Articles

Grammarly
GRAMMAR

What Are Articles?

Articles are words that define a noun as specific or unspecific. Consider the following
examples:

After the long day, the cup of tea tasted particularly good.

By using the article the, we’ve shown that it was one specific day that was long and
one specific cup of tea that tasted good.
After a long day, a cup of tea tastes particularly good.

By using the article a, we’ve created a general statement, implying that any cup of tea
would taste good after any long day.
 English has two types of articles:
definite and indefinite. Let’s discuss them now in more detail.

The Definite Article

The definite article is the word the. It limits the meaning of a noun to one particular
thing. For example, your friend might ask, “Are you going to the party this
weekend?” The definite article tells you that your friend is referring to a specific party
that both of you know about. The definite article can be used with singular, plural, or
uncountable nouns. Below are some examples of the definite article the used in
context:

Please give me the hammer.

Please give me the red hammer; the blue one is too small.

Please give me the nail.

Please give me the large nail; it’s the only one strong enough to hold this painting.
Please give me the hammer and the nail.

The Indefinite Article

The indefinite article takes two forms. It’s the word a when it precedes a word that
begins with a consonant. It’s the word an when it precedes a word that begins with a
vowel. The indefinite article indicates that a noun refers to a general idea rather than a
particular thing. For example, you might ask your friend, “Should I bring a gift to the
party?” Your friend will understand that you are not asking about a specific type of
gift or a specific item. “I am going to bring an apple pie,” your friend tells you. Again,
the indefinite article indicates that she is not talking about a specific apple pie. Your
friend probably doesn’t even have any pie yet. The indefinite article only appears with
singular nouns. Consider the following examples of indefinite articles used in context:

Please hand me a book; any book will do.

Please hand me an autobiography; any autobiography will do.

Exceptions: Choosing A or An

There are a few exceptions to the general rule of using a before words that start with
consonants and an before words that begin with vowels. The first letter of the
word honor, for example, is a consonant, but it’s unpronounced. In spite of its
spelling, the word honor begins with a vowel sound. Therefore, we use an. Consider
the example sentence below for an illustration of this concept.

My mother is a honest woman.

My mother is an honest woman.

Similarly, when the first letter of a word is a vowel but is pronounced with a
consonant sound, use a, as in the sample sentence below:

She is an United States senator.

She is a United States senator.

This holds true with acronyms and initialisms, too: an LCD display, a UK-based
company, an HR department, a URL.

Article Before an Adjective

Sometimes an article modifies a noun that is also modified by an adjective. The usual
word order is article + adjective + noun. If the article is indefinite,
choose a or an based on the word that immediately follows it. Consider the following
examples for reference:

Eliza will bring a small gift to Sophie’s party.

I heard an interesting story yesterday.

Indefinite Articles with Uncountable Nouns

Uncountable nouns are nouns that are either difficult or impossible to count.
Uncountable nouns include intangible things (e.g., information, air), liquids (e.g.,
milk, wine), and things that are too large or numerous to count (e.g., equipment, sand,
wood). Because these things can’t be counted, you should never use a or anwith
them—remember, the indefinite article is only for singular nouns. Uncountable nouns
can be modified by words like some, however. Consider the examples below for
reference:
Please give me a water.

Water is an uncountable noun and should not be used with the indefinite article.

Please give me some water.

However, if you describe the water in terms of countable units (like bottles), you can
use the indefinite article.

Please give me a bottle of water.

Please give me an ice.

Please give me an ice cube.

Please give me some ice .

Note that depending on the context, some nouns can be countable or uncountable
(e.g., hair, noise, time):

We need a light in this room.

We need some light in this room.

Using Articles with Pronouns

Possessive pronouns can help identify whether you’re talking about specific or
nonspecific items. As we’ve seen, articles also indicate specificity. But if you use both
a possessive pronoun and an article at the same time, readers will become confused.
Possessive pronouns are words like his, my, our, its, her, and their. Articles should not
be used with pronouns. Consider the examples below.

Why are you reading the my book?

The and my should not be used together since they are both meant to modify the same
noun. Instead, you should use one or the other, depending on the intended meaning:
Why are you reading the book?

Why are you reading my book?

Omission of Articles

Occasionally, articles are omitted altogether before certain nouns. In these cases, the
article is implied but not actually present. This implied article is sometimes called a
“zero article.” Often, the article is omitted before nouns that refer to abstract ideas.
Look at the following examples:

Let’s go out for a dinner tonight.

Let’s go out for dinner tonight.

The creativity is a valuable quality in children.

Creativity is a valuable quality in children.

Many languages and nationalities are not preceded by an article. Consider the
example below:

I studied the French in high school for four years.

I studied French in high school for four years.

Sports and academic subjects do not require articles. See the sentences below for
reference:

I like to play the baseball.

I like to play baseball .

My sister was always good at the math .

My sister was always good at math .

My 2017 Annual Review

by James Clear | Annual Review

We have officially closed the door on 2017, which means it's time to share my Annual
Review with you. This will mark the fifth year in a row I have conducted my Annual
Review, and I've found the process useful every time.

As always, this Annual Review will answer three questions.

1. What went well this year?

2. What didn’t go so well this year?

3. What did I learn?

If you'd like to spend some time reflecting on your year, you're welcome to use a similar
format for your own Annual Review.

1. What went well this year?

Okay, here's where I succeeded this year.

Book writing. I wrote a book! (Well, mostly.) In last year's review, I shared that my
biggest failure during 2016 was not finishing my book. Naturally, completing the
manuscript became my primary area of focus for 2017.

I finished the first draft of the manuscript in November, and we're working on edits
now. There are still many improvements to make and, truthfully, a few months of work
left, but it feels really good to see literally years of work all coming together.

Writing this book has been the most challenging professional project of my young
career. My brain seems to be good at doing things on shorter time scales (e.g. going to
the gym each day, writing weekly articles), but maintaining focus on the same project
month after month is not natural for me. I've learned a lot about my strengths and
weaknesses during the process, and I'll be sharing more about that once it's all said and
done.

Systems building. Because I spent nearly all of my time writing the book, I had
virtually no time to work on the other aspects of my business, which, you can imagine,
also happen to be fairly important. Thankfully, my business still had a great year
because, with the help of my assistant Lyndsey, we have built a variety of systems that
enable the business to run without constant attention from me. These include systems
for selling The Habits Academy, sending out email newsletters, driving new traffic, and
more.

As a result, we had a great year. Here are some quick stats…

 216,415 new email subscribers this year

 327,105 total email subscribers as of December 31, 2017

 9,333,641 unique visitors this year

 26,044,115 unique visitors since launching on November 12, 2012

I work on this business every day, but some of these numbers still surprise me. Twenty-
six million people have read my writing in the last five years. That seems impossible. Of
course, before I get too self-congratulatory, I should point out that I have friends who
get more visitors in one month than I got all last year, so there is still plenty of room for
improvement. But still. I never thought my ideas would have an audience like this. It's
crazy.

Weightlifting. Exercise is a core part of my life. Regular readers will know that I have
a background as a college athlete and that I've been training regularly in the gym for
almost a decade now, but this past year was my most consistent year yet.

In 2017, I exercised 188 times for an average of 15.7 workouts per month. My typical
training session lasts about 45 minutes to 1 hour. My focus remains on building
strength, and every training session includes lifts like the squat, bench press, deadlift,
and clean and jerk. I've written about my process for recording my workoutspreviously
and I'm still following that format.

Workouts per month in 2017:

 January – 19

 February – 19

 March – 19

 April – 16

 May – 18

 June – 9

 July – 14

 August – 15

 September – 17

 October – 15

 November – 17

 December – 10

My best lifts of the year were:

 Back Squat – 425 lbs (192 kg) for 1 rep

 Bench Press – 305 lbs (138 kg) for 1 rep

 Deadlift – 495 lbs (224.5 kg) for 1 rep

The squat and bench press numbers are lifetime PRs for me, which feels great to say. At
my strongest point in 2017, I hit 390×5 on squat, which might be more impressive than
425×1. I'm getting close to a benchmark I've always had in the back of my mind: the
elusive 300-400-500 club for bench, squat, and deadlift. Technically, I'm already a
member (I deadlifted 501 in 2016), but I always thought it would be cool to do all three
in one workout. Maybe in 2018.
Twitter. For years, I basically ignored social media and focused only on writing great
content and sharing it with my email newsletter. In 2017, I finally spent a little more
time on social media. In particular, I focused on Twitter and started posting
tweetstorms—a thread of tweets on a related topic. A few of my favorites are
on comparison and success, inversion and better thinking, entropy and disorder, first
principles thinking, and deliberate practice.

2. What didn’t go so well this year?

Alright, where did I slip up this year?

Blog writing. Because I spent so much time working on my book, I had very little time
left over to write new articles. I wrote 10 new articles this year, which is my lowest total
since launching JamesClear.com in 2012. What I missed most was the feedback from
readers. I thrive on getting interaction with my ideas and hearing about what people
liked and didn't like. I rarely got that while working on the book, and I'm looking
forward to sharing many new articles with readers in 2018 once the manuscript is
complete.

International travel. This one shocked me. For the first time in years, I didn't visit a
new country. I was so heads-down, fully focused on writing the book that I didn't even
realize this until I sat down to write this review.

Honestly, it makes me sad to think that I let an entire year go by without making this a
priority. Travel, and specifically international travel, has become a big part of my life in
the past decade, and it's one of the primary ways I have learned about other cultures and
perspectives. Thankfully, I already have multiple international trips scheduled for 2018.

I did manage to see more of the United States this year. My travel highlights for 2017
include:

 1 country: United States.

  14 states (3 new): Alaska, Arizona (2x), Colorado, Idaho, Illinois (2x), Minnesota, Missouri,
New York (2x), North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee (2x), Texas (2x), Washington.

I also updated my Ultralight Travel Guide for the third year in a row.

Team building. This was my first full year as a “manager,” and I've still got a lot to
learn. One thing I'm struggling with is finding the right balance between being the
creator and being the manager. It's hard for me to be a good manager and visionary for
the team when I need to hole up for a few months and write 75,000 words. This is
something I'll need to be better about in 2018.

