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.

Those interested in my previous months’ efforts can see them here:

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

Today, I’ll start with personal reflections, then move onto my reading for the month.

Reflections on Reading

As evidenced by my previous months’ book lists, I already read a lot of books. This is largely an occupational side-effect, but my reading volume isn’t something that concerns me.

Instead, my goals for the month were twofold:

1. To read, however briefly, right before bed. I felt like this habit would facilitate sleeping well, in addition to injecting another regular reading slot into my life.
2. To expand the breadth of books I read. I wanted to spend more time reading literature, history and topics not directly related to my writing. (Though I admit such breadth will probably not be sustained outside of this initial month.)

For both goals, I was successful:

I managed to read every night before falling asleep, although on nights spent with company, my wife and I went to bed later, and I kept this reading brief. I will strive to continue this habit, especially when I approach the month when my project focuses on sleep itself. Books beat screens for improving sleep quality.

In terms of breadth, I was also successful. In particular, I focused on two books I have wanted to read that kept getting pushed out of my queue by more “important” books:

1. The Count of Monte Cristo. This is my all-time favorite novel. I’ve read it at least three times, and last summer I started listening to it as an audiobook in French. Given this month’s focus, I restarted where I left off and have nearly reach the end.
2. Journey to the West. This Chinese classic has been sitting on my shelf since my first trip to China, but the Chinese text was too difficult for me. I’ve surrendered a couple times when attempting to read it in the original Chinese, only making it through a few pages at a time. Now, I’ve decided to read it in English first, following Anthony Yu’s unabridged translation.

Both books are excellent, but they’re hardly quick reads. The unabridged audiobook for Monte Cristo is nearly 50 hours long, and Yu’s translation runs nearly 2000 pages. Thus, in an ironic twist, the month focused on reading is probably the one in which I finished the fewest total books!

Reading about Reading: Notes on Five Books

In addition to my literary excursions, I read five books about reading for this month’s research, two of which were re-reads. This is a lot less than I normally read for Foundations each month. Part of this was owing to the amount of time I took to read longer books that were off-topic, as mentioned earlier. But a bigger part was simply that I have already read a ton of books on this topic as part of researching my latest book, so I didn’t feel compelled to research the topic as aggressively as I do the subjects that are new to me.

1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

First, some quick takeaways from this month’s research:

1. Reading relies on brain mechanisms that evolved to do different jobs, that are recycled to be applied to the evolutionarily-recent task of reading.
2. Despite differences in scripts, reading in Chinese, English and Italian all use basically the same brain circuitry.
3. Reading speed is mechanically and psychologically limited. Speed reading doesn’t work, and the upper limit on reading (without skimming or skipping stuff) is probably around 500 words per minute for most people.
4. Knowledge is the biggest driver of comprehension and memory. The more you know the more you’ll remember from what you read. Ultimately this, not speed, is probably the biggest factor separating people who easily read dozens of books in a month and those who find one or two to be arduous.
5. Reading is a virtuous cycle. In keeping with my fourth point, if you read more, you know more, which makes further reading easier and more enjoyable. Reading well comes from reading lots.

Notes on Five Books

1. The Reading Mind by Daniel Willingham

I first read this when it came out. Now, having done a lot more background research on reading, I can appreciate just how good a job Willingham does in covering the basic cognitive science of reading.

Willingham carefully articulates the current standard model for how reading works, from moving your eyes, to decoding letters on the page, to the dual routes of sounding out words while accessing irregular ones through a mental lexicon, assembling words into propositions, determining what a book says and, finally, what it actually means. Along the way, he dispels many myths and misconceptions about this process held by educators and readers alike.

My favorite part of this book was Willingham’s discussion of how limited our field of vision is—and how unaware we are of this. Researchers using eye-tracking software transformed a page of text to replace every character outside a narrow range of vision with the letter “X”, quickly updating the display every time a person’s eye moved. Not only did this change have no effect on reading speed—subjects didn’t even realize there was anything strange about the text!

Truly, the things most familiar to us contain some of the greatest surprises.

2. How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren

This classic has long been recommended to me, but it never made its way out of my book queue. I figured this month was as good a time as any to actually finish it.

The book is well-argued. It articulates a demanding form of “analytical” reading to be applied to the close reading of particular books. The authors argue from the point of view of a reader determining, solely from his or her own efforts and without relying on external commentary, what a book means.

On the one hand, it’s hard to fault much of the advice given in the book, which I found beneficial. And it certainly helped me reflect on my own research process which mirrors the “syntopical” reading they discuss near the end.

And yet, through my research over the past few years, I’ve become more inclined to believe in the “knowledge-centric” view of reading competency rather than the “skills-based” view, especially in light of educational evidence that excessive reliance on skills training has pretty sharp diminishing returns and that what students generally need most is more knowledge.


Still, I think Adler and Van Doren’s book is a classic for a reason, and it outlines a useful strategy for tackling books that might otherwise seem too daunting even to consider.

3. How to Read a Paper by Trisha Greenhalgh

I first read this when embarking on my research project for my first book, Ultralearning. While aimed at medical practitioners, the advice in this book is useful to anyone who wants to make sense of, or apply recommendations from, quantitative research.

There’s a danger in becoming halfway educated on a topic and, as someone who is halfway educated about many things, I’m well aware of the risks. It’s all too easy to see a study cited or read a single book and feel like that’s the end of the story on a contentious topic. It rarely is.

