the feedback from readers. I thrive on getting interaction with my ideas and hearing about what people liked and didn't like. I rarely got that while working on the book, and I'm looking forward to sharing many new articles with readers in 2018 once the manuscript is complete.

International travel. This one shocked me. For the first time in years, I didn't visit a new country. I was so heads-down, fully focused on writing the book that I didn't even realize this until I sat down to write this review.

Honestly, it makes me sad to think that I let an entire year go by without making this a priority. Travel, and specifically international travel, has become a big part of my life in the past decade, and it's one of the primary ways I have learned about other cultures and perspectives. Thankfully, I already have multiple international trips scheduled for 2018.

I did manage to see more of the United States this year. My travel highlights for 2017 include:

1 country: United States.
14 states (3 new): Alaska, Arizona (2x), Colorado, Idaho, Illinois (2x), Minnesota, Missouri, New York (2x), North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee (2x), Texas (2x), Washington.

I also updated my Ultralight Travel Guide for the third year in a row.

Team building. This was my first full year as a “manager,” and I've still got a lot to learn. One thing I'm struggling with is finding the right balance between being the creator and being the manager. It's hard for me to be a good manager and visionary for the team when I need to hole up for a few months and write 75,000 words. This is something I'll need to be better about in 2018.

Another challenge is a structural one: we have a remote team, which provides incredible flexibility, but can also feel lonely because each person is working on their own. I'd love to find ways for us to spend more time face-to-face.

3. What did I learn this year?

I learned a lot in 2017. Here are some of the main takeaways.

Recovery is non-negotiable. From January to April, I ramped up my training and put in a lot of volume at the gym. As you might expect, this paid off with bigger lifts. However, eventually, the elevated pace caught up with me. From June to September, I had to dial everything back due to inflammation (and some travel). As a result, all of my biggest lifts happened in the first half of the year. I peaked, but I didn't maintain it.

Something similar happened with book writing. I would pour my mental energy into a week-long burst of writing—and then crash for a few days before starting the cycle again. This lesson applies to most areas of life. Recovery is non-negotiable. The bill always comes due. Push yourself hard and you'll have to take it easy at some point.

Recovery is non-negotiable. The bill always comes due. Push yourself hard and you'll have to take it easy at some point.

It will never feel like the right time to travel. I didn't travel internationally in 2017 because it never felt like a good time to do it. I always felt guilty doing anything except working on the book, and I kept pushing off anything fun because there was always more work to do. When something is important, but not urgent, it will never feel like the right time to do it. You just have to schedule it, which is why I already have multiple international trips booked for 2018.

When choosing who to work with, take the extra time and find the best people. This is true for hiring. This is true for partnerships. This is true for who you select as mentors, coaches, and peers. Despite my mistakes—and there were many of them in the last year—I made three very wise choices: I hired a great employee. I signed with a great agent. And I signed with a great publisher.

These three people have a direct impact on my work. Because they are highly talented, my life and work continued to improve despite my faults. If these three people (or even one of them) was not an A-player, then my business and book would have fallen off the rails this year. With the right people, what should be a problem becomes easy. With the wrong people, what should be easy becomes a problem.

With the right people, what should be a problem becomes easy. With the wrong people, what should be easy becomes a problem.

Choose the version of a habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular. There are many ways to perform the same task. If you want to be a writer, then you have a lot of options. On the short end, you could write tweetstorms that are a few hundred words or blog posts that are a few thousand words. On the long-end, you could write feature pieces for magazines that are 10,000 words or you could write books that are 60,000 words. Each one is a form of writing and any of them can be valuable.

This is true for any habit. Don't choose the form of exercise or meditation or gratitude or whatever that the world says you should do. Choose the one that's right for you.

