I’m working on a new writing project, based on some of the ideas I’ve written about in Do the Real Thing, The Hard Way is the Easy Way and the chapter on directness in Ultralearning. The basic idea is that instead of doing the real thing we need to improve, we often get stuck on […]

As many of the readers here probably know, I’ve been a long-time fan and friend of Cal Newport. We co-instruct two online courses and we’ve shared more conversations than I can count. Cal also coined the term “ultralearning” and pushed me to write my book, so his influence on my career hasn’t exactly been minor. […]

Over the last week, I’ve been sharing lessons on thinking of motivation as a system. One which, if you master it, can allow you to make more progress on your goals with less struggle. Key to all of this, of course, is self-awareness. You can’t diagnose a problem if you don’t even know you have […]

In the last lesson, I introduced a simple metaphor for motivation: action always flows downhill. Thanks to the amazing circuitry in our basal ganglia, we take the billions of simultaneously firing neurons in our brain and produce sequential thoughts and actions. Yet the choice of which action to take isn’t always the one our higher […]