Click here to sign up for Rapid Learner.

This is the new edition of the course, which includes 20+ newly-recorded lessons, deep dives, walk-throughs and more. If you’re looking to get better at learning difficult things, this course is the place to start.

This course is designed for students who want to do better in school with less stress and studying, professionals who need to master hard skills to get ahead and people who just like learning and want to do it better. The course is divided into six weeks where you’ll learn:

1. How to set up a learning project you’ll actually finish.
2. How to manage your time and energy to learn, on top of your work.
3. The ingredient common to all successful learning efforts.
4. The process to deeply understand any idea.
5. How to remember anything.
6. How to master and maintain everything you learn.

If you have any questions about the course at all, please email me directly and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Registration will only remain open until midnight on Friday, April 18th, 2025, (Pacific time).

The post Rapid Learner is Now Open for a New Session appeared first on Scott H Young.

Today, I want to step back and consider the question of why to learn in the first place. Learning is not just a means to a better job, fitter body or more interesting hobby (although it can do all those things) but one of the ends of life itself.

What Makes You Happy?

The exact shape of a life well-lived has been debated for millennia. While we may never have a “final” answer, many different philosophies put an expansion of consciousness at the apex of any hierarchy of human needs.

Abraham Maslow called it self-actualization. Aristotle called it eudaimonia. Socrates thought only the reflective life was worth living. And throughout the ages, many other sages have placed inner cultivation above material rewards and social status.

Life, at its best, isn’t about mere survival and status, but self-expansion. When we see our possibilities in life expanding, we are happy with our lives. When we see them static or contracting, life feels dull—even if we have wealth or social standing.

Learning is the process of self-expansion. It is the expanding of the mind to encompass new possibilities, and with new possibilities come vibrancy and enthusiasm.

If Learning Makes Us Happy, Why is Studying Hard?

Humans are intrinsically curious. We enjoy learning. We seek out experiences of mastery, growth and new ideas.

Unfortunately, I think the process of learning has often been dominated by institutions that thwart our natural curiosity. Schools foster competition among students. Credentials wall off opportunities to a narrow class. Sports pick winners and discourage losers.

This socialization means that, for many, we begin to associate “learning” with pain and frustration. Our innate curiosity remains, but we push this urge to grow and expand into other areas: video games, social media, television shows, “safe” areas where we can feel some facsimile of our desire for self-expansion without the threat of discouragement or failure.

Entertainment is fine. But just as watching Friends is a poor substitute for having friends, limiting all your experiences of mastery to video games, or all of your thirst for knowledge to social media gossip is, fundamentally, a limit on how your self can expand.

Rekindle Your Desire to Learn

My life’s work tries to help people rediscover their original curiosity. To get excited about learning, in the knowledge that they actually can finish the projects they daydream about. You actually can learn French, programming, or ballroom dancing. You actually can change your career, improve your health, transform your relationship, or understand your own psyche.

A major obstacle to rediscovering curiosity is simply lacking the right tools: your projects never seem to get off the ground, you try to get better but constantly get stuck, you’re beset by doubts about your own talent, aptitudes or even motivations.

I’d like to be your guide in changing your relationship with learning. I don’t just want to show you a new technique for memorizing facts, or a strategy for practicing skills (although there are plenty of those). Instead, I want to show you a different way to live: less focused on achieving a specific goal, and more on cultivating a continuous process of becoming a better you.

On Monday, I’m going to be opening my popular, six-week course, Rapid Learner, for a new session. I hope you’ll join me in building the tools for a more curious life, together.

The post Lesson 4: Happiness is the expansion of possibility appeared first on Scott H Young.

Today, I want to talk about actually doing the work. What separates a delightful and fun process of learning from an endless grind? What, in other words, separates those who excel at doing the work of learning from those merely daydreaming about mastering it?

Flow: Between Boredom and Frustration

The late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pioneered the concept of flow to define the state of pleasurable absorption in a mentally challenging and meaningful task. 

Learning demands concentration and has the potential to be quite meaningful, both of which are needed to produce the flow state.

But more often, learning produces the opposite: boredom and frustration. Boredom fuels our desire to escape—think of constantly glancing at the schoolroom clock as you wait for the bell to signal a lecture is finally over. Frustration occurs when there is no progress, despite effort; it happens when we’re working hard but feel completely stuck.

Flow matters because we’ll only do the work of learning if the joys of learning consistently exceed the pain.

A learning project may have high extrinsic rewards (better job, health, or relationship), or even delayed intrinsic rewards (satisfaction, pride, a new hobby). But if its moment-to-moment experience is highly negative, it will be difficult to sustain in the face of alluring, low-cost alternatives like games or social media.

In contrast, if the experience of learning is pleasurable (or at least not too unpleasant), you’ll be able to sustain it much longer. This is the secret behind tools like Duolingo, which is a much more enjoyable tool to learn languages than most alternatives.¹

How to Flow

How can you create and sustain a flow state in learning? 

The answer is simple: flow occurs when tasks are not too hard (frustration) and not too easy (boredom). Add to this clear and visible markers of progress, and even superficially mundane activities can become addictively compelling.

This is what game designers do when they want to create compelling games: set the difficulty just right and create constant progress markers to sustain engagement.

Games can be optimized entirely for flow. But learning projects, at least effective ones, must also be designed to acquire the knowledge you actually need. This other purpose often puts constraints on how you maximize flow in your learning.

However, assuming you have a more compelling reason to learn than simply filling time, we don’t need to make learning as compelling as a video game to get it done. All we need to do is make sure it is compelling enough so we don’t have difficulty doing the work consistently.

In general, there are three tools you can use to improve the flow in your learning project:

Flow Enhancer #1: Make boring parts more engaging

Boredom is one failure mode of flow. If you’ve ever gotten stuck when reading a dull textbook and found yourself drifting off as you re-read the same passage, you’ve seen how boredom can derail learning.

