The only approach I know of that I think has a meaningful shot to help solve such huge problems, which you might call “Scientific Entrepreneurship,” combines two methods into one:

(1) Rigorous science to deeply understand the causal structures of the problem and how strong an effect each cause has (which often will begin with a qualitative approach to understand the outlines of the problem and then move to analysis of carefully conducted measurements).   

(2) A “lean startup” approach, where you try things (guided by your current understanding of the causal relationships), see what happens, and then rapidly course-correct based on the results (and sometimes take large pivots) to iterate towards better and better approaches.

When dealing with these highly complex problems, I think that a “lean startup” approach without rigorous science ends up leading to lots of random attempts that have almost no chance of ultimate success (and sometimes even converge to self-propagating but useless approaches, such as charities that perpetually absorb money without genuinely helping the cause).  

On the other hand, a purely scientific approach without the lean startup iterative mindset often ends up missing critical contextual details that are actually essential for the project to work. You’ll inevitably encounter many specific barriers that the scientific theory doesn’t address. In summary, I think our best bet for solving highly complex world problems is Scientific Entrepreneurship: developing a deep understanding of the high-level causal structures through scientific rigor and then combining that with an entrepreneurial form of rapid iteration.

This piece was first written on May 5, 2024, and first appeared on my website on June 5, 2024.

That peak reflects the total sum of your achievements according to your intrinsic values. This may include, for instance, your happiness, the happiness of your loved ones, your positive impact on the world, living virtuously, achieving your deeply meaningful goals, and so on.

Unfortunately, the mountains you face are foggy as hell. Plus, they have dense forests, huge boulders, and brambles covering them. Your mountains are untamed, uncharted.

• The fog means that you can only see clearly for a short distance, and the further you look, the harder it is to tell what’s out there.
• The dense forests mean that to go a considerable distance in most directions, you’ll have to whack your way through with substantial effort.
• The huge boulders will sometimes make a path impassible that had looked promising from around the bend.
• The brambles mean that certain paths will cause considerable pain if you take them. Even more inconveniently, beautiful grasses and flowers sometimes conceal the brambles.

These are your personal mountains, unique in all the world. Your mountains are determined by a combination of:

(1) Your intrinsic values. It is your values that determine the height of each landing and peak, including the height of wherever you’re standing right now.
(2) The structure of the real world, which makes some paths easier to traverse than others. The locations of the forests, boulders, and brambles are metaphors for this structure.
(3) Your current life situation. This is represented by your current latitude and longitude on the mountain range, as well as your physical and mental health, resources, and skills.

Looking out from a distance, you can see the dim outlines of many high-up peaks far away that look promising, but they are in different directions from each other. That means you’ll have to make tough choices about what direction to go, even at the beginning of your journey.

This journey will take your entire life. If you’re like most people, it will be long and hard but also too short. It will be wondrous, terrifying, joyful, and sad.

Rather than trying to travel a great distance in order to climb to great heights, it is easier to find the first comfortable spot, set up a hammock and tent, and make camp there forever. Who can blame you for making that choice (except, perhaps, yourself)?

If you decide to take the journey, you’ll need to use your tool belt, which (if you’re lucky) comes equipped with five (metaphorical) tools.

To have the greatest chance of reaching the highest peaks, you’ll want to train yourself to be a master of each tool.

Here are the tools to master.

Tool 1: The walking stick, which is what you use to move forward along the path you’ve chosen.

By far, the most common tool you’ll use is the walking stick. For every choice of path, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time walking.

Maybe you’ll give up and turn back at the first encounter with a snake, tiger, or tornado. Or maybe you’ll use the walking stick to keep going.

You’re using the walking stick when you create a to-do list and tick items off of it. You’re using it when you push through fear to do something valuable.

Mostly, climbing a mountain involves using your walking stick, but if you only use that, you’re doomed.

Tool 2: The telescope, which allows you to peer at the shape of the mountain, collecting data and facts about the world that you can use to select your path.

The questions that guide your use of the telescope are ones like:

• What questions could I ask that would help me choose my path?
• What do I need to know about the mountains that I don’t yet know?
• What important question am I confused about?
• Where is my lack of knowledge showing?

The scope, like each of your tools, takes many forms. In a start-up, it may look like talking to customers, running surveys, examining other products, or scrutinizing the structure of your own product, keeping a keen eye out for flaws. In your career, it may look like researching career paths, talking to others who have tried different routes, quickly trying things out, and soliciting feedback on your work from your colleagues.

What you’re looking for with the telescope are indications of which nearby paths lead quickest up the mountain, as well as hints for other (potentially faraway) parts of the mountain range that may have yet higher peaks (even if you have to go a ways back down the mountain to get there).

Being good at using the scope means being observant, impartial, curious, methodical, open to criticism, and empirical. And it means being able and willing to cope with reality.

Tool 3: The notepad, which you use to formulate your theories about how the world works, as well as to devise plans.

This tool will most dramatically increase how effectively you use the telescope because there are far too many potential things to point the scope at. Your theories on the notepad, therefore, guide your use of the scope. At the same time, the scope provides data to go into your theories in the notebook.

Some of your theories will be explicit, penned in detail with full awareness, but most will be implicit, born out of the things you’ve seen, etched in your subconscious with a shadowy ink.

In your personal life, your notebook contains your understanding of yourself, your partner, your parents, your friends, and human nature. It contains your understanding of your mountains (as well as other people’s mountains) and your beliefs about where the brambles, boulders, and high peaks lie.

To use the notebook is to sit and reflect, to make predictions, to spell out your thoughts, to reduce ambiguity through precision, to derive new knowledge from other things you already know, to come to new conclusions.