Good ideas take longer than you think. I wanted so badly to finish this book faster than I did. I would work and work and work, and yet, it still wouldn't be done. Of the many challenges associated with long-term creative projects, perhaps the most difficult one is that you must find a way to remain motivated and committed to your project without getting positive feedback on most days. Every morning, you have to find the motivation to put in another day of work even though you know you won't be finished when night falls. Patience is among the most valuable creative traits.

That's all I've got for this year's Annual Review. As always, thanks for reading. I can't wait to share my best work with you in 2018. 3

The Annual Review Archives

This is a complete list of Annual Reviews I have written.

My 2017 Annual Review My 2016 Annual Review My 2015 Annual Review My 2014 Annual Review My 2013 Annual Review

Footnotes

In previous years, the third question was “What am I working toward?” but I think reminding myself of lessons learned will be more useful and fitting for the annual review process, so I'm going to finish this year's review with “What did I learn?” and see how I like it.

We had over 400,000 email subscribers, but then decided to cut a significant portion of unengaged users. It was a tough call and delivered a hit to my ego, but we're now routinely achieving 40-50 percent open rates with a list of 325,000 people, which I think is great.

Thanks to Chris Guillebeau for inspiring me to do an Annual Review each year.

First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself

First principles thinking, which is sometimes called reasoning from first principles, is one of the most effective strategies you can employ for breaking down complicated problems and generating original solutions. It also might be the single best approach to learn how to think for yourself.

The first principles approach has been used by many great thinkers including inventor Johannes Gutenberg, military strategist John Boyd, and the ancient philosopher Aristotle, but no one embodies the philosophy of first principles thinking more effectively than entrepreneur Elon Musk.

In 2002, Musk began his quest to send the first rocket to Mars—an idea that would eventually become the aerospace company SpaceX.

He ran into a major challenge right off the bat. After visiting a number of aerospace manufacturers around the world, Musk discovered the cost of purchasing a rocket was astronomical—up to $65 million. Given the high price, he began to rethink the problem.1

“I tend to approach things from a physics framework,” Musk said in an interview. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”2

Instead of buying a finished rocket for tens of millions, Musk decided to create his own company, purchase the raw materials for cheap, and build the rockets himself. SpaceX was born.

Within a few years, SpaceX had cut the price of launching a rocket by nearly 10x while still making a profit. Musk used first principles thinking to break the situation down to the fundamentals, bypass the high prices of the aerospace industry, and create a more effective solution.3

First principles thinking is the act of boiling a process down to the fundamental parts that you know are true and building up from there. Let's discuss how you can utilize first principles thinking in your life and work.

Defining First Principles Thinking

A first principle is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”4

First principles thinking is a fancy way of saying “think like a scientist.” Scientists don’t assume anything. They start with questions like, What are we absolutely sure is true? What has been proven?

In theory, first principles thinking requires you to dig deeper and deeper until you are left with only the foundational truths of a situation. Rene Descartes, the French philosopher and scientist, embraced this approach with a method now called Cartesian Doubt in which he would “systematically doubt everything he could possibly doubt until he was left with what he saw as purely indubitable truths.”5

In practice, you don't have to simplify every problem down to the atomic level to get the benefits of first principles thinking. You just need to go one or two levels deeper than most people. Different solutions present themselves at different layers of abstraction. John Boyd, the famous fighter pilot and military strategist, created the following thought experiment which showcases how to use first principles thinking in a practical way.6

Imagine you have three things:

A motorboat with a skier behind it
A military tank
A bicycle

Now, let's break these items down into their constituent parts:

Motorboat: motor, the hull of a boat, and a pair of skis.
Tank: metal treads, steel armor plates, and a gun.
Bicycle: handlebars, wheels, gears, and a seat.

What can you create from these individual parts? One option is to make a snowmobile by combining the handlebars and seat from the bike, the metal treads from the tank, and the motor and skis from the boat.

This is the process of first principles thinking in a nutshell. It is a cycle of breaking a situation down into the core pieces and then putting them all back together in a more effective way. Deconstruct then reconstruct.

