I’m going to describe the process I’ve used to condense a lot of learning into a short period of time. This is the same process I used to learn MIT’s 4-year computer science curriculum in twelve months, teach myself languages, business and intellectual subjects like physics and psychology.

This article is going to be a bit longer (~3500 words), so you may want to bookmark it for later.

I’m going to focus on the strategy for learning, meaning how you choose to break down a nebulous goal like “learn to speak French” or “understand personal finance” into something concrete and actionable. As much as possible, I’ll try to provide links to specific low-level tactics I use, such as the Feynman technique, visual mnemonics or active recall as well.

This strategy is just one possibility. If you’ve found success with another, by all means, go ahead! I only want to share the method I’ve been honing for years across a variety of different subjects.

The Steps in 2-Minutes

If you’re short on reading time, I’ll summarize the steps for you:

1. Take your learning goal, and craft it into a compelling, obsession-worthy mission.
2. Find material to learn from, structure it into a flexible curriculum.
3. Define feedback mechanisms to constantly direct your future learning efforts and ensure high-intensity, active recall.
4. Test and enforce a schedule that is sustainable over the entire lifetime of the project.
5. Develop a long-term retention strategy (formal or informal).

There’s a few points that may be different from what you’re used to:

The first is that the learning goal is oriented around a obsessive mission. Many people trying to learn something adopt a haphazard, casual approach. In general, I’ve found this wastes a lot more time and produces lesser results.

The second is that the strategy is defined by high-feedback practice. In a classroom setting, students can be forgiven for neglecting this step because it is already partially provided in the form of assignments and quizzes. When teaching yourself something, it is very easy to slip into learning tasks that are devoid of feedback and so it takes months to realize you’re off course.

Finally, the process is driven by mentally intensive, active learning methods. Although this can be uncomfortable at first, the speed of that results come makes it worthwhile. You can spend months on a slower strategy, get discouraged and give up which could be fixed by going through some initial discomfort but seeing results quickly.

Now, onto the steps…

Step One: Craft an Obsession

Almost anything can be achieved with the right motivation. The motivation you bring to a project forms the foundation for all your efforts. If that foundation is unstable, you don’t have a chance at success even if you use all the “correct” learning techniques.

My approach has been to choose short-term obsessive missions for learning new things. The word obsession usually has a negative connotation, being paired with “dangerous” or “unhealthy”. But obsession can also be a positive force. By structuring your project around a compelling mission, you focus your enthusiasm for the subject (or the rewards it can bring in your life) onto a single target.

The MIT Challenge was a good example of this. I took the vague goal I had of wanting a computer science education, and crafted it so that it would become very interesting to me. Had I instead started off with the aim of “learning a lot about computer science” I doubt I could have accomplished nearly as much in ten years, let alone one.

Your missions don’t need to be as ambitious or all-consuming, however. Even a project that only takes a couple hours a week can still be compelling.

Here are a few ingredients I’ve found helpful for taking a vague goal and crafting a mission you can get excited about:

1. Give it a name. Naming your project helps you define it. A name helps you identify the boundaries of what you’re trying to accomplish with this particular mission, and which you aren’t. Having a name also helps you think about the project as a unified whole instead of a random collection of loosely related learning tasks.
2. Pick a specific objective. Narrow your ambitions onto something concrete. Instead of just trying to learn a language, have a goal of speaking only in the target language for an entire day, for example.
3. Constrain the scope. Instead of just defining what you’d like to accomplish, also define which things are outside of the scope. This doesn’t mean you have to avoid learning anything outside of those constraints, but it helps you prioritize the vague desire many autodidacts have to “learn everything” onto something attainable in a project.
4. Hit the challenge sweet spot. The ideal amount of challenge is that it should be hard enough that you aren’t sure whether you’ll be successful, but not so hard that you give up. If you’ve put off learning something because it scares you, try lowering the challenge. If you’ve given up because you’ve been bored before, try increasing the challenge.

Building a compelling mission isn’t too difficult, once you try. The majority of the time people skip this step, in my mind, is because they either don’t realize it’s important, or they falsely convince themselves that there’s no way learning about *insert subject* could be compelling.

Step Two: Build a Flexible Curriculum

The next step is to gather material. The problem is rarely that there isn’t any material available, but that the material can be hard to find or that good material can be drowning in irrelevant or lousy content.

I’ve found it important to choose material from a wider net than others may cast. This way you can shift between resources to meet your goals. Here are some points to look for when trying to find material:

• Open courses and MOOCs (edX, Coursera, Udemy, MIT’s OCW)
• Textbooks (look in the comments here for good ones)
• Pre-packaged courses
• Book lists (Personal MBA, Good Reads, etc.)
• Videos (YouTube, Khan Academy, Patrick JMT, etc.)
• Journal articles
• Private instruction/tutoring
• Educational software

Depending on the size of your project, you may want to spend a few hours looking for different options. I must note, that with the exception of some MOOCs and pre-packaged courses, you’ll almost always need to draw from multiple sources.

Another piece of advice—don’t let a lack of complete courses bother you. I did two-thirds of the MIT Challenge just using suggested textbooks and minimal guidance from MIT’s OCW, and in most cases the deficiency was negligible. The difficulty is almost always from the subject, not a lack of resources.

Once you’ve identified material, you need to develop a flexible curriculum around it. By flexible, I mean that, unlike school, the curriculum is something that you can modify and adjust depending on your progress.

When I’d go through a class during the MIT Challenge, I’d often have a few resources to choose from: videos, textbook, external tutorials and articles. My curriculum would be to pursue one resource, but use the feedback I was getting to adjust it. After watching videos, for example, I could use the textbook or articles to fill the missing gaps.

This is even more true when your goal isn’t to learn a particular set of knowledge, but to acquire a useful skill. When I’m learning a new programming language, I often go through several different resources, switching whenever my feedback indicates my weaknesses are more easily fixed using a different resource.

The final key with a curriculum is to not get overwhelmed. The purpose of picking out material isn’t to try to cover all of it. Instead, it should be to give you a starting point for structuring your learning efforts. Even if a different resource turns out to be slightly more efficient later, you can adjust.

I’ve found it useful to do most of this step prior to starting my project. For me, gathering material is distracting from the task of actually learning from it. This is why investing a day or two into researching, bookmarking, downloading and purchasing all of the material you might use in advance is so helpful.

Side note: If you’re not sure about a paid resource, check if it has a free trial/money-back offer. Most have free trials, so you can do a pilot with it before committing your money. For those that don’t, used and library options can significantly reduce the cost. I’d often get textbooks for under ten dollars during the MIT Challenge, so cost is rarely the limiting factor.

Step Three: Define Feedback Mechanisms

Feedback is essential to learning. The first reason is because it helps you guide your progress. If you’re failing practice problems or can’t code a simple program, you know you need to adjust your learning methods.

The second reason is that thinking about feedback mechanisms tends to promote efficient learning methods. One feedback tool you might use is practice problems, which has demonstrated effectiveness in increasing long-term retention.

How do you incorporate feedback?

The two most straightforward ways are by producing something or practicing something. Although not guaranteed to provide feedback, if you’re doing either of these as a significant amount of your learning time, you’ll probably be getting feedback.

Combining learning a programming language, for example, with a set of mini-projects where you actually write valid code ensures that you’re getting feedback. Learning about design while building models or illustrations gives you a chance to observe whether the lessons are creating improvement.

