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Habit Stacking: How to Keep Up With Everything (When You Don’t Have Time)

If you’re like me, you probably have a lot of things you’d like to do, but not enough time to do them all.

On my list of things I’d like to do (or should do), I have:

Meditate

Exercise

Programming

Learn Chinese

Art

Writing

and more…

And this list doesn’t even include all the things I really should do, but often fail to do as frequently as I’d like, such as keeping my home clean and organized, preparing meals ahead of time, reading more books, and all the millions of things I could do for work, but don’t seem to have time for.

In some ways, this is unavoidable. We only have a certain amount of time (and even less energy) to do things like this, and thus some things inevitably get left behind.

Today, I’d like to share a method I’ve been finding helpful for managing all these competing goals I call habit stacking.

What is Habit Stacking?

Habit stacking combines two concepts that you may be familiar with: minimal habits and overlapping tasks.

Part #1: Minimal Habits

The first component is minimal habits. This is an idea that says you should try to commit to the bare minimum amount of effort towards a goal, but make it highly frequent. The idea being that the friction of going from zero to some amount of effort in some direction, once overcome, can allow for a much larger investment over time.

I’ve written before about how I’ve done this successfully in exercise by switching my commitment from going to the gym every day (or a minimum number of times per week) to focusing on just doing fifty push-ups.

This commitment is probably not enough for ideal fitness, but the benefit is that it’s easy enough that I almost always do it. Over the last 219 days, I’ve only missed it once.

I still go to the gym about as much as before, but now I don’t need to feel guilty that I don’t have time to go perfectly. Even if I can only go two or three times one week, I know I’m still doing some background physical activity to maintain my health.

Part #2: Overlapping Tasks

The second component of this idea is overlapping tasks. This has a more common name: multitasking. However, I’d like to avoid that word here because it has a negative connotation and is usually used to refer to combining tasks that really can’t be doubly allocated (like trying to watch television while studying).

The idea behind overlapping tasks is that, if you have enough of them, even a minimal investment in each of your possible goals might start to be too much.

Right now, for instance, I have the following minimal habits I’m trying to do (nearly) every day:

50 push-ups.

30 minutes of meditation first-thing in the morning.

10 minutes of Chinese listening/reading practice.

Flossing.

5 minutes cleaning the house.

This isn’t too much. However, this is also on top of the million other things I usually have to do each day. Work gets swamped, life gets in the way, and sometimes it’s almost time for sleep and I haven’t done some of these yet.

The Danger of Overcommitting

Having a lot of *musts* simultaneously can end up being a house of cards. You can layer commitment on commitment and it’s fine. Until you break one of the commitments and you start to crumble. Too many things to do, and soon you stop doing all of them.

The key is to apply the minimal habit principle, once again. How can I make the habits easier to sustain, so that in a pinch, I can default to a lower-effort input and not break my commitment?

Here, the problem can be solved by recognizing that some of these habits can overlap without too much interference. I can listen to audio in Chinese while cleaning up, for instance, or while doing my push-ups. This allows two tasks to occupy the same time slot.

How You Can Apply Habit Stacking

To apply habit stacking in your own life, start small. Pick one or two cornerstone habits you want to do every single day, presumably forever. These should be:

Portable – You can do them anywhere, in any condition.

Easy – Even on your most exhausting days, you should still be able to keep them up.

Independent – They shouldn’t depend on outside things going right, for you to apply them.

I started with push-ups and flossing. You may have other goals. I suggest only starting with a couple, just to get a feel for it.

The first thing I noticed is that even easy goals have a lot of days where you don’t want to do them. This isn’t because the habits are too hard, but because your motivational inertia would rather just not do them at all. The power of this method is that it forces you to break that inertia by committing to something you can’t reasonably dismiss without feeling lazy.

The second step, is to see which of these habits are stackable. You probably won’t be able to stack more than two at a time, but this can create an extra layer of safety. If you have several 5 or 10 minute daily habits, that can add up to over an hour of work every day. Suddenly, what was intended as a minimal habit ends up becoming a difficult one.

By having the ability to stack, you can add extra flexibility on the days you need it most.

A good way to stack habits is to combine a task which is mostly physical with one which is mostly mental. Exercising + listening to audiobooks, is a good example. Another way might be to combine a task which is highly verbal with one that doesn’t require as much verbal focus. I can often listen to audiobooks if I’m doing a visual task, like drawing, because I don’t need to think in words as much to draw.

You can even start to think about stackability when imagining your set of minimal habits. If you have 10 habits, that require, six minutes each, that’s an hour commitment every day–not so easy, even if each habit is quite minimal. However, if out of those same ten habits, six of them can be stacked, you can do the same in 40 minutes in a pinch.

Overlapping Isn’t Ideal—But That’s Not the Point

Stacking habits, and only executing their bare minimum, isn’t ideal. Obviously, it would be better if you invested more time, with a greater degree of focus, on each area you’re trying to work on with the habit.

The philosophy behind minimal habits though, is that the starting point is the one with the most friction. If you engage in something, a little bit, every day, even if it is not ideal, you’ll actually end up putting in a lot more of the ideal practice than you would otherwise if you hadn’t made the commitment.

Think about where you could apply this concept to your own habits? How could you minimize and stack the things you should do, to sustain constant progress?

The post Habit Stacking: How to Keep Up With Everything (When You Don’t Have Time) appeared first on Scott H Young.

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Underrated Success Tactic: Actually Doing the Math

My friend Justin Jackson wrote an article recently about reducing costs for his online small business.

Anyone familiar with start-up advice has probably been told a thousand times to not worry about costs. Focus on increasing revenue. Cutting costs is a losing battle.

Although this is usually sound advice, Jackson did something unusual: He actually opened a spreadsheet and did the math. And, unlikely the generic advice, he actually found controlling costs was a reasonably good business strategy for him to pursue at that time.

Look, I love heuristics and rules of thumb. It’s often helpful to have a standardized answer that will be true in most cases which you can just run with.

However, there’s often a tendency to overuse such pieces of generic advice. People begin to treat them as fundamental laws of the universe, rather than the helpful shortcuts which they are.

That’s why actually doing the math is such an underrated strategy.

It may only take twenty minutes to pull up a spreadsheet and see how one approach compares with another, but the answer you get will be far more accurate than if you had skipped the work and just stuck with prevailing assumptions.

Where Should You Actually Do The Math?

Here’s some places where you should definitely do the math, and yet few people do:

Buying a house versus renting. Renters are throwing away money. Mortgage debt is slavery. The truth is, all the fascinating variety of takes aren’t nearly as valuable as actually doing the math. You can even use a calculator like this one which does the work for you.

Exercising or cutting calories to lose weight. How many calories do you burn at the gym? How many could you reasonably cut on a diet?

Going to grad school. What are reasonable graduation salaries? How much more money do people make on average? These are all statistics you can find. Then add up the amount of money you would be spending to attend (including the opportunity costs of missing work). Which is greater?

How much money should you put away in savings? Compare how different savings rates, at different expected levels of investment return, would differ when you’re 40, 50 or 60, if you continue them for those lengths of time?

These are just scratching the surface, but they all have a common theme. They are all questions people debate endlessly. They all depend on a few assumptions, but most of which can be reasonably researched to get an approximate figure. They could be answered, largely, by simply doing the math.

How to Actually Do The Math

Doing the math is important. But most people aren’t very good at math (which might explain why this approach is uncommon).

Consider the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which includes a measure of “quantitative literacy” or the ability to do basic math. According to this report a majority of Americans were unable to “calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies, using a page from an office supplies catalog.” In most cases, actually doing the math is harder than this.

The quick answer is that you should learn to do math, before you can do *the* math in your life. However, wading through years of math classes is probably unnecessary for most of these questions, so there’s a simpler answer:

If your problem involves comparing two things that happen at the same time, then just add up the two effects and see which is bigger. The key to successful math will be estimating things properly and not forgetting about hidden factors.

Example: counting calories reduced from exercising or dieting.

If your problem involves comparing two things, especially money, that happen in different points in time, you need to discount things that happen later.

To do this, you just need the interest rate. This could be the amount your investments earn, loans you need to pay, or if you want to get fancy, a discount rate that also incorporates the risk of different options.

Put one plus the interest rate in one column of your Excel spreadsheet, and multiply it against the value in the next column, one row up. Output this to the value of the column one over. If you drag this down, you’ll automatically get how a value will grow over time. (A quick check, if you do this with a 10% interest rate, your columns should have 1.1, 1.21, 1.331, 1.4641 and so on)

You can do the reverse of this by taking something in the future, dividing it by one over one-plus-the-interest-rate and going backwards in time. This can help you figure out how much something with a lot more later, can be worth compared to something right now.

If this explanation is a bit confusing, you can go into more depth here to calculate the time value of money.

You can also use this for non-monetary things that happen at different times, but the interest rate will be less obvious there, so be careful.

If your problem involves comparing things which aren’t directly comparable, say the benefit of enjoying your job more versus earning more money, you can convert one to the other by imagining a trade-off point for each. Say you’d go with Job A over B, only if it paid $20,000 more per year, then that’s the value of the non-monetary benefits of Job B.

You Can’t Always Do the Math, But You Should Calculate More

Actually running the numbers won’t always work. The situation might be ambiguous. The factors which would come together into a formula may not be clear-cut and you may not be sure where to go with them. The world is nebulous, so sometimes there’s no correct math to do for a given situation.

However, the amount of situations where a better, if not the definitive answer, can be reached by doing the math is far, far larger than most people actually practice it.

Doing the math also enforces a kind of discipline on your thinking. It forces you to not rush to assume the answers to questions without actually going out into the world and checking it first. This kind of discipline can lead to better decision-making, even if you don’t end up going the way your numbers point.

When in doubt, do the math. Make this your mantra, and you’ll make far fewer mistakes.

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Does Choice Exist?

One of the most vexing philosophical questions is whether or not human beings have free will.

On the one hand, we certainly seem to have the ability to make choices. While what I decide to do with my life feels influenced by outside factors, it does feel like I am the one ultimately making the decision.

On the other hand, huge swaths of scientific evidence seem to undermine the idea of free choices.

Behavioral genetics says that much of our behavior is influenced by our genes. I don’t choose my genes, so if my genes explain my choices, what role is there for me? Even if it isn’t your genes, your culture determines much of what you think and believe. You don’t pick your culture, upbringing or any of those other factors, so if those things choose for you, what role do you play?

Some scientists have argued that free will is an elaborate illusion perpetrated by the brain. That the conscious mind isn’t the CEO of the brain—making and executing choices. But the PR department. Confabulating reasons to explain that behavior, once it is made by unconscious processes.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of the elephant and the rider, arguing that we are not the stampeding elephant, but the rider, vainly assuming he has control over the much larger animal beneath him.

Can Choice Exist in a Scientific World?

My own belief is one of compatibilism. This view argues that, even if we do end up living in a completely materialistic and deterministic universe, something like free will does exist.

While I don’t like the term “free will” for the baggage it represents, I do believe it is a folk psychological concept that none the less has enormous utility. Believing that something like choices exist in the world is enormously useful, and that as a model for human behavior they work extraordinarily well.

In my view, there are two different views of the world you could attack when attacking free will. One is a metaphysical critique of the concept of human agency and choice. This is attacking the idea that human choices and decisions are somehow separate from the world, yet influence it causally. Such a view is common in many religions, and yet contradicts a lot of what we know about physics and brain science.

The second is to go further than this, and not merely attack the metaphysical idea, but also the practical idea of choice. This is the idea that suggests that people can’t really be held responsible for their own actions or that, “it doesn’t really matter what you do, because you don’t have control over you own life.”

I sympathize with the first argument, but I soundly reject the second one.

To me, the people who are making the second argument are simply making a category error when talking about hierarchical systems. They are pointing to a low-level phenomenon, and using it to negate the existence of a higher-level one.

What do I mean?

Hierarchical Phenomena

A good way to understand this problem is by way of computers. Note, even if the mind ends up being nothing like a digital computer, at the really abstract level, this isn’t important. Computers simply happen to be the most complicated things in the universe that we actually fully understand from top to bottom.

In a computer, there is a lot of complex stuff going on. Because of this, we often choose different levels of description, from a hierarchy of concepts, to specify patterns of what a computer is doing.

Consider the idea of “clicking on a link.” What does that mean? Well, I move the mouse cursor over to a piece of underlined text and press the left mouse button, loading a page on the other side.

Now ask, do “links” exist inside the computer program? Clearly they do. And it’s the most useful way of talking about the behavior of users on a website. Worrying about what’s happening at lower levels of abstraction isn’t “more accurate” it’s wrong. It’s the wrong layer of the hierarchy to meaningfully understand what’s going on.

