Optimal Learning: Seven Habits for Success

The Life by Experimentation blog covers everything you could want to know about the mechanics of learning itself. It’ll teach you about note taking, creating a practice schedule, when to study, how to use flash cards, how to evaluate educational software and much more. But before you start diving into specific techniques, it is essential to optimize other parts of your life to make sure that you get the most out of your studies. No matter how much you study or practice, if you’re not sleeping enough you won’t learn as much as you want to. It’s hard to keep track of all this sort of research, so I’ve compiled it in this ebook. You’ll learn about the seven secrets to maximizing your learning outside even when you’re not studying or practicing, from improving motivation to tweaking your diet and beyond.

­ Zane

Index

1: Sleep 2: Diet 3: Exercise 4: Lifeflows 5: Decision Making 6: Motivation 7: Tracking

1: Sleep

Sleep is a topic near and dear to many productivity and life hacking bloggers’ hearts, but it is also a subject fraught with peril. There is some very good advice out there on how to maximize sleep, but there is also a lot of incorrect (or downright dangerous) information. In this post, I’ll stick to the facts: what can be optimized, and why?

What is Sleep Optimization? Optimizing sleep is not necessarily about sleeping less: it is about reaching a higher efficiency of sleep. This may mean that you end up sleeping less because you no longer need quite so much, but it might also mean that you simply feel more rested with the same amount of sleep. Of course, “feeling good” is a rather subjective measurement, but there are certain objective data points that can be used (like time spent in Deep Sleep and REM, as measured by an EEG). Many intelligent people actually sleep a lot (Einstein was said to sleep around 10 hours per night). The fact that sleep is poorly understood neurologically but known to be vital in memory creation is very significant: we should not short­change ourselves of sleep. Sleep deprivation is linked with a huge number of consequences, from general poor self­control (frequently) to hallucination (in extreme cases).

That said, optimization is still possible. Personally, I ended up needing 1­2 hours less sleep per night through my experiments. I taught myself tofall asleep quickly and to do it anywhere as well as wake up without an alarm clock. In short, I function optimally on ~6 hours of sleep per night and wake up naturally at about 5:30am. Part of this is genetics (my parents are also morning people, for example) but part of it is also conditioning. Most of this is accomplished not by drugs or changes to the sleep itself, but managing the time spent around the sleep cycles.

How Does Sleep Help Learning? Before hacking your sleep, it is important to have a basic sense of why we sleep. The problem is, even the latest science is having trouble completely answering this question. Clearly, sleep is a restorative process which appears to be necessary, and the feeling of sleepiness is caused by a build up of adenosine in the brain. The current prevalent theory is that sleeping gives our brain a chance to do some housekeeping and consolidation, something like a defragmenting process for the brain. What is clear is that there is a significant connection between sleep and memory retention.

Everybody Has a Chronotype Let’s take a moment to examine the nature of sleep. The following chart shows the average time spent sleeping:

Time Spent Sleeping

We’ve long been told that 8 hours is the standard amount of sleep, but this is true only because it is the average amount for the largest section of the population. It is entirely possible that your “natural” average duration is as high as 11 hours or as low as 4. When seeking to optimize sleep, is is possible that an hour or two might be shaved off of this as a byproduct, but we should not magically aim to move from one end of the bell curve to the other. Before going too far with tweaking your sleep patterns, you should understand exactly what your natural sleep cycle is like and why. For more on the subject, check out Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired .

Polyphasic Sleep & Naps Let’s get this out there right now: polyphasic sleep is dangerous. The idea behind polyphasic sleep is that, in case you don’t know, is that instead of a single “long sleep” at night you can have many “short sleeps” (aka naps) throughout the day. I’ve yet to see a single bit of solid science supporting polyphasic sleep, but work like that of Dr. Piotr Wozniak is very convincing that there are dangers to polyphasic sleep.

However, polyphasic sleep’s little cousin, biphasic sleep, is a wonderful thing. You’re already familiar with biphasic sleep: it’s commonly called “taking an afternoon nap” or the Mediterranean siesta. There’s a reason so many cultures developed this pattern, and there’s even ample research to show that an afternoon nap is very good for learning,

memory, and energy levels. Even Dr. Wozniak’s research, from above, agrees with this conclusion (and he is one of the foremost experts in memorization). In fact, study after study after study has shown that napping helps with memory, energy, etc.