Practicing speaking a language with native speakers ensures that all your learning efforts with SRS, audio courses or phrase books is actually helping you speak. Practice problems for math or physics ensure your conceptual understanding is growing.

Which feedback mechanism you use will depend on what resources you have and what the subject is. Even if you can’t pick a perfectly suited feedback mechanism, you can incorporate smaller feedback drills to ensure you’re not completely without feedback. These smaller mechanisms can include: self-quizzing on learned material, writing Feynmans without reference material or using software like Anki.

The best feedback goes directly toward your project’s mission. If your mission is to perform a skill or speak authoritatively about a topic, then practicing that skill or writing about the subject are ideal feedback mechanisms. If your goal is to have a particular set of knowledge, self-testing and explaining the knowledge to yourself are good mechanisms.

Step Four: Enforce a Schedule

Many self-learners can successfully reach this point in their project, but fail on the next one: actually doing all the work. It’s one thing to tell yourself you’re going to learn about biology or history. It’s another thing to actually execute the curriculum you’ve devised and accomplish the mission.

The first half is in preparation. Without a compelling mission, it’s easy to get bored and quit. Without a curriculum, it’s easy to get lost and give up. Without feedback mechanisms in place, it’s easy to not learn anything at all.

The second half is in establishing a schedule that allows you to follow through with the reading, watching and practicing you need to do. Here are a couple frameworks I’ve found helpful for successfully implementing such a system:

1. The “Every Day” Plan

The first strategy is to do a little bit of work every day. I did this with a friend on a project to learn languages (which I’ll hopefully be sharing more on in the summer). Because of conflicting schedules and the desire to stay at the same pace, we decided to do an hour lesson, in the morning, every day.

In the past, I’ve done similar approaches to book-reading projects. When I want to cover a large swatch of information on a particular domain, I would get several books and devote 30-60 minutes reading them at the same time each day.

The process is simple:

1. Define a certain time period, every day, when you’ll do your work. It doesn’t need to be a long time period to be effective.
2. Commit to following this time period, without exception, for at least three weeks. The number is arbitrary, but I’ve found that enforcing the habit strictly in the beginning is essential.

The advantage of this strategy is that the effort quickly becomes a habit. This is the approach to use if your project is not going to be full-time and it will require some self-discipline to execute. The other strategies I’ll mention can also be effective, but they have greater risks that you’ll drop the ball when your motivation wanes.

2. The Obsessive Burst

This strategy is one I’ve used on projects which interested me deeply, and were short (in the span of a few weeks). The idea is simply to work on the project during most of your off-hours until it is completed.

This method only works if you’re genuinely motivated enough to pull it off or there is a compelling external reason for such devotion. If you’re rolling your eyes at this possibility, do yourself a favor and opt for strategy #1 instead.

The advantage of this method is that it utilizes your initial motivation. Some projects that could be finished quickly, I opted for this approach because I knew that my motivation would wane after a few weeks and I wanted to see results quickly. The disadvantages are obvious, but in some instances they don’t matter.

3. The Precommitted Schedule

A final strategy I’ll mention is simply to precommit to a certain goal, or certain hours. If you’re making use of tutoring or outside help, simply committing to your tutor to have finished an amount by each lesson will give you motivation. Opting for a structured MOOC or course plan can also be helpful, since they provide you with constraints you’re required to follow.

Another alternative is to set up short-term exams which you need to pass along the way. This could be useful in studying for a larger self-study exam (SAT, MCAT, GMAT, LSAT, CFA, etc.). Basically, you could break down practice exams into segments and resolve to be able to ace a particular segment by the end of the week, giving you the motivation to learn that section without procrastinating.

Anti-Strategies (or Plans that Rarely Succeed)

In contrast with the above three mentioned strategies, I’ve also found some approaches that tend to work poorly. This doesn’t mean they never succeed, but rather that they require disproportionately more motivation or self-discipline to execute. These include:

• Working on your project whenever you feel like.
• Not establishing particular scheduled hours or deadlines.
• Planning to begin a learning task later, without providing a compelling reason why it should be delayed.

In the end, you know yourself and your motivation. If getting stuff done isn’t a problem for you—don’t worry about this step. If it is, I’d recommend using strategy #1 in most cases. It’s a good default go-to approach when you’re not sure which one to apply.

Step Five: Long-Term Retention

This final step is an optional one. For many learning projects, I pursue this step informally because I know my lifestyle and goals will allow me to circle back to the knowledge I acquired previously at some point.

For those who are worried that such an informal approach may lead to losing a lot of the knowledge acquired, taking additional steps can be useful. Adding a strategy for long-term practice and retention can make sure that you don’t forget things years later.

Learning for Long-Term Retention

My first weapon against the long-term decay of memory is to learn it better, the first time around. I’ve found that learning with the goal of understanding promotes the best long-term retention compared to memorized facts.

Consider learning physics. Most students spend a great deal of time memorizing formulas and the situations where they apply. Smart students spend time trying to build the intuitive principles for what the formulas are saying and why they work.

Sometimes learning to understand isn’t a short-term goal. Learning how to solve a particular problem with an equation takes a lot less time than trying to build an intuition around how it works, but years later the equations will be forgotten and the intuition will remain.

This is why I recommend metaphors, visualization, diagrams and the Feynman technique when learning. They promote the process of decoding an abstract idea into an intuition that you can keep with you much longer than memorized trivia.

This doesn’t mean understandings are immune to forgetful minds, but simply that they persist longer.

Here are some other mechanisms you can use to ensure long-term retention:

1. The Orbit Strategy

Think of how the moon orbits the Earth, returning to the same relative position each month. This strategy works similarly—after completing a project, set a notice on your calendar a few months or years into the future. Once the time comes, do a mini project to reactivate those skills.

I intend to do this broadly with the programming and computer science knowledge I acquired during the MIT Challenge. By doing a mini project every 6-12 months, I hope to sustain my skills even when I’m at a stage in my life where they aren’t a main part of my career.

I recently executed this successfully with French. Even though it had been over two years since I lived in France (and spoke French infrequently) I made the goal of going back to Paris for a month and speaking exclusively en français. I was surprised that I was even able to improve my French from where I had left it after that burst.

If the goal is only sustaining, not improving, then the period of the orbits doesn’t need to be fixed. Increasing the spacing between each burst can probably sustain the same level up to a point. An exception would be very high levels of skill (which decay more quickly) and where the skill itself changes rapidly (such as programming).

2. Scheduled Practice

Another strategy is to schedule practice or recall regularly, in small doses. I know that Benny Lewis, who speaks around ten languages fluently, uses this approach to maintain his ability. By speaking the languages every week or so, he can continue to sustain and improve his abilities over the long-term.

I do this myself with many subjects I’m interested in. I subscribe to blogs on those topics (say linguistics or economics) and use the regular posting as a way to stay connected to them.

3. Formal Systems (SRS)

If these strategies are too informal for you, then you can opt for implementing an even more structured review using a spaced repetition system such as Anki. This would be particularly useful if you needed to retain a large corpus of factual information you aren’t using frequently. I suspect medical and law students, for example, would benefit from having the factual details of their courses inputted into Anki, which they would then get reminders of long after the class was taken, so the knowledge doesn’t fade.