Imagine, however, that some computer scientist were to tear apart the computer and see that, unfortunately, there were no links to be found. Instead, there were merely registers and logic units built on transistors. By carefully damaging certain transistors, or disabling certain registers, we could create links that don’t go anywhere when you click them.

Would such a computer scientist shout “Aha! I’ve proven that links are an illusion,” or suggest that, “this is further evidence that links do not exist and computers really are engaging in a process of shuffling bytes, rather than ‘clicking’ on any ‘links.’”?

That would be silly. A computer scientist knows that beneath the concept of a link, there is enormous amount of lower-level programming and hardware processes. That those processes are themselves not “links” and can be engineered to break down in certain situations doesn’t undermine the fact that “links” are still the correct concept to use when describing the higher-level behavior in most situations.

Choice as a Higher-Level Phenomenon

Choices, I would like to argue, are like links, and the act of choosing is like clicking a link. It is a complex process that contains many other processes, which themselves are not choices!

This is why I take issue with many working in neuroscience claiming that detailed examinations of the brain, and unusual experimental setups somehow are evidence that people don’t routinely make choices in their everyday lives.

Again, if the argument is simply being made against the metaphysical idea that free will somehow comes in from outside the material universe and causally influences things, then I have no issue with it. But if it is extended to argue that, practically speaking, we should stop talking about “choices” since they don’t exist, then I think this is as mistaken as a computer scientist denying the existence of hyperlinks and clicking behavior based on evidence involving registers and logic units.

The Anatomy of a Choice

The challenge right now is that with our incomplete understanding of psychology and neuroscience we are not in the position of the computer scientist when understanding linking behavior. We can’t go from the atom up and figure out exactly what constitutes a choice, versus an unconscious action.

It may also turn out that our folk psychological concept of a choice is perhaps too fuzzy. Maybe there are different kinds of choices, that have completely different properties, and it would be better to speak about them more precisely than we do right now.

Despite the revisions that may come from increasing science, I’m highly skeptical that science will judge that choosing, or anything like it, as an obsolete description of human nature. Rather, what we will do is figure out what are the underlying mechanisms that facilitate choices, and those will almost certainly be made of things that themselves are not choices.

If we are made of biological components, which are themselves made of atoms, there can be no other option. Since atoms, and the behavior of atoms, almost certainly don’t have choices, then the sub-component of human choices will be choiceless as well.

The Implications of Choice

All this is to say is that dismissing the practical relevance of choosing, or its moral implications, as our knowledge of lower-level brain mechanisms, is profoundly misguided. Like the computer scientist who discovers that the complex user interface she sees on the screen is actually caused by transistors, doesn’t undermine the concept of “links” or “clicking”, neither should the discovery of unconscious brain processes which underlie decision-making, negate the concepts of “choice” or “agency.”

We are a part of the universe, not separate from it. The thing which separates us from the simple quantum fluctuations of atoms, or chemical shuffling of microbiology, is huge orders of complexity built on complexity, rather than a difference in kind. Choices, and the implications of being something which possesses the ability to choose, is something which fits into that picture, rather than stands apart from it.

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How to Enjoy Studying

Studying is an unpleasant task for most people. Students procrastinate on preparing for an exam until a last minute cram. Professional avoid taking the training they need to get ahead in their profession. Tests make people so anxious they change careers altogether.

If you can learn to enjoy studying, however, you’ll unlock a much larger world of opportunities. Not just in school and classes, but in life.

Those who deeply enjoy learning new things can add new hobbies, accelerate their career and develop new points of pride and confidence. That can’t happen, however, if the thought of studying hard to learn something fills you with so much dread that you only stick to easier things.

Why You Don’t Like Studying

Why people like and don’t like things is a big subject in psychology. Although there are intrinsic likes and dislikes, a lot of our likes and dislikes are learned, rather than instinctual.

This is because we learn to associate the things we like with other, instinctive, likes. We also learn to associate the things we dislike with other, instinctive, dislikes. Sometimes this effect is powerful enough that something which is a mildly instinctive dislike can be overcome through sufficiently strong pairing to an instinctive like.

Consider spicy food. The capsaicin found in hot peppers creates its sensation by activating pain and temperature receptors on the tongue. Normally these are designed to tell you to stop eating, not to consume more.

Yet many people learn to like spicy foods because they become a learned association with other rewarding treats like salsa, curry or kimchi. Eventually the spice that was previously painful may even be addictive, as you seek spicier foods and avoid blander ones.

How to Learn to Enjoy Studying

Studying is a mentally strenuous activity that often involves frustration by default. Because you’re learning something hard, it’s a natural reaction for your mind to seek out things which are easier or more entertaining.

This is made worse because this mildly difficult task can be associated with painful associations. Test anxiety. Failure. Negative feedback from teachers and peers. Boredom in school.

However, if you can pair studying with sufficiently rewarding activities, a different association can begin to develop. Now instead of feeling anxious, bored or frustrated, you can start to feel excited, interested and enthusiastic.

Step One: Pair Your Existing Studying With Things You Like

Although this could technically be accomplished simply by eating ice cream every time you finish a chapter, I’m skeptical how durable this conditioning will be. After all, you know you can just skip one to get the other. Also, needing to reward yourself each time you do a little studying can delay the whole process enough that now new anxieties form about your lack of productivity.

A better way is to try to create an intrinsic connection between what you’re studying and what you like. Studying statistics may be boring, but if you’re interested in sports, it can be a window into understanding why teams win and lose. Computer programming may feel bland, until you’re making your own game or web app.

Every subject sits in a nexus of millions of connections to everything else in the world. Seeking out and fostering those connections can help you cultivate an interest. Making the effort to see how something dull applies to something interesting can make all the difference in making studying enjoyable.

Step Two: Connect Studying with Progress

Progress itself is inherently rewarding. When you start to connect actions with progress, then this itself can be intrinsically reinforcing. Arnold Schwarzenegger worked out so much, in part, because he enjoyed the feeling of soreness in his muscles after a workout. In his mind, that minor pain became so connected to the muscular growth he sought after, that it started to feel good every time he did it.

Similarly, if you track your progress and visualize it, you can make studying a more enjoyable task. When I was studying languages, nothing would make me happier than clearing my Anki count for the day. I would often set the new words as a countdown so I had a goal to clear them out.

How would your motivation change if you drew a map of everything you needed to study, and colored it in as you reviewed it, filling out your knowledge territory and taking the abstract mental improvement you’re undertaking and turning it into something you can see?

Step Three: Create Your Own Study Projects

This one may sound backwards. If you’re already having hard time doing the studying you need to do, why would adding more studying make it better?

The reason is that many people get into a low-confidence spiral. They don’t do as well in school as they would like, so all they feel worse and worse about studying. This, in turn, makes it hard for them to study properly so they do badly and thus deepen the spiral.

Creating self-initiated studying projects can get you out of this by removing the source of negative feedback. If you set the goal, interests, methods and materials, you can work on a project you’re much more likely to succeed with and start to recapture a positive spiral.

If this subject is adjacent to one you’re learning in school, you can leverage that confidence learned in your side project into the one you need to tackle full-time.

Step Four: Focus on the Now

Human beings like challenging mental tasks. Solving Sudoku or crossword puzzles is something many people do for fun, but if the same tasks were packaged into a classroom, many of the same people would hate doing them. Why?

The reason is that the future performance evaluation, the need to study and the only semi-voluntary nature of the activity can stifle any natural enjoyment. If I know I have to solve this Sudoku puzzle, and that if I get it wrong it might ruin my life, I’m not going to love it the same way as if it were just for fun.

Therefore, one of the most powerful ways you can learn to enjoy studying is to, paradoxically, focus on the studying itself. Don’t focus on future outcomes, just focus on the puzzles in front of you and challenging yourself to see if you can solve them. Become curious about how they work, rather than feeling burdened with the obligation to learn them.

Human beings learn through play. The more your study becomes play, the more you’ll enjoy it, but also the more you’ll learn.

Shifting Your Enjoyment

None of these steps will take you from hating something to loving it overnight. The loops of reinforced conditioning are probably years-deep and can take a long time to unravel.

However, if you an apply these consciously maybe you can take something you absolutely hate and turn it only into a minor nuisance. Or something you don’t really like into something you find kind of interesting.

Even small shifts of this kind can add up in reduced stress and less procrastination. In the end, learning to enjoy studying can matter even more than learning to study well. If you can enjoy the challenge and begin to see what you’re learning in a more positive light, you’ll be able to start performing better as well.

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Some Thoughts on Meditation

About a year ago, I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. I was interested in meditating before that, but like most people, found it pretty frustrating and didn’t do it regularly.

If there’s one benefit of doing a 10-day retreat is that you quickly get over the mild feeling of discomfort in meditating. Instead it gets replaced by an extreme, almost torturous feeling as you contemplate spending the next ten days sitting motionless, cross-legged on the floor.

After the initial unpleasantness though, I felt like I left the retreat with two big things I didn’t have before.

The first was simply the ability to meditate. Rather than get frustrated and give up after fifteen minutes, now it was possible to sit for an hour or two.

The second thing feels harder to describe. Some combination of the no-speaking, heavily restricted lifestyle and non-stop meditation caused a shift in my cognitive processes. For awhile after, I found it impossible to get bored or frustrated. Life felt completely fresh.

This second thing is hard to understate, but it came with a pretty large disadvantage, which was that it faded away almost immediately. Two weeks after I had come back, and despite my commitment to realizing a new way of seeing things, everything settled back down to normal.

My First Meditation Habit Failed

For awhile, I kept up the initially recommended dose of two hours of meditation per day. This wasn’t easy. I was in the midst of an intense book writing schedule, and so an extra two hours of sitting were hard to pry from my schedule.

However, I had hoped that keeping up the meditation might help the new perspective I had gained on the retreat prove more durable.

I can’t say whether the continued meditation helped prolong that perspective, but I can say that it faded much more quickly than my meditation habit. I kept up the habit for another six-to-eight weeks, after things felt like normal. Eventually, with the excessive schedule weighing me down, I dropped the habit.

I briefly tried taking a different course—ten minutes a day of meditation. Just as a placeholder, while I figured things out. But that also didn’t last. I didn’t take it seriously enough, and my practice was getting too sloppy to have any chance of a benefit.

What was the Magic Behind Meditation?

At this point, for most things in life, I would probably just chalk up my experience as a fluke. It was a weird moment of consciousness due to an extreme environment I’ll be unable to replicate. Leave it as a good memory and move on with life.

However, there really was something dramatic about my experience during, and in the week or two after, my first meditation retreat. It really had felt like I had gained a perspective that could be “flipped-on” the way you might learn to cross your eyes to see the 3-D pictures in magic eye drawings.

That perspective had a lot less anxiety, more focus and was free of many of the pathologies that I felt were present in my everyday thinking. Even if that perspective feels distant now, I think it’s worth spending more time trying to understand it.

Putting on my scientist’s hat for a moment, I can imagine a few things that might have been different (or a combination of them) in the retreat and the immediate post-retreat environment that allowed this perspective shift even if I can’t sustain it now:

Retreats are cut off from outside worries and anxieties. They are a mental vacation from real life, even if they replace that with something arduous.

No talking. Perhaps verbal silence fosters mental silence, given enough of it?

Quasi-religious atmosphere. Maybe the semi-cultlike nature of the Vipassana retreats itself creates a kind of spiritual placebo effect that one later attributes to the meditation?

Extreme lifestyle restriction. No screens, no meals after noon, no sex, no reading, no talking, no nothing. The extreme constraints might have forced a perspective shift the same way being in a dark room long enough can create hallucinations.

Intense experiences create afterglow. The experience was incredibly difficult in the beginning, and I had my share of negative experiences as well. Perhaps the ramped intensity of those negative experiences created the positive experiences in the rebound.

It’s impossible to know which of these was the principle cause of my subjective shift, or whether it’s something that could be replicated. But I’m still curious enough that I’d like to keep searching to find out more.

How I’m Restarting a Meditation Habit

The first thing I’m doing now, is trying to avoid the mistakes of my first two attempts:

The first habit was too hard. Two hours per day was too difficult. I ended up dropping it when I felt it was making me more anxious than before (because I couldn’t find time for it).

The second habit was too easy. I didn’t discipline myself to sit up straight and commit to proper technique, so many times I was just doing some informal meditation lying in bed before going to sleep.

Given these two failures, I wanted to try something down the middle. Thirty minutes, first thing in the morning.

First thing in the morning, to cement the routine and avoid procrastination.

Thirty minutes, in a seated posture, to give myself enough time to actually meditate.

I can’t say whether this habit will fare better than the previous two, but I’m committed to giving it a shot.

In addition to the new habit, I’m also attempting a new approach. During my Vipassana retreat, we were advised to treat the practice very seriously. Treat it like work.

