Maneesh is a 24-year old with a resume that most people won’t accomplish in their entire lives. He was an international best-selling author still in his sophomore year of high-school. He took two years off from Stanford to travel the world, learn five languages, build a business that paid for his lifestyle while working fewer than four hours per week, and even started an NGO, SaveThem.net, in India to teach poor kids computer skills.

Maneesh’s secret isn’t that he’s an insane workhorse, he will admit himself he’s lazier than most. Instead it’s a talent for stripping away the irrelevant in pursuing a goal to rapidly outpace the people who spend years working but never see any results.

It would be easy to dismiss or dislike Maneesh. But I prefer to learn from him. Even if you don’t want to live in a desert for a month or become a DJ in Berlin in 90 days without any experience, you can apply his systems-hacking to create your own remarkable life.

The Sex Scandal Technique by Maneesh Sethi

Let me tell you a story about one of my employees in the Philippines. I hired Klarc to help me build a habit: at 10:00 every day, he would call me and remind me to floss my teeth.

One day, at 10:32, I received a Skype message. “Excuse me Mr. Maneesh Sir (Klarc always called me sir, even though I asked him not to), I’m so sorry I’m late. We were hit by a hurricane, and the whole village has no electricity! I had to run 8 miles to the next village so that I could call you!”

Would you run 8 miles to remind me to floss? I was paying Klarc $2 / hr (but gave him a hefty bonus after this incident). What are you doing to make yourself so valuable employer would pay 10-20x that amount?

The Entitlement Fallacy

“I went to college. I worked hard and got good grades. I got a degree. Now, I can’t get a job. This just isn’t fair.”

Here are the facts: everyone is doing exactly the same thing. In 2011, there were 19,700,000 college students. At the same time, there are 13,100,000 million unemployed Americans. Look at the staggering disconnect: there are more and more students graduating from college every day, but almost no job creation. What do students expect will happen to them after graduation? [Sources: The US Census and The Bureau Of Labor Statistics].

The truth is, anyone can hire an employee in India for much less money and FAR LESS paperwork than hiring someone from North America. Where’s the incentive for any employer to choose you?

I was sitting down with a friend last night, lamenting the difficulty of finding good employees. When it came down to it, we both agreed: ‘Almost everyone sucks at absolutely everything.’

This is horrible news for employers. It’s almost impossible to find someone good to hire, even on a short term basis.

However, for you, this is AWESOME news. Fortunately, almost everyone sucks at absolutely everything. You don’t have to be the best. You just have to be better than everyone else—everyone who sucks.

Faster Than The Average Bear

Two friends went camping in a forest. In the morning, one friend noticed a bear eating their supplies (probably because he didn’t use a proper bear bag, which I had to do while living in the wilderness for 28 days). The bear, startled, began to charge the two friends.

The two scattered, and one friend yelled: “We’ll never outrun this bear.”

The second, pulling ahead, yelled back: “I don’t have to be faster than the bear—just faster than you.”

In the same vein, you don’t need to be the best in your industry. You just need to be better than everyone else.

How Not To Suck

Getting a job in any industry requires two things:

1. Skill in your work
2. Ability to market your skill

Most people stop at step one. It seems simple, right? If you’re talented in your work, you deserve the job, right?

Wrong. You don’t deserve anything. If you want something, you need to grab it.

Hiring doesn’t discover which candidate is the best for the job. It simply finds which candidate is the best at interviewing for the job.

Put yourself into the mind of an employer: “Why should I hire this person? There are 25 other candidates—what makes this person special?”

The shortest path to a goal is not by doing what everyone else is doing. It’s often by doing the EXACT opposite.

How to achieve any goal via the Sex Scandal Technique

When most people approach any goal, they do what everyone else does: Figure out a goal, write down milestones to achieve it, and slowly pursue the milestones.

Unfortunately, everyone else is doing the same thing.

Instead, every successful goal I’ve achieved has followed what I call the Sex Scandal Technique.

1. Figure out your final goal
2. Skip all of your worthless milestones–focus on kicking ass and hitting that goal, immediately.

For example, when most people decide to become famous, the often do what everyone else does: go to Hollywood, try to meet people, work on their script, etc. But Kim Kardashian found a faster way: sleep with someone famous, make a sex tape, get famous.

In the same way, you can approach your goals by looking at methods of beating the system.

I’m going to show you two of my most successful hacks to achieve crazy goals. First, I’ll show you how to network with the best people in your industry. Next, I’ll show you how I became a “famous DJ” in Berlin (and got to party with Tim Ferriss) in just 90 days.

How to Meet Famous People

I met Scott in person while road tripping for my Hack The System Podcast (which you should totally subscribe to). He let me crash on his couch for five days, mainly because I wanted to beat Call of Duty on his LCD TV. (Check out my podcast interview with Scott here)

While staying there, I met Scott’s roommate, Vat, who is currently trying to become an architect in Vancouver. He was rather interested in my podcast.

“So what’s the point Maneesh? Are you expecting a lot of readers to watch?”

