James Clear's Blog, page 3

Inversion: The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You

The ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus regularly conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum, which translates to a “premeditation of evils.”1

The goal of this exercise was to envision the negative things that could happen in life. For example, the Stoics would imagine what it would be like to lose their status in society or to be abandoned by their spouse or to have all of their worldly possessions stolen.

The Stoics believed that by imagining the worst case scenario ahead of time, they could overcome their fears of negative experiences and make better plans to prevent them. While most people were focused on how they could achieve success, the Stoics also considered how they would manage failure. What would things look like if everything went wrong tomorrow? And what does this tell us about how we should prepare today?

This way of thinking, in which you consider the opposite of what you want, is known as inversion. When I first learned of it, I didn't realize how powerful it could be. As I have studied it more, I have begun to realize that inversion is a rare and crucial skill that nearly all great thinkers use to their advantage. 2

How Great Thinkers Shatter the Status Quo

The German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi made a number of important contributions to different scientific fields during his career. In particular, he was known for his ability to solve hard problems by following a strategy of man muss immer umkehren or, loosely translated, “invert, always invert.” 3

Jacobi believed that one of the best ways to clarify your thinking was to restate math problems in inverse form. He would write down the opposite of the problem he was trying to solve and found that the solution often came to him more easily.

Inversion forces you to consider aspects of a situation that are often hidden at first glance. What if the opposite was true? What if I focused on a different side of this situation? As author Josh Kaufman writes, “By studying the opposite of what you want, you can identify important elements that aren't immediately obvious.” 4

Great thinkers, icons, and innovators think forwards and backwards. Occasionally, they drive their brain in reverse.

Great thinkers, icons, and innovators think forwards and backwards. They consider the opposite side of things. Occasionally, they drive their brain in reverse. Art provides another example.

One of the biggest musical shifts in the last several decades came from Nirvana, a band that legitimized a whole new genre of music—alternative rock—and whose Nevermind album is memorialized in the Library of Congress as one of the most “culturally, historically or aesthetically important” sound recordings of the 20th century. 5

Nirvana turned the conventions of mainstream rock and pop music completely upside down. Where hair metal bands like Poison and Def Leppard spent millions to produce each record, Nirvana recorded Nevermind for $65,000. Where hair metal was flashy, Nirvana was stripped-down and raw. 6

Inversion is often at the core of great art. Humans are heavily biased to continue the status quo, which means the artists and innovators who stand out are often the ones who overturn the standard in a compelling way. This is why many groundbreaking artists create work that shatters the status quo.

This strategy works equally well for other creative pursuits like writing. Many great headlines and titles use the power of inversion to up-end common assumptions. As a personal example, two of my more popular articles, “Forget About Setting Goals” and “Motivation is Overvalued”, take common notions and turn them on their head.

Great art breaks the previous rules. It is an inversion of what came before. In a way, the secret to unconventional thinking is just inverting the status quo.

Success is Overvalued. Avoiding Failure Matters More.

This type of inverse logic can be extended to many areas of life. For example, ambitious young people are often focused on how to achieve success. But billionaire investor Charlie Munger often encourages them to consider the inverse of success.

“What do you want to avoid?” he asks. “Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability. If you’re unreliable it doesn’t matter what your virtues are. You’re going to crater immediately. Doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability.” 7

Avoiding mistakes is an under-appreciated way to improve. In most jobs, you can enjoy some degree of success simply by being proactive and reliable—even if you are not particularly smart, fast, or talented in a given area.

Similar examples exist in personal life. If you can manage to stay out of jail (don't do illegal things) and not go into debt (spend less than you earn), you'll be far ahead of many folks and save yourself a lot of pain and anguish along the way. Sometimes it is more important to consider why people fail in life rather than why they succeed.

The Benefits of Thinking Forwards and Backwards

Inversion can be particularly useful in the workplace.

Leaders can ask themselves, “What would someone do each day if they were a terrible manager?” Good leaders would likely avoid those things.

Similarly, if innovation is a core piece of your business model you can ask, “How could we make this company less innovative?” Eliminating those barriers and obstacles might help creative ideas arise more quickly.

And every marketing department wants to attract the right customers, but it might be useful to ask, “What would alienate our core customer?”

A different point of view can reveal surprising insights. You can learn just as much from identifying what doesn't work as you can from spotting what does.

Project Management

One of my favorite applications of inversion is known as a Failure Premortem. It is like a Premeditation of Evils for the modern day company.8

It works like this:

Imagine the most important goal or project you are working on right now. It could be a business project, a goal for your family and work-life balance, or a health goal. Whatever it is, bring it to mind. Now fast forward six months and assume the project or goal has failed.

Tell the story of how it happened. What went wrong? What mistakes did you make? How did it fail?

This strategy is sometimes called the “kill the company” exercise in organizations because the goal is to spell out the exact ways the company could fail. Just like a Premeditation of Evils, the idea is to identify challenges and points of failure so you can develop a plan to prevent them ahead of time.

Productivity

Most people want to get more done in less time. Applying inversion to productivity you could ask, “What if I wanted to decrease my focus? How do I end up distracted?” The answer to that question may help you discover interruptions you can eliminate to free up more time and energy each day.

This strategy is not only effective, but often safer than chasing success. For example, some people take drugs or mental stimulants in an effort to increase their productivity. These methods might work, but you also run the risk of possible side effects.

Meanwhile, there is very little danger is leaving your phone in another room, blocking social media websites, or unplugging your television. Both strategies deal with the same problem, but inversion allows you to attack it from a different angle and with less risk.

This insight reveals a more general principle: Blindly chasing success can have severe consequences, but preventing failure usually carries very little risk.

Decluttering

Marie Kondo, author of the blockbuster best-seller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, uses inversion to help people declutter their homes. Her famous line is, “We should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of.”

In other words, the default should be to give anything away that does not “spark joy” in your life. This shift in mindset inverts decluttering by focusing on what you want to keep rather than what you want to discard.

Consider the Opposite

Inversion is counterintuitive. It is not obvious to spend time thinking about the opposite of what you want.

And yet inversion is a key tool of many great thinkers. Stoic practitioners visualize negative outcomes. Groundbreaking artists invert the status quo. Effective leaders avoid the mistakes that prevent success just as much as they chase the skills that accelerate it.

Whatever problem you are facing, always consider the opposite side of things.

Read Next

Mental Models: The Importance of Multidisciplinary Thinking
The Best Decision Making Books
How to Solve Big Problems: Lessons Learned From Cancer Scientists

Footnotes

Hat tip to Ryan Holiday. I learned about the “premeditatio malorum” in his article, Practice the Stoic Art of Negative Visualization. His books on Stoicism are great as well. I recommend starting with The Obstacle is the Way.

Inversion is different than working backward or “beginning with the end in mind.” Those strategies keep the same goal and approach it from a different direction. Meanwhile, inversion asks you to consider the opposite of your desired result.

A variety of math textbooks claim that “invert, always invert” was one of Jacobi's favorite phrases. The oldest source I could find was the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 23. 1917.

The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman.

Sources: 10 years later, Cobain lives on in his music, TODAY. For The Record: Quick News On Gwen Stefani, Pharrell Williams, Ciara, ‘Dimebag' Darrell, Nirvana, Shins & More, MTV.

Sandford 1995, p. 181

USC Law Commencement Speech by Charlie Munger. May 2007.

The term “Failure Premortem” was coined by psychologist Gary Klein in 2007.

A Margin of Safety: How to Thrive in the Age of Uncertainty

In late August of 2005, one of the most dangerous tropical storms in history began brewing. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico were unusually warm that month, and the high temperatures transformed the ocean basin into a giant cauldron with the optimal conditions for growth.

As the tropical storm cut across the tip of Florida and entered the Gulf, it immediately began to swell. In less than 24 hours, the storm doubled in size. And as it grew into a full-blown hurricane, the weather experts gave it a name: Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina churned through the tropical waters of the Gulf and quickly escalated to peak intensity. It ripped through the atmosphere with remarkable force, registering gusts of wind that exceeded 175 mph (280 km/h) and lasted for more than a minute. By the time the storm hit the southeastern coast of Louisiana on August 29th, Hurricane Katrina was nearly 120 miles wide. 1

[image error]Satellite imagery of Hurricane Katrina on August 28, 2005, one day before striking New Orleans, Louisiana. (Jeff Schmaltz / NASA)

A storm of Katrina’s size is expected to cause flooding and damage, but coastal cities and neighborhoods use a variety of flood walls and levees to prevent total catastrophe. These walls are built along rivers and waterways and act as a barrier to hold back usually high waters and prevent flooding.

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, it became clear that the levees of New Orleans might not be able to hold back the rising waters. A few hours in, the director of the National Hurricane Center said, “I do not think anyone can tell you with confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that's obviously a very, very great concern.”

