When you pay attention to one thing, there is an opportunity cost – you could be paying attention to something else, like one of your loved ones, a meaningful project, your source of income, or a hobby you love.

When you get sucked into a dumb argument online or read an upsetting news story (that will never lead you to take any kind of positive action), you’re consuming moments of attention that could be better used.

What is less obvious than that, though, is that we can create more moments of attention – because often we’re not doing anything in particular, or we’re just partially paying attention, or we’re letting our minds wander without attention in a pointless or stressful way (rather than in an interesting, relaxing, fun or helpful way).

We can create more moments of attention within our familiar activities to make them even better – like being more present with a loved one or new acquaintance, noticing more fully the delicious flavor of our food, or being more focused during our work (to get closer to peak performance).

Attention is what our life experiences are made of; it’s worth paying attention to what we pay attention to.

Or, as Sam Harris puts it: “How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives.”

This piece was first written on July 9, 2024, and first appeared on my website on September 9, 2024.

Can a chosen definition be “wrong”? No. If you choose a definition, then you can define a sound or series of characters to mean whatever you want them to mean. For instance, if you wanted, you could declare that whenever you say “phloop,” you mean one of those little paper umbrellas that are sometimes found in Piña coladas. That would be weird, but it wouldn’t be “wrong.” But we suggest that there are at least seven ways a definition can be “lousy.” 

By understanding what makes a good definition and what makes a lousy one, you can better formulate your ideas, and you can better spot mistakes in other people’s arguments. For instance, you might be in a situation where you’re trying to define the essence of an idea you came up with or characterize the unique career role that you’ve designed for yourself. Alternatively, you might be struggling to understand a definition that someone else is using, and you want to diagnose why exactly you’re finding it confusing. The words we use are crucial to the success of the interactions we have, and it is very handy to be able to pinpoint when a particular word is making a conversation more confusing than it needs to be. So, here are the things that we think make for lousy definitions! 

1. Miscommunication

If you decide the word “dog” refers to cats, people are going to be very confused.

Similarly, if you’re talking to someone who uses the word “racism” to mean X (say, “an explicitly held and endorsed belief that some racial groups are inferior to others”), and you use it to mean Y (say, “any form of negative generalization or attitude to a racial group, whether it’s implicit or explicit”), your conversation is probably not going to go as well as you would like until you identify that difference in usage. For these reasons, good definitions shouldn’t reuse terms that people are already familiar with or have multiple meanings associated with them. A good way to avoid the latter is to clarify upfront what you mean when you’re using a particular definition if the other person might not know what you mean when using that word.

2. Irrelevance

If you define a “dooooog” to be a dog with more than five legs, you’re not going to find it to be useful for much of anything. Dogs like that probably do exist, but they are not something almost anyone ever needs to refer to. We want our definitions to aim toward the things we are likely to want to reference.

For instance, someone bothered to define the word “Rasceta” to mean the crease commonly found going across a person’s wrist. Presumably, there is some subculture where that is a useful word, but very few people will ever need to know that definition. 

3. Unnaturalness

If you define “dogephant” to include all dogs smaller than 10 pounds AND all elephants more than 8000 pounds, you have not “carved reality at the joints.” Because of mixing things that aren’t clearly alike, using this definition makes communicating more muddled than it needs to be.

Another instance of this phenomenon is our use of the word “selfish.” Sometimes people define the word “selfish” in such a way that it includes both “stealing money from someone” and “sacrificing your own life to save the life of ten others because you feel such a strong emotion of compassion for those people;” it’s about doing things that make you feel “good.” An alternate reading of “selfish” might be much more negative: it’s about taking actions which benefit you at the cost of other peoples’ wellbeing.

4. Opinionatedness

If you define “dogmor” to be “those dog-loving morons who somehow are convinced that dogs are better than cats,” then the definition imports both a debatable opinion and an emotional slant into its meaning, causing usage of this word to be infected with either or both of these things.

For example, the word “sissy” not only suggests that someone — usually a boy or man — embodies feminine qualities but carries with it a negative, insulting connotation. If your aim is to make certain people feel bad, then this might be a good strategy to take, though you might be being a jerk, and that approach doesn’t make for clear, unbiased communication.

5. Ambiguity

If by “dogdog” you mean anything that a dog can like, then your word is (1) hard to use and (2) hard to think about; dogs like a large range of things, and individual dogs also have distinct preferences!

