The data are clear. Here are the rankings for mathematics for PISA, an organization which compares educational performance internationally:

We have to go down the list to number seven before we reach a Western nation. And this ranking doesn’t even include China. While China wasn’t in this data set, in 2018 China’s major metropolitan areas of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang (BSJZ) actually ranked higher than Singapore.

East Asian countries also score high in reading, claiming 4 of the top 5 spots. This is even more impressive when you account for the fact that writing systems based on characters, such as those used in Japan and China, are much harder to learn than alphabetic systems used in most European languages.


The obvious answer to the question of East Asian scholastic performance is culture.

Of the six East Asian countries that top the PISA rankings in mathematics, all but Japan exceed the OECD average for weekly hours of classwork, and including the combined Chinese cities of BSJZ, three were in the top seven worldwide for total hours studying. Many students in these high-performing countries also attend evening “cram” schools after their regular classes conclude for the day.


Whether all this studying is a good thing (or not) is a complicated question. On the one hand, a competitive, academic culture may remove opportunities for kids to play and socialize. To the extent that the academic knowledge is not useful for many jobs, this approach may be a net-negative that puts a drag on society.



But, it’s hard not to look at the incredible performance of East Asian economies, such as the Four Asian Tigers of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, particularly in high-technology manufacturing, and believe that all this focus on math and science isn’t having some payoff.

While it might be fun to debate the relative merits of different educational cultures (including some of the differences within East Asian approaches, especially Japan’s outlier status in terms of high grades with comparatively fewer hours of studying), I’m more interested in the origins of those cultures themselves. Why is there such a strong emphasis on educational attainment in East Asian countries in the first place?

The Keju: 1300 Years of Studying

One explanation for the cultural emphasis on education has to do with the long-lasting influence of the Chinese civil service exams, or the keju (科举). While Europe was just beginning to invent feudalism, the Chinese state was staffed by a meritocratic bureaucracy drawn from graduates of some of the most competitive exams the world has ever known.

To try to understand this better, I recently read Ichisada Miyazaki’s fascinating book, China’s Examination Hell, to look into the benefits (and costs) created by this system.

Initiated in the Sui dynasty (605 CE), the civil service examinations were originally designed to get around the powerful aristocratic families that wielded considerable control over the imperial government.

In theory, the exams were open to all men.¹ Any man, from the son of a noble family down to a peasant commoner, could attend. In practice, of course, the financial burdens of years of study meant that few outside of the already well off could seriously pursue it.

Still, the system allowed for a degree of social mobility, helped legitimize imperial rule, and worked to centralize power. For these reasons, despite dynastic changes and even foreign conquest, the system persisted for thirteen centuries. It was finally abolished in the waning days of the Qing.

Even Hong Xiuquan who, after failing multiple times to become a licentiate, had a nervous breakdown, believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, and launched a war that killed tens of millions, nonetheless set up his own version of the examination system in the territories he controlled. The exams, even for those who personally suffered under them, were essential.

What Was it Like Taking the Exams?

Miyazaki’s book is interesting not only for its description of the system, with its many layers of examinations and re-examinations centered on memorizing the Chinese classics, but also for his accounts of what it was like for the students themselves.

At the height of their complexity, in the late Qing dynasty, the exams had three major divisions: provincial, metropolitan and palace examinations.

The provincial examinations, held “annually”—every three years—had exam takers locked into tiny cells in large, labyrinthian exam halls for three days straight. Exam takers were provided with three wooden boards: one for a bed, one for a bench and one for a writing surface. The halls, used so infrequently, were often dilapidated, with students sheltering their precious exam answers from leaking rain.

Those taking the provincial exams faced not only harsh physical conditions, but also threats from the supernatural. It was widely believed that ghosts punished those guilty of unseen crimes at this stage of the process. Seducers and swindlers could expect to be haunted, with some anecdotes of guilty consciences leading to suicide or nervous breakdown during the three days of confinement.

In other cases, karma was more indirect. A past transgression might result in lamp oil accidentally spilling on one’s answer sheets, a violation that led invariably to failure at the exams. It was widely believed that any apparent unfairness in the exam results must be due to concealed crimes or evil deeds being judged from heaven rather than some unlucky accident.

Of the few who succeeded, they made the long (and expensive) journey to the capital for the metropolitan examinations. In the early years of the keju, these were the final stage in a scholar’s journey, after which he would have a near-guaranteed place in the Chinese bureaucracy.

Yet, the loyalty test-takers owed to their examiners created factions within the government system. Much as academics today often owe their careers to eminent doctoral advisors, scholars owed loyalty to their examiner. To prevent this from undermining imperial loyalty, palace exams, judged by the emperor, were instituted.² This way, it was supposed, graduates would owe their gratitude not to an examiner, but to the emperor himself.

Given the enormous incentives for corruption in this system, it was impressive how many steps were taken to combat cheating and favoritism. Exam takers were thoroughly searched for any smuggled writing. Examiners only had access to students’ seat number, not their names, and, in the higher exams, even the answer sheets were meticulously hand-copied by scribes so as not to reveal a test-taker’s identity through distinguishing marks in handwriting.

Scandals, when they did emerge, created such public backlash that that there was a strong motivation to maintain at least a facade of integrity. Examiners found to engage in schemes to undermine the process were often exiled or executed.

The exam process itself was intensely competitive. Of those entering the provincial exam, first a local exam had to be passed just to get into the system. That exam had a roughly 1 to 2% pass rate. Provincial exams had a roughly 5% pass rate, and metropolitan exams had a 15 to 20% pass rate. Although few failed the palace exams, which tended to be more of a formality than a substantive test, the ranking one achieved there had an important impact on one’s career opportunities. In all, from a hundred thousand potential applicants, perhaps a dozen would go on to see their dream realized by becoming a graduate of the palace exams (jinshi).

Unlike the modern university system, where key academic bottlenecks occur in one’s youth, the process of studying and taking the imperial exams could go on for years. It wasn’t uncommon for new graduates to be grey-haired old men. In some cases, elderly exam-takers were passed automatically, allowing them to earn their jinshi status, knowing that they had already passed the age of retirement from official positions in government.

Legacy of the Imperial Examination System

It’s hard to know exactly how big an impact China’s examination system has had on academic achievement in East Asian countries today. 

One clever paper used the natural variation in the intensity of exam attendance within China, as measured by the percentage of jinshi per 10,000 population, finding that a doubling of jinshi in a region corresponds with an 8.5 percent increase in educational attainment today.

I’m somewhat skeptical that we can directly trace these effects. For centuries, China exerted enormous cultural influence on its neighbors, so even countries like Japan, which never had its own version of an imperial examination system, nonetheless adopted many aspects of Chinese culture, from the use of Chinese characters in writing to Zen Buddhism. It’s hard to believe that attitudes towards learning did not similarly diffuse, even absent a formal examination system.


But even if we can’t ascertain the exact impact of the keju on modern attitudes towards education, I think the question of its legacy is still worth considering. For more than a millennium, the examination system created a cultural emphasis on education that had no parallel in Europe, at least until the Renaissance.

Despite its flaws, the keju seems remarkably progressive for its time. Giving government positions based on merit, not birthright, was practically unknown in Western nations until the nineteenth century. The fact that the exam system emerged when feudalism was just arising in Europe and endured until the beginning of the last century is remarkable.

The cultural impact of the keju extends beyond education. One effect seems to have been a suppression of the military. While military exams did proceed in parallel to civilian ones, success in them led neither to great respect in society nor high office in government. Similarly, battlefield generals were limited in how far they could typically advance, leading to stronger civilian control over the military.

