People typically are more status seeking than they admit to others or even themselves

The impact of status and the desire for it in society is easily underestimated, because status is a taboo. It is not well regarded to be status seeking, in fact, seeking status is often seen as low status – an idealised high status person already has everything they need, including status. In addition, it feels unpleasantly adjacent to thinking of people as inferior or superior. Status has a zero sum quality that makes it feel meaningless.

Hence many status games have evolved plausible deniability, allowing the status drive to be pursued while being hidden from others and even ourselves. People pursue hobbies that can bring genuine joy, connection and growth and also just happen to be expensive (e.g. fancy camera equipment), demand a significant amount of time (e.g. travel), intellectual energy (e.g. appreciating challenging art and understanding its context), skill (e.g. performing arts like dance or music) or physical fitness or impress others in some other way. We may fool ourselves into thinking we’re not seeking status when we are, e.g. believing we just want certain clothes for their quality etc. – because it is simpler to fool others when we also fool ourselves. Our hearts draw no clear line between practicality, pleasure, connection and status.

A lot of what exists in the world is due in large part to status drive, for example companies, beautiful buildings or art. Successful societies are organised in a way so that status more often is gained through net positive activities, e.g. solving problems and charging for that or creating art that enriches life, rather than negative ones like murdering rivals. Because much work is done for the sake of status, working hours do not decrease as much as productivity increases when technology improves. Unfortunately it also means wellbeing does not increase as much as one expects when societal wealth increases.

Status does indeed matter

In fact, the status drive makes sense, because status does matter. Most obviously, there is an intense high we feel after an increase in status – I remember that feeling after getting into Cambridge, or when making more money as an intern at quant trading shop Jane Street than many full time finance employees, or when introducing a beautiful girlfriend. And there is a corresponding crushing feeling when losing status, say when I did not receive a return offer from Jane Street. These intense feelings do not last, because hedonic adaptation brings us back towards our baseline after a while – but not all the way, because status has significant lasting impact on health and wellbeing:

• British civil servants of higher rank have lower mortality than low ranked ones (e.g. a risk ratio of 3.6 between the highest and lowest ranked ones for deaths from heart disease), despite receiving the same healthcare through the NHS. Much of the difference remains even after controlling for factors such as smoking and BMI, and even income does not appear to be the most important factor. In his book Status Syndrome, Michael Marmot, one of the authors of this Whitehall Study, lists many more examples of such health disparities among status gradients, for example with Oscar winners living 4 years longer than their co-stars or Oscar nominees. “Gradients in health abound. They run all the way down the social scale from the most to the least privileged, covering everyone in between. We see them in just about every society that has looked. Quite remarkably, we see them for diseases of poverty and for so-called diseases of affluence.”

• Baboons of low or unstable rank have increased cortisol compared to baboons with a stable high rank

• High status individuals have more serotonin activity

• And lower inflammation

• It is possible to change stress and other health biomarkers in monkeys by artificially changing their status

Status is about connection

But why is status so important? It is because we are social animals. As humans we strongly rely on connection. Our ancestors were doomed to almost certain death if expelled by their tribe, so social rejection feels viscerally threatening to us. Access to food, shelter and physical safety is less dependent on status in our current age, especially if living in a first-world welfare state. But we still carry the wiring from our ancestors with us. And connection is still key for thriving in a modern society – most of the achievements of our civilization, such as material abundance, are due to the cooperation of a very large number of individuals unseen in any other animal. If we want to have the full experience of life including raising children, we still need to attract a partner. Altogether, this amounts to our relationships having a massive impact on our well-being, with major studies such as the Harvard Study suggesting that they are in fact the most important factor for our health and happiness. The impact of loneliness and social isolation has been estimated to be equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness is correlated with other negative emotions such as sadness and worry.

Aside from our parental love (if we are lucky) and some government and charity support, love and support is generally not unconditional. Status is far from the only factor affecting the quality of our connections, but it is important, in particular for forming new connections.

I think of status as easily identifiable signals that indicate one of the following:

• The ability to help (or more rarely harm) others in some way, including changing their own status. For example a wealthy person can provide direct financial support or provide credible career advice and connections, or a physician friend can provide quick advice without having to go through the medical system. If in need of a less taboo word, one might call this credibility. Sometimes, such as in a job hierarchy, a higher status person formally is entitled to order the lower status person around – but the reason the lower status person obeys is mostly still that the higher status person can improve or worsen their life

• A general impressiveness, for example a beautiful highly symmetric face (most relevant in a dating context through indicating strong genes, but also a proxy for status of the first type due to both being correlated)

Most forms of status fit both of the definitions above.

Status signals make other people interested in spending their scarce time to explore forming a relationship with us. A homeless beggar can still make friends, but mostly with other homeless people, who have limitations in terms of the type of support they can give. Higher status allows us to form connections more easily with other people who also have higher status and ability to help, while sacrificing less of our freedom and authenticity. Tim Ferris can have Peter Attia as his physician, someone of average or moderately high status cannot. Status outlasts any individual relationship (unless that relationship is the cause of the status), providing a sense of stability and resilience in the face of loss of both romantic and platonic relationships – hence the common urge to “upgrade” ourselves and our lives (actually our status) after a breakup.

Autonomy and social support are both crucial for our health and wellbeing. Status allows us to gain more support while giving up less autonomy.

The status drive can be anxiety provoking

The status drive can be anxiety inducing. To a large part that is due to achievements being benchmarked to age – think about the “Forbes 30 under 30” award, or people being celebrated for being the youngest ever person to achieve something. This can make life feel like a race, with a feeling best described by the red queen in Alice in Wonderland “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” An excessive focus on status can remove playfulness and ease from life, and make it feel meaningless. Ultimately a hunger for status can be insatiable: As we rise in status, we become exposed to higher status people, and our goals can easily shift. A focus on extrinsic goals tends to reduce wellbeing.

Ironically, a highly urgent status drive can reduce status:

• An anxious, contracted urgent energy can appear low status

• Long term status (and happiness more generally) profits from spending our time on activities that deeply align with our personality. Sometimes that requires a change of direction in our life, e.g. in our career. But such a shift often leads to a status drop in the short- to mid-term, because we are less experienced in the new activity and have less of a reputation to lean on

• If we resent high status people, we may pointlessly try to drag them down in our mind or even reality. It would be more conducive for our own status to instead either learn form them, or mostly ignore them because their method of achieving status is not suitable for us

• More generally, making certain achievements part of our identity can make it harder to have a growth mindset – recognizing opportunities for improvement may threaten our identity

Excessive status-drive can hurt connection directly, defeating the original goal:

• If we focus too much on status when choosing friends, we may neglect other qualities important for a good relationship, such as kindness and integrity. Even worse, if we view status as a linear scale, we can view anyone who wants a relationship with us as being lower status than us and hence not worthwhile. We end up wanting what we cannot have – a very isolating attitude

• Through workaholism we may view relationships as a nuisance and not give them enough attention. I sometimes felt like this when working at McKinsey, and never want to work this much again – I want to be available to my loved ones at relatively short notice

• Instead of being present with others in a relaxed way, we may be anxiously focused on achieving some outcome, or validation of our status

• Excessive impression management can prevent vulnerability and hence a deep, authentic connection

• We may try to gain others respect by having them recognize us as superior, for example by bragging, or demonstrating and asserting our knowledge and expertise. But they may end up liking us less because they feel put down or not recognized, and because we’re not engaging in a real dialogue

• We may consciously drop loyal, supportive friends whose company we enjoy when we gain status, believing that outgrowing friends is part of or evidence of growth. Less harshly, we may excessively deprioritize existing relationships when busy with new opportunities from increased status. We may come to regret doing this, because a deeply trusting and committed relationship takes time to build, it takes time for challenges to occur that test the relationship. The new higher status friends have not yet proven themselves in the same way

• Conversely, the fear of others abandoning us after an increase in their status may make it difficult for us to be happy for and supportive of our friends’ successes. My experience is that this fear is not completely unfounded, which certainly increased my status anxiety – but if we allow ourselves to be an angry, envious, competitive person, we may drive away also those people that would have maintained the relationship even if they gain a lot of status. Status can have a win-lose quality – but overall, social life is not like that

How can we deal with our drive for status?

I believe the best way is to find a balance between different approaches to address our desire for connection:

1. A decent ability to meet our needs independently from the support of others

2. Relationship skills, since successful relationships are very much not only about status

3. Several sources of status that align well with our values and abilities

One approach is to reduce the need for status by reducing the need for connection and being okay or even feeling great being alone. After all, the practical need for connection is less critical in modern life than it used to be in primal times. Maybe we can adapt our psyche to better match those changes. For example by

• Acquiring financial resources so that we are less dependent on others

• Trying to meet our own emotional needs for being seen, validated and supported, e.g. through journaling

• Raising a pet

• Hiring a therapist, who will generally not refuse to work with us because of low status or poor relationship skills, as long as we pay them and treat them with basic respect

• Experientially realising that nothing bad happens when are alone, for example as described here by Aella: “You’re drunk with the agony of loneliness and it’s in you now, underneath the skin of your palms. There’s nothing left to bring yourself into contact with, nothing else to look for, because that pain is now a part of the You that Looks. You are in the world where you have been abandoned. You have grieved it, are grieving it, will always grieve it. It was hard when the cold was settling into you, but now that it’s here, you’re… somehow okay? It still hurts, but the hurt is quiet. You aren’t moving into it or against it, and in that stillness, where the current has finally settled, you find peace. You’ve plunged in and somehow still have consciousness behind your eyes and you’re somehow okay. And there you find the lesson—in a world where you are alone, you will still be okay.”

Less appealing to me is to dismiss the value of others through misanthropy, like Schopenhauer does: “We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire an adequate knowledge of the superficial and futile nature of their thoughts, of the narrowness of their views, of the paltriness of their sentiments, of the perversity of their opinions, and of the number of their errors. We shall then see that whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honour.”

In general, people who take the independence approach too far, not working on building relationships at all and becoming a hermit instead, never seem genuinely happy to me. And we should never shame ourselves for our desire for connection, it is after all natural. But a decent amount of independence is helpful, and can also make it easier to build relationships, because we don’t need to ask too much of people too quickly (at its most extreme, such neediness can take the form of borderline syndrome, which can be very difficult for the sufferer as well as the people around them). And in the process of building independence we usually learn skills that can bring value to others. In a sense most of us follow the independence path to a certain degree when we grow up and more and more reduce our dependence on our parents.

Status is just one of several factors that secures relationships, and most important in the beginning. Purely focusing on status means becoming a narcissist and sociopath – with the consequence that most emotionally intelligent people will try to avoid us. Many other things are also important aside from status:

• Being present and attentive when interacting

• Active listening through paraphrasing etc.