A Complete List of Scientific Strategies I have only included well­researched strategies in this list; for example, I’ve excluded pop­sci “findings” (ahem) about the supposed effect of the phase of the moon on sleep (I’ll avoid a full rant on the topic here, but let’s just say that there are plenty of “scientific” sites willing to reprint a preliminary weak study as “fact”). Instead, here’s what we know works (to some degree or another):

Get rid of full­spectrum lights before bed because there is a chemical in the brain (melatonin) which regulates our wakefulness based upon light levels. This means no electronic screens, bright lights, etc. I still read before bed, but I do it with a Kindle (which is not backlit) and a soft/warm light just bright enough to see the page easily.

Invest in your sleeping environment, because you don’t need science to know that noise and light can be disastrous for good sleep. For those of us who live in a city, noise/light canceling curtains and earplugs can be a life­changing prospect.

Create a mental division between your sleeping area and the rest of your life. Whenever possible, keep your sleeping space “sacred:” your bed should, as much as possible, be used for only sleeping. The further the radius around your bed that’s a “sleep­only” zone, the better. This is tough for those of us who live in a small apartment, but even moving to a chair to read a book before bed is helpful.

Create sleep triggers, things which you only do just before going to sleep. This can be whatever you want, such as ambient noise you listen to, or a warm glass of milk/tea, etc. Just keep them consistent, so that your brain associates them with the event of sleep.

Be a little bit cold since studies have found that the optimal sleep temperature is 60­68 degrees (F) and insomniacs tend to have trouble decreasing their body temperature before sleep.

Manage hunger, which is to say, don’t be too hungry before bed. Some claim that eating fat before sleep can help the quality of sleep, and others in the dieting realm claim that food close to bed can cause weight gain. I’ve yet to see any study that convinces me entirely, but one thing I am sure of is that excessive hunger can make sleep hard, and that your body needs energy to rebuild itself during sleep.

Avoid alcohol (and other drugs) whenever possible. Alcohol has been show to impair normal sleep cycles (even if it can decrease the time to fall asleep), and though maijuana (cannabis) may increase the duration of sleep it seems to decrease the quality (the exact opposite of our goals!)

Practice mindfulness like meditation. The truth is that if you’re having trouble falling asleep, the problem is most likely in your head. I managed to train myself to fall asleep in 2 minutes by adopting techniques derived from my mindfulness practice.

Diet is always important to health, and can have cascading effects on sleep. A lot of people seem to claim that a ketogenic diet can decrease the need for sleep, but the only actual study I’ve found is on children with epilepsy. However, other self experimenters have found this to be the case, and I must admit that my own experience with ketogenic diets seems to agree with their findings (though I’ve yet to do my own experiment).

Exercise does not need to mean that you are running marathons (in fact, over­training can cause its own sleep problems). That said, the national sleep foundation has found that exercisers sleep better.

Simple Tips If I had to boil everything I’ve read or tested on myself regarding sleep into a prioritized list, this would be it:

1. Take a single 30min – 1 hour nap, if possible, around 1pm 2. Create a pre­bedtime routine, eliminating noise, bright lights and electronics about 30 min before sleep 3. Experiment on yourself to see what works best for you 4. Practice mindfulness to help control thoughts and allow yourself to fall asleep faster 5. Eat well (maybe ketogenic) 6. Exercise

2: Diet

I must admit, I was a bit intimidated to start writing this post. The subject of diet is so massive that it can (and does) fill many, many books. At the same time, it is very obviously an essential part of maximum accomplishment, and there is some information that can be easily applied.

When it comes to diet, we get stuck staring at the bark on the trees instead of seeing the forest. For most people, making precise decisions about what foods to eat based upon nutrient composition is not only overly time­consuming, it’s downright impossible to adhere to (though,decision­hacking can help). If you already know a lot about nutrition, some of this may be a review for you – though hopefully there are some tidbits that can help you make better decisions about when to eat, etc.

Most importantly, solid research has shown that diets designed to combat seemingly unrelated disorders (what I will call “healthy diets”) have been shown to also aid cognition. Thus, the benefits of a healthy diet extend far beyond simply feeling better and living longer.