At the same time, while the suppression of the military and centralization of power assisted by the examination system may have made China more peaceful and stable than polities in Europe and elsewhere, some have argued that the centralization of the state may have prevented the disruptive innovations that spurred the Industrial Revolution in Europe.

And then there was the content of the exams themselves. While studying the Chinese Classics was supposed to impart wise judgement and upright conduct, it’s not clear that it was successful on these fronts. And from a modern educational perspective, the system seems extraordinarily wasteful in terms of its focus on skills far removed from those needed for effective governance.

Finally, there’s the intensity of the exams themselves and the impact of that competition on culture and society. While such a system was arguably superior to the hereditary aristocracy practiced in the West for much of the same time period, it’s unclear that decades spent studying for exams were the best use of the best minds.

Perhaps a similar argument could be made today with the prevalence of credential inflation not necessarily resulting in vastly greater human capital. Will future societies judge our own culture for our focus on grades and degrees over useful skills? Or will we be viewed as philistines by much more educated descendants?

A culture includes within it, not only its values, but the yardstick for measuring those values, making comparison between them an unworkable task. Whether future generations will see the keju as an essential forerunner to a meritocratic, knowledge-based society, or an exorbitantly wasteful scholastic competition will say just as much about the role of education in the culture of the future as it does about the system as it existed at the time.

Regardless, the imperial examination system fascinates me both for its incredible persistence as an institution, and as a window into the role education continues to play in societies today.

The post Book Review: China’s Examination Hell appeared first on Scott H Young.

In the first job, there is prestige, interest and, in many instances, good pay and benefits. Many people see this line of work as not merely a job, but a calling.

In the second job, work is simply work. While one may earn a living, and even enjoy the tasks, few people make this type of job the central purpose of their life.

Which kind of job do you think is more likely to create burnout?

If you had asked me this question a year or two ago, I would have guessed the second type. Man does not live by bread alone, so I would have argued that careers which offer the possibility of prestige, purpose and intellectual challenge would make work energizing.

So I find it interesting that researchers generally find the opposite is the case. While people with terrible jobs often do burnout, the phenomenon was first documented in, and is most frequently found in, jobs which are often considered to be very desirable. Doctors, teachers, activists and academics appear frequently in case studies of burnout.

Why Burnout?

Why do people with enviable jobs experience burnout more often?

The best explanation for this finding I’ve read comes from Jonathan Malesic in his book The End of Burnout.

 Burnout occurs when the gap between the expectations of a job and its reality become irreconcilable. People with “great” careers face burnout more, not always because their jobs are objectively worse, but because they tend to come with idealistic expectations as well.

Malesic’s case is itself interesting. Previously a tenured academic in theology, Malesic got into the job because his early experiences in college led him to think that a life teaching students about the deeper mysteries of the universe would be deeply satisfying and important.


But even after achieving tenure (itself often a burnout-inducing quest), he found that most of his students couldn’t care less about his teachings, the papers he wrote were largely ignored, and he could barely drag himself to class in order to teach.

Malesic’s expectations of the work—that it would be intellectually stimulating and deeply meaningful—crashed into the reality of bored students, squabbling academics and thankless service work.

Malesic reflects on his experience working as a parking attendant, prior to his time in academia. Even though most working at the parking lot considered their work a menial job, nobody had burnout. They did their work, got paid, and went back to “real” life, which often involved pursuits outside of work that imbued life with meaning.

The Opposite of Burnout

All of this suggests that the opposite of burnout is not simply passionate engagement. Ironically, passionate engagement—and the unrealistic expectations it creates—can often create the conditions for burnout.

Of course, none of this suggests that having a dead-end job is the cure, either. Good things are good. All else being equal, it’s better to have a job that has greater pay, benefits and prestige than one with less. Gaps between lofty expectations and mediocre reality can trigger burnout, but so can even minimal expectations of a healthy work environment when stuck in a hellish workplace.

The opposite of burnout is balance. This means having your expectations for work well-matched by the realities of your job, along with a surplus of other sources of meaning and resiliency in life: good relationships, hobbies, healthy habits and social support.

An irony here is that balance is often more productive than an obsession with work. The person who devotes themselves entirely to work may succeed more in the short-run, but they create instability. If the steady drip of rewards fails to meet their lofty expectations, the result can be a crash that is difficult to recover from.

The person who approaches work as only one piece of their life alongside other pursuits in their personal life has built a buffer against burnout. This allows that person to continue doing good work far longer and more consistently, which adds up to more in the long run.

_ _ _

Earlier this year, I ran the first-ever session of a course devoted to maximizing your energy in life and work: Everyday Energy. Drawing on research about what creates (and what zaps) our productive energy, this course takes you through a three-month plan for creating more vitality in your life, starting where you are right now.

If you are interested, check it out here: Everyday Energy

The post The Paradox of Burnout appeared first on Scott H Young.

Two years out from my Foundations project, I’m happy that, for most of the areas I worked on, things have stayed relatively strong.

I still exercise nearly every day. And while I didn’t run a marathon this year, I did finish a race going from sea level to the top of a local mountain (16 km, 1400 m of elevation gain). I’ve also been fairly consistent with eating, sleep, reading and keeping up with friends. I’ve had some backsliding on organization, but given my low starting point there, I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes a few more attempts before that one sticks.

The big project of the year was putting together the first session of my course, Everyday Energy. This was a fun project to research. I’ve always had a deep interest in the connections between motivation, productivity, health and well-being, so creating 75+ lessons for the course gave me an excuse to dive deep into a lot of topics I might have otherwise missed.

My Plans for Next Year

The big learning project I have for next year is trying to create more (and better) videos for YouTube.

I’ve always enjoyed video content, especially on educational topics. Channels like 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium and World War Two do amazing work that manages to be both entertaining and intellectually rigorous.

 So far, my own commitment to creating videos has always been somewhat half-hearted. Video production is a lot more time-consuming than writing, and so I never committed myself to climbing the skill curve to make content I was really happy with. So, even though I’ve had a YouTube channel for over a decade, I’ve been inconsistent as a video creator.

However, the overall shift of the online ecosystem towards video makes me feel like the commitment to learning the medium and creating the videos that I’d like to make this year is justified.

You can check out two of the most recent videos I’ve done here:

• How To Read One Book Per Week (Even If You Read Slowly)
• The Real Reason You Procrastinate (Scientific Explanation)

If you prefer written essays to videos, don’t worry, I’m not going to stop writing here. But I will try to share some of the videos I make on the newsletter.

Personal Goals

Outside of work, my main focus is continuing to deepen some of the foundations I worked on in my initial project. 

Health and fitness are going smoothly, but I might like to enter another race. I’m not sure I’ll have time to train for a full marathon this year, but a half-distance race or a triathlon could be fun.

For reading, I’m going to try to cast a wider net if time allows. Often I’m doing research for a project which narrows my reading list, so it would be nice to use this year to read more books that aren’t intended to make their way into my writing directly. Still, given my overall focus on video creation, I’ve (of course) bought a few books on film in general to help with learning.

Outreach was another area I realized had been somewhat weak during my initial Foundations project. A priority for the next year is to make time for friends, even if it sometimes feels less productive. The emergence of AI has served as a reminder of how much value flows through real relationships—they shouldn’t be neglected.

And, as always, it’s the relationships that I have with readers like you that make what I do for a living possible. I’ve been writing for over twenty years now, and I’m enormously grateful that I have the opportunity to share what I learn with you.

Thanks for sticking with me for another year!

The post I’m 38 appeared first on Scott H Young.

1. Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour by Helmut Schoeck

Part sociological theory, part political tirade, I found Schoeck’s analysis of envy in society to be interesting and provocative.