Finding a more expressive lecturer or better author to read is one solution. But even if you can’t change your materials, you can make processing them more engaging by changing the technique you use while reading them.

For instance, by keeping a stack of index cards and writing a few bullet points summarizing each page after you read it, you take a completely passive activity and turn it into a more active one. This assists with learning, but also makes the activity itself less boring.

Flow Enhancer #2: Make the frustrating parts easier

Frustration is the other failure mode of flow. It occurs when you’re working on something that is beyond your current skill level, so you’re experiencing frequent negative feedback signals from the environment.


While some frustration is almost inevitable in a learning project, it isn’t a necessary emotion for learning. The more we can reduce frustration in our efforts, the more enjoyable we can make learning—without sacrificing effectiveness.

For instance, if you’re working through a set of problems and solutions, you can adjust the difficulty level dynamically to keep it challenging, but not frustrating. If you can’t solve the problems alone, try solving them with a hint. If you can’t do that, try omitting one of the steps of the solution and see if you can fill it in. If you can’t do that, try explaining the solution to yourself as you read through it. By dynamically adjusting difficulty downward to where it is challenging yet doable, you can increase flow, decrease frustration and make it easier to stick to the work.

Flow Enhancer #3: Make progress more visible

Beyond choosing the right difficulty, it helps to break your learning into small units you can make steady progress on. Then make that progress conspicuous in your learning efforts.

Flashcard softwares do this well by giving you a constantly increasing counter showing “cards learned” so you can watch your progress inch forward. But you can do this for almost any variable that is associated with progress:

• Number of problems solved.
• Pages read.
• Sketches made.
• Exercises completed.
• Rehearsals performed.

Choose a variable that always improves (setbacks are ~3x as costly to motivation as forward progress is helpful), is fine-grained enough that you see it go up every time you study, and reliably matches the learning activity you’re actually trying to accomplish. 

Then, make sure this variable is highly visible in your actual learning efforts. If you don’t “feel” its presence when you’re studying, it won’t work to motivate you.

_ _ _

In my full course, Rapid Learner, I’ll go through much more than flow in the equation of how you can get your learning done—from productivity systems, energy management and the nitty-gritty of studying. On Monday, I’ll be opening the course for a new session. In the next lesson, the last in this preview series, I’ll talk about imagining a life devoted to learning new things, and why it’s the key, not just to success, but to happiness itself.

The post Lesson 3: The surprising secret to flow appeared first on Scott H Young.

Today, I’d like to discuss how to make the projects you undertake effective. How can you ensure that the projects you work on actually help you get better at the things you’re trying to get better at?

To succeed in our efforts at improvement, we need two types of knowledge:

1. Knowledge of the domain. In Spanish, this includes the words “agua” and the difference between “estar” and “ser.” In programming, the difference between a variable and a constant. In calculus, how to take a derivative.
2. Knowledge of how the domain is organized. Learning Spanish requires learning vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Learning programming requires remembering syntax and having a mental model of what each line of code is doing. Learning calculus requires memorizing transformation rules, as well as developing a spatial intuition about rates of change.

Meta-learning is the second kind of knowledge. It is your “map” of a domain that you use to plan what you intend to learn. And, just as in real navigation, when you have a good map, you’re less likely to wander aimlessly on your way to your destination.

To create this map successfully, there are three major questions to keep in mind:

Question #1: How do other people draw the map?

Learning anything on your own has a bootstrapping problem. Learning and meta-learning are intertwined, so the less we know about a subject, the less we know about how that subject is organized. 

This leads to our first principle: before embarking on any new learning project, try to figure out how other people organize efforts to learn it. What do those people see as the major divisions in skill, knowledge and practice?

Is the skill taught in school? If so, how do people organize curricula around it? Is it taught in books, courses or apprenticeship programs? How do those typically proceed?


Fortunately, research here has gotten much easier. Google and, more recently, LLM tools like ChatGPT can offer starting points for understanding novel topics. You can now get a glance at how experts break down a topic with just a few clicks.

Question #2: What facts, concepts and procedures must be acquired?

Once you have a rough map, it’s time to fill in the details. All learning is composed of a few basic “atoms” of knowledge in three main types:

1. Facts—things which need to be memorized. Words, terms, formulas, dates, jargon.
2. Concepts—things which need to be understood. Principles, ideas, narratives, explanations.
3. Procedures—things which need to be performed. Methods, steps, actions, techniques.

This applies across fields. Learning Spanish breaks down into facts (vocabulary), concepts (such as the difference between estar/ser), and procedures (like grammar and pronunciation). Learning programming breaks into facts (like syntax), concepts (design patterns), and procedures (like how to write a for-loop). Learning calculus has facts (e.g., cosine is the derivative of sine), concepts (such as what a limit is), and procedures (like the chain rule).

This framework transforms an otherwise amorphous process of improvement into, essentially, a to-do list. To learn a skill you simply need to perform the techniques that are useful for learning each type of knowledge, such as memorization for facts, explanation for concepts, and practice for procedures.

Question #3: What fine-tuning and feedback are needed?

Drawing the map and identifying the “atoms” of the skill you want to learn is powerful, but it is rarely sufficient. Maps never fully reflect the territory—what looks like a straight road may unexpectedly be a dead-end. What appears to be a simple concept or procedure may disguise enormous tacit knowledge and intuition.

Simply checking off items on the to-do list can backfire if the way you are learning those “atoms” doesn’t match with how they need to combine in real skills and situations. As such, the process of successful learning requires constantly rewriting the map and reshuffling the to-do list. You learn a bit, see what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust your approach accordingly.

This means good learning projects require two activities in parallel:

1. Drills to work through the “atoms” of learning you’ve identified. This means reading books, memorizing terms, practicing procedures and understanding the essential concepts.
2. Direct practice both to test how closely your learning efforts match reality, and to integrate and combine the “atoms” in ways that are useful. This includes solving problems, writing code, or using the language to communicate. Direct practice means applying the skill you are learning to real life.