Minutes later, the levees began to fail. The waters breached the levees and flood walls of New Orleans in more than 50 different places. Entire districts became submerged in more than 10 feet of water. Evacuation routes were destroyed as bridges and roads collapsed. At Memorial Medical Center in the heart of New Orleans, the surging water killed the backup generators. Without power, temperatures inside the hospital rose to over 100 degrees as doctors and nurses took turns manually pumping each breath into dying patients in a desperate attempt to keep people alive. 2

Water flooded more than 80 percent of the city. And in the days that followed, the death toll began to rise. Bodies were found floating down the streets. Rescue and recovery efforts failed to track down missing people. At least 1,200 people died, and hundreds more were unaccounted for—the total number of dead is still unknown to this day.

So many residents were displaced by Hurricane Katrina that the population of New Orleans dropped by 50 percent from 484,000 before the storm to 230,000 one year later. In total, the damages from Hurricane Katrina surpassed $100 billion. It was the costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States. 3

The Margin of Safety

The great mistake of Hurricane Katrina was that the levees and flood walls were not built with a proper “margin of safety.” The engineers miscalculated the strength of the soil the walls were built upon. As a result, the walls buckled and the surging waters poured over the top, eroding the soft soil and magnifying the problem. Within a few minutes, the entire system collapsed.

This term, margin of safety, is an engineering concept used to describe the ability of a system to withstand loads that are greater than expected. 4

Imagine you are building a bridge. The maximum weight for a fully loaded commercial truck is around 80,000 pounds (36,000 kg), but any decent engineer will build a bridge that can safely carry vehicles weighing far more. You don't want to drive an 80,000-pound truck across a bridge that can only hold 80,001 pounds. Just to be safe, the engineer might build the bridge to handle 5x the expected weight, say 400,000 pounds. This additional capacity is known as the margin of safety.

Of course, maintaining a proper margin of safety is crucial not only in construction and engineering, but also in many areas of daily life.

How to Use a Margin of Safety in Real Life

There are many ways to implement a margin of safety in everyday life. The core idea is to protect yourself from unforeseen problems and challenges by building a buffer between what you expect to happen and what could happen. This idea is widely useful on a day-to-day basis because uncertainty creeps into every area of life. Let's explore a few ways we can use this concept to live better.

Time Management

One of the keys to being prompt and reliable is to use a margin of safety when scheduling your day. If it takes 10 minutes to get somewhere, don't wait to leave until 11 minutes beforehand. Instead, leave 30 minutes beforehand. Similarly, if it always seems to take an extra five minutes to wind down a meeting, then don't schedule meetings back-to-back.

If you're always running late it is because you are living your life without a margin of safety. There will always delays in the real world. When everything has to go perfectly for you to be on time, you're not going to be on time very often. Give yourself a healthy margin of safety. 5

Strength Training

When strength training, you can utilize a margin of safety by finishing each set with at least one repetition left in the tank. This strategy ensures you can complete each repetition with proper technique and reduces the odds of injury. Training to failure eliminates your margin of safety.

Similarly, strength coaches often prevent their athletes from attempting to lift as much weight as possible for a single repetition. Instead, they only allow their athletes to select a weight they can do for at least three repetitions. (Elite sports teams often test a three-rep max, not a one-rep max.) This strategy creates a margin of safety and helps prevent injury during training by never placing athletes under a maximal load.

Investing

Warren Buffett, the famous investor, is a proponent of using a margin of safety when considering which stock to buy. He says, “Do not cut it close. That is what Ben Graham meant by having a margin of safety. You don’t try to buy businesses worth $83 million for $80 million. You leave yourself an enormous margin.”

Our predictions and calculations turn out to be wrong all the time. When it comes to assessing investment opportunities, you want a margin of safety that is so wide, it doesn't matter if your prediction is inaccurate. Buffett's business partner, Charlie Munger has said something similar, “The margin of safety ought to be so attractive. The decision should be obvious.”

“You don’t try to buy businesses worth $83 million for $80 million. You leave yourself an enormous margin.”

As Munger says, “If you could take the stock price and multiply it by the number of shares and get something that was one third or less of sellout value… you've got a lot of edge going for you. Even with an elderly alcoholic running a stodgy business, this significant excess of real value per share working for you means that all kinds of good things can happen to you. You had a huge margin of safety by having this big excess value going for you.”

Project Management

Many complex projects require coordination between multiple people. Let's say five people need to touch a project before it is completed. On average, it might take each person four days to complete their task. Under these circumstances, it would seem reasonable to set the deadline for 20 days from now, which gives each person four days.

But let's say that the total range of time each stage could take is between two days and six days. It is often better to plan for the worst case scenario and set the deadline 30 days from now, which gives each person six days. Hopefully, the average of four days per person will continue and you'll finish the project early. But in any major project, it helps to have a cushion to safeguard against any unexpected problems.

Personal Finance

If you have to spend every dollar you earn each month, then you don't have any margin of safety to protect against unexpected expenses. Conversely, if you can manage to live on 90 percent of your income, then the 10 percent you save provides a nice buffer in case of emergency.

And if you can manage to live on 50 percent of your income, then you can handle a great amount of financial stress. Imagine a medical emergency that requires $25,000 in cash. With a large buffer of cash, you can withstand such an unpleasant surprise. A big bank account can handle a lot of turbulence with inflows and outflows. Meanwhile, one small bank account can be sent into bankruptcy from one big shock. The bigger the buffer, the more chaos you can handle.

Expenses bite into your financial margin of safety. Savings expand it.

Jay Leno, the famous comedian, is a perfect example of this strategy. Leno worked two jobs at the beginning of his career, but lived off the income from one of them. “When I was younger, I would always save the money I made working at the car dealership and I would spend the money I made as a comedian,” he says. “When I started to get a bit famous, the money I was making as a comedian was way more than the money I was making at the car dealership, so I would bank that and spend the car dealership money.”

Leno continued this habit even after he was making millions of dollars per year hosting The Tonight Show. “When I got ‘The Tonight Show,' I always made sure I did 150 [comedy show] gigs a year so I never had to touch the principal,” Leno says. “I've never touched a dime of my ‘Tonight Show' money. Ever.” 6

Wildlife Protection

There are millions of squirrels in the world today. If a viral outbreak killed 100,000 squirrels, the species would continue just fine. But if a similar virus killed 100,000 lions, the species would be extinct. There is not enough slack in the ecosystem to handle such a catastrophe. Endangered species are in a precarious position because they have no margin of safety.

Mobility and Stretching

Each muscle in the body has a “stress-strain curve” which describes how far a muscle can stretch before reaching the point of failure. Injury often occurs near the extreme end of this curve. The closer you get to the limits of your range of motion, the more strain your muscles endure.

Practicing stretching and mobility exercises can help expand your range of motion and widen your stress-strain curve. This helps to keep your normal movements in the middle of the curve and away from the extremes where injury is more likely to occur. In other words, it is not necessary to be as flexible as a yoga teacher, but it's nice to have a good margin of safety in your mobility to prevent injury.

Leave Room for the Unexpected

Utilizing a margin of safety can serve you well in nearly any area of life.

All information—no matter how bulletproof it may seem—comes with some degree of error. The future is uncertain. A margin of safety acts as a buffer against the unknown, the random, and the unseen.

The world is more uncertain now than ever before. There is too much information for one person to handle, too many moving pieces for one person to manage. This is why the greatest benefit that a margin of safety provides might be reduced stress and overwhelm. Nobody can predict the future, but there is a sense of quiet confidence that comes over you when you know you are capable of handling the uncertainties of life.

If your life is designed only to handle the expected challenges, then it will fall apart as soon as something unexpected happens to you. Always be stronger than you need to be. Always leave room for the unexpected.

Footnotes

Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina by Richard D. Knabb, Jamie R. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown. Published by the National Hurricane Center on December 20, 2005.

For a remarkable account of the events at Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina listen to this Radiolab episode.

Facts for Features: Katrina Impact by Allison Plyer. August 26, 2016

The margin of safety is also known as a “factor of safety” in engineering circles.

Like most of the good ideas I share, I didn't come up with this one. I modified this example from another great article about margin of safety called “It's All About the Safety Margin” published on Mr. Money Mustache. October 17, 2011.

Quotes from Jay “Why Jay Leno has never touched a dime of his ‘Tonight Show' money” by Kathleen Elkins. CNBC. December 14, 2016.

Margin of Safety: Always Leave Room for the Unexpected

In late August of 2005, one of the most dangerous tropical storms in history began brewing. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico were unusually warm that month, and the high temperatures transformed the ocean basin into a giant cauldron with the optimal conditions for growth.