Being good at using the notebook means being thoughtful, philosophical, reflective, logical, cautious, precise, and rational.

Tool 4: The jump rope, which you use to practice and improve your skills.

Sometimes, this will take the form of physical training – maybe you don’t yet have the bushwhacking skills to knock away the brambles. Oftentimes, the training and practice will be mental rather than physical. Maybe you don’t know enough about how to use the scope, or your facility with the notepad is not where it needs to be.

Early on in your journey, you’ll need to use the metaphorical jump rope a lot so that you can build the skills you’ll need for the journey. Over time, you’ll need it less often, but there will always be new skills that are useful to train as you climb higher.

The jump rope is informed by the scope and the notebook. Sometimes the scope will tell you about the sort of paths you’ll soon need to face, and the jump rope will help you prepare for them. Other times, you’ll turn the lens of the scope on yourself to see your weaknesses. You can then use the jump rope to work on these, to reshape yourself.

You’re using the jump rope when you’re reading to learn, taking a course to understand something important, practicing how to do something, asking someone to teach you, breaking a difficult skill into smaller pieces, or asking a question when you’re confused.

If your walking speed is slow, or you find another weakness that is slowing you down, use the jump rope to get that skill up to par. But just as importantly, use the jump rope to hone what you’re already good at, to sharpen it into an exceptional skill.

Tool 5: The whistle, which is how you get the help you need from others.

Most things that are worth doing can’t be done alone, and those that travel without a whistle put themselves in great peril. Sometimes you’ll need the help of others to clear a path, to show you how to use the other tools effectively, or to help you understand why you’re stuck. No matter where you’re headed on the mountains, there are those that have gone that way before who have advice to share.

Using the whistle may mean requesting assistance or a favor, but it can also mean asking advice, asking a simple question, or getting support when you’re mentally exhausted.

Being good at using the whistle means investing time in your relationships, developing deep connections, being a good friend when others use their whistles, meeting new people when you perceive gaps, and being bold enough to call for support when you could use it.

Never travel without a whistle when you don’t have to.

So how, then, do you get to the top of your mountains? Well, you will never get to the very top – the mountains stretch forever. But you can climb high. To maximize your chances, use:

(1) The walking stick (to keep moving forward without giving up).
(2) The telescope (to investigate the mountains carefully and with minimal bias so that you can understand where the brambles and boulders are).
(3) The notepad (to reflect carefully on your beliefs and formulate your plans).
(4) The jump rope (to improve your weaknesses and enhance your strengths).
(5) The whistle (to get help and support).

Good luck – may your climb be a joyous one!

This piece was first written on May 19, 2023, and first appeared on this site on September 22, 2023.

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.

With that definition in mind, there are many reasons a work team may have low productivity. To make a team more productive, I suggest first trying to pinpoint the predominant causes of inefficiency, since different failure points typically have different solutions. The key is to identify and then focus on just the 1-3 of these causes that seem to be the biggest recurring blockers of team productivity.

Once these biggest blockers are identified, an analysis needs to be made of why they are occurring (e.g., using a method like the “5 whys”, where you try to uncover the root cause of the issue). Then, strategies need to be developed to try to resolve the blockers, and one or two strategies that have sufficient team buy-in need to be selected for implementation. Finally, re-evaluation needs to occur to make sure the problems are actually improved by those strategies.

Below is a list of these potential failure points or blockers.

There are four main facets of team productivity (Planning, Effectiveness, Resources, and Communication), which break down further into specific reasons for low productivity. You can use this list by considering each potential reason and scoring the degree to which you think it’s a problematic factor on your team (or having all team members anonymously score each potential reason for how big a problem it is, and then aggregating the responses to find the few most important seeming issues).

—

Reasons For Low Team Productivity:

—

(A) Planning

(1) Wrong Goal – the work is focused on achieving a goal that is not actually particularly valuable.

      e.g., the team is building a new feature that customers don’t want

(2) Poor prioritization – rather than focusing on the very most important things, the team focuses on things of secondary importance.

      e.g., the team lead keeps pushing team members to make tiny improvements to existing features, even though there are really major features where implementation hasn’t even begun.

(3) Slow Path – the planned route for achieving the team’s goal is not as efficient as other routes to achieving the same goal.

      e.g., the team could use a well-tested plugin to help them solve their problem, but the team lead insists they build their own alternative to this plugin.

(4) Incompletion – there is no pressure to finish projects, or team members work on far too many projects at once, so work doesn’t get completed, or takes much longer than it should.

      e.g., when a crisis comes up, the projects already in progress are abandoned, and rarely are they picked up again.

(5) Feature Creep – the project takes a really long time to be released because its scope or feature set keeps unnecessarily increasing, repeatedly delaying the launch.

      e.g., the client keeps making more and more requests about what to include in the next version.

(6) Missing Buy-in – team members don’t actually care about achieving the team’s goals (i.e., they don’t view the goal as valuable, and don’t feel like a genuine team, such that they care about the team’s success).

      e.g., Bill doesn’t think the product they are building is worthwhile, Sally doesn’t feel invested in the success of her team members or the team overall.

(7) Incentive Misalignment – some team members have incentives that cut against the project going well, or are focused on optimizing for personal goals at the expense of project goals.

      e.g., team members know that if they succeed at the goal, then someone else will take all the credit, and if they fail at it, there will be no negative consequences, and Bob actually wants the project to fail because then he’ll get to move on to a different project he likes more.

(8) Missing Skills – certain skills are needed to accomplish the goals, but no one on the team has these skills, and there are no external consultants that can be called on.

      e.g., no one on the team has a good eye for design, so the interface you’re building has the right features but looks bad.

