My hypothesis is different. I think that the effects of social media are extremely heterogeneous based on app, population, and dosage: that in some subgroups, some social media apps (when used in high doses) have substantially negative effects on mental health, but in other subgroups, using other social media apps in moderate doses has no negative effect on mental health.

For instance, 13-year-old girls in the US using TikTok or Instagram for 4 hours a day may be very differently impacted than 25-year-old men in Denmark using Twitter/X or WhatsApp for 30 minutes per day.

The current studies may be like trying to answer the generic question: “Do non-prescription drugs have a negative mental health effect?” This question can’t be answered because it combines too many dissimilar things. In particular, the answer hinges on which drugs we’re talking about (cannabis vs. fentanyl), the age of the person doing the drug (teenagers vs. adults), and the quantity of drug use (occasional vs. extreme usage).

If my hypothesis is true, then getting to the bottom of the true impacts of social media on mental health will require carefully designed studies that subdivide by app and by population (ideally after preliminary research is done to figure out what apps and which populations are reasonable to group together – for instance, it may be essential to segment by gender and rough age group and even by culture, but it’s important to get these segmentations right if the research is going to make progress).

Another thing that makes this research so tricky is that social media literally adapts itself to what you pay attention to. So if you tend to click on upsetting things, it will show you more upsetting things, which can create a self-reinforcing cycle, whereas if you click on things that are interesting and pleasant, you’ll get more of those instead. So even at the level of the individual, social media can provide highly varied experiences. It’s instructive to compare your social media feed to a friend’s (on the same app). When I’ve done this, it’s been remarkable to see just how different our experiences on that app are.

Overall, my best guess is that most people’s social media use would be found to have little or no negative causal link to mental health. But I would predict that there is a moderately sized causal negative link to mental health for:

• teenage girls scrolling Instagram a large amount (e.g., checking it >25 times daily)
• teenage boys playing video games (but not with friends), very large amounts (e.g., > 5 hours per day)
• people who are already predisposed to worry a lot about the state of the world, scrolling Twitter a large amount (e.g., > 3 hours daily)
• I also would predict a negative impact on attention or focus for those who use TikTok a lot (>5 hours daily)
• But I would predict little to no average negative mental health effects for apps that a person uses only 20 minutes per day or less, since I think that’s unlikely to be a high enough dose to cause problems for many people

Another hypothesis is that insofar as social media causes negative mental health impacts, it’s because it changes the situation for everyone at once. For instance, if all teenagers in a school are on social media, that can change the way that they socialize (or how much people socialize) and how they interact (e.g., how much bullying or social comparison occurs). By this view, studying what happens to individuals when they use more or less social media misses the important effects. If this is the case, it makes the phenomena even harder to study!

This piece was first written on August 29, 2025, and first appeared on my website on November 2, 2025.

1) Diagnosis Error: It’s a non-standard presentation of a known disease or a rare (or frequently missed or misunderstood) disease, making it hard to get properly diagnosed. In this case, seeking out fantastic doctors (especially those with relevant expertise) may lead to a solution.

For instance, one time, I started presenting with strange symptoms and was getting sicker every week. It turned out to be due to mold! I had just moved into a new home, and there was mold hidden behind a wall about 3 feet from where I was sleeping. Once we located the mold and removed it, I recovered completely in a few weeks.

While it sometimes happens that people misattribute issues to mold exposure, I’m pretty confident that mold actually was the cause in this instance. This was due to the timing of the symptoms starting and stopping and due to the fact that I’ve never had symptoms like that prior to the event or since the event.

As another example, I know more than one person who had a fairly common disorder that doctors tend not to understand very well for some reason. In each case, it took these people quite a lot of time to get the right diagnosis from doctors.

A third example is a friend who has an unusual dietary sensitivity. For some time, nobody could figure out why they had the odd symptoms that they did. Luckily, they discovered that when they remove certain items from their diet, their symptoms completely disappear, leaving them feeling dramatically better.

2) Psychological: It’s a physiological reaction to a psychological phenomenon (such as due to stress or anxiety), or it’s a psychosomatic condition. In such cases, a psychologist may be life-changing. Note that psychosomatic does not mean that the experiences are not really felt. If you feel pain in your stomach, then you have pain in your stomach. The question is, “What is generating that pain?”

To give an example, at one point in my life, when I was going through a tremendous amount of stress, I thought that I had some kind of mysterious medical problem because of strange and intense physical symptoms (e.g., chronic nausea, random tingling in my arms, tightness in my chest). But it turned out to be all just caused by the stress and went away when I improved my coping strategies and the stressful events receded further into the past.

Another example is from someone I know who had bad pain for years. He would try to carefully work around the pain, only to eventually discover that the key to eventually ending the pain was to use his body naturally and not let the pain constrain his behaviors.

3) Unknown to Science: it’s a type of medical issue that medicine hasn’t yet discovered. All currently known disorders were at one time not known about. While there are fewer and fewer of these as science progresses, and it would be nice to think that medicine has figured it all out by this point, the reality is that there are still some things that are mysterious to science. In such cases, symptom management and lifestyle changes (that make it easier to live with the issues) may be the only option.

As an example, I have (for as long as I can remember) had trouble with my sleep, and despite going to numerous doctors, getting numerous tests, and trying numerous remedies, I’ve never resolved it. I’m still open to the possibility that whatever my sleep issue is, it’s of type (1) or (2), but I’ve come to think it’s increasingly likely to be in category (3).