As the tropical storm cut across the tip of Florida and entered the Gulf, it immediately began to swell. In less than 24 hours, the storm doubled in size. And as it grew into a full-blown hurricane, the weather experts gave it a name: Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina churned through the tropical waters of the Gulf and quickly escalated to peak intensity. It ripped through the atmosphere with remarkable force, registering gusts of wind that exceeded 175 mph (280 km/h) and lasted for more than a minute. By the time the storm hit the southeastern coast of Louisiana on August 29th, Hurricane Katrina was nearly 120 miles wide. 1

[image error]Satellite imagery of Hurricane Katrina on August 28, 2005, one day before striking New Orleans, Louisiana. (Jeff Schmaltz / NASA)

A storm of Katrina’s size is expected to cause flooding and damage, but coastal cities and neighborhoods use a variety of flood walls and levees to prevent total catastrophe. These walls are built along rivers and waterways and act as a barrier to hold back usually high waters and prevent flooding.

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, it became clear that the levees of New Orleans might not be able to hold back the rising waters. A few hours in, the director of the National Hurricane Center said, “I do not think anyone can tell you with confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that's obviously a very, very great concern.”

Minutes later, the levees began to fail. The waters breached the levees and flood walls of New Orleans in more than 50 different places. Entire districts became submerged in more than 10 feet of water. Evacuation routes were destroyed as bridges and roads collapsed. At Memorial Medical Center in the heart of New Orleans, the surging water killed the backup generators. Without power, temperatures inside the hospital rose to over 100 degrees as doctors and nurses took turns manually pumping each breath into dying patients in a desperate attempt to keep people alive. 2

Water flooded more than 80 percent of the city. And in the days that followed, the death toll began to rise. Bodies were found floating down the streets. Rescue and recovery efforts failed to track down missing people. At least 1,200 people died, and hundreds more were unaccounted for—the total number of dead is still unknown to this day.

So many residents were displaced by Hurricane Katrina that the population of New Orleans dropped by 50 percent from 484,000 before the storm to 230,000 one year later. In total, the damages from Hurricane Katrina surpassed $100 billion. It was the costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States. 3

The Margin of Safety

The great mistake of Hurricane Katrina was that the levees and flood walls were not built with a proper “margin of safety.” The engineers miscalculated the strength of the soil the walls were built upon. As a result, the walls buckled and the surging waters poured over the top, eroding the soft soil and magnifying the problem. Within a few minutes, the entire system collapsed.

This term, margin of safety, is an engineering concept used to describe the ability of a system to withstand loads that are greater than expected. 4

Imagine you are building a bridge. The maximum weight for a fully loaded commercial truck is around 80,000 pounds (36,000 kg), but any decent engineer will build a bridge that can safely carry vehicles weighing far more. You don't want to drive an 80,000-pound truck across a bridge that can only hold 80,001 pounds. Just to be safe, the engineer might build the bridge to handle 5x the expected weight, say 400,000 pounds. This additional capacity is known as the margin of safety.

Of course, maintaining a proper margin of safety is crucial not only in construction and engineering, but also in many areas of daily life.

How to Use a Margin of Safety in Real Life

There are many ways to implement a margin of safety in everyday life. The core idea is to protect yourself from unforeseen problems and challenges by building a buffer between what you expect to happen and what could happen. This idea is widely useful on a day-to-day basis because uncertainty creeps into every area of life. Let's explore a few ways we can use this concept to live better.

Time Management

One of the keys to being prompt and reliable is to use a margin of safety when scheduling your day. If it takes 10 minutes to get somewhere, don't wait to leave until 11 minutes beforehand. Instead, leave 30 minutes beforehand. Similarly, if it always seems to take an extra five minutes to wind down a meeting, then don't schedule meetings back-to-back.

If you're always running late it is because you are living your life without a margin of safety. There will always delays in the real world. When everything has to go perfectly for you to be on time, you're not going to be on time very often. Give yourself a healthy margin of safety. 5

Strength Training

When strength training, you can utilize a margin of safety by finishing each set with at least one repetition left in the tank. This strategy ensures you can complete each repetition with proper technique and reduces the odds of injury. Training to failure eliminates your margin of safety.

Similarly, strength coaches often prevent their athletes from attempting to lift as much weight as possible for a single repetition. Instead, they only allow their athletes to select a weight they can do for at least three repetitions. (Elite sports teams often test a three-rep max, not a one-rep max.) This strategy creates a margin of safety and helps prevent injury during training by never placing athletes under a maximal load.

Investing

Warren Buffett, the famous investor, is a proponent of using a margin of safety when considering which stock to buy. He says, “Do not cut it close. That is what Ben Graham meant by having a margin of safety. You don’t try to buy businesses worth $83 million for $80 million. You leave yourself an enormous margin.”

Our predictions and calculations turn out to be wrong all the time. When it comes to assessing investment opportunities, you want a margin of safety that is so wide, it doesn't matter if your prediction is inaccurate. Buffett's business partner, Charlie Munger has said something similar, “The margin of safety ought to be so attractive. The decision should be obvious.”

“You don’t try to buy businesses worth $83 million for $80 million. You leave yourself an enormous margin.”

As Munger says, “If you could take the stock price and multiply it by the number of shares and get something that was one third or less of sellout value… you've got a lot of edge going for you. Even with an elderly alcoholic running a stodgy business, this significant excess of real value per share working for you means that all kinds of good things can happen to you. You had a huge margin of safety by having this big excess value going for you.”

Project Management

Many complex projects require coordination between multiple people. Let's say five people need to touch a project before it is completed. On average, it might take each person four days to complete their task. Under these circumstances, it would seem reasonable to set the deadline for 20 days from now, which gives each person four days.

But let's say that the total range of time each stage could take is between two days and six days. It is often better to plan for the worst case scenario and set the deadline 30 days from now, which gives each person six days. Hopefully, the average of four days per person will continue and you'll finish the project early. But in any major project, it helps to have a cushion to safeguard against any unexpected problems.

Personal Finance

If you have to spend every dollar you earn each month, then you don't have any margin of safety to protect against unexpected expenses. Conversely, if you can manage to live on 90 percent of your income, then the 10 percent you save provides a nice buffer in case of emergency.

And if you can manage to live on 50 percent of your income, then you can handle a great amount of financial stress. Imagine a medical emergency that requires $25,000 in cash. With a large buffer of cash, you can withstand such an unpleasant surprise. A big bank account can handle a lot of turbulence with inflows and outflows. Meanwhile, one small bank account can be sent into bankruptcy from one big shock. The bigger the buffer, the more chaos you can handle.

Expenses bite into your financial margin of safety. Savings expand it.

Jay Leno, the famous comedian, is a perfect example of this strategy. Leno worked two jobs at the beginning of his career, but lived off the income from one of them. “When I was younger, I would always save the money I made working at the car dealership and I would spend the money I made as a comedian,” he says. “When I started to get a bit famous, the money I was making as a comedian was way more than the money I was making at the car dealership, so I would bank that and spend the car dealership money.”

Leno continued this habit even after he was making millions of dollars per year hosting The Tonight Show. “When I got ‘The Tonight Show,' I always made sure I did 150 [comedy show] gigs a year so I never had to touch the principal,” Leno says. “I've never touched a dime of my ‘Tonight Show' money. Ever.” 6

Wildlife Protection

There are millions of squirrels in the world today. If a viral outbreak killed 100,000 squirrels, the species would continue just fine. But if a similar virus killed 100,000 lions, the species would be extinct. There is not enough slack in the ecosystem to handle such a catastrophe. Endangered species are in a precarious position because they have no margin of safety.

Mobility and Stretching

Each muscle in the body has a “stress-strain curve” which describes how far a muscle can stretch before reaching the point of failure. Injury often occurs near the extreme end of this curve. The closer you get to the limits of your range of motion, the more strain your muscles endure.

Practicing stretching and mobility exercises can help expand your range of motion and widen your stress-strain curve. This helps to keep your normal movements in the middle of the curve and away from the extremes where injury is more likely to occur. In other words, it is not necessary to be as flexible as a yoga teacher, but it's nice to have a good margin of safety in your mobility to prevent injury.

Summary of Margin of Safety

Utilizing a margin of safety can serve you well in nearly any area of life.

All information—no matter how bulletproof it may seem—comes with some degree of error. A margin of safety acts as a buffer against the unknown, the random, and the unseen. Perhaps the greatest benefit is that a margin of safety reduces stress and overwhelm. Nobody can predict the future, but there is a sense of quiet confidence that comes over you when you know you are capable of handling the uncertainties of life.

If your life is designed only to handle the expected challenges, then it will fall apart as soon as something unexpected happens to you. Always be stronger than you need to be. Always leave room for the unexpected.

Footnotes

Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina by Richard D. Knabb, Jamie R. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown. Published by the National Hurricane Center on December 20, 2005.

For a remarkable account of the events at Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina listen to this Radiolab episode.