• Putting ourselves into other people’s shoes to better understand them and how we can support them

• Validating their feelings

• Gradually increasing mutual investment and vulnerability

• Behaving with integrity, including

  • Honesty

  • Coming through on commitments

• Being available and ready to offer

  • Practical support

  • Emotional support (consistently available emotional comfort is in fact a large part of what makes drugs and certain behaviours addictive – they are a substitute for the ready availability of comfort from real consistent relationships)

Just being available and kind is not enough however, we need to actually have a decent amount of value to offer. We need to be both visibly able to provide value, and willing to do so. And we need to be careful sometimes to not offer too much to people who have demonstrated that they are not willing to reciprocate – unless they are people we want to help unconditionally out of a sense of purpose, like children or the disadvantaged. If we overinvest thanklessly, we may sabotage our ability to obtain status, and we may become cynical and resentful – a state that will ultimately sabotage connection. And people may lose respect for us, because they sense that we do not respect ourselves.

As adults we can choose our status games

As children we are stuck in a social environment (family and school mostly), so we may have to bend more to fit in, being inauthentic or playing status games we don’t find otherwise valuable. The same was probably true for most adults living in small tribes in ancient times. But as adults in the modern world such situations are rather rare – for example prison, and to a lesser degree being stuck in a job due to financial commitments with no Fuck You Money to cover them.

We need to get along reasonably with most people, but we only need to build deep connections with a small number of people in the world. We do not need to make people we don’t like love us. There are large numbers of status games we can play, that can help us find connection with different kinds of people.

Global status games can make a wide variety of people impressed with us and more likely to connect with us, e.g.:

• Wealth

• A degree from a prestigious university

• Beyond wealth, a prestigious career. These can be careers that receive a lot of media coverage and stereotyping, like being an astronaut. Or ones that can provide direct aid to friends, such as being a physician or lawyer.

• A followership on social media

• Fitness and physical beauty

• A calm, confident, happy energy

• A congruent sense of style

• Social intuition

• A large amount of interesting experiences and stories

• Wise (at least in appearance) thoughts on life built from such experiences and reflection

• A strong sense of humour with a large repertoire of jokes and / or on the spot wittiness

• Conspicuous leisure, e.g. demonstrated through travel posts

• A high status partner

• An apparently happy, well functioning family

• A recognized contribution to the world

Local status games can provide a lot of opportunity for connection with people that share those interests or are in the relevant community, e.g.:

• Success in a hobby, e.g. being a capable dancer or pool player. Hobbies can also provide global status if

  • They are widely appreciated and can be displayed somewhat frequently, e.g. singing

  • A professional or celebrity level is reached

• Being friends with high status people

• Knowing how to get into exclusive parties, e.g. in Berlin with its confusing and ever changing dress codes (A bohemian status game that provides an alternative to mainstream status games – “Now the nerds and weirdos can keep the normies out”)

• Taking “badass” physical risks, e.g. fights, dangerous sports and stunts, drug use, opening beer bottles using teeth (especially among males, teenagers and in high crime circles)

Because of the multitude of status games, it is not possible to place people on a linear status hierarchy. That is a good thing, because as mentioned earlier, thinking of status as a singular quantity can lead to all kinds of problems – for example believing that anyone who likes us must be lower status than ourselves. By looking at status as something diversified, we can respect what others bring to the table without viewing ourselves as inferior.

It is definitely impossible to succeed at every status game. Luckily we don’t need to, people generally don’t look down on us for not having some accomplishment that they have, instead they’re attracted by what we are good at. It is risky to focus on one status game to the detriment of everything else, in case we cannot continue with it, or want to impress someone who does not care about it. At the same time, spreading ourselves too thin limits our potential for high status or a large positive impact in the world, as this usually requires some sort of specialisation. So how do we choose? At least some of our status games should ideally be global, so that we can engage with a large variety of people. Local status games are also valuable though, fantastic deep individual connections can come from them. What we definitely want to be careful about are fake engineered activities that don’t actually bring much status, e.g.

• The fictional status accruing to our character in a video game

• Many forms of consumption that are marketed as high status (though some forms of conspicuous consumption can genuinely bring status)

Beyond that, a status game we choose should as much as possible be something

• We enjoy

• We are talented at / comes easy to us

• We can feel authentic in

Unless an activity brings a lot of status quickly, it also should have another benefit or several, like

• Health, including mental health

• Financial security and freedom

• Connection

• Meaning and contribution, especially given that status can feel meaningless and zero-sum

This incidentally also enables the plausible deniability discussed earlier. Across our activities, we want each of the above four life ingredients covered in at least one way in our life. I abandoned physics for example, because while it offers status and can be enjoyable (as well as frustrating at times),

• It does not provide much deep connection

• It is not a very effective path towards wealth relative to how difficult it is

• I consider the practical impact of the kind of fundamental theoretical physics I did pretty negligible

It is also worth keeping in mind that some of our status activities can actually damage the other ingredients of a good life – for example high-level competitive sports often damages health. It is also not certain that every kind of status is helpful – mainstream fame comes with significant downsides, status among a smaller group of people we find highly valuable could be preferable.

In many cases people may acquire status without thinking about it if they pursue the above four goals for their own sake. This does not always happen though, e.g.

• A focus on meaning can lead to being an unsung hero. The lack of status may also make it difficult to create the maximum positive impact, because status helps us get things done, including meaningful things

• A focus on enjoyment can lead to a low status nerd life. This can be quite lonely, especially if the nerd cannot find community with others who share that interest (i.e. a local status game). Nerds with high global status usually enjoy an activity that brings plenty of value to others, e.g. IT

If we are reasonably confident however that what brings us joy and meaning also gets us a decent amount of status, we can just pursue the joy and meaning etc. without thinking about status all the time – this can feel more wholesome.

Status tends to become less important as we age

Status is more important for forming new relationships than maintaining old ones. As people get older, they tend to accumulate loyal, loving long-term friendships as well as a long term romantic partnership. These relationships are supported by a strong foundation of gratitude, trust and deep understanding that new relationships could not replace, even if those new relationships are with people of significantly higher status. As a friend put it to me: “I would not leave my husband even if I found someone who was better in every single way”. Hence the importance of status decreases continuously from a peak in adolescence, and can become pretty small in old age. Together with the status taboo, this causes a lot of people to give advice not to care about status – this advice is helpful in the sense that as we advance through life, it makes sense to reduce how much we care about status. But this does not mean it would be good advice for a teenager to try to not care about status at all.

Being conscious of status in a relaxed way

Ultimately, status does impact well-being, and we do not need to pretend that it does not. But we also do not need to be obsessed with it – it probably evolved in large part to optimise our procreation rather than our happiness. And it is only one of several ingredients for strong relationships of all kinds. There will always be people of lower and higher status than us. We can have meaningful connections no matter what our status, status just affects the range of people we can build relationships with.

In my 20s, I lived my life implicitly under the assumption that I would live forever. This state of ignorance has a number of advantages:

• There is not much need to fear missing out. I can just try something out and do something else later, there is no need to overthink decisions

• If I want something I do not have, I can tell myself I can work towards having it or something similar, and will probably get it eventually

• Any problem I currently have can be mentally reframed with a growth mindset: Whatever skill I am lacking I can learn

• I can be generous with time towards others, and in that way avoid many difficult conversations where I say no to requests, because there is always time later for my own priorities

There is a wonderful lightness in living in such a carefree way, focusing on what we enjoy doing in the moment. Now at 34, with early visible signs of ageing beginning to appear, and the biological clock becoming more relevant for potential partners (representing a sort of mini death of possibilities) I am more and more drawn to thinking about death. Below are some of the approaches I have seen on how to address our mortality:

Subscribe now

Life extension

The most obvious answer is to try to make the problem go away, and of course there is an enthusiastic community investigating life extension in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Those interventions should (and do) increase health span not just life span, i.e. delay the diseases associated with ageing. So far, what everyone agrees on are mostly still the basics, which luckily also improve quality of life

• An exercise regime including strength, high intensity cardio, moderate intensity cardio (“Zone 2 training”, which is thought to have different benefits to high intensity training), balance and flexibility

• Avoiding processed foods, especially ones involving added sugar and other fast carbs or nitrites

• 8 hours of sleep opportunity

• Destressing, e.g. through avoiding overwork, having a strong loving social support network we feel comfortable being vulnerable with, and practices such as meditation, breathwork or emotional release

What is clear is that this alone will not get us a dramatically long health span, it only optimises our chances to live until something like 90. What is discovered in terms of supplements and pharmaceuticals shows some promise, but so far appears mostly incremental. I make an effort to extend my healthspan while trying to not get too attached to the outcome, and being prepared for two scenarios:

• Living with the current life expectancy, or of course it being cut short through an accident or sickness. This means we should not delay experiences that are important to us for too long, including ones that require commitment

• A dramatically longer life expectancy of potentially hundreds of years, if the relevant technologies do come through fast enough. That means being more cautious about risks of permanent injury or death than we would be if we only had the normal life expectancy on the table, in order to realise the full potential of a long life

Making the most of what we got

The big risk of ignoring thinking about death completely because of the grief those thoughts can bring, is that we make decisions that we later regret when the reality of mortality eventually catches up on us, e.g. during a midlife crisis. While we can of course talk endlessly about how to live the best possible life, I believe there are a few key points where death affects what makes sense to do: In the face of death we can less afford certain lazy choices. Delaying decisions for a long time means that we will not experience certain things we can only experience through commitment. A big one for me was letting go of succeeding in difficult challenges that satisfy my ego, but do not help improve my life much in the long run (e.g. I enjoyed studying fundamental physics, but I would be less drawn to it now). Delayed gratification, so often praised in self improvement content, has its obvious limits if gratification is delayed to such a degree that life just passes by without being enjoyed .We can give permission to treat ourselves nicely everyday. We want to try to make sure that we enjoy most of the activities we engage in day to day, both by choosing the right activities, as well as a mindset of presence, calm, compassion and curiosity.

“The solution is to invest more fully in atelic activities like going for a walk, spending time with friends, appreciating art or nature, parenting or working hard. There may not be a change in what you do from day to day. It is enough to adjust your attitude, what you love: to value not just projects, but the process of raising kids, maintaining friendships, doing your job.” Midlife by Kieran Setiya

On the other hand we do want to work on improving our life - in addition to the joy of that work in itself, it gives us something to look forward to, to compensate for the eventual physical deterioration. This can include:

• Deeper and more meaningful relationships

• Working through our issues and the associated increased inner peace

• Better understanding of what we like (e.g. in terms of people, environments and activities) and designing our life around it

• Improved material standards and the new experiences this opens up as well as removal of certain worries and inconveniences

This does not prevent us from enjoying the process of improving our life, as well as the outcomes.

