THE CHEF LAUGHED WHEN I STARTED CRYING. “Daijoubu desu ka?” (Are you ok?) he asked. “I’m ok. It’s spicy, but I like it,” I said in basic Japanese, and he laughed harder after I said it. His laughter stood out in this small sushi restaurant near Tokyo’s financial district, and both staff and customers turned to see the gaikokujin (foreigner) tearing up with the wasabi. I still had five more tuna nigiri pieces on my plate. There was more crying to come.

“Why you in Japan?” The chef asked me in broken English. He had a loud voice and held eye contact longer than comfortable.
“I’m studying Japanese,” I said, holding a piece of sushi midair, waiting for the exchange to end so I could eat it.
“Oh, muzukashii, ne? (it’s hard, isn’t it?)”
“It’s only been a few weeks, but yeah, it’s hard.”

He grabbed a handful of rice and a slice of salmon and shaped them together into a nigiri piece.

“What food do you like?”
I thought for a moment, “I like Ramen”
“Oh yes, ramen, me too.” he said, “I take you to a ramen place”

I went quiet. I don’t know this guy. We can barely speak each other’s language, and he looks like a middle-aged gangster who had to take a regular job to lay low after a hit gone wrong.

“…ok,” I said out of politeness but immediately regretted it.
“Takadanobaba station,” he said, “Sunday. Noon. ok? ok?”

I guess I can’t back down now, “…ok, ok.”

The days leading up to Sunday, I kept going back and forth between showing up or not. He must pray on trusting foreigners, I thought. He’s going to rob me. Kidnap me. Drug me and take my kidney (any or all of the above). That type of invitation is exactly what you are told to avoid when traveling abroad.

But what if he’s just friendly? Japan is safe, I thought. Also, it would be rude not to show up.

I was trying to justify a bad decision.

Sunday came. He was waiting for me outside Takadanobaba station as agreed. “Ohayo” (hello), he said and took a puff out of his cigarette. The way he smoked seemed more like compulsion than enjoyment. I greeted him back and glanced around, scanning for “accomplices.”

The chef looked clean-cut today, as if he was out on a date. Slicked-back hair. Good smelling cologne (if only he hadn’t overdone it). Dark blue buttoned-up shirt with a cream vest on top that called attention to his beer belly. Below the waist, a pair of white fitted jeans, and polished black shoes. Every piece of clothing on its own was of good taste; the crime was putting them together.

“It’s this way,” he said and started walking.
“How far is it?”

He took the last puff of his cigarette and immediately lit another one. “Not far.”

We walked side by side in silence. He was avoiding eye contact this time. The few times he looked at me, he gave me a forced smile. For the most part, he glanced at his phone, and every other time he did, he typed a message. His hand trembled when he texted, though it looked more like impatience rather than nervousness, as if we were running late for something.

After several blocks, the chef stopped and turned to face a building on the right. “This is it,” he said, “come.”

Huh… It’s really a ramen place. I guess I’m safe for now.

The shop was small and built around functionality. No decorations, no tables, just a red vending machine at the entrance from which we got our ticket order and a “U” shaped counter big enough to seat twenty. The open space inside the “U” worked as the passageway for the only waitress to go in and out of the kitchen and serve the customers, something she did with quiet precision.

No one talked, and the few exchanges with the waitress were whispered. But the place wasn’t quiet; it was filled with loud cheering of slurps as if everyone agreed on how good the food was. I joined in. The first sip of the duck-based broth hit me like no ramen I’ve had before. It was heavy with fat but felt light in the mouth, and the thick scent of meat was balanced with the freshness of green onion and ginger. As good as it was, I couldn’t enjoy it. The sushi chef looked at me often while I ate. “Oishii? (good?)” he asked, midway through the meal. I nodded and replied as best I could with my mouth full of perfectly chewy noodles, “Oishii.”

We slurped the remaining of our bowls and walked outside. The chef lit up another cigarette and took out his phone to send a text.

Was he trying to gain my trust with the food, and now he’ll make his move?

What are you doing next? I asked, looking to set up an excuse to leave.

He gave me a confused stare as if he was planning to spend more time together. “No plan, you?”

“I have to go study for class tomorrow,” I lied.
“oh...ok, ok.”
“Thank you for the meal; it was delicious.”

He pulled out a business card and gave it to me. He pointed at the bold Japanese characters written in front and said, “Watanabe,” then pointed at himself and repeated, “Watanabe.” I brought my right hand to my chest and said, “Nick.” We waved goodbye and parted ways.

Maybe he was just being friendly, after all.

I came back to the sushi shop the next day and the day after that. It became my routine. And as my Japanese got better Watanabe and I started having longer conversations. We went for food again and visited museums. He proved to be a great host, making sure I had a good time and insisting on picking up the bill, an argument I could never win. He liked to talk about his native Hokkaido, and about his only son, who he helped train to become a professional fighter, and how proud he was of him. I told him about life in Canada and how different it was compared to life in Japan. He enjoyed learning about those cultural differences; they seemed to shock and amuse him at the same time.