My best guess is that fairly common conditions that end up grouping patients together by their symptoms (without medicine understanding the underlying causes), with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome being the classic example, typically end up being a mix of (1), (2) and (3) depending on the patient. Some such patients probably have a known disease that has been misidentified, others may have a psychological origin of their fatigue (such as from anxiety or depression), and others may have a medical problem that is not yet known to science.

If you or a loved one has been ill for a while, and you still don’t have a helpful diagnosis despite seeing a number of doctors, I definitely recommend staying open-minded to all three of the above possibilities. I think that people often jump to conclusions too quickly because they assume it can’t have psychological origins (because they think it wouldn’t “feel so real” if it was psychological), or they assume if doctors say they are healthy, that there really isn’t a medical explanation for their symptoms.

It’s also very worthwhile to be careful in these situations because there are numerous peddlers of fake treatments who make their living on people in exactly these kinds of situations (especially after desperation sinks in). Most (but not all) of those peddlers actually believe in their own cures, which makes them even more convincing salespeople for their useless (and sometimes actively harmful) “remedies.”

This piece was first written on September 27, 2024, and first appeared on my website on October 27, 2024.

Before you read this, however, I recommend you read our piece on the Missing Heritability Problem, which provides important context for interpreting this information. Newer, genome-wide association studies tend to get substantially lower estimates for heritability than the twin study figures listed below, and it is still a debate in the field which approach to measuring heritability is more accurate.

Focusing on twin studies, let’s examine estimated heritabilities across five categories: body, mental health, physical health, cognitive/mind-related traits, and personality (including the Big Five personality traits).

You can find high-resolution versions of these charts here:

• Heritability of body-related traits
• Heritability of mental health-related traits
• Heritability of physical health-related traits
• Heritability of cognitive/mind-related traits
• Heritability of personality-related traits
• Heritability of all traits in one chart

Note that here, we are looking at h^2, which represents the “narrow sense heritability”. It measures the proportion of phenotypic variance in a population that is attributable to additive genetic variance. This measure focuses specifically on the additive effects of alleles, excluding other genetic effects like dominance or epistasis. In particular,

h^2 = (additive genetic variance) / (total phenotypic variance).

All of the h^2 numbers in this article come from (or are derived from) papers (or from combining papers). In most cases, these h^2 numbers were calculated by comparing the similarity of traits between monozygotic / MZ (identical) and dizygotic / DZ (fraternal) twins to isolate the additive genetic component. The intuition for how such studies estimate heritability is that the more similar identical twins are in that trait relative to fraternal twins, the more heritable the trait generally is.

Note that h^2 is different than H^2 (broad sense heritability, sometimes written h_b^2 or h_{b}^2), which measures the proportion of phenotypic variance attributable to all genetic factors, including additive, dominance, and epistatic (gene-gene interaction). In particular,

H^2 = (total genetic variance including additive, dominance, and epistatic variances) / (total phenotypic variance).

H^2 will always be greater than or equal to h^2. The two numbers will be similar in cases where the additive genetic variance constitutes the majority of the total genetic variance.

For traits heavily influenced by dominance or gene-gene interactions, H^2 will be significantly larger than h^2. Examples include traits influenced by a few genes with strong dominance effects or complex traits with significant gene-gene interactions.

Note that h^2 values should be considered rough approximations only. Calculating them can be complex and estimates can vary for a variety of reasons, including:

• Differing populations: sometimes h^2 will differ in different human populations due to differences in genetics or differences in environmental influences
• Equivalent environment assumption: if identical twins and fraternal twins don’t “share their environment” to the same extent, that can lead to issues in calculation. If identical twins share more similar environments than fraternal twins, heritability may be overestimated.
• Gene-environment correlations: if there is a correlation between genetics and the environment experienced by individuals, this can bias estimates.
• Differences in the environment: heritability estimates are merely estimates of the percent of phenotypic variation that is accounted for by genetics in a particular environment. If the environment changes, this number can be expected to change. For instance, if everyone’s environment became more identical, heritability would go up because the environment then can’t account for as much variation.
• Simplifying assumptions: additionally, sometimes additional assumptions are made when estimating heritabilities. For example, Falconer’s formula says that h^2 = 2 (r_MZ – r_DZ) where r_MZ is the correlation coefficient for monozygotic (identical) twins and r_DZ is the correlation coefficient for dizygotic (fraternal) twins. But Falconer’s formula makes some assumptions, for instance, that the correlation in traits between twins is not significantly influenced by shared environmental factors, that the effect of genes on the trait is independent of environmental factors, and that assortative mating doesn’t occur (i.e., parents of the twins are not more similar to each other in terms of the trait than would be expected by chance).

Heritability figures will sometimes change as the environment changes. For instance, in an extreme situation where every person has an identical environment, the only variation is genetic. Hence, the more constrained an environment is the greater the heritability.

A common misconception is that zero heritability would imply that genes are not involved. Suppose, though, that in a specific population, everyone has a gene causing trait X (which the environment then modifies). The heritability of X for that population will be found to be 0, even though the trait is caused by a gene!

Now, let’s look at the heritability of all traits in one bar chart:

And here is a list of heritabilities in table form:

Sources:

This is the fifth and final part in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the first, second, third, and fourth parts.