One approach to keeping death in mind when making decisions is the following death meditation from buddhism:

• If you died tomorrow, what would you do?

• If you died in a week what would you do?

• If you died in a year, what would you do?

• If you were on your deathbed now, how would you feel?”

There are several ways to go astray if trying to make the most of life. We can feel a sense of urgency that itself takes the joy out of life. The opposite of that would be to accept a simpler, less impressive in a flashy way maybe, but calmer and more peaceful life full of dignity. The sense of urgency can be especially strong when first coming to terms with mortality - I feel that I initially started assuming that life is shorter than it really is, that I am running out of time, when really I still have the majority of life ahead of me. We can become perfectionistic and develop an inner critic scolding ourselves for not living optimally. In fact, having self compassion (including self compassion for lacking self compassion) is one way to make the most of life.

One aspect I am still looking for a balance for is how generous to be with my time towards others. Saying no to others’ demands for our time is often encouraged, e.g. in The Shortness of Life by Seneca “I am always surprised to see some people demanding the time of others and meeting a most obliging response. Both sides have in view the reason for which the time is asked and neither regards the time itself - as if nothing there is being asked for and nothing given”. Saying no is definitely something that often needs to be done to not end up with a life that is controlled by others, especially ones who are very demanding without reciprocating. Except for those bigger examples I like to not embrace this perspective too much however, because life feels warmer when I give somewhat readily without overthinking it, it strengthens relationships as well as being rewarding in itself.

Grieving and acceptance

In order to be able to make the most of what we got, we need to allow the reality of a finite lifespan into our consciousness.

Mark Manson in the Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck “While death is bad, it is inevitable. Therefore, we should not avoid this realization, but rather come to terms with it as best we can”

This may lead to feelings of sadness. Luckily, if we allow this sadness, we can grieve the loss of the illusion of immortality, and the sadness gradually mellows. Our happiness tends to revert to a set point despite changing circumstances (or in this case a changing perception of circumstances) through hedonic adaptation.

“The force that there is something that is going to take me out is something I cannot control, so I might as well make peace with it”

“What do you do about a heartbreak? You cry, you cry”

Season 1 Episode 8, Midnight Gospel

The smaller losses we have in life, such as breakups or decisions that remove possible life paths, can be seen as small deaths that may also need to be grieved (while making sure to also notice the gains that come with them, whether through what you committed to, or simply that space is freed up to find something new) - I feel there is a synergy between accepting those losses and the impermanence of life as a whole. In addition, through meditation we can consciously experience impermanence (mainly of our thoughts, feelings and emotional sensations) and get comfortable with it to a certain degree.

Gratitude for what we have in the face of impermanence

Instead of despairing on the shortness of life, we can cultivate gratitude for the moments we do have. Gratitude is not just pleasant, it also makes logical sense: Since we are not conscious when we are dead, being dead is really not that bad, it is neutral - instead being alive is positive, and something worth celebrating. This is a principle that can apply to many things that we likely eventually lose, such as relationships especially with people older than us, or simply the experience of joy. Gratitude can also be used as an antidote to the fear of missing out: Instead of being sad that we cannot have all experiences that life offers, we can be grateful that there are always lots of options available to experience if we want to, e.g. more countries to visit, things to learn and people to get to know if we want to, rather than being bothered by not having time to do all of those things. One factor that helps gratitude is that we have more detailed knowledge of what we have than of what we do not have. We can focus on these details to help our appreciation, and divert attention from what we do not have. In a sense that helps us fall in love with the life we have in a similar way to how we uniquely appreciate the individual personality traits of someone we love, even though we could also love another person with different quirks.

Gratitude is harder during difficult times. Though it can still be helpful to remind ourselves of the positive things we still have during those times, it might be better to focus on improving life rather than worrying about its shortness.

Seeing the positive in mortality

An even stronger stance is to actually be grateful for the impermanence of life. Some people find death gives life, and especially decisions, meaning, e.g. Mark Manson in The Subtle Art Of Not Giving a Fuck “Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero”. The sense of urgency can help us make difficult choices and have difficult conversations that we may otherwise delay indefinitely, thereby helping improve our lives. We may think about what is truly important more deeply than we otherwise would. Some people also feel like knowledge of mortality makes them experience life more fully, e.g. from Midnight Gospel S1E8: “The closer I am to physical death, the more alive I feel, the more present I feel, the more real I am.” Some believe that impermanence enables activities being enjoyable, e.g. posing the question “Would you enjoy eating a cake if you keep eating it forever?” - what this ignores in my view however is that there is an almost infinite amount of possibilities of how to live our lives, if we want impermanence we can always choose to make changes. At the very least, I believe it is possible to fill a lifetime of at least several hundred years with interesting things to do, as well as experiencing everything more deeply by cultivating more and more presence, awareness and curiosity. Finally, a societal argument can be made that old people need to die to make space for their descendants, and to enable cultural progress.

I personally struggle to embrace any of these lines of thinking, but I think this approach can be helpful for many people. Viewing something positively has an emotional value in itself, especially if we cannot do much to change it.

Legacy

We can create a sort of immortality by creating impact in the world that extends beyond our lifetime, whether through meaningful paid or unpaid work, day to day influence on the people around us or having children, e.g. explained like this by Thich Nhat Hanh:

“This body of mine will disintegrate, but my actions will continue me. In my daily life, I always practice to see my continuation around me. We don't need to wait until the total dissolution of this body to continue.. we continue in every moment. If you think I am only this body, then you have not truly seen me. When you look at my friends, you see my continuation. When you see someone walking with mindfulness and compassion, you know he is my continuation. I don’t see why we have to say “I will die”, because I can already see myself in you, in other people, and in future generations.”

To me, having a significant and lasting impact appears meaningful quite independently of my lifespan.

Ignorance / not thinking about it

We can also simply strive to avoid the difficult thoughts and feelings associated with thinking about death, similar to what I described in the beginning, using one of two approaches:

• Being optimistic that life extension technologies will have a massive impact

• Simply avoiding / letting go of the thoughts in the day to day, e.g. through distraction, meditation, or a focus on the present moment, taking the lack of worry animals experience as an inspiration

Putting it all together

I think that life extension always plays an important role, the earlier we start with it the better. Which of the other approaches is most useful however depends on where we are in life: Ignorance seems like the right approach for a small child. Thinking of how to make the most of it, and the grief and acceptance that is required for it, can already make sense as early as the teenage years in my view. Not thinking about it, when mentally possible, can make sense if we have taken a number of decisions that take into account our limited lifespan, and do not want to question those decisions for the time being - there are times and places to think about death, but probably not all times and places, unless you experience that such constant awareness improves your appreciation of each moment. Gratitude, while always valuable (I think this is probably the most important of all the approaches), becomes more and more important the more commitments are made - we want to appreciate all that is wonderful about the life we have chosen. Finally, I expect legacy, and the appreciation of it, to play an important role towards the later years.

Subscribe now

I spent a little over four years working at McKinsey. One of my motivations was to pick up the sort of business soft skills one does not learn when studying physics. McKinsey is a great environment to do this given

• Many trainings focused on interpersonal and other soft skills

• Lots of opportunities to practice, due to interactions with many different clients and colleagues

• A deep feedback culture, consisting of ad hoc comments, as well as dedicated feedback time every ~2 weeks in a direct reporting relationship and about once a month in relationship across two layers

Here are some of the things I learned – some of which I plan to keep, some of which I consider harmful outside the McKinsey context, and some of which I see as double edged swords.

1. Things I am taking away to keep

Syndication

Before presenting a result to senior stakeholders, we want to first test it with relevant junior stakeholders. That way

• We may receive input that improves the work

• The junior stakeholders may support us when we are challenged by the senior stakeholders

• If we do not agree with the junior stakeholders’ input, at least they feel heard, and we can ideally peacefully agree to disagree

To make syndication as smooth as possible, we need to take it into account when planning the timing of our work. We need to give the people we need to syndicate enough time to find slots in their calendars and to read the materials, as well as ourselves enough time to integrate the feedback we receive.

Client meeting structure

The following structure worked for most client meetings:

• Some small talk to connect with the client – easily forgotten when in a rush

• Recapping of where we are at – we remember, but the client may not

• Starting with our agenda of things we want to get through – but, and this was my most important learning, releasing that agenda if the client wants to talk about something else / goes off on a tangent. This feels very non-intuitive when under stress, and comes with a time cost, but has several advantages

  • Important information may be uncovered, after all the client has some sort of reason to bring these topics up

  • It strengthens the relationship. For example, after a meeting that lasted for 3 hours instead of 1, a client said: “I used to be very sceptical of McKinsey, but I now changed my mind. Finally someone is listening to me”

  • Because they feel listened to, the client will usually be happy to make time for a follow-up meeting, where the original agenda can be completed

Addressing feelings as well as facts

When people talk about their problems, they do not necessarily want just their problems solved (or at all), they also want to feel heard, have their feelings recognized as valid and understandable, and receive emotional support. When we go straight into problem solving, they may be in a less productive mindset and the relationship may suffer. In non-professional relationship guides, it is commonly said that we should not give advice at all. I do not believe that is the right approach in a work context (and probably also not in a personal context in my opinion), instead we can

1. First provide empathy and emotional support (“When [something similar] happened to me I also found that very difficult”, “I can’t imagine how that feels”)

2. When it looks like the person feels heard try to jointly solve the problem (“Have you considered xxx?”)

Putting yourself into the shoes of the other person

If we want to meet other people’s needs, and influence them to meet our needs, we need to put ourselves into their shoes. So before an important conversation it helps to formally go through a framework like this:

1. What is the current situation of the topic we want to address, as well as my / my team’s relationship with that person?

2. What outcome are we looking for?

3. What is the best way to reach the outcome, given 1.?

More generally, I developed the habit of imagining how I would feel when hearing what I am about to say before saying it, potentially adjusted for known differences between me and the conversation partner. For example, in the case of a late deliverable, instead of saying “I am upset with you because you have not sent this to me yet”, we can ask “Are there any roadblocks that prevent you from completing this? Can I help in any way?”

