As many of the readers here probably know, I’ve been a long-time fan and friend of Cal Newport. We co-instruct two online courses and we’ve shared more conversations than I can count. Cal also coined the term “ultralearning” and pushed me to write my book, so his influence on my career hasn’t exactly been minor.

So of course, I was very excited to hear that his latest book, A World Without Email, had reached the New York Times bestseller list in its first week. …

Over the last week, I’ve been writing about thinking of motivation as a system. One which, if you master it, can allow you to make more progress on your goals with less struggle.

Key to all of this, of course, is self-awareness. You can’t diagnose a problem if you don’t even know you have one. Similarly, unless you have a good sense of who you are, your strengths, weaknesses, personality and proficiencies, you’ll always struggle to make progress.

Yet no bookstore sells a book about “you”, so how do you develop this kind of insight into yourself?

Inside and Outside Views

There are two…

In a previous article, I introduced a simple metaphor for motivation: action always flows downhill. Thanks to the amazing circuitry in our basal ganglia, we take the billions of simultaneously firing neurons in our brain and produce sequential thoughts and actions.

Yet the choice of which action to take isn’t always the one our higher selves would opt for. Our motivational hardwiring is notoriously short-sighted, failing to spur us on for rewards that will take months and years to reach.

In this simplified account, one aspect I didn’t include was why our motivational terrain is what it is. Why do…

In the last essay, I shared why it was important to think about success in terms of systems, not inspiration. This isn’t because motivation isn’t important — rather it’s because motivation is itself a kind of system. If you can understand it, you can change it.

Success as systems may not be so dramatic, but the results speak for themselves. The steady accumulation of wealth, building of fitness and acquisition of skills aren’t going to lead to any Oscar-worthy moments, but the outcome is a better life. Provided, of course, you master the processes that lead to them.

Unfortunately, a…

There are two dominant stories about how success happens. The first is the one you’ve seen in movies and television. A challenge arises, and you rise to the occasion. There’s a flash of insight that triggers of a heroic effort, followed by victory.

The second story is a lot more boring. You start saving in your mid-twenties and have a hefty retirement account by the time you’re sixty-five. You start a business, grow it steadily for ten years and eventually you’re rich. You work out every day for years and you’re in great shape.

The first story is exciting. The…

I tend to prefer courses to books. Although the best books definitely beat mediocre courses, there’s a few reasons why a great course can leave a lasting impression.

For starters, courses tend to teach foundational topics. Most books try to be original. But much of what’s worth knowing is actually fairly old.

Courses tend to be more balanced. A professor teaching a basic course will try to explain most of the major viewpoints. Yet a popular book written by the same professor might be completely one-sided, as they try to make the strongest case for their views. …

A personal goal of mine is to get a basic understanding of every major intellectual area: physics, philosophy, history, and so on. I thought I’d share a little bit about my motivation, the feasibility of achieving it and how well I’m making progress.

The first difficulty in learning every subject is, what counts as a subject?

A naive way to approach this problem would simply be to consider all the undergraduate departments in a typical university. But this is unsatisfactory for a few reasons.

Consider languages. Language families typically get their own department. Would learning every subject require learning all…

Last week, I shared the idea of a “productive frontier.” When you’re below the frontier, you can usually get more done simply by optimizing your systems. Cut out the waste and be more productive. When you’re at the frontier, getting more done comes at the expense of other things — like your time off.

One wrinkle I didn’t address in that essay was the role of effort. This matters greatly because a lot of our up-and-down struggles with productivity come from it.

Put simply, for most types of work you can increase your output, without increasing your hours, by upping…