Bringing it all together

The end result is a learning project that is both practical and flexible.

Practical, because it is grounded in expert understanding of how the skill or subject is organized, and because it has been broken down from vague notions of “improvement” into specific facts, concepts and procedures.

Flexible, because by combining drills to master the atoms with doing direct practice to test out your map, you ensure you can make any needed changes to your project so those atoms combine successfully into real skills.

There is, of course, more to this process than I can explain in one lesson. This was a major motivation behind developing my full, six-week course Rapid Learner. Teaching the art and science of meta-learning, this course will guide you through how to design projects to master any skill or subject you care about. I’ll send out registration information on Monday. In the next lesson, I’d like to turn from meta-learning to productivity. After all, a plan is only paper. Effective learning means execution—how can you go from someone with great plans, to someone who consistently gets the work done?

The post Lesson 2: The three questions for effective meta-learning appeared first on Scott H Young.

Projects are bigger than individual tasks, but still aim to complete some concrete set of actions. A project can be all sorts of things. It can be a goal to start exercising, a plan to learn French, moving to a new city, or getting a new job.


Most of us have many projects, including the active strivings of our daily life, as well as daydreams about hobbies we’d like to learn, sports we’d like to try or career moves we might want to make.

But even though we all have projects, there is an enormous difference in our propensity to complete them.

Some people are finishers. Their life is a steady conveyor belt of realized goals and projects.

Other people are starters. They have a lot of enthusiasm for new efforts, but somehow fail to reach a conclusion with most of the efforts they begin.

If you feel like you’re more of a starter than a finisher, that’s not a reason to be alarmed. Indeed, I have a lot of sympathy for you; I used to be a frequent starter and infrequent finisher myself.


And starters should be proud. Even though you may not complete all your projects, there is at least a strong desire to do things and enthusiasm for life. It’s far better to be constantly seized by ideas for your life than to have no aspirations at all.

However, in both my personal experience and work with students over the last two decades, I know that becoming a consistent finisher is not always easy, even when you know it can produce dramatic benefits over time.

So today, let me share with you a three-step process you can use to become a more consistent finisher:

1. Be specific
2. Be brief
3. Only one project at a time

1. Be specific

Projects that are more specific are also more successful. The raw materials that spark our motivations are often sprawling and vague. It takes work to shape them into a format we can make progress on.

Consider the following projects, ordered from most general to most specific:

1. I want to be healthier.
2. I want to get in shape.
3. I want to start exercising more.
4. I want to start running.
5. I want to run every day.
6. I wake up early and run every morning.

Each rung you ascend on the ladder of specificity makes your project more actionable, and more likely that you’ll successfully complete it before moving on.

2. Be brief

Motivation fades with time. The race you began with a sprint often ends with a slog. There’s a simple fix for this: choose shorter periods of time to focus.

For open-ended projects where improvement is continuous (e.g., fitness, language learning, research on a topic), limit your first several projects to one-month sprints. Remember: you can always stack projects working on the same goal back-to-back, but working in short bursts keeps you focused.

If your project is defined by all-or-nothing achievements (e.g., launching a business, writing a book, graduating from college), then I recommend either finding short-term milestones to focus your effort (e.g., getting one client, writing a book proposal, passing your next exam) OR being pickier when taking on longer projects. A four-year project should inspire much more thought before embarking than a four-week effort.

3. Only one project at a time

Once you pick a project, commit to finish it or to deliberately put it aside before picking a new one. Resist the urge to start any new projects until you’ve exited out of your last one.

While there’s always a little slipperiness in what, exactly, constitutes a project, the intention is what matters most. Habits, routine work and the “whirlwind” of your daily life will continue, but steel yourself against committing to new projects until your previous one officially concludes.²

Becoming a project finisher, not just a starter, isn’t something that happens all at once. Instead, it’s a meta-habit, a kind of practice you establish and reinforce through repeated experience. It takes some time and practice to learn, but by choosing the right sorts of projects—and completing them consistently—you can take your life in any direction you wish.

_ _ _

Next week, I’m going to be holding a new session of my course, Rapid Learner. This course teaches the strategy I’ve used for my learning projects, such as the MIT Challenge, Year Without English and, most recently, Foundations. In this six-week course, I’ll teach you not only how to design successful projects, but to optimize your learning and results. But first, I’d like to share how you can go from finishing projects to making those projects effective—choosing activities that are likely to accelerate your learning.

The post Lesson 1: How to start projects you’ll actually finish appeared first on Scott H Young.

• Fitness: Start, End, Books.
• Productivity: Start, End, Books.
• Money: Start, End, Books.
• Food: Start, End, Books.
• Reading: Start, End and Books.
• Outreach: Start, End, Books.

Sleep is essential for health, productivity and well-being. Yet often we don’t give it the attention it deserves. While those who shirk on fitness or healthy eating are often shamed in our culture, lack of sleep is valorized—getting too little shut-eye is a badge of honor demonstrating our work ethic and stoicism.

Recently, the popular discussion around sleep has begun to assign it the importance it deserves. Even so, culture changes slowly. When I was discussing this list of foundations with a friend, one of them gave me a quizzical look when I suggested an entire month focusing on sleeping better. Exercise, sure. But sleep?

Despite recent attention, sleep remains underrated as a driver of good health, positive mood, productive energy and all-round well-being.

My Sleep (or Lack Thereof)

Sleep is one of the hardest foundations for me personally. Much of this is owing to being the father of two small children who, lovable though they are, are not always conducive to getting eight uninterrupted hours every night.