Another challenge is a structural one: we have a remote team, which provides incredible
flexibility, but can also feel lonely because each person is working on their own. I'd love
to find ways for us to spend more time face-to-face.

3. What did I learn this year?

I learned a lot in 2017. Here are some of the main takeaways.

Recovery is non-negotiable. From January to April, I ramped up my training and

put in a lot of volume at the gym. As you might expect, this paid off with bigger lifts.
However, eventually, the elevated pace caught up with me. From June to September, I
had to dial everything back due to inflammation (and some travel). As a result, all of my
biggest lifts happened in the first half of the year. I peaked, but I didn't maintain it.

Something similar happened with book writing. I would pour my mental energy into a
week-long burst of writing—and then crash for a few days before starting the cycle again.
This lesson applies to most areas of life. Recovery is non-negotiable. The bill always
comes due. Push yourself hard and you'll have to take it easy at some point.

Recovery is non-negotiable. The bill always comes due. Push yourself

hard and you'll have to take it easy at some point.
It will never feel like the right time to travel. I didn't travel internationally in
2017 because it never felt like a good time to do it. I always felt guilty doing anything
except working on the book, and I kept pushing off anything fun because there was
always more work to do. When something is important, but not urgent, it will never feel
like the right time to do it. You just have to schedule it, which is why I already have
multiple international trips booked for 2018.

When choosing who to work with, take the extra time and find the best
people. This is true for hiring. This is true for partnerships. This is true for who you
select as mentors, coaches, and peers. Despite my mistakes—and there were many of
them in the last year—I made three very wise choices: I hired a great employee. I signed
with a great agent. And I signed with a great publisher.

These three people have a direct impact on my work. Because they are highly talented,
my life and work continued to improve despite my faults. If these three people (or even
one of them) was not an A-player, then my business and book would have fallen off the
rails this year. With the right people, what should be a problem becomes easy. With the
wrong people, what should be easy becomes a problem.

With the right people, what should be a problem becomes easy. With the
wrong people, what should be easy becomes a proble m.

Choose the version of a habit that best suits you, not the one that is most
popular. There are many ways to perform the same task. If you want to be a writer,
then you have a lot of options. On the short end, you could write tweetstorms that are a
few hundred words or blog posts that are a few thousand words. On the long-end, you
could write feature pieces for magazines that are 10,000 words or you could write books
that are 60,000 words. Each one is a form of writing and any of them can be valuable.

This is true for any habit. Don't choose the form of exercise or meditation or gratitude or
whatever that the world says you should do. Choose the one that's right for you.
Good ideas take longer than you think. I wanted so badly to finish this book faster
than I did. I would work and work and work, and yet, it still wouldn't be done. Of the
many challenges associated with long-term creative projects, perhaps the most difficult
one is that you must find a way to remain motivated and committed to your project
without getting positive feedback on most days. Every morning, you have to find the
motivation to put in another day of work even though you know you won't be finished
when night falls. Patience is among the most valuable creative traits.

That's all I've got for this year's Annual Review. As always, thanks for reading. I can't
wait to share my best work with you in 2018.
First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power
of Thinking for Yourself

by James Clear | Mental Models

First principles thinking, which is sometimes called reasoning from first principles, is
one of the most effective strategies you can employ for breaking down complicated
problems and generating original solutions. It also might be the single best approach to
learn how to think for yourself.

The first principles approach has been used by many great thinkers including inventor
Johannes Gutenberg, military strategist John Boyd, and the ancient philosopher
Aristotle, but no one embodies the philosophy of first principles thinking more
effectively than entrepreneur Elon Musk.

In 2002, Musk began his quest to send the first rocket to Mars—an idea that would
eventually become the aerospace company SpaceX.

He ran into a major challenge right off the bat. After visiting a number of aerospace
manufacturers around the world, Musk discovered the cost of purchasing a rocket was
astronomical—up to $65 million. Given the high price, he began to rethink the problem.
“I tend to approach things from a physics framework,” Musk said in an interview.
“Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said,
okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade
aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is
the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials
cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”
Instead of buying a finished rocket for tens of millions, Musk decided to create his own
company, purchase the raw materials for cheap, and build the rockets himself. SpaceX
was born.
Within a few years, SpaceX had cut the price of launching a rocket by nearly 10x while
still making a profit. Musk used first principles thinking to break the situation down to
the fundamentals, bypass the high prices of the aerospace industry, and create a more
effective solution.
First principles thinking is the act of boiling a process down to the fundamental parts
that you know are true and building up from there. Let's discuss how you can utilize first
principles thinking in your life and work.

Defining First Principles Thinking

A first principle is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further. Over two
thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a
thing is known.”
First principles thinking is a fancy way of saying “think like a scientist.” Scientists don’t
assume anything. They start with questions like, What are we absolutely sure is true?
What has been proven?

In theory, first principles thinking requires you to dig deeper and deeper until you are
left with only the foundational truths of a situation. Rene Descartes, the French
philosopher and scientist, embraced this approach with a method now called Cartesian
Doubt in which he would “systematically doubt everything he could possibly doubt until
he was left with what he saw as purely indubitable truths.”
In practice, you don't have to simplify every problem down to the atomic level to get the
benefits of first principles thinking. You just need to go one or two levels deeper than
most people. Different solutions present themselves at different layers of abstraction.
John Boyd, the famous fighter pilot and military strategist, created the following
thought experiment which showcases how to use first principles thinking in a practical
way.
Imagine you have three things:

 A motorboat with a skier behind it

  A military tank

 A bicycle

Now, let's break these items down into their constituent parts:

 Motorboat: motor, the hull of a boat, and a pair of skis.

 Tank: metal treads, steel armor plates, and a gun.

 Bicycle: handlebars, wheels, gears, and a seat.

What can you create from these individual parts? One option is to make a snowmobile
by combining the handlebars and seat from the bike, the metal treads from the tank, and
the motor and skis from the boat.

This is the process of first principles thinking in a nutshell. It is a cycle of breaking a

situation down into the core pieces and then putting them all back together in a more
effective way. Deconstruct then reconstruct.

How First Principles Drive Innovation

The snowmobile example also highlights another hallmark of first principles thinking,
which is the combination of ideas from seemingly unrelated fields. A tank and a bicycle
appear to have nothing in common, but pieces of a tank and a bicycle can be combined
to develop innovations like a snowmobile.

Many of the most groundbreaking ideas in history have been a result of boiling things
down to the first principles and then substituting a more effective solution for one of the
key parts.

For instance, Johannes Gutenberg combined the technology of a screw press—a device
used for making wine—with movable type, paper, and ink to create the printing press.
Movable type had been used for centuries, but Gutenberg was the first person to
consider the constituent parts of the process and adapt technology from an entirely
different field to make printing far more efficient. The result was a world-changing
innovation and the widespread distribution of information for the first time in history.
The best solution is not where everyone is already looking.

First principles thinking helps you to cobble together information from different
disciplines to create new ideas and innovations. You start by getting to the facts. Once
you have a foundation of facts, you can make a plan to improve each little piece. This
process naturally leads to exploring widely for better substitutes.

The Challenge of Reasoning From First Principles

First principles thinking can be easy to describe, but quite difficult to practice. One of
the primary obstacles to first principles thinking is our tendency to optimize formrather
than function. The story of the suitcase provides a perfect example.

In ancient Rome, soldiers used leather messenger bags and satchels to carry food while
riding across the countryside. At the same time, the Romans had many vehicles with
wheels like chariots, carriages, and wagons. And yet, for thousands of years, nobody
thought to combine the bag and the wheel. The first rolling suitcase wasn’t invented
until 1970 when Bernard Sadow was hauling his luggage through an airport and saw a
worker rolling a heavy machine on a wheeled skid.
Throughout the 1800s and 1900s, leather bags were specialized for particular uses—
backpacks for school, rucksacks for hiking, suitcases for travel. Zippers were added to
bags in 1938. Nylon backpacks were first sold in 1967. Despite these improvements, the
form of the bag remained largely the same. Innovators spent all of their time making
slight iterations on the same theme.
What looks like innovation is often an iteration of previous forms rather than an
improvement of the core function. While everyone else was focused on how to build a
better bag (form), Sadow considered how to store and move things more efficiently
(function).
How to Think for Yourself
The human tendency for imitation is a common roadblock to first principles thinking.
When most people envision the future, they project the current form forward rather
than projecting the function forward and abandoning the form.

For instance, when criticizing technological progress some people ask, “Where are the
flying cars?”

Here's the thing: We have flying cars. They're called airplanes. People who ask this
question are so focused on form (a flying object that looks like a car) that they overlook
the function (transportation by flight). This is what Elon Musk is referring to when he
says that people often “live life by analogy.”
Be wary of the ideas you inherit. Old conventions and previous forms are often accepted
without question and, once accepted, they set a boundary around creativity.
This difference is one of the key distinctions between continuous improvement and first
principles thinking. Continuous improvement tends to occur within the boundary set by
the original vision. By comparison, first principles thinking requires you to abandon
your allegiance to previous forms and put the function front and center. What are you
trying to accomplish? What is the functional outcome you are looking to achieve?

Optimize the function. Ignore the form. This is how you learn to think for yourself.

The Power of First Principles

Ironically, perhaps the best way to develop cutting-edge ideas is to start by breaking
things down to the fundamentals. Even if you aren't trying to develop innovative ideas,
understanding the first principles of your field is a smart use of your time. Without
a firm grasp of the basics, there is little chance of mastering the details that make the
difference at elite levels of competition.

Every innovation, including the most groundbreaking ones, requires a long period of
iteration and improvement. The company at the beginning of this article, SpaceX, ran
many simulations, made thousands of adjustments, and required multiple trials before
they figured out how to build an affordable and reusable rocket.

First principles thinking does not remove the need for continuous improvement, but it
does alter the direction of improvement. Without reasoning by first principles, you
spend your time making small improvements to a bicycle rather than a snowmobile.
First principles thinking sets you on a different trajectory.

If you want to enhance an existing process or belief, continuous improvement is a great

option. If you want to learn how to think for yourself, reasoning from first principles is
one of the best ways to do it.
Mental Models: How to Train Your Brain
to Think in New Ways

by James Clear | Mental Models

You can train your brain to think better. One of the best ways to do this is to expand
the set of mental models you use to think. Let me explain what I mean by sharing a story
about a world-class thinker.