Schoeck argues that envy is caustic, and all functional societies learn to suppress it to some extent. By discouraging individual effort and achievement, envy holds back not just productivity and wealth, but even ordinary virtues as people don’t want to attract the “evil eye” of their neighbors’ envy.

Schoeck also argues that envy, as an emotion, doesn’t function the way class-conscious political organizers would like it to. We are much more envious of small differences among our close associates than we are of large gaps between us and people far away. One can think of the Cultural Revolution in China where the brunt of the malice was borne not by ruling elites, but by schoolteachers, small landowners and other people just slightly better off than others in their local villages.

Although the targets of Schoeck’s tirades against a politics built on envy are largely left-wing, it was hard not to read a similar sentiment into much of the right-wing populism sweeping the world today.

Although we might like to think we’ve matured into a culture that can debate the trade-offs between growth and equality, or environment and economy, Envy is a potent reminder that, in many ways, we’re still a society of children upset that the kid next door has a slightly nicer toy than we do.

2. Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz

A fascinating book on the history of calculus.

I really enjoy Strogatz’s work, especially his class on chaos theory. This book, looking at the history of one of mathematics’ crowning achievements is also great.

One minor quibble I have is that Strogatz seems almost to want to bend over backwards to convince the reader that calculus is important. It’s almost as if a pushy editor told him that most people find calculus boring and to amp up the practical examples to maximize interest. I find it hard to believe that anyone whose eyes glaze over at the thought of advanced math would bother to read this book, so I find the efforts to hype the subject somewhat unnecessary.

3. The Fragility of Goodness by Martha Nussbaum

Life is fragile, and we often fail to do the right thing, or to get what we want. That much is well understood.

 But are there situations in life where it’s impossible to do the right thing? Times we’re left with no good options, and all choices inevitably involve sacrificing a dearly held value?

Nussbaum argues that there are, and the ancient Greek tragedians understood this to be a part of the human condition. Their works are tragedies not because bad things happen to good people, but because people have no choice but to do things badly. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

Philosophers since Plato have been on a mission to reorganize our interior life so that such tragedies are impossible, to provide a clear and consistent ordering of human values so that there is always a correct decision. From Socrates’s pull away from the perceptible world into the world of pure ideas to Bentham’s utilitarian calculus which measures all human values using a single ruler, all seek to find some way to rid us of the painful possibility that many problems in life have no good answer.

4. Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich

Recently, geneticists have been able to extract DNA sequences from the skeletons of ancient humans. By sequencing that DNA and comparing it to other archeological specimens and modern-day human beings, we are getting a much richer picture of our ancestry than ever before.

There’s a tendency to view our current cosmopolitan age as an aberration. To assume that, until recently, people lived largely where they settled after the initial human migrations out of Africa. That Chinese people are from China, Europeans are from Europe, and First Nations people in the Americas settled roughly where they landed after crossing the Bering Strait tens of thousands of years ago. In this view, our multi-ethnic societies with mixtures of ancestral ethnic groups is highly unusual.

Reich’s work shows that the past was a far more interesting place than we realize, and that human history was one of frequent mixtures. While we have no written records from these times, our genomes tell stories of mass migrations, continent-scale conquests and repeated returns.

5. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” To Camus, life is obviously absurd and meaningless. The question is whether it’s still worth living a meaningless existence.

Camus argues that it is, asking what it would be like to create art that, fundamentally, does not matter. He argues for a kind of experiential gluttony, maximizing one’s experiences, treating living itself as an act of rebellion in the face of an uncaring cosmos.

Sisyphus, the figure of Greek myth whose punishment by the gods was to spend eternity repeatedly rolling a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll down, need not be suffering. Camus argues that Sisyphus possesses something that those of us still attached to finding meaning in life lack, a true understanding of his plight. And from that understanding, he has freedom.

Camus is provocative, but his solution seems psychologically implausible for me. I believe we are deeply teleological, goal-directed creatures. To live without purpose is an anathema. What needs reforming is not our innate psychology, but an idea of meaning that can accommodate a universe that does not provide eternal purposes.

6. The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester

The modern world is built on an idea: precision. By making things ever-more exactly, we can solve technological puzzles that ancients could only dream of. Winchester takes the reader on a tour through the history of precision, beginning with the first precision-machined cannons, milled to within about the width of a coin, to the lithographic processes used to make high-end computer chips, offering precision to within a few atoms.

One of my favorite stories in the book compares Rolls-Royce and Ford automobiles. While Rolls-Royce was famous for their exquisite craftsmanship, it was actually Ford’s Model T that was more precise. The reason was simple: Ford needed to build all the cars with identical, interchangeable parts. Being unable to fiddle with the pieces until they lined up perfectly meant that each part had to, on its own, be much more perfect than any component of a hand-crafted automobile.

7. The Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

This book was billed as a new kind of book on generative AI. Cowen even went so far as to build a companion website that allows you to ask the book questions. I didn’t do any of that, though, and simply read the Kindle edition of the book start-to-finish.

Cowen offers a history of marginalism, or the theory that the right way to analyze a decision is not to ask how much something costs on average, but what it costs you to do one more of something. 

Consider the famous diamond-water paradox. Water is necessary for life, so its value must be immense. Diamonds, in contrast, are mostly useless baubles, so they shouldn’t be very valuable. Yet water is cheap and diamonds are expensive.

Marginalism helps explain this phenomenon by pointing out that the price of water doesn’t come from its total value to you (which is indeed very high) but its marginal value—i.e., how much more one glass of water is worth to you. And, if you aren’t very thirsty, the answer might be not very much. Water is abundant, so the marginal value is low compared to the supply.

Cowen argues that marginal thinking has been enormously productive for economics, but its centrality to the discipline is waning. Price theory, which makes marginalist principles central, is out of favor compared to econometrics and other sophisticated mathematical techniques. One might even say marginalist thinking is declining on the margin.

8. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

This may be the funniest book I’ve ever read. A satire on war, bureaucracy and the paradoxes of life, the eponymous Catch-22 refers to a fictitious rule for bomber pilots who wanted to get out of combat duty:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

The whole book is full of amusing little observations about the absurdities of life:

He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom. Dunbar was working so hard at increasing his life span that Yossarian thought he was dead.

The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.

McWatt was the craziest combat man of them all probably, because he was perfectly sane and still did not mind the war.

The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.

Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian’s fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.

Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.

I haven’t always been motivated to read many classic works of fiction, although I seldom regret reading them. Catch-22 reminds me that fiction is good, not just for entertainment, but for the kind of thinking it stimulates.

The post Recent Reading appeared first on Scott H Young.

This is a problem I’ve thought a lot about, both intellectually and personally.

Intellectually, the role of setbacks in motivation is well-understood. Progress is one of the most reliable motivators in our work. And setbacks aren’t just negative progress—research by Teresa Amabile finds that setback experiences are roughly three times as negative as progress is positive.

Similarly, it’s long been understood in therapeutic contexts that lacking self-efficacy can create a self-fulfilling prophecy: when we have an irrational fear, we avoid exposing ourselves to scary situations, even if they might provide evidence our fears are overblown. Likewise, if we feel like everything we try ends up in failure, we don’t put in the effort to make it succeed.

I’ve been there. I’ve experienced many moments of feeling completely stuck, where everything I try doesn’t seem to work. It took me over five years writing before I found a way to make a living from it. My motivation to keep going was often mixed in with a considerable amount of self-doubt.

Thus, even beyond an intellectual interest, trying to resolve the problem of motivation in the face of setbacks has had enormous practical consequences for my life, as I’m sure it does for everyone.

Is Giving Up Actually Irrational?


A lot of self-improvement advice takes the perspective that persistence is an unqualified good. In this view, staying motivated is hard, but it’s always the right decision when faced with challenges in life.