My typical sleep routine isn’t bad. I usually go to bed between 9:30 and 10:00 pm and wake up between 5:30 and 6:00 am. On days without interruptions, this is probably close to the amount of sleep my body actually needs. In the rare cases where I do sleep past 6:00 am, I usually wake up spontaneously between 6:30 and 7:00 am.

 The challenge I have is not with my typical sleep routine, but how many nights are atypical. While both of my kids (not quite 5 and 2) sleep through the night, at least one of them wakes up before 5:30 about 50% of days.

Sometimes it’s just a quick interruption that doesn’t impact my sleep much. In other cases, an interruption becomes an early wake-up. My two-year old, for instance, was waking around 4:00 or 4:30 am nearly every day for most of the previous month. It seems like we’ve gotten her back on a normal schedule, but travel, colds or other minor changes in routines can set us back into an unfortunate sleeping rhythm.

I also tend to function poorly when low on sleep. Some people seem to need more sleep to function at their best, and others can get by with 4-6 hours without it seeming to bother them. I’m definitely in the former group, and before having kids I almost always got eight hours of sleep each night.

Still, my sleep situation could definitely be worse. I have no problems of insomnia—it rarely takes me more than 5-10 minutes to fall asleep when I lay down, and I rarely wake up in the night for more than a few minutes. I’m also an excellent napper—I can even fall asleep and wake up in about ten minutes if I need it. I also don’t, as far as I know, have any health problems associated with sleeping that can be so frustrating for many.

My Plan for Improving My Sleep

Leading up to this month, I noticed I had a bit of pessimism about whether or not I would be able to do anything to improve my sleep. My wife and I are well-versed in the behavioral strategies to get kids to sleep better (consistent bedtime routines, wake-up lights, self-soothing, etc.), and I already follow a lot of the advice to improve my sleep (consistent bedtime routines, going to bed early, avoiding caffeine late in the day).

 Some problems in life aren’t easily fixable. Fortunately, sleeping problems due to kids are typically temporary, so some of this may just be the sort of things I have to wait out for a year or two.

However, as I started a little advance reading for this month and did some brainstorming, I realized there are actually a lot of things I could do better. On top of that, even if I don’t have solutions now, spending a month rigorously documenting my sleep might point to solutions I hadn’t considered before.

So here are a few things I’m going to try to improve my sleep quality this month:

1. Start taking brief naps again. I used to be a near-daily napper. Twenty to thirty minutes is usually plenty, and it can make a big difference. I mostly stopped this habit once I started working in an office—there was never a comfortable place to stretch out, even if I knew it would be better for my productivity to nap rather than to keep working. I think if I bring a yoga mat and a small pillow I might be able to get a good setup to make 20-minute naps a regular part of my day again.
2. Be more consistent about sleeping early, especially after a night of poor sleep. If I don’t sleep well, my hardest times are usually around 4:00 to 6:00 pm when I feel like a zombie. By then whatever caffeine was in my system has worn off, and it is still hours until I would normally sleep. However, by 9pm, I am typically fairly alert, even if I only got a few hours of sleep the night before. I may not have total control over my sleep, but I can at least inch my bedtime a bit earlier when I’m in a sleep deficit.
3. Cut down to one cup of coffee per day. I drink a lot of coffee. Some days I even have three or four cups of coffee throughout the day. Since I tend to fall asleep quickly, and the research-backed benefits of caffeine consumption likely outweigh the costs, cutting back wasn’t a priority for me initially. However, for this month I’m going to stick to only my morning coffee as an experiment.
4. Avoid television or exercise after 8:30 pm. While I was a consistent 6:00 am jogger when I began this year-long project, the combination of a few months of kids disrupting sleep and my wife breaking her foot pushed running out of this slot and forced me to work out later. However, I find exercise after 8:00 pm makes it much harder for me to fall asleep, so I’m going to do my best to keep it earlier. I don’t watch a lot of television before sleep, but I’ll keep notes on this too in case this is happening more than I realize.
5. Keep a sleep journal. I’m going to write some brief notes every day this month of when I went to sleep, any interruptions, and my overall mood. This, plus the sleep tracking on my Fitbit, should help me make some empirical observations about my sleep rather than just relying on my memory.

Overall, as I consider these changes, I’m cautiously optimistic. Hopefully I can improve the baseline quality (and quantity) of my sleep at night and, barring that, at least get some restorative naps throughout the day to improve my functioning when my sleep has been poor. As always, I’ll keep you updated with how it goes at the end of the month!

The post Sleep: Day One appeared first on Scott H Young.

In doing the reading for this month, I found myself impressed by the numerous associations between having strong and broad social ties and living well. Being connected isn’t just good for your career or happiness—it matters for your health too. The association between isolation and mortality is in the same ballpark as smoking a pack of cigarettes every day.

It was also while doing this reading that I realized my foundation here is weaker than I thought. I feel like I have fairly good close connections with my family and best friends. I’m also not terrible at meeting people or engaging in low-stakes small talk and socializing. However, I’m bad at managing the periphery of my social world—there are people I consider “good friends” who I see only once or twice a year.

Going through the reading, I also felt my initial focus for the month, emphasizing activities that allowed me to meet new people, was somewhat misplaced. Instead, I think my real weak point is one layer inward—all those people I sort of know, but don’t make enough effort to sustain a casual friendship.

At this point, it would be easy to trot out various excuses: I have good friends, so who needs acquaintances? (Except the two serve different purposes, and both are necessary for thriving.) I’m too busy as a parent with small kids to “hang out” as much as I used to. (Except that’s true of literally everything; if something matters to us, we make time for it.) I don’t like one-sided efforts to sustain weaker ties, and I’d prefer things to be spontaneous. (Except nothing else in life is like this—all good habits require some amount of effort and systems in place.)

Despite these obstacles, I’d like to be better with outreach than I am currently. This month was a good start but, given that the work here takes place over years, it’s hardly finished.