What Is “Healthy?” The word “healthy” has become so loaded as to be ridiculous. Any time you see a packaged food labeled as “healthy,” odds are it is anything but that. Marketing has turned the word into a farce: a company can take any one aspect (low­fat, for example) and claim that it makes the product healthy, ignoring the many bad aspects (most “low­fat” foods are high in sugar to compensate). To assess true healthiness, there are a few main things to consider when evaluating the health of the food:

1. Source: how was it created/grown? Were there lots of chemicals involved? 2. Nutrients: the reason you’ve been told to eat fruit and veggies is because they contain more nutrients than

processed foods 3. Macro­Nutrients: the amount of protein, fat, carbohydrates, etc.

Even breaking down “healthiness” into these three main categories, we’re being quite reductionist. If you really care a lot about body building, you might be more interested in protein. But for most of us, it need not get that complicated.

In the book “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto “, Michael Pollen argues that we have spent so much time trying to swap out one nutrient for another (“high carb! Wait, no, high protein! No, wait…”) that we’ve completely lost sight of what’s important. If you want a simple and direct route to eating “healthy,” then I highly recommend his book as a starting point, which begins with the simple statement:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Throughout the book, he slowly breaks down these statements to make much more sense, but the basic gist of it is this: if your (great) grandparents would not recognize it as food, then don’t eat it. If you follow this basic principle, you are on the path towards true health. Generally, dieting is actually detrimental; studies have shown that the “rebound” after a diet leaves you in worse shape than when you started.The best eating plan is always the one which you can sustain. In any case, though, there are definitely some foods you want to avoid, since some foods (like sugar) can have huge detrimental effects which cascade to affect how your body processes other foods.

Going a step forward, you may be interested in diets like the Paleo/Caveman diet, reading about ketosis, experimenting with slow­carbs, etc. I have personally had excellent success with low­carb, high­protein and high­fat for both body composition and energy levels. I currently eat a high protein high fat diet, and find that I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in and have noticeably crazy amounts of energy. Just last night, I chose not to eat ice cream (which used to be my weakness) because I knew that the energy level dip from the sugar spike would be annoying.

For those who really want to go to the extreme, there’s no better nutritionist blogger that I’ve found than Lyle McDonald. This post is not about achieving weight­lifting success, or training for marathons, so I will leave the basic nutrition overview here, and focus on the often overlooked aspects of diet.

How to Eat Consider the following words of advice from Erick Barker:

“Eating with overweight friends? You’ll eat more. Is your waitress overweight? You’ll eat more. Are you a

woman eating with a man? You’ll eat less. Wide variety of food? You’ll eat more.”

Clearly, the surroundings in which you eat can have a huge impact on how much you eat. Research into Blue Zones,

where people tend to live longer has identified eating slowly and with friends as a key factor. Furthermore, eating slowly and creating a social environment can help prevent excessive glycogen spikes and provide other health benefits (more on that in a moment).

Blue Zones

When to Eat There is a lot of conflicting advice out there about the best times to eat. Some claim that snacking is best, so that your hunger levels remain even throughout the day. Others believe in “three square meals” per day, and there is even a large number of athletes who subscribe to Intermittent Fasting (IF), where you eat all your daily food in a 6­hour window. Others claim that you should not eat before bed, because it could cause weight gain.

Each of these claims seems fairly reasonable taken in isolation, and there’s even some good science backing each of them up. The problem is… they all work, in a way. I’ve had times where I ate food every 2 hours all day, and times when I’ve eaten just one meal in the day, and in both cases I managed to have good energy levels. The key is to understand the process of eating, taking time to sit down and (ideally) step away from what you were doing before the meal. But, the main benefit comes with understanding how the body handles the food it takes in…

Blood Sugar and Energy Levels Blood sugar, as the name would imply, is the measure of the amount of sugar in your blood. You’ve probably heard of it before – diabetics frequently monitor their blood sugar due to an inability to regulate it well. For those of us without such physiological challenges, blood sugar is still vital: it essentially represents the amount of “working energy” our body has on a moment­to­moment basis. The problem is, having high blood sugar is not the goal.

