Scott H Young

Over the last year, I’ve read more than 100 books. Moreover, I’ve put a lot of what I’ve learned from my reading into practice in the form of new habits. While I’ve been sharing the specifics of what I’ve learned in the monthly updates to my Foundations project, today I’d like to talk generally about the process of creating a structured reading project that results in changes to your life—not just a stack of books on your nightstand.

First, some notes on the relationship between reading and taking action:

1. No, reading books is not somehow “bad” for self-improvement.

A dangerous meme in the self-improvement space is that the typical person spends too much time “learning.” Somehow, the specious argument goes, the average person is reading too many books, and this is what is preventing action.

This is ridiculous. The average person reads shockingly little, and now reads even less than they used to.

Done properly, reading provides a solid foundation for knowledge in a domain. That knowledge ensures action is pointed in the right direction.

2. Action should take place alongside reading, not afterward.

While reading is good, not harmful, it can get in the way if you require yourself to “finish” your reading before you take action.

In general, the only time reading should be completed before taking any action is in cases where the action is relatively easy, but the cost of a wrong decision is high. So buying a house, choosing whether to quit your job, or having kids are all choices where initiating the action isn’t the problem—it’s making a wise decision.

However, for most areas of life, mistakes tend to be reversible. Thus, it’s far better to begin a project with a bad strategy and modify it based on your reading than to wait until you’ve formalized the “perfect” strategy to take action.¹

Reading without action is impotent. Action without reading is ignorant. You need both.

Creating a One-Month Knowledge Sprint

The basic framework I’d like to suggest is the one I used for my Foundations project: pick a defined area of improvement, and make a focused effort at improving your knowledge and behavior over one month.

Why one month?

People tend to drastically overestimate their willingness to stick to long projects. Year-long projects sound cool, but few people have the stamina to reach the end of them.

A month, in contrast, is enough time to make substantial progress while being short enough to avoid some common pitfalls. Assuming you’re dedicated, you should be able to read one to five good books on a topic and cultivate new habits, systems or skills.

If it turns out one month is insufficient, you can follow up your month-long sprint with a second (or third, or fourth) one-month sprint. The one-month sprint imposes useful design constraints, but not artificial restrictions, for nearly any project you might care about.

I break down the process of conducting a month-long sprint into four parts:

• Choose a theme.
• Take action.
• Get books.
• Adjust based on feedback.

Step One: Choose a Theme

First, you need to choose a theme you’d like to work on. This could be something personal (such as improving your health, career, relationships or hobbies), or it could be related to acquiring a skill or field of knowledge (such as French, history or using AI in your job).

Scope matters too. If you pick something too general, your reading will be diffuse, and getting a solid answer as to the right actions to take will require reading more books. If you pick something too specific, you risk allowing your preconceptions to distort the project, and may end up focusing on something that’s not relevant to your broader goals.

For example: the theme “better health” may be overly broad; there are many different relevant actions that would be difficult to fit into one month. On the other hand, “apply keto-specific dietary strategies to my running performance” is probably too specific—it takes for granted the efficacy of the strategy, and thus, makes it hard for you to learn something that might change your mind. Here, a better project might be “improving health through fitness.”

Step Two: Take Action

I like to invert the normal “read first, do later” approach that is commonly used in school-based learning. An action-first approach is how we’ve learned to structure our courses, as students usually find it more effective for most areas of self-improvement.

The reason is simple: virtually no one is a blank slate. You already have some general ideas about how you would go about improving within a given theme. So get started. What you read will then change your direction rather than provide the entire road map.

This is clearest with areas where you already have enough knowledge to get started. You probably already know enough about eating better to improve your diet without doing extensive research in nutrition. This doesn’t mean reading the nutrition books isn’t valuable—a lot of what you believe may be wrong!—but if the average person simply took actions they thought were useful, it would probably still be a positive change.

What about areas where you know nothing? Perhaps you want to learn a foreign language, programming or how to start a business, and you don’t know anything about it at all. In those cases, I suggest finding a workbook or practical guide as your first book and using it as your starting point—read while doing the exercises.

Step Three: Get Books

After you’ve started doing something in the domain you’d like to improve, it’s a good idea to pair that naive action with intensive study. This allows you to pivot toward something better if it turns out your initial plan was misguided. Even if your approach is basically solid, you can use what you learn to reinforce your commitment and fine-tune the details.

You should read books in this order:

1. Textbooks.
2. Credible popular books based on expert consensus (not polemics).
3. Interesting books that may not be consensus opinions.

1. Textbooks

Textbooks should be your first choice for understanding a domain. I know, I know, nobody likes this advice, but I’m going to repeat it anyways.

Textbooks have many great properties. They’re aimed at learners (unlike academic monographs or papers), so you can usually read them even with minimal background knowledge. They are comprehensive, giving a full picture of a field. They usually present the expert consensus relatively well, with less bias than many popular sources.