Still, I think we live in a media ecosystem which increasingly requires us to understand scientific work in order to evaluate claims in health, education, politics and beyond. In short, we’re all unavoidably doing the kind of amateur research that often backfires into overconfidence in shoddy opinions.

From this perspective, I think Greenhalgh’s book should be mandatory reading for everyone. She outlines the right way to think about published research. As Richard Feynman once remarked, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Knowing how to read a paper cannot substitute for years of study, but perhaps it can help you avoid fooling yourself.

4. Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

A good complement to Willingham’s The Reading Mind, this book, authored by one of the leading neuroscientists in his field, covers the neuroscientific perspective on reading.

It was from this book I learned the surprising fact that nearly all readers, in all languages, read in nearly the same way. I found this surprising because of my time spent learning Chinese, which has a script that seems utterly unrelated to the alphabetic code we use in most European languages.

5. Why Read? by Mark Edmundson

A stirring apologia for the humanities, Why Read? provides perhaps the best rationale I’ve heard for reading more (and better) fiction.

Edmundson is critical of critics, those literary types that tackle a great book with excessive theorizing, close reading, psychoanalysis and other forms of dissection that, to him, serve to show off the analytical skills of the reader rather than the purpose of great literature. And what is the point of reading great literature? To be changed by it. To have the themes and descriptions give you tools for deciding how to live. This sort of explanation would have caused me to raise my eyebrows not too long ago. Wouldn’t it be easier to read philosophy, which directly tackles such questions, rather than an entertaining work that merely reaches them obliquely? The idea that someone could read The Iliad and derive from it a way of life borders upon the absurd. (The epic, you shall recall, begins with Achilles’ temper tantrum over the forfeiture of his war-won sex slave.)

Yet, I think Edmundson did a good job arguing his point. Stories are felt in ways that arguments are not. Reading The Count of Monte Cristo in my youth did more to shape my feelings about the idea of committing to a long and patient plan than any rational analysis about such an approach did.

Therefore, while I think direct instruction and books that plainly tackle one’s questions are the best way to answer them, I think good literature and philosophy can help you ask better questions of your life in the first place. For that, they deserve a place in your library for more than mere entertainment.

_ _ _

That’s it for this month. Next month, my focus is shifting to Outreach, the first foundation for maintaining and building connections with more people. I’ll share some thoughts on that in the next update!

_ _ _

P.S. – Quick Update on Fitness

I decided to redo my original fitness test from ~5 months ago. Some progress:

• 1.5 mile run test. Original: 11 minutes. Now: 9 minutes, 20 seconds. (Estimated VO2 max: 47.4 → 55.3 mL/kg*min.)
• Consecutive pull-ups. Original: 3. Now: 10.
• Consecutive push-ups. Original: 24. Now: 49.

The post Reflections on a Month for Reading appeared first on Scott H Young.

Predictably, and disappointingly, a lot of the replies I got to that article looked something like this:

“But have you read so-and-so? They wrote a book explaining why the experts are all wrong!”

It’s predictable because it’s easy to see how ideology, misinformation, and the complexity and uncertainty of doing fundamental science make nutrition one of the more contentious fields out there.

However, it’s also disappointing because none of the readers I spoke with seemed to disagree with me that their favored stance wasn’t reflected in the dominant scientific perspective—they simply thought the dominant scientific perspective was wrong.

This, to me, reflects a more fundamental disagreement I have with those readers—not one of nutritional advice¹ but of how we should form beliefs in the first place.

My fundamental worldview is that:

If you want to have more true beliefs, you should simply believe the experts who study the topic, most of the time.

In short, if you want to have an accurate worldview, you should avoid being a contrarian almost all of the time and simply accept whatever people who have studied a topic extensively think about it.

Why We Should Believe Experts

The rationale for defaulting to believing experts in almost all cases is simple:

1. An expert is, by definition, a smart person who knows a lot about a topic.
2. The typical expert has more true opinions than the typical non-expert because they have more knowledge with which to form an opinion.
3. The most common expert opinion is even more accurate than the typical expert. This is because each expert has a different subset of all available knowledge on a topic, so the average view is a better “best guess” than any individual’s opinion.
4. The majority expert opinion may be wrong. But contrarian opinions are even more likely to be wrong. The value of this perspective is probabilistic: expert consensus will fail sometimes, but it fails less often than the contrarian alternative. It is therefore a strong default presumption to hold.

I forget exactly where I first heard this argument, but I find the logic difficult to reject. Experts are more accurate than non-experts. The expert consensus² is more accurate than any particular expert.

Despite the logic of this argument, the advice simply to believe the dominant scientific viewpoint on an issue has a lot of dissenters. Indeed, even though we could easily recognize its accuracy, if a viewpoint doesn’t “feel” right, isn’t it kind of brainless to just accept whatever some group of experts tells us to think? Shouldn’t you make up your own mind and come to your own conclusions?

Objections to Simply Trusting Expertise

There are many objections to the anti-contrarian epistemology I’m supporting here, and I’d like to review a few of them. While I do think some of these arguments can be legitimate, they need be invoked carefully. Successful contrarianism is like successful gambling—possible in theory, but it frequently leads to losing your shirt.

1. “Experts ignore X.”

The most common cry of the skeptic is that the experts ignore valuable evidence. In this view, because the expert opinion fails to sample some part of the useful knowledge needed to form an opinion, the conclusions aren’t to be trusted.

This is undoubtedly true, but I would argue it is a virtue rather than a vice. A lot of seeming evidence isn’t reliable for forming conclusions, and simpler theories often lead to better explanations than ones that try to account for everything.