Facts for Features: Katrina Impact by Allison Plyer. August 26, 2016

The margin of safety is also known as a “factor of safety” in engineering circles.

Like most of the good ideas I share, I didn't come up with this one. I modified this example from another great article about margin of safety called “It's All About the Safety Margin” published on Mr. Money Mustache. October 17, 2011.

Quotes from Jay “Why Jay Leno has never touched a dime of his ‘Tonight Show' money” by Kathleen Elkins. CNBC. December 14, 2016.

The 1 Percent Rule: Why a Few People Get Most of the Rewards

Sometime in the late 1800s—nobody is quite sure exactly when—a man named Vilfredo Pareto was fussing about in his garden when he made a small but interesting discovery.

Pareto noticed that a tiny number of pea pods in his garden produced the majority of the peas.

Now, Pareto was a very mathematical fellow. He worked as an economist and one of his lasting legacies was turning economics into a science rooted in hard numbers and facts. Unlike many economists of the time, Pareto's papers and books were filled with equations. And the peas in his garden had set his mathematical brain in motion.

What if this unequal distribution was present in other areas of life as well?

[image error]

The Pareto Principle

At the time, Pareto was studying wealth in various nations. As he was Italian, he began by analyzing the distribution of wealth in Italy. To his surprise, he discovered that approximately 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by just 20 percent of the people. Similar to the pea pods in his garden, most of the resources were controlled by a minority of the players.

Pareto continued his analysis in other nations and a pattern began to emerge. For instance, after poring through the British income tax records, he noticed that approximately 30 percent of the population in Great Britain earned about 70 percent of the total income. 1

As he continued researching, Pareto found that the numbers were never quite the same, but the trend was remarkably consistent. The majority of rewards always seemed to accrue to a small percentage of people. This idea that a small number of things account for the majority of the results became known as the Pareto Principle or, more commonly, the 80/20 Rule. 2

Inequality, Everywhere

In the decades that followed, Pareto's work practically became gospel for economists. Once he opened the world's eyes to this idea, people started seeing it everywhere. And the 80/20 Rule is more prevalent now than ever before.

For example, through the 2015-2016 season in the National Basketball Association, 20 percent of franchises have won 75.3 percent of the championships. Furthermore, just two franchises—the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers—have won nearly half of all the championships in NBA history. Like Pareto's pea pods, a few teams account for the majority of the rewards. 3

The numbers are even more extreme in soccer. While 77 different nations have competed in the World Cup, just three countries—Brazil, Germany, and Italy—have won 13 of the first 20 World Cup tournaments.

Examples of the Pareto Principle exist in everything from real estate to income inequality to tech startups. In the 1950s, three percent of Guatemalans owned 70 percent of the land in Guatemala. In 2013, 8.4 percent of the world population controlled 83.3 percent of the world's wealth. In 2015, one search engine, Google, received 64 percent of search queries. 456

Why does this happen? Why do a few people, teams, and organizations enjoy the bulk of the rewards in life? To answer this question, let's consider an example from nature.

The Power of Accumulative Advantage

The Amazon rainforest is one of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. Scientists have cataloged approximately 16,000 different tree species in the Amazon. But despite this remarkable level of diversity, researchers have discovered that there are approximately 227 “hyperdominant” tree species that make up nearly half of the rainforest. Just 1.4 percent of tree species account for 50 percent of the trees in the Amazon. 7

But why?

Imagine two plants growing side by side. Each day they will compete for sunlight and soil. If one plant can grow just a little bit faster than the other, then it can stretch taller, catch more sunlight, and soak up more rain. The next day, this additional energy allows the plant to grow even more. This pattern continues until the stronger plant crowds the other out and takes the lion’s share of sunlight, soil, and nutrients.

From this advantageous position, the winning plant has a better ability to spread seeds and reproduce, which gives the species an even bigger footprint in the next generation. This process gets repeated again and again until the plants that are slightly better than the competition dominate the entire forest.

Scientists refer to this effect as “accumulative advantage.” What begins as a small advantage gets bigger over time. One plant only needs a slight edge in the beginning to crowd out the competition and take over the entire forest.

Winner-Take-All Effects

Something similar happens in our lives.

Like plants in the rainforest, humans are often competing for the same resources. Politicians compete for the same votes. Authors compete for the same spot at the top of the best-seller list. Athletes compete for the same gold medal. Companies compete for the same potential client. Television shows compete for the same hour of your attention.

The difference between these options can be razor thin, but the winners enjoy massively outsized rewards.

Imagine two women swimming in the Olympics. One of them might be 1/100th of a second faster than the other, but she gets all of the gold medal. Ten companies might pitch a potential client, but only one of them will win the project. You only need to be a little bit better than the competition to secure all of the reward. Or, perhaps you are applying for a new job. Two hundred candidates might compete for the same role, but being just slightly better than other candidates earns you the entire position.

Situations in which small differences in performance lead to outsized rewards are known as Winner-Take-All Effects.

These situations in which small differences in performance lead to outsized rewards are known as Winner-Take-All Effects. They typically occur in situations that involve relative comparison, where your performance relative to those around you is the determining factor in your success.

Not everything in life is a Winner-Take-All competition, but nearly every area of life is at least partially affected by limited resources. Any decision that involves using a limited resource like time or money will naturally result in a winner-take-all situation.

In situations like these, being just a little bit better than the competition can lead to outsized rewards because the winner takes all. You only win by one percent or one second or one dollar, but you capture one hundred percent of the victory. The advantage of being a little bit better is not a little bit more reward, but the entire reward. The winner gets one and the rest get zero.

[image error]

Winner-Take-All Leads to Winner-Take-Most

Winner-Take-All Effects in individual competitions can lead to Winner-Take-Most Effects in the larger game of life.

From this advantageous position—with the gold medal in hand or with cash in the bank or from the chair of the Oval Office—the winner begins the process of accumulating advantages that make it easier for them to win the next time around. What began as a small margin is starting to trend toward the 80/20 Rule.

If one road is slightly more convenient than the other, then more people travel down it and more businesses are likely to build alongside it. As more businesses are built, people have additional reasons for using the road and so it gets even more traffic. Soon you end up with a saying like, “20 percent of the roads receive 80 percent of the traffic.”

If one business has a technology that is more innovative than another, then more people will buy their products. As the business makes more money, they can invest in additional technology, pay higher salaries, and hire better people. By the time the competition catches up, there are other reasons for customers to stick with the first business. Soon, one company dominates the industry.

If one author hits the best-seller list, then publishers will be more interested in their next book. When the second book comes out, the publisher will put more resources and marketing power behind it, which makes it easier to hit the best-seller list for a second time. Soon, you begin to understand why a few books sell millions of copies while the majority struggle to sell a few thousand copies.

The margin between good and great is narrower than it seems. What begins as a slight edge over the competition compounds with each additional contest.

The margin between good and great is narrower than it seems. What begins as a slight edge over the competition compounds with each additional contest. Winning one competition improves your odds of winning the next. Each additional cycle further cements the status of those at the top.

Over time, those that are slightly better end up with the majority of the rewards. Those that are slightly worse end up with next to nothing. This idea is sometimes referred to as The Matthew Effect, which references a passage in The Bible that says, “For all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

Now, let's come back to the question I posed near the beginning of this article. Why do a few people, teams, and organizations enjoy the bulk of the rewards in life?

The 1 Percent Rule

Small differences in performance can lead to very unequal distributions when repeated over time. This is yet another reason why habits are so important. The people and organizations that can do the right things, more consistently are more likely to maintain a slight edge and accumulate disproportionate rewards over time.

You only need to be slightly better than your competition, but if you are able to maintain a slight edge today and tomorrow and the day after that, then you can repeat the process of winning by just a little bit over and over again. And thanks to Winner-Take-All Effects, each win delivers outsized rewards.

We can call this The 1 Percent Rule. The 1 Percent Rule states that over time the majority of the rewards in a given field will accumulate to the people, teams, and organizations that maintain a 1 percent advantage over the alternatives. You don't need to be twice as good to get twice the results. You just need to be slightly better. 8

The 1 Percent Rule is not merely a reference to the fact that small differences accumulate into significant advantages, but also to the idea that those who are one percent better rule their respective fields and industries. Thus, the process of accumulative advantage is the hidden engine that drives the 80/20 Rule.

Footnotes

These numbers are covered in Pareto’s book, Cours d'économie politique.

Pareto published this discovery in 1906 in a book titled, Manual of Political Economy. As I noted here, the 80/20 Rule does not mean the numbers involved must be 80 and 20. It's just a shorthand way of referring to the idea that the majority of the rewards go to a minority of the players.

The Pareto Principle shows up constantly in sports. In the National Football League, the top 19 percent of the franchises have won 57 percent of the Super Bowls. In Major League Baseball, the top 20 percent of the franchises have won 62 percent of World Series championships.

Global Wealth Report by Credit Suisse. October 2013.