Frankly, this is false. Giving up is the correct answer in many situations. If anything, human beings have a tendency to persist too long in many pursuits. We fail to exclude sunk costs when evaluating our decisions. We allow initial conditions to frame our future decisions. We take unnecessary gambles to win back losses.

 In many situations, then, quitting is the right move. Our motivational circuitry is, in some sense, responding to the situation we perceive in the environment. Experiencing a lot of failure doing one thing is life’s way of telling us to try something else.

I bring this up because, even though we all can struggle to deal with the emotional and motivational aspects of persistence, we need to start by answering this question as objectively as possible: should I keep going?

Only if you can give yourself a good answer in the affirmative—that yes, continuing is still the best option, in spite of the previous setbacks—does it even make sense to try to resolve the emotional and motivational problems of persisting.

When Should You Keep Going? When Should You Quit?

In general, continuing is the right answer when, looking at all the other alternatives, it’s still the most beneficial course of action.

Say you’re studying for an important exam, which you’ve already failed three times. Should you continue?

The answer depends on

• (a) what’s the chance you can still pass if you work hard,
• (b) how much time and effort do you need to invest, and
• (c) what other opportunities would you have if you didn’t go for it.

Having failed three times in the past is evidence, at the very least, that the exam is harder than you thought. Thus, the probability of succeeding is probably lower, and the effort required to succeed is higher than you might have thought before you attempted the exam.

However, the main factor here is actually (c), your other opportunities. If passing this exam doesn’t have a major influence on your future career or professional life, or if you have a really good fall-back opportunity available to you, then persisting might not make sense. You’d be better off spending that time and energy tackling other projects.

 If, instead, this exam matters greatly for your future career, and failing it leaves you with much worse professional opportunities, then it might still pass the cost-benefit test to study for it, even if you have to revise your probability of success downward and your effort upward.

Whenever I’m facing setbacks in something, whether it’s a major goal in life or simply one of my ongoing projects, I like to do this kind of rough analysis to get a sense for whether persisting still makes sense. 



This kind of analysis sounds almost depressing. Isn’t this just a way to reinforce poor self-esteem? Wouldn’t a pep talk work better?

In practice, however, I’ve found the opposite is usually the case. Either I get the clarity that giving up is actually the right decision, or I realize that, despite the recent setbacks, it’s still in my best interest to persist. Either way, I can move forward decisively.

Rebuilding Motivation

Supposing you go through this exercise and you determine that, despite your recent frustrations, continuing with your current pursuit is still the right decision. How do you rebuild your motivation to actually pursue it?

Once again, I disagree with a lot of advice given in this space. People are told to repeat positive affirmations to themselves, thump their chest or otherwise hype themselves up. This may work momentarily, but the effects wear off quickly and leave you vulnerable to future setbacks you’ve convinced yourself won’t happen again.

I think the key to rebuilding motivation is to have a clear plan that you honestly believe will work.

Take the exam example again. Suppose you’ve decided that it’s going to take you another six months of studying full-time to prepare for the exam, and even that only gives you fifty-fifty odds of success. However, you believe this is still a better opportunity, all things considered, than what you might do in those six months otherwise.

To rebuild your motivation, you need to create a plan that you feel, deep in your bones, would work as advertised.

Sometimes this involves making a plan that would definitely work, even if it requires a large amount of effort. For instance, if you’ve only put in ten hours per week studying, you might be able to convince yourself that studying full-time for a stretch would definitely work. If so, then drafting up this plan and committing to it can help overcome the past disappointments.

Other times, the plan may not be guaranteed, but you still believe it would be worthwhile, either because the probability of success is acceptably high, or because you believe the information you’d gain from your attempt would make that attempt worth it.

For example, if you’ve been struggling with finding a job—failing to land a single interview despite sending out a dozen resumes—then a project to send out two hundred resumes won’t guarantee success. But it does tell you that whatever you’re experiencing in the job market isn’t just bad luck, rather it’s a pretty good indicator that your resume isn’t sparking much actual interest.

Motivation tends to falter when we have plans that we don’t honestly believe will work. Success should look like a logical progression of doable, step-by-step actions that will lead to the desired result. If there are steps in your plan that require a miracle to succeed, deep down, you won’t believe in the plan, and that lack of belief will undermine your motivation.

If you can’t come up with a plan you believe in, the best first steps are either to do some more research to come up with such a plan, or to adopt a more exploratory mindset by trying out various things with the goal of finding a path that might work.

For instance, if you’re trying to succeed as an entrepreneur, it may not be clear what’s necessary to create a product people will want to pay money for. But you could decide it’s still worthwhile to spend six months experimenting with prototypes and talking to customers to see if you can find an offering that might have potential.

In the end, the motivation to persist is less about willpower than it is about rationally assessing your situation and crafting a strategy and plan you can believe in. If you can do that, the emotions needed to keep going tend to follow.

The post Discouraged? Here’s How to Stay Motivated appeared first on Scott H Young.

The drawbacks are obvious. For many classroom assignments, AI is now good enough that it can simply do your homework for you. But having AI do your homework is self-defeating. You can’t learn without doing the work.

That said, the opportunities AI may provide are numerous. Alongside its drawbacks, AI also brings the possibility for cheap and patient tutoring, on-demand explanations, extra practice problems and assistance in research.


To paraphrase Dickens, when it comes to learning, it really is both the best of times and the worst of times.

This brings me to a recent essay written by the always insightful Carl Hendrick. In it, he reviews recent findings on AI’s impact on learning, drawing an analogy between the introduction of autopilot and the degrading of pilot skill:

The thing I find really fascinating about this story and why I think it has so much import for learning and AI is that his core diagnosis was that the autopilot was in fact, not the problem. The truth is that automated function in planes saves far more lives than it endangers and I think the same will be true of self-driving cars. (I have no interest in the hackneyed claim that the machines are bad and the humans good. The machines are, on the whole, magnificent I think). The thing I think is so interesting is that when faced with an emergency, the pilots reached instinctively for more automation not less, when the right thing to do was often to drop down a level and fly. So the danger is not automation itself but over-dependency on automation and this is quite obviously what happens when we give novice learners unfettered access to chatbots.

Hendrick doesn’t blame the students for this alarming trend; he blames educational institutions themselves. Schools have been vacillating between wanting to adopt a pro-AI stance, encouraging students to use AI in their work provided they properly “cite” the results, and embracing the language of academic honesty in a vain attempt to maintain the status quo.

Obviously, this is untenable. Education will have to change because of AI.

The answer isn’t to adopt some vague AI-forward solution which simply accepts AI output as a legitimate substitute for students doing the work themselves. Instead, it will be understanding that AI, like calculators and Wikipedia, can be both an incredible tool and a debilitating crutch.

What is the Right “Amount” of AI Use for Optimal Learning?

It’s pretty clear that the solution of having AI do your homework for you will not to result in much actual learning. Enamored as I am by the possibilities unlocked by the arrival of coding agents, it’s obvious to me that vibe coding actively impairs your ability to learn to write code by hand.

Whether this trade-off is valid in the realm of productive work is a more difficult question. I suspect the answer of whether vibe coding enhances or undermines productivity depends a lot on the stage of knowledge acquisition. Beginners who haven’t built up a mental model of what code is being written are losing out on the opportunity to practice foundational skills. Experts, who can steer the process, may end up benefitting from the saved effort.

But nobody can deny that if your goal was to learn to write code by hand, getting Claude to do your work for you will result in less learning.

What’s more interesting to me is if there’s an optimal amount of, or timing for AI help. Meaning, even if too much AI is obviously bad, might learning be hindered if there is too little?