In previous posts, I’ve described Valuism – my life philosophy. I’ve also discussed how it could serve as a life philosophy for others. In this post, I discuss how a Valuist lens can help shed light on various fields and areas of inquiry.

Valuism and Effective Altruism

Effective Altruism is a community and social movement about “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.”

Effective Altruists often operate from a hedonic utilitarian framework (trying to increase happiness and reduce suffering for all conscious beings). But Effective Altruism can alternatively be approached from a Valuist framework.

You can think of Valuist Effective Altruism as addressing the question of how to effectively increase the production of one’s altruistic intrinsic values within the time, effort, and focus you give to those values (as opposed to your other intrinsic values). If you’re an Effective Altruist, chances are two of your strongest intrinsic values are related to reducing suffering (or increasing happiness) and seeking truth.

For people with certain intrinsic values, Effective Altruism is a natural consequence of Valuism. To see this, consider a Valuist whose two strongest values are the happiness (and/or lack of suffering) of conscious beings and truth-seeking. Such a Valuist would naturally want to increase global happiness (and/or reduce global suffering) in highly effective ways while seeing the world impartially (e.g., by using reason and evidence to guide their understanding). This is extremely aligned with (and similar to) the mission of Effective Altruism.

For more on the relationship between Effective Altruism and Valuism, see this post.

Valuism and existential risk

Potential existential risks (such as threats from nuclear war, bioterrorism, and advanced A.I.) are a major area of focus for many Effective Altruists. According to most people’s intrinsic values, existential risk is also incredibly bad. Existential risks threaten many of the things that humans value (happiness, pleasure, learning, achievement, freedom, longevity, legacy, virtue, and so on). So for most people’s intrinsic values, Valuism is compatible with caring about existential risk reduction (depending on one’s estimates of the relevant probabilities).

Valuism and utopias

Utopias are hard to construct. Sure, we pretty much all want a world without poverty and disease, but it’s hard to agree on the specific details beyond avoiding bad things. If we go all-in on one intrinsic value, we end up with a world that seems like a dystopia to many. For instance, a utopia, according to hedonic utilitarianism, might look like attaching each of our brains to a bliss-generating machine while we do nothing for the rest of our lives, or it might look like or filling the universe with tiny algorithms that experience maximal bliss per unit of energy. Of course, these are horrifying outcomes for many people.

If we maximize utopia according to one or a small set of intrinsic values, it will very likely seem like a dystopia according to someone with other intrinsic values. To construct a utopia that is not a dystopia to many, we should make sure that it includes high levels of a wide range of intrinsic values, keeping these in balance rather than going all-in on a small set of values.

Put another way, if we preserve a wide range of different intrinsic values in our construction of potential utopias, we protect ourselves against various failure modes. For instance:

• The intrinsic value of avoidance of suffering protects us from a world where there is a lot of pain and suffering.
• The intrinsic value of freedom helps protect us from a failure mode of a world of forced wireheading. 
• An intrinsic value of truth helps protect us from a failure mode where we’re all unknowingly in the matrix (e.g., being used for a purpose unknown to us) or living under an authoritarian world government that tries to keep the populace happy through delusion.

Valuism and worldviews

Worldviews usually come with a set of shared intrinsic values. These are the strong intrinsic values that most (though not all) people with that worldview have in common. Of course, in most cases, in addition to these shared intrinsic values, each individual will also have other intrinsic values that are not shared by most people with their worldview. You can learn more about the interface between worldviews and intrinsic values in our essay on worldviews here.

Valuism and mental health 

Mental health may have interesting connections to intrinsic values. For instance, here’s an oversimplified model of anxiety and depression that I find usefully predictive (I developed this in collaboration with my colleague Amanda Metskas):

Anxiety occurs when you think there is a chance that something you intrinsically value may be lost. Anxiety tends to be worse when you perceive the chance of this happening as higher, when you perceive the intrinsic values as more important, or when the potential loss is nearer in time.

Depression occurs when you’re convinced you can’t create sufficient intrinsic value in your future. This could be because you think the things you value most are lost forever, because you see yourself as useless at achieving what you value, or for other reasons.

Valuism and animals

What do animals care about? While some animals (e.g., some insects) may not be conscious (i.e., they may lack something that it’s like to be them), and therefore it may not matter what they care about, for conscious animals, it may be important to understand what they intrinsically value so we know how to treat them ethically.

An intrinsic value perspective on animal ethics is that we should not deprive animals of the things they intrinsically value (and we should help them get the things they intrinsically value, at least when they are easy to provide). So, for instance, we can ask how much a chicken that lives almost its whole life in a small cage (as many chickens raised for food in the U.S. do) is able to have its intrinsic values met. The answer is probably very little.

But what are the sorts of things that animals may intrinsically value? I suspect there are a wide variety of animal intrinsic values and that they depend on species, but here are a few that may be especially common in mammals:

• Pleasure
• Not suffering
• Not experiencing large amounts of fear, stress, and anxiety
• Surviving
• Agency (e.g., the ability to choose)
• Bonding with other animals
• Protection of their offspring

Valuism and economics

Economics often operates under the assumption that each person has a “utility function”: i.e., a function that maps states of the world into how good or bad the person thinks those states are and that describes the choices people make. According to this frame, if a person chooses A over B, that means that their utility function assigns a higher value to A than B. For example, if I buy a Mac rather than a PC, and they are the same price, this must mean that I predict the Mac gives me more utility (according to my utility function). 