(9) Reactivity – the team is constantly reacting to crises or imminent deadlines, which means there isn’t time to focus on achieving the long-term goals.

      e.g., every month or two, there is a major system failure, followed by weeks of scrambling simply to get things back to normal.

(10) Groupthink – team members do not feel comfortable sharing their unique ideas, or challenging the team lead, or getting their ideas heard above the most vocal person, or contradicting the group consensus, so the best ideas don’t filter to the top.

      e.g., the first proposed solution to a problem was accepted because no one wanted to challenge the person who proposed it, and since no one spoke up, everyone assumed the other group members must be in consensus.

(11) Guessing – the team doesn’t have enough data or information to solve the problems they are working on, but rather than gathering this data or information, they guess at solutions that aren’t very likely to work.

      e.g., the team has the goal of reducing customer churn, but they haven’t conducted customer interviews or carefully analyzed the churn data, so they are merely guessing at why churn is occurring and developing inadequate solutions based on those guesses.

—

(B) Effectiveness

(12) Insufficient Time – people not working enough hours.

      e.g., a culture of showing up at 10 am and leaving at 4 pm.

(13) Waste – spending time engaged in unnecessary processes or pointless meetings.

      e.g., a culture of constant meetings where you have little time to get your actual work done, or a requirement to tediously document all your work.

(14) Distraction – people may not be able to get “in the zone” on their work because of frequent distractions, or an environment where it is hard to focus.

      e.g., a noisy office environment where colleagues continuously interrupt you to ask you questions.

(15) Burnout – people may feel stressed, depressed, disinterested, bored, or exhausted, and find it is psychologically difficult to get their work done.

      e.g., a culture where bosses regularly yell at, blame, and fire employees for things that are not their fault.

(16) Bad Foundations – the work may be building on other work that was not well made, slowing down additional progress.

      e.g., programmers inherit a massive, buggy, and poorly written spaghetti codebase (i.e., high levels of technical debt).

(17) Disempowerment – team members are not allowed to do certain things (or make certain decisions) that would move the project forward, or they are required to follow a bureaucratic or standardized process that is not an efficient or effective process.

      e.g., a user experience researcher is not allowed to pay customers for doing interviews, but customers won’t do the interviews for free.

(18) Intrinsic Difficulty – the work may genuinely be intrinsically difficult, with progress speed inherently limited.

      e.g., work involving proving new theorems that others have failed to prove.

—

(C) Resources

(19) Slow Platforms – the systems or platforms on which the work is performed make progress more difficult, slower, or more complex than it needs to be.

      e.g., teams are forced to work on Windows 98 and experience regular computer crashes, or teams are forced to work using old and out-of-date software.

(20) Lacking Tools – the team members don’t have the best tools to do their work.

      e.g., a construction team is forced to use a saw that is inappropriate for the job because they don’t have access to the right kind of saw.

(21) No Training – there is a lot of relevant information about how to do the job well that team members are not told, and have to laboriously figure out on their own, or struggle to get by without.

      e.g., programmers are expected to figure out how the undocumented API works on their own via trial and error.

(22) Insufficient Assistance – when team members are stuck, they have no one knowledgeable they can go to (or that they feel comfortable going to) for help.

      e.g., a machine learning researcher can’t get her neural network model training properly and has no one she can ask for advice.

(23) Insufficient Skill – team members are not sufficiently skilled at the tasks they are trying to do.

      e.g., the team members responsible for writing documentation are not skilled at clear communication.

—

(D) Communication

(24) Blocking – team members are waiting on each other to do things before they can get their own work done.

      e.g., Sam needs approval from Sally to move forward, but Sally requires approval from Samantha in order to give Sam permission.

(25) Conflict – team members dislike each other, don’t trust each other, or have clashing personalities.

      e.g., Bill refuses to work with Sam, Jill thinks that Jenny is trying to undermine her, Tim and Tammy get into heated arguments.

(26) Discordant Goals – different team members are working towards different long-term goals, because they are not on the same page about what the purpose, mission, or primary goal of the team is.

      e.g., the product manager is trying to add features, whereas the engineering team is trying to do a feature freeze so they can focus on stability and efficiency.

(27) Ambiguity – the goals are not clear enough, leading to confusion, false starts, and stops, or circling around problems without directly solving them.

      e.g., there is agreement that the user interface needs to be “easier to use,” but little clarity on what that means.

(28) Duplication – team members end up repeating work that has already been done (or that is in the process of being done) by others, either because they don’t know that other work exists or because they don’t trust the quality of it.

      e.g., the new lead engineer doesn’t trust the code developed by the prior lead engineer and so decides to rewrite it from scratch.

(29) Unassigned work – it is not clear who is supposed to tackle certain work (e.g., it is not in any particular person’s job description or current assignments), so some important work just doesn’t get done by anybody.

      e.g., nobody has been assigned the responsibility of bug testing, so bug testing simply doesn’t get done, and therefore, the product is highly buggy.

(30) Siloed Information – team members need information from each other to do their work well, but this information is not transmitted reliably.

      e.g., the team member doing customer interviews isn’t reliably communicating what they learn to the team member planning UX changes.

A big shoutout goes to Eddie Liu, who helped develop this framework.

This piece was first written on July 3, 2019, and first appeared on my website on January 22, 2026.

But another, important part of the story as to why resolutions are so often ineffective is that they often lack a plan. Sure you want to be more productive this year. But what strategies will you use to boost your productivity? And what will you do to increase the chance that you stick to these strategies?

To become more effective at meeting our goals, we need to go beyond just deciding what we want to achieve. We should stop making just resolutions, and instead make Planned Resolutions. A Planned Resolution is made by answering each of the following questions:

1) What do I want to achieve? This is just the standard question that is answered when making any resolution. But by itself, it’s not enough.