A physicist may assume an object is a perfectly rigid cube lying on a frictionless plane. A nutritionist may simplify foods into a collection of chemicals. An economist may assume people behave as rational utility-maximizing agents.

The omissions made by these models are not haphazard—experts themselves debate about which factors are important. Models and theories must necessarily be simpler than reality; a map as large as the territory it describes would be useless.

Claiming that a body of expertise is wrong because it systematically ignores some factor is simply a restatement of the contrarian claim that “factor X is important, but mainstream expert opinion says it isn’t.” In other words, this argument doesn’t work on its own. You’d need an additional explanation for why experts ignore X, even though it is evidently important.

2. “Experts are biased.”

Although my rationale for believing experts is based on the idea that experts are simply smart people who know a lot about a topic, that isn’t quite accurate. In reality, experts are social groups that carefully draw boundaries between members and non-members.

This social reality influences expertise, and anyone who has spent time with experts can attest to how much social factors influence which beliefs take root in expert communities.

If researchers are ideologically committed to a particular position, or they find certain conclusions of their research unpalatable for non-epistemic reasons, or even if they are disproportionately drawn from a group that is likely to hold strong prior beliefs, these can all be reasons to question expert conclusions.


As an example, I find it difficult to wholeheartedly accept a lot of the science done by meditation or psychedelic researchers. These fields have a selection effect where many of the researchers begin with strong beliefs that those things ought to work, so there’s a greater chance of finding false positive effects for the usual reasons science can go wrong.³

However, while bias is real and potentially a ground for legitimate contrarianism, we must also turn the mirror on ourselves. We, too, have biases that predispose us to be favorable to some perspectives rather than others. Casually discarding expert opinion because of bias is the pot calling the kettle black. If you’re going to dismiss the majority opinion of a field because of bias, you need strong evidence that you yourself are more likely to be impartial—a high bar that few contrarians can surmount.

3. “Those experts are fake.”

Perhaps the biggest indictment of a field is simply to decry that the brand of expertise they practice is fake. If the knowledge the field has amassed is utter garbage, then there’s no real reason for believing any of the claims it makes.

This claim is easiest to see with the benefit of hindsight. Of course scholastics who believed in Aristotle’s four-elements theory of physics were fake. Of course doctors who used blood letting and leeches as cure-alls were fake. Of course alchemists, astrologers and fortune-tellers are fake. We see those fields, and the knowledge they accumulated, as largely worthless enterprises today—the average person would have been better off staying at home than visiting a doctor who would likely bleed them to death for a minor ailment.

Of course, the idea that economics, theoretical physics, finance, nutrition, cognitive science or social psychology are fake fields with fake expertise is popular among contrarians of all stripes. After all, if you can reject the legitimacy of experts, you can discount their consensus opinions wholesale.

I’m sympathetic to this claim. Like most people, I have my preferences for evidence and my hierarchy of fields I’m willing to believe more strongly—and those I’m more likely to roll my eyes at.

But, the argument for believing specific claims of expert opinion extends to believing in specific fields of expertise. Intellectual life doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Different groups of experts all vie for supremacy on most topics—there are many questions that are simultaneously tackled by social psychologists, economists, anthropologists and humanities scholars. If an intellectual argument clearly “wins” in the court of opinion among intelligent observers, then that field gets a larger share of the intellectual marketplace and the less-successful intellectual group withers.

Indeed, the reason it’s easier to point to past groups of experts as being clearly fake is because their paradigms did not survive the intellectual evolutionary process. Alchemy was outcompeted by chemistry. Aristotle’s theory was outcompeted by Newton’s. Modern evidence-based medicine outcompeted bloodletting and folk remedies.

In short, the rationale for accepting the legitimacy of a field are the same as the rationales for accepting a specific claim made within a field: If there were a better, more intellectually satisfying approach, the likelihood is that the better approach would dominate the current paradigm—from another community of experts if not from within.

4. “Trusting experts is intellectually lazy. You should review the evidence and come to your own conclusions.”

A final objection doesn’t rest on the weakness of expert opinion, rather on the supposed intellectual vice that simply trusting experts creates. In this view, being the kind of person who follows along with the mainstream consensus is cowardly and lazy: you should bravely think for yourself—even if you sometimes get the wrong answer.

But this, to me, is a fundamental misconception. Trusting expertise is not an intellectually simple task. It takes enormous work to bring your worldview even partly in line with what experts think. Deep understanding requires you to review much of the knowledge that experts possess—hardly a task for the intellectually lazy.

Instead, it’s typically the reflexive contrarians who are intellectually lazy. They would prefer to read one flashy book that supports a worldview they are already predisposed to believe rather than wade through multiple dense textbooks that slowly build the consensus perspective.

Simply parroting the conclusions of experts is not enough. To really understand an expert conclusion, you need to develop for yourself the mental models used to generate it. That’s hard work. It’s why getting an advanced degree in a field takes so long—mastering the tools and models needed to accurately simulate the expert opinion in a wide range of scenarios within a single field takes years, and that must happen before the student can do their own meaningful work in that field.

Truly smart contrarianism not only has to articulate an opposing view, but provide a deep explanation for why that viewpoint is not widely accepted by other smart people with similar knowledge. Few experts in a given field ever reach this position, never mind casual readers commenting on a topic outside of their specialty.

Some Final, Moderating Factors

My original advice was:

If you want to have more true beliefs, you should simply believe the experts who study the topic, most of the time.