How First Principles Drive Innovation

The snowmobile example also highlights another hallmark of first principles thinking, which is the combination of ideas from seemingly unrelated fields. A tank and a bicycle appear to have nothing in common, but pieces of a tank and a bicycle can be combined to develop innovations like a snowmobile.

Many of the most groundbreaking ideas in history have been a result of boiling things down to the first principles and then substituting a more effective solution for one of the key parts.

For instance, Johannes Gutenberg combined the technology of a screw press—a device used for making wine—with movable type, paper, and ink to create the printing press. Movable type had been used for centuries, but Gutenberg was the first person to consider the constituent parts of the process and adapt technology from an entirely different field to make printing far more efficient. The result was a world-changing innovation and the widespread distribution of information for the first time in history.7

The best solution is not where everyone is already looking.

First principles thinking helps you to cobble together information from different disciplines to create new ideas and innovations. You start by getting to the facts. Once you have a foundation of facts, you can make a plan to improve each little piece. This process naturally leads to exploring widely for better substitutes.

The Challenge of Reasoning From First Principles

First principles thinking can be easy to describe, but quite difficult to practice. One of the primary obstacles to first principles thinking is our tendency to optimize form rather than function. The story of the suitcase provides a perfect example.

In ancient Rome, soldiers used leather messenger bags and satchels to carry food while riding across the countryside. At the same time, the Romans had many vehicles with wheels like chariots, carriages, and wagons. And yet, for thousands of years, nobody thought to combine the bag and the wheel. The first rolling suitcase wasn’t invented until 1970 when Bernard Sadow was hauling his luggage through an airport and saw a worker rolling a heavy machine on a wheeled skid.8

Throughout the 1800s and 1900s, leather bags were specialized for particular uses—backpacks for school, rucksacks for hiking, suitcases for travel. Zippers were added to bags in 1938. Nylon backpacks were first sold in 1967.9 Despite these improvements, the form of the bag remained largely the same. Innovators spent all of their time making slight iterations on the same theme.

What looks like innovation is often an iteration of previous forms rather than an improvement of the core function. While everyone else was focused on how to build a better bag (form), Sadow considered how to store and move things more efficiently (function).

How to Think for Yourself

The human tendency for imitation is a common roadblock to first principles thinking. When most people envision the future, they project the current form forward rather than projecting the function forward and abandoning the form.

For instance, when criticizing technological progress some people ask, “Where are the flying cars?”

Here's the thing: We have flying cars. They're called airplanes. People who ask this question are so focused on form (a flying object that looks like a car) that they overlook the function (transportation by flight).10 This is what Elon Musk is referring to when he says that people often “live life by analogy.”

Be wary of the ideas you inherit. Old conventions and previous forms are often accepted without question and, once accepted, they set a boundary around creativity.11

This difference is one of the key distinctions between continuous improvement and first principles thinking. Continuous improvement tends to occur within the boundary set by the original vision. By comparison, first principles thinking requires you to abandon your allegiance to previous forms and put the function front and center. What are you trying to accomplish? What is the functional outcome you are looking to achieve?

Optimize the function. Ignore the form. This is how you learn to think for yourself.

The Power of First Principles

Ironically, perhaps the best way to develop cutting-edge ideas is to start by breaking things down to the fundamentals. Even if you aren't trying to develop innovative ideas, understanding the first principles of your field is a smart use of your time. Without a firm grasp of the basics, there is little chance of mastering the details that make the difference at elite levels of competition.

Every innovation, including the most groundbreaking ones, requires a long period of iteration and improvement. The company at the beginning of this article, SpaceX, ran many simulations, made thousands of adjustments, and required multiple trials before they figured out how to build an affordable and reusable rocket.

First principles thinking does not remove the need for continuous improvement, but it does alter the direction of improvement. Without reasoning by first principles, you spend your time making small improvements to a bicycle rather than a snowmobile. First principles thinking sets you on a different trajectory.