“I don’t really care man: With my podcast, I have an excuse to meet my biggest role models, get an hour of free consulting with them, and great content for my readers.”

Now, all of the people I’ve interviewed (Chris Guillebeau, Ramit Sethi, JD Roth, Jonathan Mead, Tynan, and many more) are friends of mine. They introduce me to other people. They retweet my links. They give me great advice.

“That’s great Maneesh,” said Vat. “But how can I use this idea to become an architect?”

“It’s simple: a three stage process. Just do this:

1. Start a website.
2. Find all the people in your industry that you want to meet.
3. Interview them (in person if possible) for your website.”

You can do it in any industry: web design, SEO, architecture, finance, research, teaching, knitting—anything. By virtue of having a blog/interview series, you have an awesome excuse to sit down with experts—and get extremely valuable free coaching, and content for your readers.

This is the strategy I’ve used for networking. Rather than trying hard to convince influential people to sit down with me, I do something that targets their own self interest. Besides, who doesn’t like to talk about themselves on camera?

Partying With Tim Ferriss: How to become a “famous” DJ in Berlin with no experience

Let’s take a look at another example of trying to hack the system. In 2011, I lived in Berlin, Germany, and decided to film a Youtube show: 90 days to becoming a DJ in Berlin. I had no prior experience DJing.

When I moved to Berlin, I didn’t have years—I wanted to become a DJ, but I only had a few months to make it happen. When I asked around, everyone told me the same thing:

“It’s going to take you YEARS before you’ll get your first gig.”

I wasn’t willing to accept that. I didn’t have years—I only had a few months. So, instead, my partner and I figured out a way to subvert the system–we could throw OUR OWN party and position ourselves as the DJs.

Most people think that it takes years to become successful, but there are specific tactics you can use to dramatically decrease that time frame.

We began throwing our own monthly party. We made advertisements, printed flyers, we bought facebook ads. During our second show, just a month after starting, we earned a profit of 1000 Euros ($1500) in *one night*.

Guess what: Within just a few weeks of throwing these parties, we got to host Tim Ferriss live in Berlin. Our party brought in hundreds of people from countries all around the world.

Again, we could have gone the normal route: practicing in our basement, emailing bars, and hoping we would be discovered. Instead, we did what we do best—hack the system, figure out a way to achieve our goals, and execute. The Sex Scandal Technique.

My special gift to Scott H Young readers

I put together a resource kit especially for Scott H Young readers, just because I love Scott (and you!) so much. Check out this Hack The System page. Drop your email address, and I’ll send you over some awesome stuff I’m preparing specially for you. Here’s what you’ll get:

• A 3 minute video with my DJ Partner where we deconstruct EXACTLY how we did it. A 3 minute video that shows you the exact steps we took to become “successful” DJs—in just one month.
• The Travel Hacking Report – How to get a) an international plane ticket for less than $100 and b) free office space in every country of the world.

Thanks so much for reading my stuff, and don’t forget to check out Hack The System.

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A common template goes something like, “You think it’s easy to do _____. Just wait until you have kids, tons of debt and a mortgage bub.” The idea being that I’m somehow at fault for not giving them personalized advice because they had made poor life decisions.

But it does bring up a good point: if you’re young, it is easier to do harder and riskier things. If you’re smart, you take advantage of that.

Being Young and Taking Risks

When I say risks, I’m talking about the long-shot, high-reward, low-cost kind: starting a business, living in a different country or building something interesting.

Of course, you don’t need to be young to do any of these things. On the contrary, risky, difficult things would seem more feasible as you gain more experience and resources.

But the more you have, the harder it is to justify giving it up. There’s a lower opportunity cost to invest hundreds of hours in a speculative project when you’re earning $10 per hour than $100. Spending a year living abroad is harder if you need to convince a spouse or kids to come along for the ride.

You don’t need to be young to take on difficult, risky things. I know people twice my age who are more adventurous than I am. But the life trajectory people take usually makes it harder to do.

Fail When It’s Easy To Fail

I started thinking through this idea when I was contemplating starting my MIT Challenge. On the one hand, my business was becoming more consistent. One year’s worth of work improving my courses and distribution would have been tens of thousands of dollars in extra income.

Instead I chose to spend a year doing something I thought was interesting and had a possibility of sharing the passion I have for learning and self-education with a larger audience.

The benefits aren’t purely emotional. If the challenge were to be successful, it could help build better credibility for my methods and attract new customers. Even if I were being strictly motivated by money, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea, just a riskier one.

I could take on this project because I could afford to fail at it. My lifestyle is still inexpensive, so even if I didn’t have my business, a year’s worth of bills would have been less than a year in a university. I had no outstanding commitments and no dependents.

Taking on risks isn’t just about being bold, it’s about being able to handle the possibility of failure. If you can’t afford to fail, you can’t afford to try, so fail while failing is still cheap.

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Do the hardest thing you can.

Uncommon, because I’ve met exceedingly few people who agree with it. In fact, almost everyone suggests the opposite. When I started my MIT Challenge, one of the most common warnings was, “don’t burn yourself out.”