Implementing the 5 Steps

This is just a framework for planning and executing a self-education project. As such, you may have a lot more questions about handling the specifics. Here are a few articles I’ve written on the details of learning efficiently:

• How to understand hard ideas.
• How to take notes. (PDF)
• How to read faster.
• How to read a textbook.
• How to use metaphors/visualizations to study for an exam.
• How to quickly learn a free online course.
• How to get work done.
• How to focus on what you’re learning.
• How to access ‘hidden’ courses from MIT.
• How to learn really hard subjects.
• How to translate your self-education into an actual degree.

I cover all of this comprehensively in my course, but those above free resources should be a good starting point if you’re not ready to invest in it.

The Benefits of Learning Well

Self-education can seem like a luxury at times. Or it can look like an exercise in intellectual wastefulness—something that doesn’t materially improve your life. I’ve found the opposite is true: learning more gives you an enormous advantage in almost any area of life you choose to apply it toward.

The people I know with the best careers, relationships and lives are the ones who learn continuously. I always strive to have a learning project at all times, and following these steps have been essential to make them successful, instead of something I idly start and never finish.

Image courtesy of Hash Milhan.

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If I wanted to start a business selling industrial solvents, I suffer under the first error. I have no idea how the industry works (or much about solvents, for that matter). Ignorance holds me back.

Ignorance, however, isn’t too hard to fix. If I spent several months researching, I could probably have a decent idea of how the industry works. If I spent several years working in it, I’d know even more. The first error has a straightforward remedy—learn more.

The second kind of mistake, and far more insidious, is the mistake of believing things that happen to be wrong. If you’ve convinced yourself that a hill is a valley, it will take a lot of climbing before you realize you were wrong. I worry more about the second mistake.

The Map and the Territory

We spend our lives devising theories for explaining the world. These theories form crude maps of the impossibly complex terrain of our lives. We have a map for our careers, a map for our relationships, a map for our beliefs about the meaning in our lives.

Maps are good. Even a map that is wrong occasionally is a lot better than no map. Philosophical skepticism may have its adherents but it’s utterly impractical. You must have beliefs about the world to make decisions, and even imperfect ones are better than nothing.

But the map is not the territory. The territory is alien, strange and perhaps even incomprehensibly complex. Any map-making process undertaken by an individual over the course of one lifetime is going to be error-ridden.

The rational thing to do, is a cost-benefit analysis. If we can invest less resources to fix our map than the benefits of a correct map yield, fix the map. Yet human beings rarely do the rational thing.

Confirmation Bias and Protecting Our Maps

It turns out we don’t follow the rational process for map fixing. Through a set of interesting experiments, psychologists could show that instead of trying to hunt for the information that would force us to change our maps, we instead seek to information confirming what we already “know”.

The experiment was ingenious. Subjects were given a set of three numbers, such as 2, 4, 6 and told it fits a secret pattern. The task was to guess the identity of the secret pattern by suggesting further sets of three numbers, which the experimenter would say either fit or didn’t fit the pattern.

Given only one data point, many possible hypotheses could be dreamt up by the participants. The numbers could be all even, for example, or the middle number could be the average of the first and last.

The rational method for testing these hypotheses would be to choose counterexamples. If you believed the numbers were all even, try 3, 4, 6 and see if it is validated. If it did, you’d know that your only-evens rule was not the correct rule.

This wasn’t how subjects proceeded, however. Instead, they picked examples which confirmed their previous hypothesis. All-evens testers would pick 4, 8, 10 or 2, 6, 12 as candidate patterns, seeking validation for their theory.

The problem with this method was that the actual rule was “any ascending numbers” so the previous two examples would have been valid, but so would 1, 3, 12 or 3, 9, 11. The method of testing hypotheses sought confirmation, even when it couldn’t determine the secret rule.

What relevance does this have outside the laboratory? The relevance is that we look for information to support our theories, not to break them. We try to protect our maps instead of pointing out where they may be flawed. Worse, when we expend energy trying to improve our maps, the methods we default to are unsound.

Looking Around the Edges

The most profitable method to winning the secret-rule game of the experiment is not to pick random counterexamples. After seeing 2, 4 and 6 validate, picking 1, 17, 4 and seeing it fail doesn’t teach you too much. Instead, the best bet is to try to break the edges of your rule: make one odd, flip the order, make two the same.

The same strategy is effective in life: test around the edges of your map, so you’ll know where to redraw. By breaking your map in precise ways, you can get more information than seeking confirmation or pulling counterexamples out of a hat.

I’ll give an example from my business. When I first launched Learning on Steroids, it was unusually successful compared to my previous business efforts and I wanted to know which principles guided that so I could use those insights in the future. Here were some candidate hypotheses:

• Monthly billing over one-time sale.
• Conducting an email-based launch.
• Restricting capacity.
• Restricting registration time.
• Having a clearer service component (in earlier editions I made more emphasis on being able to reach me for feedback)

All of these could have been valid, some combination of them could be or it could be that none of them were the underlying causes of the recent success.

My approach to testing these hypotheses was to vary the different variables individually in my future launches. Later, I did launches that had one-time courses, no capacity restrictions and downplayed the service component. I couldn’t always test each variable in perfect isolation, but in nearly every launch the permutation of these variables was somewhat different.

In retrospect, my hypothesis now is that #2, conducting an email-based launch, is the only consistent winner. Restrictions on capacity has mixed results and restrictions on registration time has a minor, but positive effect. Service components were not important, but that could have been a feature of the price points tested.

My map is far from perfect now, but it is a lot better than it was when I started, which I believe is a large part of the reason my business is generating four times the revenue from when I had made those initial hypotheses.

Researching Edge Cases

You often don’t need to run an experiment to break your map on edge cases and update it to more accurate beliefs. Sometimes simply doing a bit of research can reveal edge-case counterexamples which force you to re-evaluate your thinking.

Cal Newport recently shared an example from his own journey trying to become a tenured academic. Instead of browsing through random examples and trying to confirm his previous hypotheses, he looked for a natural experiment: choose a group of PhD graduates from the same graduating class, but who differed greatly in their eventual success and look at what they did differently in their early careers.

Studying these two groups, the biggest differences were number of papers published (the successful group had more publications) and number of citations, a rough indicator for quality. Using that as a benchmark, Cal could easily hone in on the precise metrics success required in his field.

Research, as opposed to direct experimentation, is useful when the time frame you expect to see results is very long. I could directly experiment on my launch strategy because I could repeat it every 3-6 months. Cal was better off looking for natural experiments because the time frame to observe results was in decades.

Comfort in Contradiction

To me, the idea of map-breaking is unsettling and counterintuitive. Our brains aren’t hard-wired to think this way, so it always takes a deliberate effort to apply.

The challenge to me is being able to be comfortable with spending a lot of mental energy constructing explanatory theories, and then seeking to tear them down. We’d rather spend time building more, rather than admit what we’ve built may be on a shaky foundation.

One step I’ve found helpful to combat this urge (and is often derided by outsiders) is to simply allow yourself to temporarily hold contradictory beliefs. Believing that your theories themselves are a work-in-progress can allow you to recognize the validity of part of the map, even if you don’t know how to connect it to the other parts yet.

Ultimately, confirmation bias is in our nature, and can’t be completely avoided. With effort, however, I think we can remind ourselves to avoid it when we design the larger experiments or research projects to redraw the lines on our map.

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Instead, life is full of confounding variables. We build theories for our lives the best way we can, but those are corrupted somewhat by hidden variables. What little we think we know about ourselves, we probably know less.

