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 […]

In the last lesson, I shared why it was important to think about success in terms of systems, not inspiration. This isn’t because motivation isn’t important—rather it’s because motivation is itself a kind of system. If you can understand it, you can change it. Success as systems may not be so dramatic, but the results […]