The word “problematic” (when used without clarification) is another (problematic) example of a definition: the problem being referred to could be of many different types and could range from quite objective to just the idiosyncratic, subjective opinion of the writer.

6. Inefficiency 

If you define “doglegs” to be anything with the legs of a dog, and “dogface” to be anything with the face of a dog, etc., then you can talk about walking your dog by saying, “I just got back from walking a creature with doglegs, dogface, dogfur, dogheart, …” But this is a ridiculously inefficient way to talk about your dog! Some definitions make communication substantially more efficient since they compress lots of information you commonly want to express into a small package.

Consider a different instance of this: it is possible to talk about calculus without having a word that means “the derivative” (e.g., by always referring to “limits of functions”), but this is going to be a painful and inefficient way to think and communicate. The word derivative makes ideas in calculus much easier to talk about. 

7. Lack of precision

If you define “floofster” to be any animal with fur, then you will not be communicating very precisely when you say, “I pet my floofster this morning.” You may be saying something true (and rather adorable), but someone will not know if you were petting a dog, a cat, or something more exotic like a lizard wearing a fur coat! Ideally, we want our definitions to focus on just those items or concepts we are trying to communicate.

Similarly, if you say to your friend, “I’m feeling bad,” the ambiguity of the word “bad” makes it harder for them to understand what you’re going through. If you say, “I have a headache,” then it will be easier for your friend to help you. Even better, if true, would be to say, “I have a migraine.” 

So, no chosen definition can be “wrong,” but plenty of definitions are “lousy.” To prevent lousy definitions, you should choose definitions that:

(1) allow clear communication, 

(2) refer specifically to the things of interest, 

(3) carve reality at the joints, 

(4) don’t sneak in debatable opinions/slants, 

(5) are relatively unambiguous, 

(6) express more information in fewer words, and 

(7) allow us to be more exact and specific with our words. 

We hope you found this helpful!

This piece first appeared on the Clearer Thinking blog on March 2, 2021, and was published on this site on December 16, 2022.

Note: here, I use the term “success” merely in terms of achievement, career success, or high levels of expertise, NOT in terms of happiness, living a good life, morality, having strong social bonds, etc. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be successful in the way this post focuses on. But if you DO want “success” in the sense in which it is used in this post (or you are interested in being able to predict it in others), you may find some of the models here useful.

I’m also interested to know: which model (below) do you find most useful for thinking about success, and which one of these factors (used in the models) do you think is currently most limiting your success?

1. Noise theory:

success = luck

2. Genetic determinism:

success = (innate) aptitude + luck

Note: whenever I use “luck,” I mean random factors not already accounted for in the other factors in the model. So in the case above, “luck” means luck other than the random chance of what your aptitude is.

3. Traditional right:

success = aptitude + surrounding culture + hard work

4. Social justice left:

success = privilege + luck

5. Economic left:

success = social/economic class you’re born into + luck

6. Cynical theory:

success = some combination of self-promotion, bullshitting, social skills, good-lookingness, starting resources, and luck

7. Gladwell: 

success = whoever practiced for 10,000 hours + luck

8. Dweck: 

success = aptitude + growth mindset + luck

9. Duckworth: 

success = aptitude + growth mindset + grit + luck

10. Seligman: 

success = skill * effort * self-promotion * luck

11. Psychometrics: 

success = IQ + conscientiousness + low neuroticism + luck

12. Ericsson: 

success = luck + hours spent doing “deliberate practice” (i.e., with specific goals and tight performance feedback loops, while analyzing mistakes and dividing skills into micro-skills that can be practiced independently, ideally all done under the supervision of expert coaches)

13. My mega model:

success at a fixed goal = luck^a

* (resources+opportunities)^b

* (community/collaborator quality and supportiveness)^c

* (innate aptitude at relevant skills)^d

* intelligence^e

* rationality^f

* (creativity and resourcefulness)^g

* (social skills)^h

* (hours of deliberate practice)^i

* (unitary or obsessive focus on the goal)^j

* (conscientiousness and self-control)^k

* (physical or mental health)^l

* confidence^m

* (ambition and agency/self-directedness)^n

* (self-promotion skill and effort)^o

* courage^p

* (goal/task-specific factors)^q

* (efficiency and prioritization)^r

Each exponent a, b, c, …, r is a different number from 0 to 1. Note that each of these traits is selected because I believe, on average, having more of them improves the chance of success – that’s why I exclude negative exponents. Furthermore, I’m claiming that these factors, on average, each have diminishing marginal returns. That’s why the exponents are each less than 1 (making a concave function).