Glycemic Index

Eating a sugary candy bar will cause a very quick spike in blood sugar levels, followed by a crash. Even though it has roughly the same net amount of energy as, say, a piece of chicken, the effect on your energy levels and body is drastically different. When you digest “simple carbohydrates” (things close to sugar… like, say, sugar), the effect is that the entire amount of the energy becomes available at once, and then all burns away just as quickly. However, when you eat more complex foods (like whole grains), the conversion process is drawn out, and thus creates a nice, even blood sugar levels. So, remember:

“Bread is sugar in 10 minutes”

Bread is a very simple carbohydrate, almost as if it were just sugar. Understanding simple vs. complex foods is the motivation behind Glycemic Index (GI): understanding how food will affect your blood sugar levels. A basic understanding of GI will give you the tools to make intelligent decisions about what kinds of food to eat.

The Simple Rules Distilling diet down into simple rules is distressingly difficult. Again, the point of this post is not to achieve maximum athletic performance or body composition. Rather, the purpose is to achieve high energy levels. As always, I would encourage readers to do their own research and experiment on themselves, but here’s my own (oversimplified) list:

Eat slowly and with friends/family, away from work

Eat real food (things your great­grandfather would recognize as food), especially vegetables and plants Protein and fat are good, carbohydrates are bad (the simpler it is, the worse it is)

3: Exercise

Exercise is, in some ways, its own reward. It can make you feel good and look better in the mirrors. There’s much more to be gained from exercise than becoming faster or stronger, though.

You Don’t Need to Be an Athlete I’ve noticed a pattern when talking to people about exercise: those who already exercise regularly are already proud of it, and those who don’t are not interesting in having someone tell them (yet again) about all the benefits. It’s either preaching to the choir or falling on deaf ears. The point of this article is not to convince you to try to look good or compete in athletic matches.

Paradoxically, exercise provides you with more energy overall (by increasing mitochondrial biogenesis). Early studies have shown that exercise prevents cognitive decline with age. It has been shown that exercise helps with memory, but recent studies have found that it is specifically moderate exercise which increased recall (memory) the most. The American Heart Association and Surgeon General both concluded:

Every U.S. adult should accumulate 30 minutes or more of moderate-intensity physical activity on most,

or preferably all, days of the week.

What’s more, exercise releases endorphins, which are an all­natural feel­good drug.

You don’t have to be the fittest person who is exercising every day to receive the feel-good benefits of

exercise. It’s a matter of taking it one day at a time, of trying to get your activity in, and then there’s this

feel-good reward afterwards. – (David Conroy)

Walking

Walking as Exercise A common excuse for not exercising is being too busy. Steve Jobs famously liked taking walks, though, and it’s hard to imagine anyone more busy than the CEO of one of the largest companies on the planet. Walking is just one form of moderate exercise, but that the tangential benefits are huge. For example:

If you walk to a destination, you’ll save yourself money (on gasoline or public transportation) It is an opportunity to focus on posture, countering the hunched­over form we tend to take at desks I listen to podcasts while walking, allowing me to keep informed (or even do research) Being outside means you’ll be exposed to sunlight, which triggers vitamin D production (many people are

deficient, which leads to a large number of problems)

The 30 Minute Rule My rule is simple: if it takes me 30 minutes or less to reach a destination by walking, I do so. There are many reasons I chose 30 minutes:

Two 30­minute walks (there and back again) is enough to reach 10,000 steps (which is recommended by Fitbit )

30 minutes is about how long it takes to listen to one podcast 20­30 minutes is frequently used by Pomodoro and other attention­focusing techniques

FitBit

Less Pain, More Gain Going a step beyond moderate exercise can have additional benefits. The more lean body mass you have, the higher your basal metabolic rate (BMR). This means that you burn more calories, even when at rest. Oversimplified, increasing BMR means that your body becomes more efficient and high­energy.

Higher intensity workouts, done in a group setting, can actually decrease pain thresholds. One study done on rowers found that their tolerance for pain was much higher when it was done as a group. Clearly, there are also social benefits to be gained from exercising (playing sports) with a group of friends.

Infinite Energy & Climbing Trees

Me, camping in the Rockies and deciding to climb a tree

Do you remember the feeling of being a child: wanting to jump around, run, explore and climb?

Most people seem to lose this as they age, and the culprit is just as much (if not more) a sedentary lifestyle than the actual process of aging itself. I’ve spoken to countless people who, after finding an exercise program that worked well for them, regained this childlike infinite energy.