What I Did This Month

To start, I was pretty good about keeping my once-weekly commitment to participating in some kind of activity with new people. I went to a couple language meet ups and met some people at a birthday party.

The push to do some research to find activities was helpful. In the past couple years, I feel like I often missed opportunities to socialize not only out of busyness, but also because I hadn’t kept opportunities on my radar, so I didn’t have any potential activities to try during weeks when I was relatively free.

I also made efforts to spend some time with some old friends. I don’t expect to go back to pre-kids levels of socializing, but here too the once-per-week threshold seems like a doable minimum.

Finally, I decided to make following up with friends and colleagues at regular intervals a more structured habit. Creating a list of people I know with recurring reminders to contact them and putting it in my productivity system nudges me to reach out to people. I’m also putting birthdays and other events in the same list so I can keep track of those too, now that I no longer use social media.

The month wasn’t perfect. As I write this, it is December. (I write these updates three months in advance to give my team and myself lead time in preparing the course.) My family and my in-laws visited, which meant this wasn’t the ideal month to focus on outreach. But that hiccup aside, I’m confident that I’ll be able to sustain the roughly once-per-week habit in the coming months.

Plans for Ongoing Outreach

With a weekly habit, one month really isn’t long enough to make something routine. So I’m going to need to consciously monitor and make an effort here for at least another few months.

Given my assessment of my weak point here, I’m also modifying the keystone habit I’m going to try to sustain: Instead of focusing on meeting new people, I’m going to try to split my efforts evenly between trying activities with new people and sustaining existing friendships with people I don’t interact with automatically. 

One step I have not taken, but feel might be important, is joining or belonging to a more formal organization or group. Putnam’s Bowling Alone really sold me on the idea that there’s a benefit to belonging to something beyond an informal circle of friends. I suspect this is something I’ll revisit in the last foundation: service.

Updates to Previous Foundations

Of course, my goal with this project isn’t simply to focus on one habit for a month and then move on, but to sustain my commitments from all the previous months. Here are some updates for the previous five foundations:

1. Fitness. Still going strong. My running speed has improved, with my 10 km time getting down to 52 minutes. That’s a major improvement over a few months ago when it was a challenge to run that distance in under an hour, and an even bigger improvement from before this project began when I hadn’t run for more than 30 minutes in almost a decade.
2. Productivity. The system I reworked during the month is still holding, although I still struggle with keeping up with household chores. Still, the amount of things that slip my mind has dropped considerably, which means the system is doing its job even if I still don’t have time to do everything I’d like.
3. Money. Also solid. My term life insurance policy was approved, so I can finally check that box after applying for it months ago. I also started the process of setting up educational savings funds for my kids. Since it’s December when I write this, I plan to do a bigger annual review in January as well.
4. Food. There was some predictable backsliding here during the holiday season. I was fine with this, but it will be important to get back to my defaults next month. I’m now about 15 lbs. lighter than my weight at the start of my project, which is probably close to my ideal weight, so at this point I’m trying to avoid both over- and under-eating, especially as I’ve been exercising more.
5. Reading. With eight books read this month, I’m mostly back to my normal reading routine. This month was a little lighter than usual, but the holidays cut into work-related reading. Still, I fully expect to be on track to read 100+ books for this project by its end.

That’s it for this month. Next week, I’ll share an update for the next foundation: sleep.

The post Outreach – Month-End Update appeared first on Scott H Young.

For those interested, my notes from the previous months are available here:

1.     Fitness: Start, End, Books.
2.     Productivity: Start, End, Books.
3.     Money: Start, End, Books.
4.     Food: Start, End, Books.
5.     Reading: Start, End and Books.

1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

Here are some quick takeaways from the eight books I read:

1. Good friends keep you healthier. People with better social networks live longer, and the health impacts of loneliness and isolation are in the same ballpark as well-known dangers such as smoking cigarettes.
2. Acquaintances matter too. Although the focus for most of us is on having deep friendships, there’s a whole literature on the role of “weak ties,” or people you rarely see, being *more* important for finding job opportunities or word-of-mouth opportunities.
3. Friendship isn’t fast. Estimates on the time required for people to become friends is on the order of 60+ hours of in-person contact. This threshold explains why you can socialize frequently, yet still fail to make friends—if you don’t have sustained opportunity to socialize with the same people over and over, many potential friendships drop off before they hit the 60+ hour threshold.
4. It’s better to be interested than interesting. People are egocentric. We like people who like us, who take an interest in our interests and who really want to listen.
5. Democracy itself may be at stake. Since the 1960s, community and civic life have withered from their post-WWII peak. This decay of social infrastructure may be a major reason for our collective distrust and polarization.

Overall I found this topic much deeper than I had expected, leading to some personal realizations which I’ll discuss next week. Now, some notes on each of the books I read…

8 Books on Making Friends

1. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Every once in awhile, a self-help book becomes so popular that it becomes a free-floating meme, detached from its actual content. Carnegie’s classic belongs in that rare genre of books which you probably feel like you’ve read—even if you haven’t.

While the book has dozens of chapters articulating specific strategies for dealing with people, they all basically boil down to a simple observation: most people are egocentric. If you can adopt the other person’s perspective, and give them what they genuinely want, you’ll have smoother social interactions than if you focus directly on what you want.

The book definitely shows its age in a few places, such as a charming anecdote about a manager complimenting his secretary’s appearance, but the advice needs few updates because human nature hasn’t changed since Carnegie first wrote it.

2. Friendship by Lydia Denworth

I enjoyed this wide-ranging book discussing the science of friendship. The topics covered are eclectic, so it’s difficult to summarize adequately. Denworth’s investigation of friendship ranges from in-depth discussion of monkey communities, to the health impacts of loneliness, to whether or not Facebook is good or bad for society.

3. Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

Duhigg, a journalist whose previous work includes bestsellers on habits and productivity, tackles social skills in Supercommunicators. The idea is drawn from the observation that some people are consistently better in their ability to make friends than others, and that this skill is learnable to some degree.