Valuism, on the other hand, says that when A is more intrinsically valuable to us than B (and equivalent along other dimensions such as price), we often will choose A over B because A produces more of what we intrinsically value; however, sometimes we choose B over A instead because we confuse instrumental value with intrinsic value, or we have a habit of doing B, we feel social pressure to do B, etc.

In other words, choosing something is not the same as intrinsically valuing something, and ideally, we want to construct a society where people get more of what they intrinsically value, not merely giving people more of what they would choose. 

A classic example where intrinsic value and choice come apart is addictive products like cigarettes or video games with upsells: people sometimes choose to pay for them and use them way past the point of benefit, according to their own intrinsic values.

A similar issue comes up when people slip into treating every dollar of GDP or each unit reduction of “deadweight loss” as though they are equally valuable. Imagine that an influencer gets all the hottest celebrities to start wearing the hair of a rare species of sloth and that buzz convinces millions of people that it’s really cool, so consumers spend billions of dollars buying these sloth hair pieces. Unfortunately, the sloth hair is really aesthetically ugly, uncomfortable, and expensive, and making clothes out of it requires torturing the sloths. This will probably increase GDP, yet (on net) intrinsic value will almost certainly have been destroyed. There is no good reason to care about GDP for its own sake, but intrinsic values are precisely the things we care about for their own sake. While increasing GDP may often be aligned with producing more of what people intrinsically value (both now and potentially in the future), in cases when GDP and the long-term production of intrinsic values are out of alignment, I would argue that GDP is no longer a good measure of societal benefit.

Going back to the sloth hair example, having a free market for this sloth hair would, according to simple economic theory, reduce “deadweight loss” (relative to having restrictions on their sale). And yet, the production of this sloth hair will likely be net destructive to what people intrinsically value. We can imagine a multi-faceted accounting of how society is doing that takes into account productivity and wealth but goes beyond it to consider the extent to which people are creating their intrinsic values; productivity and wealth would be viewed as being in the service of intrinsic value production.

As a complement to GDP, we can think about measuring how well the people of a society get the things that they intrinsic value. For instance, attempting to measure:

• How happy are they? 
• To what extent are they accomplishing their goals? 
• How free are they?
• How meaningful are their relationships? 
• How much are they suffering?

This is related to the Human Development Index, though that index includes items that are not intrinsic values, and it doesn’t cover all intrinsic values.

If we had such an accounting, different people would naturally rank societies differently (in terms of how good they are overall) because they value these intrinsic values to different extents.

As you can see in this post, a Valuist perspective may have something to say about many other topic areas, giving us a different way to look at topics like Effective Altruism, utopia, animal ethics, worldviews, mental health, and economics.

You’ve just finished the fifth and final part in my sequence of essays on my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the first, second, third, and fourth parts.

I’ve noticed that it’s quite common for people to struggle to know what they should do to support friends or family members going through a mental health challenge, and it’s also quite common to say counterproductive things in such situations.

With the aim of helping you better help those people in your life who are struggling, here’s a list of five things that are usually a *bad* idea to say to someone who is dealing with a mental health challenge, along with seven things it usually is a *good* idea to do in such cases.

Part 1: things that are usually a *bad* idea to say to someone who is going through a mental health challenge

1. “Just think positively.”

For most mental health challenges, the problem is not a lack of positive thinking, and even if it were, being told to “think positively” would not enable them to actually be able to do so. This advice also trivializes people’s problems and so can come across as quite annoying or condescending.

2. “Focus on everything you have to be grateful for. Other people don’t even have enough food to eat!”

While it may be true that their life objectively has a lot of good things in it, their mental health challenge is not going to go away just by observing that. Gratitude can be a very useful mindset, but it is not a solution to mental health challenges, and being told to be grateful for what you have can lead to feelings of guilt (e.g., “I’m such a screw-up that I can’t even be happy when I have all these good things!”)

3. “You have to choose to be happy.”

It’s extremely rare that people choose to have a mental health challenge, and very few people, if any, know how to take the ongoing action of “choosing” to be happy. This framing of “choice” can also come across as though you are blaming the person for their mental health challenge, which is likely to be counterproductive.

4. “Today is the first day of your new life!”

This assumes that they can suddenly break out of their old patterns by reframing their life as starting anew, but this is a very unrealistic assumption. 

5. You should read “The Secret”/”The Power Of Positive Thinking” (or similar books)

These are in a genre of books that tell you that your problems are the result of not thinking the right way and that if you just start to think differently (e.g., imagine yourself succeeding and believe it with certainty), you will suddenly start to have the life you want. These techniques usually do not work for people with mental health challenges and can leave the reader feeling blamed for how they feel.

Part 2: things that usually *ARE* helpful to do with someone who is struggling with their mental health:

1. Ask open-ended questions about how they’re feeling and what they’re experiencing, without pushing them to reveal more than they’re comfortable with. Listen carefully. Try to really understand what they are going through.

2. Learn about the condition. Reading a book or two about the condition they are struggling with, or talking to an expert about it, can help you better understand what the other person is dealing with and can improve your ability to support them in helpful ways. Keep in mind, however, that their manifestation of the condition may differ from the typical manifestation, so be careful about jumping to conclusions about what they must be experiencing.