I would add a few moderating factors to that generalization:

1. Experts can tell you what to believe—not how strongly to believe it.


The quality of evidence used to form expert beliefs varies widely. Despite this, experts, on the whole, are highly confident of their own opinions. Since making decisions in life depends on not only what the “best guess” beliefs are, but how likely they are to be correct, this lack of calibration is a problem for my simple model of trusting experts.

I have much more faith in basic physics than basic nutrition, for instance. I would be extremely surprised if the principles of quantum mechanics turned out to be wrong, but it wouldn’t shock me if nutritional researchers flip-flopped on the link between saturated fat and heart disease.

This lack of confidence calibration means that while it’s not usually justified to say, “the experts are all wrong, you should believe X instead,” it’s not always incorrect to say, “the experts are wrong, you shouldn’t have any opinion on X.” Skepticism of the expert view in shaky fields is consistent with the position I’m advocating for, even if true skepticism (rather than ardent belief in even more dubious propositions) is quite rare.

2. If your goal isn’t to maximize true beliefs, contrarianism can be justified.

Somewhat ironically, the individual experts aren’t necessarily incentivized to maximize the truth value of their beliefs. Expert consensus is a kind of smudgy, bland version of a particular worldview; it’s what’s left after averaging out of all sorts of unique or unusual perspectives.

In contrast, a scientist or pundit aims not just to be right about the stuff everyone already agrees on, but to be surprisingly correct—to hold a belief that later turns out to be perceived as more plausible, thus changing the consensus viewpoint.

Indeed, this may even be a good thing. An intellectual environment where all experts followed my “just trust the experts” maxim would result in excessive conformity of opinion, making bias more likely. We should want to live in a world where experts don’t agree, and instead debate each other, as this raises the average quality of their opinions.⁴

An analogy is investing. The average investor is better off putting their money in a low-cost index fund rather than picking stocks. Most investors (including professionals) fail to beat the market consistently. And yet, we do want at least some amount of (mostly deluded) contrarians trying to actively beat the market, since it is this very activity that determines values in the market.

Final Thoughts

While I first heard this argument for believing expertise ages ago, I don’t think its logic alone is what made me attempt to follow it more rigorously in my life.

Instead, it’s the experience of having been persuaded by a contrarian expert, being fully convinced and, years later, being dissuaded from those original views as I encountered more evidence. And unlike the boy who touched the fire, it took being burned more than a few times before I developed the reflex.

While I doubt this argument will bring any dyed-in-the-wool contrarians or conspiracy theorists to my worldview, I do hope it will nudge a few people into giving more weight to the dominant expert perspective, and a bit less weight to the voices of persuasive-sounding contrarians.

Because, ultimately, having true beliefs does matter. Your beliefs inform how you invest, eat, build your career, raise your kids and take care of your health. And if your fundamental worldview isn’t optimized for gathering true beliefs, you’re bound to make mistakes.

The post Just Trust the Experts appeared first on Scott H Young.

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

I picked this focus as one of the twelve because I believe a regular habit of reading, particularly from books, is one of the best foundational habits you can have in life. It’s also one that people do less frequently than they used to: most adults read fewer books than they did in decades past, no doubt a trend caused by the rise of smartphones.

However, reading books is something I’m fairly good at. I’ve regularly read at least 10 books for each month of this project so far, typically including at least two college-level textbooks for each topic. While my reading volume tends to go up and down depending on my projects, I can easily read a hundred books in a year when such reading is central to my work.

Therefore, my personal goals for the month will be a little different than the habit I’m encouraging other people to build this month, which is to always have a book. I’ll touch on this general recommendation more at the end of this post, but otherwise I’m focusing here on what I’m doing in the month ahead.

Two Goals: Bedtime Reading and Increased Breadth

I have two goals for this month. The first is to get into a regular habit of reading before going to sleep. I do this sometimes, but not consistently. My hope here isn’t to increase my reading volume, rather I want to use the habit to encourage better (and earlier) sleep.

I’m not setting a minimum threshold for bedtime reading, since that would quickly become a burden if I stay up later than usual owing to social events. But I think having the habit of reading before sleep, even if only for a minute, will encourage me to wind down faster than looking at a screen.

My second goal for the month is to spend more time reading books outside of my usual non-fiction focus. While I enjoy literature and off-topic non-fiction books, they definitely take a back seat when I’m working on a research project. I probably won’t be able to sustain this breadth as I shift to future months, but I will use this month to plan some longer-term reading lists in areas I read less than I’d like.

Here are some of the categories of books I’d like to read more of:

1. Classic literature. Ever since reading Hirsch’s book arguing for cultural literacy, I’ve been encouraged to expand my reading with more classic works of fiction.
2. Religious works. I’m not religious, but I think religion is a topic worth reading more of both for its cultural significance and its lessons for everyday life.
3. History. I’ve read quite a few biographies, often while researching for my books, but I’m less well-informed about a lot of history on its own. Given that history knowledge tends to be voluminous, I’d like to make some efforts to expand here.
4. Books in other languages. I don’t do nearly as much conversation practice in other languages as I used to; it was one of the necessary sacrifices I made to save time when I became a parent. But reading more in the languages I want to maintain is easier to fit in and something I’d like to cultivate.

I already have some books in each of these topics, probably more than enough for the month ahead, but I’ll use this month to prepare some longer-term lists, so I’ll have more books to choose from when those initial ideas run out.

AHAB: Always Have A Book

The keystone habit I’m encouraging people in my Foundations course to cultivate for this month is simpler than my personal goals. It comes from the observation that a major obstacle to reading more is simply not having anything you’re excited to read right now.