That’s why I’m always interested in blank slate moments. These are moments where there is an abrupt change of many different variables. They don’t have the precision of a controlled experiment, but they give you a chance to eliminate much of the noise.

Travel as a Blank Slate

I lived for almost a year in France, a few years ago. No one from my old life came with me, so for eleven months every relationship and friendship I had was a blank slate. Even the language and culture were different so I had to relearn how I communicated with other people.

I remember at one point getting in a fight with a girl I was dating. Had it not been in French, it would have been identical to one I had had back home. Everything else was different, except for me. I was creating the situation, even if I didn’t yet know how.

Job Changes as a Blank Slate

A good friend of mine recently switched offices. This time, instead of noticing the recurring constants, he noticed the changes. At his old job he had been a junior employee. While smart and competent, his early trainee period set his first impression with many of his colleagues of being the newbie.

When he switched jobs, the impression was radically different. Now he’s one of the most sought-after employees in the office, with perks and pay that are unusual for someone of his experience. The old environment was holding him back, but it took a blank slate moment for him to realize it.

Entrepreneurial Blank Slates

I’ve been blogging and selling ebooks/courses for over seven years now. I’m sure if I wanted to write a book about how to do it, I could (I have zero desire to, but that’s another matter). In my head, I’ve convinced myself that I know a lot about it.

But where are my blank slate moments? Almost every moment of this blog was built on the previous one. A/B testing can test details, but you can’t split test your strategy. How can I be so convinced I’m right?

Admittedly, I’m probably wrong about many of the things I’m convinced are true. The problem is I don’t know which ones.

When I started Learning on Steroids, I became convinced that monthly subscriptions were a better business model for me than static product sales. But my newer data seems to cast doubt on that theory. It might be that Learning on Steroids was successful simply because of the product, and the subscription model was inconsequential.

The Cost of Blank Slates

When I look over the long-term trajectory of my life, blank slate moments were the inflection points in many areas. The sudden changes allowed me to realize the truth of a situation and break out of stagnation.

Blank slate moments are most useful when they’re a temporary deviation of an ongoing trend. Living in France taught me about where I was failing in my relationships because every variable changed but me. However, had I changed cities every three months, the frequent change would itself be a kind of variable that stays constant. In that hypothetical possibility, I might have deduced that my fight wasn’t my fault, but the fault of moving around so much.

Clearly generating endless blank slate moments in the same way isn’t helpful. Blank slates hamper progress—how could you possibly get any insight into what it takes to start a successful business if you kept switching businesses every week. Worse, when the way the blank slate is generated is itself recurring, it introduces a new variable which perverts the data.

Positive blank slates are minimally disruptive, but they provide maximal information by quickly randomizing many of the otherwise confounding variables.

Generating Positive Blank Slates

I’ve thought a lot about how I can generate positive blank slates in my life. Here’s some ideas I’ve come up with:

1. Relocation. Travel, on its own, has only been minimally useful for me. To me, living in a new place long enough that you invest in a normal life there seems to have the best impact. The challenge is balancing the depth that allows for a true blank slate without creating a huge disruption in your life.
2. Short-term experiments. Experiments can be more controlled than a blank slate. When you just switch one variable, you get more precise information than when you change hundreds of them. I’ve found that short-term experiments, however, often limit you in the kinds of things you can change, so you test easy-to-change variables instead of the ones that might actually generate insight.
3. Orienting Projects. My MIT Challenge was a blank slate in a lot of ways, as my working life changed very abruptly. Completing it reminded me that physical travel isn’t the only way to cause a blank slate.

I haven’t built a complete framework for pursuing blank slate moments yet. However, a good rule of thumb seems to be always engaging in some kind of blank slate, especially if you can leverage the change to be useful instead of disruptive.

Ultimately I’ve found blank slate moments more useful, not as a tool to learn more about yourself or the world, but as a tool to weed out the convictions you have that might be wrong.

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Habits are built on sameness. By making your triggers, schedule and internal rules of thumb consistent, you reduce the mental overhead to get those actions done. The consistent rhythm of your behavior makes continuing that pattern easier.

But here lies a problem—learning isn’t optimized by rhythm. Deliberate practice suggests the opposite, that you should break routines to drive growth. Too much consistency inevitably leads to a plateau where weaknesses ossify and improvement becomes harder.

Hence the dilemma: we want to be able to maximize growth by breaking through plateaus, however, we also need stability and consistency so that we can sustain our effort.

Resolving the Dilemma

I’ve thought hard about this problem. One area I seem to face it is in my writing. On the one hand, having a weekly writing habit allows me to ensure I’m putting in time writing each week. Whenever I’ve let this habit slip, writing becomes much more difficult. On the other hand, I want to improve my writing ability, which may not happen if I mostly write under the same conditions, week after week.

Which should take precedence? Should I sacrifice the consistency of my current writing habit because it might push me past my current level? Should I continue writing as I am and try to grow from other areas? I don’t have an easy answer.

This also strikes me as a problem many of you might face in your jobs. The job you get paid for isn’t also the one that causes you to learn the most. Your boss or clients may want you to do the work you find easiest and most routine, likely because you’re already good at it. Yet it’s precisely the work you’re not an expert at yet which will help you master your craft.

Possible Solutions

I’ve considered a few approaches that might work to resolve this dilemma.

1. Learning Projects

A project typically runs in the span of months, not days or hours. Therefore it might be a good strategy to always have a learning oriented project, but make the project long enough that you could reasonably build the habits to support it each time.

I’ve been doing this in my own work. Last year I did the MIT Challenge which, although it was directed towards computer science, was also a project to improve my writing by giving me a better understanding of the learning topics I write about. I’m working on a similarly scaled upcoming project which should hopefully have the same effect.

One weakness of this is extra effort. Projects, as opposed to narrowly focused practice sessions, have a lot of work which is necessary but doesn’t drive growth. Designing projects efficiently isn’t always easy.

2. Setting General-Purpose “Deep Focus” Hours

Another strategy I’ve seen employed by Cal Newport is to simply chunk out time for deep focus work. In practice this could mean that you set aside 2 hours every morning to deliberately pushing your skillset further. This way you benefit from having the regular deep-focus habit, but the content of that habit changes each time so you don’t plateau.

A possible disadvantage of this is that it constrains what kinds of deliberate practice you can explore. Not all valuable learning experiences can fit inside identical constraints, so you may have less flexibility to improve learning as you could with a project.

3. Environment Shifting

Another idea is to not change what you’re doing, but change where you’re doing it. This way the environment forces both habit changes and learning.

As a writer, this could mean that I make an effort to write for a different publication, write a book or start working with an editor. These environmental changes would create an external change meaning less willpower is required to complete the project, while preventing my skills from stagnating.

Switching jobs, companies, industries or cities could all be an environmental switch that could create this effect. The weakness here is that sometimes the environment you need to kickstart growth isn’t available.

What do you think? What’s your strategy for coping with the need for both change and stability? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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After the talk, one of the audience members came and asked me whether I felt the success of the project was mostly due to efficient learning methods or hard work.

This reminded me of the first weeks of the challenge. This was when I was still worried that the project may be impossible to complete, so I put in a lot of effort. I wanted to go somewhat faster than scheduled, to give me a bit of slack as I moved to harder courses. Mostly I wanted to convince myself that the project was doable at all.