If you want to enhance an existing process or belief, continuous improvement is a great option. If you want to learn how to think for yourself, reasoning from first principles is one of the best ways to do it.

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Footnotes

When Musk originally looked into hiring another firm to send a rocket from Earth to Mars, he was quoted prices as high as $65 million. He also traveled to Russia to see if he could buy an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which could then be retrofitted for space flight. It was cheaper, but still in the $8 million to $20 million range.

“Elon Musk's Mission to Mars,” Chris Anderson, Wired.

“SpaceX and Daring to Think Big,” Steve Jurvetson. January 28, 2015.

“The Metaphysics,” Aristotle, 1013a14–15

Wikipedia article on first principles

I originally found the snowmobile example in The OODA Loop: How to Turn Uncertainty Into Opportunity by Taylor Pearson.

Story from “Where Good Ideas Come From,” Steven Johnson

Story from “Reinventing the Suitcase by Adding the Wheel,” Joe Sharkey, The New York Times

“A Brief History of the Modern Backpack,” Elizabeth King, Time

Hat tip to Benedict Evans for his tweets that inspired this example.

Stereotypes fall into this style of thinking. “Oh, I once knew a poor person who was dumb, so all poor people must be dumb.” And so on. Anytime we judge someone by their group status rather than their individual characteristics we are reasoning about them by analogy.

Mental Models: How to Train Your Brain to Think in New Ways

I remember the moment I first learned what a mental model was and how useful the right one could be. It happened while I was reading a story about Richard Feynman, the famous physicist.

Feynman received his undergraduate degree from MIT and his Ph.D. from Princeton. And during that time, he developed a reputation for waltzing into the math department and solving problems that the brilliant Ph.D. students couldn’t solve.

When people asked how he did it, Feynman claimed that his secret weapon was not his intelligence, but rather a strategy he learned in high school. According to Feynman, his high school physics teacher asked him to stay after class one day and gave him a challenge.

“Feynman,” the teacher said, “you talk too much and you make too much noise. I know why. You’re bored. So I’m going to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the corner, and study this book, and when you know everything that’s in this book, you can talk again.” 1

So each day, Feynman would hide in the back of the classroom and study the book—Advanced Calculus by Woods—while the rest of the class continued with their regular lessons. And it was while studying this old calculus textbook that Feynman began to develop his own set of mental models.

“That book showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign,” Feynman wrote. “It turns out that’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. So because I was self-taught using that book, I had peculiar methods of doing integrals.”

“The result was, when the guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a certain integral, it was because they couldn’t do it with the standard methods they had learned in school. If it was a contour integration, they would have found it; if it was a simple series expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.” 2

The moment I read this story was the moment I realized that the smartest people are not necessarily the ones with the greatest raw intelligence, but often the ones with the best mental models.

What is a mental model? Let me explain.

[image error]Richard Feynman (Image Source: California Institute of Technology)
What is a Mental Model?

A mental model is an explanation of how something works. It is a concept, framework, or worldview that you carry around in your mind. Mental models guide your perception and behavior. They are the thinking tools that you use to understand life, make decisions, and solve problems.

For example, supply and demand is a mental model that helps you understand how the economy works. Game theory is a mental model that helps you understand how relationships and trust work. Entropy is a mental model that helps you understand how disorder and decay work.

Mental models are imperfect, but useful. For example, there is no single mental model from physics or engineering that provides a flawless explanation of the entire universe, but the best mental models from those disciplines have allowed us to build bridges and roads, develop new technologies, and even travel to outer space. As historian Yuval Noah Harari puts it, “Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100 percent correct. Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility.”

The best mental models are the ideas with the most utility. Understanding them will help you make wiser choices and take better actions. This is why developing a broad base of mental models is a crucial task for anyone interested in thinking clearly, rationally, and effectively.