The practice to solve this can be summarized in a simple acronym AHAB, or “Always Have A Book.”

The goal is to have a book you’re interested in reading with you at all times. This doesn’t mean you need to lug around large paperbacks with you everywhere you go. With Kindle and Audible apps, you can now keep an entire library on your smartphone.

Setting this up means getting quite a few books—either buying them or borrowing them from a local library.

It also means prioritizing books you’re keenly interested in reading. A common mistake people trying to read more make is trying to finish whatever boring book they’ve already started. Then, because they don’t actually want to read it, they spend more time on social media.

If you’re already a voluminous reader, you can challenge yourself with harder books. But if you don’t regularly read at least one book per month, I encourage you to build a habit of picking books you enjoy and not feeling even a twinge of guilt about failing to finish any book that no longer interests you.

I’ve long practiced the AHAB habit, but even I slip occasionally. I’ll have periods where I have a few paper books, but no Kindle books—which means I check the news on my phone rather than read. Or I don’t have an audiobook I’m listening to—which means I can’t listen to anything other than music or podcasts even if I want to listen to a book.

Therefore, as part of my own challenge, I’m aggressively stocking all of my go-to book places, so I have plenty of books ready at my office, nightstand, Kindle app and Audible.

As an aside, I’m also hoping to use this month to relax a little bit in the project. The start of the Foundations course, plus the research-heavy food and money months, made my workload a little high over the previous two months. Since I’ve spent the last several years of my life reading books about learning, my reading-about-reading book list will probably be a little lighter this month, and I’ll use that downtime to read or listen to more off-topic books.

As always, I’ll share how this focus went for me at the end of the month, as well as some of the books I enjoyed.

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

You can also watch my wife’s and my conversation about how this month in the ongoing project went:

Eating Better and Healthier

This month was a bit unusual because I made most of the changes I wanted to make to my eating habits during the fitness month, which was the first month of my year-long project. Although I read a lot more and deepened my knowledge of many of the aspects of nutrition I was unclear on, behaviorally speaking, I was already pretty happy with my eating habits when this month began.

My focus for the month, then, was on tracking my food intake. In particular, I was curious to see how my actual eating habits conformed to both dietary guidelines and my own subjective sense of how healthy I have been eating.

As an experiment, I found tracking my food intake for the month to be informative. In terms of nutritional information, I learned:

1. I almost always get more than the minimum recommendation for fiber.
2. I’m typically under the threshold for saturated fat.
3. I consume more sodium than I should. I’m typically over, and this may be an undercount as my tracking might have missed some added salt in home-cooked dishes.
4. My protein intake is above the DRIs, but can be lower than what is considered optimal for strength training if I’m not intentional about including it in every meal.

I would have liked to learn more about micronutrients in my diet, but the software I used couldn’t track these well. Too few foods reliably list things like omega-3 or other micronutrient content to really know whether my diet, which abstains from red meat, is low on zinc or iron, for instance.

In addition to nutritional information, I also got a lot of behavioral data:

1. I tended to overconsume food when eating at restaurants or having guests over and cooking large dinners. When I cooked my own food and ate with my family, eating moderate portion sizes was pretty easy to do.
2. I don’t drink often, but drinks caught me off guard for empty calories.

Some of My Early Results

Of course, most people don’t track food intake to gain insight; they track to lose weight. I wasn’t aiming to lose a lot of weight this month, but the app I used (MacroTracker) required it to set up the goals. Despite my ambivalence about sticking to the calories it recommended, I did end up adhering most of the time and lost about 4 lbs. from the start of the month.

While I mostly credit the fitness and dietary changes I started four months ago, rather than the specific efforts of this month, I’m quite happy with my progress in my overall body composition. I’m now around 165 lbs., down from a peak of around 178 lbs. shortly before the project started.

I haven’t been consistent in measuring my waistline, but that has shifted too: it started around 37” sometime during the first month of the project and is around 33” now. Given I’m in the “healthy” BMI range, I’m going to pay more attention to this metric over the long-term, since muscle gains and losses will blur any effect of weight loss per se.

It’s nice to be a bit leaner, closer to my college-era weight than I have been for the last several years, but I’m also doing my best to not fixate on it. I’m chastened by the pessimistic data on weight regain, so I’d rather focus on sustaining health and fitness over the long-term.

Why I’m Not Tracking Long-Term

While my experiment with tracking food was informative, it’s not a behavior I want to sustain in the future. Tracking was annoying in the beginning, but now it’s fairly well-automated as a habit, so I don’t find the act of tracking to be the main problem. Instead, I think tracking what I ate had a few unwanted side effects that distracted me from how I’d really like to eat:

1. Tracking encourages you to eat easy-to-track foods rather than healthy foods. While tracking discourages some poor food choices, such as junk food with a lot of calories, I find it also subtly encourages eating foods with nutritional labels, which ends up increasing processed foods rather than whole foods.
2. Tracking encourages a focus on calories (or macros) rather than other aspects of nutritional quality. This could be a side-effect of the app I was using, but I found that gamifying things like calorie count or grams of protein/fat/carbs encourages you to use that lens for viewing nutrition—but this approach wasn’t really supported by my overall research. Such an emphasis encourages you to see whole wheat bread and white bread as being basically the same nutritionally, when they’re really worlds apart.
3. Tracking encourages paying attention to numbers rather than internal sensations. The month of tracking gave me renewed appreciation for the more mindful way of eating I had been following the previous three months. When you focus on calories, you eat more when you have “room” and you hold back, even though you’re hungry, when you’re over. This may be good if you’re struggling with overeating, but I found it discouraged me from listening to my own sensations of hunger and satiety, instead taking the app for ground truth.