2) Why do I want to achieve this? Understanding why you want to achieve your goal can help prevent you from wasting time attempting to achieve something that won’t benefit you, or whose purpose can be more easily achieved in another way. People waste years in pursuit of a goal that they haven’t questioned for a mere hour. Sometimes when we understand why we are motivated to achieve something, that motivation disappears. For instance, if we’ve crafted some of our goals based on what others want us to do, rather than what we want ourselves to do, recognizing this may begin to shape what we want.

3) Is there an easier way to achieve the same underlying purpose? Since most of our goals have a deeper purpose behind them (even though we aren’t always aware of our underlying motivations), we may discover that there are more effective ways to achieve this purpose than through the original goal that we set. For instance, suppose that you’ve decided your goal is to get into a PhD program this year, and upon reflection, conclude that you want this because you’ll enjoy the job of being a professor. Well, even if you are correct that you would enjoy such a life, there may be other jobs that are far easier to get which would require much less time investment. Before setting yourself the goal of getting into a PhD program, it’s almost certainly worth spending some time to carefully investigate these other possibilities. Sometimes there is an easier way to achieve the true goal beneath the surface goal.

4) What strategy can I use to achieve my goal? Knowing where you want to go isn’t enough to get to that place, you have to know how to get there. If your goal is to lose weight, do you plan on dieting? If so, which diet will you try? It might be worth taking a look at the research on weight loss to see if some diets have proven to be more effective or easier to stick to than others. Or suppose that your goal is to improve your social life. Are you going to achieve this by seeing your existing friends more? Which friends? Or by meeting new people? If so, where will you meet them? Convert your abstract desire into a plan of action.

5) What can I do right now to get myself to apply this strategy? One of the other big reasons that resolutions fail is because people don’t actually follow through on pursuing the goal they set. Even if you plan a strategy to achieve your goal, it still raises the question as to how you’re going to get yourself to carry out this strategy. Four months from now will you remember the goal you’ve set? Will you have the willpower and motivation to carry out the plan you’ve chosen? Will you actually make the time to do it? Take a few minutes to plan out how you can get yourself to actually apply your plan. A few suggestions are:

• Put reminders (right now!) in your calendar that recur periodically to remind you of your plan.
• Tell a couple of friends that you need their help making sure you stick to your plan. Ask them to check in on you about it.
• Use stickk.com to put money on the line, betting that you’ll actually achieve your goal.
• Put a sticky note reminder in a place where you’ll see it pretty often (but not so often that you stop noticing it altogether).
• Make a list of reasons why things would be better off if you meet this goal, and mentally contrast that list to what exists now.

Once you’ve figured out what you can do to increase your chances of applying your strategy, immediately go and do these things. Tomorrow you may not remember, or may not feel the same motivation that you do today.

So stop merely making resolutions, and start making Planned Resolutions. Don’t just think about what you want to achieve, but also why you want to achieve it, and whether there is a more efficient path to achieve your underlying purpose. Then identify a plan of action, and a strategy you can use right now to get yourself to stick to this plan. Here’s a form (in Microsoft Word format) to help you do this.

Suppose that you know a friend who always eats chocolate cake when he has the opportunity, even when he forcefully wills himself not to. Naturally, you would predict that this person would eat chocolate cake the next time he has the opportunity. But we often fail to apply this sort of simple reasoning when assessing our own behavior. We believe that we have “free will”, and are in control of our decisions.  So on issues of willpower, we believe that our past behavior does not determine our present or future behavior. We say to ourselves, “It didn’t work before, but this time I will simply choose not to eat the cake,” or “I’ll just exert more willpower this time.” But unless you or your motivation have changed significantly since your past chocolate cake encounter, why should you expect yourself to behave any differently now than you did before? If you previously had good reason not to eat the cake, and you ate it anyway, why should that same reason stop you from eating it next time? If there is nothing substantially different about you, your motivation, your willpower, or the situation in which you are being placed, then there is no good reason why you will behave differently this time.

If resisting the cake is obviously the correct action to take in the future, it is natural to expect oneself to be capable of making that correct choice.  From the current vantage point, that is, one without cake in sight, it is easy to see that you should not eat lots of empty cake calories. The problem occurs though when the cake is in front of you, and you are salivating. Now, it is difficult to remember why you shouldn’t eat the cake. When you are planning ahead, you are not quite the same person as you are in front of cake. You are wrong to assume that you would make the same decisions in front of the cake that you had planned to make before encountering it. If a certain strategy for solving our problems has never worked before, and we still believe it might work, we may be failing to model ourselves accurately.

The big danger of viewing ourselves as being too much in control of our actions, or not being subject to our past decisions, is that we tend to try the same thing over and over again. We think, “Next time I’ll just choose to do things differently,” or “Next time I will try harder,” ignoring the fact that we never seem to be able to actually do that. We fall into a routine, trying to solve the same problem using the same method, and continue with that method long after it becomes clear that it is not helping us. We continue trying this method merely because we are used to trying it, or because we keep thinking, “Maybe now I can get it to work for me,” even when there is no indication that anything has changed since the last attempt.

If you have been trying to will yourself out of depression for the past year, it’s time to try something else. If you have been in psychotherapy for your anxiety for two years, with no noticeable improvement, it’s time to find a new type of therapy or explore other methods. If you have not been able to meet someone you’d like to date in more than a year, you should start meeting different kinds of people in different ways. If you keep trying the same old thing, you will most likely get the same old results.