When I returned from the trip, I was reading more accounts from different traditions of meditation that emphasized a no-effort kind of “do nothing” approach to meditation. While I can see how this advice can make sense, I think without a really strong foundation of disciplined meditation to start, it’s probably just going to end up failing to meditate.

I’d like to reshift my focus now back onto that original approach I learned, to see if it makes a difference. Take the meditation seriously, and try my best to sustain focus on the technique I’m going to use during that time.

I’m not sure whether this habit will be enough to recapture the kind of perspective shift I experienced my first time around. It may be that the perspective shift is inherently transient, a short-term effect of an intense shift to my life. However, as always, the only way to find out will be to experiment carefully and keep track of the results.

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Want to Learn a Language on Your Next Trip? Avoid These Six Mistakes.

Immersion is the best way to learn a language. You can learn much faster than sitting in class. It feels exciting and useful, not just a stale list of grammatical rules and vocabulary words.

However, most people make some key mistakes when trying to learn a language while traveling. I’ve made these mistakes, so I want to help you avoid repeating them on your next trip.

My first experience learning another language was studying abroad in France. I spent a year there, and after a year of hard work, I was able to speak some French. Although I was happy with this, I noticed how so much of my effort was pushing uphill. If I had made choices differently, I could have learned much faster.

Flash forward four years. I’m now attempting, with a friend, a much more ambitious project. One year, four different languages. Instead of a year to learn each, we’d only have three months.

The difference, however, was that I didn’t make the mistakes of my first trip. The outcome was that I ended up learning Spanish better in three months than I did over a year learning French in France. Same opportunity, different strategy, completely different results.

Side note: In case you’re wondering whether my French unduly helped my Spanish, my traveling partner also learned Spanish exceptionally well and he didn’t know any other Romance language before we started. You can see our full progress here.

The Six Mistakes When Learning a Language While Traveling

Below are the six biggest mistakes I made on my first trip (and which are painfully common amongst travelers and expats). If you can avoid them, you’ll learn much faster, regardless of whether you’re a linguistic genius or if you failed high-school Spanish class.

Mistake #1: Creating an English-Speaking Bubble

Or, if English isn’t your first language, then a bubble of whichever language you feel most comfortable with.

Immersion is something that sounds easy on paper. Go to the country that speaks the language you want to learn. Live there. Voila!

Except it usually doesn’t work that way. Instead, you land in the country not feeling confident speaking, so you decide to start in English, just until you get your bearings. You meet your new landlord, some peers, maybe make a friend or two at a party—all in your native language.

Soon enough, you’re three months in and you’ve spent all your time talking in English, except for the occasional restaurant order or taxicab instructions.

The bubble is your number-one enemy to fluency when traveling to learn a language. If you can successfully avoid making a bubble, you’ll end up having massive amounts of practice and you’ll be almost guaranteed to learn something.

On the other hand, if your bubble sticks, you can end up living in a country for decades without ever learning the local language. I met expats in China who had lived there for over twenty years, and could barely say anything above a simple, “Ni hao.” Pop the bubble early and you’ll avoid being one of them.

Mistake #2: Not Mastering Basic Phrases at Home First

Immersion is great for facilitating a language. But to speak to others (without forming the dreaded bubble I mentioned earlier) you need to have some basics. These are core sentence patterns that let you make basic requests, including those that help you expand your ability to speak.

There are many ways you can acquire these basic phrases. Unfortunately a lot of language learning tools out there are absolutely terrible at this initial requirement for immersive learning.

Of all the tools I’ve tried, the best (even if it feels a bit antiquated) is still Pimsleur. The reason why is that it fulfills the two basic requirements for memorizing: repetition and recall.

You need to practice saying something more than once to master it. Probably a dozen times, at least. And you’ll remember it better if those times were spaced out over days or weeks, rather than all occurring back-to-back. Many apps today specialize in repetition, but that’s not worth anything unless you have recall.


Recall is also essential, but unlike spaced repetition, it’s a lot less common. Apps like DuoLingo help you learn phrases by choosing words from a word-bank. Unfortunately, from a cognitive perspective, speaking is nothing like this, so it doesn’t help much in being able to utter those phrases. Pimsleur, with their full-English prompts, followed by a pause for saying the matching phrase, get it right.

Pimsleur is expensive, unfortunately, and I don’t recommend going beyond level one month. If you’re going to travel to learn, you just need enough to get started.

If you’re on a budget, a good alternative is to create a list of basic phrases and put them in a free-to-use app like Anki, along with asking a native speaker to record them spoken aloud, so you don’t mess up the pronunciation.

A good list of starting phrases should include:

I would like ____

Where is ____?

How do you say _____?

What is that?

How much is it?

What is your name? // My name is ____.

Where are you from? // I am from _____.

What do you do for work? // I am a _____.

In our intensive language immersion trip, we also had another phrase memorized, “We’re doing a project to learn [the language] by not speaking English.” This avoided issues when someone was curious why someone whose language ability wasn’t that good would nonetheless insist on practicing.

Mistake #3: Not Making Native-Language Friends

Socializing is an essential ingredient to immersion. In some immersion situations, this will be easy for you. Maybe your traveling to meet faraway relatives and want to learn their language? Maybe you’re going as part of a study-abroad program and events with your classmates are guaranteed?

However, in other circumstances, making friends isn’t so easy—especially if you want to avoid the bubble.

In our trip, we were confronted with this problem, constantly. We were living for three months at a time, working from home and not attending any classes or social events. How could we meet friends who were either native speakers of the language we wanted to learn, or were fluent enough that they could speak with us in the language?

In European countries, if you’re a younger person, the easiest solution is often just to go out. Go to meetups through meetup.com. Join activities. Go to parties. Say hello to people in coffee shops. If you can add some enthusiasm to your delivery, you’ll eventually make some friends. Just don’t give up early if you feel like switching back to English.

In Asia, the different culture meant randomly approaching strangers was often a no-no. In these cases, we opted for a different tactic. Hire a couple private tutors who were roughly our age, and tell them that you’re looking to make friends and need to socialize to learn the language. In most cases, this allowed us to get introductions which started the process of building a social circle without having to awkwardly approach random strangers for conversation practice.

Ultimately the key is to not give up and try different tactics. If you don’t feel comfortable approaching strangers, try going to meetups. If you need introductions, try leveraging the few people you do meet and asking them if they can introduce you to others.

Mistake #4: Not Getting a Tutor (or Dedicated Language Partner)

Most people see the role of tutors as a kind of academic facilitator. The tutor is someone who helps you study and pass classes, for languages or something else.

In reality, the role of the tutor shouldn’t be to lecture while you take notes. Instead, it should be a dedicated person who can answer questions, explain how the language works and, at the very least, be an early opportunity to practice speaking while you’re still trying to make friends.

I suggest getting a professional teacher if you’re not a seasoned language learner for your first time. This is because many native people don’t actually have a high degree of understanding of how their language works. They can speak it, but they cannot explain nuances of grammar or vocabulary. Professional teachers get this instruction and so can often help.

If you’re from a Western country and you’re traveling to a developing country or country where tutoring costs are low, this solution may be fine. But what if you’re going in the reverse direction? Or you’re trying to learn in a country that has exorbitantly high costs?

In that case, you may want to settle for a dedicated language partner. This person doesn’t even need to be a native speaker of the language. Rather you just want someone that you can put in at least an hour a day talking with them to make sure you can practice the things you do understand. They could be a fellow learner, or a native speaker who is willing to swap practice in your language in exchange for the one you’re trying to learn.

Mistake #5: Not Learning the Phonology Properly

The biggest thing that will hold back your perceived fluency is vocabulary. Lacking the right word is a huge problem. Unfortunately, learning words is also the most time-intensive part of language learning. To be properly fluent in a language, you may need upwards of 50,000 words, especially once you include proper nouns, names and cultural knowledge.

Pronunciation, on the other hand, is a much easier win, and it can often leverage an initially low level into a slightly higher perceived level. This is a strategic advantage early on, when you want to convince people to speak with you in the language, rather than “help you out” by speaking in English.

The technical way to do this would be to master the IPA and study linguistic texts for the language you’re trying to learn. A much easier way, however, is simply to look at diagrams of tongue positions so you can mimic them when you’re trying to speak. For reference, here’s one I used for learning to pronounce Mandarin properly.

Keep in mind that the goal, especially early on, shouldn’t be perfection but understandability. You don’t need to trick someone into thinking you’re a native speaker. But you should be articulate enough so that native speakers don’t struggle to understand the words and phrases you do actually know.

Mistake #6: Moving Around Too Much

If your goal is to learn a language, pick a place and then stay put.

Moving around, hopping from city to city, within a linguistic environment, often breaks the social connections you might have been tenuously forming in a given place. By breaking those connections, you’ll find it harder to sustain interactions with tutors, friends or language partners.

If you want to travel around and not stay cooped up your whole trip, I recommend picking a base to start at, staying there for awhile (this can correspond with a work or study term), and planning some travel after once you’ve reached a moderate level of fluency.

If you’ve already planned to travel a lot on your trip, you can still practice, but the ability to go deep will be more restricted. It’s a trade-off you’ll have to consider if you’re planning to travel or live abroad primarily for sightseeing or for language learning.

Bonus Suggestion: Stop Speaking English!

If you can avoid the above six mistakes, then you’re already off to a very good start learning a language while traveling. A final, bonus suggestion I would like to give is that you attempt to stop speaking English (or whichever languages you already speak) completely during your trip. This may sound impossibly difficult, but this was the basis of my four-language experiment around the world and it actually made things a lot easier.

Even if you have requirements from work, school or life that require some speaking of your mother tongue, putting strict “No English” boundaries on your life can help avoid the temptation to fall into the bubble and makes practicing much easier.

Learning a language while traveling can be one of the most rewarding things you’ll do in your life. There’s nothing quite like being able to participate in another culture, and language learning is one of the best ways to do that.

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How to Enjoy Studying

Studying is an unpleasant task for most people. Students procrastinate on preparing for an exam until a last minute cram. Professional avoid taking the training they need to get ahead in their profession. Tests make people so anxious they change careers altogether.

If you can learn to enjoy studying, however, you’ll unlock a much larger world of opportunities. Not just in school and classes, but in life.

Those who deeply enjoy learning new things can add new hobbies, accelerate their career and develop new points of pride and confidence. That can’t happen, however, if the thought of studying hard to learn something fills you with so much dread that you only stick to easier things.

Why You Don’t Like Studying

Why people like and don’t like things is a big subject in psychology. Although there are intrinsic likes and dislikes, a lot of our likes and dislikes are learned, rather than instinctual.

This is because we learn to associate the things we like with other, instinctive, likes. We also learn to associate the things we dislike with other, instinctive, dislikes. Sometimes this effect is powerful enough that something which is a mildly instinctive dislike can be overcome through sufficiently strong pairing to an instinctive like.

Consider spicy food. The capsaicin found in hot peppers creates its sensation by activating pain and temperature receptors on the tongue. Normally these are designed to tell you to stop eating, not to consume more.

Yet many people learn to like spicy foods because they become a learned association with other rewarding treats like salsa, curry or kimchi. Eventually the spice that was previously painful may even be addictive, as you seek spicier foods and avoid blander ones.

How to Learn to Enjoy Studying

Studying is a mentally strenuous activity that often involves frustration by default. Because you’re learning something hard, it’s a natural reaction for your mind to seek out things which are easier or more entertaining.

This is made worse because this mildly difficult task can be associated with painful associations. Test anxiety. Failure. Negative feedback from teachers and peers. Boredom in school.

However, if you can pair studying with sufficiently rewarding activities, a different association can begin to develop. Now instead of feeling anxious, bored or frustrated, you can start to feel excited, interested and enthusiastic.

Step One: Pair Your Existing Studying With Things You Like

Although this could technically be accomplished simply by eating ice cream every time you finish a chapter, I’m skeptical how durable this conditioning will be. After all, you know you can just skip one to get the other. Also, needing to reward yourself each time you do a little studying can delay the whole process enough that now new anxieties form about your lack of productivity.

A better way is to try to create an intrinsic connection between what you’re studying and what you like. Studying statistics may be boring, but if you’re interested in sports, it can be a window into understanding why teams win and lose. Computer programming may feel bland, until you’re making your own game or web app.

Every subject sits in a nexus of millions of connections to everything else in the world. Seeking out and fostering those connections can help you cultivate an interest. Making the effort to see how something dull applies to something interesting can make all the difference in making studying enjoyable.