Yet, despite taking on bigger projects, I’ve found this mantra to be increasingly valuable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the few people I have met who live this mantra are also incredibly successful. What’s more interesting is that the more I follow this mantra the happier I am as well.

Building Strength

If you lift the heaviest weight you can lift, then you become stronger as a result. This is true, not just of muscles, but of yourself as well. Doing harder things makes you a stronger person.

A synonym for this kind of strength might be confidence, although that also has implications of irrational self-assessments as well, so I prefer the word strength. When you’ve taken on harder and harder tasks, and succeeded, then everything else in life seems a little less daunting.

When I did my first course for the MIT Challenge, it was stressful. I’d rarely learned at that pace before, and the constraint scared me. Now working on the classes 11 to 13, I’m not stressed at all.

I’d also say I have fewer negative preoccupations during this challenge than before it. Taking on a hard task can also be a source of focus, shifting yourself away from the myriad of little frustrations and disappointments that otherwise eat at an empty mind.

What if You Burn Out?

Implicit in the mantra is the hardest thing you can do. Which means not doing things which are strictly harder than you can do. After months of research, I felt learning, and writing all the exams for, a computer science degree in one year was doable. Doing the same in three months wasn’t.

Burnout shouldn’t be the goal, but it might be a side-effect. After all, doing the hardest thing can sometimes lead to taking on a project that turns out to be too hard.

But even in that case, how bad is burnout really?

Burnout, like any failure, is only temporary. The only way to ensure you never feel burnt out is to never do anything difficult. The costs of risk must be weighed against the opportunity cost of perfect safety. I’d rather have the occasional burnout, and have developed the inner-strength to confidently take on the world, than to hide away from it.

Caveats: Hard, Not Many; Harder Goals, Not Harder Methods

Two important exceptions:

1. Difficulty shouldn’t add. One challenging goal isn’t the same as two moderate challenges simultaneously.
2. Difficulty should be intrinsic. The goal should be what’s hard. Don’t take an easy goal and make it needlessly difficult.

The first is to distinguish the philosophy of hard work from the philosophy of busy work. Many ambitious students fall into this trap. They want to boost their resume, so they take on dozens of different activities, which individually are only moderately hard.

The problem with this philosophy is that the benefits of difficulty don’t add. Doing one hard project, in terms of impressiveness, learning and developing confidence is way better than trying to juggle three fairly easy projects at the same time.

If a goal doesn’t require at least a certain degree of obsession, it’s not a hard goal. Adding easy goals together doesn’t make them “hard” in the way I’m discussing.

The second is to make it clear that the difficulty should be in the constraints. Once the constraints are established, you should try to make accomplishing it as easy as possible.

Hard Work and Interesting Work

Difficult projects also tend to be interesting. If the challenge is difficult enough to require a minor obsession to complete, then it usually also needs to be interesting, if it has to generate the motivation to accomplish it.

It’s this correlation between difficulty and impressiveness that I think explains another correlation—people who seek hard work tend to also be successful. Not for the simple reason that they also tend to be ambitious (I don’t notice the same correlation with the people who rack up numerous easy accomplishments), but because hard projects generate a path for future opportunities.

A related mantra might be, “Always do the most interesting thing you can.” This is a little trickier to implement in practice. (What’s interesting? What if you don’t know where to start?) If you omit the cases of difficult projects which are uninteresting, then I believe the original mantra works pretty well.

Happiness and the Challenge

The main reason I follow this mantra is that it makes me happier. It took me awhile to discover that fact, since I had been convinced by everyone around me that the key to happiness was avoiding stress and difficulty.

Looking back, I think they were certainly correct about challenges forced upon you. Choosing to do the hardest things also implies that you’re choosing. If you’re coerced into taking on harder work, it has all the stress and frustration without the excitement.

In the end this mantra isn’t correct for everyone. Some people really will be happier if they could sit on a beach all day. But if you enjoy the thrill of the challenge, even at the sacrifice of a little leisure, then I’d say it’s a good mantra to live by.

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About seven years ago, I had big ambitions. I was going to run my own online business and be successful. Unfortunately I didn’t have any direct role models of people who had already done what I wanted to do, I could only read about them.

One inference I made is that most successful people are incredibly productive. But because I had never met any of them, I had to guess what that would be like. And, like many people, I assumed that meant ruthless focus and monastic self-discipline.

So I tried to emulate that model. I tried to avoid anything that looked “unproductive” like watching television, drinking or relaxing. I replaced them with reading, work and exercise—all things I had associated with being productive.

It’s probably obvious I was no fun at parties.

Looking VS Being Productive

Sometime later I started to actually meet successful people. Much to my surprise they weren’t the Randian titans of discipline and focus. In fact many of them were the opposite, drinking, relaxing and full of vices.

But even more surprisingly, they still got a lot done. Even though they hardly abstained from enjoying life, they got way more done than I could.