Making ourselves heard

To get ahead, it helps tremendously if the seniors are actually aware of us. Sometimes direct supervisors will make the effort to actively create visibility for us, but usually they are worrying about other things, or even want to hog visibility for themselves. That meant I had to make an effort to actively be visible. Initially in my first few months I started with this by going into meetings with senior internal stakeholders with the intention to say at least one meaningful thing. In big meetings where it can be hard to get a word in, one neat trick is to start speaking when it seems like a person is about to finish their sentence, rather than waiting for them to finish completely. An often mentioned McKinsey classic that also helps is top down communication: We want to start with the takeaway first. The takeaway will then be accepted or we will be asked for reasons. If we start with the reasons and we lose people’s attention, we may never get to say the takeaway. And if we do get to the takeaway after starting with the reasons, and it turns out the takeaway was actually uncontroversial, we have spent more of everyone’s time than needed.

2. Double edged swords

Ownership mindset

Stakeholders (both internal and external) want problems to be solved, and want to be able to trust that their people will get it done. They do not want to have to worry about bad surprises. This means it creates a lot of value to actively take ownership of the problem and try to find the solution, even if the problem is someone else’s fault. The risk of the ownership mindset is to let ourselves be exploited, by reflexively taking on ownership for everything that is asked of us rather than pushing back, or even taking ownership when noone actually wants us to.

Quality control

When studying physics, I could make a mistake in a problem and still get most of the marks. When creating work output this is not the case: We really want to make a good effort to make sure our stuff does not contain mistakes. I created a checklist for that purpose that I would go through before sending off my deliverables. Where quality control can become a problem is if it is taken to excess, and focused on optics. I cannot recall a single instance where a client complained about formatting (which many other consultants loved to do), but many instances where they would have liked to get involved earlier and looked at some work in progress material (see syndication).

3. To be unlearned

Working until the last minute

In university, I would often complete my assignments as much as months in advance – doing so reduced my stress levels without any downsides. This approach does not work in McKinsey for two reasons

• The context might change, making work done earlier less relevant

• It can be difficult to get anyone to look at the work if it is not urgent yet, so there is always a chance of rush due to last minute input

• Being done ahead of time invites additional work, up until the real deadline

While the last problem can be addressed by not sharing the work until the last minute, the first two cannot. I thus learned to become more accepting of the stress of working close to the deadline. While I am convinced this is the right strategy at McKinsey, and probably at most other corporates, for self-directed work I see it as much more useful to be ahead of things.

Sleep deprivation

At McKinsey many people still have the belief that by working more and sleeping less, we will get more done and at higher quality. A dialogue between a well-meaning manager and a nervous team member before a presentation that illustrates this:

Manager: “Did you work until 4 am last night to prepare this?”

Team member: “Yes”

Manager: “Then why are you worried? You have put in the effort to create quality output. You will be fine, it will hold up”

The evidence that sleep deprivation significantly hurts performance is now about as conclusive as things can get in psychology (e.g. here and here). Within McKinsey, it is increasingly often mentioned in training programs or documents, like this one. But it is not always recognized among partners in their actions – the consultants that care deeply about sleep tend to leave before becoming partners.

4. Other

One thing I did not mention is problem solving, even though McKinsey is often associated with that. There are two reasons for this:

• My learning intention was focused on communication / relationship skills

• I actually believe that the way we solved problems is quite specific to large professional services firms. A few decades ago, when generalist methodologies like issue trees became popular, McKinsey was much smaller, and there was not much specialist knowledge available. Now, with a much larger community that is significantly more specialised, these generalist tools are rarely used and the problem solving process usually goes something like this:

  • Identify the problem

  • Search the intranet and reach out to some well-connected people to find relevant existing materials and experts

  • Choose one of the previously undertaken approaches found in the previous step

  • Execute, copying as much previous work as possible to preserve time for the rest of the work

Overall, I am grateful for the many things I learned at McKinsey, but also making an active effort to returning to my own best practices where I lost them a little bit in order to fit in. It is also great to have more free time for unrelated personal development.

A lot of people take an approach of being tough on themselves in order to facilitate growth, which when framed positively can be called accountability or taking responsibility. I certainly have often done so myself. However this approach comes with clear downsides – not only has self criticism a direct negative effect on our mood, up to potentially the point of depression, it can also inhibit growth and performance by draining our energy, or driving us towards avoidance behaviours. Luckily, I believe that a better, much more pleasant way is often possible, involving the following four steps:

1. Recognize the self criticism

2. Appreciate the upsides of dropping the self criticism

3. Understand the purpose and benefits of the self criticism

4. Find alternative ways to achieve the same purpose and benefits. Often these alternative ways can involve self compassion as a key part

Subscribe now

Recognize the self criticism

A critical voice might make us miserable despite operating subconsciously. To work on it and find an alternative path, we first need to recognize what is happening. The following can help us recognize critical voices

• Stream of consciousness journaling, i.e. simply writing down all the thoughts that come to our mind. I find this especially helpful when done immediately during a period of bad mood

• Meditation, which trains us to notice when we are lost in thought. Regular practice can help us notice thoughts more readily when they appear day to day. This one is great to practice also when currently in a good mood, in preparation for when we are not. I have found both meditation focused on the breath but actively noting thoughts as well as open awareness practices helpful

• Simply going for a walk and letting our thoughts wander while maintaining a decent amount of awareness of them. It is perfectly fine to to have some attention also on the beauty of the surroundings or the occasional dog to pet

Appreciate the upsides of dropping the self criticism

There are obvious direct benefits to happiness from replacing self criticism with self compassion. But there are also benefits beyond that, that can improve productivity as well as happiness. We free up energy previously used for beating ourselves up, so that we can use it for more productive purposes. We can let go of harmful avoidant / addictive behaviours that we use to bring comfort or distraction from the self criticism, such as excessive screen use. By accepting ourselves as imperfect, we can stop denying weaknesses we currently have – facing reality is the first step to actually working on those weaknesses, hence a sort of at least temporary acceptance is the precondition for growth. The resulting increase of self esteem from increased self compassion can even improve our relationships, by preventing “I don’t want to be part of a club that would accept me as a member” patterns or us pushing others to give us external validation to the point of exhausting them.

Understand the purpose and benefits of the self criticism

Recognizing the harms of self criticism can be helpful but is often not sufficient, and can even lead to a meta self criticism like “Why can I not be less self critical, what’s wrong with me?”. To make progress, we often also need to appreciate the purpose of the self criticism. Sometimes that purpose only exists in the past (e.g. needing to be self critical to be accepted by our parents) and simply realizing that, and convincing the critical part of it, is a major step towards letting go. Having experiences that contradict the unhelpful core belief and bringing conscious awareness to that contradiction can be helpful for letting go of such outdated beliefs. Sometimes the purpose is still meaningful in the present, e.g. getting us to work, go to the gym or avoid harmful behaviours like eating junk, and it is worthwhile appreciating that.

This “embracing of the inner critic”, i.e. understanding and appreciating how it is trying to help us, can often by itself create a significant improvement in well-being.

Find alternative ways to achieve the same purpose and benefits

If the harsh method of helping us function still has a benefit, it can be much easier to let go of if we find a new method to get the same benefit. Sometimes these methods can be quite practical as detailed in my Productivity without Anxiety post, e.g. working in a dedicated space instead of the bedroom to have more energy. Most interestingly, self-compassion can often actually bring the same benefit as self-criticism:

• Instead of beating ourselves up for procrastinating, we can forgive ourselves for potentially failing / imperfectly completing the task we are procrastinating

• Instead of punishing ourselves for being indecisive, we can forgive ourselves for bad decisions in the past, and, crucially in advance for the future

• Instead of berating ourselves for not approaching a potential romantic partner, we can relax the need to achieve a certain outcome (the potential partner’s approval) to feel good about ourselves

• Instead of criticizing ourselves for making a mistake, we can celebrate that we noticed it

I believe it is important not to be perfectionist in this endeavor – if we cannot find a good replacement for a less compassionate method that helps us function in the world, the right choice might be to keep the harsh method for the time being – sometimes we just need to give ourselves a kick to do something uncomfortable but important. But over time we can discover more and more self-compassionate ways that help us ensure well-being in the current moment while still working to have a good future.

Environmental engineering

We can help get ourselves into the right mindset for the task at hand by separating the environments for work, play and sleep. For example I

• Try to work outside the home (i.e. in an office or café), or at least not in the bedroom

• Use different laptops for work and entertainment / social media

• Eliminate distractions where possible, e.g. turning phone to airplane mode

• Work during the daylight hours and play / rest when it is dark

• When working either be alone or surround myself with people who also are in work mode

When encountering an energy slump, it can sometimes help to work in a new environment to be energized by the associated novelty. I used this technique frequently doing my time studying physics when facing an energy slump, for example by switching to a new library, working in a park, or even on top of a historic tower. More on that here:

Habits

If we do something regularly enough, it becomes a habit that becomes automatic. If that behaviour is negative this is a downside – we continue the behaviour mindlessly, and once we realise it is a problem may need willpower to control it. But on the positive side, we can also automatically maintain positive behaviours. By deliberately turning all the desired activities that allow for regularity into habits, we can free up our willpower for work that is more variable. I find it easiest to keep a daily habit, as opposed to one say 4 times a week. For example by turning exercise into a daily habit (i.e. exercising every day, limiting it to a bit of stretching if my body really feels like it needs a rest day), it does not take that much effort anymore and I can use my remaining willpower on tasks I do more irregularly, such as writing this post. Environmental engineering can also be thought of as a way of building a habit: The environment becomes a trigger for the habit or doing work, or relaxing, and so on. Atomic Habits by James Clear is a great introduction on all things habit.

Focus meditation

In focus meditation we learn to maintain focus on some anchor, e.g. the breath or a visualisation, and gently bring the attention back to that anchor when the mind eventually drifts. Doing this gently is key - we want to maintain kindness rather than taking this exercise as an opportunity to practice beating ourselves up. While this has a number of important benefits unrelated to work, like directly reduced stress and insight about how the mind works, it also helps to maintain focus at work, with that spirit of gentleness. 15 minutes of breath watching per day has become one of the habits I stick to most consistently. The headspace app is a great place to get started.

Energy management

Many people trying to achieve a high output work very long hours, sometimes even neglecting their sleep. However often energy, not time, is the limiting factor for goal achievement, with both periods of effort and recovery, instead of uninterrupted stretches of moderate effort, leading to optimal productivity and well-being. In addition, solutions to tough problems we have been working on often appear during rest time, and of course leisure is a value in itself. Rest is easier when satisfied that enough work has been done, for which I usually use one of two methods:

• Work until a set number of to dos is completed, then rest. This increases drive and encourages speed, especially if the task is not very enjoyable, but can reduce quality. The list should not be too long - it is notoriously easy to underestimate how long a task takes, and how many additional ad hoc tasks may appear during the day

• Work without allowing external distractions for a set period of time, potentially with pauses scheduled in. This is more relaxed, and encourages creativity and quality – often patience is the fastest or even only way to figure out the solution to a problem. Oliver Burkeman’s “Four Thousand Weeks” has some great examples of this effect in the chapter “The Impatience Spiral”.