In light of these considerations, one particularly helpful strategy for self-improvement is to spend a couple of hours coming up with a list of new self-improvement methods you are going to try. After you’ve given one item on the list a fair trial, move onto the next one. Make the list long enough that you won’t get to the end of it easily. Keep working until you’ve achieved your goal. The fact that there are many things on your list that you have not tried yet can be motivating, as it reminds you that, even if a few potential solutions to your problems don’t work out, there are lots of things left to try. Hopefully you will not have to go through the entire list, but only work through it progressively until you see sufficient improvement.  At that point, you are ready to move on and improve a different area of your life.

Here are some sample lists of things to try to help achieve some common self-improvement goals:

Anxiety/Stress

1. Read When Panic Attacks.

2. For eight weeks, spend 15 minutes a day trying exercises from the book (for instance, as soon as you wake up each morning).

3. Read The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety.

4. Read The Worry Cure (if your anxiety comes in the form of frequent worrying).

5. Find a cognitive behavioral therapist in your area, and begin weekly sessions with him or her. (Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most evidence-based treatment for anxiety.)

1. For eight weeks, make a routine to exercise for 20 minutes every morning.

2. For two weeks, practice doing diaphragmatic breathing for 5 minutes each morning, Then, for six weeks, practice immediately doing this sort of breathing whenever you notice your anxiety level rising.

8. Setup an appointment with a psychiatrist to discuss anti-anxiety medication.

9. Sign up for local meditation classes and go for eight weeks. During this period, meditate for 15 minutes each morning just after you get out of bed.

Depression

1. Read Feeling Good (skipping the section on medication, which is a bit out of date).

2. Read The Happiness Trap.

3. For eight weeks, spend 15 minutes a day trying exercises from the book (for instance, as soon as you wake up each morning).

4. Read Overcoming Depression One Step at a Time.

5. For eight weeks, spend 15 minutes a day trying suggestions from the book (for instance, as soon as you wake up each morning).

6.  Find a cognitive behavioral therapist in your area, and begin weekly sessions with him or her. (Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most evidence-based treatment for depression.)

7. For eight weeks, make it a routine to exercise for 20 minutes every morning.

8. Each morning, make a list of three things you are grateful for. Ideally, get a friend to do the same, and email each other these lists each morning. Try to vary the list from day-to-day.

9. Each morning, make a list of three things you are looking forward to. If you can’t think of three things, then immediately try to schedule some things to look forward to so that you can complete the list every day.

10. Setup an appointment with a psychiatrist, and discuss anti-depression medication.

Difficulty finding someone you’d like to date

1. Sign up for an online dating website, such as OKCupid. As you write your profile, remember that it is an advertisement trying to attract people you’d like to get to know.

2. Ask your friends (of the attractive gender) for feedback on your profile, to see if they think it is likely to attract the sort of people you’d like to meet.

3. Schedule at least an hour each week to search for new people on the site and send messages to the people you find.

4. Ask fashionable friends how you could change your appearance to be more attractive, and implement those changes.

5. Ask your most socially savvy friends (and people you used to date, if possible) if they can pinpoint any behaviors you have that others might find unattractive, and particularly attractive features that you could work to highlight. Make a list of such behaviors, and work actively on correcting them. Review this list of corrections for 5 minutes each morning for 6 weeks.

6. Read How to Win Friends and Influence People.

7. Sign up for speed dating in your area, and attend sessions once a month. Speed dating events are often themed, so try to select events that will be likely to attract the type of people you are interested in meeting.

8. Ask a few of your friends if they can set you up with someone they think you might like. Repeat this process as often as you can without becoming a nuisance.

9. Join groups, take classes, or do activities in your area where you are likely to meet many new people. Choose these groups and activities strategically: think about which activities will also attract people you may like.

10. Make an effort to attend every social gathering you can where there are likely to be people you don’t know. At each of these events, make sure that you speak to every attractive person for at least a few minutes.

To give one of many possible examples, when a group of students were asked to estimate how long their senior theses would take if everything went as poorly as it possibly could, the average estimate was about 49 days. In fact, the average time it took the students to complete these papers was about 56 days, 7 days worse than their worst case scenario estimates. Only about 30% of the students finished their projects in the amount of time they estimated. Other studies have demonstrated a similar optimistic bias on a variety of project types, from computer programming to tax form completion.

Why might we be bad at making estimates about our own projects? It is likely a combination of:

• Our tendency to plan as though the stages of a project will each go smoothly (when, in fact, one or more of these stages may have hitches).
• A self-serving bias, where we take credit for our past successes, but treat our past failures as being caused by unpredictable external events. This can lead us to have an inflated sense of our ability to complete projects.
• Our tendency to try to impress others by exaggerating how well we can perform (which becomes relevant when we are making our estimates in front of others).
• A wishful thinking bias, where our beliefs are influenced by how much we want something to be true. Since it is more pleasing to believe that a project will be completed quickly, in some cases we may be biased towards believing that.

So how can we correct this problem in our forecasting? Well, just knowing about it makes it possible for us to consciously make corrections for what are likely to be overly optimistic estimates. But even this approach often fails, as we may not adjust enough (being optimistic about the amount of bias that we have), or overact and adjust too much. Fortunately, there is a prediction method, known as Reference Class Forecasting, that has a tendency to be more reliable. At its core, this technique involves considering past cases that were similar to the project that you are now trying to make predictions about, and applying probabilistic thinking.

Rather than asking “Given what this project’s parts consist of, how long do I expect it to take?”, Reference Class Forecasting involves asking, “How long did similar projects I’ve done in the past take?” If you’ve never done a project similar to the one at hand, you can modify this question to, “Historically, how long have projects like this one taken for people with a level of skill that is similar to mine?” Once you have recalled or collected data on how long similar projects have taken, it is then easy to make estimates for how likely the project is to take different lengths of time. For instance, to estimate the probability that a project takes more than 30 days, we can just check what percentage of the time similar projects took us 30 days or more. The more data you have on similar projects, and the more similar those projects are to the project you are now doing, the less uncertain your estimates will be.