U.S. Desktop Search Engine Rankings by comScore. October 2015.

This pattern shows up in negative ways as well. In 2002, Microsoft analyzed their software errors and noticed that “about 20 percent of the bugs cause 80 percent of all errors” and “1 percent of bugs caused half of all errors.” This quote comes from an email sent to enterprise customers by Steve Ballmer on October 2, 2002. The full quote was, “About 20 percent of the bugs causes 80 percent of all errors, and—this is stunning to me—1 percent of bugs caused half of all errors.”

Hyperdominance in the Amazonian Tree Flora. Science: Vol. 342, Issue 6156. October 18, 2013.

In this case, I mean “better” as in more advantageous. Obviously, this includes factors besides skill and hard work. You can also be “better” in the lucky sense. It is better for a plant to be born in fertile soil rather than on a rocky cliff. Similarly, it is better to be born into a culture that values your skills or into a family that can provide for you. In any case, The 1 Percent Rule still holds: those who maintain small advantages, whether due to luck or hard work, gradually accumulate the bulk of the rewards.

The 1 Percent Rule: Why a Few People Get Most of the Rewards

Sometime in the late 1800s, nobody is quite sure exactly when, a man named Vilfredo Pareto was fussing about in his garden when he made a small but interesting discovery.

Pareto noticed that a tiny number of pea pods in his garden produced the majority of the peas.

Now, Pareto was a very mathematical fellow. He worked as an economist and one of his lasting legacies was turning economics into a science rooted in hard numbers and facts. Unlike many economists of the time, Pareto's papers and books were filled with equations. And the peas in his garden had set his mathematical brain in motion.

What if this unequal distribution was present in other areas of life as well?

[image error]Vilfredo Pareto in the 1870s. Photographer unknown.
The Pareto Principle

At the time, Pareto was studying wealth in various nations. As he was Italian, he began by analyzing the distribution of wealth in Italy. To his surprise, he discovered that approximately eighty percent of the land in Italy was owned by just twenty percent of the people. Similar to the pea pods in his garden, most of the resources were controlled by a minority of the players.

Pareto continued his analysis in other nations and a pattern began to emerge. For instance, after poring through the British income tax records, he noticed that approximately thirty percent of the population in Great Britain earned about seventy percent of the total income. 1

As he continued researching Pareto found that the numbers were never quite the same, but the trend was remarkably consistent. The majority of rewards always seemed to accrue to a small percentage of people. This idea that a small number of things account for the majority of the results became known as the Pareto Principle or, more commonly, the 80/20 Rule. 2

Inequality, Everywhere

In the decades that followed, Pareto's work practically became gospel for economists. Once he opened the world's eyes to this idea, people started seeing it everywhere. And the 80/20 Rule is more prevalent now than ever before.

In the National Basketball Association, twenty percent of franchises have won 75.3 percent of the championships through the 2015-2016 season. Furthermore, just two franchises—the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers—have won nearly half of all the championships in NBA history. Like Pareto's pea pods, a few teams account for the majority of the rewards. 3

The numbers are even more extreme in soccer. While 77 different nations have competed in the World Cup, just three countries—Brazil, Germany, and Italy—have won 13 of the first 20 World Cup tournaments.

Examples of the Pareto Principle exist in everything from real estate to income inequality to tech startups. In the 1950s, three percent of Guatemalans owned 70 percent of the land in Guatemala. In 2013, 8.4 percent of the world population controlled 83.3 percent of the world's wealth. In 2015, one search engine, Google, received 64 percent of search queries. 456

Why does this happen? Why do a few people, teams, and organizations enjoy the bulk of the rewards in life?

The Power of Accumulative Advantage

The Amazon rainforest is one of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. Scientists have cataloged approximately 16,000 different tree species in the Amazon. But despite this remarkable level of diversity, researchers have discovered that there are approximately 227 “hyperdominant” tree species that make up nearly half of the rainforest. Just 1.4 percent of tree species account for 50 percent of the trees in the Amazon. 7

But why?

Imagine two plants growing side by side. Each day they will compete for sunlight and soil. If one plant can grow just a little bit faster than the other, then it can stretch taller, catch more sunlight, and soak up more rain. The next day, this additional energy allows the plant to grow even more. This pattern continues until the stronger plant crowds the other out and takes the lion’s share of sunlight, soil, and nutrients.

From this advantageous position, the winning plant has a better ability to spread seeds and reproduce, which gives the species an even bigger footprint in the next generation. This process gets repeated again and again until the plants that are slightly better than the competition dominate the entire forest.

Scientists refer to this effect as “accumulative advantage.” What begins as a small advantage gets bigger over time. One plant only needs a slight edge in the beginning to crowd out the competition and take over the entire forest.

Winner-Take-All Effects
The 1 Percent Rule

The process of accumulative advantage is the hidden engine that drives the 80/20 Rule. Being just a tiny bit better—even by just one percent—is not a one-time advantage, but an effect that gets magnified over time. Winning one competition improves your odds of winning the next.

There is a lot of conversation about being “10x” better than the alternatives. But that's actually not necessary for dominance. What's necessary is maintaining a slight edge. Not just once or twice, but over time. And that means that the key to remarkable results is consistent habits. It is the people, teams, and organizations with the best habits and systems that maintain their advantages over time and, as a result, accumulate the majority of rewards.

We can call this The 1 Percent Rule. The 1 Percent Rule states that over time the majority of the rewards in a given field will accumulate to the people, teams, and organizations that maintain a 1 percent advantage over the alternatives.

The 1 Percent Rule is not merely a reference to the fact that small differences add up, but also to the idea that those who are one percent better rule their respective fields and industries. Over time, those that are slightly better end up with the majority of the rewards. Those that are slightly worse end up with next to nothing. This idea is sometimes referred to as The Matthew Effect, which references a passage in The Bible that says, “For all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

The 1 Percent Rule

All living organisms compete for limited resources. In the case of plants, those resources are sunlight, rain, soil, and nutrients. In our modern lives, some of the biggest resources we compete for are time, money, votes, and measurement. And just like the plants, those that are better at securing resources are in a better position to win them again the next time around.

If one road is slightly more convenient than the other, then more people travel down it and more businesses are likely to build alongside it. As more businesses are built, people have additional reasons for using the road and so it gets even more traffic. Soon you end up with a saying like, “20 percent of the roads receive 80 percent of the traffic.”

If one business has a technology that is more innovative than another, then more people will buy their products. As the business makes more money, then can invest in additional technology, pay higher salaries, and hire better people. By the time the competition catches up, there are other reasons for customers to stick with the first business. Soon, one company dominates the industry.

If one author hits the best-seller list, then publishers will be more interested in their next book. When the second book comes out, they will put more resources and marketing power behind it, which makes it easier to hit the best-seller list for a second time. Pretty soon, you end up seeing that a few books and a few authors sell millions of copies while the majority struggle to sell a few thousand copies each.

Now, let's come back to the question I posed near the beginning of this article. Why do a few people, teams, and organizations enjoy the bulk of the rewards in life?

The Margin Between Good and Great

The margin between good and great is narrower than it seems. What began as a slight edge over the competition compounds with each additional contest. Each additional cycle further cements your status at the top.

Small differences in performance can lead to very unequal distributions when repeated over time. You only need to be slightly better than your competition, but if you are able to maintain a slight edge today and tomorrow and the day after that, then you can repeat the process of winning by just a little bit over and over again.

Mastery is not an accident. The people and organizations that spend their days accumulating small wins and compounding tiny improvements are the ones that experience massive success. Time and time again, the highest achievers are the ones who have the best habits.

Footnotes

These numbers are covered in Pareto’s book, Cours d'économie politique.

Pareto published this discovery in 1906 in a book titled, Manual of Political Economy. As I noted here, the 80/20 Rule does not mean the numbers involved must be 80 and 20. It's just a shorthand way of referring to the idea that the majority of the rewards go to a minority of the players.

The Pareto Principle shows up constantly in sports. In the National Football League, the top 19 percent of the franchises have won 57 percent of the Super Bowls. In Major League Baseball, the top 20 percent of the franchises have won 62 percent of World Series championships.

Global Wealth Report by Credit Suisse. October 2013.

U.S. Desktop Search Engine Rankings by comScore. October 2015.

This pattern shows up in negative ways as well. In 2002, Microsoft analyzed their software errors and noticed that “about 20 percent of the bugs cause 80 percent of all errors” and “1 percent of bugs caused half of all errors.” This quote comes from an email sent to enterprise customers by Steve Ballmer on October 2, 2002. The full quote was, “About 20 percent of the bugs causes 80 percent of all errors, and—this is stunning to me—1 percent of bugs caused half of all errors.”

Hyperdominance in the Amazonian Tree Flora. Science: Vol. 342, Issue 6156. October 18, 2013.

