My team and I are gearing up for a new session of Foundations [1], the year-long course that mirrors my recent project [2]. The first cohort just finished a few weeks ago, and it’s been amazing to hear the stories of so many people who made substantial improvements to diverse aspects of their lives.
Before we open registration, I’d like to explain what foundations are and why they matter. While I’ve written about this a lot over the last year, the ideas are scattered across dozens of essays, and I’d like to put them in one place. I also hope this summary will help you decide if you want to join our second session.
What is a Foundation?
A foundation is a universal practice that helps support a good life.
Foundations are universal, which means they matter for (almost) everyone. Whether or not you have any particular talent or interest in them, your foundations shape your life in ways big and small.
In that sense, we can easily contrast foundations with the things that make you unique, like your professional specialty or hobbies you enjoy. Being a good programmer, for instance, is not a foundation. A person doesn’t need to write code to live well. But fitness is a foundation because, whether you’re a jock or not, regular exercise is good for your health and energy levels.
Foundations are practices, which means they’re something you do, not simply something you know or believe. But there is often a gap between our ideals and our behavior. We know we should exercise more, sleep better, read books and maintain our friendships, but we often struggle to be consistent.
Why Work on Foundations?
Foundations cannot be delegated or ignored. This means that, contrary to much self-help advice, it’s your weakest foundations—not your strongest—that determine the quality of your life.
Foundations are not automatic. Problems with our foundations often arise from mismatches between our ancestral environment and modern lives. We didn’t evolve to exercise, because for most of history survival alone provided enough activity. Today, with office jobs and car commutes, we benefit from moving more than modern life asks of us, but we don’t have a corresponding urge to be more active.
Similar stories can be told about other foundations: artificial lighting keeps us awake long past sundown, ultra-processed foods make us overeat, screens distract us, and there was no need for to-do lists or retirement accounts in the Stone Age.
This lack of automaticity means we must deliberately cultivate our foundations. Systems and habits don’t need to be strenuous to be successful, but without proper maintenance they won’t support your life.
All of this is complicated by the fact that while foundations are necessary and must be deliberately cultivated, they’re also usually in the periphery of our lives. It’s only when they conspicuously fail that we tend to notice our foundations, or lack thereof. More often, they wither in the background from neglect, making our lives feel heavier without us always knowing why.
Why Work on Many Foundations in One Year?
Focus is needed to do anything well. And it is required to make improvements in your foundations. While sustaining an exercise routine, managing your money or keeping your work organized aren’t exceptionally difficult, they don’t usually happen unless you make them your priority for at least a little while.
However, the trickiest part about foundations isn’t usually their individual difficulty. Instead, it’s integrating them together into a sustainable whole.
Anyone can get into really good shape if they put exercise above everything else in their life. But the cost of improving your health with this approach is your work, friends or family life.
By working on different foundations in close succession, you get an opportunity not just to resolve conflicts between foundations, but also to create synergies. For instance, many of the students in the first session reported that they were able to improve both their sleep and increase their book reading by combining them into a single habit.
In the end, the goal isn’t to create an ever-expanding list of chores for your life. It’s to integrate habits and behaviors that support your foundations into a lifestyle that checks the boxes without feeling like work.
How Can You Strengthen Your Foundations?
There are, of course, lots of ways you could strengthen your foundations. I certainly don’t have a monopoly on advice here. However, the approach that I took in my own project, and that we’ve used with hundreds of students in the first session, looks like this:
- Start with a keystone habit. Pick a single, well-defined behavior that supports a foundation, and focus on it for at least a month.
- Study from a focused curriculum. Additional knowledge helps with motivation by providing the rationale for both the keystone habit and the foundation itself. Learning more about each foundation also provides support for other actions needed to sustain the practice.
- Find commitment and support. Accountability comes from many places. For me, doing the project publicly allowed me to center it in my life. For students in the first session, the communal aspect of the project united participants together.
In our year-long program, I’ve worked hard to boil down the essence of what I learned through reading 100+ books, experimenting with my own foundations, and coaching hundreds of students to work on their foundations together. I hope you’ll join me for our second session [1].
Before I go, I have a question to ask: Of the twelve foundations I covered in my project (Fitness, Productivity, Money, Food, Reading, Outreach, Sleep, Reflection, Connection, Focus, Organization and Service), which do you think is your strongest, and which do you think is your weakest? Write your response in the comments and let me know!