Last month, Cal Newport and I released a new course, Life of Focus. The course covers three months dedicated to cultivating focus in three areas: work, life and mind. One thing that makes a course like this different is that it centers on month-long challenges. Thus even if you’re already relatively focused, you can use […]

Focus is incredibly important. But often we struggle to turn it on when we need it. The right rituals can help a lot. The human brain is a giant association machine. As neuropsychologist Donald Hebb famously put it, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” Repeated patterns form stronger connections. Thus if you pair a consistent […]

My first set of articles I wrote that got my blog some attention were a series called Habitual Mastery. At the time I had spent a couple years extensively working on my habits through thirty-day trials. The series was an attempt to condense my observations into usable advice. For someone who has never put serious […]

A reader asked me recently whether I thought there was a limit to how much math you could learn, based on your intelligence. As in, if your IQ was too low you’d get stuck at algebra or calculus and be unable to learn any more math. This seems highly unlikely. The way deep subjects like […]