How to Retain More of Every Book You Read

Finishing a book is easy. Understanding it is harder.

In recent years, I have focused on building good reading habits and learned how to read more. But the key is not simply to read more, but to read better. For most people, the ultimate goal of reading a nonfiction book is to actually improve your life by learning a new skill, understanding an important problem, or looking at the world in a new way. It's important to read books, but it is just as important to remember what you read and put it to good use.

With that in mind, I'd like to share three reading comprehension strategies that I use to make my reading more productive.

[image error]

1. Make all of your notes searchable.

Having searchable book notes is essential for returning to ideas easily. It increases the odds that you will apply what you read in real life. An idea is only useful if you can find it when you need it. There is no need to leave the task of reading comprehension solely up to your memory.

I store all of my book notes in Evernote. I strongly prefer Evernote over other options because 1) it is 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 book notes into Evernote in three ways.

First, if I am listening to an audiobook then I create a new note for that book and type my notes in as I listen. My preference is to listen to audiobooks on 1.25x speed and then press pause whenever I want to write something down. The faster playback speed and slower note taking process tend to balance out and I usually finish each book in the same time as normal. 1

Second, if I am reading a print book then I follow the same process with one change. Typing notes while reading a print book can be annoying because you are always putting the book down and picking it back up. I like to place the book on a book stand, which makes it much easier to type out a long quote or keep my hands free while reading.

Print books and audiobooks are great, but where this system really shines is with ebooks. My third (and preferred) approach is to read ebooks on my Kindle Paperwhite. I can easily highlight a passage while reading on my Kindle—no typing required. Once I'm finished, I use a software program called Clippings to import all of my Kindle highlights to Evernote.

These three approaches make it fairly easy for me to get my book notes into Evernote where they will be instantly searchable. Even if I can't remember where I read about a particular idea, I can usually search my Evernote folder and find the answer quickly.

2. Integrate thoughts as you read.

When you go to the library, all of the books will be divided into different categories: biographies, history, science, psychology. In the real world, of course, knowledge is not separated into neatly defined boxes. Topics overlap and bleed into one another. All knowledge is interconnected.

The most useful insights are often found at the intersection of ideas.

The most useful insights are often found at the intersection of ideas. For that reason, I try to consider how the book I'm reading connects with all of the ideas that are already knocking around inside my head. Whenever possible, I try to integrate the lessons I'm learning with previous ideas.

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 Brene 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. This process of integration and connection is crucial not only for making new ideas “stick” in your brain, but also for understanding the world as a whole.

Too often, people use one book or one article as the basis for an entire belief system. Forcing yourself to connect ideas helps you realize that there is no single way of looking at the world. The complex connections between ideas are often where the most beautiful bits of knowledge reside.

3. Summarize the book in one paragraph.

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 I do find it to be a useful exercise because it forces me to review my notes and consider what was really important about the book.

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

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. (There is a lot of fluff in non-fiction books these days.)

I have published many of my book summaries, which include my one paragraph summary and my full notes. If you're looking for an idea of what these reading comprehension strategies look like in practice, feel free to browse that page.

Happy reading!

Footnotes

I often hear from friends and readers who suggest listening to audiobooks at some crazy speed like 2x or 3x. Maybe my brain is just slow, but this is way too fast for me. Furthermore, I feel like burning through books at that pace is an indication of the wrong approach. It seems like the goal is simply to check books off the list rather than to deeply understand what the book is about. My preferred pace is slower, but hopefully my understanding is better.

How to Read Better: 3 Ways to Improve Reading Comprehension

Finishing a book is easy. Understanding it is harder.

In recent years, I have focused on building good reading habits and learned how to read more. But the key is not simply to read more, but to read better. For most people, the ultimate goal of reading a nonfiction book is to actually improve your life by learning a new skill, understanding an important problem, or looking at the world in a new way. It's important to read books, but it is just as important to remember what you read and put it to good use.

With that in mind, I'd like to share three reading comprehension strategies that I use to make my reading more productive.

1. Make all of your notes searchable.

Having searchable book notes is essential for returning to ideas easily. It increases the odds that you will apply what you read in real life. An idea is only useful if you can find it when you need it. There is no need to leave the task of reading comprehension solely up to your memory.

I store all of my book notes in Evernote. I strongly prefer Evernote over other options because 1) it is 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 book notes into Evernote in three ways.

First, if I am listening to an audiobook then I create a new note for that book and type my notes in as I listen. My preference is to listen to audiobooks on 1.25x speed and then press pause whenever I want to write something down. The faster playback speed and slower note taking process tend to balance out and I usually finish each book in the same time as normal. 1

Second, if I am reading a print book then I follow the same process with one change. Typing notes while reading a print book can be annoying because you are always putting the book down and picking it back up. I like to place the book on a book stand, which makes it much easier to type out a long quote or keep my hands free while reading.

Print books and audiobooks are great, but where this system really shines is with ebooks. My third (and preferred) approach is to read ebooks on my Kindle Paperwhite. I can easily highlight a passage while reading on my Kindle—no typing required. Once I'm finished, I use a software program called Clippings to import all of my Kindle highlights to Evernote.

These three approaches make it fairly easy for me to get my book notes into Evernote where they will be instantly searchable. Even if I can't remember where I read about a particular idea, I can usually search my Evernote folder and find the answer quickly.

2. Integrate thoughts as you read.

When you go to the library, all of the books will be divided into different categories: biographies, history, science, psychology. In the real world, of course, knowledge is not separated into neatly defined boxes. Topics overlap and bleed into one another. All knowledge is interconnected.

The most useful insights are often found at the intersection of ideas.

The most useful insights are often found at the intersection of ideas. For that reason, I try to consider how the book I'm reading connects with all of the ideas that are already knocking around inside my head. Whenever possible, I try to integrate the lessons I'm learning with previous ideas.

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 Brene 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. This process of integration and connection is crucial not only for making new ideas “stick” in your brain, but also for understanding the world as a whole.

Too often, people use one book or one article as the basis for an entire belief system. Forcing yourself to connect ideas helps you realize that there is no single way of looking at the world. The complex connections between ideas are often where the most beautiful bits of knowledge reside.

3. Summarize the book in one paragraph.

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 I do find it to be a useful exercise because it forces me to review my notes and consider what was really important about the book.

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

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. (There is a lot of fluff in non-fiction books these days.)

I have published many of my book summaries, which include my one paragraph summary and my full notes. If you're looking for an idea of what these reading comprehension strategies look like in practice, feel free browse that page.

Happy reading!

Footnotes

I often hear from friends and readers who suggest listening to audiobooks at some crazy speed like 2x or 3x. Maybe my brain is just slow, but this is way too fast for me. Furthermore, I feel like burning through books at that pace is an indication of the wrong approach. It seems like the goal is simply to check books off the list rather than to deeply understand what the book is about. My preferred pace is slower, but hopefully my understanding is better.

The Paradox of Behavior Change

The natural tendency of life is to find stability. In biology we refer to this process as equilibrium or homeostasis.

For example, consider your blood pressure. When it dips too low, your heart rate speeds up and nudges your blood pressure back into a healthy range. When it rises too high, your kidneys reduce the amount of fluid in the body by flushing out urine. All the while, your blood vessels help maintain the balance by contracting or expanding as needed.

The human body employs hundreds of feedback loops to keep your blood pressure, body temperature, glucose levels, calcium levels, and many other processes at a stable equilibrium.

In his book, Mastery, martial arts master George Leonard points out that our daily lives also develop their own levels of homeostasis. We fall into patterns for how often we do (or don’t) exercise, how often we do (or don’t) clean the dishes, how often we do (or don’t) call our parents, and everything else in between. Over time, each of us settles into our own version of equilibrium.

Like your body, there are many forces and feedback loops that moderate the particular equilibrium of your habits. Your daily routines are governed by the delicate balance between your environment, your genetic potential, your tracking methods, and many other forces. As time goes on, this equilibrium becomes so normal that it becomes invisible. All of these forces are interacting each day, but we rarely notice how they shape our behaviors.

That is, until we try to make a change.

The Myth of Radical Change

The myth of radical change and overnight success is pervasive in our culture. Experts say things like, “The biggest mistake most people make in life is not setting goals high enough.” Or they tell us, “If you want massive results, then you have to take massive action.”

On the surface, these phrases sound inspiring. What we fail to realize, however, is that any quest for rapid growth contradicts every stabilizing force in our lives. Remember, the natural tendency of life is to find stability. Anytime equilibrium is lost, the system is motivated to restore it.

If you step too far outside the bounds of your normal performance, then nearly all of the forces in your life will be screaming to get you back to equilibrium. If you take massive action, then you quickly run into a massive roadblock.