I first discovered what a mental model was and how useful the right one could be while I
was reading a story about Richard Feynman, the famous physicist. Feynman received
his undergraduate degree from MIT and his Ph.D. from Princeton. During that time, he
developed a reputation for waltzing into the math department and solving problems that
the brilliant Ph.D. students couldn’t solve.

When people asked how he did it, Feynman claimed that his secret weapon was not his
intelligence, but rather a strategy he learned in high school. According to Feynman, his
high school physics teacher asked him to stay after class one day and gave him a
challenge.

“Feynman,” the teacher said, “you talk too much and you make too much noise. I know
why. You’re bored. So I’m going to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the
corner, and study this book, and when you know everything that’s in this book, you can
talk again.”
So each day, Feynman would hide in the back of the classroom and study the book—
Advanced Calculus by Woods—while the rest of the class continued with their regular
lessons. And it was while studying this old calculus textbook that Feynman began to
develop his own set of mental models.

“That book showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign,” Feynman
wrote. “It turns out that’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t emphasize
it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and
again. So because I was self-taught using that book, I had peculiar methods of doing
integrals.”

“The result was, when the guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a certain integral,
it was because they couldn’t do it with the standard methods they had learned in school.
If it was a contour integration, they would have found it; if it was a simple series
expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under
the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals,
only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all
their tools on it before giving the problem to me.”
Every Ph.D. student at Princeton and MIT is brilliant. What separated Feynman from
his peers wasn't necessarily raw intelligence. It was the way he saw the problem. He had
a broader set of mental models.
What is a Mental Model?
A mental model is an explanation of how something works. It is a concept, framework,
or worldview that you carry around in your mind to help you interpret the world and
understand the relationship between things. Mental models are deeply held beliefs
about how the world works.

For example, supply and demand is a mental model that helps you understand how the
economy works. Game theory is a mental model that helps you understand how
relationships and trust work. Entropy is a mental model that helps you understand how
disorder and decay work.

Mental models guide your perception and behavior. They are the thinking tools that you
use to understand life, make decisions, and solve problems. Learning a new mental
model gives you a new way to see the world—like Richard Feynman learning a new math
technique.

Mental models are imperfect, but useful. There is no single mental model from physics
or engineering, for example, that provides a flawless explanation of the entire universe,
but the best mental models from those disciplines have allowed us to build bridges and
roads, develop new technologies, and even travel to outer space. As historian Yuval
Noah Harari puts it, “Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100 percent correct.
Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility.”

The best mental models are the ideas with the most utility. They are broadly useful in
daily life. Understanding these concepts will help you make wiser choices and take
better actions. This is why developing a broad base of mental models is critical for
anyone interested in thinking clearly, rationally, and effectively.

The Secret to Great Thinking and Decision Making

Expanding your set of mental models is something experts need to work on just as much
as novices. We all have our favorite mental models, the ones we naturally default to as
an explanation for how or why something happened. As you grow older and develop
expertise in a certain area, you tend to favor the mental models that are most familiar to
you.

Here's the problem: when a certain worldview dominates your thinking, you’ll try to
explain every problem you face through that worldview. This pitfall is particularly easy
to slip into when you're smart or talented in a given area.

The more you master a single mental model, the more likely it becomes that this mental
model will be your downfall because you’ll start applying it indiscriminately to every
problem. What looks like expertise is often a limitation. As the common proverb says, “If
all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
When a certain worldview dominates your thinking, you’ll try to explain
every problem you face through that worldview.

Consider this example from biologist Robert Sapolsky. He asks, “Why did the chicken
cross the road?” Then, he provides answers from different experts.

 If you ask an evolutionary biologist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road
because they saw a potential mate on the other side.”

 If you ask a kinesiologist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because the
muscles in the leg contracted and pulled the leg bone forward during each step.”

 If you ask a neuroscientist, they might say, “The chicken crossed the road because
the neurons in the chicken’s brain fired and triggered the movement.”

Technically speaking, none of these experts are wrong. But nobody is seeing the entire
picture either. Each individual mental model is just one view of reality. The challenges
and situations we face in life cannot be entirely explained by one field or industry.

All perspectives hold some truth. None of them contain the complete truth.

Relying on a narrow set of thinking tools is like wearing a mental straitjacket. Your
cognitive range of motion is limited. When your set of mental models is limited, so is
your potential for finding a solution. In order to unleash your full potential, you have to
collect a range of mental models. You have to build out your decision making toolbox.
Thus, the secret to great thinking is to learn and employ a variety of mental models.

Expanding Your Set of Mental Models

The process of accumulating mental models is somewhat like improving your vision.
Each eye can see something on its own. But if you cover one of them, you lose part of the
scene. It’s impossible to see the full picture when you’re only looking through one eye.

Similarly, mental models provide an internal picture of how the world works. We should
continuously upgrade and improve the quality of this picture. This means reading
widely from the best books, studying the fundamentals of seemingly unrelated fields,
and learning from people with wildly different life experiences.
The mind's eye needs a variety of mental models to piece together a complete picture of
how the world works. The more sources you have to draw upon, the clearer your
thinking becomes. As the philosopher Alain de Botton notes, “The chief enemy of good
decisions is a lack of sufficient perspectives on a problem.”

The Pursuit of Liquid Knowledge

In school, we tend to separate knowledge into different silos—biology, economics,
history, physics, philosophy. In the real world, information is rarely divided into neatly
defined categories. In the words of Charlie Munger, “All the wisdom of the world is not
to be found in one little academic department.”
World-class thinkers are often silo-free thinkers. They avoid looking at life through the
lens of one subject. Instead, they develop “liquid knowledge” that flows easily from one
topic to the next.

This is why it is important to not only learn new mental models, but to consider how
they connect with one another. Creativity and innovation often arise at the intersection
of ideas. By spotting the links between various mental models, you can identify solutions
that most people overlook.
Tools for Thinking Better
Here's the good news:

You don't need to master every detail of every subject to become a world-class thinker.
Of all the mental models humankind has generated throughout history, there are just a
few dozen that you need to learn to have a firm grasp of how the world works.

Many of the most important mental models are the big ideas from disciplines like
biology, chemistry, physics, economics, mathematics, psychology, philosophy. Each field
has a few mental models that form the backbone of the topic. For example, some of the
pillar mental models from economics include ideas like Incentives, Scarcity, and
Economies of Scale.

If you can master the fundamentals of each discipline, then you can develop a
remarkably accurate and useful picture of life. To quote Charlie Munger again, “80 or 90
important models will carry about 90 percent of the freight in making you a worldly-
wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.”
I've made it a personal mission to uncover the big models that carry the heavy freight in
life. After researching more than 1,000 different mental models, I gradually narrowed it
down to a few dozen that matter most. I've written about some of them previously,
like entropy and inversion, and I'll be covering more of them in the future. If you're
interested, you can browse my slowly expanding list of mental models.

My hope is to create a list of the most important mental models from a wide range of
disciplines and explain them in a way that is not only easy to understand, but also
meaningful and practical to the daily life of the average person. With any luck, we can all
learn how to think just a little bit better.
Entropy: Why Life Always Seems to Get
More Complicated

by James Clear | Mental Models

Murphy's Law states, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

This pithy statement references the annoying tendency of life to cause trouble and make
things difficult. Problems seem to arise naturally on their own, while solutions always
require our attention, energy, and effort. Life never seems to just work itself out for us.
If anything, our lives become more complicated and gradually decline into disorder
rather than remaining simple and structured.

Why is that?

Murphy's Law is just a common adage that people toss around in conversation, but it is
related to one of the great forces of our universe. This force is so fundamental to the way
our world works that it permeates nearly every endeavor we pursue. It drives many of
the problems we face and leads to disarray. It is the one force that governs everybody's
life: Entropy.
What is Entropy and Why Does It Matter?
What is entropy? Here's a simple way to think about it:

Imagine that you take a box of puzzle pieces and dump them out on a table. In theory, it
is possible for the pieces to fall perfectly into place and create a completed puzzle when
you dump them out of the box. But in reality, that never happens.

Why?

Quite simply, because the odds are overwhelmingly against it. Every piece would have to
fall in just the right spot to create a completed puzzle. There is only one possible state
where every piece is in order, but there are a nearly infinite number of states where the
pieces are in disorder. Mathematically speaking, an orderly outcome is incredibly
unlikely to happen at random.

Similarly, if you build a sand castle on the beach and return a few days later, it will no
longer be there. There is only one combination of sand particles that looks like your
sand castle. Meanwhile, there are a nearly infinite number of combinations that don't
look like it.

Again, in theory, it is possible for the wind and waves to move the sand around and
create the shape of your sand castle. But in practice, it never happens. The odds are
astronomically higher that sand will be scattered into a random clump.
These simple examples capture the essence of entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder.
And there are always far more disorderly variations than orderly ones.

Why Does Entropy Matter for Your Life?

Here's the crucial thing about entropy: it always increases over time.
It is the natural tendency of things to lose order. Left to its own devices, life will always
become less structured. Sand castles get washed away. Weeds overtake gardens. Ancient
ruins crumble. Cars begin to rust. People gradually age. With enough time, even
mountains erode and their precise edges become rounded. The inevitable trend is that
things become less organized.

This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is one of the foundational

concepts of chemistry and it is one of the fundamental laws of our universe. The Second
Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system will never decrease.
“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme
position among the laws of Nature.” —Arthur Eddington

The great British scientist Arthur Eddington claimed, “The law that entropy always
increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone
points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's
equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be
contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes.
But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give
you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”
In the long run, nothing escapes the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The pull of
entropy is relentless. Everything decays. Disorder always increases.

Without Effort, Life Tends to Lose Order

Before you get depressed, there is good news.