A central idea of this book is that essential communication depends on understanding what kind of conversation the other person wants to have and ensuring you match them in that desire. Duhigg argues for three broad types of conversations: practical (What are we going to do?), emotional (How do we feel about it?), and identity (Who are we?), and that attempts to dialogue often derail when people don’t successfully synchronize this.

4. Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi

I first read this book shortly after it came out in 2005. I think Ferrazzi does a good job of practically explaining how super-networkers, such as himself, manage to meet so many people and maintain so many relationships. One key insight I enjoyed revisiting was his explanation that relationships are muscles which strengthen through use, not bank accounts where favors can be saved up for a rainy day.

While I found this book useful, it’s probably not the best book to persuade someone of the value of networking if they already find the practice off-putting. I think guides that focus on friendship and service are probably better to adopt as a mindset than the ambition-orientation that suffuses this book.

5. We Should Get Together by Kat Vellos

Vellos writes about how hard it is to make friends in big cities. People are abundant, yet genuine connection is often rare and fleeting. 

This book was interesting, although probably aimed more at an earlier chapter in my life when I was often newly in a big city with ample time for socializing but struggling with the revolving door of temporary friendships.

Still, I think Vellos addresses a genuine need for a lot of people, and her advice is practical and useful.

6. Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton

Negotiation is a central part of all relationships. From diplomatic conferences to deciding where to go for dinner, we’re always in a delicate dance of conflicting interests and desires. 

The authors argue that most people make the mistake of bargaining over positions, like hagglers at a street market who keep stating their “best price” until they either make a deal or walk away. The uncomfortable conflict this creates causes some people to go hard, trying to squeeze the other person at the risk of the relationship, or go soft, trying to accommodate at the risk of failing to get what you really want.

Instead, the authors suggest we should negotiate on principles, not positions. Separate the people from the problem; focus on your interests, not your position itself; look for options for mutual gain; and when you have to compromise, look for objective standards and principles to determine fairness.

7. The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

A good book opens you to a new way of thinking. Parker’s book definitely did that for me. Before reading this, not once had I ever considered hosting a dinner party or social event with the mindset Parker espouses.

Parker’s key to throwing successful parties is to define a clear (and debatable) purpose and have everything tailored to that outcome. That means the venue, guest list and even the rules of the party (she thinks a good host should have and enforce them) should all work to achieve the gathering’s stated purpose.

Definitely a must-read if you want to have an important event and aren’t sure the right way to go about it.

8. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam

Civic participation and communal life in America have been declining for decades, and the decay in our social infrastructure is showing.

 Armed with hundreds of charts and statistics, Putnam walks through various measures of social decline from club membership, church attendance, volunteerism, political activism, and even picnics. Across the board, people are spending less time connected to their community than they were during the heyday of communal life in the 1960s.

This decline is epitomized in the title of the book: at the time of its writing, more people than ever were bowling, but there were far fewer bowling leagues.³

In this decline, Putnam sounds a warning about the health of American society. Places with lower measures of social capital have worse social outcomes: less civic participation, less trust in government, higher crime and worse health. Communal interaction builds generalized trust, which acts as a social lubricant making transacting with strangers easier and safer.⁴

Unfortunately, it hardly seems like we’ve reached the nadir of Putnam’s social capital decline. Putnam blaming the entertainment value of television for causing the decline in social gathering now seems almost quaint when we have always-on, algorithmically-mediated entertainment in our pockets at all times.

While the message may be a bit of a downer, I still found this book enormously useful in reshaping my perspective on socializing. There’s value in belonging to communities, not merely circles of friends. Clubs and organizations that bring people together from different strata of society are both valuable and necessary.

_ _ _

That’s it for books this month. Next week, I’ll share some personal reflections on how I’ve improved my own outreach this past month as well as my plans for the future.

The post Here are 8 Books I Read on Making Friends This Month appeared first on Scott H Young.

In some ways, choosing to quit is harder than choosing to take action. We all know we should exercise, read, meditate, socialize, work hard, spend time with family, and drink eight glasses of water every day. But when that list inevitably becomes unmanageable, it’s hard to say what we ought to stop.

Another reason the importance of quitting is less often discussed is that worthwhile pursuits are often challenging, and it is tempting to surrender to early difficulties. “Never give up” is an unrealistic slogan, but it may serve us well in situations where we’re tempted to give up on our dreams and watch Netflix instead.

Because we devote more time to thinking about projects we should undertake rather than those we should abandon, the latter tends to occur impulsively. We quit because we’re tired, bored, or because something else seems more appealing. 

I think this is a mistake. Thinking more deliberately about when to give up might improve our decisions more than simply choosing more tasks to add to our to-do list.

Here are four questions you can ask yourself to help make the decision.

1. The past is done. Do the future benefits outweigh the future costs?

It’s often helpful to start with figuring out what an ideally rational person would do in your situation. If you could consult an oracle who never gets tired or frustrated, and could calculate the right decision, what would she tell you to do?

Oracles don’t exist, so we’ll have to settle for economic theory. A key concept is sunk costs. This is the idea that when making a decision in the present moment, past investments don’t matter. All that matters is how much you anticipate investing in the future, and whether those investments will pay off.

Suppose you’ve invested three years working toward an accounting degree in college. But if you could go back, you’d study engineering instead. Should you quit accounting and switch majors or stick it out?

It’s tempting to analyze this decision by considering it as a whole: “Do I want to study accounting or engineering?” But this isn’t correct. The better question is “Will it be better for me to invest one more year and get an accounting degree, or switch immediately and start four years studying engineering?”

The previous three years are sunk costs and thus shouldn’t be weighed in your decision about whether to quit. The only thing that matters is future costs and future benefits. Perhaps you decide that having an accounting degree for only one more year of work is worth it, even if you want to study engineering after that.