• One can combine the two approaches, for example by

  • Starting the day by finishing some to dos that need to be churned through, then doing more relaxed / creative work for a set period of time

  • Finishing the workday either when a set number of to dos is done or a set time is reached, to maintain the incentive of finishing early, but avoid late nights that destroy productivity and wellbeing the next day

No matter the approach, we need to have a generous mindset with ourselves that recognizes what we have done in order to switch off in peace. When ending work for the day, it can help to look back and give gratitude to ourselves for everything we have done.

It can help to align tasks with the energy curve throughout the day: For many people that means doing the most energy demanding tasks first and completing more routine ones later when tired. That way the satisfaction of having already completed the difficult task also improves satisfaction throughout the day. Furthermore, one can think of energy being separated into types, e.g. physical, emotional, mental. For example, one can use a period of exercise (physical effort) as recovery from mental effort and so on. Hence I like to have activities stretching different energies on most days, i.e. all of mental work, social activity and physical exercise. Often managing one energy type well supports work in the other realms, e.g. most obviously maintaining physical health makes both mental and emotional / social tasks easier. A more subtle example is socialising (meeting our attachment needs) reducing procrastination and distraction e.g. from screen use. Often those distractions are actually easy, but not very effective, substitutes for real connection.

Dopamine detox

Not all “rest” activity is helpful if emotionally easy productivity is the goal. We now have many ways to achieve the rewarding feeling of success in a fairly reliable way - video games for example are designed to have just the right difficulty for us to succeed with some effort. Social media is optimised to keep us engaged with short tidbits of information and social validation. In addition, the user experience is designed to be as low effort and intuitive as possible. This leads to two problems:

• Because the electronic entertainment is often stimulating, it is not optimal rest. Even the availability of the activity, without actually engaging in it at the time, can damage rest through cravings

• The sense of reward is so easily available that work towards our real-life goals seems difficult and less rewarding

By limiting our exposure to such highly motivating (though not necessarily actually enjoyable) artificial “achievements”, we obtain better rest, genuine achievements become more rewarding, and the associated work more appealing.

Batching and the associated task management system

Generally, it is much more effective to focus on one task until it is completed instead of switching, because the switching takes time and energy, and because progress when focusing on a single project at a time feels more tangible and immediate, hence encouraging further effort. There are two exceptions

• Switching between tasks that require different types of energy (see above)

• If long term memory retention is the goal, spaced repetition (instead of batched cramming) is often very helpful. This can be formalized through something like a flashcard system, but can also include something like reading a self-improvement book in small batches, to help the attitude of the author gradually sink into the subconscious, if that is desired

Even if we intend to batch, the mind may still be racing around, wondering about what else might be more urgent that we are forgetting we need to do. To effectively batch and not worry about what else we could be doing, we need a set of tools and processes that allow us to determine which activity to focus on at any given time:

• A set of to do lists, grouped for example by context of work to be done, type of energy required and/or priority. I use Quire, which has good functionality for nested lists

• A calendar for tasks that need to be done on specific days. I use Google Calendar

• Somewhere to store potential actions we may or may not take (e.g. books to read, projects to undertake). I use Notion

• Reference information stored in a way that makes us feel comfortable we can find it at the right time

• A habit to consistently enter all the actions / information in the system

• A habit of breaking down daunting large projects into smaller, manageable chunks

• A habit to regularly review the actions to determine what to do each day / week. For example, I like to write down at the end of the day any actions I already know I want to do the next day to get them out of my head, and in the morning may add more from my larger to do list

Such a system, if you learn that you can trust it, helps you fully focus on the task at hand, thereby increasing productivity and reducing anxiety. Getting Things Done by David Allen dives deeply into this.

Saying no and accepting there is a limit to what can be done

With the most effort and efficiency in the world, we would still only be able to do a tiny minority of the things that are available for us to do. Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 weeks even goes so far to describe productivity as a trap: “Rendering yourself more efficient – either by implementing various productivity techniques or driving yourself harder – won’t generally result in the feeling of having “enough time”, because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be generating new things to do”. An example of this is the popular “hack” to give urgent tasks to the most busy person in the office. While I do still believe that productivity is very valuable, we do need to accept the fact that our capacities are severely limited. The implication is that we need to focus on what is most important to us, and eliminate the rest.

• Let go of internal goals that are only moderately important

• Push back on external demands not in line with our values

By doing this, and not waiting until we are so stressed that we have no choice but to deprioritize things (and hence an excuse), we set ourselves up for success and increase our self compassion – which ironically again, may increase our productivity, because self-flagellation and a sense of overwhelm can draw us towards distracting ourselves with activities that are comforting in the short term but not in line with our values. Often we can go so far as picking just one thing to work on that feels important but where we face significant resistance, and if we do that one thing, the day is a success. It is often these anxiety inducing tasks that most move our life forward.

Enjoyment and meaning

More deeply being certain we are working on the right thing connects to meaning – even if the task management system makes us feel confident that we are not forgetting something urgent, being unconvinced on a more fundamental level about what we are doing can deeply hurt our concentration. We need to be convinced that what we are doing is in line with our most important values, and if that feels uncertain, a period of reflection may be in order.

It obviously makes sense to choose work that we enjoy and connects with our inner nature. There will however generally be aspects to our work that we do not enjoy. This is where meaning comes in: If what we do helps others, or builds a better future for ourselves, we can look positively even at the unenjoyable aspects of our work.

Optimism

To be motivated to undertake a task we need to actually believe we can succeed. The more uncertain the outcome is, the more important it becomes to actively cultivate optimism. This does not mean believing failure is impossible: It just means also seeing that success is possible, and driving towards it. Vividly imagining the eventual potential payoff can deepen the motivational effect further. We may have to deal with disappointment eventually, but that can wait until it happens - and it may not actually happen. It also means expanding the definition of success: With hindsight, failure often becomes a great learning opportunity that points us in a better direction, and hence a success in its own way. Simply knowing that something does not work has value by closing a mental open loop.

The more we experience failure as something positive, or at least as not so bad, the less it paralyses us, and the more optimistic we become that we can draw value from any outcome. One thing we do not want to do however is to get lost in fantasy to the point that we are not working at all, or that initial successes feel insignificant in comparison.

Consuming self-help content for me is very different to learning other material, such as languages or dance. For the latter, there is usually a relatively clear answer for what is the right thing to do (e.g. if a given sentence is grammatically correct), at least at a beginner to intermediate level. We do not need to challenge what is taught that much, because the skill gap to the content creators and teachers is large. For such learning with a relatively clear correct answer my focus is learning and retention, using the principles I describe in my “How to learn efficiently and durably” guide:

• A healthy overall lifestyle as a foundation to enable the physical processes underlying learning

• Loops of exposure to content, recall/testing and feedback as the core learning methodology

• Doing the real thing, i.e. performing the actual skill we want to learn in the actual context we need it in as far as possible, interchanged with drills isolating specific sticking points

The topics that self-help tends to cover on the other hand, such as relationships, values, happiness, meaning, how to live a good life, are ones that have perplexed humanity for millennia. They have been addressed over and over through philosophy, art, religion and more recently psychology and self help. No one has everything truly figured out, definitely not in a way that works for everyone, and usually also not in a way that works for themselves. The most rigorous of the approaches investigating how to live a good life is probably modern experimental psychology, but even there replication rates are only around 50%, and generalizability is often limited. The scope of experimental psychology is also simply not enough to have something relevant to say about every question around how to live a good life.

Because of this lack of a clearly correct answer, for self-help content, retention is not the only thing that matters – what is most important is how to choose what to accept into our belief system. We want to find answers that work for us individually, at least for the time being. To avoid taking on an answer that does not work for them, some people avoid reading self-help entirely, instead preferring to read fiction to trigger thoughts and then figuring things out for themselves. I still value the direct advice from self-help, but take a sceptical stance. My approach involves the following:

• I will generally read “just-in-time” content that somehow relates to issues I am currently facing in my life or I anticipate to deal with soon, rather than “just-in-case” content that may or may not become useful later

• To get a variety of perspectives I will usually consume several books or other sources relevant to the question I’m interested in, as well as talk to several people whose opinion I respect

• Whenever I have an urge to do so, I will take a break from reading or listening to the content and think about whether I fully understand it, and whether I agree with it. I find this especially important for emotionally charged content, e.g. around relationships. Often I journal when taking such a break. I believe more is gained from this rather than rushing through books in order to become a “well-read” person

I will then experiment with some of the ideas I exposed myself to, to see if they improve my life. The content creators or advice givers will often take a very motivational stance, pushing us to implement their advice. This makes some sense, because if we only consume content and take no action, we will make no progress, while having the illusion that we are doing something productive. I believe however that it is better to only experiment with a minority of the advice we receive, because experimentation usually takes vastly more time and energy compared to consuming content. We want to have a balance where we regularly implement some ideas, but discard others. This leaves us with the question of what advice to experiment with. I consider several factors when selecting ideas for experimentation:

• How many people are in favour of a certain viewpoint?

• How clear and convincing are their arguments? Do they show their full chain of thinking and what evidence brought them to their conclusions? Do they discuss context, and give examples for when their ideas do not apply?

• Do these people seem to have good outcomes? There can be a lot of bullshitting regarding outcomes, but for content targeted towards emotional health, a subjective sense of the energy given off by the person can be a helpful indication. That being said, people can still have a lot of interesting things to say if they got themselves from a really bad state to “only” a tolerable state

• Have I previously obtained good results from following other advice from these people?

• Most importantly, does it intuitively make sense to me and is consistent with my existing viewpoints? I believe that for most people confirmation bias is a good thing when consuming self help content, because if we constantly challenge everything we can become uncentered and disoriented. We need to have working hypotheses for how to do most things, and only selectively make changes. The answers we find only have to be good enough for ourselves, not universally apply to everyone, and it is ok and inevitable to find out that some of our working hypotheses were not ideal after all with hindsight. Deciding what to move forward with is as at least as much an intuitive process for me as a logical one – it is probably not even possible to grasp all the relevant factors logically

Different ideas I have implemented have different levels of support from the above points, for example

• Many people in favour: The fluffy explanations given by meditation teachers I often found unconvincing, and I was not intuitively drawn to meditation, but it was recommended by so many people that I decided to give it a solid go

• Credibility through outcomes: I take exercise advice preferably from people who have bodies that seem healthy, beautiful and powerful, and who I know are not using performance enhancing drugs (which is hard to say for influencers that I do not know personally)

• Makes intuitive sense to me: When first exposed myself to Internal Family Systems, which frames issues involving self criticism or addictive behaviours as parts that are trying to help us, I was immediately drawn to the warmth and self compassion I experienced from this approach and rapidly began experimenting

What I do not consider is how assertive the content creator is about their viewpoint. In my experience, the more humble, subtle writers often have a better understanding than the brash ones. The brash ones may either be bullshitting confidence for simplicity or in order to drive engagement, or may not have had enough experience applying their ideas in different contexts to recognize the limitations of those ideas – sort of like a teenager who thinks they have it all figured out.