It was around this time that I realized the difference between looking and being productive. Being productive means getting work done. It means being efficient and focused when you work, but it doesn’t mean anything about your off-hours.

Being Productive Allows You To Appear Unproductive

The reality is, the people who have the least fun aren’t the most productive. They’re the people trying to “look” productive. The students who spend their lives in the library to look like they’re working hard. The office drones who stay late every evening even though their output is dwindling.

These people, like I once did, confuse being productive with looking productive. And, at the end of the day your boss, professor or team members care about results, not how hard you appear to be working.

The impression I give on this blog is that I’m productive. I’d say it’s more or less a fair one (although there are many people more prolific than me). But if you talked to anyone who knows me personally, that probably isn’t the surface impression they have. They know me as the guy convincing people to go to parties and who never appears to be working at all.

It isn’t that I’m lying to them or to you, it’s simply that I don’t care about appearances. I aim for ruthless efficiency in my working life so that can enable me to be relatively carefree and fun-loving in my personal life.

Work Hard, But Have Fun Too

During the MIT Challenge, I’ve been working up to 60 hours per week, much of it on hard-focus activities like watching lectures at twice the speed or reading textbooks. I’ve also shared as much as possible about my working routines and the learning techniques I’m using.

But that hasn’t stopped my personal life. I still go out for drinks at least once per week, meet people, go on dates, exercise. Blogging friend Maneesh Sethi, who recently came to stay with me for a week said he was surprised by how relaxed I seemed.

I say this not to brag that I’ve achieved some nirvana work-life balance, or that I have some exceptional ability. Many, if not most, of the successful people I know have similar tendencies. They stop worrying about “looking productive”, get their work done and enjoy life as much as possible.

The goal of productivity, and all the ideas I try to teach, isn’t to become a monk who can work non-stop without tiring. It’s to get a lot accomplished, in spite of not being monk-like. I respect the person who can calmly executes projects more than the person who constantly complains about working too much.

Two Reasons Success While Enjoying Life Isn’t a Contradiction

Part of the problem is our entire conception of work and life puts them at odds. We talk about work/life “balance” as if the two things were weights on a scale that too much work or too much fun would ruin the equilibrium.

The first reason this scale metaphor holds little weight is that “productivity” can’t be stripped from the human element. Most of the successful people I know owe much to having built extensive social networks. It’s a lot harder to make friends if you never have fun.

The second is that fun replenishes the very mental energy you need to work. I take a day off every week, which often means going to a party and sleeping in, even when I’m incredibly busy. The reason is that even though taking time off looks lazy, it results in higher performance work which more than pays for its costs.

Perhaps the image of me as being a serious, humorless work-horse is a remnant of my days where that probably would have been an apt description. Or maybe it’s a feature of the topics I like to write about—I have many articles about my work philosophy and none telling the story of how I was attacked by gypsy dogs walking back drunk from a party in France.

However, I think part of it is simply because someone who hasn’t developed productive habits, it’s difficult to conceptualize a way of getting work done that doesn’t require unending hours of grueling labor. But the concept of productivity isn’t at odds with being relaxed, they’re almost synonymous.

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Confucius shared general principles of good living, not just advice for one person. Steve Jobs spoke to the entire Stanford convocation, not just one graduate.

The advantage of generic advice is scale. Instead of reasoning about all cases and circumstances, the advice-giver tries to provide a best-fit approximation of the advice for most cases. The advice is better the closer you are to the author’s ideal case.

Because of this scale, through books we can access the recorded generic advice of the best thinkers who have ever lived. It doesn’t matter that Seneca died thousands of years ago, I can still draw lessons from his teachings to apply to my own life.

The disadvantage of this advice is that the more nuanced the situation, or the further removed you are from the ideal case, the worse the advice is. Seneca couldn’t have anticipated how life has changed in modern times, nor could he anticipate all possible permutations of life situations.

The Importance of Specific Advice and Mentors

I love generic advice. It’s probably the reason I read so many books. But the problem with this advice is that sometimes it doesn’t work. You may try your best to implement the suggestions of one author, only to find them useless. Worse are the generic platitudes or advice which is correct “on paper” but fail to accommodate the endless nuances of reality.

That’s why specific advice is crucial. Specific advice allows you to tap into the tacit and nuanced knowledge of someone who has been there before. It’s the difference between reading a book on calculus, and having someone show you exactly why you got a question wrong.

Institutions like universities are mostly about facilitating this specific advice. With Wikipedia, cheap textbooks, libraries and Google searches, generic advice large enough to fill entire lifetimes of education is freely accessible. The gap being filled isn’t the knowledge, but the specific advice that is sometimes missed in a textbook.

Because specific advice is so valuable, it helps explain the importance of “who you know over what you know” to fields like business. Because the generic advice is too simple to fill all the gaps. Ben Casnocha puts this another way in saying, “the who you know is the what you know.”

Finding Mentors

A realization that made a big difference in my life was that, just as I can read books in a library, I can go find mentors to help me. Too many people put arbitrary limits on who they can attempt to reach out to or ask advice from, and as such, never get the benefits of having someone experienced give them a push in the right direction.