If you had asked me this question in the lead up to my 2019 book, Ultralearning, I would have said no. I was a strong advocate for doing hard problem solving and the associated mental effort it requires as a way to learn difficult skills.

However, after the research that led to my 2024 book, Get Better at Anything, I’m no longer convinced. Practicing problems is certainly an essential part of learning any skill. But the cognitive load involved can easily become too high. Getting help, whether it’s in the form of a worked example, a completion problem or just a hint to get you unstuck, can be faster for learning than floundering.

Some Tentative Guidelines

In education research, conversations about different pedagogical approaches often span decades. On that timescale, AI has only been here for the blink of an eye. Therefore, I expect it will take some time before a mature consensus on AI best-practice emerges in the research literature.

However, I’d like to share my best guess of what some of those AI guidelines might look like, absent stronger evidence-based work:

1. You can’t learn from work you don’t do yourself.

This is obvious, but it needs to be restated. While AI-assistance may help or harm learning, it’s clear that anything you get a chatbot to do in toto isn’t going to allow you to learn the underlying skill.

2. Don’t use AI on your first attempt.

For many tasks, there is only one problem. In such cases, I think it’s almost always better to attempt a solution on your own before looking up the answer. This seems particularly true in creative domains where each problem is unique. Asking an AI for help with the start of an essay, for instance, will invariably shape what direction you end up following, robbing you of the crucial experience of building your own judgement around a topic and selecting your own path to research and argue.

3. Don’t use AI on your last attempt.

What if you can’t solve the problem despite your best efforts? Assuming this is a repeated problem, the research is fairly clear that seeing a worked example or explanation or getting instruction is going to be better than continuing to struggle. Thus, getting help with AI after a failure seems prudent. But, if you’re going to benefit from learning, you need to then attempt another problem of the same type without AI help.

4. Do use AI to suggest alternative ideas and resources.

While starting with AI is likely to cause you to skip over the necessary hard thinking that results in learning, I do think AI can be useful in suggesting alternatives you might have overlooked. Here, the superhuman breadth of knowledge possessed by AI can be an enormous asset—surfacing methods, papers, books and ideas you may have missed in your first pass.

5. Do use AI to fix confusion and mistakes.

Similarly, after you’ve completed your first attempt at solving a problem, I would typically encourage looking at the expert solution for feedback. AI can not only generate expert-level solutions in many domains, but it can help point out the source of confusion and mistakes.

See-Do-Feedback (+AI)

In Get Better at Anything, I argued that much of effective learning looks like a practice loop: Seeing involves getting instruction, viewing a worked example or otherwise getting knowledge into your head to guide the search for the right answer. Doing involves practicing on your own. Feedback involves getting some relevant signal from the environment about how effective your practice was.

AI has the potential to assist with both the first and last element of that loop. What it cannot replace is the middle step—doing the work for yourself.

The post We Need Guidelines for Learning and AI appeared first on Scott H Young.


In contrast, creative skills have an aura of unlearnability to them. Either you have creative talent, or you don’t.

 But this isn’t true. Creative skills are as learnable as any other skill you’d like to master. In this essay, I’d like to show how.

The Two Components of Creative Skills

Any creative skill you’d like to learn, whether it’s painting, writing, music, design or something else, has essentially two components:

1. Technical skills.
2. Ideational skills.

Technical skills are those aspects of creativity which don’t actually require, well, creativity. Take my portrait drawing challenge as an example. Although I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish with one month’s work, there was zero creativity involved. The difficulty in this challenge was purely technical.

Technical skill is the aspect of creative expertise most impressive to non-artists. Being able to play a very difficult guitar solo flawlessly or render a compelling likeness of an image with paint or pencil is hard to do. But, strictly speaking, there isn’t much creativity required.

Ideational skills, in contrast, are more often what we refer to as creativity itself. What we think of as “creativity” is the ability to do something that is both valuable and original. Among practitioners, there’s usually a greater appreciation for these ideational skills, as technical skills often lose their aura of mysticism when you’ve spent enough time practicing them.

Great artists are usually good at both the technical and ideational components of creative skills, although some artists’s talents clearly lie more heavily on one side or the other. John Singer Sargent’s paintings are technically virtuosic—especially when you appreciate that most of his work was done alla prima, which means he did each painting largely in one go, rather than meticulously building up layers as was more common during the Renaissance:

In contrast, Vincent van Gogh is the best paradigm of an ideational genius with mediocre technical skills. He couldn’t keep up with the other artists in his Parisian atelier and eventually left. Even when he was in the mature phase of his painting, he frequently repeated the same subject multiple times because he struggled to get the details right:

Still, as much as I’m personally a fan of Sargent’s, it’s clear that Van Gogh has had far more impact as a painter, in no small part due to his original and compelling style.

With this distinction in mind, let’s look at how how to get good at each aspect of creative skills.

Achieving Technical Proficiency

Technical proficiency is the easier of the two to master. It’s hardly trivial, but technical skills are amenable to hard work and practice in a way that ideational genius often is not.

That being said, many people struggle to acquire technical proficiency in creative skills because they go about it the wrong way. All technical skills break down into three essential parts:

1. Methods.
2. Concepts.
3. Practice.

The first part is that to learn a creative skill you need to start with a method. This can be difficult because many artists have so overlearned their skills that they no longer appear to follow any particular method.

This was an aspect of portrait drawing that initially confounded me. Seeing street artists draw a good likeness in minutes or technically excellent artists render a likeness with a few flicks of their brush suggests that perhaps there isn’t a method at all, that success in art is simply an innate talent or intuition.

But this misunderstands the situation. Across many domains, researchers have found that nearly all expertise follows a similar pattern. Skills start out learned explicitly but, after more and more practice, parts of that explicit learning become automated—they become more like background intuition than a method you can easily articulate.³

When I started my portrait drawing challenge, for instance, I didn’t turn up very good methods. So I assumed that simply putting in a lot of bulk practice with feedback would be the key to improvement. I was right that high volumes of practice are essential, but I was wrong in assuming that methods were irrelevant.


The fact is, most portrait artists use a variety of methods to gain accuracy. Some of these are perceptual, using various means to overcome optical illusions or our natural sensory limitations to correctly assess the relative sizes, angles and tonal values in an image. Others are conceptual, building up from knowledge of lighting, geometry and anatomy to infer shapes that aren’t immediately visible.

The starting point for learning any technical skill is first to learn what the methods used are, and then practice them until they become second nature.

The next part of technical proficiency is less about rote practice and more about creating a mental model of the possibilities afforded by the medium and the constraints attached. I love this little clip discussing how Steven Spielberg achieved a scene in the movie Hook where one of the Lost Boys appears to bring down his sword quickly just a few millimeters from Robin Williams’s head.

In a pre-CGI world, Spielberg achieved this effect by filming the entire scene backwards, including the dialog of the actors, so that what appears to be a near-fatal sword strike is actually the sword lifting up quickly, in reverse.

The final key to technical virtuosity is an enormous amount of practice. Both precision and fluency matter here.

Precision, in the sense of adhering to accuracy afforded by the method you’ve adopted, is necessary because it is how you learn the underlying skill. Thus, whether you’re learning a method for drawing a portrait or playing a guitar solo, your practice will be ineffective if you permit yourself to make a ton of mistakes.

Fluency matters because motor skills, like the strumming of a guitar or the flicking of a paintbrush, will be completely different if they’re executed with different rhythms or movements. 

I used to struggle with the tension between precision and fluency. In visual arts, there’s often a contrast between “tighter” more controlled styles, and “looser” more expressive ones. Sometimes it feels like I need to slow down and get more precise to improve. Other times it feels like I’d do better to just loosen up.