Step Two: Connect Studying with Progress

Progress itself is inherently rewarding. When you start to connect actions with progress, then this itself can be intrinsically reinforcing. Arnold Schwarzenegger worked out so much, in part, because he enjoyed the feeling of soreness in his muscles after a workout. In his mind, that minor pain became so connected to the muscular growth he sought after, that it started to feel good every time he did it.

Similarly, if you track your progress and visualize it, you can make studying a more enjoyable task. When I was studying languages, nothing would make me happier than clearing my Anki count for the day. I would often set the new words as a countdown so I had a goal to clear them out.

How would your motivation change if you drew a map of everything you needed to study, and colored it in as you reviewed it, filling out your knowledge territory and taking the abstract mental improvement you’re undertaking and turning it into something you can see?

Step Three: Create Your Own Study Projects

This one may sound backwards. If you’re already having hard time doing the studying you need to do, why would adding more studying make it better?

The reason is that many people get into a low-confidence spiral. They don’t do as well in school as they would like, so all they feel worse and worse about studying. This, in turn, makes it hard for them to study properly so they do badly and thus deepen the spiral.

Creating self-initiated studying projects can get you out of this by removing the source of negative feedback. If you set the goal, interests, methods and materials, you can work on a project you’re much more likely to succeed with and start to recapture a positive spiral.

If this subject is adjacent to one you’re learning in school, you can leverage that confidence learned in your side project into the one you need to tackle full-time.

Step Four: Focus on the Now

Human beings like challenging mental tasks. Solving Sudoku or crossword puzzles is something many people do for fun, but if the same tasks were packaged into a classroom, many of the same people would hate doing them. Why?

The reason is that the future performance evaluation, the need to study and the only semi-voluntary nature of the activity can stifle any natural enjoyment. If I know I have to solve this Sudoku puzzle, and that if I get it wrong it might ruin my life, I’m not going to love it the same way as if it were just for fun.

Therefore, one of the most powerful ways you can learn to enjoy studying is to, paradoxically, focus on the studying itself. Don’t focus on future outcomes, just focus on the puzzles in front of you and challenging yourself to see if you can solve them. Become curious about how they work, rather than feeling burdened with the obligation to learn them.

Human beings learn through play. The more your study becomes play, the more you’ll enjoy it, but also the more you’ll learn.

Shifting Your Enjoyment

None of these steps will take you from hating something to loving it overnight. The loops of reinforced conditioning are probably years-deep and can take a long time to unravel.

However, if you an apply these consciously maybe you can take something you absolutely hate and turn it only into a minor nuisance. Or something you don’t really like into something you find kind of interesting.

Even small shifts of this kind can add up in reduced stress and less procrastination. In the end, learning to enjoy studying can matter even more than learning to study well. If you can enjoy the challenge and begin to see what you’re learning in a more positive light, you’ll be able to start performing better as well.

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Does Choice Exist?

One of the most vexing philosophical questions is whether or not human beings have free will.

On the one hand, we certainly seem to have the ability to make choices. While what I decide to do with my life feels influenced by outside factors, it does feel like I am the one ultimately making the decision.

On the other hand, huge swaths of scientific evidence seem to undermine the idea of free choices.

Behavioral genetics says that much of our behavior is influenced by our genes. I don’t choose my genes, so if my genes explain my choices, what role is there for me? Even if it isn’t your genes, your culture determines much of what you think and believe. You don’t pick your culture, upbringing or any of those other factors, so if those things choose for you, what role do you play?

Some scientists have argued that free will is an elaborate illusion perpetrated by the brain. That the conscious mind isn’t the CEO of the brain—making and executing choices. But the PR department. Confabulating reasons to explain that behavior, once it is made by unconscious processes.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of the elephant and the rider, arguing that we are not the stampeding elephant, but the rider, vainly assuming he has control over the much larger animal beneath him.

Can Choice Exist in a Scientific World?

My own belief is one of compatibilism. This view argues that, even if we do end up living in a completely materialistic and deterministic universe, something like free will does exist.

While I don’t like the term “free will” for the baggage it represents, I do believe it is a folk psychological concept that none the less has enormous utility. Believing that something like choices exist in the world is enormously useful, and that as a model for human behavior they work extraordinarily well.

In my view, there are two different views of the world you could attack when attacking free will. One is a metaphysical critique of the concept of human agency and choice. This is attacking the idea that human choices and decisions are somehow separate from the world, yet influence it causally. Such a view is common in many religions, and yet contradicts a lot of what we know about physics and brain science.

The second is to go further than this, and not merely attack the metaphysical idea, but also the practical idea of choice. This is the idea that suggests that people can’t really be held responsible for their own actions or that, “it doesn’t really matter what you do, because you don’t have control over you own life.”

I sympathize with the first argument, but I soundly reject the second one.

To me, the people who are making the second argument are simply making a category error when talking about hierarchical systems. They are pointing to a low-level phenomenon, and using it to negate the existence of a higher-level one.

What do I mean?

Hierarchical Phenomena

A good way to understand this problem is by way of computers. Note, even if the mind ends up being nothing like a digital computer, at the really abstract level, this isn’t important. Computers simply happen to be the most complicated things in the universe that we actually fully understand from top to bottom.

In a computer, there is a lot of complex stuff going on. Because of this, we often choose different levels of description, from a hierarchy of concepts, to specify patterns of what a computer is doing.

Consider the idea of “clicking on a link.” What does that mean? Well, I move the mouse cursor over to a piece of underlined text and press the left mouse button, loading a page on the other side.

Now ask, do “links” exist inside the computer program? Clearly they do. And it’s the most useful way of talking about the behavior of users on a website. Worrying about what’s happening at lower levels of abstraction isn’t “more accurate” it’s wrong. It’s the wrong layer of the hierarchy to meaningfully understand what’s going on.

Imagine, however, that some computer scientist were to tear apart the computer and see that, unfortunately, there were no links to be found. Instead, there were merely registers and logic units built on transistors. By carefully damaging certain transistors, or disabling certain registers, we could create links that don’t go anywhere when you click them.

Would such a computer scientist shout “Aha! I’ve proven that links are an illusion,” or suggest that, “this is further evidence that links do not exist and computers really are engaging in a process of shuffling bytes, rather than ‘clicking’ on any ‘links.’”?

That would be silly. A computer scientist knows that beneath the concept of a link, there is enormous amount of lower-level programming and hardware processes. That those processes are themselves not “links” and can be engineered to break down in certain situations doesn’t undermine the fact that “links” are still the correct concept to use when describing the higher-level behavior in most situations.

Choice as a Higher-Level Phenomenon

Choices, I would like to argue, are like links, and the act of choosing is like clicking a link. It is a complex process that contains many other processes, which themselves are not choices!

This is why I take issue with many working in neuroscience claiming that detailed examinations of the brain, and unusual experimental setups somehow are evidence that people don’t routinely make choices in their everyday lives.

Again, if the argument is simply being made against the metaphysical idea that free will somehow comes in from outside the material universe and causally influences things, then I have no issue with it. But if it is extended to argue that, practically speaking, we should stop talking about “choices” since they don’t exist, then I think this is as mistaken as a computer scientist denying the existence of hyperlinks and clicking behavior based on evidence involving registers and logic units.

The Anatomy of a Choice

The challenge right now is that with our incomplete understanding of psychology and neuroscience we are not in the position of the computer scientist when understanding linking behavior. We can’t go from the atom up and figure out exactly what constitutes a choice, versus an unconscious action.

It may also turn out that our folk psychological concept of a choice is perhaps too fuzzy. Maybe there are different kinds of choices, that have completely different properties, and it would be better to speak about them more precisely than we do right now.

Despite the revisions that may come from increasing science, I’m highly skeptical that science will judge that choosing, or anything like it, as an obsolete description of human nature. Rather, what we will do is figure out what are the underlying mechanisms that facilitate choices, and those will almost certainly be made of things that themselves are not choices.

If we are made of biological components, which are themselves made of atoms, there can be no other option. Since atoms, and the behavior of atoms, almost certainly don’t have choices, then the sub-component of human choices will be choiceless as well.

The Implications of Choice

All this is to say is that dismissing the practical relevance of choosing, or its moral implications, as our knowledge of lower-level brain mechanisms, is profoundly misguided. Like the computer scientist who discovers that the complex user interface she sees on the screen is actually caused by transistors, doesn’t undermine the concept of “links” or “clicking”, neither should the discovery of unconscious brain processes which underlie decision-making, negate the concepts of “choice” or “agency.”

We are a part of the universe, not separate from it. The thing which separates us from the simple quantum fluctuations of atoms, or chemical shuffling of microbiology, is huge orders of complexity built on complexity, rather than a difference in kind. Choices, and the implications of being something which possesses the ability to choose, is something which fits into that picture, rather than stands apart from it.

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Underrated Success Tactic: Actually Doing the Math

My friend Justin Jackson wrote an article recently about reducing costs for his online small business.

Anyone familiar with start-up advice has probably been told a thousand times to not worry about costs. Focus on increasing revenue. Cutting costs is a losing battle.

Although this is usually sound advice, Jackson did something unusual: He actually opened a spreadsheet and did the math. And, unlikely the generic advice, he actually found controlling costs was a reasonably good business strategy for him to pursue at that time.

Look, I love heuristics and rules of thumb. It’s often helpful to have a standardized answer that will be true in most cases which you can just run with.

However, there’s often a tendency to overuse such pieces of generic advice. People begin to treat them as fundamental laws of the universe, rather than the helpful shortcuts which they are.

That’s why actually doing the math is such an underrated strategy.

It may only take twenty minutes to pull up a spreadsheet and see how one approach compares with another, but the answer you get will be far more accurate than if you had skipped the work and just stuck with prevailing assumptions.

Where Should You Actually Do The Math?

Here’s some places where you should definitely do the math, and yet few people do:

Buying a house versus renting. Renters are throwing away money. Mortgage debt is slavery. The truth is, all the fascinating variety of takes aren’t nearly as valuable as actually doing the math. You can even use a calculator like this one which does the work for you.

Exercising or cutting calories to lose weight. How many calories do you burn at the gym? How many could you reasonably cut on a diet?

Going to grad school. What are reasonable graduation salaries? How much more money do people make on average? These are all statistics you can find. Then add up the amount of money you would be spending to attend (including the opportunity costs of missing work). Which is greater?

How much money should you put away in savings? Compare how different savings rates, at different expected levels of investment return, would differ when you’re 40, 50 or 60, if you continue them for those lengths of time?

These are just scratching the surface, but they all have a common theme. They are all questions people debate endlessly. They all depend on a few assumptions, but most of which can be reasonably researched to get an approximate figure. They could be answered, largely, by simply doing the math.

How to Actually Do The Math

Doing the math is important. But most people aren’t very good at math (which might explain why this approach is uncommon).

Consider the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which includes a measure of “quantitative literacy” or the ability to do basic math. According to this report a majority of Americans were unable to “calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies, using a page from an office supplies catalog.” In most cases, actually doing the math is harder than this.

The quick answer is that you should learn to do math, before you can do *the* math in your life. However, wading through years of math classes is probably unnecessary for most of these questions, so there’s a simpler answer:

If your problem involves comparing two things that happen at the same time, then just add up the two effects and see which is bigger. The key to successful math will be estimating things properly and not forgetting about hidden factors.

Example: counting calories reduced from exercising or dieting.

If your problem involves comparing two things, especially money, that happen in different points in time, you need to discount things that happen later.

To do this, you just need the interest rate. This could be the amount your investments earn, loans you need to pay, or if you want to get fancy, a discount rate that also incorporates the risk of different options.

Put one plus the interest rate in one column of your Excel spreadsheet, and multiply it against the value in the next column, one row up. Output this to the value of the column one over. If you drag this down, you’ll automatically get how a value will grow over time. (A quick check, if you do this with a 10% interest rate, your columns should have 1.1, 1.21, 1.331, 1.4641 and so on)

You can do the reverse of this by taking something in the future, dividing it by one over one-plus-the-interest-rate and going backwards in time. This can help you figure out how much something with a lot more later, can be worth compared to something right now.

If this explanation is a bit confusing, you can go into more depth here to calculate the time value of money.

You can also use this for non-monetary things that happen at different times, but the interest rate will be less obvious there, so be careful.

If your problem involves comparing things which aren’t directly comparable, say the benefit of enjoying your job more versus earning more money, you can convert one to the other by imagining a trade-off point for each. Say you’d go with Job A over B, only if it paid $20,000 more per year, then that’s the value of the non-monetary benefits of Job B.

You Can’t Always Do the Math, But You Should Calculate More

Actually running the numbers won’t always work. The situation might be ambiguous. The factors which would come together into a formula may not be clear-cut and you may not be sure where to go with them. The world is nebulous, so sometimes there’s no correct math to do for a given situation.

However, the amount of situations where a better, if not the definitive answer, can be reached by doing the math is far, far larger than most people actually practice it.

