In the last three lessons, I’ve discussed the importance of focusing on the career capital that drives people’s success, the logic of supply and demand that explains why rare and valuable skills matter so much, and the crucial importance of correctly identifying the path forward so you don’t burn yourself out working on the wrong things. Today, I’d like to shift and talk about how you can get good at the skills you need to flourish in your career. Anders Ericsson and the Legacy of Deliberate Practice Few psychologists contributed more to the study of expertise than Anders Ericsson. His work st ..read more

In the previous two lessons, I shared why you should pay attention to successful people’s career capital rather than their personal quirks when trying to emulate their achievements. Next, I applied the economic model of supply and demand to understand why some people are able to negotiate great career perks—money, autonomy, flexibility—while others are not. Career capital, particularly rare and valuable skills, is the starting point for finding work you love. But how do you get them? A tempting answer is simply to work hard. While it’s true that success requires hard work and most successful p ..read more

In the last lesson, I explained why focusing on irrelevant details obscures the true driver of professional success: career capital.  But the connection between career capital and a great career isn’t always obvious. Why does the owner of a car dealership tend to make more than a nurse or a teacher? Why would most people struggle to make a living as an artist, but the guy who put a taxidermied shark in a tank is worth nearly half a billion dollars? The basic answer of whether you’ll have a great career can be understood in terms of the simple economic concept of supply and demand. Supply ..read more

A pet peeve of mine is self-help advice that obsesses over irrelevant personality quirks rather than the true drivers of a person’s success. Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio meditates forty minutes per day.  Tim Ferriss wrote his bestselling books between 10 pm and 5 am.  Warren Buffett famously drinks five cans of Coca-Cola every day. And so on … There isn’t any secret diet, exercise, meditation or journaling exercise that will make you successful. Warren Buffett isn’t rich because of his junk food diet; he’s rich because he is an incredibly skilled investor who has worked co ..read more

Our deepest beliefs are often girded by assumptions we rarely articulate. The mindset of efficiency is one of mine. The assumptions of this mindset are essentially: There are things we want. We can take actions to get the things we want. Some actions are more efficient than others—i.e., they will get more of what we seek for less time, effort, money, etc. The resources we save by being more efficient can be spent on other things we want. To consider a concrete example, think of a task like studying for an exam: There is something you want: to pass the exam and learn the material. There are ..read more

Today is my birthday. In keeping with a tradition I’ve now done for half of my life, this post reflects on my life over the last year and my thoughts on the year ahead. The last year was a big one. I celebrated the birth of my second child, Julia. I finished the manuscript for my second book, Get Better at Anything, which will be published in the spring of 2024. We also spent our first year in our new house, having moved in shortly before my last birthday. Finishing a book while having a new baby kept me busy. The first few months were a kind of synchronized chaos. I got used to the rhythm of ..read more

Recently, I wrote a defense of the uncontroversial-within-cognitive-science-but-widely-disbelieved idea that the mind is a computer. That post got me thinking about other ideas that are broadly accepted amongst the expert communities that study them, but not among the general population.1 I agreed with some of the following ideas before I read much about them; for these, the expert consensus reinforced my prior worldview. But for most, I had to be persuaded. Many ideas are genuinely surprising, and one needs to be confronted with a lot of evidence before changing their mind about it. 1. Market ..read more

Recently, when I was a guest on a podcast, the host asked me why my book wasn’t more popular. She thought it belonged in the same class as mega-bestsellers like Atomic Habits or Deep Work, and was surprised it wasn’t in the same league for popularity. While it’s deeply flattering to be told your work is underrated, I think some people’s surprise that a moderately-popular thing isn’t super popular stems from a cognitive illusion. Why Bestsellers Seem Common Try to imagine every book you’ve ever read, seen or heard about. How many books would that be? Maybe 1000? It’s probably not more than 10,0 ..read more

In my recent call for questions, a reader asked me a version of Peter Thiel’s now-famous interview question: what important truth do few people agree with you on? I had a hard time answering this because, for the most part, I’m an intellectual conformist. I read what experts think and generally agree with their consensus. While intellectual conformity may sound cowardly, I’d argue it’s actually a kind of virtue. My professional incentives align with being contrarian rather than dryly repeating whatever Wikipedia says on a topic. I usually agree with experts because experts are regular people w ..read more

Two weeks ago, I asked the audience to send me their questions. The response was great, so I decided to split my responses over two posts. You can see last week’s answers here, where I talked about Range, learning styles, nootropics and the value of learning things you’re doomed to forget. Some questions have been lightly edited, and questions that multiple people asked have been merged into single questions. Q: How can I overcome procrastination? (multiple readers) The research on procrastination indicates that we mainly fail to buckle down and get to work (or our studies) because we find ..read more