Reference Class Forecasting is useful, in part, because it gives us a way of predicting how long a project will take (or how costly it will be) that is unlikely to be influenced by our various biases. Wishful thinking, excessive optimism, and self-serving tendencies can be avoided simply by viewing our project as one among many, and thinking in terms of the probability of different outcomes. This process is certainly not perfect. For instance, it is not obvious which projects should count as “similar enough” to include in our analysis. And there will be a fundamental trade-off in this procedure between considering more past projects that are less similar, or considering fewer past projects that are more similar, and it isn’t clear what the optimal tradeoff is. But, nonetheless, this method often yields substantial improvements in prediction accuracy over other approaches.

Reference Class Forecasting can be used for many things besides planning projects. For instance:

• If you want to know how likely your friend is to cancel plans with you, consider the frequency with which they canceled in the past. For example, you can check your calendar to look at the last six times you had plans, and try to remember if they canceled on each of those occasions. If they canceled half of those times, it is quite likely they will cancel this time as well. If they didn’t cancel any of those times, then they probably won’t this time either. Of course, if you have extra information, such as that your friend has a cold and it is raining outside, you’ll want to try to make an adjustment to this probability, and conclude that your friend is less likely to show than normal.
• Suppose that you are stressing out about a test that is coming up a in a couple of weeks, and want to know how likely you are to do poorly. Well, consider your history of taking tests in the past that seemed to be of about this difficulty. If you never got a grade lower than a B on ten such exams, then it is quite unlikely that you will get a C on this next one.
• Perhaps you are feeling hopeless about finding a boyfriend, because you haven’t dated anyone for a while. Think back to your dating history, and note how long it took you to meet someone you liked in past cases. Unless something important has changed in your life that would affect your dating outcomes, this information can help you estimate how long it is likely to take you to find someone in the future. If this procedure tells you that you likely will have to wait a depressingly long time to find someone you like, consider the strategies you can use to increase your average romantic happiness.

Using the past to predict how well things will turn out in the future is certainly not an infallible method. Sometimes things change in a fundamental way such that past examples are just not relevant, or we lack knowledge about past examples. There are also fairly arbitrary decisions to be made during this process, like deciding which cases are similar enough to include. But, remarkably, using this simple procedure can often give us reasonable answers to questions that we care about, and produce predictions that may be less biased and more accurate than would typically be achieved by the methods we would have naturally relied on.

In cases where it is very important that our predictions are accurate, we can use both Reference Class Forecasting and other methods, and compare their results. When they agree, this should give us increased credence in our predictions. When they disagree, we can try to figure out why our prediction methods are diverging.

The next time you want to make a prediction, consider asking yourself, “Are there past examples similar to this case? What were the outcomes in those past cases, and how often did each of those outcomes occur?”

Our non-conscious systems primarily work using pattern recognition. Through a combination of genetic pre-programming and repeated exposure, your brain learns to label instances of things in the world as “dangerous” or “not dangerous”, “food” or “not food”, “person” or “not person”, “real smile” or “fake smile”. It learns to categorize and predict automatically.

When you see a chair you are immediately able to recognize it as a chair and associate it with your concept of chair, even if it is the largest chair you have ever seen, or the first one you’ve seen with a zebra stripe pattern. Your brain has effectively developed a way to rapidly recognize things as being “chairs” or “not chairs” based on whether they match a certain pattern. This pattern was learned automatically from exposure to many chairs in the past. You don’t have to consciously consider whether this particular object has the features necessary to make it a chair, your brain produces an answer before you are even aware of thinking about it.

To give another example, consider what happens when a chess Grandmasters looks at a chess board. In many cases, they are able to glance at a board positions and immediately (without conscious thought) identify them as being strong or weak, with good reliability. Of course, they might then choose to reason consciously about the positions in order to check or improve upon their gut responses.

Having considered these two ways of making predictions and decisions, the question then arises: when should we rely on thorough conscious analysis, and when should we use our automatic processing? To answer this, let’s consider the advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches.

Careful Conscious Analysis

Advantages

• Handles problems where multiple logical deductive steps are necessary to find a solution (e.g. I know that all A’s are B’s, and also that if something is a C it cannot be a B, therefore this particular A is not a C.)
• Allows the application of theories to problems, and in doing so lets you leverage the research and thinking of others (e.g. what does economic theory tell us will happen to soybean prices when the supply of soybeans dries up?)
• Allows you to develop theories of your own which can then be applied in future situations. (e.g. I’ve noticed that when I attack him on his left side he parries and counter attacks. So this time I will initiate a fast attack to the left, and as he begins to parry, I will drop the point of my blade to get underneath his sword, and carry the momentum into an attack to the right instead)
• Lets you compare the advantages and disadvantages of multiple possible methods or solutions. (e.g. The first theory predicts results will come out a certain way, but the second predicts a slightly different outcome. However, the first theory has a better track record on cases like this one.)
• Produces reasoning that can be communicated to others. (e.g. I came to my conclusion by evaluating the randomized controlled trials and noting that…)

Disadvantages

• Unless you have honed your truth discernment skills, you may fall prey to logical fallacies, become misled by cognitive biases, or rely on theories that have not been empirically validated. Performing truly excellent and reliable conscious analysis takes work, skill, self correction, good habits of mind, knowledge about potential pitfalls, and practice. (e.g. Due to the compatibility of your astrological charts, I think that he would make an excellent husband.)
• Thinking carefully is a slow process. (e.g. There is a deer in the road about thirty feet ahead of me and I’m going 60 miles per hour. If I hit the brake now will I have time to stop before I hit it? Will it be more or less dangerous to me if…)