There are plenty of great exercise programs and techniques to experiment with. Simply “going to the gym” is no longer an effective way to approach exercise, in my opinion. I’d recommend having a look atCrossFit if you’re interested in real­world application, or High­Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) if you want maximum efficiency.

Putting it All Together Incorporating moderate exercise into your daily routine will increase your energy levels and improve memory/recall, and is thus an essential part of Nonstop Accomplishment. Devoting an hour a day to walking and/or other exercise may seem like a large investment at first, but it pays dividends throughout your entire life. Furthermore, you can use the time spent exercising for other reasons (relaxation, listening to podcasts, etc.) which you’d otherwise not have time to do. As a result, the net benefit from exercise is multiplicative: it increases everything else in your life.

4: Motivation

A “lifeflow” is like a workflow, except it applies to every aspect of life. It leverages synergy and the power of habit; every aspect of life feeds into the overarching goals. Ideally, it achieves a sense of cognitive flow , despite the different tasks throughout the course of the day.

In this post, I’ll outline my personal lifeflow, which I call the “autodidact blogger lifeflow.” I’ll show you how everything I do throughout the day feeds into my goals, as well as provide some links to tools to help maximize your accomplishment.

Setting the Goals Goals are a way to keep you honest. They provide a yardstick to measure everything against. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a little television from time to time, but it becomes much harder to over­indulge when you are measuring each action against the yardstick of your goals.

The amazing power of goals is that simply setting them changes our self­perception. By setting a goal, you are saying to yourself “I identify with this image of myself,” and diverging the goal actually causes a sense of loss (or even cognitive dissonance).

As a result, the exact goals aren’t even that important. The point of setting goals is to illustrate a reasonable picture of the person you believe you are; to consciously decide your self­identity. It’s not about creating ambitious plans for the future which you may or may not achieve (thus leading to disappointment), but rather an image you can identify with. As an example, here are my autodidact blogger goals:

Learn new things Explore ideas and topics I am unfamiliar with (or disagree with) Have a searchable repository of knowledge Share what I learn

Identifying Opportunities (Bottom­Up) This post would be of no use if I told you to reconstruct your entire life around your goals. Such a top­down approach is overly prescriptive, and far too ambitious. Think about a dieting: replacing everything you eat with something new is

a recipe for poor compliance. You might manage to stick to the new diet for a week or a month, but it is almost inevitable that eventually you’ll burn out (due, perhaps, to activation energy and ego depletion). The smarter way to go about the task is to selectively replace one bad habit at a time (no more cookies!)

Similarly, the best way to make a move toward nonstop accomplishment is to identify times where you’re not making good use of your time. Some of these will be “wasted” time that you can cut out entirely, while others will be routine tasks that could be better optimized. For example:

Commuting is usually unavoidable but poorly utilized Television is an addicting born from boredom and can often be eliminated Reading news (or surfing Facebook) may seem informative, but information­gathering can be optimized

much further Good ideas are frequently forgotten soon after inspiration strikes

Of course, it’s important to not overdo this. A little relaxation and “wasted time” is, in itself, useful as a sort of catharsis. This is a balance we each must find ourselves. The trick is to look at each “bad” thing in your life as an opportunity for improvement.

Optimization

Now, it is a simple matter of tweaking the opportunities to align with your goals. Here are some examples of what I do:

When walking to work, I listen to my favorite podcasts via Downcast on my iPhone. My walk is 30 minutes each way, and I listen to podcasts on 3x speed, so this amounts to 3 hours worth of audio consumed per day. I highly recommend Downcast over the default podcast player because it does not garble the audio at such high speeds; I can understand all podcasts easily at 3x with Downcast, but struggle with a mere 2x on the built­in podcast player.

Whenever an interesting idea strikes me, no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I write it down in Wunderlist, which syncs between my iPhone and computers.

When I decide I want to read, I use a service like Google News orPrismatic instead of surfing the web or Facebook. This limits my information consumption to things which I consider valuable, since I only follow topics which I consider useful.

Whenever I encounter an interesting page, I use Buffer to place it into a queue of things to tweet. When an article is especially interesting, I use the Evernote Web Clipper browser plugin to save it, making

sure to add plenty of tags. When reading at home, I highlight interesting passages on my Kindle, which can then be explored at any

time online via my Kindle highlights, since the Kindle syncs with my Amazon account seamlessly.