Once I experiment with an idea, I observe closely what results it got me in terms of objective outcomes and in terms of how I feel, often journaling about it. Some changes I decide to make a permanent habit and others I discard. I may consolidate my views in a blog post such as this one – aside from hopefully delivering value to others and building connection, the process of writing closes the topic to a certain degree, freeing up mental space for other topics. If I want to deeply ingrain a mindset, I might continue to expose myself to content promoting that mindset, for example I enjoy listening to Tara Brach repeatedly making similar points encouraging awareness and compassion: content being repetitive is a feature not a bug in that case.

Some of the ideas I am exposed to but decided to not experiment with stay in the background of my mind, and later become relevant again. In that sense, reading self help content can prime us for learning through experience. It is important not to get too hung up on regret for not implementing the advice earlier – we are simply not able to implement all advice, especially given it often conflicts with other advice.

Although my method of approaching self help content does not make retention the number one goal, it still has some elements that support it:

• Taking breaks to think about the content aids understanding which increases retention

• Discussing it with others or writing about it is active recall that strengthens retention and challenges illusions of competence

• Experimentation is further recall in the form of doing the real thing

Over the course of my life so far I have learnt a variety of skills, from the intellectual , like physics, to the more soft and intuitive or physical. Some of these areas I view myself as quite talented in, others not so much. Despite all that variation, a number of themes keep reappearing about what I believe is important for effectively improving a skill and maintaining that improvement:

• A healthy overall lifestyle as a foundation to enable the physical processes underlying learning

• Loops of exposure to content, recall/testing and feedback as the core learning methodology

• Switching between

  • Doing the real thing, i.e. performing the actual skill we want to learn in the actual context we need it in, as far as that is possible

  • Drills isolating specific sticking points

This applies if the skill is reasonably well established. For an established skill, there is a decent amount of clarity around what is and isn’t good mastery of the skill, and experts are available that can give decent assessments of it - e.g. learning a well known dance. If you are building a skill that does not exist yet, e.g. trying to develop your own unique art style, this guide may be less applicable - though it can still be helpful for developing the more universal foundations that your art style is based on.

I will first elaborate my view on the best practices further, and then illustrate them through examples of learning efforts throughout my life - from achieving top grades studying physics at Cambridge without attending lectures, learning Mandarin to the point of passing the highest level of the relevant standardised test (HSK 6), receiving an offer at McKinsey and succeeding once there, as well as more low key efforts to become a social latin dancer.

A healthy foundation

A healthy lifestyle, aside from making our life directly more enjoyable, supports both

• our learning process

• our performance during key moments where we are applying the skills we learned, such as during an exam

Learning is a physical neurological process that occurs not only when we are actively learning, but also to a certain degree at all other times. An especially important time is sleep, because during sleep we

• Consolidate and strengthen memories

• Clear out toxins from the brain, preparing it for performance the next day

Non-sleep rest, which can include full rest such as going for a walk or simply lying down and doing nothing, or work that is not mentally challenging like doing laundry, is also helpful. Learning continues in the background while we are doing something else or let our mind wander, with a diffuse mode of thinking (as opposed to the focused mode of thinking when we are actively engaged in the task) consolidating memories and discovering creative solutions that might not come to us while we concentrate. More often than not energy and not time is the limiting factor for our learning progress, making it feasible to incorporate plenty of rest from learning activity into our schedule.

Physical exercise is very helpful for aiding learning, including the learning of completely unrelated non-physical skills. Most directly it does this by increasing neuroplasticity, but also by improving sleep quality. Both going on walks and intense exercise feel helpful to me, either as time where I rest from learning, or as time where I expose myself to audio content.

Finally, learning relies on the reward and motivation system, involving neurotransmitters such as dopamine, with a feeling of reward being triggered if we learn something or succeed at a task. If we engage in highly stimulating activities when we are not learning, this makes learning less appealing and less effective by desensitising us. Aside from stimulant drugs (going on a cocaine fuelled bender over the weekend will not aid learning the following week), technology is the biggest culprit here, with especially video games but also social media being designed to trigger the motivation system very effectively. It is worthwhile to at least experiment with cutting down on such stimulating activity (i.e. doing a “dopamine detox”), and tp observe what that does to our well-being as well as our learning progress.

These are the most important factors in my experience, but there are of course further factors contributing to health and also indirectly to learning, such as nutrition, hydration, air quality and a supportive social network.

Having a healthy foundation is important to support the learning process, but becomes even more important before key moments where we perform the skills we learnt. Many people work very hard leading up to the key moment and then rest afterwards, e.g. having an all-nighter before an exam and then collapsing once it is done. In fact, late night cramming is the absolute worst we can do - I always give myself sufficient sleep opportunity the day before a key performance moment, and often take the day before off completely from any study, work, or highly stimulating entertainment. Because I rested extensively before the performance moment, I often do not rest much afterwards, only maybe taking the rest of the day off and then going back to my normal rhythm. The only exception to this rest before performance approach is really the limited cramming of very simple knowledge that I have no intention of remembering long term - e.g. I would memorise the name of the CEO of a company I am interviewing with on the way to the interview. If the information is not available in advance, short term memorization is actually the only option. But it only works for a very limited amount of information - if a larger amount needs to be remembered, and it is available in advance, it is better to make a more extended learning effort starting well before the performance moment in order to bring the knowledge into long term memory.

The exposure, recall and feedback loop

Learning fundamentally consists of a sequence of 1) exposure to a concept, 2) recall / application / testing and 3) feedback, with at least the recall and feedback parts repeated multiple times.

Exposure means simply the initial introduction to the content, e.g. by reading a book or being demonstrated a movement. Sometimes we skip this step by simply winging it and then building on feedback. But at other times that is a less practical approach because

• It is simply not possible to do the full skill without building it up first and being exposed to some knowledge. E.g. a physics problem can be impossible to solve for even the most talented person if they do not know certain definitions.

• There is a risk of bad habits getting entrenched, e.g. intuitive but harmful movement patterns in some sports.

I believe that exposure is actually the smallest part of learning, at least in terms of amount of time spent, but that there are still a number of best practices (depending on the skill only some of these may be practical)

• The content should be as directly relevant to what we are trying to achieve as possible, with not too much exposure to content that we do not need.

• If we are learning a somewhat common skill, often the initial exposure does not need to be customised much to us. This means frequently the best source is cheap or free off-the-shelf polished content by the very best teachers of the subject, such as a book or popular YouTube video, as opposed to e.g. a live presentation by an average teacher.

• Different people take different amounts of time to digest the content depending on their starting point, so a form of exposure where we can adjust the speed can make our learning more efficient. For example when reading a book, we can automatically adjust the speed at which we are reading and take breaks to digest. When attending a lecture, the speed may be so high that we cannot follow or we may waste time due to an unnecessarily slow speed. Lectures are really a legacy method from back when books were too expensive to give each student one, and really their only advantage is high relevance to the exam, and an externally prescribed schedule for those that find that helpful.

• Understanding connections between content, e.g. being able to derive formulas for a quantitative subject, or understanding why a movement is done a certain way for a physical skill, usually leads to much better retention and transfer than trying to memorise isolated facts. I also find it a lot more enjoyable. Analogies can aid understanding, e.g. comparing electrical voltage to height difference because they both can store potential energy. We can force and test understanding by explaining a concept to ourselves or others using different words than the ones in the exposure material.

• When understanding is less feasible, e.g. when memorising vocabulary or a checklist, mnemonics, which link something hard to remember to something easy to remember, can be helpful. For example there are a variety of mnemonics for the SCUBA diving safety checklist “BCD, Weights, Releases, Air, Final Check”, such as “Because We Really Aren’t Fish”. Mnemonics are also really useful for learning Chinese characters. Once the knowledge becomes more settled, we usually do not need the mnemonic anymore.

Recall means retrieving knowledge, e.g. by direct testing (such as looking at a flashcard of a word in a known language and trying to remember what the translation is) or applying the skill (e.g. actually talking), or by teaching someone else (which can be a very powerful way to reveal gaps in understanding). Recall is a requirement for receiving feedback, but it is also at the core of learning itself - recall is the most effective way to strengthen and consolidate memories. It is most efficient when it has become somewhat effortful, e.g. when some time has passed since the last successful recall. “Overlearning” by recalling very frequently while it is still easy on the other hand is less efficient. For simple knowledge such as vocabulary, a spaced repetition software such as Anki can be used to test us at close to optimal intervals, with the intervals increasing if the recall is successful and decreasing if it is not. For more complex skills this is less feasible, but spaced repetition can still be achieved by

• Planning to learn over an extended period of time, or at least maintaining what is learned over an extended period of time. This is in contrast to e.g.

  • limiting learning to a short high intensity project, such as deciding to learn a language in three months and then being “finished” (an intense project however can still be useful to overcome major hurdles)

  • procrastinating beginning to study before an exam until quite close to the date

• If we want to do a lot of learning, studying several things in parallel (“interleaving”) to avoid overlearning. This has the additional benefits of allowing diffuse thinking about one topic while we focus on another, and mixing up the cognitive context in which we perform the skill, allowing for wider applicability (see the later discussion of doing the real thing). One example of interleaving is university curricula teaching several subjects in parallel.

A common alternative to recall is repeated exposure, e.g. rereading a textbook, or a sort of passive recognition through multiple choice testing. There are two problems with this:

• It does not strengthen memories as much as full active recall does.

• It can lead to an “illusion of competence” - we recognize the piece of knowledge when we expose ourselves to it again, and falsely believe that that means we know it and can use it.

After recall / testing, we want to receive feedback at least some, and ideally most of the time. If we recall without feedback, we may in fact be strengthening incorrect “knowledge”. The feedback should be as close as possible to the recall to allow for rapid improvement. There are fundamentally two kinds of feedback:

• Simply observing if we achieved a favourable outcome (e.g. passing an exam, swimming quickly, or the follower doing the dance move we’re trying to lead). The limitation of this is that from outcomes by themselves it is often not clear exactly what we need to change. However, outcome based feedback is essential to avoiding illusions of competence (falsely believing we have learned a skill) - after all certain outcomes are what we are learning a skill for in the first place.