The day before my flight out of Tokyo, I stopped at the sushi shop to say goodbye and get my tuna nigiri fix. Watanabe welcomed me with a big smile as I sat at the bar directly in front of him, my usual spot.

“Are you happy to go back?” He asked after I finished my meal.
“No, I love it here. I wish I could stay.”
“So desu ne (is that so?)”
“Japan is the best”

“Ichiban! ...Number one,” He lifted his index finger in the air. “Arigatou (thank you),” he added and did a quick bow.
“I want to keep learning Japanese,” I said, “so, I think I’ll come back next year.”
“Next year. Ramen,” He pointed back and forth between him and me.
“Mochiron (off course),” I said and stood up to leave.

“Chotto matte (hold on a moment).” He washed his hands and grabbed something from under the counter. Then, he offered it to me.

I wasn’t expecting a gift, much less the perfect gift. It was a sushi book, half in Japanese and half in English. He managed to encompass my experience in Japan and our friendship in a single object. I didn’t know what to say to that level of thoughtfulness. I wanted to hug him; some feelings can only be expressed through human touch. But it would have been inappropriate. The Japanese are not big on displays of affection, especially in public, and especially in the workplace. I limited it to a head bow and an “Arigatou Gozaimasu” (thank you very much). Then we both said our “Sayonaras.”

I WAS BACK IN TOKYO A YEAR LATER. I walked past Watanabe’s restaurant but didn’t see him inside. Maybe he has the night shift, I thought. I’ll come back later. I headed to Shinjuku park and met a Japanese friend for Hanami (flower watching).

“I love cherry blossoms,” I said as we sat under a Sakura tree, “too bad they only bloom for a week or so.”
“Yeah, but that’s what makes it special” She put her head back and looked at the tree branches moving with the breeze, “do you know ‘mono-no aware’?”
“What’s that?”
“Hmm, hard to explain. Chotto matte (hold on)” She took out her phone and searched for it. “It’s a bittersweet feeling of appreciating beauty knowing that it won’t last,” she read.

I let the thought sink. “...I like that.”

We both went quiet for a moment and watched the pink leaves falling around us with each gust of wind.

Deep into our conversation nearing dusk, I began talking about the sushi chef; of our gastronomic “adventures” and our unlikely friendship given the language barrier and our age difference (He was probably twenty years older than me).

“I love that,” she said, “that’s so cute.”
“I haven’t seen him since I came back.” I said, “Wanna come grab sushi where he works? It’s not far.”
“Sure, I’d like to meet him” She grabbed her purse and stood up.

We walked into the shop. It had just opened for dinner hours, and the only person in view was one of the chefs setting up the counter.

“He’s not here,” I said. “It’ll have to be another day.” I turned around and moved toward the door.
“Wait, maybe he’s in the back,” She said. “I’ll ask for him”

She approached the chef arranging the counter and talked to him in Japanese. I stayed near the door, ready to leave.

I didn’t understand the words, but there was something about the chef’s tone, or maybe it was his body language; I felt something was wrong. After a few exchanges, my friend finally turned to me to translate. She didn’t need to say it. I saw it in her face.

“Watanabe died.”
“What?... When?” My first question was a reflex, the second, a useless need to understand events in time, as if they would change the fact.
“Almost a year ago. He had cancer.” Her face turned sadder the longer she looked at mine. “He didn’t tell you?”

“No.” My memories started morphing, colored by the news. All my interactions with Watanabe took on a new meaning. His joyful attitude, his banters, even his laughter when I teared up with the wasabi; it all meant something different now.

That’s why he invited me out even though I was a stranger, I thought. He was trying to enjoy the last few months of life as much as he could. Just having fun, seeing the beauty in everything, meeting people, enjoying meals, living.

“I remember you,” Said the chef to me in Japanese, slow enough so I could understand, “you used to go for ramen together.”

He turned around and opened a cabinet on the wall behind the counter. Inside it was a box with a small stack of business cards. He took one and turned back to face us.

“Doozo (please, take this)” I moved closer and took the card. It was Watanabe’s. I had thrown out the one he had given me the year before. I didn’t see the need to keep it. The same piece of cardboard I considered trash back then was now a relic to cherish.

The Next morning, Tokyo’s crowded streets felt empty; all the people walking around me were just part of a moving background. I’ve heard that grief feels like carrying a weight, but it hasn’t been like that for me the few times I’ve felt it. Yes, there is a side that feels heavy and pulling you down. But there’s also lightness. Not in a good way, though, more like I imagine it would be to lose a limb; you are lighter, sure, but at the expense of having less of yourself.