The schedule I adopted was pretty simple: wake up at six, work until six. I usually took two twenty minute breaks plus a twenty minute break for lunch. In total, around eleven hours of work each day, six days per week, for the first three months (I slowly eased back on the schedule for the following nine).

My goal would be to finish the lectures of a class in 2-3 days. A class usually had 35 hours worth of lecture content, so this meant watching about 18 hours in one day. You can squeeze that into 11 if you play it back at 1.5-2x the speed.

Reflecting on this, I wagered it was mostly hard work.

Focus is Paramount

The difficulty isn’t putting in the time. Anyone can force themselves to sit in a library and study all day. The hard part is sustaining focus.

Focus matters more than time spent. Most tasks can be completed in a fraction of their normal time with complete focus. This is especially true for learning whereby the most efficient methods also tend to be the most mentally taxing.

Focus matters more than raw effort. The sun can’t burn paper without a lens to focus its rays. Similarly, you can burn yourself out working on a project, but if that effort isn’t focused, you won’t make tremendous progress.

I don’t think I need to preach this point. When I’ve asked readers what their biggest obstacle to learning is, the number one answer is always focus. Focus is essential, but it is also incredibly hard to do.

Learning to Focus from Meditation

Focus is difficult, but it can be learned. I don’t think I could have completed the MIT Challenge, if I hadn’t learned the skill of focusing. Some may find it easier than others, like all things, but I believe anyone can get better at focusing through practice.

I became convinced that focus was learnable when I first studied meditation. I’m far from an expert meditator, but what I gleaned from my early practice attempts years ago, was that focus can be trained.

Many forms of meditation are based on the idea of mental focus. Some have you focus on a particular sound or concept to quiet your mind. Others have you focus on intense visualization which, with practice, can push you into a semi-dreamlike state as you force out the sensory input of the outside world.

I don’t meditate much these days, although I have nothing against the practice. But I do believe being introduced to meditation gave me the conceptual tools for training focus in other areas of my life.

For anyone who is interested in improving focus, I’d try doing a bit of basic research on meditation. Transcendental seems to be quite popular, but I haven’t personally tried it so I can’t vouch for it. When I started I just picked a few random books from the library and tried out a couple methods for free.

I don’t think it’s the meditation itself which helps with focus. Meditation is an inwardly-focused activity which is very different from the outwardly-focused tasks most people want to be able to focus on. But learning a couple breathing techniques and methods for focusing inwardly, they give you a sense of what is required for focusing in your work.

Practicing Focus

The first feeling I had when starting to meditate was how boring it was. Sitting awake, eyes-closed in a quiet room, I felt intensely restless. I wanted to get up and doing something and my mind felt like an uncontrollable flow of thoughts, constantly jumping from topic to topic.

They teach you when meditating to ignore this feeling. Not to suppress thoughts, but to just let them float by without jumping on them. Eventually, you get into the desired meditative state, which depends on the style of meditation you’re trying to practice.

I think this is strongly analogous to focus in your work. When you’re sitting to work on a particular project, you feel restless. You want to check something on Facebook, read a blog article, check your email or listen to music.

Following the same analogy, however, I think you can continue a meditative state of work by learning, not to suppress those feelings, but just to ignore them. Eventually you can cultivate mental stillness and allow yourself to focus on what you need to work on.

A difference between meditation and focus, however, is mental engagement. I usually find meditation to be relaxing, but focus is draining. Practicing focus is more like a mixture between meditating and endurance running.

Mastering Focus

The unfortunate part is that the only way to get good at this is through practice. Just like strengthening a muscle, focus can only be improved by doing it more.

The two methods I’ve found helpful for practicing focus are cutting distractions and setting up time blocks.

Eliminating distractions is the most obvious way to improve focus. When I’m preparing to write an article, I’ll often sit in a chair with a blank document for 30-45 minutes as I think through possible ideas to write about. No music, no internet, no phone.

The best way you can help your focus training efforts is to purposefully eliminate all distractions. This way the only enemy you need to combat is the distractions of your own mind. Meditative techniques can help a lot with those.

The next strategy I’ve found effective is to clearly delineate chunks of time for focus. The problem many people have with focus is that they don’t establish which times are focus times and which are not. By setting up a particular set of hours in the day where you don’t allow interruptions or distractions, you can get a lot more done.

All training should be progressive, so note how long you can sustain your focus, record it and then aim to slowly improve on it. If you can only hold your focus on reading a book for twenty minutes, that’s fine. Try to go for twenty-five next time.

Limits to Focus

I don’t believe a person’s ability to focus is perfectly mutable. You’ll still need breaks and you’ll still need succumb to distractions. That doesn’t negate the utility of practice, just in the way that the human body puts limitations on maximum strength doesn’t mean you can’t get stronger by lifting weights.

I believe the real value of focus is that you save time. Learning to focus means you need less time to get the same work done. Although my MIT experiment was difficult, I point out that I still had every evening off and I always had one day per week where I didn’t do any work. Focus may be difficult, but I believe it is far more liberating than the alternative.

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Some of my thoughts on the key findings:

Self-Explanation and Reading

Elaborative learning and self-explanation were found to be moderately effective. This is similar to the Feynman technique, but I’d argue the use of the method was different (I mainly use this method to hunt out specific misunderstandings, not as a general catch-all which is usually too time consuming as indicated by the research).

Summarizing and highlighting were found to be ineffective. I was surprised about the finding on summarizing, but the note on highlighting was what I expected. Perhaps some of the problem with summarizing is that it lacks a feedback mechanism to know whether you’ve actually gathered the key details?

Rereading was found to be ineffective. No surprises here. Passive review strategies are less effective than active ones.

Visualization and Mnemonics

The keyword mnemonic (using visual links to memorize words) was labelled “ineffective” but probably a better description of the actual findings is that it has more narrow usage.

Visualization while reading was found to be ineffective. I found this interesting, given my advice to students to visualize. However, it seems like the issue may be that visualization while reading is distracting. In addition, I’ve always felt the major benefits of visualizing are for abstract subjects, which don’t naturally lend themselves to images, as opposed to the concrete subjects measured here.

Practice and Spacing Were The Most Effective Methods

Practice was one of the most effective methods studied. This was a staple of the MIT Challenge, probably making up 50% of the total time I spend working through the courses. I found it interesting that practice questions were still effective even when you created the questions yourself—a good alternative if practice exams are unavailable.

Spacing effects were shown as being effective as well. During the MIT Challenge I tried to make use of spacing as much as possible, doing classes in parallel after the first few classes. It was an unfortunate weakness of the tight time-constraint premise of the challenge, however. I’d recommend most students looking to follow my self-education attempt to spread out their learning over a longer period of time and at a lower intensity than I did.

I find the spacing effects on learning to be somewhat tricky because I’ve also found focus to be enormously effective for getting things done. Juggling a couple different learning projects at the same time to be far harder to manage than being dedicated to only one or two.

Ultimately, there may be a trade-off between spacing and focus—you want the spacing to ensure better long-term recall, but you want the focus to actually get the work done.

Science, Experience and What Actually Works

Scientific research on the efficacy of different learning techniques has been a very useful counterbalance for me to the methods I’ve developed through practical experience.

I’m only a single data point. Although I collect a lot of observations and data from my students in my courses, the empirical rigor of a self-selected online course is not the same as a scientific paper. Placebo effects and the lack of control groups mean that it’s important to return to the psychological research for checks and balances.