While the research on tracking tends to be fairly positive in terms of its overall effectiveness, for the sake of my diet long-term, I’m going to focus on generally eating high nutritional quality food, being as physically active as possible and being mindful that I’m eating enough—not too much or too little.

Food, Beyond Nutrition

I’m leaving this month feeling good about how I eat. One disappointment from the month was that the act of tracking preoccupied more of my time than anticipated, so I feel like the month ended up being more about nutrition (and less about other aspects of food) than I had initially intended. I had wanted to also focus on cooking more, exploring new recipes and finding more ways to make healthier eating more satisfying on a regular basis.

Now that I’m taking a pause on tracking, I think I’ll be able to resume some of these other aspirations, and I’ll certainly get to revisit them when this essay gets published and I’m working on this foundation along with everyone in the Foundations course.

Overall, I’m satisfied with how this month went. I gained some insight into my eating habits, recommitted myself to the changes I started four months ago, and even managed to lose a few pounds.

Update on Fitness, Productivity and Money

Some quick updates on my continued progress in the previous three foundations I covered:

For fitness, I continued to make major strides. I did two long runs of 21km, a half-marathon distance, and by far my longest runs ever. I can now do 9 pull-ups in a row, compared to 3 when I started. I’m still below my peak strength on major lifts, but I’m inching closer.

For productivity, I can’t say that much has changed. I’m better at tracking and coordinating a lot of non-work related tasks with my wife, but time is still limited, and staying on top of low-priority chores is still hard. I’m accepting that there will always be more to do than time to do it in, and trying to feel good about what I am able to accomplish.

For money, I’m actually a little behind with my monthly expense tracking. This was largely a side-effect of creating a new tracking template and thus needing to go through and relabel the past year of transactions before moving forward. Given I’ve been tracking my expenses for nearly two decades already, I’m not too concerned, but I’m hoping to get caught up.

This month was also incredibly busy. Because I write these updates three months before we cover each topic in the class and they are published here, this was also (for me) the first month of the Foundations course with the new students. I love teaching, but it definitely adds to my workload compared to just doing a solitary project. Additionally, my wife broke her foot which forced a reorganization of many of our day-to-day habits and childcare tasks.

Next month’s focus will be on reading, a foundation I’m already quite content with, so I’m hoping it will act as a little bit of a breather on my end.

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

The classic course is all about providing information. There’s a syllabus with a list of content; a bunch of lectures where the ideas, facts and concepts are conveyed; and finally, there’s an exam to test if you remember everything you were taught.

There’s nothing wrong with this model for many subjects. In many fields, information is what’s missing, so taking some time to learn is the best action.

However, from nearly two decades developing online courses, I’ve often been disappointed with how the classic approach to structuring a course translates to action. The problem is that a lot of information, on its own, rarely translates to concrete behavioral change. A course on nutrition, for instance, will give you tons of useful concepts and ideas about eating better—but it may not actually change how you eat, which is the ultimate goal of most people.

When Cal Newport and I started designing Life of Focus, we knew this was going to be a potential issue in our course. Cal had recently published Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. Most of our prospective students had either read these books or followed Cal’s blog or podcast and were already familiar with his calls for increasing focus in work and life.

We knew that people attending the course didn’t need more exhortations to turn off their email when doing deep work or lessons about the neuroscience of attentional processing. Instead, we designed the course to guide them through specific steps to create new working behaviors, and to have follow-through so those behaviors could become lifelong habits.

The Format of an Action-Centered Course

As a result of this, Life of Focus (and my more recent course, Foundations) follows a different model than what we typically think of as a course.

To start, the course is organized into three monthly challenges. Rather than putting the lessons first with the homework as an optional bonus (let’s face it, most people who take online courses rarely do the assignments), we put taking action to improve our focus first, and then provide regular lessons to remind and reinforce those actions as they are already underway.

The three challenges for Life of Focus are:

• Tracking your deep work hours
• Conducting a digital declutter, and
• Engaging in a focus-building project to make or learn something new.

As another inversion to the typical course format, we start each month with a guided worksheet. This helps students come up with step-by-step actions they can take to begin each month-long challenge with the best footing. Only once students start working on the challenge do we start providing lessons to fine-tune, remind, motivate and redirect students as they go through the month.

On top of this, we add a lot of direct community support and coaching so students can quickly address sticking points as they come up, before they fall off the challenge or get discouraged.

In brief, the format of Life of Focus is more like a personal trainer at the gym than a university class on exercise science. By encouraging action from the get-go, the lessons and feedback support behavioral changes as you’re making them.

While Cal and I were unsure how such a novel course format would work with students, we have been pleasantly surprised, and many students have told us Life of Focus is their favorite course they’ve taken with us. Many students have even taken the course multiple times since they first enrolled, treating second and third passes as a chance to further refine their process using the three-month structure it provides.

Life of Focus Opens Monday

I wanted to explain this course format because, in running this course and others over the last few years, I’ve forgotten how different this approach can be for many people. It can be hard to explain why joining a structured three-month program to improve focus is different than simply reading a book or listening to podcasts. But our focus on taking action first, and then supporting that action with learning, is designed to help our students make real changes—not just think about making them.



I hope you’ll join us on Monday so you can see it for yourself!

The post Lesson Four: How Life of Focus Works appeared first on Scott H Young.