3. Empathize with them and show compassion. Don’t blame them for what they’re experiencing. And don’t use their struggles as an excuse to spend a lot of time talking about your own struggles. Though if you have been through similar challenges, they may appreciate knowing that.

4. Encourage them (with gentleness and compassion) to seek professional help (e.g., an excellent psychologist or psychiatrist). If they’re struggling to get started, ask permission to assist, and if they agree, reduce the effort for them (for instance, by trying to track down an excellent professional and provide them with the contact info). Thankfully, most people will improve when they are given evidence-based treatment that is carried out by a competent mental health professional (though it may take a few tries and failures to find a treatment that works well).

If they aren’t willing to see a therapist, you can ask if they would be up for reading a book that is specifically designed to help people who have mental health challenges. If they agree, you can research what the best book is on the topic and buy it for them.

For instance, many people have benefited from the David Burns books Feeling Good (for depression) and When Panic Attacks (for intense fears, such as social anxiety and phobias). Chronic worriers may benefit from The Worry Cure by Robert Leahy. For people who are mean to themselves (e.g., engaging in negative self-talk), the book Self-Compassion (by Kristin Neff) may be useful. For people who have very intense emotions or who have Borderline Personality Disorder, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook by Matthew McKay may be useful.

If the person expresses openness to it, you may also want to encourage them to engage in other healthy behaviors that may be beneficial (such as eating healthy food, walking outside daily, and getting regular exercise at the gym). It’s ideal if you can make these behaviors easier for them, such as by offering to go to the gym with them three times per week or by buying them a healthy meal delivery plan as a gift (with their permission, of course).

5. Avoid advice until they are ready to hear it. In an attempt to be helpful, people are often much too quick to give advice, which can be very frustrating to the receiver (especially when the advice-giver doesn’t really understand the circumstances well). The time to give advice is after you have done a lot of listening and when the other person has indicated that they would like your advice. If you aren’t sure if they want advice, you may want to ask something like, “Would it be helpful if I gave you some suggestions now for how to do X, or would that not be useful at the moment?” Of course, once they are ready for advice, you should absolutely give it. When you do give advice, try to make it clear when you are confident in what you’re saying versus when you aren’t as sure (and they may want to consult someone else, such as a mental health professional).

6. Do nice things for them that you know (based on past experience with the person) they’re likely to appreciate – whether it’s spending more time together, sending a random compliment, reminding them you love them, giving an extra hug, planning a fun activity for the two of you (that they feel well enough to enjoy), or offering to help them clean their apartment. What matters, of course, is what they would actually appreciate in their current state, not what you would appreciate if you were them, and not what they would appreciate if they weren’t in their current condition.

7. Make your help sustainable. Remember that it is not your job to “fix” this person’s mental health, nor will you be able to do so. Mostly, you can only help someone when they WANT to be helped and only in ways they are WILLING to be helped. It’s also important that you take care of yourself in the process. This person may have a mental health challenge for a long time, so (other than in cases of acute crises where extra action is needed), it’s not a good idea to extend yourself in a way that will not be sustainable. Don’t jeopardize your relationship with this person by taking on more than you can realistically handle, which could lead you to experience burnout or resentment. Just because someone is experiencing a mental health challenge does not mean you should let them violate your boundaries. If the person is acting in a way that is harmful to you, it’s important that you clearly assert your boundaries to prevent yourself from being harmed (while you continue to help in whatever ways you can, without giving up on those boundaries).

Conclusion

Everyone is different, so it’s always possible someone would benefit from items in the “bad” list above or dislike items in the “good” list. But I believe that following these guidelines will, more often than not, make you more effective at helping the people you love.

In summary, as a friend/family member, your job is to provide love, empathy, and the level of support that you can sustainably manage. Avoid giving shallow suggestions such as to “think positively.” Instead:

• ask open-ended questions

• learn about their condition

• empathize with their experience

• encourage the person to get high-quality professional help

• avoid giving advice (until they want it)

• do nice things

• make your help sustainable

This piece was first written on January 8, 2023, and first appeared on this site on May 28, 2023.

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.

Below is my attempt to list all human needs ranked according to their typical importance (from most important to least). Thanks for the idea, Maslow!

I’m defining a “need” here as something non-replaceable (i.e., you can’t just substitute it for something else), which, if substantially unsatisfied, would inhibit well-being for the vast majority of people.

You might say that you “need an iced tea” on a hot day, but it could be easily replaceable with lemonade or iced coffee, so iced tea is not a “need” in the sense that I mean. On the other hand, water (if you haven’t had any in a couple of days) really is irreplaceable, and a lack of it greatly reduces well-being. I’m using well-being here in a broad sense, to include everything from not dying to not feeling miserable to feeling happy.

Someone might say, “I need X if I’m going to achieve Y,” but that’s also not the sort of need I mean here (unless Y is “well-being” and X is something non-fungible).

My organizational scheme is to place needs into five levels, from highest to lowest average importance:

NEEDS

Level I: Immediate Survival

Level II: Extended Survival

Level III: Mental Health

Level IV: Relationships

Level V: Satisfaction

Immediate Survival needs come first because if you don’t satisfy them, you will quickly die. So all other needs usually take a back seat. Extended Survival needs are usually next in importance when they are not met (most of the time) because if you don’t satisfy them, you eventually die. The categories after that are harder to rank strictly, but in acute states of poor mental health, it is a lot harder to focus on relationships and higher forms of satisfaction, so I place mental health third. After that, I put relationships because they seem to create stronger needs for most people most of the time than the final level (satisfaction needs).