You can fight back against the pull of entropy. You can solve a scattered puzzle. You can
pull the weeds out of your garden. You can clean a messy room. You can organize
individuals into a cohesive team.
But because the universe naturally slides toward disorder, you have to expend energy to
create stability, structure, and simplicity. Successful relationships require care and
attention. Successful houses require cleaning and maintenance. Successful teams
require communication and collaboration. Without effort, things will decay.
This insight—that disorder has a natural tendency to increase over time and that we can
counteract that tendency by expending energy—reveals the core purpose of life. We
must exert effort to create useful types of order that are resilient enough to withstand
the unrelenting pull of entropy.
“The ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy
energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out
refuges of beneficial order.” —Steven Pinker

Maintaining organization in the face of chaos is not easy. In the words of Yvon
Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, “The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your
life because everything is pulling you to be more and more complex.”

Entropy will always increase on its own. The only way to make things orderly again is to
add energy. Order requires effort.

Entropy in Daily Life

Entropy helps explain many of the mysteries and experiences of daily life.

For example:

Why Life is Remarkable

Consider the human body.

The collection of atoms that make up your body could be arranged in a virtually infinite
number of ways and nearly all of them lead to no form of life whatsoever.
Mathematically speaking, the odds are overwhelmingly against your very presence. You
are a very unlikely combination of atoms. And yet, here you are. It is truly remarkable.

In a universe where entropy rules the day, the presence of life with such organization,
structure, and stability is stunning.
Why Art is Beautiful

Entropy offers a good explanation for why art and beauty are so aesthetically
pleasing. Artists create a form of order and symmetry that, odds are, the universe would
never generate on its own. It is so rare in the grand scheme of possibilities. The number
of beautiful combinations is far less than the number of total combinations. Similarly,
seeing a symmetrical face is rare and beautiful when there are so many ways for a face to
be asymmetrical.

Beauty is rare and unlikely in a universe of disorder. And this gives us good reason to
protect art. We should guard it and treat it as something sacred.

Why Marriage is Difficult

One of the most famous opening lines in literature comes from Anna Karenina by Leo
Tolstoy. He writes, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way.”

There are many ways a marriage can fail—financial stress, parenting issues, crazy in-
laws, conflicts in core values, lack of trust, infidelity, and so on. A deficiency in any one
of these areas can wreck a family.

To be happy, however, you need some degree of success in each major area. Thus, all
happy families are alike because they all have a similar structure. Disorder can occur in
many ways, but order, in only a few.

Why Optimal Lives Are Designed Not Discovered

You have a combination of talents, skills, and interests that are specific to you. But you
also live in a larger society and culture that were not designed with your specific abilities
in mind. Given what we know about entropy, what do you think the odds are that the
environment you happen to grow up in is also the optimal environment for your talents?
It is very unlikely that life is going to present you with a situation that perfectly matches
your strengths. Out of all the possible scenarios you could encounter, it’s far more likely
that you’ll encounter one that does not cater to your talents.

Evolutionary biologists use a term called “mismatch conditions” to describe when an

organism is not well-suited for a condition it is facing. We have common phrases for
mismatch conditions: “like a fish out of water” or “bring a knife to a gunfight.”
Obviously, when you are in a mismatch condition, it is more difficult to succeed, to be
useful, and to win.

It is likely you'll face mismatch conditions in your life. At the very least, life will not be
optimal—maybe you didn't grow up in the optimal culture for your interests, maybe you
were exposed to the wrong subject or sport, maybe you were born at the wrong time in
history. It is far more likely that you are living in a mismatch condition than in a well-
matched one.

Knowing this, you must take it upon yourself to design your ideal lifestyle. You have
to turn a mismatch condition into a well-matched one. Optimal lives are designed, not
discovered.

Murphy's Law Applied to the Universe

Finally, let's return to Murphy's Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

Entropy provides a good explanation for why Murphy’s Law seems to pop up so
frequently in life. There are more ways things can go wrong than right. The difficulties of
life do not occur because the planets are misaligned or because some cosmic force is
conspiring against you. It is simply entropy at work. As one scientist put it, “Entropy is
sort of like Murphy's Law applied to the entire universe.”
It is nobody's fault that life has problems. It is simply a law of probability. There are
many disordered states and few ordered ones. Given the odds against us, what is
remarkable is not that life has problems, but that we can solve them at all.
Inversion: The Crucial Thinking Skill
Nobody Ever Taught You

by James Clear | Mental Models

The ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus regularly
conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum, which translates to a
“premeditation of evils.”
The goal of this exercise was to envision the negative things that could happen in life.
For example, the Stoics would imagine what it would be like to lose their job and
become homeless or to suffer an injury and become paralyzed or to have their
reputation ruined and lose their status in society.

The Stoics believed that by imagining the worst case scenario ahead of time, they could
overcome their fears of negative experiences and make better plans to prevent them.
While most people were focused on how they could achieve success, the Stoics also
considered how they would manage failure. What would things look like if everything
went wrong tomorrow? And what does this tell us about how we should prepare today?

This way of thinking, in which you consider the opposite of what you want, is known as
inversion. When I first learned of it, I didn't realize how powerful it could be. As I have
studied it more, I have begun to realize that inversion is a rare and crucial skill that
nearly all great thinkers use to their advantage.
How Great Thinkers Shatter the Status Quo with
Inversion
The German mathematician Carl Jacobi made a number of important contributions to
different scientific fields during his career. In particular, he was known for his ability to
solve hard problems by following a strategy of man muss immer umkehrenor, loosely
translated, “invert, always invert.”
Jacobi believed that one of the best ways to clarify your thinking was to restate math
problems in inverse form. He would write down the opposite of the problem he was
trying to solve and found that the solution often came to him more easily.

Inversion is a powerful thinking tool because it puts a spotlight on errors and roadblocks
that are not obvious at first glance. What if the opposite was true? What if I focused on a
different side of this situation? Instead of asking how to do something, ask how
to not do it.

Great thinkers, icons, and innovators think forward and backward.

Occasionally, they drive their brain in reverse.

Great thinkers, icons, and innovators think forward and backward. They consider the
opposite side of things. Occasionally, they drive their brain in reverse. This way of
thinking can reveal compelling opportunities for innovation.

Art provides a good example.

One of the biggest musical shifts in the last several decades came from Nirvana, a band
that legitimized a whole new genre of music—alternative rock—and
whose Nevermind album is memorialized in the Library of Congress as one of the most
“culturally, historically or aesthetically important” sound recordings of the 20th
century.
Nirvana turned the conventions of mainstream rock and pop music completely upside
down. Where hair metal bands like Poison and Def Leppard spent millions to produce
and promote each record, Nirvana recorded Nevermind for $65,000. Where hair metal
was flashy, Nirvana was stripped-down and raw.
Inversion is often at the core of great art. At any given time there is a status quo in
society and the artists and innovators who stand out are often the ones who overturn the
standard in a compelling way.

Great art breaks the previous rules. It is an inversion of what came before. In a way, the
secret to unconventional thinking is just inverting the status quo.

This strategy works equally well for other creative pursuits like writing. Many great
headlines and titles use the power of inversion to up-end common assumptions. As a
personal example, two of my more popular articles, “Forget About Setting
Goals” and “Motivation is Overvalued”, take common notions and turn them on their
head.
Success is Overvalued. Avoiding Failure Matters
More.
This type of inverse logic can be extended to many areas of life. For example, ambitious
young people are often focused on how to achieve success. But billionaire investor
Charlie Munger encourages them to consider the inverse of success instead.

“What do you want to avoid?” he asks. “Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability. If
you’re unreliable it doesn’t matter what your virtues are. You’re going to crater
immediately. Doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part
of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability.”
Avoiding mistakes is an under-appreciated way to improve. In most jobs, you can enjoy
some degree of success simply by being proactive and reliable—even if you are not
particularly smart, fast, or talented in a given area. Sometimes it is more important to
consider why people fail in life than why they succeed.

The Benefits of Thinking Forward and Backward

Inversion can be particularly useful in the workplace.

Leaders can ask themselves, “What would someone do each day if they were a terrible
manager?” Good leaders would likely avoid those things.

Similarly, if innovation is a core piece of your business model you can ask, “How could
we make this company less innovative?” Eliminating those barriers and obstacles might
help creative ideas arise more quickly.

And every marketing department wants to attract new business, but it might be useful to
ask, “What would alienate our core customer?” A different point of view can reveal
surprising insights.

You can learn just as much from identifying what doesn't work as you can from spotting
what does. What are the mistakes, errors, and flubs that you want to avoid? Inversion is
not about finding good advice, but rather about finding anti-advice. It teaches you what
to avoid.

Here are some more ways to utilize inversion in work and life:

Project Management

One of my favorite applications of inversion is known as a Failure Premortem. It is like a

Premeditation of Evils for the modern day company.
It works like this:

Imagine the most important goal or project you are working on right now. Now fast
forward six months and assume the project or goal has failed.

Tell the story of how it happened. What went wrong? What mistakes did you make?
How did it fail? In other words, think of your main goal and ask yourself, “What could
cause this to go horribly wrong?”

This strategy is sometimes called the “kill the company” exercise in organizations
because the goal is to spell out the exact ways the company could fail. Just like a
Premeditation of Evils, the idea is to identify challenges and points of failure so you can
develop a plan to prevent them ahead of time.

Productivity

Most people want to get more done in less time. Applying inversion to productivity you
could ask, “What if I wanted to decrease my focus? How do I end up distracted?” The
answer to that question may help you discover interruptions you can eliminate to free
up more time and energy each day.

This strategy is not only effective, but often safer than chasing success. For example,
some people take drugs or mental stimulants in an effort to increase their productivity.
These methods might work, but you also run the risk of possible side effects.
Meanwhile, there is very little danger is leaving your phone in another room, blocking
social media websites, or unplugging your television. Both strategies deal with the same
problem, but inversion allows you to attack it from a different angle and with less risk.

This insight reveals a more general principle: Blindly chasing success can have severe
consequences, but preventing failure usually carries very little risk.

Decluttering

Marie Kondo, author of the blockbuster best-seller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying
Up, uses inversion to help people declutter their homes. Her famous line is, “We should
be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of.”

In other words, the default should be to give anything away that does not “spark joy” in
your life. This shift in mindset inverts decluttering by focusing on what you want to keep
rather than what you want to discard.

Relationships

What behaviors might ruin a marriage? Lack of trust. Not respecting the other person.
Not letting each person have time to be an individual. Spending all of your time on your
kids and not investing in your relationship together. Not having open communication
about money and spending habits. Inverting a good marriage can show you how to avoid
a bad one.