The values of the exponents vary depending on the field and type of skill. For instance, in some areas, courage is a minor factor (in which case the courage exponent, n, would be close to 0, and in other fields, courage is essential, in which case n would be close to 1). So, in other words: success is a PRODUCT of roughly 18 factors, and how much each factor matters depends on what you’re trying to do.

Note that this is designed so that if you have literally 0 of any factor, then the level of success is automatically 0 (since 0 times any number is 0). For instance, if you have literally no physical health, you are, presumably, dead, and if you have literally no ambition, presumably you just sit around all day or do the minimum you need to eat.

It’s worth noting that the factors above are not completely statistically or causally independent in reality (becoming higher in one may make you higher in another, on average). But I think the enormous extra complexity of trying to account for these dependencies probably is not worth it in practice.

How do you improve your odds of success?

A lot of times, when people are extremely successful, I think it’s because they avoid being TOO low in any of the factors, and they have one or two factors where they are exceptionally high. Many factors are “bounded” ones: for instance, you can’t work more than 24 hours per day. So it’s impossible to work more than 3x the amount the average person does. But there are some “unbounded” factors where you can potentially be WAY higher than the average person (e.g., “creativity”), which can drive the success score very high (as long as no other factor is close enough to zero to drag it back down). Hence, this model leads to an approach for thinking about how to be more successful (if that’s something you care about).

Put simply, success often flows from not being TOO weak on really important factors and having one or two really strong (and relevant) strengths.

Getting into more detail, here is a process you might use to consider how to increase your odds of great success:

1. For the goal/task you’re trying to succeed at, figure out which of the above factors matter substantially (which maps onto trying to – very roughly – figure out the exponents for each factor).

2. If your strong/weak factors are not a good fit for the goal, consider changing the goal to better play to your strengths, or consider teaming up with someone (e.g., a co-founder) to compensate for your weaknesses.

3. Once you have settled on a goal, identify any especially low factors (relevant to that goal) that are driving your potential for success down, and think about how you can improve at those. Due to multiplicative effects, very low factors can really drag down your potential for success. For instance, if you have severe mental health challenges that interfere with your day-to-day tasks, working on that first can be a great idea (even if you’re just optimizing for success).

4. Identify your strongest factors (that are relevant to that goal) and think about how you might improve at them or hone them to get them VERY high. You can also figure out how to make even more use of these great strengths of yours to achieve good outcomes. Often, one of the most effective things we can focus on is leaning into our greatest strengths (for instance, by designing a path towards our goals that leverages them or working to enhance them even more). This is especially the case once we’ve gotten barriers to success out of the way (i.e., we’ve worked on improving our especially low factors).

A question for you: right now, which of the factors listed above is the one that is most significantly limiting your success?

This piece was first written on September 12, 2021 and first appeared on this site on March 25, 2022.

1. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
2. Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
3. Gates’ Law: Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
4. Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
5. Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or, don’t invoke conspiracy when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence).
6. Acton’s Dictum: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
7. Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
8. Benford’s Law: In a diverse collection of unrelated statistics, a given statistic has roughly a 30% chance of starting with the digit 1.
9. Betteridge’s Law: Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.
10. Brooks’ Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
11. Chesterton’s Fence: Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
12. Claasen’s Law: Usefulness = log(technology).
13. Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right, but when they state something is impossible, they are probably wrong.
14. Cromwell’s Rule: Nothing but logical impossibilities have a prior probability of 0 or 1.
15. Cunningham’s Law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.
16. Doctorow’s Law: When someone puts a lock on a thing you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.
17. Dunbar’s Number: Most people can’t maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people.
18. Eroom’s Law: Drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology.
19. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: You’ll believe articles outside your area of expertise, even after acknowledging that neighboring articles in your area of expertise are completely wrong.
20. Gibson’s Law (or the Expert Witness Law): For each PhD (to use as an expert witness for one side) there’s an equal and opposite PhD.
21. Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
22. Morley-Souter’s Law (Rule 34): There is porn of it (no exceptions).
23. Greenspun’s Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
24. Hebb’s Law: Neurons that fire together wire together.
25. Hubble’s Law: Galaxies recede from an observer at a rate proportional to their distance to that observer.
26. Hume’s Guillotine (Is-Ought Problem): Normative statements (about what’s moral/immoral/right/wrong) cannot be deduced exclusively from descriptive statements.
27. Humphrey’s Law: Conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance.
28. Kranzberg’s Law: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
29. Lamarck’s Principle (or “Use it or Lose it”): Use it or lose it (evolutionarily speaking, but also in the brain).
30. Lewis’s Law: The comments you’ll inevitably find on any article about feminism justify feminism.
31. Littlewood’s Law: Individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month.
32. Maes–Garreau Law: Favorable predictions about future technology will fall at the latest possible date they can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the predictor.
33. Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.
34. Miller’s Law: To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.
35. Moore’s Law: Computation per dollar grows exponentially (or: number of transistors per circuit doubles roughly every 24 months).
36. Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
37. Alder’s Law: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
38. O’Sullivan’s Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
39. Pareto’s Principle (80/20 Rule): For many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
40. Peter’s Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
41. Poisson’s Law (or Law of Large Numbers): For independent random variables with a common distribution, the average tends to the mean as sample size increases.
42. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In bureaucracy, those devoted to the bureaucracy get control, those devoted to what it’s supposed to achieve lose influence.
43. Putt’s Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
44. Rosenthal Effect (Pygmalion Effect): High expectations lead to an increase in performance, low expectations to a decrease in performance.
45. Schneier’s Law: Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.
46. Shermer’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.
47. Zipf’s Law: The frequency of use of the nth-most-frequently-used word in any natural language is approximately inversely proportional to n (few words are used often, most are used rarely).
48. Wirth’s Law: Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.
49. Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
50. Stigler’s Law: No discovery is named after its original discoverer, including this one.

This piece was first written on July 6, 2020, and first appeared on my website on May 30, 2026.

There is a simple formula for thinking about how to be more productive that most people aren’t familiar with. It breaks down productivity into the product of three factors, namely:

PRODUCTIVITY = TIME x EFFICIENCY x OBJECTIVE

More explicitly:
PRODUCTIVITY
(i.e., the total value – according to your own values – of your work each week on a goal of yours)
= TIME
(i.e., the total hours you work on the goal each week)
x EFFICIENCY
(i.e., the average fraction of the goal you complete *each hour* of time you spend on it)
x OBJECTIVE
(i.e., the total value – according to your values – that would be achieved from *fully* completing the goal)

To make a metaphor for this equation: imagine you’re trying to drive across the country. TIME would be how long you spend driving each day, EFFICIENCY would be the number of miles you make it on average towards your destination each hour (i.e., related to your speed but also to what route you take), and OBJECTIVE would be how valuable it actually is to you to make it all the way to the other side.

This equation assumes that you do eventually achieve your goal (since for some goals, such as getting into a PhD program, not fully completing the goal may produce zero value to you). It also only measures the value in an “average” sense.

To see that this equation really works, consider how the units cancel each other out:

TIME x EFFICIENCY x OBJECTIVE

= (hours) x (fraction_complete/hour) x (value_for_completing_all)

= fraction_complete x value_for_completing_all

= value_for_fraction_you_completed = PRODUCTIVITY

When it comes to PRODUCTIVITY, people are often concerned with spending more time on their goal, but as the equation above makes clear, there are two other unrelated ways to increase productivity. Increasing any of the three factors by the same amount (say, 10%) is equally valuable when it comes to productivity since the equation is fully symmetrical in the three factors. I’ll take a moment now to examine each of the three factors and some of the tricks for increasing them.

(1) TIME in our lives is fixed, so making more time is usually about some form of prioritization, that is, taking time away from something else (e.g., social media, chores, sleep, hobbies, friends) to make more time to work on a goal. Though in some cases, it is about leveraging some resource (e.g., money or people you can delegate to) towards making more time.