Thanks to all these tools, writing new blog posts becomes easy (I can search Evernote and my Kindle highlights for useful articles and quotations). Whenever I’m bored, instead of flipping on the TV I look through Wunderlist; inevitably something strikes my fancy as being worth reading about or pursuing. Surprisingly, my lists of blog posts I want to write, experiments I want to do, books I want to read, etc. all grow faster than I can possibly keep up with: I’m actually forced to prune them frequently.

Lastly, it might seem that all this “productivity” would be exhausting, but the opposite is actually true. Accomplishments create a sense of progress and cultivate attention, which makes life feel longer (according to neuroscientist David Eagleman). I remember specific walks to work when there was a good podcast that day and I’m pleased to review dozens of good quotations after finishing a book. For me (and probably for you, too) Intrigue + Accomplishment = Happiness.

5: Decision Making

Hacking Decision­Making so that the Big Things in Life are Easier August 27, 2013 by: Zane in: hack No Comment

This post is a part of the 10 Steps to Nonstop Accomplishment series. If you like the tips in this post, check

out the other posts in the series for maximum accomplishment, energy, and motivation.

Why do some people seem to be able to accomplish things nonstop? Is it because they’re more motivated or smarter than everybody else?

Surprisingly, no. It is a common misconception that the ability to do lots of things comes from willpower alone. The truth is, the people who seem to have the most willpower have actually just created many good habits for themselves.

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things

done not because they have more willpower or drive, but because they know productivity is a game played

against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the

soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates

into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.

– Charles Duhigg

Removing Options The single most important thing you can do to make everything else in your life easier to do is to remove options. Have you ever noticed that it becomes easier to eat healthy when you’re around healthy food? Studies show that removing temptation is more effective than willpower. Even when you have multiple good options available, decision

paralysis can be fatal to effectively choosing a good option. Simply get rid of the bad things, and the good choices will become easier to make.

So go toss out that junk food!

Front­Loading Decisions When you’re confronted with a new decision, the brain goes into a complex process of deciding what the right course of action is. Your ability to choose the “correct” choice in­the­moment is limited by your available willpower, which naturally depletes through the course of the day. On the other hand, when you make tough decisions before the situation actually arises, studies have shown that you are much more likely to adhere to the “correct” decision. Thus, imagining the decision you will have to make before hand (walking past the tempting donuts) allows you to make the decision correctly, once, and in isolation – so that you will stick to it later.

So promise yourself you’ll work out tomorrow, and put the shoes next to your bed!

Just Get Started!

Activation Energy

When something seems challenging, the decision to get started can be hard. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of over­thinking something to the point of never getting started at all. The best solution is simply to start! There’s a phenomenon called activation energy, which states that simply getting started is much harder than the rest of a project. Thus, it is often a good idea to simply choose the easiest task on your list and start going!

So go start something… right now!

Keystone Habits Keystone habits take advantage of activation energy, the power of habit, and other psychological principles to prepare you psychologically for success. Here’s what Charles Duhigg has to say about the subject in his book, The Power of Habit:

Keystone habits say that success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on

identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers. … However, where should a

would-be habit master start? Understanding keystone habits holds the answer to that question: The habits

that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.

Keystones

Keystone habits are so­named because they support the rest of your decisions, keystone habits can be many different things. Simply making your bed in the morning has been shown to be an effective keystone habit, and the

same goes for exercise. What’s important about keystone habits is that they set the tone for the rest of your accomplishments. The intention is that they make you feel as though you are already “the sort of person” who does the things you wish to do, which brings us to the last important bit of decision making…

Identify with the Decision By attaching an aspect of self­identity to a decision, you effectively tie your perception of self to making the correct decision. Why is it that Muslims can fast during Ramadan when many of us would find it hard? How are Jewish people able to avoid pork, or even vegetarians able to eschew all meat? In each of these cases, the person has self­applied a label. If you call yourself a Muslim or a Jew and you break these rules, you either have to admit that you’re lying about who you are or suffer through some very painful cognitive dissonance.

So decide who you want to be!