Diagnoses of ADHD (including self-diagnoses) have skyrocketed. While it’s likely that some of this is due to a lessening of stigma around mental health issues revealing what was already there, anecdotally, it appears that people are having a much harder time concentrating than they used to.

The number of people I know who struggle to finish reading a single book, or who can’t seem to stay on task for more than twenty minutes without opening their email, seems to be getting worse.

Are Smartphones Ruining Our Brains?

While technology certainly plays a role in our collective distractibility, it’s probably not the case that Google is literally making us stupider, or that we’ve lost the ability to focus. I agree with cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, who raises his eyebrows at the idea that our fundamental brain architecture could be reshaped in this way.

Instead, there’s a much simpler explanation for why focus is hard—and why it has gotten harder. In short, the ability to sustain attention on something is a function of two factors:

1. Pull. This is how much an activity draws in and motivates us to sustain our attention. True multitasking is a myth, and our attention can only focus on one thing at a time. As a result, the pull of an activity is always defined relative to everything else we could possibly be paying attention to at this moment.
2. Friction. This is how much resistance, difficulty or effort is required to sustain engagement in an activity. Too much friction, and even something that should be compelling is pushed out for easier alternatives.

These two factors help to explain why focusing has gotten so difficult lately. We’re now in an environment where strong pulls on our attention are ubiquitous, so the relative pull for reading a great book is simply too quiet compared to the pull of social media or streaming television.

Second, many of our most potent distractions have become increasingly frictionless. When I started blogging two decades ago, reading my feeds meant going to the room with my computer (I still had a desktop), turning it on (which took forever), connecting to the internet, opening my RSS feed reader, and scrolling through an uncurated list of simple headlines to decide what to read.

Had I been born two decades later, I’d instead have TikTok, which only requires taking a device out of my pocket, with whatever content *it* deems most interesting served up to me instantaneously.

“Dumb” media and old-fashioned hobbies, which haven’t altered much, have the same pull and friction that they’ve always had. But they can’t compete with the attentional candy we now encounter regularly.

How to Improve Your Ability to Focus

This two-part model of focus suggests a simple answer for how you can focus better: increase the relative pull of an activity, reduce the friction, or both. And since pull and friction are defined relative to all salient alternatives, you can achieve the same impact by reducing the pull or increasing the friction of your most tempting distractions.

Let’s consider all four possibilities:

1. Increase the pull of focusing. Read more interesting books. Choose hobbies you find compelling. Join groups to integrate socializing with activities you enjoy. Measure your progress and give yourself rewards just for showing up.
2. Decrease the friction of focusing. Have books always available. Have your hobbies “ready-to-go” rather than requiring lengthy setup. Stop reading books that bore you (read something else instead). Make it possible to quickly dip into the things you care about.
3. Decrease the pull of distractions. Put your phone on grayscale. Switch your media consumption to RSS feeds, rather than algorithmically curated sources.
4. Increase the friction of distractions. Keep your phone in a dedicated location in your house, rather than at your hip. Delete apps from your phone, so you need to log in with your computer.

A similar fourfold list of strategies can be employed for improving your focused work, not just your focused leisure: Increase the pull of deep work, decrease the pull of shallow work, decrease the friction of deep work, increase the friction of shallow work.

Shifting to a more focused life takes time and work. None of these changes are automatic, and it can take awhile for them to feel natural. But if you invest in a more focused life now, you can reap dividends for all your years to come. With sufficient time, these habits will become automatic and, sure enough, you’ll find yourself reading more books, engaging in more interesting hobbies and completing more meaningful projects.

Life of Focus, my course co-taught with Cal Newport, will begin on Monday, January 27th. If you’re interested in joining, I will be sending out registration information on Monday. I look forward to working with a dedicated group of students to help them improve their focus and achieve bigger things in 2025!

The post Lesson Three: Why You Can’t Focus appeared first on Scott H Young.

For instance, when I read a book that really interests me and then write about it later—was the reading work or fun? What if I had to read the book for research? What’s different between the drawings I do for fun and those I use on this blog?

Perhaps I’m an isolated case, but I’d like to think not. In the years Cal Newport and I have run Life of Focus, I’ve interacted with dozens of students who struggle with work and play being intermixed in both their time at home and their time formally allocated to an employer.

The situation is even more complicated for retirees, students, academics, and stay-at-home parents, many of whom aren’t “paid,” strictly speaking, for many things that clearly seem to be work.

Recently, however, I’ve stumbled into a distinction I think matters more than the one between work and life: that between craft and chores. While work seemingly embodies everything you must do to earn a living, and life is everything else, craft is all of the productive activities that utilize your creativity and skill in order to accomplish something you’re proud of, and chores are all the tasks that must be done to keep on going but don’t satisfy this same desire.

Maximize Craft Instead of Balancing Work

One thing I like about this revised approach is that it shifts the goals for our productive lives.

Working nonstop is not desirable. Burnout is real, and even if you love your job, pressure to perform continuously can be exhausting. If you add to that all the commitments you have outside of work, even a dream job can become a millstone around your neck if you aren’t careful.

Yet “balance” is definitionally hard to achieve.

Balance is akin to Aristotle’s maxim that virtue is to be found in moderation—except everyone’s definition of moderation is different. What’s a moderate amount of eating? Drinking? Going to the office? We end up falling back on cultural norms, where 9 to 5 is considered “balanced” even though a full-time job can be exhausting if you also have full-time childcare duties. And different cultures may have entirely different standards, in fact China’s infamous 9-9-6 start-up culture was sold as being *more* balanced than the nonstop-work ethic promoted at more aggressive firms.