Beyond Level V there is another level, “Intrinsic Values,” but I do not include them as “needs,” per se, because while they are things people want, they differ a lot from person to person, and having them be poorly met often is not sufficient to inhibit well-being. For instance, someone may have an intrinsic value of people all around the world being happy, but they may not have their own day-to-day well-being limited by the lack of happiness of strangers around the world.

Note that it is definitely possible to attain higher-level needs while not having all the lower-level needs met. For instance, someone who is a prisoner could build meaningful relationships with other prisoners despite not having privacy or enough food to eat.

While most people have all or almost all of the needs listed below, the degree to which people experience the needs differs. Hence the order here should be taken as only very approximate. Moreover, some people fully lack some of these needs, especially items later in the list, so these should not be thought of as universal.

An additional factor is that how much people seek a need depends both on the importance of that need and on the perceived difficulty of satisfying it. For instance, someone who has not had any water in a day will likely be very focused on finding water if they believe it is attainable, but if they believe it is not attainable, they may be focused on other (higher up) needs.

List of Human Needs

Level I: Immediate Survival

1. Oxygen – an open airway (between our lungs and the outside world) and a constant supply of air that is at least 19.5% oxygen (and partial pressure of oxygen of less than 1.4 atm)

2. Functioning – freedom from severe/acute injury, bodily damage, and organ failure

3. Safety – no immediate threats from the environment, including from dangerous human or nonhuman animals

4. Temperature – protection from hypothermia or hyperthermia (i.e., one’s core body temperature needs to stay within 95-104 degrees Fahrenheit at all times)

5. Hydration -at least a few liters of water every three days

Level II: Extended Survival

6. Noncontamination – no more than trace quantities of poisons, radiation, and toxins

7. Lack of infection – the absence of severe infection with dangerous viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoans, helminths, and prions

8. Dryness – a sufficiently dry environment at least every few days (or else our skin will macerate)

9. Sleep – at least ~28 hours of sleep per week

10. Energy – at least ~25,000 calories every three weeks

11. Macronutrients – sufficient quantities of the three macronutrients each month (varieties of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins) plus fiber

12. Macrominerals – sufficient quantities of the essential macrominerals every so often (sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sulfur)

13. Microminerals – at least a tiny bit of the microminerals every so often (which probably include iron, zinc, iodine, selenium, copper, manganese, fluoride, chromium, molybdenum, nickel, silicon, vanadium, cobalt).

14. Vitamins – sufficient quantities of the 13 essential vitamins every few months (vitamins A, C, D, E, K, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B12, Folate)

Note: these nutrients/minerals/vitamins may not all be truly essential for survival, and there could be other nutrients, vitamins, or minerals that are essential that science doesn’t yet know about or that I just haven’t heard of.

Level III: Mental Health

15. Comfort – freedom from intense pain or discomfort (e.g., due to a pinched nerve, migraine, having to pee extremely badly, or a kidney stone)

16. Urge Satiation – freedom from an intense addiction or urge that can’t be satiated (e.g., a heroin user who is in the throes of a very strong urge to use again or someone who is very hungry when there is food just out of reach that they can’t get to)

17. Rest – the ability to stop exerting yourself once you have been engaged in a strenuous physical or mental activity for a long time

18. Cleanliness – a body and environment that doesn’t feel extremely dirty, contaminated, or infested

19. Understanding – not being confused about what is happening around you and being able to make sense of events.

20. Choice – the ability to make choices about what we do and don’t do (including freedom from imprisonment, enslavement, and extreme coercion or control)

21. Calmness – the sense that most of the time we, and the things that matter to us, are sufficiently safe (or else we are likely to have chronic anxiety)

22. Self-esteem – the sense that we have value and are capable of doing things that are worth doing

23. Hope – the sense that there will be value that we can create in the future and that the future will contain at least some good things (or else we are likely to be depressed)

24. Privacy – the ability to do things without being monitored and to have time to yourself without other people there (e.g., when showering, using the bathroom, or just when wanting to be alone)

Level IV: Relationships

25. Trust – a sense that the people in our immediate environment will not manipulate us, trick us, steal from us, use us, or hurt us.

26. Social interaction – social interaction with people we like and care about, and the sense that there are people who like and care about us

27. Community – the sense that we are accepted socially in at least one community, and ideally also that we are valued and have a role to play in that community

28. Sex – at least one partner we can engage in sexual activity with

29. Romantic love – a romantic partner we have a strong emotional bond with, who loves us and whom we love

30. Non-romantic love – family members or friends that love us and that we love back

31. Children – either children of our own, a partner we plan to have children with, or children of our relatives to help care for. Note: not everyone feels a need to have children, though many people do.

Level V: Satisfaction

32. Stimulation – sufficiently novel stimuli to keep us interested, or engaging tasks that bring us into a flow state (or else we become bored)

33. Enjoyment – the availability of activities that we enjoy

34. Meaning – goals, relationships, causes, or activities that feel important or meaningful to us, or that we feel we “live for” (or else our lives lack a sense of purpose and meaning)

35. Authenticity – the ability and confidence to behave as our authentic self without facing severe negative consequences

INTRINSIC VALUES

Beyond needs (i.e., non-fungible inhibitors to well-being), there are “intrinsic values,” which are things you desire for their own sake (not as a means to other ends) and which you would want even if they brought you nothing else. By definition, the things we intrinsically value, we want there to be more of.