In this case, an analysis of sunk costs discouraged us from quitting early, but it can easily go the other way.

Suppose you’ve spent three years working on a business idea. Initially, the market looked promising, so you quit your job and spent three years trying to build a company. Now, however, the forecast looks gloomy. You think it will take another three years at least before you can make a go of it—and there are other opportunities that might be better. Should you stay the course, or switch?

Once again, the past three years don’t matter. Even if those turned out to be a waste of time, they shouldn’t change your decision overall. All that matters is whether the future time (and money) you will invest is better spent continuing or quitting.

An economic perspective encourages detachment. The question is not “Would I undertake this project if I had to start again?” instead it’s “What’s the value of continuing versus quitting (compared to my alternatives)?”

Sometimes a half-finished project you’re no longer excited about makes more sense to finish because there’s little work needed to complete it. Sometimes a pursuit you poured your soul into needs to be thrown out because the future investment needed to make it work isn’t worth the payoff.

2. Don’t rush to act. When’s the best point to re-evaluate your exit?

The economic perspective is useful, but it’s only one part of the story. After all, if we could easily make dispassionate decisions about whether to stick it out or give up, deciding what to do—or to quit—wouldn’t be so tricky. The real difficulty is that we alternate between feeling unable to let go of projects and abandoning projects for shiny new pursuits, in neither case explicitly weighing the merits of our choice. Emotion, not reason, looms larger in our decision-making.

We can’t eliminate our emotions when making decisions. And we wouldn’t want to, even if we could. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio illustrates, patients with damage to emotional centers of their brain are not hyper-efficient Vulcans, rather they’re hopelessly lost—wasting hours on unimportant tasks because they can’t properly evaluate what matters most.

But there is a happy medium. One way we can tame some of our worst impulses, without undermining the real value our emotions bring to decision-making, is by creating structures that can influence our decisions.

One structure I find particularly helpful is to define your quitting points in advance. By setting up projects that have well-defined exit ramps, you can ensure you don’t make decisions based on momentary temptations.

For instance, I tend to work on learning projects in focused bursts, rather than making lifelong commitments. Part of the reason for this is that it’s much easier to commit to learning a new language for thirty days than to assume automatically that I’ll want, or be able, to invest in it lifelong. Thirty days is a relatively small commitment, so it’s easier to bolster my commitment even when I’m not feeling like it.

Another structure that can be helpful is creating an automatic delay or review period for any quitting decision. When you’re convinced you want to give up, set a reminder in one week or one month to re-evaluate. For bigger goals, you might want to set the reminder once you’re past a particularly stressful period—such as deciding whether to quit a job after a big project wraps up, or deciding if you want to switch majors after your final exams—so you’re making the decision from relative neutrality.

In both of these cases, the length of the pre-commitment period is crucial. Too short, and you’ll allow temporary impulses to drive your decisions. Too long, and you might not be able to endure, defaulting to an emotional response rather than a reasoned one.

3. The grass isn’t always greener. What’s the day-to-day reality of the alternative to my current course?

Frustration and stress are only one emotional factor. Distractions can be a far bigger issue. How often have you embarked on one goal only to find yourself pulled toward a new one that seems like a better opportunity?

Construal-level theory argues that we tend to evaluate decisions using different frames of reference: we view lofty goals idealistically, omitting their complications and details, and we view daily to-do lists pragmatically, with a focus on what’s expedient. But this sets us up for failure, because our current project gets the nitty-gritty treatment, whereas any new pursuit gets viewed through the hazy lens of idealism. Who wouldn’t want to switch under those circumstances?

One way to overcome this cognitive illusion is to give yourself a brief, realistic experience of pursuing your alternative. If you’re thinking about switching majors, take a full class (including homework and exams) from your potential new field. If you’re thinking about switching markets, make a prototype and try to pitch it. Low-key commitments often help us realize that the new pursuit has just as many obstacles and challenges as our current one and can temper the desire to switch.

If you’re unable to devote time to experience the new pursuit in full detail, it can sometimes be helpful to shift the current project back into the higher construal level to make a fairer comparison. Spend an hour or two journaling about your ultimate goals and values for the project. What originally got you excited about it?

Finally, a strategy I employ regularly is procrastination. When I get new project ideas, I deliberately put them in a “someday” pile on the back burner. Procrastination is often seen as a vice, but procrastinating on possible distractions means I end up completing more projects. Some of those “someday” projects will make it into reality, but many will be forgotten about entirely as they turned out to be momentary impulses.

4. Know your values. Which lines won’t you cross?

Emotions can sometimes lead us to quit impulsively, but they can also lead us to stay in situations we should walk away from. Sometimes, not quitting is the worse decision, because sticking around in a bad relationship, job or project can waste years of our lives with little to show for our time and effort. Indeed, while quitting prematurely has its costs, sticking out to the bitter end of a failed pursuit is the real tragedy.

Make clear, bright-line rules about when you’ll quit, even if you’re tempted to stay. Here are some conditions where I would advocate quitting:

• The pursuit no longer aligns with your deeply-held values. For instance, if you start a job with one understanding of the work, but later realize that sticking through will require betraying your internal code of ethics or behaving in a way that’s contrary to your values, quitting is best.
• The costs of the pursuit clearly exceed its benefits, and there is no clear short-term exit. I often do push myself to finish projects which (mildly) fail the cost-benefit test if the end of the project is near, because I think a moderate degree of perseverance is worth cultivating. But if the costs are dramatically higher than the benefits, or if there is no clear natural exit for the pursuit, quitting is often necessary.
• You’re trying to recoup a loss that has already occurred. One place human nature tends to irrationally discourage quitting is when we’ve lost something and are desperate to “undo” that loss. Gamblers call this going “on tilt,” where a player is no longer making rational analyses because of bets that went bad.