Personal Finance

Everyone wants to make more money. But what if you inverted the problem? How could
you destroy your financial health?

Spending more than you earn is a proven path to financial failure. It doesn’t matter how
much money you have, the math will never work out for you over time. Similarly,
accumulating debt is a hair-on-fire emergency to be resolved as quickly as possible. And
gradually creeping into unchecked shopping and spending habits can lead to self-
inflicted financial stress.

Before you worry too much about how to make more money make sure you have figured
out how to not lose money. If you can manage to avoid these problems, you'll be far
ahead of many folks and save yourself a lot of pain and anguish along the way.

Consider the Opposite

Inversion is counterintuitive. It is not obvious to spend time thinking about the opposite
of what you want.

And yet inversion is a key tool of many great thinkers. Stoic practitioners visualize
negative outcomes. Groundbreaking artists invert the status quo. Effective leaders avoid
the mistakes that prevent success just as much as they chase the skills that accelerate it.

Inversion can be particularly useful for challenging your own beliefs. It forces you to
treat your decisions like a court of law. In court, the jury has to listen to both sides of the
argument before making up their mind. Inversion helps you do something similar. What
if the evidence disconfirmed what you believe? What if you tried to destroy the views
that you cherish? Inversion prevents you from making up your mind after your first
conclusion. It is a way to counteract the gravitational pull of confirmation bias.

Inversion is an essential skill for leading a logical and rational life. It allows you to step
outside your normal patterns of thought and see situations from a different angle.
Whatever problem you are facing, always consider the opposite side of things.
A Margin of Safety: How to Thrive in the
Age of Uncertainty

by James Clear | Mental Models

In late August of 2005, one of the most dangerous tropical storms in history began
brewing. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico were unusually warm that month, and the
high temperatures transformed the ocean basin into a giant cauldron with the optimal
conditions for growth.

As the tropical storm cut across the tip of Florida and entered the Gulf, it immediately
began to swell. In less than 24 hours, the storm doubled in size. And as it grew into a
full-blown hurricane, the weather experts gave it a name: Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina churned through the tropical waters of the Gulf and quickly escalated to peak
intensity. It ripped through the atmosphere with remarkable force, registering gusts of
wind that exceeded 175 mph (280 km/h) and lasted for more than a minute. By the time
the storm hit the southeastern coast of Louisiana on August 29th, Hurricane Katrina
was nearly 120 miles wide.
Satellite imagery of Hurricane Katrina on August 28, 2005, one day before striking New Orleans,
Louisiana. (Jeff Schmaltz / NASA)
A storm of Katrina’s size is expected to cause flooding and damage, but coastal cities and
neighborhoods use a variety of flood walls and levees to prevent total catastrophe. These
walls are built along rivers and waterways and act as a barrier to hold back usually high
waters and prevent flooding.

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, it became clear that the levees of New
Orleans might not be able to hold back the rising waters. A few hours in, the director of
the National Hurricane Center said, “I do not think anyone can tell you with confidence
right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that's obviously a very, very great
concern.”

Minutes later, the levees began to fail. The waters breached the levees and flood walls of
New Orleans in more than 50 different places. Entire districts became submerged in
more than 10 feet of water. Evacuation routes were destroyed as bridges and roads
collapsed. At Memorial Medical Center in the heart of New Orleans, the surging water
killed the backup generators. Without power, temperatures inside the hospital rose to
over 100 degrees as doctors and nurses took turns manually pumping each breath into
dying patients in a desperate attempt to keep people alive.
Water flooded more than 80 percent of the city. And in the days that followed, the death
toll began to rise. Bodies were found floating down the streets. Rescue and recovery
efforts failed to track down missing people. At least 1,200 people died, and hundreds
more were unaccounted for—the total number of dead is still unknown to this day.

So many residents were displaced by Hurricane Katrina that the population of New
Orleans dropped by 50 percent from 484,000 before the storm to 230,000 one year
later. In total, the damages from Hurricane Katrina surpassed $100 billion. It was the
costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States.

The Margin of Safety

The great mistake of Hurricane Katrina was that the levees and flood walls were not
built with a proper “margin of safety.” The engineers miscalculated the strength of the
soil the walls were built upon. As a result, the walls buckled and the surging waters
poured over the top, eroding the soft soil and magnifying the problem. Within a few
minutes, the entire system collapsed.

This term, margin of safety, is an engineering concept used to describe the ability of a
system to withstand loads that are greater than expected.
Imagine you are building a bridge. The maximum weight for a fully loaded commercial
truck is around 80,000 pounds (36,000 kg), but any decent engineer will build a bridge
that can safely carry vehicles weighing far more. You don't want to drive an 80,000-
pound truck across a bridge that can only hold 80,001 pounds. Just to be safe, the
engineer might build the bridge to handle 5x the expected weight, say 400,000 pounds.
This additional capacity is known as the margin of safety.

Of course, maintaining a proper margin of safety is crucial not only in construction and
engineering, but also in many areas of daily life.

How to Use a Margin of Safety in Real Life

There are many ways to implement a margin of safety in everyday life. The core idea is
to protect yourself from unforeseen problems and challenges by building a buffer
between what you expect to happen and what could happen. This mental model is
widely useful on a day-to-day basis because uncertainty creeps into every area of life.
Let's explore a few ways we can use this concept to live better.

Time Management

One of the keys to being prompt and reliable is to use a margin of safety when
scheduling your day. If it takes 10 minutes to get somewhere, don't wait to leave until 11
minutes beforehand. Instead, leave 30 minutes beforehand. Similarly, if it always seems
to take an extra five minutes to wind down a meeting, then don't schedule meetings
back-to-back.

If you're always running late it is because you are living your life without a margin of
safety. There will always delays in the real world. When everything has to go perfectly
for you to be on time, you're not going to be on time very often. Give yourself a healthy
margin of safety.
Strength Training

When strength training, you can utilize a margin of safety by finishing each set with at
least one repetition left in the tank. This strategy ensures you can complete each
repetition with proper technique and reduces the odds of injury. Training to failure
eliminates your margin of safety.

Similarly, strength coaches often prevent their athletes from attempting to lift as much
weight as possible for a single repetition. Instead, they only allow their athletes to select
a weight they can do for at least three repetitions. (Elite sports teams often test a three-
rep max, not a one-rep max.) This strategy creates a margin of safety and helps prevent
injury during training by never placing athletes under a maximal load.

Investing

Warren Buffett, the famous investor, is a proponent of using a margin of safety when
considering which stock to buy. He says, “Do not cut it close. That is what Ben Graham
meant by having a margin of safety. You don’t try to buy businesses worth $83 million
for $80 million. You leave yourself an enormous margin.”

Our predictions and calculations turn out to be wrong all the time. When it comes to
assessing investment opportunities, you want a margin of safety that is so wide, it
doesn't matter if your prediction is inaccurate. Buffett's business partner, Charlie
Munger has said something similar, “The margin of safety ought to be so attractive. The
decision should be obvious.”
“You don’t try to buy businesses worth $83 million for $80 million. You
leave yourself an enormous margin.”

As Munger says, “If you could take the stock price and multiply it by the number of
shares and get something that was one third or less of sellout value… you've got a lot of
edge going for you. Even with an elderly alcoholic running a stodgy business, this
significant excess of real value per share working for you means that all kinds of good
things can happen to you. You had a huge margin of safety by having this big excess
value going for you.”

Project Management

Many complex projects require coordination between multiple people. Let's say five
people need to touch a project before it is completed. On average, it might take each
person four days to complete their task. Under these circumstances, it would seem
reasonable to set the deadline for 20 days from now, which gives each person four days.

But let's say that the total range of time each stage could take is between two days and
six days. It is often better to plan for the worst case scenario and set the deadline 30
days from now, which gives each person six days. Hopefully, the average of four days per
person will continue and you'll finish the project early. But in any major project, it helps
to have a cushion to safeguard against any unexpected problems.

Personal Finance

If you have to spend every dollar you earn each month, then you don't have any margin
of safety to protect against unexpected expenses. Conversely, if you can manage to live
on 90 percent of your income, then the 10 percent you save provides a nice buffer in
case of emergency.

And if you can manage to live on 50 percent of your income, then you can handle a great
amount of financial stress. Imagine a medical emergency that requires $25,000 in cash.
With a large buffer of cash, you can withstand such an unpleasant surprise. A big bank
account can handle a lot of turbulence with inflows and outflows. Meanwhile, one small
bank account can be sent into bankruptcy from one big shock. The bigger the buffer, the
more chaos you can handle.

Expenses bite into your financial margin of safety. Savings expand it.

Jay Leno, the famous comedian, is a perfect example of this strategy. Leno worked two
jobs at the beginning of his career, but lived off the income from one of them. “When I
was younger, I would always save the money I made working at the car dealership and I
would spend the money I made as a comedian,” he says. “When I started to get a bit
famous, the money I was making as a comedian was way more than the money I was
making at the car dealership, so I would bank that and spend the car dealership money.”

Leno continued this habit even after he was making millions of dollars per year
hosting The Tonight Show. “When I got ‘The Tonight Show,' I always made sure I did
150 [comedy show] gigs a year so I never had to touch the principal,” Leno says. “I've
never touched a dime of my ‘Tonight Show' money. Ever.”
Wildlife Protection

There are millions of squirrels in the world today. If a viral outbreak killed 100,000
squirrels, the species would continue just fine. But if a similar virus killed 100,000 lions,
the species would be extinct. There is not enough slack in the ecosystem to handle such
a catastrophe. Endangered species are in a precarious position because they have no
margin of safety.

Mobility and Stretching

Each muscle in the body has a “stress-strain curve” which describes how far a muscle
can stretch before reaching the point of failure. Injury often occurs near the extreme end
of this curve. The closer you get to the limits of your range of motion, the more strain
your muscles endure.
Practicing stretching and mobility exercises can help expand your range of motion and
widen your stress-strain curve. This helps to keep your normal movements in the middle
of the curve and away from the extremes where injury is more likely to occur. In other
words, it is not necessary to be as flexible as a yoga teacher, but it's nice to have a good
margin of safety in your mobility to prevent injury.

Leave Room for the Unexpected

Utilizing a margin of safety can serve you well in nearly any area of life.