Some intrinsic values are things we want for ourselves, others we want for our friends, family, or community, and still others we want for the world or universe.

Intrinsic values can be organized into something like 22 categories. Our categorization of them includes longevity, legacy, reputation, virtue, loyalty, justice, fairness, diversity, respect, caring, protection, nature, beauty, purity, spirituality, truth, learning, achievement, and freedom. Normally I would also include happiness, pleasure, and non-suffering in that list, but those bleed into needs, and so I would leave them out in this case to make the distinction between needs and intrinsic values clearer.

To learn more about your own intrinsic values, you can take our Intrinsic Values Test.

This essay was first written on July 28, 2021, and first appeared on this site on September 16, 2022.

One way to cut through the noise is to look at the commonalities between the advice that many different highly successful people give (i.e., take the “intersection”), letting the noise and contradictions drop away. If many of them provide the same advice, we can be at least somewhat more confident that it generalizes. Having said that, we should nevertheless remain mindful of selection effects (affecting who we hear advice from), including survivorship bias.

With that in mind, here’s my attempt to “intersect” the repeated advice I’ve read or heard from many different highly successful people who come from a wide range of fields and life circumstances. I expand on each piece of advice by listing common themes I’ve heard around that advice (that I also largely agree with), and then I give a relevant quote.

Ten Repeated Pieces of Advice From Highly Successful People

1. You won’t automatically be happy when you reach your goals.

Achieving goals breeds new ones.

A terrible situation creates misery, but a good situation doesn’t imply you’ll be happy. Happiness takes inner work, and it benefits a lot from gratitude for whatever it is you already have. The good life is a journey, not a destination.

Quote: “Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.” – Denis Waitley

2. High levels of accomplishment almost always require hard work over a long time. “Overnight successes” are rare and are often misidentified. If you look closely, usually, the person was practicing for 5-20 years before they were an “overnight success.”

Always be looking for how you can do your work better, and focus on improving in those areas. Compounding improvement over a long period is how people become great at things.

Quote: “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” – Thomas Jefferson

3. Life is unpredictable. When young, people usually don’t know what they’re going to “do with their life.” That’s fine!

Life takes crazy, unexpected twists and turns. Plans are great, but you should expect to modify them. Be adaptable and on the lookout for great, unexpected opportunities.

Quote: “Sometimes, when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need.” – Wally Lamb

4. Don’t let fear stop you. Attempting hard things will bring stress, fear, and anxiety. 

If you avoid what you fear (more than is warranted by the level of danger), your potential will be curtailed. Learn to push through your fears to do stressful things that are valuable.

Quote: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anaïs Nin

5. Choose who you spend time with wisely. Be thoughtful about who you are friends with, whether you spend enough quality time with your loved ones, etc.

Spending time with the wrong people will waste time or even sap potential. Make enough time for the people that matter most to you.

Quote: “You Are The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With” – Jim Rohn

6. Learn to say no. People will ask you many things from you. If you always say “yes,” it will drain energy & focus.

Say “yes” to your loved ones and to requests that are aligned with your deepest values. For others, consider if you realistically have the bandwidth to handle the request without taking away from your most important priorities. If not, give an authentic “no.”

When you’re starting out, it makes sense to say “yes” to more things. The more successful you become, the better you have to get at saying “no” – otherwise, your life will be dictated by other people’s demands.

Make choices based on your own values rather than based on what pleases or impresses others. Be your authentic self.

Quote: “Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.” – Josh Billings

7. Take care of your body. Exercise regularly, reduce sugar intake, eat healthy foods that make you feel good, make enough time for sleep, and avoid excessive alcohol/drugs.

Good health has ripple effects and will help you achieve your goals. Your body impacts your mind.

Quote: “The groundwork for all happiness is good health.” – Leigh Hunt

8. Take care of your mind. Meditate regularly (or find another practice that refreshes and resets you). Sleep enough. Seek treatment for mental health challenges.

Get out of relationships where people mistreat you. Have compassion for yourself, and treat yourself with kindness.

Know your limits, and keep stress within those limits. Take some time just to relax and have fun with no obligations. Take vacations.

Quote: “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” -Jack Kornfield

9. Expect to fail many times. That’s normal and expected. 

The key is to learn from every failure, pick yourself back up, and keep going. If you’re not willing to fail many times, you aren’t prepared to do hard things.

Quote: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison

10. Leverage habits. Figure out what daily pattern works for you. 

Maybe it’s an hour of writing at 6 am, strong tea in the morning, a carefree walk in nature at noon, or jumping jacks in the early afternoon. Experiment to find what works well for you, and stick to it.

Quote: “First, forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.” – Octavia Butler

This piece was first written on January 26, 2021, and first appeared on this site on October 14, 2022.

(1) Noticing: paying close attention to your negative thoughts instead of pushing them away or trying to ignore the bad feelings. What are the EXACT words running through your mind? How does it feel right now to be you? What do your body and mind feel like?

(2) Allowing: letting go of negative thoughts or feelings ABOUT your emotional response. Be loving to yourself, like you would a friend. Remember, emotions are there to help you. It’s not bad to feel sad. You don’t have to be anxious (or angry at yourself) for these emotions.

