Most of self-improvement boils down to behavior change. You want to exercise more, eat better, earn more money, learn a new language, stop worrying so much. All of it is a form of changing your behavior. Looking around, there seems to be broadly three ways of changing behavior: Bottom-up Top-down Inside-out I notice that people […]
Genes and Free Will
How important are your genes? If your genes determined most of your life outcomes, would that mean you have more or less control over your life? The answer to the first question, at least with respect to a lot of traits, seems to be fairly important. Researchers using various techniques (such as identical twins separated […]
What’s the Difference Between Learning an Art and a Science?
What’s the difference between learning physics and painting? Well, on the surface, almost everything is different. Physics uses math, painting uses brushstrokes. Physics requires abstract thinking, painting requires concrete perception. But, at a deeper level, learning painting and physics has a lot of similarities. They both involve concepts (force, composition), skills (calculus, color mixing) and […]
How I Became a Full-Time Blogger: Reflections on Ten Years of ScottHYoung.com
Ten years ago I wrote the first entry to this blog. Since then, it’s gone from zero to hundreds of thousands of monthly readers, four books, three courses and over a thousand articles. It’s also been my full-time occupation for the last five of those ten years. Becoming a full-time blogger was little more than […]