All information—no matter how bulletproof it may seem—comes with some degree of
error. The future is uncertain and life always seems to get more complicated. A margin
of safety acts as a buffer against the unknown, the random, and the unseen.

The world is more uncertain now than ever before. There is too much information for
one person to handle, too many moving pieces for one person to manage. This is why
the greatest benefit that a margin of safety provides might be reduced stress and
overwhelm. Nobody can predict the future, but there is a sense of quiet confidence that
comes over you when you know you are capable of handling the uncertainties of life.

If your life is designed only to handle the expected challenges, then it will fall apart as
soon as something unexpected happens to you. Always be stronger than you need to be.
Always leave room for the unexpected.
The 1 Percent Rule: Why a Few People
Get Most of the Rewards

by James Clear | Continuous Improvement, Featured, Habits

Sometime in the late 1800s—nobody is quite sure exactly when—a man named Vilfredo
Pareto was fussing about in his garden when he made a small but interesting discovery.

Pareto noticed that a tiny number of pea pods in his garden produced the majority of the
peas.

Now, Pareto was a very mathematical fellow. He worked as an economist and one of his
lasting legacies was turning economics into a science rooted in hard numbers and facts.
Unlike many economists of the time, Pareto's papers and books were filled with
equations. And the peas in his garden had set his mathematical brain in motion.

What if this unequal distribution was present in other areas of life as well?
The Pareto Principle
At the time, Pareto was studying wealth in various nations. As he was Italian, he began
by analyzing the distribution of wealth in Italy. To his surprise, he discovered that
approximately 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by just 20 percent of the
people. Similar to the pea pods in his garden, most of the resources were controlled by a
minority of the players.

Pareto continued his analysis in other nations and a pattern began to emerge. For
instance, after poring through the British income tax records, he noticed that
approximately 30 percent of the population in Great Britain earned about 70 percent of
the total income.
As he continued researching, Pareto found that the numbers were never quite the same,
but the trend was remarkably consistent. The majority of rewards always seemed to
accrue to a small percentage of people. This idea that a small number of things account
for the majority of the results became known as the Pareto Principle or, more
commonly, the 80/20 Rule.

Inequality, Everywhere
In the decades that followed, Pareto's work practically became gospel for economists.
Once he opened the world's eyes to this idea, people started seeing it everywhere. And
the 80/20 Rule is more prevalent now than ever before.

For example, through the 2015-2016 season in the National Basketball Association, 20
percent of franchises have won 75.3 percent of the championships. Furthermore, just
two franchises—the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers—have won nearly half of
all the championships in NBA history. Like Pareto's pea pods, a few teams account for
the majority of the rewards.
The numbers are even more extreme in soccer. While 77 different nations have
competed in the World Cup, just three countries—Brazil, Germany, and Italy—have won
13 of the first 20 World Cup tournaments.
Examples of the Pareto Principle exist in everything from real estate to income
inequality to tech startups. In the 1950s, three percent of Guatemalans owned 70
percent of the land in Guatemala. In 2013, 8.4 percent of the world population
controlled 83.3 percent of the world's wealth. In 2015, one search engine, Google,
received 64 percent of search queries.
Why does this happen? Why do a few people, teams, and organizations enjoy the bulk of
the rewards in life? To answer this question, let's consider an example from nature.

The Power of Accumulative Advantage

The Amazon rainforest is one of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. Scientists have
cataloged approximately 16,000 different tree species in the Amazon. But despite this
remarkable level of diversity, researchers have discovered that there are approximately
227 “hyperdominant” tree species that make up nearly half of the rainforest. Just 1.4
percent of tree species account for 50 percent of the trees in the Amazon.
But why?

Imagine two plants growing side by side. Each day they will compete for sunlight and
soil. If one plant can grow just a little bit faster than the other, then it can stretch taller,
catch more sunlight, and soak up more rain. The next day, this additional energy allows
the plant to grow even more. This pattern continues until the stronger plant crowds the
other out and takes the lion’s share of sunlight, soil, and nutrients.

From this advantageous position, the winning plant has a better ability to spread seeds
and reproduce, which gives the species an even bigger footprint in the next generation.
This process gets repeated again and again until the plants that are slightly better than
the competition dominate the entire forest.

Scientists refer to this effect as “accumulative advantage.” What begins as a small

advantage gets bigger over time. One plant only needs a slight edge in the beginning to
crowd out the competition and take over the entire forest.
Winner-Take-All Effects
Something similar happens in our lives.

Like plants in the rainforest, humans are often competing for the same resources.
Politicians compete for the same votes. Authors compete for the same spot at the top of
the best-seller list. Athletes compete for the same gold medal. Companies compete for
the same potential client. Television shows compete for the same hour of your attention.

The difference between these options can be razor thin, but the winners enjoy massively
outsized rewards.

Imagine two women swimming in the Olympics. One of them might be 1/100th of a
second faster than the other, but she gets all of the gold medal. Ten companies might
pitch a potential client, but only one of them will win the project. You only need to be a
little bit better than the competition to secure all of the reward. Or, perhaps you are
applying for a new job. Two hundred candidates might compete for the same role, but
being just slightly better than other candidates earns you the entire position.

Situations in which small differences in performance lead to outsized

rewards are known as Winner-Take-All Effects.

These situations in which small differences in performance lead to outsized rewards are
known as Winner-Take-All Effects. They typically occur in situations that involve
relative comparison, where your performance relative to those around you is the
determining factor in your success.

Not everything in life is a Winner-Take-All competition, but nearly every area of life is at
least partially affected by limited resources. Any decision that involves using a limited
resource like time or money will naturally result in a winner-take-all situation.

In situations like these, being just a little bit better than the competition can lead to
outsized rewards because the winner takes all. You only win by 1 percent or 1 second or 1
dollar, but you capture 100 percent of the victory. The advantage of being a little bit
better is not a little bit more reward, but the entire reward. The winner gets one and the
rest get zero.

Winner-Take-All Leads to Winner-Take-Most

Winner-Take-All Effects in individual competitions can lead to Winner-Take-Most
Effects in the larger game of life.

From this advantageous position—with the gold medal in hand or with cash in the bank
or from the chair of the Oval Office—the winner begins the process of accumulating
advantages that make it easier for them to win the next time around. What began as a
small margin is starting to trend toward the 80/20 Rule.
If one road is slightly more convenient than the other, then more people travel down it
and more businesses are likely to build alongside it. As more businesses are built, people
have additional reasons for using the road and so it gets even more traffic. Soon you end
up with a saying like, “20 percent of the roads receive 80 percent of the traffic.”

If one business has a technology that is more innovative than another, then more people
will buy their products. As the business makes more money, they can invest in
additional technology, pay higher salaries, and hire better people. By the time the
competition catches up, there are other reasons for customers to stick with the first
business. Soon, one company dominates the industry.

If one author hits the best-seller list, then publishers will be more interested in their
next book. When the second book comes out, the publisher will put more resources and
marketing power behind it, which makes it easier to hit the best-seller list for a second
time. Soon, you begin to understand why a few books sell millions of copies while the
majority struggle to sell a few thousand copies.

The margin between good and great is narrower than it seems. What
begins as a slight edge over the competition compounds with each
additional contest.

The margin between good and great is narrower than it seems. What begins as a slight
edge over the competition compounds with each additional contest. Winning one
competition improves your odds of winning the next. Each additional cycle further
cements the status of those at the top.

Over time, those that are slightly better end up with the majority of the rewards. Those
that are slightly worse end up with next to nothing. This idea is sometimes referred to as
The Matthew Effect, which references a passage in The Bible that says, “For all those
who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who
have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

Now, let's come back to the question I posed near the beginning of this article. Why do a
few people, teams, and organizations enjoy the bulk of the rewards in life?
The 1 Percent Rule
Small differences in performance can lead to very unequal distributions when repeated
over time. This is yet another reason why habits are so important. The people and
organizations that can do the right things, more consistently are more likely to maintain
a slight edge and accumulate disproportionate rewards over time.

You only need to be slightly better than your competition, but if you are able to maintain
a slight edge today and tomorrow and the day after that, then you can repeat the process
of winning by just a little bit over and over again. And thanks to Winner-Take-All
Effects, each win delivers outsized rewards.

We can call this The 1 Percent Rule. The 1 Percent Rule states that over time the
majority of the rewards in a given field will accumulate to the people, teams, and
organizations that maintain a 1 percent advantage over the alternatives. You don't need
to be twice as good to get twice the results. You just need to be slightly better.
The 1 Percent Rule is not merely a reference to the fact that small differences
accumulate into significant advantages, but also to the idea that those who are 1 percent
better rule their respective fields and industries. Thus, the process of accumulative
advantage is the hidden engine that drives the 80/20 Rule.
How to Retain More of Every Book You
Read

by James Clear | Productivity, Self-Improvement

Finishing a book is easy, young man. Understanding it is harder.

In recent years, I have focused on building good reading habits and learned how to read
more. But the key is not simply to read more, but to read better. For most people, the
ultimate goal of reading a nonfiction book is to actually improve your life by learning a
new skill, understanding an important problem, or looking at the world in a new way.
It's important to read books, but it is just as important to remember what you read and
put it to good use.

With that in mind, I'd like to share three reading comprehension strategies that I use to
make my reading more productive.
1. Make all of your notes searchable.
Having searchable book notes is essential for returning to ideas easily. It increases the
odds that you will apply what you read in real life. An idea is only useful if you can find it
when you need it. There is no need to leave the task of reading comprehension solely up
to your memory.

I store all of my book notes in Evernote. I strongly prefer Evernote over other options
because 1) it is searchable, 2) it is easy to use across multiple devices, and 3) you can
create and save notes even when you're not connected to the internet. I get my book
notes into Evernote in three ways.

First, if I am listening to an audiobook then I create a new note for that book and type
my notes in as I listen. My preference is to listen to audiobooks on 1.25x speed and then
press pause whenever I want to write something down. The faster playback speed and
slower note taking process tend to balance out and I usually finish each book in the
same time as normal.
Second, if I am reading a print book then I follow the same process with one change.
Typing notes while reading a print book can be annoying because you are always putting
the book down and picking it back up. I like to place the book on a book stand, which
makes it much easier to type out a long quote or keep my hands free while reading.