Admittedly, the higher you aim your sights, the harder it can be to make a deep connection. People are busy, so they won’t always return your emails or calls. But for whatever pursuit you’re trying to excel at, there are thousands, if not millions of people who have done it before. The stupidest thing you can do is not even try to talk to any of them.

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It’s been slightly over two months since I started the MIT Challenge, and I’ve already passed the one-year mark for classes completed so far. Now that I’ve finished a significant chunk of the courses, I wanted to share my thoughts so far on the tradeoffs I’ve noticed from taking this rather unconventional approach to learning a subject.

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One explanation for this bizarre fact is that intelligence has a compounding property. If you’re slightly smarter as a child, due to innate advantages, you’ll enjoy learning more and accelerate your intelligence faster. The smart, it seems, get smarter.

Malcolm Gladwell brought this quirk of human nature to light in his book Outliers. Called the Matthew Effect, it explains a lot of the divergence in talent in individuals, and suggests that even slight advantages early on can create huge gaps in success, intelligence or skill later on.

The Mathematics of Destiny

It turns out that this tendency, for small advantages to create huge disparities isn’t an uncommon phenomenon. The mathematics of chaos theory show that many systems can be modeled as having these divergent properties.

With a system of differential equations, you can even observe so-called “funnels” emerging from simple relationships. Slightly different starting points, creating wildly different destinies.

Trajectories Visualization via MIT's Mathlets

One path increases, another gets very close but never makes it. If the Matthew Effect is correct, those plots could be the trajectories of your life, not just equations on a blackboard.

Swimming Upstream

But what happens if you reject the direction you feel your life is headed? Just because you struggled at school, does that mean there will be concepts forever outside your reach? Einstein was famously called a dullard in elementary school. But Einstein is just one man, and hardly a representative one at that.

My feeling is that there are two types of self-improvement. There’s the natural, accelerative kind. The slightly taller kid gets more attention from his basketball coach and practices even harder. The Matthew Effect in action.

Then there’s the swimming upstream kind. This is where the feedback isn’t wholly positive, and you need to fight against the seemingly mathematical inevitability of your current trajectory. This is the overweight person starting exercise or the awkward kid going to parties to try to meet people.

Some people would argue that making such a distinction is limiting. After all, if you tell yourself it’s an uphill battle, won’t that sap the very motivation to work that you have? Maybe it’s easier to ignore the sociological principles and pretend that our destinies are entirely ours to define.

But there’s an implicit optimism in the upstream swim as well. Because it means that if you can swim far enough to get into a different funnel, success might start to become easier, you might be able to get your own Matthew Effect rolling and forever escape the trajectory of your old destiny.

Swimming Towards the Inflection Point

I had an experience like this when setting up my first online business. I desperately wanted to earn just enough money to live on, and it was very frustrating when I spent years not even able to do that. I was swimming upstream, and the scale of the challenge ahead was daunting to me.

Yet, after five years of work, something strange happened. I went from being unable to pay the bills to having a good income in just the span of a few months. From there, future improvements became even easier, and now I’m financially secure enough to devote myself to a huge project that has zero impact on my bank account.

A truth, properly interpreted, is always more optimistic than a self-delusion. So while the Matthew Effect says growth is hard in the upstream phase, that’s not actually news to anyone. If you’re struggling with your career, finances, relationships, health or studies, you’re acutely aware of how hard self-improvement is.

What the Matthew Effect suggests is that there’s also an inflection point. A point where the positive reinforcement exceeds the negative feedback, and growth takes less effort—the trajectory shifts enough to define a new destiny.

Getting to the Turning Point

Recognizing that, in many systems, success is hardest early on, but it gets easier helps put things in perspective. It also encourages you to use more discipline early on, since getting to the inflection point is the hardest step.

I definitely felt this upstream swim with my social skills when I had graduated from high-school. I had been boring and fairly unpopular, growing up in a tiny town isolated from a lot of opportunities to meet new people.

When I moved away to study in university, I was eager to make up for lost time. But, I also noticed I was much rustier that many of my peers in the art of making friends and socializing. It always took an effort to convince myself to go out, since I wasn’t the life of the party.

I kept working at it, and somewhere in university I started hitting an inflection point. I became good enough at meeting new people, that I didn’t have to force myself to do it. I recently moved to a new city with no friends and I’ve met hundreds of people in the following months.

With my business and with my social skills, I had plenty of moments of frustration early on. Especially when success is not forthcoming, it is easy to believe that maybe you aren’t cut out to succeed.

Were I able to go back, I would have told myself to expect that, and just because the rate of progress is slow initially, doesn’t mean it won’t accelerate later. Work hard, show up every day, and sometimes you can swim upstream far enough to change your destiny.

Side Note: This happens to be the 900th article for ScottHYoung.com. Although it’s been a lot of work, I too owe a lot to the randomness of early fluctuations and from the generosity of readers here. Thanks to you for reading, and for making it possible for me to do what I love every day!