 But I think this distinction is a bit of an illusion. Looser “expressive” movements are simply a different kind of motor skill than tightly controlled ones. Both of these movements need practice to master, but that doesn’t negate the need for broader technical proficiency. Like many skills in life, the solution is to practice both the movements and the methods that support them.

How to Have Better Ideas

The other component of creative skills is having good, original ideas. Even this isn’t entirely removed from technical proficiency. If you want to understand the opportunities for expressing good, original ideas within a medium, you first have to understand what the medium affords and what it constrains. Creativity, then, is at least somewhat reliant on proficiency.

But it’s a mistake to simply collapse technical virtuosity down to creativity, because creativity relies on more than just being really good at the technical aspects of the craft.

Having really good, original ideas is a mixture of two different components:

1. Knowledge.
2. Judgement.

Knowledge is the most important part. There’s good evidence that creativity itself is a largely random process. What separates more creative artists from less creative ones is less the ability to generate lots of random ideas (all of us have that ability), but that the more creative artists have better quality filters and thus can judge more reliably which ideas are actually good.

Vincent van Gogh is a case in point. Although he struggled technically, he was incredibly attuned to the artistic landscape of his time. His brother was an art dealer, and Van Gogh had a lot of contact with the emerging trends in the art world. So, even though he is often billed as an “outsider” compared to his Salon-trained contemporaries, he had insider knowledge.

Similarly, of my friends who are successful serial authors, I’m more impressed by their ability to quickly ascertain which ideas are likely to be popular and engaging than their writing skill.

Generally speaking, it’s a myth that successful creatives are outsiders to their fields.⁴ While the most creative works may come from the edges of a field, from those who are less invested in the dominant styles or paradigms, genuinely creative outsider art is practically non-existent.

This suggests that immersion in the social world that surrounds a creative endeavor is essential for truly successful creativity. That if you’re detached from the world that forms the fundamental judgements on what counts as good, original work, you’ll inevitably fail to produce something that qualifies.

The second aspect of creative idea generation is less about having creative ideas, and more about having the disposition to actually create them. Creativity, particularly original work, requires effort and risk-taking. You have to attempt something that may not work and, particularly in the case of many high-art pursuits, may not pay off financially either.

A lot of valuable creativity is suffocated not because the artist lacks original ideas, but because the pressure to conform to a particular style or genre is itself strong. As social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi put it:

The common belief is that if creativity is rare, it is because of supply-side limitations; in other words, because there are few geniuses. The truth seems to be that the limits to creativity lie on the demand-side. If there is too little creativity, it is because both individually and collectively we cannot change our cognitive structures rapidly enough to recognize and adopt new ideas.⁵

Creative ideas succeed when they’re in the Goldilocks zone of originality—new enough that they’ll attract interest, but still comprehensible to the world of artistic taste.

Putting Them Together

Getting good at creative skills, of course, is easier said than done. To become an excellent painter, musician, writer or woodworker requires a ton of practice, learning, immersion and experimentation.

But even though the road may be long, it is much easier to persist in the endeavor if you have a map.

The post How to Learn Creative Skills appeared first on Scott H Young.

This raises a question: how do you find time to learn the things you want to?

In this essay, I’m sharing my approaches for finding time to devote to learning efforts. I’ll look at three different situations, as the strategies I’ve found successful differ for each:

1. The full-time learner.
2. The serious, part-time learner.
3. The person who can only devote spare moments, inconsistently.

1. Creating a Full-Time Studying Schedule

This advice applies to students who are full-time or nearly so. Typically, this includes students enrolled in school, studying full-time for an exam or otherwise tackling an intensive training program, including people tackling intensive self-directed projects akin to some of my challenges.

For these people, I strongly recommend making an explicit studying timetable. This is a schedule that blocks off the hours you’re going to devote to studying to maximize your results, given the other constraints in your life.

In terms of making the schedule (not actually sticking to it) this is probably the simplest. If you’re studying full-time, you can block in a roughly full-time work schedule, but allocate your hours to studying.

That said, there are some common pitfalls:

1. Studying too much.

Few people can reliably concentrate for more than 5 to 8 hours per day, even with high motivation. Studying schedules with 12+ hours are usually fantastical—the most likely result is that you’ll end up procrastinating and wasting time, not focusing for the entire period.

2. Forgetting to include sleep, exercise, socialization and stress-relief.

Look, I get it. When you’re studying full-time for something extremely important, it can be tempting to cut some of the other aspects of your life down in order to maximize the amount you learn. And certainly, if you have a competitive exam that you’re not sure you’ll pass, you want to be focused.

But if the studying period is longer than a week or two, certain kinds of cuts are actually counterproductive. Sleep is probably the biggest one. Sleep plays a major role in memory consolidation, so a student who only gets six hours of sleep a night to squeeze in an extra two hours of study is actually undermining their performance.

Exercise is another cognitive booster, so including a little bit—15 minutes of higher-intensity activity is sufficient if you’re super busy—is a no-brainer. I would argue some amount of social contact and stress-relief are also important, particularly when your studies will span multi-month timescales.

3. Not including enough short breaks.

The amount of breaks you need is somewhat personal, and somewhat dependent on the dominant studying activity. When I was doing intensive MIT coursework, I found that I needed fewer breaks on lecture days than on reading days, and problem-solving days required the most.

Inserting a number of 10 to 15 minute breaks is wise. Pay attention to when you start feeling fatigued or when your focus is degrading to figure out how many breaks you need for a given activity. The best kind of breaks are short walks or, if you’re a good napper, really short naps—not social media or entertainment. Save those for after.

4. Not scheduling larger chunks of time off in the evening or weekend.

This is a matter of personal preference, obviously. But I’ve found that ensuring at least some free evening time and one day off per week tends to be optimal for me. Studying more than this is actually a net-negative for my productivity.

This constraint is somewhat weaker if you have many other obligations that keep you from studying full-time. For instance, if you work another job or have other tasks and chores that keep you occupied much of the day, evenings or weekends may be your only available time to study.

_ _ _

Ultimately, studying full-time can be daunting, especially if the project isn’t one taken on out of personal interest but because of a stressful exam needed for professional advancement. However, if you approach it like a well-structured endurance event, where pacing and recovery are optimized, you’ll put yourself on a much better path for sticking with it.

2. Creating a Serious, Part-Time Studying Schedule

Studying full-time is tough, but studying part-time is arguably harder. Those who have to learn something difficult while also managing the responsibilities of a job and/or childcare face higher levels of strain with fewer hours to make progress.

However, there are good solutions here too, they simply require more planning and preparation.

The first step is to map out your mandatory commitments—times when you won’t be able to learn, such as time you’re in the office, caregiving responsibilities, etc. Remove these from your study schedule first.

Next, figure out when the largest chunks of unscheduled time exist in your calendar. For most people this will be mornings, evenings and weekends.

Then, choose a consistent studying routine that you feel would be the easiest to stick to, for the given time investment. For instance, you might decide to wake up a little earlier and study each morning from 6:00 am to 9:00 am before work. Or you might decide to stay after work and go until 8:00 pm. You might decide to study later in the evening before bed or dedicate one (or two) weekend days to the job.

All irregular time slots have trade-offs. From having attempted serious part-time learning projects in most of these slots, I can attest to some of the difficulties:

• Mornings have fewer interruptions, but they risk cutting in to sleep, particularly if you have a later chronotype.
• After work maintains continuity with the workday, but you tend to be more fatigued.
• Late evening can have more energy for many, but it often has a harder transition to start given you may have been taking time off for dinner.
• Weekends are perhaps the most free, but devoting them to studying can interfere with other social and family plans.