Nearly anyone who has tried to make a big change in their life has experienced some form of this. You finally work up the motivation to stick with a new diet only to find your co-workers subtly undermining your efforts. You commit to going for a run each night and within a week you’re asked to stay late at work. You start a new meditation habit and your kids keep barging into the room. 1

“Resistance is proportionate to the size and speed of the change, not to whether the change is a favorable or unfavorable one.”

The forces in our lives that have established our current equilibrium will work to pull us back whether we are trying to change for better or worse. In the words of George Leonard, “Resistance is proportionate to the size and speed of the change, not to whether the change is a favorable or unfavorable one.” 2

In other words, the faster you try to change, the more likely you are to backslide. The very pursuit of rapid change dials up a wide range of counteracting forces which are fighting to pull you back into your previous lifestyle. You might be able to beat equilibrium for a little while, but pretty soon your energy fades and the backsliding begins.

The Optimal Rate of Growth

Of course, change is certainly possible, but it is only sustainable within a fairly narrow window. When an athlete trains too hard, she ends up sick or injured. When a company changes course too quickly, the culture breaks down and employees get burnt out. When a leader pushes his personal agenda to the extreme, the nation riots and the people re-establish the balance of power. Living systems do not like extreme conditions.

Thankfully, there is a better way.

Consider the following quote from systems expert Peter Senge. “Virtually all natural systems, from ecosystems to animals to organizations, have intrinsically optimal rates of growth. The optimal rate is far less than the fastest possible growth. When growth becomes excessive—as it does in cancer—the system itself will seek to compensate by slowing down; perhaps putting the organization’s survival at risk in the process.” 3

By contrast, when you accumulate small wins and focus on one percent improvements, you nudge equilibrium forward. It is like building muscle. If the weight is too light, your muscles will atrophy. If the weight is too heavy, you’ll end up injured. But if the weight is just a touch beyond your normal, then your muscles will adapt to the new stimulus and equilibrium will take a small step forward.

The Paradox of Behavior Change

In order for change to last, we must work with the fundamental forces in our lives, not against them. Nearly everything that makes up your daily life has an equilibrium—a natural set point, a normal pace, a typical rhythm. If we reach too far beyond this equilibrium, we will find ourselves being yanked back to the baseline.

Thus, the best way to achieve a new level of equilibrium is not with radical change, but through small wins each day.

This is the great paradox of behavior change. If you try to change your life all at once, you will quickly find yourself pulled back into the same patterns as before. But if you merely focus on changing your normal day, you will find your life changes naturally as a side effect.

Footnotes

It is worth noting that radical change can work, but only under very specific circumstances. Most notably, radical changes work when we are forced to accept them permanently. For example, people will often radically change their behavior after major life events like graduating college, moving to a new city, starting a new job, getting married, having a baby. (Pro tip: don’t try all of those at once.) These big changes lead to entirely new habits that persist for years. Why? Because generally speaking, it’s quite difficult to get rid of a baby, get divorced, find a new job, move to a new city, and so on. The new lifestyle is permanent and so are the radically new habits that come with it.

In his book Mastery, George Leonard shares an interesting insight about change and homeostasis. Leonard points out that stability is comfortable and that means, by default, change is uncomfortable. Thus, it is not always a bad thing to feel some pain or discomfort or uncertainty when trying something new (within reason) because these feelings can be seen as a signal not that something is wrong, but that something is right. You are experiencing discomfort precisely because you are changing.

The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. Page 62.

The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice

In some circles, Ben Hogan is credited with “inventing practice.”

Hogan was one of the greatest golfers of the 20th century, an accomplishment he achieved through tireless repetition. He simply loved to practice. Hogan said, “I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning so I could hit balls. I’d be at the practice tee at the crack of dawn, hit balls for a few hours, then take a break and get right back to it.” 1

For Hogan, every practice session had a purpose. He reportedly spent years breaking down each phase of the golf swing and testing new methods for each segment. The result was near perfection. He developed one of the most finely-tuned golf swings in the history of the game.

His precision made him more like a surgeon than a golfer. During the 1953 Masters, for example, Hogan hit the flagstick on back-to-back holes. A few days later, he broke the tournament scoring record. 2

This iconic image of Ben Hogan’s 1-iron shot at the 1950 US Open was taken by master photographer Hy Peskin. It is widely considered to be the most famous image in golf history. (Source: USGA Museum from The Hy Peskin Collection.)

Hogan methodically broke the game of golf down into chunks and figured out how he could master each section. For example, he was one of the first golfers to assign specific yardages to each golf club. Then, he studied each course carefully and used trees and sand bunkers as reference points to inform him about the distance of each shot. 3

Hogan finished his career with nine major championships—ranking fourth all-time. During his prime, other golfers simply attributed his remarkable success to “Hogan’s secret.” Today, experts have a new term for his rigorous style of improvement: deliberate practice.

What is Deliberate Practice?

Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance. When Ben Hogan carefully reconstructed each step of his golf swing, he was engaging in deliberate practice. He wasn’t just taking cuts. He was finely tuning his technique.

While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.

The greatest challenge of deliberate practice is to remain focused. In the beginning, showing up and putting in your reps is the most important thing. But after a while we begin to carelessly overlook small errors and miss daily opportunities for improvement.

This is because the natural tendency of the human brain is to transform repeated behaviors into automatic habits. For example, when you first learned to tie your shoes you had to think carefully about each step of the process. Today, after many repetitions, your brain can perform this sequence automatically. The more we repeat a task the more mindless it becomes.

Mindless activity is the enemy of deliberate practice. The danger of practicing the same thing again and again is that progress becomes assumed. Too often, we assume we are getting better simply because we are gaining experience. In reality, we are merely reinforcing our current habits—not improving them.

Claiming that improvement requires attention and effort sounds logical enough. But what does deliberate practice actually look like in the real world? Let’s talk about that now.

Examples of Deliberate Practice

One of my favorite examples of deliberate practice is discussed in Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. In the book, Colvin describes how Benjamin Franklin used deliberate practice to improve his writing skills.

When he was a teenager, Benjamin Franklin was criticized by his father for his poor writing abilities. Unlike most teenagers, young Ben took his father’s advice seriously and vowed to improve his writing skills.

He began by finding a publication written by some of the best authors of his day. Then, Franklin went through each article line by line and wrote down the meaning of every sentence. Next, he rewrote each article in his own words and then compared his version to the original. Each time, “I discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.” Eventually, Franklin realized his vocabulary held him back from better writing, and so he focused intensely on that area.

Deliberate practice always follows the same pattern: break the overall process down into parts, identify your weaknesses, test new strategies for each section, and then integrate your learning into the overall process.

Here are some more examples.

Cooking: Jiro Ono, the subject of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, is a chef and owner of an award-winning sushi restaurant in Tokyo. Jiro has dedicated his life to perfecting the art of making sushi and he expects the same of his apprentices. Each apprentice must master one tiny part of the sushi-making process at a time—how to wring a towel, how to use a knife, how to cut the fish, and so on. One apprentice trained under Jiro for ten years before being allowed to cook the eggs. Each step of the process is taught with the utmost care.

Martial arts: Josh Waitzkin, author of The Art of Learning, is a martial artist who holds several US national medals and a 2004 world championship. In the finals of one competition, he noticed a weakness: When an opponent illegally head-butted him in the nose, Waitzkin flew into a rage. His emotion caused him to lose control and forget his strategy. Afterward, he specifically sought out training partners who would fight dirty so he could practice remaining calm and principled in the face of chaos. “They were giving me a valuable opportunity to expand my threshold for turbulence,” Waitzkin wrote. “Dirty players were my best teachers.”

Chess: Magnus Carlsen is a chess grandmaster and one of the highest-rated players in history. One distinguishing feature of great chess players is their ability to recognize “chunks,” which are specific arrangements of pieces on the board. Some experts estimate that grandmasters can identify around 300,000 different chunks. Interestingly, Carlsen learned the game by playing computer chess, which allowed him to play multiple games at once. Not only did this strategy allow him to learn chunks much faster than someone playing in-person games, but also gave him a chance to make more mistakes and correct his weaknesses at an accelerated pace.

Music: Many great musicians recommend repeating the most challenging sections of a song until you master them. Virtuoso violinist Nathan Milstein says, “Practice as much as you feel you can accomplish with concentration. Once when I became concerned because others around me practiced all day long, I asked [my professor] how many hours I should practice, and he said, ‘It really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.’” 4

Basketball: Consider the following example from Aubrey Daniels, “Player A shoots 200 practice shots, Player B shoots 50. The Player B retrieves his own shots, dribbles leisurely and takes several breaks to talk to friends. Player A has a colleague who retrieves the ball after each attempt. The colleague keeps a record of shots made. If the shot is missed the colleague records whether the miss was short, long, left or right and the shooter reviews the results after every 10 minutes of practice. To characterize their hour of practice as equal would hardly be accurate. Assuming this is typical of their practice routine and they are equally skilled at the start, which would you predict would be the better shooter after only 100 hours of practice?”

