You’re supposed to write an essay, but you procrastinate. The treadmill is collecting dust in your basement. You want to learn a language, start a business or change careers, but those ideas go nowhere. Inaction is something we’ve all experienced. Inaction, more than anything else, is the cause of our failures and our miseries. If […]

A few years ago, when I was planning on writing Ultralearning, a couple well-meaning friends told me not to do it. “People don’t care about learning,” they told me. Having reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, I’m glad they were wrong. Not merely for my own career as a writer, but because given how […]

Could productivity be a bad thing? I had a podcast interview about Ultralearning recently where the host asked if being productive might be overrated. Working all the time, striving for ever-more efficiency, aggressive efforts to get more done, maybe chasing productivity isn’t the answer? I couldn’t disagree more. Productivity features a lot in my writing […]

Few things are as unpleasant as anxiety. With the explosion of interest in mindfulness meditation and books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, I’m hardly alone in wanting to worry less. Recently, I read Anxious by NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. LeDoux is an expert on a lot of the neural processes behind […]