Regardless of how you schedule it, making a super consistent routine is crucial. So, if you’re allocating 15 hours per week on top of a full-time job by studying for 3 hours every morning before work, always study at those times. The repetition will make it more tolerable than if you try to study on an ad hoc timetable.

The same suggestions for exercise, sleep, stress relief and breaks for leisure also apply here, but it can be more complicated. Since you’re not studying full-time, ensuring sufficient hours is the priority rather than maximizing the efficiency of each hour.

As a result, while I tend to find studying all day and all evening to be counterproductive for a full-time student (because of the average productivity drop spread over 12+ hour days), if you work full-time and only have 3 hours to study, reliably carving out those three hours will likely do more than trying to compress those hours into 90 minutes.

Ultimately, however, all of this is constrained by what you have the capacity to sustain. If you have a full-time job, small kids and other life responsibilities, a 15-hour per week studying goal may be overly ambitious. In this case, starting with a smaller amount that you can reliably do, even if you think it’s insufficient for your goal, will be better than aiming high and failing at it.

3. Recovering spare moments of time.

So far, I’ve looked at relatively serious projects. Whether it’s full-time or part-time, you’re serious about your learning goal and your drive is high. Importantly, you’re willing to prioritize your learning efforts over other things in your life by giving them dedicated time in your schedule.

Sometimes, however, such dedication isn’t possible. You may be really keen on learning something new, but you recognize that it isn’t going to take precedence over many other things that you have to do in your life. If so, how do you maximize your available time for this kind of learning?

Generally speaking, I find that dedicating time works better than trying to learn things ad hoc. This is true even if you have a lot of intrinsic motivation to learn. This is a big reason most people learn better from in-person classes than self-paced courses—the medium of instruction isn’t vastly different, but for most people, signing up for an in-person class forces them to attend at a particular time and place—effectively upgrading them to the prior strategy.

What shifts between the serious, part-time strategy and the spare-moment strategy isn’t really the amount of time dedicated (both are part-time), it’s that the latter requires you to make a decision to do some learning activity at opportune moments throughout the day.



Unfortunately, learning is effortful, and so doing some learning activity, whether that’s reading a book, watching lecture videos or practicing a skill, will usually be an uphill climb compared to other options like playing video games or watching Netflix. In other words, even if you could *in theory* capture 5 to 10 hours per week for a learning project you’re strongly motivated to pursue, most of the time you won’t. You’ll do something easier instead.

It’s for this reason that I almost always prefer the previous strategy of dedicating time. It’s much easier to commit to something that’s higher-effort when it’s habitual than if you have to choose to engage spontaneously over and over again.

The key to success with this strategy, then, tends to be finding ways to reduce the overall effort cost of engaging in learning until you’re able to pass the effort threshold regularly. The two main ways to do this are:

1. Reduce learning friction. Have your materials ready-to-go. Clearly define your next step and leave a reminder for yourself you will see immediately. Make the project always available and easy-access.
2. Reduce alternative temptations. Get rid of your TV. Delete social media from your phone. Block distracting websites or even your internet access if possible.

A third option, which is quite common, but which I don’t particularly like, is to water down the learning activity so that the learning itself becomes more appealing. This is the strategy used by a lot of educational games like Duolingo and others. While there can be some value in these apps, they often produce disappointing results for the time invested, because you’re effectively cutting yourself off from the more effective, higher-effort strategies.

Combining the Approaches

A fourth option is a hybrid between a fixed studying schedule and the spontaneous engagement just discussed. I’ve used this for projects that include both learning activities that require deep focus and ones that can be engaged in quickly with low-effort.

For instance, when learning languages, I do scheduled conversation practice and textbook study to master elements of grammar. But I also do lower-effort activities, like rewatching old television shows dubbed into the language I’m learning or working through my flashcards, at random intervals during the day.

This hybrid approach can be successful if what you’re learning genuinely involves a mixture of high- and low-effort strategies. It can help you squeeze more time out of your schedule than might be possible from dedicating chunks of time alone. The key is knowing which activities are high-effort and require dedicated chunks, and not getting frustrated when you can’t squeeze them in random ten-minute intervals throughout the day.

_ _ _

Ultimately, the studying schedule you end up sticking with will never be exactly the same as the one you plan for yourself. Real life involves unexpected interruptions, fatigue, motivation and other factors that prevent perfect adherence to a plan.

But I’ve never regretted seriously thinking out a studying plan. For learning projects that are difficult grinds, the schedule and pacing make a heavy burden feel like one you can carry. For learning projects that are fun and inspiring, the plan allows you to stop daydreaming and begin taking action. Either way, you’re far more likely to learn something if you start with a solid plan.

The post How to Find Time for Learning appeared first on Scott H Young.

1. There are behaviors, such as exercise, that clearly pass a cost-benefit test in making our lives better, and most of us would benefit from doing them more. Using some of the published data, I showed this is the case, even if you restrict the benefits to just a single measure (trading time spent exercising now to live longer later), and even if you dislike exercising.
2. Our inconsistency with these behaviors is not a problem of willpower. These are opportunities, not problems. There currently exist low-hanging fruit that could make our lives better without much cost. The difficulty isn’t one of character (which tends to encourage guilt and rationalization), but one of engineering. We need to design ways to make maintaining these behaviors consistent and stable.

Today, I want to go into some of the research on how the design of good behavioral systems actually works. But first, I have to explain a bit of what I initially got wrong.

How I Was Wrong About Habits

Habits were one of the first topics I tackled two decades ago when I first started writing. I was young and enthusiastic—and not at all versed in reading scientific papers. So most of my theories came from self-help and self-experimentation.

In particular, I subscribed to some common ideas about habits:

1. Habits are mostly about repetition and consistency.
2. A new habit can be formed in thirty days.
3. Once formed, a habit is automatic and effortless.
4. To build a habit, it’s important to maintain an uninterrupted streak. Don’t break the chain!

I now think all four of these ideas are wrong. I’m still a big believer in habits, but I think the actual data on how people sustain behavioral change is more interesting than my original ideas permitted.

Debunking My Past Beliefs

Let’s start with the last claim: that missing a single day can unravel a habit. I’m not sure where I first got this idea, but it might owe to some of the stereotype about addiction recovery—where a single mistake can throw you “off the wagon” and undermine your resolve.

Fortunately, research doesn’t back this up. In one study, they found that missing a day was associated with a little less automaticity—but not devastating relapse. This is about what you’d expect if you have the mental model that each repetition adds a little to habit strength; missing a day fails to strengthen the habit, but it isn’t fatal to the overall goal.

The belief that habits require perfect consistency might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, if you believe that you’ve completely failed when you miss a single day, that belief might cause your habit to break down rather than any underlying failure or flaw of your habits themselves.

Which leads to the third claim: that habits, once formed, operate without any continued effort. The authors of the same study also refute this idea. Even looking at the very simple behaviors they studied, researchers found that the automaticity of most behaviors plateaued at some point.

In other words, if even simple behaviors never become fully automatic, this is doubly true of more complex real-world behaviors like exercising, eating healthy or maintaining good relationships. In other words, whatever people do to sustain their behavior long-term, the reality is never so simple as a mindless habit.

This brings me to the second claim: that thirty days is all that’s required to make a habit. Even using the more modest standard of having a behavior reach it’s plateau of automaticity rather than becoming completely effortless, most behaviors required more than a month to feel maximally automatic. In this paper, the average was 66 days, and some habits required almost a year.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with committing to less than a year per behavior in order to make a habit stick. But we have to realize that, just as concrete can set within hours yet take months to reach full strength, many habits we set up in an initial burst of focus remain vulnerable to disruption for months afterward.