However studies are often designed to measure the outcome of a very narrow set of conditions. If the conditions change from the experiment, the results may be very different. I end up relying a lot on practical experience to fill in those gaps in my own self-learning efforts.

Opinions I’ve Changed Since Learn More, Study Less

I find myself learning a lot about learning, as more research like this comes out and I get exposed to different learning situations and am forced to adapt. While I still support the most of the main points of Learn More, Study Less, I’ve evolved considerably on my views since then.

Here are the major opinions I’ve shifted:

• Repetition isn’t a bad thing (even if repetition alone probably is).
• Speed reading is only narrowly useful. In most learning situations, reading at a deeper level of processing and reading more slowly is better.
• Practice and active recall should be a bulk of your strategy. I haven’t given enough emphasis on active recall in the past, even though it should probably form a large chunk of your learning time.
• Spaced repetition software can be quite useful. I’ve flipped my thinking on this point since I mentioned it earlier. To me the disadvantages of decontextualized and unprioritized knowledge are outweighed by the automatic structuring of review and active recall.
• Don’t highlight. I used to have highlighting as part of an active reading strategy, but now I’m inclined to avoid it altogether. Taking sparse notes is better.
• Holistic learning is still valid for law and languages. I expressed doubts in my initial ebook as to whether learning via connections was appropriate for densely factual subjects, but since then I’ve found it useful for these subjects nonetheless.

A major challenge for me is that, in spending a lot of time learning, my opinions grow with time. Hopefully my minor reversals and shifts in emphasis don’t irk or confuse longtime readers too much. The alternative is to be dogmatic, an unsupportable long-term strategy.

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Many situations in life are close to Catch-22s, problems by which the method of solution which have the solution itself as a prerequisite. Building a successful business is considerably easier with access to capital and connections. Capital and connections are much easier to obtain if you’ve run a successful business.

Men who have had difficulty with women often lament that women claim to love genuine confidence, which comes from past experiences of success, which would seem to rely on having the confidence in the first place.

Of course, none of these are perfect Catch-22s. For every successful entrepreneur or relationship, there had to be a first success. A success that defied the circular logic that supports further successes. Overcoming these initial successes is hard, and worth studying since it may turn out to be more important than later, and grander successes, that we typically pay attention to.

Pulling Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps

Bootstrapping is another idiom that points to a seemingly circular situation. The concept, which means to achieve something using minimal resources, comes from an early 19th century American phrase to, “pull oneself over a fence by one’s bootstraps.”

Bootstrapping, that impossible of solutions, is the cure for that seemingly impossible of problems—the Catch-22s we all face in life.

The philosophy of bootstrapping is popular in entrepreneurship circles. The idea of building a company with initially limited resources is a powerful one. While many businesses required enormous investment to make viable—many haven’t. I spent about a hundred dollars to get this website started. Every month since, the business has paid for itself.

Bootstrapping isn’t a preference, it’s often a necessity. I don’t frown on entrepreneurs who invest large amounts of money in a project before it returns profit. Sometimes that is a smarter strategy than being stingy. But I started my first attempt at entrepreneurship in a small-town, with no connections at fifteen. I had to save for college and all I had was the part-time income of working as a lifeguard.

Bootstrapping applies to life, not just business. It’s the skills necessary to build something with zero resources or, seemingly, any of the prerequisites for success. Habits, discipline, social skills, confidence and competence are all, to a certain extent, driven by these exponential forces which make it easier to continue than to start.

Studying Small Beginnings

Often the advice that matters at one stage becomes irrelevant at another. As a blogger now, I don’t chase for links. I know that enough people read my blog that, if my content is good, it will spread. Spamming my articles to other blogs isn’t a good use of my time, and may even be a detrimental force since it doesn’t allow people to discover it organically.

But when I started I had zero traffic. If I didn’t tell people about what I was writing, nobody would read it. My early method was to track down blogs that frequently linked to articles similar to mine—and give them a friendly heads-up whenever I wrote an article.

The concept of marginal benefit comes into play. The marginal benefit of telling someone about your article when you have zero traffic can be quite high. Now I’ve found that same marginal benefit is often low, or sometimes even negative. It makes far more sense to build strong relationships with other bloggers before finding ways to share traffic. That has a high marginal benefit, but such opportunities are often unavailable to new bloggers.

Because the marginal costs and benefits are very different in an early phase than in a mature phase of growth, it doesn’t make sense to copy the methods of someone far along in their development. Study small beginnings, not only grandiose middles.

Bootstrapping Life

Career and entrepreneurial activities have an obvious bootstrapping component. This is often why they experience exponential growth over some range of their progress—the effects create the causes resulting in a compounding effect.

Other areas of life have less pronounced Catch-22s as well. Consider self-discipline. Self-discipline is trained through exercising self-discipline. The positive reinforcement of succeeding at discipline-requiring tasks strengthens that resource. However, it’s much easier to succeed at them when you already possess discipline in the first place.

I found something similar in my early attempts at habit formation. I was so used to being lazy and giving up at everything, that it was hard to even get the early successes I needed to reinforce those behaviors. I failed a lot at simple challenges because my self-discipline muscles were weak.

Is it Bootstrapping or Immutable Character?

I used to look at the feats of the people I admired and feel inadequate. How could they start companies, have adventures and succeed across so many areas of life when I failed at so many. They persevered through difficulty, and I gave up.

I wish someone had told me that those character traits are often bootstrapped as well. Discipline, courage, charisma and all the ingredients of success are manufactured. Even if you don’t feel you possess them now, you can generate the experiences you need to have them in the future.

Scientists who measure personality traits notice consistency over time. While I don’t doubt that our genes play significant roles in our development, part of me wonders whether those traits are truly unchangeable or whether their apparent persistence is due to the Catch-22 required. Divergence from a different starting point is not because change is impossible, but because it requires bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is arduous, so when examining populations we see most people flowing down the stream they were cast into, not swimming into a new one.

Swimming upstream is hard. But, if you work at it, eventually that upstream swim becomes downstream and what was improbable becomes inevitable.

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When you try to say that your network of professional friends is important to your career, you get tons of angry socially maladroit engineer-types ranting about it. Technical competence, and points on an IQ test are what matters most, and any suggestion that social fluency or relationships matter too is inherently unmeritocratic.

I’ve also heard plenty of entrepreneurs who believe that everything is outsourceable. Why bother learning something like programming or design when you can pay someone else?

Why does it have to be a dichotomy? There’s no reason they both don’t matter. Which matters more absolutely is actually irrelevant, the difference is whether more skills or more people matter more marginally to your situation.

Where Would You Get More Marginal Benefit?

Marginal benefit is a very useful concept from economics. The idea is that many activities have diminishing return. The 80/20 rule is essentially a more specific restatement of diminishing return, with the first twenty percent of opportunities generating eighty percent of the total results.

Advice giving is hard because it needs to make an assumption not just about the absolute worth of an activity, but where you are on the marginal benefit curve. What might be good advice for someone in the state of high marginal benefit may be lousy for someone further down it.

The networking/skill-development trade-off is a clear example. If you never cultivate connections and your network consists only of people you met by happenstance, there’s a good chance that each extra hour you invest in networking might benefit you more than an extra hour improving your craft.

However, the opposite is true if you’re a socialite with no job skills. Knowing a lot of people is useless if you’re useless. If you can’t do the things people will pay for, it doesn’t matter who you know.