Print books and audiobooks are great, but where this system really shines is with
ebooks. My third (and preferred) approach is to read ebooks on my Kindle Paperwhite. I
can easily highlight a passage while reading on my Kindle—no typing required. Once I'm
finished, I use a software program called Clippings to import all of my Kindle highlights
to Evernote.

These three reading strategies make it fairly easy for me to get my book notes into
Evernote where they will be instantly searchable. Even if I can't remember where I read
about a particular idea, I can usually search my Evernote folder and find the answer
quickly.

2. Integrate thoughts as you read.

When you go to the library, all of the books will be divided into different categories:
biographies, history, science, psychology. In the real world, of course, knowledge is not
separated into neatly defined boxes. Topics overlap and bleed into one another. All
knowledge is interconnected.

The most useful insights are often found at the intersection of ideas.
The most useful insights are often found at the intersection of ideas. For that reason, I
try to consider how the book I'm reading connects with all of the ideas that are already
knocking around inside my head. Whenever possible, I try to integrate the lessons I'm
learning with previous ideas.

For example:

 While reading The Tell-Tale Brain by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, I

discovered that one of his key points connected to a previous idea I learned from
social work researcher Brene Brown.

 In my notes for The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, I noted how Mark Manson's
idea of “killing yourself” overlaps with Paul Graham's essay on keeping your
identity small.

 As I read Mastery by George Leonard, I realized that while this book was about the
process of improvement, it also shed some light on the connection between genetics
and performance.

I added each insight to my notes for that particular book. This process of integration and
connection is crucial not only for making new ideas “stick” in your brain, but also for
understanding the world as a whole.

Too often, people use one book or one article as the basis for an entire belief system.
Forcing yourself to connect ideas helps you realize that there is no single way of looking
at the world. The complex connections between ideas are often where the most beautiful
bits of knowledge reside.

3. Summarize the book in one paragraph.

As soon as I finish a book, I challenge myself to summarize the entire text in just three
sentences. This constraint is just a game, of course, but I do find it to be a useful exercise
because it forces me to review my notes and consider what was really important about
the book.
How would I describe the book to a friend? What are the main ideas? If I was going to
implement one idea from the book right now, which one would it be?

In many cases, I find that I can usually get just as much useful information from reading
my one-paragraph summary and reviewing my notes as I would if I read the entire book
again. (There is a lot of fluff in non-fiction books these days.)

I have published many of my book summaries, which include my one paragraph

summary and my full notes. If you're looking for an idea of what these reading
comprehension strategies look like in practice, feel free to browse that page.

Happy reading!
The Paradox of Behavior Change

by James Clear | Featured, Goal Setting, Habits

The natural tendency of life is to find stability. In biology we refer to this process as
equilibrium or homeostasis.

For example, consider your blood pressure. When it dips too low, your heart rate speeds
up and nudges your blood pressure back into a healthy range. When it rises too high,
your kidneys reduce the amount of fluid in the body by flushing out urine. All the while,
your blood vessels help maintain the balance by contracting or expanding as needed.

The human body employs hundreds of feedback loops to keep your blood pressure, body
temperature, glucose levels, calcium levels, and many other processes at a stable
equilibrium.

In his book, Mastery, martial arts master George Leonard points out that our daily lives
also develop their own levels of homeostasis. We fall into patterns for how often we do
(or don't) exercise, how often we do (or don't) clean the dishes, how often we do (or
don't) call our parents, and everything else in between. Over time, each of us settles into
our own version of equilibrium.

Like your body, there are many forces and feedback loops that moderate the particular
equilibrium of your habits. Your daily routines are governed by the delicate balance
between your environment, your genetic potential, your tracking methods, and many
other forces. As time goes on, this equilibrium becomes so normal that it becomes
invisible. All of these forces are interacting each day, but we rarely notice how they
shape our behaviors.

That is, until we try to make a change.

The Myth of Radical Change

The myth of radical change and overnight success is pervasive in our culture. Experts
say things like, “The biggest mistake most people make in life is not setting goals high
enough.” Or they tell us, “If you want massive results, then you have to take massive
action.”

On the surface, these phrases sound inspiring. What we fail to realize, however, is that
any quest for rapid growth contradicts every stabilizing force in our lives. Remember,
the natural tendency of life is to find stability. Anytime equilibrium is lost, the system is
motivated to restore it.

If you step too far outside the bounds of your normal performance, then nearly all of the
forces in your life will be screaming to get you back to equilibrium. If you take massive
action, then you quickly run into a massive roadblock.

Nearly anyone who has tried to make a big change in their life has experienced some
form of this. You finally work up the motivation to stick with a new diet only to find your
co-workers subtly undermining your efforts. You commit to going for a run each night
and within a week you're asked to stay late at work. You start a new meditation habit
and your kids keep barging into the room.
“Resistance is proportionate to the size and speed of the change, not to
whether the change is a favorable or unfavorable one.”

The forces in our lives that have established our current equilibrium will work to pull us
back whether we are trying to change for better or worse. In the words of George
Leonard, “Resistance is proportionate to the size and speed of the change, not to
whether the change is a favorable or unfavorable one.”
In other words, the faster you try to change, the more likely you are to backslide. The
very pursuit of rapid change dials up a wide range of counteracting forces which are
fighting to pull you back into your previous lifestyle. You might be able to beat
equilibrium for a little while, but pretty soon your energy fades and the backsliding
begins.
The Optimal Rate of Growth
Of course, change is certainly possible, but it is only sustainable within a fairly narrow
window. When an athlete trains too hard, she ends up sick or injured. When a company
changes course too quickly, the culture breaks down and employees get burnt out. When
a leader pushes his personal agenda to the extreme, the nation riots and the people re-
establish the balance of power. Living systems do not like extreme conditions.

Thankfully, there is a better way.

Consider the following quote from systems expert Peter Senge. “Virtually all natural
systems, from ecosystems to animals to organizations, have intrinsically optimal rates of
growth. The optimal rate is far less than the fastest possible growth. When growth
becomes excessive—as it does in cancer—the system itself will seek to compensate by
slowing down; perhaps putting the organization's survival at risk in the process.”
By contrast, when you accumulate small wins and focus on one percent improvements,
you nudge equilibrium forward. It is like building muscle. If the weight is too light, your
muscles will atrophy. If the weight is too heavy, you'll end up injured. But if the weight
is just a touch beyond your normal, then your muscles will adapt to the new stimulus
and equilibrium will take a small step forward.
The Paradox of Behavior Change
In order for change to last, we must work with the fundamental forces in our lives, not
against them. Nearly everything that makes up your daily life has an equilibrium—a
natural set point, a normal pace, a typical rhythm. If we reach too far beyond this
equilibrium, we will find ourselves being yanked back to the baseline.

Thus, the best way to achieve a new level of equilibrium is not with radical change, but
through small wins each day.

This is the great paradox of behavior change. If you try to change your life all at once,
you will quickly find yourself pulled back into the same patterns as before. But if you
merely focus on changing your normal day, you will find your life changes naturally as a
side effect.
The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate
Practice

by James Clear | Continuous Improvement, Deliberate Practice, Self-Improvement

In some circles, Ben Hogan is credited with “inventing practice.”

Hogan was one of the greatest golfers of the 20th century, an accomplishment he
achieved through tireless repetition. He simply loved to practice. Hogan said, “I couldn't
wait to get up in the morning so I could hit balls. I'd be at the practice tee at the crack of
dawn, hit balls for a few hours, then take a break and get right back to it.”
For Hogan, every practice session had a purpose. He reportedly spent years breaking
down each phase of the golf swing and testing new methods for each segment. The result
was near perfection. He developed one of the most finely-tuned golf swings in the
history of the game.

His precision made him more like a surgeon than a golfer. During the 1953 Masters, for
example, Hogan hit the flagstick on back-to-back holes. A few days later, he broke the
tournament scoring record.
Hogan methodically broke the game of golf down into chunks and figured out how he
could master each section. For example, he was one of the first golfers to assign specific
yardages to each golf club. Then, he studied each course carefully and used trees and
sand bunkers as reference points to inform him about the distance of each shot.
Hogan finished his career with nine major championships—ranking fourth all-time.
During his prime, other golfers simply attributed his remarkable success to “Hogan's
secret.” Today, experts have a new term for his rigorous style of improvement:
deliberate practice.

What is Deliberate Practice?

Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic.
While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires
focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.
When Ben Hogan carefully reconstructed each step of his golf swing, he was engaging in
deliberate practice. He wasn't just taking cuts. He was finely tuning his technique.

While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate

practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific
goal of improving performance.

The greatest challenge of deliberate practice is to remain focused. In the

beginning, showing up and putting in your reps is the most important thing. But after a
while we begin to carelessly overlook small errors and miss daily opportunities for
improvement.

This is because the natural tendency of the human brain is to transform repeated
behaviors into automatic habits. For example, when you first learned to tie your shoes
you had to think carefully about each step of the process. Today, after many repetitions,
your brain can perform this sequence automatically. The more we repeat a task the more
mindless it becomes.

Mindless activity is the enemy of deliberate practice. The danger of practicing the same
thing again and again is that progress becomes assumed. Too often, we assume we are
getting better simply because we are gaining experience. In reality, we are merely
reinforcing our current habits—not improving them.
Claiming that improvement requires attention and effort sounds logical enough. But
what does deliberate practice actually look like in the real world? Let's talk about that
now.

Examples of Deliberate Practice

One of my favorite examples of deliberate practice is discussed in Talent is Overratedby
Geoff Colvin. In the book, Colvin describes how Benjamin Franklin used deliberate
practice to improve his writing skills.

When he was a teenager, Benjamin Franklin was criticized by his father for his poor
writing abilities. Unlike most teenagers, young Ben took his father's advice seriously and
vowed to improve his writing skills.

He began by finding a publication written by some of the best authors of his day. Then,
Franklin went through each article line by line and wrote down the meaning of every
sentence. Next, he rewrote each article in his own words and then compared his version
to the original. Each time, “I discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.”
Eventually, Franklin realized his vocabulary held him back from better writing, and so
he focused intensely on that area.