• The second type of feedback is targeted advice on what we should change. This could come from

  • A software (e.g. a flashcard showing the correct translation of a word) or study material (e.g. detailed solutions to a problem set). This is often very cheap and easy, but usually only works for simple skills

  • A formal teacher, ideally in a 1-on-1 context. Indeed hiring 1-on-1 tuition is a game changer for many skills, and I have used it for many learning efforts including physics, Mandarin, dancing and swimming. To make it financially sustainable it can be beneficial to either be in a low-wage country or take lessons remotely from a teacher in a low-wage country

  • Someone we are practising a skill on, e.g. a dance partner

  • A friend or colleague (including supervisors and reports) observing us performing the skill

In some contexts, such as school / university study, feedback is readily provided by the institutional framework. In other contexts, a key lever for improved learning is making an effort to receive more feedback, not only by hiring teachers, but also by

• surrounding ourselves with people that are willing to give feedback. Regular feedback is one of the best parts of McKinsey’s culture for example, and I highly value friends that give me feedback about how I show up in social situations.

• by directly asking for it. E.g. if I get rejected in a job search or even dating context I will usually ask for feedback, even if this feels awkward. I also ask several people for feedback before publishing a text like this one. However if people respond reluctantly to the feedback request, usually not worth it to keep pushing for it

• by responding positively when we receive feedback, whether solicited or unsolicited. I will try to thank a person giving me feedback even if I do not agree with it and choose to not implement it (if you ask for a lot of feedback, you will find that you will necessarily have to disagree with some, because the feedback from various people ends up being conflicting - it is still useful however because patterns emerge and it spurs our own thinking). There is a saying at McKinsey that feedback is a gift - sometimes we choose to throw a gift away instead of using it, but we can still see positive intent in it

The biggest challenge is often psychological, with us attaching our sense of self-worth to a certain degree of perfection. It is important to instead try to accept ourselves at whatever capability level we have for the time being, have a growth mindset and get excited about being able to get better.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that positive feedback is just as useful as negative feedback - it helps us continue or double down on things that work well, motivates, helps maintain an accurate picture of our performance and makes it easier to accept negative feedback. A combination of positive and negative feedback is ideal.

Doing the real thing and drilling sticking points

Sometimes we learn something simply because we like the activity, e.g. reading a non-fiction book that we find interesting, even though we never plan to apply that knowledge in any way. But usually we are trying to build an ability to perform a certain task. To avoid developing an illusion of competence, our learning method needs to include performing the skill in as close to realistic of a way as possible. E.g.

• If we want to pass an exam, doing past exam papers, sometimes timed, sometimes in unfamiliar surroundings (because the exam hall will be unfamiliar)

• If we want to be able to speak in a language, actually speaking to non-teacher native speakers in that language

This of course requires us to have clarity about what goal we are trying to achieve / what capability we are trying to build in the first place.

Part of doing the real thing is becoming sufficiently flexible about the context we use the skill in. If we always practise skills in a similar sequence, with similar people or at similar times, we may become reliant on habitual cues that are missing in a key performance moment.

Sometimes doing the real thing early on in the learning journey is not feasible, because

• the skill is too difficult to have any sort of reasonable performance (e.g. trying to wing freestyle swimming without any build-up may just turn into an uncomfortable mess involving a lot of swallowing of water)

• we want to avoid the possibility of bad habits getting ingrained - such development of bad habits can be in particular an issue with physical skills such as sport or music

• It may be dangerous, e.g. we should not go scuba diving without some safety drills first

At other times, fear of failure, embarrassment or simply discomfort might prevent us from doing the real thing. We can address this part by pushing ourselves to try anyway, and by being compassionate when it turns out we perform badly (e.g. someone we are trying to talk to does not understand us) - it is helpful to have a more input than output oriented mindset in these times, being proud of ourselves for simply trying. Often when we overcome our fears we realise the negative outcomes are not as bad as we thought they would be.

When doing the real thing immediately is not feasible, we need to start building the skill up from smaller subskills, and / or practise some sort of halfway house where we use some method to make it easier and / or safer to practise the skill, i.e. “putting on training wheels”

• If we start practicing smaller subskills, over time, through sufficient recall, these subskills turn into “chunks” (sometimes called a mental representations) that can be performed without much conscious attention (e.g. the breathing movement in freestyle swimming). We can then perform a more advanced exercise where we combine several chunks (e.g. combining breathing with arm movement), eventually forming a larger chunk. This combination into larger chunks is necessary, because our working memory can only hold a certain number of chunks at a time. Eventually our chunks become large enough that we can do the real thing.

• We can put on “training wheels” by e.g.

  • for interactive skills practising with a teacher first (e.g. a language teacher will be better at understanding flawed speech than a non-teacher)

  • giving ourselves more time than we would in the real situation (e.g. solving exam problems without time pressure or dancing to slow or no music)

  • using a floatation device when practising swimming

In either case we do not want to let fear prevent us from moving on towards practise that is closer to the real thing. When the exercise does not feel effortful anymore and there is no more significant negative feedback, we should move on.

Even when we get to a point where we can at least to some degree perform a complex skill, we often want to return to drilling specific sub skills based on feedback. We do the real thing, discover a sticking point, and then focus on that specific sticking point, by either

• Still doing the real thing, but putting focused attention on the sticking point, while running the rest of the skill mostly subconsciously

• Performing some sort of drill that isolates the subskill, similar to what we did when building the complex skill up the first time

This practice of focusing on difficult sticking points based on feedback is often called deliberate practice.

Effort, flow, fun and rest

Most of my recommendations, such as recall instead of review or focusing on sticking points, make learning feel more effortful, and essentially involve us stretching ourselves beyond our current capabilities. This contrasts with the experience of flow, which is usually described as effortless and highly enjoyable, and needing a balance of challenge and capability. I certainly want learning to be fun a lot of the time, both for its own sake, and because from my experience I am pretty certain that enjoyment makes learning more effective. I believe there is a place in a learning system for both flow and effortful practice, and that both can be fun and help the learning process:

• Flow is worth it simply in how enjoyable it is, and can be thought of as a reward for improving our skill. I also think that its highly rewarding nature should be helpful for reinforcing memories

• Effortful practice is still required to make progress and push through sticking points. My experience is that it is actually quite enjoyable if a sufficient amount of breaktime is added: The progress made during the learning session makes me feel satisfied during the break, and the exhaustion from effortful practice aids relaxation. After the break I continue learning with joy and energy. The higher effectiveness of effortful learning makes it possible to take frequent breaks - energy not time becomes the limiting factor, with learning still progressing during break time through diffuse thinking as discussed earlier. An analogy is how running can be fun if you also take time to rest - endlessly marching while being stressed out about progress however can be miserable.

Example: Achieving top grades in undergraduate physics at Cambridge University

The first question to ask when studying a formal, tested curriculum is what is the real thing? In my case I took the exams set by the university as the real thing, because

• I trusted the university to prepare a sensible curriculum that prepares me for a career as a physicist should I want such a career

• I wanted the credential of high grades to open further doors (and prop up my ego)

If we doubt that exams prepare us with the right skills, an argument could be made for example to volunteer to do some research to get a sense for what is truly useful.

Having defined passing exams as the “real thing”, the outline of how to study became apparent:

• Expose myself to the content

• Do homework practice problems sets (an intermediate “training wheel” step)

• Discuss and drill sticking points

• Practice past exam papers

• Discuss and drill sticking points

• Practice more past exam papers

The most obvious approach for content exposure would have been to attend the lectures. This however had a number of drawbacks

• The lectures started somewhat early in the morning (in my first year 6 days a week at 9 am), making it hard to maintain the social life I wanted, while still getting enough sleep

• Many but not all lecturers were great

• Lectures tend to be non-interactive

• As mentioned earlier, lectures progress at a fixed pace that might be too slow or too fast for me and do not allow any rewinding

For these reasons, by around mid second year, I did not attend any lectures. This left me with two alternatives

• Reading the lecture notes, which usually contain all of the necessary content and not much unnecessary content

• Reading relevant textbooks, which are reliably polished

Luckily the lecture notes were usually high quality, so I chose them for their high relevance to the course most of the time, only using textbooks for courses with poor lecture notes. Some of my friends who had a less exam focused goal made more use of textbooks. After I stopped attending lectures my grades improved from the 81st to the 95th percentile, and my classmates who also stopped going to lectures experienced similarly large improvements.

After exposing myself to the content, I would attempt to solve the homework problem sets. If I was stuck I would go for a walk to take advantage of diffuse thinking, leaving a smaller amount of sticking points unresolved.

One of the distinctive features of undergraduate studies at Cambridge is a system of 1-to-2 tuition called “supervisions” (they are actually much less hierarchical and controlling than they sound) - this makes it much easier and more of a default to receive teacher feedback than in most other universities. To make the best use of the teacher time, I would first discuss the problem with my classmate attending the same supervision, and we would then bring the problems neither of us could figure out to the teachers.

After dealing with the homework problems sets, it was time to do the “real thing”, i.e. practice exam papers. Again, if I hit a sticking point, I would go for a walk, then talk to my supervision buddy, then bring it to the teachers. The actual exams were concentrated in one week of the year - this meant we would need to continue doing exam problems (practice recall) throughout the year in order to retain knowledge. I believe setting end of year exams was a great choice by the university, because, although terrifying, they encourage long term retention through spaced repetition. To set a healthy foundation, I would stop drinking alcohol a month before the exam and not do any studying or other mental exertion the day before an exam.

I experienced rest as being very important when studying physics, because of the very high amount of concentration required - on most days I would only study for around 4 hours, taking frequent breaks in between.

Common pitfalls I saw among undergraduate students:

• Damaging the healthy learning foundation through sleep deprivation, both throughout the year and directly before the exam. I still vividly remember the image of classmates passed out in the lecture theatre in my first year, neither absorbing content nor getting optimal rest

• Concentrating the study effort in too short a period before the exam

• Too closely following the teaching methods prescribed, e.g. attending lectures

Example: Scoring 770 on the GMAT

Problems included in the GMAT (the standardised test for business school admissions) are relatively general, not requiring much specialised knowledge, with instead concentration and speed during the exam being most important. I hence put the largest focus on setting a healthy foundation before the performance moment by scheduling my GMAT right after a week-long vacation. During that vacation I would spend a few hours on preparation, and the rest of the day on rest, e.g. sightseeing.

For the preparation, again because the GMAT does not require much specialised knowledge, I could start by doing the real thing, i.e. I took a practice exam. This practice exam revealed on which question type I was performing the worst. I would then focus on the sticking points by doing practice problems of this type, and finish by doing one more practice exam. The day before the actual exam I rested completely.