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One of the questions I’ve been getting asked a lot about my MIT Challenge is how can I stay focused during the long working hours?

Keeping up with the pace has meant working about 10-12 hours per day. But the time needs to be focused, not just long. Even being momentarily distracted can derail progress if you’re watching lectures at twice the normal rate.

In this email, I’m going to share the strategies I’m using to sustain focus. These strategies are all about tweaking your natural motivation cycles, so you don’t need to dose up on caffeine or illicit nootropics.

There are several key tactics I’ve found effective:

1. Priming
2. Distraction-free breaks
3. Active work
4. Fixed-scheduling

Priming: How to Leverage Momentum to Stay Focused

The first strategy I use I call priming, which is basically setting up your environment and work routine to make you want to get work done.

We all understand priming in its negative form. When you’re procrastinating and not following through on your work, it can be extremely hard to motivate yourself to get started. Even if the work is minimal, it can sometimes feel impossible just to start getting work done.

A major reason for this is negative priming. Once you start procrastinating, that influences your thinking patterns to make it harder to motivate yourself. Psychologists have documented the priming effect in many situations, so there’s no reason to expect it wouldn’t also apply with procrastination.

But just as negative priming can kill your momentum, positive priming can create momentum. If you plan out the associations in your environment, they can reinforce to make you more willing to work with less effort.

Here are a few of the ways I’ve been using priming to my advantage:

1. Waking up early and starting work immediately. This isn’t to save time, it’s because waking up early, for me, is strongly associated with getting work done. When I wake up early (in contrast to my days off, when I often sleep in), I’m immediately giving myself a subconscious signal to work hard that day.
2. Creating an action plan. Even if the work isn’t complicated, I frequently make plans since the plans themselves create a positive priming towards taking action. Of course, you can waste too much time planning, but spending ten minutes to outline what you’re going to accomplish in the next several hours can push you forward.
3. Finishing a burst of work early. If you get work done earlier in the day, that also creates positive priming which will carry throughout the day. The days I can accomplish 2-3 hours of work in the morning are also the days it is much easier to keep working throughout the next 8 hours.

Distraction-Free Breaks: How Not to Kill Your Momentum

Needing breaks is an inevitability. And, sometimes, those breaks make sense. Taking 15 minutes away from a bug can help you think about the problem in a new way. Clearing your head can help you regain focus.

However, most people take stupid breaks. Not only in the timing of their activities, but the types of things they do on a break, all create opportunities to completely kill the momentum they established earlier.

Distraction-free breaks means taking breaks that won’t kill your momentum, so you can boost your energy back up without getting caught in a detour that will end up in procrastination.

The first rule of taking breaks is to never break with an activity that is engaging. Television, internet, video games, Facebook, phone texting, email or anything else which will occupy your mind. The reason for this is that you don’t want to replace the momentum you helped build with some other task.

Instead, I’ve found it far more effective to focus on breaks that are relaxing, but that I can easily snap out of to go back to work. Taking a short walk, drinking a glass of water or stretching are all good candidates. I’ve also found short naps helpful too, but they don’t seem to work for all people, so use with caution.

Now, this might sound like I’ve eliminated anything fun from the break. What’s the point of taking a break if you don’t really enjoy it?

But that is the point. Breaks aren’t about having fun, that’s what having real time off is for. Breaks are about strategically recouping your energy and focus to reattack the work at hand. Leave the television, games and entertainment for when you can relax guilt-free in the evenings.

Active Work: Or Why It’s So Hard to Stay Awake in Lectures

Passive tasks are much harder to focus on than active ones. For example, reading is harder to stay focused on than writing, watching lectures are harder to stay focused on than programming. Passive tasks are mostly observation, active tasks are mostly doing.

Because passive tasks make focusing difficult, and because so much of learning defaults to a passive task, many students find it incredibly difficult to stay focused for more than an hour or two at a time.

The key to change this is to either convert your passive learning tasks into active ones, or to intersperse your passive learning with active tasks to periodically increase your focus.

Here’s a few ways I’ve been using this:

1. Making Tasks Active. For reading, this means using active reading techniques to make the reading process less passive. For watching lectures this means writing down your own insights and explanations instead of just transcribing what the lecturer is saying.
2. Interspersing Active Tasks. Break up longer reading or listening sessions with active self-explanation tasks. This can mean doing Feynmans or doing a quick self-test on the material.

Fixed-Scheduling: The Best Way to Work Hard is to Have a Life

The biggest way to cope with a large workload is to ensure yourself time off. It’s easy to burn yourself out by making the mistake of not working hard during the day and forcing yourself to keep working all night.

That’s why even when I’m feeling pressured, I always end my day at 7pm at the latest, and I always take Saturday off. Those two things are non-negotiable, and they help me keep my sanity.

Cal Newport calls this approach fixed-schedule productivity, and I’ve found it especially helpful when you need the flexibility to pivot and change your to-do list throughout the day, but you don’t want to risk overworking.