Conclusion Let’s not downplay the importance of willpower (it has been shown to be the best predictor of a child’s success!) At the same time, willpower is finite, so let’s find good ways to spend it. Think of your willpower like your psychological currency: finding good ways to save it will help to ensure that you have plenty of it when you need it.

6: Motivation

Previously, I showed you how to use habits and other tools to remove motivation from the equation. As much as life can be made easier by these techniques, motivation still has a role: it underpins our desire to get moving. Hacking decision­making may reduce the amount of required motivation, but it cannot completely remove the need for motivation all together.

Thankfully, modern science has finally started to reveal ways by which motivation can be improved. Unfortunately, like with sleep (and many other productivity topics), this is another area where there is a lot of unverified science causing confusion.

Why is Motivation Hard? Research on how we think of ourselves at Stanford has revealed that:

Thinking about the future self elicits neural activation patterns that are similar to neural activation

patterns elicited by thinking about a stranger. – (Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: Individual

Differences in Future-Self Continuity Account for Saving)

In other words, whenever you try to make a plan for yourself, you’re fighting an uphill battle. The person you’re planning for is someone with whom you do not really identify. He’s a stranger, someone down the road who feels irrelevant today.

Sustainable motivation is not obtained by creating plans and rewards. Instead, the most effective motivation comes from finding value in the moment itself. In other words, motivation is about the road – not the destination. For my money, nothing captures the Zen of this philosophy better than this Ghandi quotation:

Ghandi

Two Types of Motivation There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsic motivation is reward­oriented (such as grades for studying hard, allowance for cleaning your room, trophies for winning a competition, etc.) While extrinsic motivation does have its place, it has serious pitfalls too. For example:

“When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the

activity,” [Deci] wrote. Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you

cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term

motivation to continue the project

– (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us , by Daniel Pink)

Daniel Pink elaborates on this idea throughout the book, explaining in great detail why a desire for purpose, autonomy and mastery is far more motivating than any extrinsic reward. Finding such value in life contributes in a vast number of ways, such as helping to prevent Alzheimer’s and many other aspects of maintaining brain health.

Developing Intrinsic Motivation with a Growth Mindset While we may be poorly suited to plan for the future, recent research on successful long­term goals has shown that being aware of incremental progress towards a long­term goal causes gradual releases of dopamine. In other words, it is hard to think of a future self and stick to a schedule, but it is easy (and enjoyable) to experience steps toward some goal.

The job of the intrinsically motivated, then, is to find pleasure in each step towards some ultimate goal (as I said earlier, to focus on the path rather than the destination). This can be accomplished through the use of what is known as a growth mindset. A growth mindset is the opposite of what researchers call learned helplessness. For contrast, here’s how learned helplessness works:

People who give up easily, who become helpless even in situations where they actually can do something,

explain bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal. They believe that negative conditions will

endure a long time, that the causes are universal rather than specific to the circumstances, and that they’re

the ones to blame. So if their boss yells at them, they interpret it as “My boss is always mean” or “All bosses

are jerks” or “I’m incompetent at my job” rather than “My boss is having an awful day and I just happened

to be in the line of fire when he lost it.”

– (To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others , Daniel Pink)

A growth mindset, then, is about taking each experience as an opportunity to build and evolve. In fact, experimentation is all about a growth mindset (which is the reason this blog is called Life by Experimentation). There is no such thing as a failed experiment because each trial demonstrates an increase in knowledge (growth). In the words of Thomas Edison:

If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong

attempt discarded is another step forward

Here, we have the essence of growth mindsets and intrinsic motivation. Edison beautifully stated how each trial is a step towards a goal which is, by itself, rewarding. Note that he made no mention of money or fame; he concludes that success is derived because each attempt is “a step forward.”

Techniques To harness a growth mindset, we must constantly strive to accomplish many small things. In fact, this is the point behind the phrase “nonstop accomplishment.” My favorite technique for building a growth mindset is to set up a lifeflow, which guarantees that every action throughout the day is a step towards this growth. This also guarantees that, if at any given point in time, you are feeling unmotivated, you can switch to a different task which which will itself be worthwhile. For example, if I ever don’t feel like writing a blog post, writing code, or listening to a podcast, there are always a dozen new books which I would like to read.