TIME-related productivity tips include:

-don’t do tasks that are neither important nor urgent (just ignore these time-wasting tasks)

-make a list of all your goals and then permanently cut out all of them except the one or two or three most important ones, and focus for years on just those

-delegate and outsource as much as you can (e.g., if you manage people, delegate to them, or if you can afford it, considering hiring a part-time assistant)

-if you can afford it, buy time-saving devices (e.g., a laundry machine/dishwasher/cleaning robot like Roomba) and services (e.g., a cleaning service)

-know the value of your time so that you know how much money to spend on time-saving stuff (you can calculate it using our tool here: https://bit.ly/2Fwiy8r)

-get comfortable saying “no” more (in a way that doesn’t offend) when people ask you to do things

-avoid addictive things and time-wasting activities (where afterward you don’t feel good about that use of time) and consider using plugins to block websites you spend too much time on

-automate tasks you do regularly (e.g., by making excel templates, or by using Zapier or IFTTT to connect services together, or using our system GuidedTrack.com to create repeatable processes/reusable tools)

(2) EFFICIENCY is about working effectively during each hour spent.

EFFICIENCY tips include:

-figure out what times of day you are most effective, and do your most important and challenging work at those times

-use caffeine to help regulate which hours are most productive (i.e., to make the most important hours work best for you)

-avoid getting too little sleep and avoid low sleep quality if you can (e.g., don’t drink caffeine at night)

-do restorative activities when you need a mental break from work if you can, such as quick exercise, yoga, taking a walk, or meditation

-turn off all non-essential phone and computer notifications so that you don’t get pulled out of the work you are doing

-avoid multi-tasking since it tends to lead to both slower and lower quality work

-leave long blocks of uninterrupted work time if you can (e.g., at least two-hour-long blocks with no meetings or distractions) so that you can achieve deep focus

-use the Pomodoro technique if it makes you more efficient (e.g., https://bit.ly/1gCYr3U)

-learn to use your tools faster (e.g., learn the key commands on your computer so that you can use the mouse less, and learn the shortcuts for the email program you use)

-if you can, make sure to have high-quality equipment for your work (e.g., if you spend 10 hours a day on your computer/using the internet, make sure your computer and internet run fast)

-get feedback from other efficient people about the process they do to do similar work, and see what ideas they have for streamlining your process

-break down the difficult tasks you do into sub-skills, and practice those sub-skills until you get good at them. For instance, if you are a slow typer, specifically practice your typing if it influences the speed at which you do all your other work.

-plan your route to achieving your objective carefully. Don’t just jump into working on the goal immediately; try to figure out the most efficient path to get you there. Compare multiple possible plans for achieving your goal to figure out the most efficient one.

-get others to critique your plan of how you’re trying to achieve your goal to see if they have ideas for a better path you may not have thought of.

(3) OBJECTIVE is about making sure the goal you are working towards is one that, if achieved, will produce a ton of value (according to what you consider valuable).

OBJECTIVE-related tips include:

-spend time reflecting on what you think is truly valuable, since the better you understand what is valuable, the easier it is to seek value in your goals

-don’t just pick a goal right away; compare multiple potential goals and evaluate how valuable they are before deciding between them

-explain your values to other people whose opinions you trust, and explain which goals you are considering, to see if they have thoughts about which goals to pick

-make sure you are aware of what the actual results of achieving a goal will be. For instance, if your goal is to become a doctor, investigate thoroughly in advance what it is like to be a doctor (ideally by talking both to current doctors and to people that decided to leave medicine).

-make sure that the goals you choose are based on what you believe is valuable and that you aren’t accidentally basing them on what others think is valuable instead (e.g., due to social pressures you experience)

It is in this OBJECTIVE variable that you tend to see the largest multiplier effects on PRODUCTIVITY since some goals are, in an expected value sense, at least 100x more valuable than others. Though typically, in those cases of very large amounts of value, the uncertainty in the value is also high (so one goal might be 100x better in expected value but still have a substantial chance of producing no value).

Oddly, some goals we may choose may have negative expected values (even according to our own value systems). Consider, for instance, someone who works for years towards a goal because they think it will make their parents happy (and it makes them miserable to work towards it). But it turns out they are wrong, and their parents are actually indifferent to them achieving the goal! In that case, due to a false belief about the world relating to their parents, the OBJECTIVE factor in the equation ends up being negative, making the whole productivity equation negative (hence the more TIME that is spent, the *less* value is produced, reversing the usual relationship!)

So, keeping all this in mind, what should you do if you want to be more productive? Well, remember that productivity is about three factors – TIME, EFFICIENCY, and OBJECTIVE.

It’s not just about how many hours you work towards a goal, but also about how efficient each hour of that work is and about how valuable the goal is to achieve in the first place. Each factor has unique techniques and tricks that can help you increase your total productivity.