Common pitfalls I see among GMAT takers:

• Sleep deprivation before the exam

• Not focusing on the hardest question types, potentially because of not taking a practice test early on

Example: Learning Mandarin, including passing HSK 6

There are several things that could be thought of as the real thing for language learning

• Talking or texting with native speakers (casual conversation)

• Reading native texts such as newspapers or books

• In the case of Chinese, handwriting as a skill in addition to reading

• Passing exams if there is a key benefit to that

For me I defined the real thing as casual conversation, including being able to read characters, with passing the HSK, the main standardised Chinese exam, as a secondary goal. Reading formal texts and hand writing seemed like too much effort to be worth it.

I started my Mandarin learning journey by attending some relatively cheap group classes. I did not make much progress here, due to

• Limited feedback given the large class size

• Speed of class not adapted to my abilities

It did however have the benefit of the teacher introducing me to spaced repetition software. I then spent several years learning characters and vocabulary by

• First learning small building blocks that make up larger Chinese characters

• Leveraging this building block knowledge to use mnemonics and the actual etymology to learn new characters and words (this in many ways actually makes Chinese vocabulary easier to learn than e.g. English, where there is less of an easy to remember relationship between words). I chose the words to learn from frequency or HSK lists available online

• Maintaining and solidifying the knowledge through spaced repetition

This laid a solid foundation, but did not lead to much actual applicable language skill, because I was not doing the real thing. Doing the real thing began in earnest during extended trips to China where I would take several hours of 1-on-1 tuition a day (usually cheapest in a country where the language is natively spoken). The teachers would expose me to new necessary grammar and pronunciation skills and provide me with feedback on my mistakes. Talking to teachers also was a stepping stone to talking to non-teacher natives, who have less practice at understanding flawed Chinese. Getting to a decent level through the 1-on-1 classes gave me the confidence to overcome my fear of talking to non-teachers, and when I noticed sticking points in real life I would go back to the teachers to do focused work on those sticking points. I would also add vocabulary that was useful in my specific real world context to my spaced repetition system. Finding a Chinese girlfriend greatly increased the amount of real life practice I could do.

Finally, to pass the HSK, once I had acquired the required vocabulary, I would take practice exams, work with the teachers on any sticking points identified in the practice exams, and repeat. I would take a day off from any study or work the day before the actual exam.

Common pitfalls for language learners:

• Not utilising a spaced repetition system for vocabulary

• Delaying doing the real thing too long

• Not hiring a 1-on-1 teacher at least some of the time - with hindsight I would have started this much earlier by hiring a teacher remotely through a platform such as iTalki, starting with practising very clean pronunciation to ingrain good habits from the start

• For Chinese: Not learning character building blocks and mnemonics

Example: Passing McKinsey interviews

Most consulting interviews consist of two parts, carrying roughly equal weight:

• The frequently discussed case interview

• A “personal fit” interview part focusing on interpersonal skills, usually based on past experiences, which is normally equal in importance to the case interview

After exposure to the overall principle for doing case interviews, I focused on doing as close to the real thing and then getting teacher feedback (there is not so much opportunity for outcome based feedback unless you receive a very large number of interview invites). The best teachers are interview trained consultants, followed by other consultants or people who received consulting offers, followed by other applicants. Since I did not know many consultants, the bulk of the practice consisted of doing cases recorded by past applicants in “case books” with another applicant, receiving feedback from them and switching roles. Only near the end would I ask my consultant friends to practise cases with me. Afterwards I would practise again with other applicants to work on integrating the consultants’ feedback. In a context where there are both many (former) consultants and other applicants, such as in an MBA program, the potential for feedback can be maximised by reaching out to consultants early on in the program before they get too tired of giving practice cases - that means peer practice should be started even earlier, right at the beginning of the program.

For the personal fit part, I would look up the most commonly asked questions on sites such as Glassdoor (i.e. try to get as close to the real thing as possible) and prepare multiple stories for each question. I would then test those stories with other applicants, receiving their feedback on how the story landed in general and how details could be improved. Leading up to the interview I would practise recalling my stories to be able to just rattle them off in the interview - this preserves energy for the case interview which cannot be memorised to the same degree.

To maximise the healthy foundation before the moment, I would try to travel to the interview location the day before the interviews if possible, so that I could get a full night of sleep before the interview. I would not do any preparation the day before the interview, except recalling my answers to the very most common personal fit questions.

Common pitfalls I have observed among consulting applicants:

• Overfocusing on passive exposure / doing cases alone without feedback, instead of practising live cases with other applicants and consultants

• Not preparing for the personal fit interview

• Not taking time off before the interview, or even allowing a full night of sleep

Example: Succeeding at McKinsey

I believe there are three main skills required to succeed as an entry level consultant:

• Actually understanding and solving the problem from an intellectual perspective - in my experience this part is relatively easy, and if anything improved through specialised knowledge for each topic. I did not put a lot of explicit effort into it

• “Making pretty slides fast” - while crucially important for advancing in a consulting career, I believe it is more of a cultural artefact of the industry and does not deliver much real impact. In the words of Self-help Singh “there is no power in those points, and no point in those presentations” so I will not focus on it here

• Getting people (colleagues and clients) to like you and do what you want them to do, usually without having any formal power over them - I will focus on this part

While there is some knowledge exposure in formal training, most learning of consulting interpersonal skills starts by doing the real thing - simply interacting with colleagues and clients, asking them for something or presenting something to them. The McKinsey environment tends to automatically provide challenging situations and feedback from colleagues, but the process can be optimised by

• Asking to be put in situations that present growth opportunities, e.g. presenting in senior meetings

• Avoiding boring work as far as possible

• Asking for feedback when it is not being given and expressing appreciation when it is

• Consciously focusing on implementing the suggested change (isolating a sticking point) for a time period and then asking for more feedback

• Maintaining a healthy foundation as far as possible - following the prevailing culture of sleep deprivation at McKinsey inhibits learning

Example: Becoming a social dancer for Bachata, Salsa and Kizomba

Several goals could be considered the real thing when learning a partner dance:

• Simply enjoying attending group classes

• Being able to dance with a fixed partner, e.g. a long term romantic partner

• Performing on stage, again usually with a fixed partner

• Being able to dance with a large variety of partners at dance socials

For me social dancing was the main goal, promising a new way of entertaining myself and meeting people as well as an interesting challenge. The biggest obstacle was that doing the real thing is really quite terrifying: I would need to ask people to dance with me, then initially almost certainly struggle and definitely dance worse than other leaders, potentially giving my dance partners a bad experience. Alcohol can blunt the anxiety but can further weaken performance and, crucially, inhibits learning.

Hiring a 1-on-1 teacher was a big help with this. I would first expose myself to a new dance move either in a group class, or from my 1-on-1 teacher showing me. I would then improve it based on feedback from the 1-on-1 teacher, aiming for a high level of precision to avoid bad movement patterns becoming ingrained. Afterwards I would finally take it to a social, first dancing with my teacher to warm up and refresh the memory, and then attempting the new dance move with advanced followers (including other teachers), who were often initially introduced to me by my 1-on-1 teacher. If I noticed any problems, I would raise them in my next 1-on-1 class. Only when the move reliably worked with advanced followers, would I try with intermediate followers and then beginners. In my experience, I would need to keep using (recalling) the move at social for at least 3 months to have a high chance of remembering it long term.

Improving dance skills frequently involves isolating sticking points. For example, even if I can lead a dance move well enough for most followers to be able to follow it, there can still be ways to improve it to:

• Allow weaker followers to understand it

• Make it more comfortable for me and / or the follower

• Make it look better

Such improvement would usually begin with feedback from a 1-on-1 teacher. I would then isolate the subskill (change in movement vs how I was doing it previously) by directing my conscious attention to it at social while keeping the rest of the overall movement on autopilot. Humility and a beginner’s mindset are key - one of my teachers described how 10 years into her dance career a teacher of her own told her “we need to work on your basic”.

Common pitfalls:

• Many people take too long to start dancing at socials (doing the real thing), e.g. they simply attend group classes for years

• On the flipside, some followers only learn at socials, and develop bad habits by poorly imitating difficult skills around e.g. body or hand movements. Without teacher feedback those bad habits do not get corrected

• A focus on more and more patterns instead of fundamentals can prevent a dancer from looking truly good

Guest example: Becoming a professional guitarist

Johann Nissen is a successful classical concert guitarist who is able to secure 5-figure concert fees and won numerous awards. He is also an in-demand teacher for adults and children and plays a leadership role in the German youth music competition “Jugend musiziert”. 1-on-1 tuition is the default process when learning to play the instrument - without it, it is very difficult to reach a high level of performance. Johann emphasises that the right teacher is needed at the right time, depending on the skill and needs of the student.

Johann places a very strong emphasis on performing movements with a high degree of accuracy from the very beginning to avoid bad habits becoming ingrained. He views the following practices as key to doing so

• Maintaining a relaxed concentration, with awareness inside the body throughout the practice and little to no mind wandering

• Limiting practice time to a few hours a day at most to allow such concentration to be maintained

• Making the practice easy enough that almost no mistakes are made by slowing down and / or isolating skills, such as practising making circular motions with the thumb

Johann maintains this high degree of awareness and grounding in the body when performing, helping him stay in an emotionally calm state. Having practised such awareness for a long term he can even rehearse mentally, e.g. when sitting in a plane. Doing the real thing, e.g. performing, has special emotional challenges for musicians, due to the highly public nature of performing and due to optimal performance requiring relaxation. Most musicians play somewhat worse during performances compared to practice (this contrasts e.g. with my experience taking exams - I usually do better in real exams than in practice ones). To get a beginning performer off to a good start, Johann finds it important to make sure that they have good positive experiences when first performing. Teaching his embodied, grounded, detail oriented approach helps greatly with this. He sets a standard of being able to perform at 120% during practice so that 100% is genuinely available during performance. Despite aiming for perfection to avoid bad habits being ingrained, Johann still believes in compassion when mistakes do occasionally happen. When organising competitions, he makes sure to select Jurors that can give feedback in a compassionate, constructive and motivating way also for the weaker performances.

Recall practice (scroll down for answers)

1. Why is it important to have a healthy foundation?

2. What are the three most important elements of a healthy foundation?

3. What are the two key learning loops discussed in this article?

4. What are the advantages of recall over repeated exposure?

Recall practice answers (feedback)

1. To aid learning as well as improve performance at key moments

2. 1) Sleep, 2) exercise, and 3) limiting strong non-learning stimulation e.g. from electronics use

3. 1) Exposure, recall, feedback and 2) doing the real thing and then drilling sticking points

4. Strengthening memories more effectively as well as avoiding illusions of competence