In general, it’s easier to optimize a dimension of life by maximizing for something than by balancing between two extremes.

Given this, I prefer the idea of maximizing craft and minimizing chores across *both* my working life and personal life. I’d like to write more essays and spend less time filing taxes in my work, just as I’d like to finish more paintings and spend less time doing dishes at home.

How Do You Maximize Craft?

Definitions are nice, but how do you actually do this? Clearly, there will always be unavoidable chores both at work and at home. Spending more time on craft, while nice-sounding, can be hard to achieve in practice.

I believe the answer comes down to focus. In your work, if you can carve out regular chunks of time for deep work, you’ll start automatically shifting your work toward the dimension of “craft” and away from “chores.” In the beginning, that shift might come from simply being more efficient with the chores, even if their quantity hasn’t diminished. But, eventually, as you build “craft” accomplishments, it becomes easier to delegate and avoid chores in favor of more time spent on your craft.

We tend to specialize at what we regularly do, and if you spend your time on deep work, it creates a gravitational pull towards more deep work. Likewise, getting really good at chores makes you the person who gets assigned more chores.

At home, things are not quite as simple. Short of hiring an army of help, many chores will need to be done. But here, too, steps to maximize craft often succeed by squeezing out the hours spent on activities that are neither necessary chores nor meaningful crafts—the filler time spent endlessly scrolling on our phones or watching television shows we don’t even enjoy.

In the previous lesson, I argued that this year should be a year for doing something big—actually finishing a project you’ve had in mind for some time. Now, I’d like to encourage you to go further, to think about maximizing the feeling of craft throughout your life. Doing activities that require full engagement, genuine skill and give you a feeling of satisfaction when they’re completed.

In the next lesson, I’ll share a simple model for how to think about focus. In particular, what you can do to overcome some of your own internal resistance to maximizing craft and achieving big things. And on Monday, January 27th, I’ll reopen Life of Focus, my three-month course co-taught by Cal Newport. Stay tuned!

The post Lesson Two: More Craft, Less Chores appeared first on Scott H Young.

Cal Newport and I are opening our Life of Focus course for a new session next week. Before we do, I’m sharing some lessons this week on how you can focus better in your work and life. Stay tuned!

I think about my life as a series of projects. I think you should, too.

Projects exist in the middle space of our productive activities. At one end we have tasks, the myriad things that need doing in our day-to-day lives: filing taxes, walking the dog, doing laundry, submitting that report. At the other end are our grand dreams for our lives: to be financially independent, travel the world, build a business or raise successful kids.

Grand dreams are nice, but they’re generally not very practical. It’s easy to get excited as you think them over, but rarely does even the most compelling grand dream tell you what, precisely, you should be doing on Tuesday morning to make it come true. Their size and distance makes them poor objects for sustaining motivation.

Tasks and to-do lists suffer from the opposite problem. You can check off lots of tasks while accomplishing nothing major. Sure, the house is a little cleaner, maybe you’ve balanced your chequebook and fixed the wobbly chair in the dining room, but these, like most tasks, simply sustain your current life. They don’t take you somewhere new.

Projects act as the bridge between grand dreams and daily action. A big life goal often can be achieved in a project or two. And a project can be achieved through a coordinated series of tasks.

The Mindset Needed to Habitually Complete Projects

Being good at completing projects requires a different mindset than being merely productive (and thus being good at checking off tasks) or ambitious (and thus coming up with grand visions for your life).

Completing projects requires focus.
Focus is not just the ability to sit down and work at something hard for hours at a time; it’s also learning how to ignore all the other things screaming for your attention. Sometimes those other things are entertainment or distractions. More often, they’re legitimate tasks and work that, if you heed their siren song, will have you crashing against the rocky shore of minutiae long before you reach your ambitious destination.

It’s Time to Finish What You Start

My guess is that you already have some project ideas. Perhaps some you’ve idly thought about. Perhaps some you’ve already committed to. Perhaps some that oscillate between daydreams and serious efforts.

This year, I suggest you go ahead and finish one of them. It doesn’t need to be the largest or most difficult project on your list—but it should be something that matters to you. Make this the year that you don’t just *think* about doing it, but actually finish it.

Certainly, this is easier said than done. Perhaps you have dreamt up projects that have gone nowhere. Maybe you’ve even insisted that “this time it’s different,” and you’re finally going to complete a project you’ve been thinking about for years—only to succumb to the relentless tide of distractions in the months ahead.

We’ve all been there.

If you are looking for help with this, I encourage you to join the upcoming session of our course, Life of Focus. In it, we’ll help you set and achieve a consistent deep work target—a necessity for making sustained progress. We’ll declutter your leisure time—creating space to tackle big things. And we’ll cultivate your ability to sustain your attention in the way, and on the things, you choose.

The full three-month course is a great complement to any big goal you’ve been meaning to accomplish, but I want to leave you with one strategy you can apply today: right now, start tracking the hours you spend working on the project you have in mind.

This doesn’t require fancy software or complicated calculations. A simple piece of paper where you tally every uninterrupted hour of work towards your project will suffice.

Put the tally on your wall, on your phone, or anywhere you will look at it often. By maintaining a visual reminder of your decision to focus, you can steadily move in the right direction.

Life of Focus, my three-month course co-taught with Cal Newport, will reopen for a new session on Monday, January 27, 2025.

The post Lesson One: Do Something Big This Year appeared first on Scott H Young.