The Secret to Great Thinking

If a certain worldview dominates your thinking, then you’ll try to explain every problem you face through that worldview. As the common proverb says, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” 3

This is something experts need to work on just as much as novices. The more you master a single mental model, the more likely it becomes that this mental model will be your downfall because you’ll start applying it indiscriminately to every problem. What starts as expertise can become a limitation.

Consider this example from biologist Robert Sapolsky. He asks, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Then, he provides answers from different experts.

Well, if you ask an evolutionary biologist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because they saw a potential mate on the other side.”
If you ask a kinesiologist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because the muscles in the chickens leg contracted and pulled the leg bone forward during each step.”
If you ask a neuroscientist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because the neurons in the chicken’s brain fired and triggered the movement.”

We all have our favorite mental models, the ones we naturally default to as an explanation. Typically, we favor the concepts we are familiar with, but each individual mental model is just one view of reality. The challenges and situations we face in life cannot be entirely explained by one field or industry.

All perspectives hold some truth. None of them contain the complete truth. Thus, the secret to great thinking is to employ a variety of mental models.

The Pursuit of Liquid Knowledge

The process of accumulating additional mental models is somewhat like your vision. Each eye can see something on its own. But if you cover one of them, you lose half of the scene. It’s impossible to see the full picture when you’re only looking through one eye.

Similarly, mental models provide an internal picture of how the world works. And we should be constantly upgrading and improving the quality of this picture. The mind's eye needs a variety of mental models to piece together a complete picture of how the world works.

For this reason, it is often the combination of mental models that leads to great thinking. The more sources you have to draw upon, the clearer your thinking becomes. As the philosopher Alain de Botton notes, “The chief enemy of good decisions is a lack of sufficient perspectives on a problem.” 4

Tools for Thinking Better

Relying on a narrow set of thinking tools is like wearing a mental straight jacket. Your cognitive range of motion is limited. And when your set of mental models is limited, so is your potential for finding a solution. In order to unleash your full potential, you have to collect a range of mental models. You have to build out your toolbox.

In school, we tend to separate knowledge into different silos—biology, economics, history, physics, philosophy. But in the real world, information is not divided into neatly defined categories. In the words of Charlie Munger, “All the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.” 5

World-class thinkers are often silo-free thinkers. They avoid looking at life through the lens of one subject. By mastering the fundamentals of many disciplines they are able to make connections and identify solutions that most people overlook. They develop “liquid knowledge” that flows easily from one topic to the next.

How to Develop Better Mental Models

Here's the good news:

You don't need to master every detail of every subject to become a world-class thinker. Of all the ideas humankind has generated throughout history, there are just a few dozen that you need to master to have a firm grasp of how the world works and upgrade your thinking.

To quote Charlie Munger again, “80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.” 6

This article is one of the first in a series I'll be doing on mental models. I've written previously about mental models like entropy, inversion, and margin of safety and in the coming months I'll be focusing particularly on the big models that carry the heavy freight in life.

My goal is to share the most important mental models from a wide range of disciplines in a way that is easy to understand as well as meaningful and practical to the daily life of the average person. I hope you'll join the newsletter and follow along.

Read Next

Mental Models: The Importance of Multidisciplinary Thinking
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First Principles: Elon Musk and Bill Thurston on the Power of Thinking for Yourself

Footnotes

Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman. Pages 86-87.

Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman. Pages 86-87.

This idea is sometimes called The Law of the Instrument or Man With a Hammer Syndrome. The original phrase comes from Abraham Kaplan's book, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science. On page 28 he writes, “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”

One of the best ways to expand your set of mental models is to read books outside the norm. You can’t expect to see problems in a new way if you’re reading all the same things as your classmates, co-workers, or peers. So, either read books that are seldom read by the rest of your group (like Feynman did with his Calculus book) or read books that are outside your area of interest, but can overlap with it in some way. In the words of the wonderful writer Haruki Murakami, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

“A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business” by Charles Munger. Speech at USC Business School. 1994.

“A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business” by Charles Munger. Speech at USC Business School. 1994.