Unconscious Automatic Processing

Advantages

• Operates fast (e.g. That ball he hit is going out-of-bounds so there is no need to run and try to catch it)
• Can be used in lots of situations where feedback is readily available, even when you don’t have a theory about how to solve the problem consciously (e.g. Now when I look at a cubist work I immediately know if is by Picasso, Braque or someone else, even if I’ve never seen it before.)
• Starts to get trained automatically without effort if you just do something enough times (e.g. Having listened to enough songs that I knew the titles of, I can now often guess what the title of a song is just from its lyrics)

Disadvantages

• Cannot effectively handle all types of problems. This method is especially bad for problems that require long deductive chains to solve, or where gathering various sorts of evidence together is necessary. (e.g. I know that the randomized controlled trials say otherwise, but my own experiences as a psychologist still tells me that psychodynamic therapy is more useful and cost-effective for treating depression than Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)
• May give you wrong answers when the problem changes compared to what you have been trained on (e.g. I know we’re playing squash now, but that move I did would have been perfect if we were playing tennis!)
• Requires repeated exposure, so won’t work well when you don’t get to practice a lot or see examples over and over again. (e.g. Well, I’ve only done heart surgery two times before, but from what I can tell this doesn’t quite seem to be in the right place, so I’m going to abandon the standard procedure and improvise)
• Doesn’t always provide us with conscious insight into why the prediction came out a certain way (e.g. I know that thing is designed to put food onto, but it still looks like a chair to me)

Careful analytical thought, and automatic processing relying on pattern matching are both extremely useful ways of approaching problems. When processing needs to be done quickly and you can train yourself through lots of examples with feedback, automatic processing may provide the best method for making predictions. But when chains of logical deduction are required, or evidence needs to be gathered and evaluated, or repeated exposure is not possible, or strong predictive theories exist, then as long as you have honed your thinking skills sufficiently well, conscious analysis will probably provide the best results.

Consider, for example, what happens when you feel tired. The obvious and natural thing to do is to lie down. This works well when there is time to sleep or nap. But what if you are feeling tired and should leave your house in 10 minutes? While lying down is what you naturally feel like doing, it is likely to make you feel even more tired, or cause you to be late. A better solution to your grogginess is to do things that you probably don’t feel like doing. Put on energetic music, make a cup of tea, and while it is heating, do fast jumping jacks for two minutes. Jumping jacks may sound really unappealing, but they are more likely to help you feel awake than lying down is.

Let’s take another example. When people are depressed, activities they usually enjoy very much tend to seem unappealing. Because of this, people tend to plan fewer fun activities when they are depressed than they usually do. Often, they have the inclination just to sit around their homes. Unfortunately, staying at home for long periods of time has a tendency to further people’s depression, socially isolate them, and make life seem even duller. As in the fatigue example, the solution is to fight against what you feel like doing. In this case, that means making plans and getting out of the house. To reduce depression, you should call friends to hang out, exercise, go for a walk, go out to dinner, etc. Behavioral changes like these are a key component of the therapeutic system known as behavioral activation, which studies indicate is one of the most effective treatments for depression.

Yet another example of our natural tendencies failing us is our reaction to our own anxiety. People who are anxious naturally tend to avoid whatever is making them anxious. The problem with this response, however, is that when we have irrational anxiety or fears that are blown out of proportion, running from the things that frighten us tends to reinforce our irrational reactions. If a man who is phobic of spiders runs away at the sight of one, he is reinforcing this behavior (via negative reinforcement). Whenever he runs from the spider, his anxiety is reduced (so the behavior leads to the removal of the negative stimulus, which acts as a form of reward for unhelpful behavior). A person with that fleeing behavior never truly learns (or becomes used to) the idea that most spiders are safe. If he had instead done the opposite behavior, and stayed in the room with the spider, it is likely that eventually his brain would stop reacting so strongly. Sitting in a room with a spider for 10 minutes may be terrifying when you are phobic, but sitting in the room with the spider for 5 hours is going to be downright boring. This technique, facing up to the things that make us anxious, is a key component of exposure therapy, which randomized controlled trials show is one of the most effective treatments for anxiety.

Anger, like anxiety and depression, also leads to counterproductive behaviors. People who feel angry tend to overact, take risks, attack, and damage relationships. But in the modern world, yelling often prevents people from discussing situations calmly and finding solutions, and it often furthers the anger of the other party. Anger increases the likelihood of physical violence, which rarely leads to productive outcomes. Often, the most useful way to react when feeling very angry is to fight against our inclinations and act to calm ourselves down. Walk away from the situation if possible. Take ten, slow, deep breaths, counting each one. Visualize something incompatible with anger (like petting a puppy, or watching your best friend laugh). Try to empathize with the person that has made you angry, asking “Why might he have behaved this way?” and “Have I ever behaved in that way?”

Fatigue  is the body’s signal for wanting rest or sleep. If it is not a good time to sleep, then you will be better off if you ignore what your body feels like it wants, and try to energize yourself rather than lying down. Depression often leads to a lack of desire to do activities, and underestimation of how fun they will be if you try them. But going with this inclination tends to promote further depression, whereas doing exactly the opposite (calling up that friend, planning that activity) tends to reduce it. Anxiety is your body’s way of warning you of danger, and there is a natural tendency to want to avoid and escape danger. But in many cases in the modern world we fear things that are unlikely to hurt us, and sometimes the anxiety is more harmful than the thing we fear. Fighting against your inclination to escape tends to reduce your fear, whereas fleeing reinforces fleeing in the future. Anger is part of a system that helps us preserve social status, and defend ourselves from enemies. But in today’s world it can get us in trouble, preventing helpful conflict resolution. We are therefore sometimes better off fighting against our impulses, and engaging in behaviors that reduce our anger.