Doing the math also enforces a kind of discipline on your thinking. It forces you to not rush to assume the answers to questions without actually going out into the world and checking it first. This kind of discipline can lead to better decision-making, even if you don’t end up going the way your numbers point.

When in doubt, do the math. Make this your mantra, and you’ll make far fewer mistakes.

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Want to Learn a Language on Your Next Trip? Avoid These Six Mistakes.

Immersion is the best way to learn a language. You can learn much faster than sitting in class. It feels exciting and useful, not just a stale list of grammatical rules and vocabulary words.

However, most people make some key mistakes when trying to learn a language while traveling. I’ve made these mistakes, so I want to help you avoid repeating them on your next trip.

My first experience learning another language was studying abroad in France. I spent a year there, and after a year of hard work, I was able to speak some French. Although I was happy with this, I noticed how so much of my effort was pushing uphill. If I had made choices differently, I could have learned much faster.

Flash forward four years. I’m now attempting, with a friend, a much more ambitious project. One year, four different languages. Instead of a year to learn each, we’d only have three months.

The difference, however, was that I didn’t make the mistakes of my first trip. The outcome was that I ended up learning Spanish better in three months than I did over a year learning French in France. Same opportunity, different strategy, completely different results.

Side note: In case you’re wondering whether my French unduly helped my Spanish, my traveling partner also learned Spanish exceptionally well and he didn’t know any other Romance language before we started. You can see our full progress here.

The Six Mistakes When Learning a Language While Traveling

Below are the six biggest mistakes I made on my first trip (and which are painfully common amongst travelers and expats). If you can avoid them, you’ll learn much faster, regardless of whether you’re a linguistic genius or if you failed high-school Spanish class.

Mistake #1: Creating an English-Speaking Bubble

Or, if English isn’t your first language, then a bubble of whichever language you feel most comfortable with.

Immersion is something that sounds easy on paper. Go to the country that speaks the language you want to learn. Live there. Voila!

Except it usually doesn’t work that way. Instead, you land in the country not feeling confident speaking, so you decide to start in English, just until you get your bearings. You meet your new landlord, some peers, maybe make a friend or two at a party—all in your native language.

Soon enough, you’re three months in and you’ve spent all your time talking in English, except for the occasional restaurant order or taxicab instructions.

The bubble is your number-one enemy to fluency when traveling to learn a language. If you can successfully avoid making a bubble, you’ll end up having massive amounts of practice and you’ll be almost guaranteed to learn something.

On the other hand, if your bubble sticks, you can end up living in a country for decades without ever learning the local language. I met expats in China who had lived there for over twenty years, and could barely say anything above a simple, “Ni hao.” Pop the bubble early and you’ll avoid being one of them.

Mistake #2: Not Mastering Basic Phrases at Home First

Immersion is great for facilitating a language. But to speak to others (without forming the dreaded bubble I mentioned earlier) you need to have some basics. These are core sentence patterns that let you make basic requests, including those that help you expand your ability to speak.

There are many ways you can acquire these basic phrases. Unfortunately a lot of language learning tools out there are absolutely terrible at this initial requirement for immersive learning.

Of all the tools I’ve tried, the best (even if it feels a bit antiquated) is still Pimsleur. The reason why is that it fulfills the two basic requirements for memorizing: repetition and recall.

You need to practice saying something more than once to master it. Probably a dozen times, at least. And you’ll remember it better if those times were spaced out over days or weeks, rather than all occurring back-to-back. Many apps today specialize in repetition, but that’s not worth anything unless you have recall.


Recall is also essential, but unlike spaced repetition, it’s a lot less common. Apps like DuoLingo help you learn phrases by choosing words from a word-bank. Unfortunately, from a cognitive perspective, speaking is nothing like this, so it doesn’t help much in being able to utter those phrases. Pimsleur, with their full-English prompts, followed by a pause for saying the matching phrase, get it right.

Pimsleur is expensive, unfortunately, and I don’t recommend going beyond level one month. If you’re going to travel to learn, you just need enough to get started.

If you’re on a budget, a good alternative is to create a list of basic phrases and put them in a free-to-use app like Anki, along with asking a native speaker to record them spoken aloud, so you don’t mess up the pronunciation.

A good list of starting phrases should include:

I would like ____

Where is ____?

How do you say _____?

What is that?

How much is it?

What is your name? // My name is ____.

Where are you from? // I am from _____.

What do you do for work? // I am a _____.

In our intensive language immersion trip, we also had another phrase memorized, “We’re doing a project to learn [the language] by not speaking English.” This avoided issues when someone was curious why someone whose language ability wasn’t that good would nonetheless insist on practicing.

Mistake #3: Not Making Native-Language Friends

Socializing is an essential ingredient to immersion. In some immersion situations, this will be easy for you. Maybe your traveling to meet faraway relatives and want to learn their language? Maybe you’re going as part of a study-abroad program and events with your classmates are guaranteed?

However, in other circumstances, making friends isn’t so easy—especially if you want to avoid the bubble.

In our trip, we were confronted with this problem, constantly. We were living for three months at a time, working from home and not attending any classes or social events. How could we meet friends who were either native speakers of the language we wanted to learn, or were fluent enough that they could speak with us in the language?

In European countries, if you’re a younger person, the easiest solution is often just to go out. Go to meetups through meetup.com. Join activities. Go to parties. Say hello to people in coffee shops. If you can add some enthusiasm to your delivery, you’ll eventually make some friends. Just don’t give up early if you feel like switching back to English.

In Asia, the different culture meant randomly approaching strangers was often a no-no. In these cases, we opted for a different tactic. Hire a couple private tutors who were roughly our age, and tell them that you’re looking to make friends and need to socialize to learn the language. In most cases, this allowed us to get introductions which started the process of building a social circle without having to awkwardly approach random strangers for conversation practice.

Ultimately the key is to not give up and try different tactics. If you don’t feel comfortable approaching strangers, try going to meetups. If you need introductions, try leveraging the few people you do meet and asking them if they can introduce you to others.

Mistake #4: Not Getting a Tutor (or Dedicated Language Partner)

Most people see the role of tutors as a kind of academic facilitator. The tutor is someone who helps you study and pass classes, for languages or something else.

In reality, the role of the tutor shouldn’t be to lecture while you take notes. Instead, it should be a dedicated person who can answer questions, explain how the language works and, at the very least, be an early opportunity to practice speaking while you’re still trying to make friends.

I suggest getting a professional teacher if you’re not a seasoned language learner for your first time. This is because many native people don’t actually have a high degree of understanding of how their language works. They can speak it, but they cannot explain nuances of grammar or vocabulary. Professional teachers get this instruction and so can often help.

If you’re from a Western country and you’re traveling to a developing country or country where tutoring costs are low, this solution may be fine. But what if you’re going in the reverse direction? Or you’re trying to learn in a country that has exorbitantly high costs?

In that case, you may want to settle for a dedicated language partner. This person doesn’t even need to be a native speaker of the language. Rather you just want someone that you can put in at least an hour a day talking with them to make sure you can practice the things you do understand. They could be a fellow learner, or a native speaker who is willing to swap practice in your language in exchange for the one you’re trying to learn.

Mistake #5: Not Learning the Phonology Properly

The biggest thing that will hold back your perceived fluency is vocabulary. Lacking the right word is a huge problem. Unfortunately, learning words is also the most time-intensive part of language learning. To be properly fluent in a language, you may need upwards of 50,000 words, especially once you include proper nouns, names and cultural knowledge.

Pronunciation, on the other hand, is a much easier win, and it can often leverage an initially low level into a slightly higher perceived level. This is a strategic advantage early on, when you want to convince people to speak with you in the language, rather than “help you out” by speaking in English.

The technical way to do this would be to master the IPA and study linguistic texts for the language you’re trying to learn. A much easier way, however, is simply to look at diagrams of tongue positions so you can mimic them when you’re trying to speak. For reference, here’s one I used for learning to pronounce Mandarin properly.

Keep in mind that the goal, especially early on, shouldn’t be perfection but understandability. You don’t need to trick someone into thinking you’re a native speaker. But you should be articulate enough so that native speakers don’t struggle to understand the words and phrases you do actually know.

Mistake #6: Moving Around Too Much

If your goal is to learn a language, pick a place and then stay put.

Moving around, hopping from city to city, within a linguistic environment, often breaks the social connections you might have been tenuously forming in a given place. By breaking those connections, you’ll find it harder to sustain interactions with tutors, friends or language partners.

If you want to travel around and not stay cooped up your whole trip, I recommend picking a base to start at, staying there for awhile (this can correspond with a work or study term), and planning some travel after once you’ve reached a moderate level of fluency.

If you’ve already planned to travel a lot on your trip, you can still practice, but the ability to go deep will be more restricted. It’s a trade-off you’ll have to consider if you’re planning to travel or live abroad primarily for sightseeing or for language learning.

Bonus Suggestion: Stop Speaking English!

If you can avoid the above six mistakes, then you’re already off to a very good start learning a language while traveling. A final, bonus suggestion I would like to give is that you attempt to stop speaking English (or whichever languages you already speak) completely during your trip. This may sound impossibly difficult, but this was the basis of my four-language experiment around the world and it actually made things a lot easier.

Even if you have requirements from work, school or life that require some speaking of your mother tongue, putting strict “No English” boundaries on your life can help avoid the temptation to fall into the bubble and makes practicing much easier.

Learning a language while traveling can be one of the most rewarding things you’ll do in your life. There’s nothing quite like being able to participate in another culture, and language learning is one of the best ways to do that.

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Some Thoughts on Meditation

About a year ago, I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. I was interested in meditating before that, but like most people, found it pretty frustrating and didn’t do it regularly.

If there’s one benefit of doing a 10-day retreat is that you quickly get over the mild feeling of discomfort in meditating. Instead it gets replaced by an extreme, almost torturous feeling as you contemplate spending the next ten days sitting motionless, cross-legged on the floor.

After the initial unpleasantness though, I felt like I left the retreat with two big things I didn’t have before.

The first was simply the ability to meditate. Rather than get frustrated and give up after fifteen minutes, now it was possible to sit for an hour or two.

The second thing feels harder to describe. Some combination of the no-speaking, heavily restricted lifestyle and non-stop meditation caused a shift in my cognitive processes. For awhile after, I found it impossible to get bored or frustrated. Life felt completely fresh.

This second thing is hard to understate, but it came with a pretty large disadvantage, which was that it faded away almost immediately. Two weeks after I had come back, and despite my commitment to realizing a new way of seeing things, everything settled back down to normal.

My First Meditation Habit Failed

For awhile, I kept up the initially recommended dose of two hours of meditation per day. This wasn’t easy. I was in the midst of an intense book writing schedule, and so an extra two hours of sitting were hard to pry from my schedule.

However, I had hoped that keeping up the meditation might help the new perspective I had gained on the retreat prove more durable.

I can’t say whether the continued meditation helped prolong that perspective, but I can say that it faded much more quickly than my meditation habit. I kept up the habit for another six-to-eight weeks, after things felt like normal. Eventually, with the excessive schedule weighing me down, I dropped the habit.

I briefly tried taking a different course—ten minutes a day of meditation. Just as a placeholder, while I figured things out. But that also didn’t last. I didn’t take it seriously enough, and my practice was getting too sloppy to have any chance of a benefit.

What was the Magic Behind Meditation?

At this point, for most things in life, I would probably just chalk up my experience as a fluke. It was a weird moment of consciousness due to an extreme environment I’ll be unable to replicate. Leave it as a good memory and move on with life.

However, there really was something dramatic about my experience during, and in the week or two after, my first meditation retreat. It really had felt like I had gained a perspective that could be “flipped-on” the way you might learn to cross your eyes to see the 3-D pictures in magic eye drawings.

That perspective had a lot less anxiety, more focus and was free of many of the pathologies that I felt were present in my everyday thinking. Even if that perspective feels distant now, I think it’s worth spending more time trying to understand it.

Putting on my scientist’s hat for a moment, I can imagine a few things that might have been different (or a combination of them) in the retreat and the immediate post-retreat environment that allowed this perspective shift even if I can’t sustain it now:

Retreats are cut off from outside worries and anxieties. They are a mental vacation from real life, even if they replace that with something arduous.

No talking. Perhaps verbal silence fosters mental silence, given enough of it?

Quasi-religious atmosphere. Maybe the semi-cultlike nature of the Vipassana retreats itself creates a kind of spiritual placebo effect that one later attributes to the meditation?

Extreme lifestyle restriction. No screens, no meals after noon, no sex, no reading, no talking, no nothing. The extreme constraints might have forced a perspective shift the same way being in a dark room long enough can create hallucinations.