Entropy: Why Life Always Seems to Get More Complicated

Murphy's Law states, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

This pithy statement references the annoying tendency of life to cause trouble and make things difficult. Problems seem to arise naturally on their own, while solutions always require our attention, energy, and effort. Life never seems to just work itself out for us. If anything, our lives become more complicated and gradually decline into disorder rather than remaining simple and structured.

Why is that?

Murphy's Law is just a common adage that people toss around in conversation, but it is related to one of the great forces of our universe. This force is so fundamental to the way our world works that it permeates nearly every endeavor we pursue. It drives many of the problems we face and leads to disarray. It is the one force that governs everybody's life: Entropy.

What is Entropy and Why Does It Matter?

What is entropy? Here's a simple way to think about it:

Imagine that you take a box of puzzle pieces and dump them out on a table. In theory, it is possible for the pieces to fall perfectly into place and create a completed puzzle when you dump them out of the box. But in reality, that never happens.

Why?

Quite simply, because the odds are overwhelmingly against it. Every piece would have to fall in just the right spot to create a completed puzzle. There is only one possible state where every piece is in order, but there are an infinite number of states where the pieces are in disorder. Mathematically speaking, an orderly outcome is incredibly unlikely to happen at random.

Similarly, if you build a sand castle on the beach and return a few days later, it will no longer be there. There is only one combination of sand particles that looks like your sand castle. Meanwhile, there are an infinite number of combinations that don't look like it.

Again, in theory, it is possible for the wind and waves to move the sand around and create the shape of your sand castle. But in practice, it never happens. The odds are astronomically higher that sand will be scattered into a random clump. 1

These simple examples capture the essence of entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder. And there are always far more disorderly variations than orderly ones.

Why Does Entropy Matter for Your Life?

Here's the crucial thing about entropy: it always increases over time.

It is the natural tendency of things to lose order. Left to its own devices, life will always become less structured. Sand castles get washed away. Weeds overtake gardens. Ancient ruins crumble. Cars begin to rust. People gradually age. With enough time, even mountains erode and their precise edges become rounded. The inevitable trend is that things become less organized.

This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is one of the foundational concepts of chemistry and it is one of the fundamental laws of our universe. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system will never decrease. 2

“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature.” —Arthur Eddington

The great British scientist Arthur Eddington claimed, “The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” 3

In the long run, nothing escapes the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The pull of entropy is relentless. Everything decays. Disorder always increases.

Without Effort, Life Tends to Lose Order

Before you get depressed, there is good news.

You can fight back against the pull of entropy. You can solve a scattered puzzle. You can pull the weeds out of your garden. You can clean a messy room. You can organize individuals into a cohesive team. 4

But because the universe naturally slides toward disorder, you have to expend energy to create stability, structure, and simplicity. Successful relationships require care and attention. Successful houses require cleaning and maintenance. Successful teams require communication and collaboration. Without effort, things will decay.

This insight—that disorder has a natural tendency to increase over time and that we can counteract that tendency by expending energy—reveals the core purpose of life. We must exert effort to create useful types of order that are resilient enough to withstand the unrelenting pull of entropy. 5

“The ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.” —Steven Pinker

Maintaining organization in the face of chaos is not easy. In the words of Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, “The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life because everything is pulling you to be more and more complex.”

Entropy will always increase on its own. The only way to make things orderly again is to add energy. Order requires effort. 6

Entropy in Daily Life

Entropy helps explain many of the mysteries and experiences of daily life.

For example:

Why Life is Remarkable

Consider the human body.

The collection of atoms that make up your body could be arranged in an infinite number of ways and nearly all of them lead to no form of life whatsoever. Mathematically speaking, the odds are overwhelmingly against your very presence. You are a very unlikely combination of atoms. And yet, here you are. It is truly remarkable.

In a universe where entropy rules the day, the presence of life with such organization, structure, and stability is stunning.