This is why I find the debates people have over these issues silly. If you are just comparing absolute benefit, then you’re arguing an irrelevant point. The only thing that matters is where there is more marginal benefit, and that will vary case-by-case.

Skills and Relationships Form a Self-Reinforcing Cycle

The situation gets more complicated because people and skills form a positive feedback loop. The better people you know, the faster your skills can improve. The better your skills, the more important people you can meet.

Consider the first point: that a better network drives better skills. This is because many opportunities for rapid skill growth are not available to everyone. They are in limited supply, and like all opportunities, they flow through relationships.

This can have an impact in subtle ways. When I started this blog, my writing was predictably lousy. It’s nearly impossible to be a good writer when you’ve never written before, and I was no exception. The question is, how do you become a better writer?

Feedback is a big part of improving as a writer. If you don’t have feedback on what people like and don’t like about your writing, you’ll improve much more slowly. How do you get feedback? From readers. How do you get readers? From traffic. How do you get traffic? Generally from other websites linking to you. How do you get other websites to link to you? It helps to befriend people who run other websites.

In most cases it’s even more direct. My friends have helped me become a better entrepreneur, often by giving me insights into my business it would have taken years to uncover. You might have growth opportunities in your career that can only come through other people. In many cases you can’t separate your skills from relationships.

Now consider the opposite direction of causality: that better skills help you meet more important people. Here the reasoning is a little easier to follow. People like people who are high-value. If you have built valuable skills that people want, then more people will want to meet you.

The best freelancers I know for a particular skill charge exorbitant rates and turn down most their work. They’re so good that people can’t ignore them.

Cycling Introversion and Extroversion for Career Growth

The problem is that the habits and behaviors that help you build your skills are often contradictory with the ones that help build relationships. I just spent almost a week meeting people and having drinks at SxSW, but I certainly wasn’t getting any work done. Similarly, meeting with new people while hard at work is a major distraction.

I think the conflict between these two behavior types is a major reason for the debate surrounding which is better to focus on. Most people can agree that both are necessary to some extent, but integrating them into one personality can feel almost impossible.

My solution has been to cycle between modes of introversion and extroversion. By flipping between the two, I can continue to work on both parts which are important for my career, but not sabotage my progress by holding conflicting habits.

When I’m in introversion mode—I like to get work done. I prefer to meet with fewer people, work in isolation most of the day, wake up early and generally implement as fully as possible all the productivity advice I recommend on this blog.

When I’m in extroversion mode, I’m quite different. I stay out later. I drink and party. I meet people, and generally don’t worry about being too productive. In fact, “being productive” in the domain of relationships can even be detrimental, as you look like you’re trying to use people instead of building trust and connections.

These two modes often have incompatible habits, so there is a certain amount of work transitioning between them. When I’m coming off an introversion period, I sometimes have to force myself to socialize more than I want. When I’m switching back to it, I sometimes need a few weeks to readjust to the quieter pace.

How Often Should You Cycle?

For me, I feel the ratio of introverted to extroverted behaviors that maximize my benefits is around 70/30. However, this ratio itself is highly dependent on your career and where you sit along those marginal benefit curves. An engineer working at a corporate job may be closer to 90/10. A start-up entrepreneur in a marketing position may be 30/70.

The length of time in each phase depends on your schedule. When I was doing the MIT Challenge, I was in introversion mode for almost the entire year straight. Other times I’ll switch back and forth every week or month.

Cycles don’t need to be polar opposites either. This month is mostly extroverted for me, travelling to conferences, meeting people and speaking. But I’m still getting my regular work done and trying to make moderate progress on my projects.

What defines the cycle is simply a temporary shift of your priorities. When you’re in an extroverted mode, you’ll sacrifice a little productivity for your relationships. When in introverted mode, you’ll sacrifice a little of your connectedness for getting work done.

Done properly, I think cycling the introverted and extroverted behaviors we all possess is a better solution than to try to perpetually maintain balance. It also helps resolve the inner conflict many of us feel in our careers over whether we need to spend more time making connections or working hard.

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Let’s assume for a second that you’re one of the few people who does read to learn more about the world. Let’s also assume that you’re interested in topics that are heavily researched: finance, health, nutrition, science or psychology. This probably eliminates most people, but I’m guessing as a reader of this blog you’re more inclined to such intellectual pursuits.

Ask yourself where you get information about these topics. Blogs? News? Popular non-fiction books?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these sources. Some blogs and popular non-fiction books are crap—but many are not. Sometimes sacrificing empirical rigor can also be useful if the content is more pragmatic or impactful.

But if you do care about a subject, it probably makes sense to read at least one general textbook on it. That textbook may not fill you with the detailed knowledge of a PhD, but it can give the foundation for evaluating many other ideas.

Why Not Textbooks?

The value of reading a textbook (or, better, doing an online course) is that it gives you a baseline for examining other aspects of that field. Taking one physics course would be enough to know why perpetual motion machines are scams.

Similarly, if you’re going to read books on the financial crisis, political blogs or start investing money—maybe it makes sense to have read one book on basic economics. I find it baffling that people have complex economic and political philosophies but haven’t learned concepts like supply and demand.

Ditto for psychology. One psychology textbook will hardly make you an expert. But it will at least make you aware that truths can’t be concluded from a single study, or that generalizing from a very narrowly designed experiment is dangerous.

The point of reading at least one textbook is to give an awareness of (a) the fundamental concepts most people agree with in a field and (b) where experts disagree.

Opinions and Experts

This blog is my opinion. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you realize that’s what it is. I’m not infallible, so there are probably quite a few opinions I’ve shared that are false.

I read other blogs that are mostly opinions. I like those blogs because they challenge me to think about topics, or introduce me to ideas I wouldn’t previously considered. As such, I try to strive to do the same in my own writing, open up new questions rather than just provide answers.

This is also true for the things where I’m an “expert”. I write about learning methods based on my experience and from working with students. I also try to use the science as best I can to guide the methods that I then test extensively.

Even then, I’m probably wrong about at least a few things. This is why I strive hard to push my own knowledge on the topic so that I am constantly adjusting or reevaluating past ideas.

The Danger of Only Using Secondhand Expertise

As a blogger, however, I’m also guided by other constraints. I need to write things people want to read. I would never write anything I knew to be intentionally false or misleading, but sometimes that means I write less about a topic that is boring, even if it is equally important.

For example, I consider doing practice questions with solutions to be one of the most important methods for learning technical subjects. I’ve stated this before, but there really isn’t much more to that. Just do a lot of practice questions.

My methods like the Feynman technique, metaphors, visualization are things I spend significantly more time covering because they are unusual to students. Despite that, they probably only took up about 20% of the time during the MIT Challenge, in comparison to about 40-50% doing practice problems.

All writers face these constraints. Science journalism tends to hype results more than the research would warrant. Pop-psych books tend to make the field appear more unanimous in opinion than it really is. Bloggers categorize the unusual or interesting details first.

Reading a textbook, which is less influenced by these constraints, can give you some awareness of these biases and correct for it in your thinking. I won’t stop reading blogs or popular books—textbooks are dry and often impractical—but having knowledge of one or two helps me balance some of the biases inherent in popular writing.

Degrees of Belief

I’ve written before that the only appropriate way to look at knowledge is through degrees of belief. This means that almost nothing (aside from logical truths) is known perfectly. Instead everything is known to different degrees of certainty.