Deliberate practice always follows the same pattern: break the overall process down into
parts, identify your weaknesses, test new strategies for each section, and then integrate
your learning into the overall process.

Here are some more examples.

Cooking: Jiro Ono, the subject of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, is a chef and
owner of an award-winning sushi restaurant in Tokyo. Jiro has dedicated his life to
perfecting the art of making sushi and he expects the same of his apprentices. Each
apprentice must master one tiny part of the sushi-making process at a time—how to
wring a towel, how to use a knife, how to cut the fish, and so on. One apprentice trained
under Jiro for ten years before being allowed to cook the eggs. Each step of the process
is taught with the utmost care.

Martial arts: Josh Waitzkin, author of The Art of Learning, is a martial artist who
holds several US national medals and a 2004 world championship. In the finals of one
competition, he noticed a weakness: When an opponent illegally head-butted him in the
nose, Waitzkin flew into a rage. His emotion caused him to lose control and forget his
strategy. Afterward, he specifically sought out training partners who would fight dirty so
he could practice remaining calm and principled in the face of chaos. “They were giving
me a valuable opportunity to expand my threshold for turbulence,” Waitzkin wrote.
“Dirty players were my best teachers.”

Chess: Magnus Carlsen is a chess grandmaster and one of the highest-rated players in
history. One distinguishing feature of great chess players is their ability to recognize
“chunks,” which are specific arrangements of pieces on the board. Some experts
estimate that grandmasters can identify around 300,000 different chunks.
Interestingly, Carlsen learned the game by playing computer chess, which allowed him
to play multiple games at once. Not only did this strategy allow him to learn chunks
much faster than someone playing in-person games, but also gave him a chance to make
more mistakes and correct his weaknesses at an accelerated pace.

Music: Many great musicians recommend repeating the most challenging sections of a
song until you master them. Virtuoso violinist Nathan Milstein says, “Practice as much
as you feel you can accomplish with concentration. Once when I became concerned
because others around me practiced all day long, I asked [my professor] how many
hours I should practice, and he said, ‘It really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice
with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is
plenty.’”
Basketball: Consider the following example from Aubrey Daniels, “Player A shoots
200 practice shots, Player B shoots 50. The Player B retrieves his own shots, dribbles
leisurely and takes several breaks to talk to friends. Player A has a colleague who
retrieves the ball after each attempt. The colleague keeps a record of shots made. If the
shot is missed the colleague records whether the miss was short, long, left or right and
the shooter reviews the results after every 10 minutes of practice. To characterize their
hour of practice as equal would hardly be accurate. Assuming this is typical of their
practice routine and they are equally skilled at the start, which would you predict would
be the better shooter after only 100 hours of practice?”

The Unsung Hero of Deliberate Practice

Perhaps the greatest difference between deliberate practice and simple repetition is this:
feedback. Anyone who has mastered the art of deliberate practice—whether they are an
athlete like Ben Hogan or a writer like Ben Franklin—has developed methods for
receiving continual feedback on their performance.

There are many ways to receive feedback. Let's discuss two.

The first effective feedback system is measurement. The things we measure are the
things we improve. This holds true for the number of pages we read, the number of
pushups we do, the number of sales calls we make, and any other task that is important
to us. It is only through measurement that we have any proof of whether we are getting
better or worse.

The second effective feedback system is coaching. One consistent finding across
disciplines is that coaches are often essential for sustaining deliberate practice. In many
cases, it is nearly impossible to both perform a task and measure your progress at the
same time. Good coaches can track your progress, find small ways to improve, and hold
you accountable to delivering your best effort each day.

For additional ideas on how to implement deliberate practice, I recommend the

following interview with psychology professor Anders Ericsson, who is widely
considered to be the world's top expert on deliberate practice.

The Promise of Deliberate Practice

Humans have a remarkable capacity to improve their performance in nearly any area of
life if they train in the correct way. This is easier said than done.

Deliberate practice is not a comfortable activity. It requires sustained effort and

concentration. The people who master the art of deliberate practice are committed to
being lifelong learners—always exploring and experimenting and refining.

Deliberate practice is not a magic pill, but if you can manage to maintain your focus and
commitment, then the promise of deliberate practice is quite alluring: to get the most
out of what you've got.
The Myth and Magic of Deliberate
Practice

by James Clear | Deliberate Practice

Joe DiMaggio was one of the greatest hitters in baseball history. A three-time winner of
the Most Valuable Player award, DiMaggio was selected to the Major League All-Star
team in each of his thirteen seasons. He is best known for his remarkable hitting streak
during the 1941 season when he recorded a hit in fifty-six consecutive games—a record
that still stands more than seventy-five years later.

I recently heard a little-known story about how DiMaggio acquired his exceptional
ability.
Joe DiMaggio in 1939. Published by Bowman Gum for Play Ball Cards.
As the story goes, a journalist was interviewing DiMaggio at his home and asked him
what it felt like to be such a “natural hitter.” Without saying a word, he dragged the
reporter downstairs. In the shadows of the basement, DiMaggio picked up a bat and
began to repeat a series of practice swings. Before each swing, he would call out a
particular pitch such as “fastball, low and away” or “slider, inside” and adjust his
approach accordingly.

Once he finished the routine, DiMaggio set the bat down, picked up a piece of chalk, and
scratched a tally mark on the wall. Then he flicked on the lights to reveal thousands of
tally marks covering the basement walls. Supposedly, DiMaggio then looked at the
journalist and said, “Don't you ever tell me that I'm a natural hitter again.”
DiMaggio then looked at the journalist and said, “Don't you ever tell me
that I'm a natural hitter again.”

We love stories like this—stories that highlight how remarkable success is the product of
effort and perseverance. In recent years, the study of hard work has developed into a
scientific pursuit. Experts have begun to refer to focused and effortful training as
“deliberate practice” and it is widely considered to be the recipe for success.

There is no doubt that deliberate practice can be the recipe for success, but only under
certain conditions. If we are serious about maximizing our potential, then we need to
know when deliberate practice makes the difference between success and failure and
when it doesn't. Before we can capture the power of deliberate practice, we need to
understand its limitations.

The Vision of Greatness

In the early 1990s, a man named Louis Rosenbaum began analyzing the eyesight of
Major League baseball players. He soon found out that professional baseball players
were nothing like the normal person when it came to vision.
According to Rosenbaum's research, the average eyesight of a Major League position
player is 20/11. In other words, the typical professional baseball player can read letters
from twenty feet away that a normal person can only read from eleven feet away. Ted
Williams, who is widely regarded as the greatest hitter in the baseball history, reportedly
had 20/10 vision when he was tested by the military during WWII. The anatomical limit
for human vision is 20/8.

Most of Rosenbaum's research was conducted on the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball
team. According to him, “Half of the guys on the Dodgers' Major League roster were
20/10 uncorrected.”

Eyesight and visual acuity results of professional baseball players from 1993 to 1995. The data
above includes both minor league and major league players. (Source: American Journal of
Ophthalmology. November 1996.)
In his excellent book, The Sports Gene, author David Epstein explains that this visual
trend holds true at each level of the sport. On average, Major League players have better
vision than minor league players who have better vision than college players who have
better vision than the general population.
If you want to play professional baseball, it helps to practice like DiMaggio, but you also
need eyesight like an eagle. In highly competitive fields, deliberate practice is often
necessary, but not sufficient for success.

The Deliberate Practice Myth

The myth of deliberate practice is that you can fashion yourself into anything with
enough work and effort. While human beings do possess a remarkable ability to develop
their skills, there are limits to how far any individual can go. Your genes set a boundary
around what is possible.

In recent decades, behavioral geneticists have discovered that our genes impact nearly
every human trait. We are not merely talking about physical characteristics like height
and eyesight, but mental abilities as well. Your genes impact everything from your short-
term memory abilities to your mental processing speed to your willingness to practice.

One of my favorite examples is tennis great Steffi Graf. When she was tested against
other elite tennis players as a teenager, she not only scored the highest on physical
attributes like lung capacity and motor skills, but also on competitive desire. She was
that once-in-a-generation talent who was both the most-gifted and the most-driven
person on the court.
During a conversation I had with Robert Plomin, one of the top behavioral geneticists in
the world, he said, “It is now at the point where we have stopped testing to see if traits
have a genetic component because we literally can't find a single one that isn't
influenced by our genes.”

If you want to learn more about the power of behavioral genetics, this audio interview with
behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin explains how genes impact our daily habits and behaviors.
How big is the influence of genes on performance? It's hard to say. Some researchers
have estimated that our genes account for between 25 percent to 35 percent of our
differences in performance. Obviously, that number can vary wildly depending on the
field you're studying.

So where does this leave us?

Well, while genetics influence performance, they do not determine performance. Do not
confuse destiny with opportunity. Genes provide opportunity. They do not determine
our destiny. It's similar to a game of cards. You have a better opportunity if you are dealt
a better hand, but you also need to play the hand well to win.

Layer Your Skills

How do we play our hand well? How do we maximize our genetic potential in life—
whatever that might be? One strategy is to “layer your skills” on top of one another.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, explains the strategy perfectly. He writes, “Everyone
has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my
case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any
funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier
than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the
combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business
background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand
without living it.”
If you can't win by being better, then win by being different. By combining your skills,
you reduce the level of competition, which makes it much easier to stand out regardless
of your natural abilities.

The Magic of Deliberate Practice

Sun Tzu, the legendary military strategist who wrote The Art of War, believed in only
fighting battles where the odds were in his favor. He wrote, “In war, the victorious
strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won.”

Similarly, we should seek to fight battles where the genetic odds are in our favor. It is
impossible to try everything in life. Each of us could become any one of a billion
different things. Thus, if you aspire to maximize your success, then you should train
hard and practice deliberately in areas where the genetic odds are in your favor (or
where you can overlap your skills in a compelling way).

Deliberate practice is necessary for success, but it is not sufficient. The people at the top
of any competitive field are both well-suited and well-trained. To maximize your
potential, you need to not only engage in consistent and purposeful practice, but also to
align your ambitions with your natural abilities.

Regardless of where we choose to apply ourselves, deliberate practice can help us

maximize our potential—no matter what cards we were dealt. That is the magic of
deliberate practice. It turns potential into reality.