Every decision is unique, so there’s no single right answer for when to quit. But if you have a process for thinking about those decisions, you’ll be more likely to land on a reasonable choice.

The post Should You Quit? Ask These Four Questions First appeared first on Scott H Young.

Two related foundations, connection and service, will focus on improving close connections and finding ways to help others in my day-to-day life, respectively.

Here are some links to the previous months’ notes, in case you missed it:

1.     Fitness: Start, End, Books.
2.     Productivity: Start, End, Books.
3.     Money: Start, End, Books.
4.     Food: Start, End, Books.
5.     Reading: Start, End and Books.

Why Outreach?

I don’t think I need to spell out how important relationships are to a good life. Pretty much all our great joys in life (as well as our deepest miseries) are built upon our connection to other people.

I chose to focus on outreach first because it is a logical antecedent to deeper connection. If you don’t have a lot of close friends or a romantic partner, then there simply might not be a lot of relationships in your life you have the opportunity to deepen. Therefore, meeting new people or strengthening “weak ties” comes first.

The logical necessity of needing first to meet people before you can be close friends with them isn’t a practical concern in my life now. I’m happily married with two kids. I have good relationships with my family, and I have a number of close friends, both personally and professionally.

However, I’ve definitely had times where this sequencing would have mattered. I moved around a fair bit in my early twenties, and I’ve had to rebuild a social world for myself from scratch several times. Thus, I know firsthand how important a foundation of outreach is in terms of social success.

I think it also makes sense to think of outreach as distinct from connection for another reason: the behaviors and skills that support each tend to be different. Deepening connection is largely a matter of spending quality time, being empathetic and being generous, but outreach relies on extraversion, self-confidence and openness to trying new things. From a practical perspective, it makes sense to consider outreach a separate foundation from the work of sustaining your existing close connections.

Reflecting on My Current Outreach

My foundation of outreach is weaker than I would like, although part of that is a comparison against previous eras of my life when it was relatively strong.

In my twenties, I had a social event almost every day. During the early days of my business, I spent a lot of time reaching out to other writers and entrepreneurs. And after moving to a new place, socializing to help me establish new friends (often in a language I didn’t speak very well) was often my main priority.

Today, however, my level of socializing with people I don’t already know is much lower. A big part of that is simply the current phase of my life. With two small kids at home, I have less time, and frankly less motivation, to seek out new friends. I often feel like I don’t have enough time to maintain a lot of the friendships I already have, never mind doing social activities with the express purpose of meeting new people.

However, it’s too easy to dismiss the need for outreach out of simple busyness. The same argument could apply to lots of other foundations. I don’t play sports and the need to maintain a certain physique is less prominent when you’re a busy parent—but that doesn’t make fitness unimportant as you get older.
Similarly, I think a total neglect of outreach could easily lead to a situation where, emerging from the isolated cocoon of early parenthood, I find myself with fewer friends and activities than I would like. An analogy might be a person who was an athlete in college, didn’t notice they were getting out of shape in their thirties and forties, and find they now have preventable health problems in old age. Better to fix a foundation before the weaknesses cause problems.

Still, given my life constraints and my currently ample supply of friends and family, I want to strike the right balance between an appropriate amount of time spent on outreach and maintaining my existing relationships and commitments.

Keystone Habit: Weekly Social Activity

Given the need for some amount of outreach, and my existing commitments, I think aiming for a habit of attending a social activity roughly once-per-week is probably ideal. Unlike my fitness habit, in which I aim for near total consistency, given the irregular nature of social events, I’m less concerned about the strictness of this habit. I think if I hit the ~1x/week average, that would be good.

My criteria for a social activity is that there is an opportunity to meet new people. This could be Meetups, classes or group activities where I don’t know anyone already. Or it could be activities I attend with my existing friends where I don’t already know all the people in attendance.

Once per week sounds like a pretty good minimal commitment. It’s hard to imagine a person for whom one outing weekly would be excessive, but I can definitely consider some people for whom a single weekly social activity would be too little. It definitely would have been too little when I was new to a city, was single, was trying to get a foothold professionally or was simply lacking friends in my life. So I don’t think this is a universal benchmark, although it might function as a reasonable minimum threshold for most people.

To reach this goal, I’m doing what I’ve always done: finding Meetups based on some of my interests, asking friends for activities they’re part of, and keeping my eyes open for opportunities. Since I’ve been running more lately, I may drop in on a running club or two and kill two birds with one stone by getting my daily exercise in, too.

I’m also keen to restart some language practice. This was something I enjoyed pre-kids, but with the pandemic cancelling all in-person meetings and the increased demands of having two babies, I dropped it almost entirely. So I’ll keep an eye on this as well.

Other Outreach Metrics

I’m prioritizing simply attending some social events on a roughly weekly basis for my outreach activity. This is partly because my needs in this foundation are pretty non-specific. As mentioned, I’m happily married, so the dating angle that motivates a lot of social activity isn’t there for me.

Similarly, while I can always do better in professional networking, this isn’t an area I’m prioritizing either. I’m always happy to meet people professionally, but I feel like I get enough opportunities organically at this point in my career that this doesn’t require a lot of extra work.

However, in addition to the weekly habit of socializing, I’d like to be more organized about keeping up and scheduling time with more distant friends. I’m not naturally good at this, and not being on social media makes it worse. While setting up CRM software for friends seems a little dehumanizing, I think I do need some system of reminders to at least check-in on those people so I don’t lose touch.

I haven’t decided exactly what system I want to use. In the past, I’ve experimented with recurring reminders and spreadsheets to try to solve this problem, but I always bristled a bit at their formality. Instead, I might try a more regular practice of checking in on people once a quarter or year to make up for my lack of awareness of people’s updates on social media.

As always, toward the end of the month, I’ll share some insights from my reading for the month as well as how my planned habit changes went.

The post Outreach – Day One appeared first on Scott H Young.