Scientific principles like relativity are so well-established we can safely say they are correct to some minuscule measurement with enormous accuracy. That’s enough to warrant rounding down that doubt to zero for most situations.

Higher-order theories in social sciences or popular opinion have more doubt built in. That doesn’t mean they need to be rejected, simply that you give yourself more room to reject them later if better theories are generated.

For now, I’m confident in the learning techniques I use, but I’m always looking for better models that might have more evidence and therefore better reliability. The hard part is realizing that this is an ongoing process. You can never just put your hands up and say, “Done!”

Different sources of information have different degrees of evidence as well. A blog article providing an opinion has significantly less evidence than dozens of controlled, well-repeated studies on a particular fact. When the two directly conflict, I side with the research.

However, often the research isn’t in yet. In these cases, I enjoy others’ opinions since it lets me entertain speculative theories while also allowing me room to continue investigating. I’ve enjoyed all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, but it would be ridiculous to assume that he isn’t making any assumptions or leaps to stitch together a cogent narrative. I’m willing to accept this uncertainty, but I wouldn’t mistake it for fact.

Thinking in degrees of belief is not an easy task. I also understand the attitude that we need to draw a line somewhere, above which all facts are compelled to be believed, below which anything can be safely ignored. But, ultimately I think this is a weak position as well. It is often abused to allow you to accept some opinions but not others with exactly the same volume of evidence.

Well-Rounded Knowledge

My advice is to read one textbook on a subject for every 4-5 popular books or 50-100 articles you read about it.

Reading only textbooks is probably impractical. I want knowledge not just for knowledge’s sake, but to do something useful with it. Reading a book about exercise that distills research into practical tips is probably more useful than a textbook in physiology. Same for personal finances, learning, productivity or nutrition.

Reading only popular nonfiction is probably misleading. If you’re going to read a dozen books in personal investing, it probably makes sense to at least understand the rationale behind the efficient market hypothesis. Some authors will do this for you, but a lot of it won’t because of the constraints mentioned earlier.

Picking Textbooks

I’ve used the word “textbook” here loosely, but broadly I’d say it means two things:

1. The book tries to describe established viewpoints, rather than argue for a particular one (except where there is consensus). Academic textbooks are good for this because universities usually try to pick books without any severe bias.
2. The book focuses on fundamental concepts necessary to understand the field, not just minor details or conclusions. A good textbook should teach you how to think about a field, not just what to think.

Since textbooks are rarely the trending topics on social media, finding good ones comes down to searching for them. Look for ones that have good Amazon reviews from researchers in the field, or ones that are used in classes at major universities. Older editions are often better, because you can get them used for cheap.

Have you read any textbooks that you felt were engaging and informative about a topic you’ve studied? Please share them in the comments!

Edit: March 6, 2013 – Reader, Luke, has posted a link to a fantastic resource for finding great textbooks. Check out LessWrong’s best textbooks on every subject.

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This why I sigh when I hear people complaining about being unable to stay motivated on a project because they aren’t sure whether it’s the right one. These people have it backwards—if you can’t get projects finished, it doesn’t matter if it is the right one.

Ask yourself this: if you gave yourself a project that you had to commit to, no matter what, for one year, could you see it through? What about five years? Ten?

Tying Yourself to the Mast

It took me awhile to realize that the get-it-done-no-matter-what discipline was the skill I lacked. Before I started this blog, I had many ideas that failed to realize. Business ventures that never hit the market. Personal goals that were abandoned soon after they had begun.

Every time they died, I had the same excuses. It wasn’t a good idea (but my next one was perfect, of course). I was bored with it. I wasn’t motivated.

Maybe these excuses were valid. Maybe the projects were bad ideas, boring or not motivating. But most ideas are. Few ideas are perfect in conception—it’s through the grueling process of execution that they get sculpted and improved.

The triggering point for a change in me was realizing that the thing I lacked wasn’t a good idea—but the ability to finish. So I changed my aim: for my next project, I would set tight constraints and finish it, no matter what.

I can’t say discipline was instantaneous, but reframing the problem helped considerably. Because I recognized that my inability to execute was my true weakness, I stopped trying to make excuses and focused on trying to get it done. Even if it was a bad idea, boring or not motivating.

Odysseus tied himself to the mast to avoid the allure of the siren’s song. Knowing he would be tempted, he constrained himself in advance so that he couldn’t make a rash decision. If you’ve struggled with execution in the past, you need to find your own mast to tie yourself to, so that you won’t give up for any reason.

Stubbornness isn’t always a virtue. Often there are good reasons to give up. But those decisions are much easier to make when they are made on a firm foundation of discipline. If you base all your decisions on the temporary whims of laziness or fatigue, you’re likely to crash upon the rocks.

Training Discipline with 30-Day Trials

Small projects are a good starting point for training discipline. They are short enough that even if their concept is seriously malformed, you won’t waste too much time.

I started with thirty-day trials. This is where you commit to a new habit or behavioral change for an entire month. Good candidates are exercising every day, waking up at a particular time or giving something up, like drinking or smoking.

While the habit changes themselves are worthwhile, the biggest benefit of doing this practice was that it strengthened my self-discipline. Each trial was a burst willpower, like lifting a heavy weight. With enough repetitions, the weight becomes easier to lift.

I remember jogging at 6am in the morning after having spent the entire night awake at a party, to make sure I didn’t miss a day. I remember waking up at 5am every morning while reading the unabridged edition of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

Neither of these were necessary. I’m sure if I had skipped one day, my fitness habit wouldn’t have suffered. It’s also unlikely I needed to grind myself through reading what turned out to be a long-winded and boring book.

But the reason I did these was that I had tied myself to the mast of those one-month 30-Day Trials. I had committed to that trial, so I would see it through, regardless of whether it was necessary or enjoyable.

I wasn’t always successful either. My exercise habit took four attempts before I finally made it through the last one. Discipline is a lot like physical strength. If you’ve never been to the gym before, you won’t be bench-pressing 300 lbs.

I’d like to say that building discipline is easy, that there’s just some productivity “hack” you can use to have more willpower. But there isn’t. The only way to strengthen your ability to stop giving up is to stop giving up.

Why Bother?

To many people, the idea of pushing yourself that hard is a little silly. Even if people don’t come outright and say it, there is a certain condescending attitude we have to the overly self-disciplined. Nobody likes a try hard, and building self-discipline is practically the definition of trying hard.

In many ways, ignoring the social pressure is harder than the act of discipline itself. I used to keep my goals private because I didn’t want to add social pressures to my internal ones. I don’t worry about it now, but that’s probably because I’ve already built a great deal of confidence from years of practice.

It’s not silly. While I remember vividly my 6am post-party jog and 5am reading sessions, I also remember another moment.

Around five years after starting this website, I had a major project flop after a year of lousy income. I felt convinced that my business wouldn’t make it—and despite spending thousands of hours of work—I was still washing my laundry in a bathtub to lower my expenses.

At the time, however, I was still finishing school. Starting a new business was impractical, so I had decided the best course of action was to hold out a bit longer. If this business wouldn’t work, after I graduated, I would move onto something else.

Despite my doubts, I put together another project and tried again. This time it was Learning on Steroids, which forms the basis of my income today. All of this happened just a few months after convincing myself I wouldn’t be able to make it work.

I can’t say what would have happened had things gone differently. But I can’t help wonder whether all those 6am jogs and early-morning reading sessions helped me stick through just a little longer.

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