Textbooks are also expensive. Get them from the library if you can, otherwise I generally rely on used copies of older editions which can often be picked up cheaply. Especially if the topic is big, you can usually find one or two that are modestly priced on Amazon.

Textbooks take longer to read than most books. That’s okay. If you only have time to read one textbook in the month, you’ll still probably end up ahead.

The only exception to this rule is non-academic subjects where there isn’t a good textbook. This is rarer than you’d think. In my recent 12-month Foundations project, for instance, Productivity and Organization were two months where the relevant academic research was too tangential to my goals to be useful, so I relied on self-help sources instead. But in Fitness, Money, Food, Reflection, Connection and Sleep, I started with textbooks, and in the rest I relied on academic books to ground my knowledge.

2. Credible Books Outlining Expert Consensus

If textbooks are unavailable for your topic, or you’ve already grabbed one and want to expand your reading list, the next books you read should be credible popular books that summarize a consensus opinion.

This can be hard to judge from the outside. Many books wear their defiance of expert consensus on their sleeve, so it’s easy to tell they represent a non-mainstream viewpoint. But given that popular readers often want what is “new” rather than what is “known” (even if they’re ignorant of both), even mainstream books often position themselves as heralds of a new way of thinking.

Credentials and prestigious academic affiliations are supposed to be barometers of expert consensus, but I find them fairly unreliable in practice. Many quacks have letters after their name, and plenty of people who attended Harvard have decidedly non-mainstream views. Conversely, there are smart, careful writers who lack credentials.

For better or worse the “style” of a book is often a better signal about its conformity to expert consensus. If it’s written in a hyperbolic tone, has nigh-unbelievable findings, or wraps explanations for dissent around dark conspiracies, that’s often a bad sign. (Although, there are exceptions to this too.)

One option for pre-vetting books I’ve recently been relying on is asking ChatGPT for the main arguments made in a book, and whether these are largely aligned with a mainstream perspective. It’s imperfect, of course, but this can be considered with other pieces of information about a book (pedigree, style, third-party reviews) that make it less likely you’ll go astray.

3. Interesting Books

The purpose of the first two steps isn’t to limit yourself to the mainstream, academic consensus for all fields. While I do believe you should just trust the experts for most things, I know a lot of people who are comfortable taking bolder bets with their knowledge base.

Instead, the purpose of reading textbooks and consensus-representing popular books is to give you a sense of what experts, as a whole, believe on the topic. This should be your prior belief in any field, even if you later choose to reject it.

In contrast, if you start with interesting, heterodox thinkers, you may end up down a rabbit hole of nonsense that’s difficult to recover from.

I don’t say this to be a condescending, finger-wagging “misinformation” type that seems to imagine everyone else is gullible and needs guardrails on their thinking.² Instead, I say this as someone who has, time and again, accidentally gone down those rabbit holes of nonsense, only belatedly correcting my misconceptions after much hard work (and embarrassment).

Interesting books are, well, interesting. It’s tempting to read them first. However, if the interesting book you happen to pick up is decidedly against what more sober analysts think is true, you may end up worse off than if you hadn’t read anything at all.³

Step Four: Adjust Based on Feedback

The fourth step in the one-month knowledge sprint is to adjust what you’re doing in light of what you’re reading in the books.

Sometimes, this results in minor adjustments that don’t fundamentally alter your plan.

When I did my research for Fitness, for instance, I was enamored with the idea of daily exercise. I still think it’s a good approach for habit building, but it was through doing research that I realized daily exercise can quickly become unsustainable if you go too hard too fast. This lead me to modify my approach to incorporate “placeholder” activities like a walk or light stretching that helped keep the habit in place, but gave me time to adapt to the new routine.

In other cases, learning more about a topic makes you realize your previous approach was misguided.

When learning about healthy eating, for instance, my original plan was to temporarily eliminate junk food—phasing it back in after a month or so. I now think this approach is unhelpful. Junk food is hard to define. Instead, what really matters is the overall eating pattern—so positive goals like making half of your plate fruits and vegetables, or half of the carbohydrates you eat coming from whole grains, are probably more useful.

Similarly, when I was doing research on sleep, it became apparent that it was better to set a fixed wind-down time for the night rather than a fixed bedtime. Trying to sleep before you’ve built up enough sleep pressure can be counterproductive, and insomnia is often a problem of trying too hard to sleep well (rather than trying too little).

The proper attitude to take during your one-month sprint is one of experimentation and trying things out. It’s better to think things like “I wonder what would happen if I tried…” rather than “I must stick to this.” Flexibility and a willingness to change approach midway are hallmarks of a successful sprint, not a failure of discipline.

What Would You Like to Improve?

What is something you’ve always wanted to learn or improve in your own life? It could be something related to personal or professional development, a hobby, sport or an area of interest. 

In the comments section below the post, write out what your one-month knowledge sprint for this subject would look like. Be sure to include the theme, what actions you’d take (to start), and books you might read (or look for, if you’re not sure yet).