Intense experiences create afterglow. The experience was incredibly difficult in the beginning, and I had my share of negative experiences as well. Perhaps the ramped intensity of those negative experiences created the positive experiences in the rebound.

It’s impossible to know which of these was the principle cause of my subjective shift, or whether it’s something that could be replicated. But I’m still curious enough that I’d like to keep searching to find out more.

How I’m Restarting a Meditation Habit

The first thing I’m doing now, is trying to avoid the mistakes of my first two attempts:

The first habit was too hard. Two hours per day was too difficult. I ended up dropping it when I felt it was making me more anxious than before (because I couldn’t find time for it).

The second habit was too easy. I didn’t discipline myself to sit up straight and commit to proper technique, so many times I was just doing some informal meditation lying in bed before going to sleep.

Given these two failures, I wanted to try something down the middle. Thirty minutes, first thing in the morning.

First thing in the morning, to cement the routine and avoid procrastination.

Thirty minutes, in a seated posture, to give myself enough time to actually meditate.

I can’t say whether this habit will fare better than the previous two, but I’m committed to giving it a shot.

In addition to the new habit, I’m also attempting a new approach. During my Vipassana retreat, we were advised to treat the practice very seriously. Treat it like work.

When I returned from the trip, I was reading more accounts from different traditions of meditation that emphasized a no-effort kind of “do nothing” approach to meditation. While I can see how this advice can make sense, I think without a really strong foundation of disciplined meditation to start, it’s probably just going to end up failing to meditate.

I’d like to reshift my focus now back onto that original approach I learned, to see if it makes a difference. Take the meditation seriously, and try my best to sustain focus on the technique I’m going to use during that time.

I’m not sure whether this habit will be enough to recapture the kind of perspective shift I experienced my first time around. It may be that the perspective shift is inherently transient, a short-term effect of an intense shift to my life. However, as always, the only way to find out will be to experiment carefully and keep track of the results.

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How to Enjoy Studying

Studying is an unpleasant task for most people. Students procrastinate on preparing for an exam until a last minute cram. Professional avoid taking the training they need to get ahead in their profession. Tests make people so anxious they change careers altogether.

If you can learn to enjoy studying, however, you’ll unlock a much larger world of opportunities. Not just in school and classes, but in life.

Those who deeply enjoy learning new things can add new hobbies, accelerate their career and develop new points of pride and confidence. That can’t happen, however, if the thought of studying hard to learn something fills you with so much dread that you only stick to easier things.

Why You Don’t Like Studying

Why people like and don’t like things is a big subject in psychology. Although there are intrinsic likes and dislikes, a lot of our likes and dislikes are learned, rather than instinctual.

This is because we learn to associate the things we like with other, instinctive, likes. We also learn to associate the things we dislike with other, instinctive, dislikes. Sometimes this effect is powerful enough that something which is a mildly instinctive dislike can be overcome through sufficiently strong pairing to an instinctive like.

Consider spicy food. The capsaicin found in hot peppers creates its sensation by activating pain and temperature receptors on the tongue. Normally these are designed to tell you to stop eating, not to consume more.

Yet many people learn to like spicy foods because they become a learned association with other rewarding treats like salsa, curry or kimchi. Eventually the spice that was previously painful may even be addictive, as you seek spicier foods and avoid blander ones.

How to Learn to Enjoy Studying

Studying is a mentally strenuous activity that often involves frustration by default. Because you’re learning something hard, it’s a natural reaction for your mind to seek out things which are easier or more entertaining.

This is made worse because this mildly difficult task can be associated with painful associations. Test anxiety. Failure. Negative feedback from teachers and peers. Boredom in school.

However, if you can pair studying with sufficiently rewarding activities, a different association can begin to develop. Now instead of feeling anxious, bored or frustrated, you can start to feel excited, interested and enthusiastic.

Step One: Pair Your Existing Studying With Things You Like

Although this could technically be accomplished simply by eating ice cream every time you finish a chapter, I’m skeptical how durable this conditioning will be. After all, you know you can just skip one to get the other. Also, needing to reward yourself each time you do a little studying can delay the whole process enough that now new anxieties form about your lack of productivity.

A better way is to try to create an intrinsic connection between what you’re studying and what you like. Studying statistics may be boring, but if you’re interested in sports, it can be a window into understanding why teams win and lose. Computer programming may feel bland, until you’re making your own game or web app.

Every subject sits in a nexus of millions of connections to everything else in the world. Seeking out and fostering those connections can help you cultivate an interest. Making the effort to see how something dull applies to something interesting can make all the difference in making studying enjoyable.

Step Two: Connect Studying with Progress

Progress itself is inherently rewarding. When you start to connect actions with progress, then this itself can be intrinsically reinforcing. Arnold Schwarzenegger worked out so much, in part, because he enjoyed the feeling of soreness in his muscles after a workout. In his mind, that minor pain became so connected to the muscular growth he sought after, that it started to feel good every time he did it.

Similarly, if you track your progress and visualize it, you can make studying a more enjoyable task. When I was studying languages, nothing would make me happier than clearing my Anki count for the day. I would often set the new words as a countdown so I had a goal to clear them out.

How would your motivation change if you drew a map of everything you needed to study, and colored it in as you reviewed it, filling out your knowledge territory and taking the abstract mental improvement you’re undertaking and turning it into something you can see?

Step Three: Create Your Own Study Projects

This one may sound backwards. If you’re already having hard time doing the studying you need to do, why would adding more studying make it better?

The reason is that many people get into a low-confidence spiral. They don’t do as well in school as they would like, so all they feel worse and worse about studying. This, in turn, makes it hard for them to study properly so they do badly and thus deepen the spiral.

Creating self-initiated studying projects can get you out of this by removing the source of negative feedback. If you set the goal, interests, methods and materials, you can work on a project you’re much more likely to succeed with and start to recapture a positive spiral.

If this subject is adjacent to one you’re learning in school, you can leverage that confidence learned in your side project into the one you need to tackle full-time.

Step Four: Focus on the Now

Human beings like challenging mental tasks. Solving Sudoku or crossword puzzles is something many people do for fun, but if the same tasks were packaged into a classroom, many of the same people would hate doing them. Why?

The reason is that the future performance evaluation, the need to study and the only semi-voluntary nature of the activity can stifle any natural enjoyment. If I know I have to solve this Sudoku puzzle, and that if I get it wrong it might ruin my life, I’m not going to love it the same way as if it were just for fun.

Therefore, one of the most powerful ways you can learn to enjoy studying is to, paradoxically, focus on the studying itself. Don’t focus on future outcomes, just focus on the puzzles in front of you and challenging yourself to see if you can solve them. Become curious about how they work, rather than feeling burdened with the obligation to learn them.

Human beings learn through play. The more your study becomes play, the more you’ll enjoy it, but also the more you’ll learn.

Shifting Your Enjoyment

None of these steps will take you from hating something to loving it overnight. The loops of reinforced conditioning are probably years-deep and can take a long time to unravel.

However, if you an apply these consciously maybe you can take something you absolutely hate and turn it only into a minor nuisance. Or something you don’t really like into something you find kind of interesting.

Even small shifts of this kind can add up in reduced stress and less procrastination. In the end, learning to enjoy studying can matter even more than learning to study well. If you can enjoy the challenge and begin to see what you’re learning in a more positive light, you’ll be able to start performing better as well.

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Does Choice Exist?

One of the most vexing philosophical questions is whether or not human beings have free will.

On the one hand, we certainly seem to have the ability to make choices. While what I decide to do with my life feels influenced by outside factors, it does feel like I am the one ultimately making the decision.

On the other hand, huge swaths of scientific evidence seem to undermine the idea of free choices.

Behavioral genetics says that much of our behavior is influenced by our genes. I don’t choose my genes, so if my genes explain my choices, what role is there for me? Even if it isn’t your genes, your culture determines much of what you think and believe. You don’t pick your culture, upbringing or any of those other factors, so if those things choose for you, what role do you play?

Some scientists have argued that free will is an elaborate illusion perpetrated by the brain. That the conscious mind isn’t the CEO of the brain—making and executing choices. But the PR department. Confabulating reasons to explain that behavior, once it is made by unconscious processes.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of the elephant and the rider, arguing that we are not the stampeding elephant, but the rider, vainly assuming he has control over the much larger animal beneath him.

Can Choice Exist in a Scientific World?

My own belief is one of compatibilism. This view argues that, even if we do end up living in a completely materialistic and deterministic universe, something like free will does exist.

While I don’t like the term “free will” for the baggage it represents, I do believe it is a folk psychological concept that none the less has enormous utility. Believing that something like choices exist in the world is enormously useful, and that as a model for human behavior they work extraordinarily well.

In my view, there are two different views of the world you could attack when attacking free will. One is a metaphysical critique of the concept of human agency and choice. This is attacking the idea that human choices and decisions are somehow separate from the world, yet influence it causally. Such a view is common in many religions, and yet contradicts a lot of what we know about physics and brain science.

The second is to go further than this, and not merely attack the metaphysical idea, but also the practical idea of choice. This is the idea that suggests that people can’t really be held responsible for their own actions or that, “it doesn’t really matter what you do, because you don’t have control over you own life.”

I sympathize with the first argument, but I soundly reject the second one.

To me, the people who are making the second argument are simply making a category error when talking about hierarchical systems. They are pointing to a low-level phenomenon, and using it to negate the existence of a higher-level one.

What do I mean?

Hierarchical Phenomena

A good way to understand this problem is by way of computers. Note, even if the mind ends up being nothing like a digital computer, at the really abstract level, this isn’t important. Computers simply happen to be the most complicated things in the universe that we actually fully understand from top to bottom.

In a computer, there is a lot of complex stuff going on. Because of this, we often choose different levels of description, from a hierarchy of concepts, to specify patterns of what a computer is doing.

Consider the idea of “clicking on a link.” What does that mean? Well, I move the mouse cursor over to a piece of underlined text and press the left mouse button, loading a page on the other side.

Now ask, do “links” exist inside the computer program? Clearly they do. And it’s the most useful way of talking about the behavior of users on a website. Worrying about what’s happening at lower levels of abstraction isn’t “more accurate” it’s wrong. It’s the wrong layer of the hierarchy to meaningfully understand what’s going on.

Imagine, however, that some computer scientist were to tear apart the computer and see that, unfortunately, there were no links to be found. Instead, there were merely registers and logic units built on transistors. By carefully damaging certain transistors, or disabling certain registers, we could create links that don’t go anywhere when you click them.

Would such a computer scientist shout “Aha! I’ve proven that links are an illusion,” or suggest that, “this is further evidence that links do not exist and computers really are engaging in a process of shuffling bytes, rather than ‘clicking’ on any ‘links.’”?

That would be silly. A computer scientist knows that beneath the concept of a link, there is enormous amount of lower-level programming and hardware processes. That those processes are themselves not “links” and can be engineered to break down in certain situations doesn’t undermine the fact that “links” are still the correct concept to use when describing the higher-level behavior in most situations.

Choice as a Higher-Level Phenomenon

Choices, I would like to argue, are like links, and the act of choosing is like clicking a link. It is a complex process that contains many other processes, which themselves are not choices!

This is why I take issue with many working in neuroscience claiming that detailed examinations of the brain, and unusual experimental setups somehow are evidence that people don’t routinely make choices in their everyday lives.

Again, if the argument is simply being made against the metaphysical idea that free will somehow comes in from outside the material universe and causally influences things, then I have no issue with it. But if it is extended to argue that, practically speaking, we should stop talking about “choices” since they don’t exist, then I think this is as mistaken as a computer scientist denying the existence of hyperlinks and clicking behavior based on evidence involving registers and logic units.

The Anatomy of a Choice

The challenge right now is that with our incomplete understanding of psychology and neuroscience we are not in the position of the computer scientist when understanding linking behavior. We can’t go from the atom up and figure out exactly what constitutes a choice, versus an unconscious action.

It may also turn out that our folk psychological concept of a choice is perhaps too fuzzy. Maybe there are different kinds of choices, that have completely different properties, and it would be better to speak about them more precisely than we do right now.

Despite the revisions that may come from increasing science, I’m highly skeptical that science will judge that choosing, or anything like it, as an obsolete description of human nature. Rather, what we will do is figure out what are the underlying mechanisms that facilitate choices, and those will almost certainly be made of things that themselves are not choices.

If we are made of biological components, which are themselves made of atoms, there can be no other option. Since atoms, and the behavior of atoms, almost certainly don’t have choices, then the sub-component of human choices will be choiceless as well.

The Implications of Choice

All this is to say is that dismissing the practical relevance of choosing, or its moral implications, as our knowledge of lower-level brain mechanisms, is profoundly misguided. Like the computer scientist who discovers that the complex user interface she sees on the screen is actually caused by transistors, doesn’t undermine the concept of “links” or “clicking”, neither should the discovery of unconscious brain processes which underlie decision-making, negate the concepts of “choice” or “agency.”