(3) Observing: making observations about your thoughts (rather than only noticing them). Which of these upsetting thoughts are true and helpful? Which are false or unhelpful? It may help to write out upsetting thoughts you’re having, which you can then read later (when feeling a little better).

(4) Explaining: trying to clarify why, precisely, you are experiencing what you are feeling. Of course, a person is sad when their pet dies – but why, precisely, are you sad that Snowball died? Can you explain what is now lost that is making you so sad? What will you miss?

(5) Understanding: trying to make sense of the event (especially when it was a surprise or shock). What exactly occurred? How much was due to chance? What caused it? What role did you play, and what should you take responsibility for? What role did others play? What can you learn from it?

(6) Accepting: accepting that the event has happened and acknowledging the new state the world is in – not denying the way things are now or mentally rebelling against reality. This involves filling in mental details about what’s true from now on instead of refusing to update your mental map.

(7) Concluding: [eventually] taking actions that help give a sense of closure. This might be saying “goodbye,” performing a ritual, severing a tie, taking a symbolic action, etc. What can help you recover or move on?

This piece was first written on December 20, 2020, and first appeared on this site on March 11, 2022.

Many of the hard-to-replace things in life accumulate damage as time passes. It’s critical to learn to detect and improve damage before these things fall apart. This requires a combination of vigilance (noticing the damage before it is really bad or even irreversible) and continually using effective strategies to repair what’s broken. A car will accumulate damage over time, but even if you don’t take good care of it, you can get a new one eventually. Some things in life are not as replaceable as a car.

Here are some major life examples where irreversible damage often accumulates if left unchecked:

(1) Damage to the body
Don’t let injuries or imbalances become chronic pain. Yes, we will all age, but we have some control over how that process goes. If you have a minor injury, it’s very important not to let it snowball into a permanent (or long-lasting) one. That might mean stopping activities that cause the damage, learning to do daily stretches (if the injury is caused by tightness or poor mobility), strengthening that area, and/or getting appropriate medical treatment.

Imbalances, tightness, and issues of mobility often get worse over time unless you actively solve the issue. If your wrist hurts when you type, work on prevention before it becomes a repetitive strain injury (RSI). If your back often hurts when sitting for work, try changing your posture, chair, or using a standing desk if you can. Chronic pain can be an awfully unpleasant thing to live with. Don’t let it get to that point if you can stop it.

(2) Damage to relationships
Don’t let fights with a life partner, long-time friend, or close family member turn into resentment or contempt. At some point, when emotions toward another person become more negative than positive, it’s hard to turn back. For the people that really matter to you, make sure that anger gets resolved and doesn’t get left simmering for a long time.

Discuss problems and work together to solve them. Don’t just blame the other person, as that rarely helps. Especially when you’re going through a stressful, busy, or difficult time together, try to still build in enjoyable experiences together and quality time. It’s very important to keep your feelings about each other positive. Make sure that your interactions with the people you care about don’t feel punishing to them. For every punishing interaction, you may need 5 or 10 more positive ones to balance the feelings out.

If you say things in anger or are inconsiderate, apologize and make it up to the other person before they hold it against you. The couples whose long-term prospects I have the most confidence in are not merely the ones that seem happy; instead, it’s the couples that also seem like they are good at identifying problems in the relationship, communicating openly about them, and working together to solve them. Having some damage is inevitable, so it’s critical that you learn to repair it.

(3) Damage to attitude
Don’t let optimism turn to pessimism or cynicism. A series of life setbacks, or people being assholes, can leave us feeling negative about the future or toward people in general. It’s important to always have at least one thing you’re looking forward to in the future. If you don’t have something you’re looking forward to, try to create it.

It’s important to have good, trustworthy, kind people around you who restore your belief in humanity. If you don’t, it’s important to meet some. Don’t spend your time around bad people (you probably know who they are). They have a tendency to make people unhappy and cynical.

(4) Damage to mental health
Inevitably, difficult psychological events will happen to each of us, whether it’s the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job, a major setback on a goal, or a global pandemic. Furthermore, psychological pressures can start to get to us over time, making us more and more unhappy. For instance, this can happen if we’re working too hard, don’t have enough free time, under too much stress, lacking critical resources, being treated unjustly, around too much conflict or danger, etc.

Highly traumatic experiences (like sudden abandonment, severe injury, sexual harassment, sexual assault, the loss of a child, etc.) can also create lasting difficulties for some people if these experiences are not addressed and processed.

Often we naturally bounce back from these situations (whether acutely traumatic or slow grinding pressures), but other times the psychological effect accumulates with time. It’s extremely important in these cases to find ways to get help. It’s ideal to get help before mild depression becomes major depression and before high stress turns into an anxiety disorder. There are a variety of options:
• You could see a therapist (e.g., try Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Behavioral Activation, Interpersonal Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy),
• You could see a psychiatrist (e.g., consider taking an antidepressant under their supervision – antidepressants are not for everyone, and they come with the risk of side effects, but they really help some people),
• You could try one of our apps (UpLift.app for depression, MindEase.io for anxiety). We help you apply a variety of evidence-based strategies, and
• You could find a well-reviewed book on the topic by an expert (e.g., Feeling Good or When Panic Attacks by David Burns).

If you’ve been unhappy for a while, NOW is the best time to do something to start to feel better.

Damage will accumulate in many areas of life. Whenever possible, it’s best to notice and reduce damage before it snowballs out of control. Problems are easier to solve when they are smaller.