When we are tired, depressed, anxious or angry the inclinations to do things that are not good for us can be very strong. But strategizing what is best for you to do while experiencing these strong feelings is very difficult. One solution that can be quite helpful is to, in advance, write down good strategies to use in these situations. This is rather easy to do while in an emotionally neutral state. These strategies take the form “If I am feeling Y then do A, B and C”. Then, when you next find yourself feeling Y, you can just consult this list of strategies (which ideally will be memorized). It can be far easier to follow a specific plan from a list than to come up with the right strategy on the fly. And if you get in the habit of consulting this list, the new reactions will start to feel effortless and natural.

Here are some pre-written strategies that you can save, print or memorize. You can then consult this list when the situation calls for it.

When tired, and it’s not a good idea to sleep:

• drink a caffeinated beverage
• put on energetic music
• do a couple minutes of fast exercise, like jumping jacks

When feeling depressed:

• call some friends and have a conversation with someone you like and feel close to
• plan some activities that you normally would enjoy (even if you predict you won’t enjoy them)
• exercise
• go outdoors
• force yourself to smile for two minutes straight, trying to imitate a real smile as closely as possible

When feeling anxious about something that is actually not going to harm you:

• don’t run away or avoid this thing that you fear
• face it, as this will help reduce your unreasonable fear in the long run
• expose yourself to similar things that you fear on a repeated basis, until you get used to them, not allowing yourself to leave the situation

When angry, and anger is counterproductive:

• walk away, if possible, and avoid acting until you feel calmer
• take ten, slow, deep breaths, and count them as you do it
• think about something incompatible with anger (like petting a puppy, or watching someone you love laugh)
• try to empathize with the person that has angered you (ask yourself “Why is he behaving this way?” and “Have I ever done something similar?”)

If one of your goals in life is to run a triathlon, and it is the day before the big race, you probably will feel excited. The day after the race is over, you will likely feel proud with a highly elevated mood. Months, and perhaps even years later, you will still probably feel good when you reflect on the fact that you completed the race. And yet, the fact that you ran that triathlon is very unlikely to impact your day-to-day mood long after the event. Most of us spend only a small percentage of our time reflecting on past memories and achievements, and even in moments of reflection the triathlon would represent just one of a great many possible things to reflect on. If you are lucky, the triathlon experience might have positive effects on your personality, increasing your confidence or perseverance, and give you a sense of accomplishment. All of these things are great. But you should also not expect the fact that you ran one two years ago to be determining how you feel on a day-to-day basis today, or to be making up for a life that currently lacks fulfillment. In other words, accomplishments are great, and you should strive for them. But you also shouldn’t expect them to benefit you that much on your typical days. But typical days are the content of most of your existence. Typical days matter most in terms of your average happiness because they are so abundant.

So in addition to thinking about the things you’d like to accomplish in your life, it can be helpful to also ask yourself:

• What would my ideal, ordinary week be like?

Ideal, in the sense that it would reflect a life that would make you happy (both helping you maintain a significantly positive average mood, keeping you feeling fulfilled, and including meaningful connections). Ordinary, in the sense that it is the sort of thing that you could actually repeat week after week for years. So base jumping is out, unless you don’t plan on surviving for very long. Eating $200 tasting menus every night is out, unless you plan on making a large sum of money first (and anyway, they would quickly become boring). And going on a roller coaster every week is out, because after six months of that most of the thrill would be gone (unless you are truly a roller coaster aficionado). To construct your ideal ordinary week, it may help to ask yourself questions like:

• What living situation would help keep me in a good mood?
• What activities give me a sense of fulfillment or purpose?
• What excites me that would still excite me if I did it weekly for years?
• What job would fit into this ideal week, providing the income to support this lifestyle while simultaneously adding to my positive mood and good feeling about life?

Don’t think in terms of achieving certain milestones, but rather in terms of how the hours in the week are spent. You can fill in these details about your ideal ordinary week with questions like:

• How much time would you spend watching TV per day? It may not be zero minutes, but your happiness is probably not maximized by watching more than an hour either.
• How much time would you spend reading or learning per day? What would you learn about and how would you go about learning it?
• How much time would you spend socializing? What sorts of people would you socialize with?
• How much time would you spend on hobbies? What might these hobbies be (making sure to choose things that wouldn’t grow boring over the years)?
• How much time would you spend doing altruistic things (keeping in mind that altruism increases both our sense of fulfillment and raises our mood, in addition to its direct benefits on the world)? Who would you be helping in this time?
• How many hours would you spend at work (keeping in mind that this job must support the lifestyle of your ideal week plus give you sufficient savings)? What would you want your hours spent at work to be like (being realistic about what you could get paid to do)? What sort of tasks would you be doing and what sort of people would you be working with that would be good for you, week to week?
• What would your romantic life be like? How would time with a romantic partner be spent?

Once you have determined what your ideal ordinary week would be like, consider how you can nudge your current life in that direction. What are you doing more of than would be your ideal, and what are you doing less of? Can you cut back on the former and increase the latter?

Milestones are important and worthwhile. But rather than thinking just in terms of what milestones you want to achieve in your life, think also about what you want your daily existence to consist of. Based on what you know about yourself, think about how you can fill your hours so that you regularly have a positive mood and a feeling of real satisfaction. Figure out what your ideal ordinary week would be like, and then ask yourself what you can change today to make your life more like that ideal.

Influences: Kenneth Chen (A Practical Guide to Defining Your Supergoals)