We are a part of the universe, not separate from it. The thing which separates us from the simple quantum fluctuations of atoms, or chemical shuffling of microbiology, is huge orders of complexity built on complexity, rather than a difference in kind. Choices, and the implications of being something which possesses the ability to choose, is something which fits into that picture, rather than stands apart from it.

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Some Thoughts on Meditation

About a year ago, I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. I was interested in meditating before that, but like most people, found it pretty frustrating and didn’t do it regularly.

If there’s one benefit of doing a 10-day retreat is that you quickly get over the mild feeling of discomfort in meditating. Instead it gets replaced by an extreme, almost torturous feeling as you contemplate spending the next ten days sitting motionless, cross-legged on the floor.

After the initial unpleasantness though, I felt like I left the retreat with two big things I didn’t have before.

The first was simply the ability to meditate. Rather than get frustrated and give up after fifteen minutes, now it was possible to sit for an hour or two.

The second thing feels harder to describe. Some combination of the no-speaking, heavily restricted lifestyle and non-stop meditation caused a shift in my cognitive processes. For awhile after, I found it impossible to get bored or frustrated. Life felt completely fresh.

This second thing is hard to understate, but it came with a pretty large disadvantage, which was that it faded away almost immediately. Two weeks after I had come back, and despite my commitment to realizing a new way of seeing things, everything settled back down to normal.

My First Meditation Habit Failed

For awhile, I kept up the initially recommended dose of two hours of meditation per day. This wasn’t easy. I was in the midst of an intense book writing schedule, and so an extra two hours of sitting were hard to pry from my schedule.

However, I had hoped that keeping up the meditation might help the new perspective I had gained on the retreat prove more durable.

I can’t say whether the continued meditation helped prolong that perspective, but I can say that it faded much more quickly than my meditation habit. I kept up the habit for another six-to-eight weeks, after things felt like normal. Eventually, with the excessive schedule weighing me down, I dropped the habit.

I briefly tried taking a different course—ten minutes a day of meditation. Just as a placeholder, while I figured things out. But that also didn’t last. I didn’t take it seriously enough, and my practice was getting too sloppy to have any chance of a benefit.

What was the Magic Behind Meditation?

At this point, for most things in life, I would probably just chalk up my experience as a fluke. It was a weird moment of consciousness due to an extreme environment I’ll be unable to replicate. Leave it as a good memory and move on with life.

However, there really was something dramatic about my experience during, and in the week or two after, my first meditation retreat. It really had felt like I had gained a perspective that could be “flipped-on” the way you might learn to cross your eyes to see the 3-D pictures in magic eye drawings.

That perspective had a lot less anxiety, more focus and was free of many of the pathologies that I felt were present in my everyday thinking. Even if that perspective feels distant now, I think it’s worth spending more time trying to understand it.

Putting on my scientist’s hat for a moment, I can imagine a few things that might have been different (or a combination of them) in the retreat and the immediate post-retreat environment that allowed this perspective shift even if I can’t sustain it now:

Retreats are cut off from outside worries and anxieties. They are a mental vacation from real life, even if they replace that with something arduous.

No talking. Perhaps verbal silence fosters mental silence, given enough of it?

Quasi-religious atmosphere. Maybe the semi-cultlike nature of the Vipassana retreats itself creates a kind of spiritual placebo effect that one later attributes to the meditation?

Extreme lifestyle restriction. No screens, no meals after noon, no sex, no reading, no talking, no nothing. The extreme constraints might have forced a perspective shift the same way being in a dark room long enough can create hallucinations.

Intense experiences create afterglow. The experience was incredibly difficult in the beginning, and I had my share of negative experiences as well. Perhaps the ramped intensity of those negative experiences created the positive experiences in the rebound.

It’s impossible to know which of these was the principle cause of my subjective shift, or whether it’s something that could be replicated. But I’m still curious enough that I’d like to keep searching to find out more.

How I’m Restarting a Meditation Habit

The first thing I’m doing now, is trying to avoid the mistakes of my first two attempts:

The first habit was too hard. Two hours per day was too difficult. I ended up dropping it when I felt it was making me more anxious than before (because I couldn’t find time for it).

The second habit was too easy. I didn’t discipline myself to sit up straight and commit to proper technique, so many times I was just doing some informal meditation lying in bed before going to sleep.

Given these two failures, I wanted to try something down the middle. Thirty minutes, first thing in the morning.

First thing in the morning, to cement the routine and avoid procrastination.

Thirty minutes, in a seated posture, to give myself enough time to actually meditate.

I can’t say whether this habit will fare better than the previous two, but I’m committed to giving it a shot.

In addition to the new habit, I’m also attempting a new approach. During my Vipassana retreat, we were advised to treat the practice very seriously. Treat it like work.

When I returned from the trip, I was reading more accounts from different traditions of meditation that emphasized a no-effort kind of “do nothing” approach to meditation. While I can see how this advice can make sense, I think without a really strong foundation of disciplined meditation to start, it’s probably just going to end up failing to meditate.

I’d like to reshift my focus now back onto that original approach I learned, to see if it makes a difference. Take the meditation seriously, and try my best to sustain focus on the technique I’m going to use during that time.

I’m not sure whether this habit will be enough to recapture the kind of perspective shift I experienced my first time around. It may be that the perspective shift is inherently transient, a short-term effect of an intense shift to my life. However, as always, the only way to find out will be to experiment carefully and keep track of the results.

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Want to Learn a Language on Your Next Trip? Avoid These Six Mistakes.

Immersion is the best way to learn a language. You can learn much faster than sitting in class. It feels exciting and useful, not just a stale list of grammatical rules and vocabulary words.

However, most people make some key mistakes when trying to learn a language while traveling. I’ve made these mistakes, so I want to help you avoid repeating them on your next trip.

My first experience learning another language was studying abroad in France. I spent a year there, and after a year of hard work, I was able to speak some French. Although I was happy with this, I noticed how so much of my effort was pushing uphill. If I had made choices differently, I could have learned much faster.

Flash forward four years. I’m now attempting, with a friend, a much more ambitious project. One year, four different languages. Instead of a year to learn each, we’d only have three months.

The difference, however, was that I didn’t make the mistakes of my first trip. The outcome was that I ended up learning Spanish better in three months than I did over a year learning French in France. Same opportunity, different strategy, completely different results.

Side note: In case you’re wondering whether my French unduly helped my Spanish, my traveling partner also learned Spanish exceptionally well and he didn’t know any other Romance language before we started. You can see our full progress here.

The Six Mistakes When Learning a Language While Traveling

Below are the six biggest mistakes I made on my first trip (and which are painfully common amongst travelers and expats). If you can avoid them, you’ll learn much faster, regardless of whether you’re a linguistic genius or if you failed high-school Spanish class.

Mistake #1: Creating an English-Speaking Bubble

Or, if English isn’t your first language, then a bubble of whichever language you feel most comfortable with.

Immersion is something that sounds easy on paper. Go to the country that speaks the language you want to learn. Live there. Voila!

Except it usually doesn’t work that way. Instead, you land in the country not feeling confident speaking, so you decide to start in English, just until you get your bearings. You meet your new landlord, some peers, maybe make a friend or two at a party—all in your native language.

Soon enough, you’re three months in and you’ve spent all your time talking in English, except for the occasional restaurant order or taxicab instructions.

The bubble is your number-one enemy to fluency when traveling to learn a language. If you can successfully avoid making a bubble, you’ll end up having massive amounts of practice and you’ll be almost guaranteed to learn something.

On the other hand, if your bubble sticks, you can end up living in a country for decades without ever learning the local language. I met expats in China who had lived there for over twenty years, and could barely say anything above a simple, “Ni hao.” Pop the bubble early and you’ll avoid being one of them.

Mistake #2: Not Mastering Basic Phrases at Home First

Immersion is great for facilitating a language. But to speak to others (without forming the dreaded bubble I mentioned earlier) you need to have some basics. These are core sentence patterns that let you make basic requests, including those that help you expand your ability to speak.

There are many ways you can acquire these basic phrases. Unfortunately a lot of language learning tools out there are absolutely terrible at this initial requirement for immersive learning.

Of all the tools I’ve tried, the best (even if it feels a bit antiquated) is still Pimsleur. The reason why is that it fulfills the two basic requirements for memorizing: repetition and recall.

You need to practice saying something more than once to master it. Probably a dozen times, at least. And you’ll remember it better if those times were spaced out over days or weeks, rather than all occurring back-to-back. Many apps today specialize in repetition, but that’s not worth anything unless you have recall.


Recall is also essential, but unlike spaced repetition, it’s a lot less common. Apps like DuoLingo help you learn phrases by choosing words from a word-bank. Unfortunately, from a cognitive perspective, speaking is nothing like this, so it doesn’t help much in being able to utter those phrases. Pimsleur, with their full-English prompts, followed by a pause for saying the matching phrase, get it right.

Pimsleur is expensive, unfortunately, and I don’t recommend going beyond level one month. If you’re going to travel to learn, you just need enough to get started.

If you’re on a budget, a good alternative is to create a list of basic phrases and put them in a free-to-use app like Anki, along with asking a native speaker to record them spoken aloud, so you don’t mess up the pronunciation.

A good list of starting phrases should include:

I would like ____

Where is ____?

How do you say _____?

What is that?

How much is it?

What is your name? // My name is ____.

Where are you from? // I am from _____.

What do you do for work? // I am a _____.

In our intensive language immersion trip, we also had another phrase memorized, “We’re doing a project to learn [the language] by not speaking English.” This avoided issues when someone was curious why someone whose language ability wasn’t that good would nonetheless insist on practicing.

Mistake #3: Not Making Native-Language Friends

Socializing is an essential ingredient to immersion. In some immersion situations, this will be easy for you. Maybe your traveling to meet faraway relatives and want to learn their language? Maybe you’re going as part of a study-abroad program and events with your classmates are guaranteed?

However, in other circumstances, making friends isn’t so easy—especially if you want to avoid the bubble.

In our trip, we were confronted with this problem, constantly. We were living for three months at a time, working from home and not attending any classes or social events. How could we meet friends who were either native speakers of the language we wanted to learn, or were fluent enough that they could speak with us in the language?

In European countries, if you’re a younger person, the easiest solution is often just to go out. Go to meetups through meetup.com. Join activities. Go to parties. Say hello to people in coffee shops. If you can add some enthusiasm to your delivery, you’ll eventually make some friends. Just don’t give up early if you feel like switching back to English.

In Asia, the different culture meant randomly approaching strangers was often a no-no. In these cases, we opted for a different tactic. Hire a couple private tutors who were roughly our age, and tell them that you’re looking to make friends and need to socialize to learn the language. In most cases, this allowed us to get introductions which started the process of building a social circle without having to awkwardly approach random strangers for conversation practice.

Ultimately the key is to not give up and try different tactics. If you don’t feel comfortable approaching strangers, try going to meetups. If you need introductions, try leveraging the few people you do meet and asking them if they can introduce you to others.

Mistake #4: Not Getting a Tutor (or Dedicated Language Partner)

Most people see the role of tutors as a kind of academic facilitator. The tutor is someone who helps you study and pass classes, for languages or something else.

In reality, the role of the tutor shouldn’t be to lecture while you take notes. Instead, it should be a dedicated person who can answer questions, explain how the language works and, at the very least, be an early opportunity to practice speaking while you’re still trying to make friends.

I suggest getting a professional teacher if you’re not a seasoned language learner for your first time. This is because many native people don’t actually have a high degree of understanding of how their language works. They can speak it, but they cannot explain nuances of grammar or vocabulary. Professional teachers get this instruction and so can often help.

If you’re from a Western country and you’re traveling to a developing country or country where tutoring costs are low, this solution may be fine. But what if you’re going in the reverse direction? Or you’re trying to learn in a country that has exorbitantly high costs?

In that case, you may want to settle for a dedicated language partner. This person doesn’t even need to be a native speaker of the language. Rather you just want someone that you can put in at least an hour a day talking with them to make sure you can practice the things you do understand. They could be a fellow learner, or a native speaker who is willing to swap practice in your language in exchange for the one you’re trying to learn.

Mistake #5: Not Learning the Phonology Properly

The biggest thing that will hold back your perceived fluency is vocabulary. Lacking the right word is a huge problem. Unfortunately, learning words is also the most time-intensive part of language learning. To be properly fluent in a language, you may need upwards of 50,000 words, especially once you include proper nouns, names and cultural knowledge.