I use a hybrid of fixed-schedule’s firm boundaries on my workday and my own task-based time management system weekly/daily goals. I prefer using just weekly/daily goals when my work can easily be divided up into tasks in advance, but I find it good to use both constraints when I might not know what work I’ll need to do (as can often be the case when I’m trying to learn a subject in just a few days).

The key, however, isn’t in which system you use, it’s that you clearly separate your work from your life. I see students falling into the trap of obsessive overwork all the time, not realizing how damaging that is to their overall productivity. Even working 65 hours per week and learning a class at 4x the pace, I make sure my evenings and Saturday are free, no exceptions.

The key to focus isn’t enormous willpower or substance abuse, it’s manipulating your own psychology and motivation circuits to get more work done. Most importantly, it’s about being strategic with your breaks and time off so you maximize your productivity instead of burning out the fuel that sustains you.

Side note: I wrote a book which combines all the tactics I use to stay productive. Normally it goes for full price, but my friends Adam and Karol have put together a huge discount which includes my book and tons of other great resources for mastering your life and business. You can check it out here, but the offer ends in 72 hours.

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It may seem crazy that someone can want to change an element of their life badly, but doesn’t take any action. But people do this all the time: overweight people who don’t exercise, people who hate their jobs but don’t work on an escape plan, failing students that procrastinate right before the final exam.

I think it’s easy to be judgmental of inaction. Explain it away as simply being laziness or weakness. But the truth is probably more basic: self-motivation is really hard to do, especially for tasks you don’t enjoy.

The Enjoyment Barrier

Although a rational reason for exercising, socializing or working should be enough, it usually isn’t. If you loathe exercising or hate your work, motivation can be an immense problem.

The solution most people have is adding more reasons. Sometimes this works, but often it fails. After all, if you already had a good reason to exercise but you’re staying home again, what difference will having a slightly better reason make?

I feel a better strategy is instead of summoning up more willpower, trying to hack the activity in question so it becomes more enjoyable. Instead of driving the change with more force, you use a catalyst.

Focus on Enjoyment Over Efficiency

Kalid Azad writes about using a variant of this strategy when teaching math. We spend so much time thinking about the efficiency of math education, forcing rules of trigonometry and algebra onto students that fewer people ever develop a real love of math.

What if we took the opposite strategy? That the role of math education isn’t just to prepare students, but to encourage a love of math so that they will more eagerly take on new challenges. Who will end up ahead, in the long-term?

What if the goal of exercise was to find something physical you really liked, not to lose weight? The goal of socializing was to find activities you enjoyed, not to fit some mold people expect you to follow?

Feedback Cycles and Positive Reinforcement

One of the first articles I ever wrote here was about the frustration barrier. The idea is that, in most new activities, there’s a period where positive reinforcement is relatively weak, so it can be draining to try to get good.

The flip-side of that is, once you reach a minimum threshold of competence, you start reaping rewards and it becomes easier to put more effort in. You can start devoting time to making your activities less enjoyable and more efficient, because you’re already have a wealth of positive feedback driving you forward.

Enjoyment First, Efficiency Second

As a rule of thumb, I would say the first priority should be to enjoy an activity. This applies whenever you find yourself procrastinating constantly or finding that you’re putting off a goal for months. After you don’t have a problem showing up, every day, the goal should be efficiency, which reaps greater rewards.

My advice to new bloggers would be, start by writing whatever you enjoy writing about most. Don’t worry about finesse or mastering the craft, just get out there and write what you’re passionate about. After a hundred or so articles, you might want to spend more time carefully examining how you can improve.

The consequence of this rule is that the advice you should be following will differ depending on where you are along the frustration barrier. In the beginning, choose fun, lower-efficiency strategies. Later on, choose intense deliberate practice tactics for mastery.

Finding Enjoyment

How to actually make a task more enjoyable is another huge topic, and I’m not sure it has a solution in every case. There’s definitely tasks I can, at most, begrudgingly accept, not fall in love with.

However, most tasks are susceptible at some point to being rearranged to make them more enjoyable. Listening to music while working tends to lower my efficiency, but increase my enjoyment. Going to the gym with friends can be a distraction if you’re on an intense schedule, but also more fun.

Thoughts and Counterarguments

Of course, the opposite theory—that quickly getting results is the best way to get the feedback cycle into the positive phase, is also popular. Tim Ferriss argued from his latest book that a less-fun but high-results dieting approach is better than one which is easy, but may not give the tangible benefits that encourage you to continue.

What do you think? Should your initial action plans focus on what is going to be the most effective strategy, or the one you’ll enjoy most? If it depends, what causes you to make that distinction?

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The matching paradigm here strikes me as too optimistically egalitarian. It somehow assumes that all jobs are equally desirable, but that they fit with different people. That’s ridiculous—some jobs are clearly more desirable than others. Otherwise, why wouldn’t we talk about people having a “passion” for stoop labor or janitorial work?

Another place I often see the “match” paradigm is in relationships. We talk about soulmates, connections and finding the right chemistry. While that’s also partially true, not all people are equally attractive. All else being equal, I’d rather date the volunteering, med student who looks like a model, and I’m guessing you would too.