Why Art is Beautiful

Entropy offers a good explanation for why art and beauty are so aesthetically pleasing. Artists create a form of order and symmetry that, odds are, the universe would never generate on its own. It is so rare in the grand scheme of possibilities. The number of beautiful combinations is far less than the number of total combinations. Similarly, seeing a symmetrical face is rare and beautiful when there are so many ways for a face to be asymmetrical.

Beauty is rare and unlikely in a universe of disorder. And this gives us good reason to protect art. We should guard it and treat it as something sacred.

Why Marriage is Difficult

One of the most famous opening lines in literature comes from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. He writes, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

There are many ways a marriage can fail—financial stress, parenting issues, crazy in-laws, conflicts in core values, lack of trust, infidelity, and so on. A deficiency in any one of these areas can wreck a family.

To be happy, however, you need some degree of success in each major area. Thus, all happy families are alike because they all have a similar structure. In this way, entropy creeps into family life. Disorder can occur in many ways, but order, in only a few.

Why Optimal Lives Are Designed Not Discovered

You have a combination of talents, skills, and interests that are specific to you. But you also live in a larger society and culture that were not designed with your specific abilities in mind. Given what we know about entropy, what do you think the odds are that the environment you happen to grow up in is also the optimal environment for your talents?

It is very unlikely that life is going to present you with a situation that perfectly matches your strengths. Out of all the possible scenarios you could encounter, it’s far more likely that you’ll encounter one that does not cater to your talents.

Evolutionary biologists use a term called “mismatch conditions” to describe when an organism is not well-suited for a condition it is facing. We have common phrases for mismatch conditions: “like a fish out of water” or “bring a knife to a gunfight.” Obviously, when you are in a mismatch condition, it is more difficult to succeed, to be useful, and to win.

It is likely you'll face mismatch conditions in your life. At the very least, life will not be optimal—maybe you didn't grow up in the optimal culture for your interests, maybe you were exposed to the wrong subject or sport, maybe you were born at the wrong time in history. It is far more likely that you are living in a mismatch condition than in a well-matched one.

Knowing this, you must take it upon yourself to design your ideal lifestyle. You have to turn a mismatch condition into a well-matched one. Optimal lives are designed, not discovered. 7

Murphy's Law Applied to the Universe

Finally, let's return to Murphy's Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

Entropy provides a good explanation for why Murphy’s Law seems to pop up so frequently in life. There are more ways things can go wrong than right. The difficulties of life do not occur because the planets are misaligned or because some cosmic force is conspiring against you. It is simply entropy at work. As one scientist put it, “Entropy is sort of like Murphy's Law applied to the entire universe.” 8

It is nobody's fault that life has problems. It is simply a law of probability. There are many disordered states and few ordered ones. Given the odds against us, what is remarkable is not that life has problems, but that we can solve them at all.

Footnotes

Hat tip to Brian Cox. I first heard of the sand castle example from his television series, Wonders of the Universe.

A closed system is one that is not taking in any energy from the outside. In other words, unless you add outside energy to keep things orderly, the natural trend of any closed system is to become more disordered.

The Nature of the Physical World (1915). Chapter 4.

For scientific nitpickers: you will never be able to reverse entropy in the long run. Billions of years from now, every atom in the universe will be scattered and spread out such that entropy is maximized and nothing is orderly. But in the short run, we can create local pockets of order within our lives.

As the renowned scientist Steven Pinker noted, “The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.” See: The Second Law of Thermodynamics by Steven Pinker.

Interestingly, this is how the first forms of life arose. As the sun beat down on the earth it provided the additional energy necessary for molecules to form into structures that could resist the chaos of entropy. The extra energy helped the first forms of life maintain order.

There is a related insight here. You should probably quit things faster than you do. There is always a risk that you will quit too early, but of all the possible things you could be exposed to and invested in, it is very unlikely that you are currently engaged in the best thing for you. Thus, if results are not coming easily, move on.

Galileo's Finger by Peter Atkins.