Pronunciation, on the other hand, is a much easier win, and it can often leverage an initially low level into a slightly higher perceived level. This is a strategic advantage early on, when you want to convince people to speak with you in the language, rather than “help you out” by speaking in English.

The technical way to do this would be to master the IPA and study linguistic texts for the language you’re trying to learn. A much easier way, however, is simply to look at diagrams of tongue positions so you can mimic them when you’re trying to speak. For reference, here’s one I used for learning to pronounce Mandarin properly.

Keep in mind that the goal, especially early on, shouldn’t be perfection but understandability. You don’t need to trick someone into thinking you’re a native speaker. But you should be articulate enough so that native speakers don’t struggle to understand the words and phrases you do actually know.

Mistake #6: Moving Around Too Much

If your goal is to learn a language, pick a place and then stay put.

Moving around, hopping from city to city, within a linguistic environment, often breaks the social connections you might have been tenuously forming in a given place. By breaking those connections, you’ll find it harder to sustain interactions with tutors, friends or language partners.

If you want to travel around and not stay cooped up your whole trip, I recommend picking a base to start at, staying there for awhile (this can correspond with a work or study term), and planning some travel after once you’ve reached a moderate level of fluency.

If you’ve already planned to travel a lot on your trip, you can still practice, but the ability to go deep will be more restricted. It’s a trade-off you’ll have to consider if you’re planning to travel or live abroad primarily for sightseeing or for language learning.

Bonus Suggestion: Stop Speaking English!

If you can avoid the above six mistakes, then you’re already off to a very good start learning a language while traveling. A final, bonus suggestion I would like to give is that you attempt to stop speaking English (or whichever languages you already speak) completely during your trip. This may sound impossibly difficult, but this was the basis of my four-language experiment around the world and it actually made things a lot easier.

Even if you have requirements from work, school or life that require some speaking of your mother tongue, putting strict “No English” boundaries on your life can help avoid the temptation to fall into the bubble and makes practicing much easier.

Learning a language while traveling can be one of the most rewarding things you’ll do in your life. There’s nothing quite like being able to participate in another culture, and language learning is one of the best ways to do that.

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Underrated Success Tactic: Actually Doing the Math

My friend Justin Jackson wrote an article recently about reducing costs for his online small business.

Anyone familiar with start-up advice has probably been told a thousand times to not worry about costs. Focus on increasing revenue. Cutting costs is a losing battle.

Although this is usually sound advice, Jackson did something unusual: He actually opened a spreadsheet and did the math. And, unlikely the generic advice, he actually found controlling costs was a reasonably good business strategy for him to pursue at that time.

Look, I love heuristics and rules of thumb. It’s often helpful to have a standardized answer that will be true in most cases which you can just run with.

However, there’s often a tendency to overuse such pieces of generic advice. People begin to treat them as fundamental laws of the universe, rather than the helpful shortcuts which they are.

That’s why actually doing the math is such an underrated strategy.

It may only take twenty minutes to pull up a spreadsheet and see how one approach compares with another, but the answer you get will be far more accurate than if you had skipped the work and just stuck with prevailing assumptions.

Where Should You Actually Do The Math?

Here’s some places where you should definitely do the math, and yet few people do:

Buying a house versus renting. Renters are throwing away money. Mortgage debt is slavery. The truth is, all the fascinating variety of takes aren’t nearly as valuable as actually doing the math. You can even use a calculator like this one which does the work for you.

Exercising or cutting calories to lose weight. How many calories do you burn at the gym? How many could you reasonably cut on a diet?

Going to grad school. What are reasonable graduation salaries? How much more money do people make on average? These are all statistics you can find. Then add up the amount of money you would be spending to attend (including the opportunity costs of missing work). Which is greater?

How much money should you put away in savings? Compare how different savings rates, at different expected levels of investment return, would differ when you’re 40, 50 or 60, if you continue them for those lengths of time?

These are just scratching the surface, but they all have a common theme. They are all questions people debate endlessly. They all depend on a few assumptions, but most of which can be reasonably researched to get an approximate figure. They could be answered, largely, by simply doing the math.

How to Actually Do The Math

Doing the math is important. But most people aren’t very good at math (which might explain why this approach is uncommon).

Consider the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which includes a measure of “quantitative literacy” or the ability to do basic math. According to this report a majority of Americans were unable to “calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies, using a page from an office supplies catalog.” In most cases, actually doing the math is harder than this.

The quick answer is that you should learn to do math, before you can do *the* math in your life. However, wading through years of math classes is probably unnecessary for most of these questions, so there’s a simpler answer:

If your problem involves comparing two things that happen at the same time, then just add up the two effects and see which is bigger. The key to successful math will be estimating things properly and not forgetting about hidden factors.

Example: counting calories reduced from exercising or dieting.

If your problem involves comparing two things, especially money, that happen in different points in time, you need to discount things that happen later.

To do this, you just need the interest rate. This could be the amount your investments earn, loans you need to pay, or if you want to get fancy, a discount rate that also incorporates the risk of different options.

Put one plus the interest rate in one column of your Excel spreadsheet, and multiply it against the value in the next column, one row up. Output this to the value of the column one over. If you drag this down, you’ll automatically get how a value will grow over time. (A quick check, if you do this with a 10% interest rate, your columns should have 1.1, 1.21, 1.331, 1.4641 and so on)

You can do the reverse of this by taking something in the future, dividing it by one over one-plus-the-interest-rate and going backwards in time. This can help you figure out how much something with a lot more later, can be worth compared to something right now.

If this explanation is a bit confusing, you can go into more depth here to calculate the time value of money.

You can also use this for non-monetary things that happen at different times, but the interest rate will be less obvious there, so be careful.

If your problem involves comparing things which aren’t directly comparable, say the benefit of enjoying your job more versus earning more money, you can convert one to the other by imagining a trade-off point for each. Say you’d go with Job A over B, only if it paid $20,000 more per year, then that’s the value of the non-monetary benefits of Job B.

You Can’t Always Do the Math, But You Should Calculate More

Actually running the numbers won’t always work. The situation might be ambiguous. The factors which would come together into a formula may not be clear-cut and you may not be sure where to go with them. The world is nebulous, so sometimes there’s no correct math to do for a given situation.

However, the amount of situations where a better, if not the definitive answer, can be reached by doing the math is far, far larger than most people actually practice it.

Doing the math also enforces a kind of discipline on your thinking. It forces you to not rush to assume the answers to questions without actually going out into the world and checking it first. This kind of discipline can lead to better decision-making, even if you don’t end up going the way your numbers point.

When in doubt, do the math. Make this your mantra, and you’ll make far fewer mistakes.

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The Nine Habits to Increase Your Energy

Energy, not time, is the basis for productivity. Having all the hours in the day won’t help you if you’re exhausted for most of it.

Your habits define your energy levels. If you have good habits, you’ll feel energized and be more resilient to burn out, both physically and mentally. If your habits are misaligned, you can get into a cycle where you feel worse and worse, until your it’s a struggle just to keep up.

Here are nine habits you can work on this year to increase your energy levels.

Habit #1: Go to Sleep Early

Sleep is the foundation of your energy. If you don’t get enough sleep, you’ll start to underperform.

While some people claim to work best on six or less hours of sleep, research says they’re kidding themselves. Seven to eight hours are pretty much mandatory if you’re going to stay cognitively sharp in the long-run.

For some people the sleep deprivation may have mentally plateaued, meaning they feel slightly tired all day, but they don’t think they’re getting any worse. An interesting experiment showed that sleep deprivation caused continuous declines in mental performance, even though subjects felt like they were holding steady.

Try this: Go to bed by 10pm every night, including weekends, for the next thirty days.

Habit #2: Exercise Every Day

Exercise is a long-term investment in your energy levels. It’s easy to cut in the short-term, but over time you’ll reduce your overall fitness, making it harder to think straight and stay alert throughout the day.

If you struggle to find time for exercise, don’t make going to the gym your prerequisite. Make a habit of doing some pushups or burpees every day throughout the day. These will get your heart pumping and blood moving, and they don’t require setting aside two hours from your already busy schedule.

You can add gym or fitness classes on top of this foundational habit, but this basic investment in exercise will keep you sharp when you can’t make it to the gym.

Try this: Do at least 10 burpees every day from your home.

Habit #3: Twenty-Minute Naps

Napping may feel lazy, but there’s research showing it has a range of cognitive benefits. This is particularly true if you’re doing a lot of learning, since the short burst of sleep can help with memory.

I used to feel guilty taking naps, believing it was a sign of weakness. Now, I think it’s definitely a strength. A short nap can turn you back on for work in the afternoon, when you’d normally be exhausted. Even if you work in an office that doesn’t encourage napping, you can use a slice of your lunch break, to quickly rest.

The key is to learn how to take short naps. Many people take naps which are too long, pushing them into deeper phases of sleep which cause them to feel even groggier when they wake up (although the benefits to even these naps often occur after the initial grogginess wears off). The key is to wake up immediately with your alarm. If you start adding more time, a quick nap can become a long sleep.

Try this: Insert a 20 minute nap after you eat lunch to recuperate your energy for the afternoon.

Habit #4: Do Your Hard Work in the Morning

Aim to get your most important work done in the first four hours of the workday, starting as soon as possible.

The benefits to your energy here are mostly psychological. My energy levels depend a lot on my mood. If I’ve gotten some important work done, my mood is usually good and I feel productive. If I’ve wasted time on emails, meetings, calls or failed to produce something valuable, I’m often frustrated and exhausted entering the second half of the day.

The other reason for this approach is that deep work isn’t always sustainable for the full workday. Better to concentrate it into a specific period than randomly insert it across chunks of time.

Try this: Make the first four hours of your morning a quiet, deep work zone.

Habit #5: Set Your Intention the Day Before

Energy is often about momentum. Start working hard and you’ll overcome procrastination and keep going throughout the day. Start slow and you may end up struggling against your own impulses, wasting the energy on things that aren’t productive.

One way to avoid this is to set a very clear intention of how your day will go, particularly in the beginning, the night before. Visualizing this intention and writing it down into your schedule can make it happen more automatically when you wake up.

Try this: Before you go to bed, write down your plan for the next day and visualize it.

Habit #6: Sell Yourself on Your Goals

Many people simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs: that other people (marketers) are really good at persuading them to do all sorts of things they wouldn’t do otherwise, but that they themselves have no ability to change their own motivation to do the things they have to do.

The truth is, you need to become the salesperson for your own goals. Not for other people, but for yourself.

Part of that starts with packaging—how you frame your goals and projects can have a huge effect on your motivation. Is this something you have to do? Or an exciting challenge?

Next it comes from refreshing and reminding yourself of your inspirations. Why did you get started down this path? What were you hoping to achieve. Good marketers know to focus the customer on visualizing what they want to drive sales. You can focus yourself on what you want to have the energy to get it done.

Try this: Set aside ten minutes every day to think about what today’s actions are helping you build towards.

Habit #7: Get Better Friends

You may not be able to choose your parents, colleagues or your boss. But you do have some control over the friends in your life.

You know that some friends you leave a conversation with them feeling excited and energized. Others you leave feeling even worse than you did beforehand.

You don’t need to exclude friends who are going through temporarily rough times, but you should consider who you spend your time with when there are people who consistently create one-sided emotional exchanges as the basis for your relationships. Everyone needs a shoulder to cry on sometimes, but some people will expect you to be their permanent shoulder.

Try this: Set a time limit on friends who leave you feeling drained.

Habit #8: Read Better Books

One of the great benefits of reading books isn’t simply to give you ideas and information. Rather it’s to reinforce a mentality that often occurs at a subconcious level. The best books aren’t those that teach you facts, but those that subtly change your entire thinking patterns.

Audio books can be very useful for this, since you can listen to them and re-listen to them on the go every day. A good book for this is one that, when you listen to it, automatically adjusts your thinking onto the things you need to work hard on. Just like a good song can be the background for a particular emotion, a good book can be the background for a particular energy of thinking.

Try this: Always have an audio book that motivates you to work on your goals.

Habit #9: Align Your Life

The last habit isn’t a one-time process, but an ongoing effort to bring the different elements of your life out of conflict and into alignment with one another.

A lot of energy is squandered because the different parts of our lives, both internal and external, are in conflict with each other. That could be the colleague at work who doesn’t want you to get promoted, the friends who make fun of your goals or even the internal fears and assumptions that keep you hesitating.

Spend some time untangling the different conflicts in your life to see how you could resolve them. Sometimes that can be done in the short-term, by making a change. Sometimes, it requires a long-term plan to escape the toxic environment, social circle or belief system that holds you back.

Try this: Sit down for an hour and brainstorm all the things which assist your goals and all the things which hold you back. How could you resolve those tensions?

What habits have you built to give you energy to work hard on the things that matter to you? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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