Next week, I’m going to be opening registration for Foundations, my new year-long program designed to help you build stronger foundations for your life.
Given the twelve foundations we’re going to work on for the following year, I wanted to distill some of the best advice I’ve received in each, both the obvious advice that everyone should follow, as well as the not-so-obvious strategies that make it all work.
1. Fitness
Obvious advice: Get your 150 minutes per week.
Not-so-obvious advice: Exercising 7x per week is easier than 3x.
Virtually every expert body suggests a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate cardiovascular activity (or 75 minutes of vigorous activity) per week. Add to that two weekly resistence training sessions and you’ve got the essential expert recommendations for health.
Despite that, few people meet the minimum. A surprising strategy to make it stick is to commit to exercising every day, rather than only a few times per week. While this sounds harder, it can actually make it easier to form a habit since the pattern is consistently reinforced.1
2. Productivity
Obvious advice: Track your tasks.
Not-so-obvious advice: Productivity comes from happy work.
The first step to being productive is to get control over all your work. You can’t work effectively if you don’t have it organized. Getting Things Done has been a life-changing book for many, because it helps you get the worries about work off your mind and into a system.
The second step to being productive is actually doing the work. Positive emotions help more than negative ones. The best way to cultivate positive feelings about the work? Organize your work to maximize the chance of making meaningful, visible progress every day. Progress leads to positivity, which leads to productivity.2
3. Money
Obvious advice: Save 10%.
Not-so-obvious advice: Less thinking = better returns.
Most of us will need to save if we want to retire some day. Experts typically recommend putting away at least 10% of your after-tax salary, although higher savings rates may be necessary if you wish to retire sooner.
Where should the money go? Here the research is clear: Simple investing works better. Putting your money in a low-cost index fund, investing the same amount, regardless of the ups and downs of the market, and not touching your money until retirement beats 85%+ of the portfolio wizards clamouring to take your money.3
4. Food
Obvious advice: Eat more veggies.
Not-so-obvious advice: Healthy eating comes from planning, not deprivation.
Consuming nutritional advice online ought to come with a warning label. Despite online misinformation, however, the scientific understanding of nutrition has been relatively stable: eat more veggies, swap saturated for unsaturated fats, replace refined carbs for whole grains and maintain a healthy weight.
But, despite decades of dietary guidance, the typical eating pattern is far from ideal. Part of the problem, however, is how we conceptualize healthy eating. Instead of focusing on deprivation, which is impossible to sustain, we need to focus on planning ahead so we have the option to eat healthy, rather than just eating junk because it’s most convenient.
5. Reading
Obvious advice: Always have a book.
Not-so-obvious advice: You read faster by reading more.
The easiest way to read more is to always have a book with you. I aim to have three: a Kindle edition on my phone, an audiobook through Audible, and a paper copy in my backpack or by my nightstand.
The surprising key to reading faster is that your speed depends critically on how much you already have read. Background knowledge is the greatest facilitator of future learning, and the only way you get background knowledge is by reading a lot.
6. Outreach
Obvious advice: You have to ask.
Not-so-obvious advice: Persuasion is listening, not talking.
You can’t make friends if you don’t meet people. You can’t go on dates if you don’t ask people out. You can’t make sales if you don’t ask people to buy. You can’t receive if you don’t ask.
But once you ask, listen. It’s a myth that the greatest salespeople are charismatic talkers. Instead influence is built on having a deep understanding of the other person’s perspective.
7. Sleep
Obvious advice: No screens before sleep.
Not-so-obvious advice: Spend less time in bed to sleep better.
The blue light produced by LED screens, we’re often told, is a major reason for insomnia. That’s probably an exaggeration. The reason to avoid screens is simpler: you can get sucked down an internet rabbit hole long past when you otherwise would have gone to bed. Read a book instead.
Interestingly, however, spending too much time in bed can lead to worse sleep. If you struggle with falling asleep, it’s often better to restrict your time in bed. That way you only sleep in bed and your mind doesn’t also associate it with other activities like reading or watching television.
8. Reflection
Obvious advice: Writing affirms your commitments.
Not-so-obvious advice: Writing makes you smarter.
A daily habit of journaling can be incredible for sustaining your commitment to your goals. Simply writing down what you’ve done in the day and planning what you’ll do tomorrow, can reinforce the vision of yourself you’d like to cultivate.
But writing isn’t just affirmation. It’s an expansion of your ability to think. Working memory, the narrow bottleneck of consciousness, is fundamentally limited. By writing things down, you can think more complex thoughts than would be possible from self-talk alone. Problems that seem unresolvable in your head can quickly be attacked when put to paper.
9. Connection
Obvious advice: Decide who you care about. Make time for them.
Not-so-obvious advice: Save everyone’s birthdays in your calendar.
In an ideal world, we’d allocate our time with others based on who we care about. Who are your deepest friends, closest family members or most supportive colleagues? In practice, we tend to spend time with people simply because they’re near us.
Getting deliberate about your social life means sustaining connections. One of the best strategies for this is to gather up any dates that are important to people you care about: birthdays, anniversaries, graduation dates or upcoming vacations, and put reminders in your calendar to reach out. It may feel mechanical, but it’s always appreciated.
10. Focus
Obvious advice: Track your deep work.
Not-so-obvious advice: Good projects drive achievement.
One of the best tools for focus is to track your deep work hours. Simply set a start time on a piece of paper whenever you decide to work on something important, then write a stop time whenever you give up or get interrupted. For progress on difficult tasks, few metrics matter more.
But having something that requires depth is an important prerequisite. If you don’t have a well-designed project that requires depth, it’s easy to get stuck in a loop of checking off trivial to-do list items that won’t matter a decade from now.
11. Organization
Obvious advice: Give every item a home.
Not-so-obvious advice: Store less than you can fit.
Tidiness depends on giving every object in your house a home. Clutter exists when items are effectively homeless, floating back-and-forth to various shelves and cupboards because you haven’t decided their resting place.
Just because you can fit something somewhere, doesn’t mean you should. If a system is jam packed, it will take much longer to take stuff out and put it back again. This is effecitvely a tax every time you use it, which will cause it to quickly revert to a maximally disorganized state.
12. Service
Obvious advice: Giving feels good.
Not-so-obvious advice: The best focus for your life is outside of yourself.
Altruism has great personal benefits. Helping other people connects you with friends and your community. You learn new skills and increase your social standing. The fact that selfish benefits derive from selfless deeds is one of the fortunate truths about the human condition.
But even deeper than the direct benefits are the psychic benefits from simply not thinking about yourself all the time. An excess of self-directed thoughts is the quickest path to misery. We achieve the blissful state of flow when our consciousness is directed toward missions and purposes that matter more than ourselves.
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Interested in improving your life? Starting next week, I’m going to be opening enrollment for Foundations. This is a twelve-month effort where we will not just give useful tips, but make concrete behavioral changes in each of the twelve foundations we just discussed.
Registration will open Monday, September 23rd, and close Friday, September 28th. I hope to see you there!
Footnotes
- If you’re worried about overtraining, you can swap out your harder workouts for a light stretch or walk to rest your body while sustaining the habit.
- See The Progress Principle for an in-depth look at the research behind this conclusion.
- For an in-depth analysis, I highly recommend A Random Walk Down Wall Street.
I'm a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, podcast host, computer programmer and an avid reader. Since 2006, I've published weekly essays on this website to help people like you learn and think better. My work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, TEDx, Pocket, Business Insider and more. I don't promise I have all the answers, just a place to start.