The Unsung Hero of Deliberate Practice

Perhaps the greatest difference between deliberate practice and simple repetition is this: feedback. Anyone who has mastered the art of deliberate practice—whether they are an athlete like Ben Hogan or a writer like Ben Franklin—has developed methods for receiving continual feedback on their performance.

There are many ways to receive feedback. Let’s discuss two.

The first effective feedback system is measurement. The things we measure are the things we improve. This holds true for the number of pages we read, the number of pushups we do, the number of sales calls we make, and any other task that is important to us. It is only through measurement that we have any proof of whether we are getting better or worse.

The second effective feedback system is coaching. One consistent finding across disciplines is that coaches are often essential for sustaining deliberate practice. In many cases, it is nearly impossible to both perform a task and measure your progress at the same time. Good coaches can track your progress, find small ways to improve, and hold you accountable to delivering your best effort each day.

For additional ideas on how to implement deliberate practice, I recommend the following interview with psychology professor Anders Ericsson, who is widely considered to be the world’s top expert on deliberate practice.

The Promise of Deliberate Practice

Humans have a remarkable capacity to improve their performance in nearly any area of life if they train in the correct way. This is easier said than done.

Deliberate practice is not a comfortable activity. It requires sustained effort and concentration. The people who master the art of deliberate practice are committed to being lifelong learners—always exploring and experimenting and refining.

Deliberate practice is not a magic pill, but if you can manage to maintain your focus and commitment, then the promise of deliberate practice is quite alluring: to get the most out of what you’ve got.

Read Next

The Myth and Magic of Deliberate Practice
Goal Setting: A Scientific Guide to Setting and Achieving Goals
The Best Self-Help Books

Footnotes

Interview with George Peper. GOLF Magazine. September 1987.

Hogan’s precision with the golf club allowed him to play the game in a different way than most. Once, another golf pro came to him for advice and said, “I’m having trouble with my long putts.” Hogan simply replied, “Why don’t you try hitting your irons closer to the pin?”

Ben Hogan was relentless in his quest for improvement. According to one New York Times article, Hogan once received a shipment of golf balls before a tournament and examined each one carefully with a magnifying glass. “Some of these balls have a little too much paint in the dimples,” he said.

The Making of an Expert by K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely. Harvard Business Review. July-August 2007 Issue.

The Myth and Magic of Deliberate Practice

Joe DiMaggio was one of the greatest hitters in baseball history. A three-time winner of the Most Valuable Player award, DiMaggio was selected to the Major League All-Star team in each of his thirteen seasons. He is best known for his remarkable hitting streak during the 1941 season when he recorded a hit in fifty-six consecutive games—a record that still stands more than seventy-five years later.

I recently heard a little-known story about how DiMaggio acquired his exceptional ability.

Joe DiMaggio in 1939. Published by Bowman Gum for Play Ball Cards.

As the story goes, a journalist was interviewing DiMaggio at his home and asked him what it felt like to be such a “natural hitter.” Without saying a word, he dragged the reporter downstairs. In the shadows of the basement, DiMaggio picked up a bat and began to repeat a series of practice swings. Before each swing, he would call out a particular pitch such as “fastball, low and away” or “slider, inside” and adjust his approach accordingly.

Once he finished the routine, DiMaggio set the bat down, picked up a piece of chalk, and scratched a tally mark on the wall. Then he flicked on the lights to reveal thousands of tally marks covering the basement walls. Supposedly, DiMaggio then looked at the journalist and said, “Don’t you ever tell me that I’m a natural hitter again.” 1

DiMaggio then looked at the journalist and said, “Don’t you ever tell me that I’m a natural hitter again.”

We love stories like this—stories that highlight how remarkable success is the product of effort and perseverance. In recent years, the study of hard work has developed into a scientific pursuit. Experts have begun to refer to focused and effortful training as “deliberate practice” and it is widely considered to be the recipe for success.

There is no doubt that deliberate practice can be the recipe for success, but only under certain conditions. If we are serious about maximizing our potential, then we need to know when deliberate practice makes the difference between success and failure and when it doesn’t. Before we can capture the power of deliberate practice, we need to understand its limitations.

The Vision of Greatness

In the early 1990s, a man named Louis Rosenbaum began analyzing the eyesight of Major League baseball players. He soon found out that professional baseball players were nothing like the normal person when it came to vision.

According to Rosenbaum’s research, the average eyesight of a Major League position player is 20/11. In other words, the typical professional baseball player can read letters from twenty feet away that a normal person can only read from eleven feet away. Ted Williams, who is widely regarded as the greatest hitter in the baseball history, reportedly had 20/10 vision when he was tested by the military during WWII. The anatomical limit for human vision is 20/8.

Most of Rosenbaum’s research was conducted on the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team. According to him, “Half of the guys on the Dodgers’ Major League roster were 20/10 uncorrected.” 2

Eyesight and visual acuity results of professional baseball players from 1993 to 1995. The data above includes both minor league and major league players. (Source: American Journal of Ophthalmology. November 1996.)

In his excellent book, The Sports Gene, author David Epstein explains that this visual trend holds true at each level of the sport. On average, Major League players have better vision than minor league players who have better vision than college players who have better vision than the general population. 3

If you want to play professional baseball, it helps to practice like DiMaggio, but you also need eyesight like an eagle. In highly competitive fields, deliberate practice is often necessary, but not sufficient for success.

The Deliberate Practice Myth

The myth of deliberate practice is that you can fashion yourself into anything with enough work and effort. While human beings do possess a remarkable ability to develop their skills, there are limits to how far any individual can go. Your genes set a boundary around what is possible.

In recent decades, behavioral geneticists have discovered that our genes impact nearly every human trait. We are not merely talking about physical characteristics like height and eyesight, but mental abilities as well. Your genes impact everything from your short-term memory abilities to your mental processing speed to your willingness to practice.

One of my favorite examples is tennis great Steffi Graf. When she was tested against other elite tennis players as a teenager, she not only scored the highest on physical attributes like lung capacity and motor skills, but also on competitive desire. She was that once-in-a-generation talent who was both the most-gifted and the most-driven person on the court. 4

During a conversation I had with Robert Plomin, one of the top behavioral geneticists in the world, he said, “It is now at the point where we have stopped testing to see if traits have a genetic component because we literally can’t find a single one that isn’t influenced by our genes.”

If you want to learn more about the power of behavioral genetics, this audio interview with behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin explains how genes impact our daily habits and behaviors.

How big is the influence of genes on performance? It’s hard to say. Some researchers have estimated that our genes account for between 25 percent to 35 percent of our differences in performance. Obviously, that number can vary wildly depending on the field you’re studying.

So where does this leave us?

Well, while genetics influence performance, they do not determine performance. Do not confuse destiny with opportunity. Genes provide opportunity. They do not determine our destiny. It’s similar to a game of cards. You have a better opportunity if you are dealt a better hand, but you also need to play the hand well to win.

Layer Your Skills

How do we play our hand well? How do we maximize our genetic potential in life—whatever that might be? One strategy is to “layer your skills” on top of one another.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, explains the strategy perfectly. He writes, “Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.” 5

If you can’t win by being better, then win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it much easier to stand out regardless of your natural abilities.

The Magic of Deliberate Practice

Sun Tzu, the legendary military strategist who wrote The Art of War, believed in only fighting battles where the odds were in his favor. He wrote, “In war, the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won.”

Similarly, we should seek to fight battles where the genetic odds are in our favor. It is impossible to try everything in life. Each of us could become any one of a billion different things. Thus, if you aspire to maximize your success, then you should train hard and practice deliberately in areas where the genetic odds are in your favor (or where you can overlap your skills in a compelling way).

Deliberate practice is necessary for success, but it is not sufficient. The people at the top of any competitive field are both well-suited and well-trained. To maximize your potential, you need to not only engage in consistent and purposeful practice, but also to align your ambitions with your natural abilities.

Regardless of where we choose to apply ourselves, deliberate practice can help us maximize our potential—no matter what cards we were dealt. That is the magic of deliberate practice. It turns potential into reality.

Footnotes

I first heard this story from Darin Van Tassell at Georgia Southern University, who either coached with Joe DiMaggio or knew someone who did. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the story beyond that.

The Sports Gene by David Epstein. Page 40.

During my research I discovered a variety of organizations that test professional athletes. A physician named Bill Harrison runs one of them. Harrison began testing athletes in the 1970s and claims that out of the thousands of baseball players he tested, Barry Bonds scored higher on visual tests than anyone else. Interestingly, these tests were conducted back in 1986, long before Bonds became the all-time leader in home runs and suffered his notorious scandal involving performance-enhancing drugs.

The Sports Gene by David Epstein. Page 46.

Career Advice by Scott Adams.