7: Tracking

If there is a single undervalued psychological technique to accomplish more, it is that of tracking. If you don’t know where you are at, or the steps to where you want to go, then how can you possibly accomplish your goals? In this sense, tracking is a sort of internal cartography. By making maps of what we’ve done, where we’re at, and where we plan to be, we can understand ourselves and our path better.

Tracking can be as simple as task lists or a diary, or much more complicated. However, there are ways that tracking can be done poorly. The Harvard Business Review has published a good breakdown of the faults of a simply task list, for example. But, if we take a look at the psychology, we can see that the benefits are extremely strong, if tracking is implemented properly…

The Science of Metacognition Metacognition is best summarized as the act of “thinking about thinking.” It is the voice in your head that can step outside of the situation and reflect upon your own thoughts. If you’ve ever said “I’m being ____ right now,” then you’ve metacognated. It requires a conscious process of stepping back from a situation, and has been shown to increase learning, as well as enhance empathy, and much more. In the words ofDavid McRaney in “You Are Not So Smart”:

Thinking about thinking—this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have

figured out something crucial: Want never goes away. Procrastination is all about choosing want over

should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted. You are really

bad at predicting your future mental states.

Brain Chemicals

In fact, the use of mindfulness (or meditation) is a metacognitive training practice. However, tracking also causes us to metacognate. When tracking your progress through any given task, you’re forced to break it apart and think about the pieces. This gives you the opportunity to psychologically distance yourself from it. This means that your ego is less wrapped up in the task, which ultimately leads to better results. Similarly, Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath recommend creating temporal distance:

To use 10/10/10, we think about our decisions on three different time frames: How will we feel about it 10

minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now? The three time

frames provide an elegant way of forcing us to get some distance on our decisions.

Rewards Dopamine has long been considered the “reward chemical” in the brain. Everyone from drug addicts to video game players experience a dopamine release associated with their chosen activity. Recent research has shown, in fact, that dopamine is released as a precursor to an expected reward. In a sense, the brain provides the chemical to help us towards the eventual goal. Critically, this chemical is essential to long­term goals.

Study after study has been able to demonstrate demonstrate dopamine release from simple rewards. In my previous profession of video game design, we knew to provide the player with “dopamine spikes” early on, and then begin to stagger the rewards more and more to create a sense of accomplishment and yearning.

Strange as it sounds, adding and removing items from a task list can also trigger such dopamine/reward circuitry.

Closing Loops In everything from story writing to motivational psychology, the concept of an “open loop” is an important one. As humans, we find it discomforting to know that a task (or “loop”) remains open. This is where the old imagery of tying a string around your finger to remember something comes from: as long as a task remains undone, it is bothersome.

Tracking gives us the best of both worlds. When you write a task down, you can be certain that you have no risk of forgetting it, so you are free to go about something else (presumably of a higher priority) without being distracted. At the same time, the loop is still open: every time you check your list, you cannot avoid the fact that the task remains.

Looper

Tools, Techniques and Avoiding Pitfalls I use Wunderlist as a task list and DayOne as a diary (both work on Mac OSX, iPhone, iPad, etc). I do not simply write any thought or idea down: I make sure to organize and prioritize my entries.

The key to successful tracking, after writing down the information, is using it effectively. The HBRarticle I linked to above mainly takes issue with the utilization of todo lists in an ineffective manner. It’s true: if you stare at a huge, daunting task list with no context or ranking of difficulty, you’ll likely be

overwhelmed and demotivated. I’ve found myself in this position before, and have created a few techniques to avoid it:

1. Straw­Tasks: taken from the idea of a “straw man” argument, I create one or two tasks that I can easily knock down: fun tasks, that let me get into a flow, thus letting me get past the activation energy.

2. Contextual Tasks: my lists are broken into sub lists and sub tasks, with annotations and thoughts. For example: this blog post was a task on my task list. At first it was nothing more than a task in my “Blog” list called “accomplishment and tracking.” Because it was on my mind, though, I started adding notes like “metacognition” and “open loops” into the notes in Wunderlist. By the time I finally got around to writing the blog post, it was several paragraphs long.

3. Commitment: my lists are not my “must do” things. Rather, they are a scratchpad of all the things that I have had thoughts about. Then, when I need something to do (eg, I want to write a new blog post), it becomes easy to pick out some content that is ready to be written.