Finally, even the concept of habits as being all-important for sustaining simple, practical behaviors like exercise is something I’ve grown to question.

 While it definitely is the case that the automaticity that comes from sticking to an exercise routine helps make it feel easier, sustaining a behavior for years and decades is not primarily a matter of habits. Instead, to make a behavior stick over the long-term, we really need both new skills and changes to our self-concept.

What Really Sustains Good Behaviors

The early picture I had of habits was both overly optimistic and incomplete.

It was overly optimistic, because the real facts about habits are somewhat less compelling. Actual habits for real-world behaviors both take longer to make and rarely become completely automatic.

But in focusing only on habits, I was ignoring two of the real, durable changes that make sticking to behavior changes much easier in the long run.


The first thing we need to do is build skills. Skillful living means you haven’t just learned one solution to a problem, but many possible solutions to many possible variations on the problem.

Take healthy eating as an example. While this can be reduced to a mindless habit—following some strict dietary rules every day—it usually doesn’t become completely effortless. However, as you get better at cooking, grocery shopping and meal planning, eating healthier does get easier, even if it never follows a simple stimulus-response pattern of an automatic habit.

The second thing we must do is change our self-concept. Because so much of our conversation about important behaviors is tangled up with ideas of willpower, virtue, guilt and shame, we often downplay the importance of various behaviors. However, once we start making many of those changes, we no longer have to battle against our own cognitive dissonance, and we very often enthusiastically embrace behaviors we previously rejected.

This helps to explain the tendency of people to preach excessively about changes they’ve recently made. While this may annoy others (I’m sorry!), it stems from the pivot in your beliefs that happens once your behavior matches your knowledge.

Once you see yourself as the kind of person who does X, this self-concept forms much of the motivation to smooth over the residual effort remaining.

A Three-Step Plan to Living Better

Putting all of this together, we have a basic process for making improvements to the foundational aspects of your life:

1. Identify the low-hanging fruit that yield important improvements in your life.

This step is non-trivial. Yes, there are “obvious” behaviors like exercise and eating healthy. But there’s a ton of dubious practices that don’t meet this threshold. There’s also many popular fads that actively contradict decades of careful research about which sorts of actions are best.

Self-experimentation can help. But, since fully testing a behavior can take 10x-1000x longer than simply reading about it, we should be picky about what we choose to work on and start with things that have the most ample base of evidence.

2. Commit to an initial “focused” period of habit-building and experimentation.

The purpose of this phase isn’t to mechanically create a perfectly consistent habit. Rather it’s to use the period of attention to troubleshoot and smooth over the many small obstacles that prevent you from trying it out.

Consistency here helps. But even more important is self-awareness, trying to spot the little patches of friction that will cause a failure once you switch your attention to something else.

3. Make the change stable through a shift in your skills and self-image.

Assuming a behavioral change genuinely makes your life better and you’ve found a way to sustain it without excessive friction or effort, the final step is to solidify it with a shift in your skills and self-image. 

Much of this is a slow process of solving problems and changing your self-beliefs that occurs naturally as long as you keep up the behavior. But some of this can also occur at an identity level, such as deciding you’re a runner, an investor, a people person or generous.

Not every change you attempt will work through all three steps. Sometimes you’ll finish working on a change only to realize that it’s not as important to you as you had initially believed. In other cases, you’ll still believe it matters, but you’ll fail to find a good design for making it stick in your life.

But, once you’ve implemented enough of these changes, you will reach the third stage where the effect can be quite dramatic. The end result isn’t just better habits, but becoming a better version of yourself.

The post How Habits Actually Work appeared first on Scott H Young.

But, of course, we already know we should exercise. We just don’t always do it.

This is problem goes far beyond exercise. Life is full of low-hanging fruit, things that would make our lives far better than the amount of time and energy they cost us—if we did them consistently.

Seeing this gap, many of us are quick to blame willpower or laziness. We chastise those who don’t do what’s in their own best interest.

Yet we also struggle to stick with them.

Even so, we rarely apply that same scrutiny to ourselves. We’re quick to rationalize our behavior. We don’t have time. We’re too busy. We only live once! Gotta enjoy life, it’s not just about living virtuously all the time, you know?

In other words, willpower is a problem for other people. We, of course, are always making the best choices we can, given our constraints and what we want out of life.

The Problem Isn’t Willpower

The problem, as I see it, is that this framing is essentially negative. It argues “you’re a lazy person if you don’t follow a particular behavior that you admit would be good for you.” It frames problems of behavior as problems of character, and since we’re loath to admit personal weaknesses, it leads us to rationalize away our own obviously imperfect behavior.

A more useful framing, I think, would consider the problem this way:

1. There are large opportunities to make life substantially better. Instead of a negative framing, we should adopt a positive one. If you improve your health, you can enjoy extra years of illness-free life with minimal cost. If you improve your savings, you can live with less stress about money and look forward to a comfortable retirement. If you improve your relationships, you’ll experience more connection and joy, as well as better health and well-being. These are opportunities, not chores.
2. Taking advantage of those opportunities is an engineering problem, not a character problem. To take advantage of all the things researchers have learned that make for better health, wealth, relationships and happiness doesn’t require you to suddenly become a totally different person. It requires solving a behavioral engineering puzzle. Whether you exercise every day or not says much less about your character and much more about whether you’ve solved this particular design challenge in your life, as it looks now.

It is, of course, always possible that certain beneficial behaviors are oversold. Indeed, the advice space is full of hyped-up recommendations that don’t actually have much (if any) empirical backing.



It is also, of course, possible that you’ve managed to find the exact optimal point for all these sorts of habits in your current life. Perhaps the constraints you face really don’t allow for any further improvement.

But I think for the majority of people (myself included), there are clear behavioral changes that pass a sensible cost-benefit test. Most of us could reap more of those benefits by making changes to the systems that support them in our lives.

Good Habits are Like Bridges, not Virtues

Building good habits is much more like engineering a bridge than it is an act of improving your character.

Think of what has to go in place to build a bridge that won’t fall down:

1. You need to make the bridge out of a material that won’t collapse under the weight it needs to bear—including its own.
2. You need to ensure the supports the bridge rests on won’t sink into the mud.
3. You need to ensure a certain amount of flexibility, so that the forces of wind or earthquakes won’t cause the bridge to collapse.
4. And so on …

Sustaining behaviors like regular exercise, healthy eating, building savings or deepening relationships depends on similar engineering principles:

1. You need to make the behavior lightweight enough that it won’t collapse under the real pressures of your schedule and other commitments.
2. You need to ensure the environment reliably supports your behavior, making it as easy as possible to sustain.
3. You need to ensure some flexibility, so that when your life gets interrupted in various inevitable ways, you can keep it up.
4. And so on …

Adopting the design metaphor helps change the discussion around our behaviors. Instead of viewing adherence to good habits as a source of pride or shame, we can instead look at it as a design problem. Each one may pose challenging constraints, unique to your situation, but each is fundamentally solvable.

And, just as you wouldn’t salvage a defective bridge by standing under it and trying to hold it up with your arms, you wouldn’t try to salvage an unworkable habit simply by applying more willpower.

Good habits, in this sense, are important precisely because they are not a function of our character. They work because they are stable with minimal effort. We sustain any good practice because it fits into our lives without much fuss, not because we have heroic discipline and self-control.

Since we’re discussing engineering, it would help to actually discuss what the principles are, not just gesture vaguely at them. A good engineer doesn’t simply believe in science, but has actual guidelines involving forces, material strengths and so on.

In the next essay, I’ll try to summarize some of the main takeaways from years of behavioral research, showing exactly what sorts of design principles help us create sustaining—and sustainable—systems in the long-term, and what sorts of mistakes people commonly make.

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