It’s considered taboo to suggest that some people are simply better than others as relationship candidates. But just because it’s unfair, it doesn’t make it untrue. Yes “match” matters, particularly in a competitive environment, but let’s not kid ourselves that everything and everyone were created equal.

Beyond “Fit”: Jobs in Terms of Navigating Opportunities

Some careers are simply more desirable than others, irrespective of match. I have friends that can live anywhere in the world, work on any project they choose, have ample vacation time, love their work and also have incomes in the high six-figure range. Who wouldn’t want that?

Because of the huge spread of general desirability of jobs (not just the specific match), even though it’s important to find passionate work, it’s even more important to accumulate what Cal Newport calls “career capital” which is a measure of the power you have to gain access to more desirable work.

Earning career capital seems to have two broad components:

1. Ambition and building skill.
2. Navigating opportunities to make your career path harder to replicate.

The first part is fairly obvious—if you have more skill or more ambition, you’ll be more able to gain one of the more desirable jobs out there. This is why parents pressure their kids to get good educations in high-paying fields, because with more career capital, the better chance you have of finding a job you really like.

The problem with raw ambition and work ethic is that there will always be people who can outwork you. I consider myself an ambitious person, but I  know many people who outwork me. Unfortunately this effect is exacerbated as you move up the ladder and basically everyone is already trying their hardest.

That’s where the second part comes in. The people I know who have the best jobs with the least stress often earned their career capital from a series of unusual opportunities. Those opportunities are hard to replicate, so the person manages to build career capital while simultaneously making it extremely hard to compete against them.

Ben Casnocha is a perfect example. He started by taking a junior-high school computer project and turning it into a website. From that opportunity, he started his first company at 15, which led to a book deal a few years later, and finally coauthoring another book with a giant of Silicon Valley in his early twenties.

Hard work, certainly, but not exactly the traditional career path that you’re taught by a guidance counselor.

Benny Lewis has another great story. His background is in engineering, but after spending several years travelling and learning languages, he managed to become a full-time traveler, through freelance engineering translation. From there he further honed his language learning abilities until he was able to launch a business teaching his method to other people.

The power of his career capital here isn’t just the effort he put in. It’s also on the uniqueness of his path that would make it harder for people to replicate his expertise.

(Note: This principle of navigating opportunities to build career capital, comes from Cal Newport’s book. Don’t let the title put you off, it’s invaluable advice for everyone)

How to Navigate Opportunities to Build Success

Taking Cal’s insights about career capital in mind, I’ve begun to follow a manta when it comes to making decisions about my life, which is:

“Do what others won’t or can’t do.”

Doing What Others Won’t Do

This is the first part about ambition and hard work. If you want things in life (and this applies to way more than just careers) you need to be willing to work harder than the average person.

An example of this is in my own career as a blogger. Most bloggers aren’t willing to put in at least 12 months of continuous posting. If you’re willing to that, you immediately increase your odds of success.

I have the same attitude with my MIT Challenge. Sure having the right learning and productivity hacks helps. But I’m also willing to wake up early every morning and put in the effort, every single day. There’s less “me too” competition since I know most people aren’t willing to do that.

Doing What Others Can’t Do

The other part is about taking advantage of the opportunities that are exclusive to you. When you do this, you form a career path that is extremely hard to replicate, and as a result, making it easier to secure larger amounts of career capital for the same amount of effort.

Taking on this MIT Challenge was a decision based on that mantra. Anybody can learn from MIT’s open courseware, but not everyone has a business based on learning or a platform to benefit from the attention. I’m in an unusual, if not unique, position to take advantage of that opportunity.

I could have attempted a similar challenge with my fitness, travel or dating, but I’m not really in a unique position to do anything with those. There are already way better fitness and travel experts who can take advantage of that.

How Do You Find Unique Opportunities?

This sounds great in theory, you might be saying, but how do I find opportunities that I have exclusive access to?

My feeling is that you can’t know where opportunities are going to come from in advance. If you can plan them out easily, then they wouldn’t be the type of opportunities that are hard to follow. By definition, the opportunities have to come somewhat as a surprise, otherwise everyone would be competing for them.

The key to finding those random opportunities seems to be just exposing yourself to a lot of randomness. Meet tons of people, take on unusual projects, learn interesting subjects and skills.

The effect of opportunities compound, so the more unusual opportunities you take on, the more unique your position is in the career landscape. That allows you to further negotiate getting on even more unusual opportunities.

When I wrote the last update to my MIT Challenge, I said that I’m taking on the challenge for mostly intrinsic reasons. A lot of people interpreted that as being that I have no real reason for doing anything, and that I’m somehow able to work really hard just on enthusiasm alone.

It would be nice if that were true, but it’s not. Anything that takes work requires at least some effort. My point about intrinsic motivation is simply that the project fits my criteria of “weird, interesting, semi-exclusive opportunities”, and I’m willing to pursue it to completion even though I have no idea what opportunities might arise from it.

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