There are also fleeting moments of gratitude, “At least I had the chance to meet him.” But with every grateful memory comes a corresponding guilt, “Why didn’t I value our friendship more when I had it?” And with the guilt, the hypocritical truth that if he were alive, I wouldn’t appreciate our friendship as much as I mourned it. The value came with the loss, and without it, nothing would have changed. Still, I wish I could pay him my respect and show him that there was one more person he made a mark on, even if mostly in retrospect.

ANOTHER YEAR PASSED, AND I TRAVELED TO TOKYO AGAIN. I stood outside Takadanobaba station, waiting to meet someone for the first time. I thought about Watanabe and remembered when we met there years before.

That’s probably him, I thought. The young man walked toward me, his face unmistakably sculpted by years of taking punches.

“Ohayo!” (hello!) he said with a smile.
“Nick. Yoroshiku (good to meet you),” I said as we shook hands.
“Watanabe, Hikaru”
“Come, It’s this way,” I said and started walking. “Your father took me to this ramen when we first met.”

In loving memory of Watanabe, Tsukasa (渡部司)

The Process

A few years ago, a photographer friend wanted to do a fitness shot. I was living in Japan at the time and looking for a challenging project. “Give me five months,” I said.

What came after was madness. I began training twice a day every day, overhauling my diet, and making my life all about fitness.

The hardest part, however, was changing my identity so everything else could be possible. I had to ask myself, “What kind of person do I need to be to work out every day, stick to a strict diet, and make fitness the priority in my life for the next few months?” and more importantly, “Can I be that person?”

The way we see ourselves directs most of our behaviors and habits. Once I started changing my identity, all the right routines fell into place. But that wasn’t enough. Getting “photoshoot ripped” takes putting your body and mind through pains few people talk about.

Most of the time, we only see the glamour of the end result, not the process that makes it possible. I thought a fitness shoot meant getting in shape till your abs show, taking some pics with a good camera, and calling it a day. Fuck no.

The last month going into a shoot is tough. You keep training hard but restricting calories to a bare minimum to shed body fat. You feel weak, tired, and most of all, hungry all the time. Your sleep gets destroyed by the combo of demanding workouts, unhealthy low levels of body fat, and insufficient food. Your hormones get thrown off balance, too, and your mood goes all over the place.

Yet, you keep pushing. You keep training. You keep dieting.

Then comes Peak week…

Peak week is the last week before a competition or shoot. You cut whatever small amount of carbs were left in your diet and start manipulating water and sodium intake to get the dry look that allows your muscle definition to pop.

You had already pushed your body and mind to the edge, and now you tip them over.

You look malnourished...because you are. And that’s only one part of it. Not only do you look sick, you feel sick, too.

I began dreaming about food every night. In one of those dreams, I had done the shoot and went to have a religious experience with a burger and fries. Then (still dreaming), I remembered I had not done the shoot yet, so I had to spit out the food. When I woke up, I thought, “This is another level of messed up; why am I doing this to myself?” I didn’t think I was gonna make it.

My friend called me up to postpone the shoot for a week. “No fucking way!” I said, “We are doing this now. I can’t keep this on for another week.”

The morning of the shoot, you start loading on carbs. I ate chocolate bars, Nutella, gummy bears, and all the stuff I had been craving for months. It all tasted horrible, almost poisonous. After so long being off those things, your body doesn’t want them anymore. It’s the last joke of the whole thing. You used up every ounce of willpower to stay away from all of those foods, and when you’re finally allowed to eat them in bulk, they all taste disgusting.

To make things worse, days before the shoot, you cut most of your water intake. So you are also dehydrated, and after loading up on carbs for the shoot, your body starts begging for a drop of water. I never felt so thirsty in my life.

Despite all of it, the shoot goes well, and the pictures come out great.

But here’s something else people don’t talk about: The physique is only a part of it. The effect also comes from a good tan, a good camera, a good lens, good lighting, and, of course, a good photographer.

Also, you only look that good for a couple of hours. If you had seen me a day before the shoot, you would think I was sick. And if you saw me a few hours after the shoot, you wouldn’t be able to see my abs because of all the water retention caused by the carb loading and binge water drinking once the shoot was over.

People criticize promoting impossible standards. There are no impossible standards, only unreasonable efforts. Anyone can get “photoshoot ripped,” but what price are they willing to pay?

What I think is important is to be transparent about the process—the sacrifices behind the results. To show people what it takes, what’s behind the glamour of the finished product, so they can decide if it’s something they want to go through.

Is this healthy? No. Is it possible? Yes. Is it worth it? It was for me. I wanted to test myself and see if I could do it. In the end, it wasn’t about getting in shape or about the shoot. It was about becoming who I needed to be to achieve a goal. As Goethe once put it, “What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”

Is it worth it for you? Only you can answer that question.

In researching my book, “Learn. Improve. Master,” I came across a video of Usain Bolt training. At one point, he finishes a sprint and starts throwing up like it was just part of the process—and for him, it was. He said that when he trained the hardest during his career, he would throw up every day. You don’t hear that part of the story often. You only see Bolt on TV doing his signature pose after winning gold with a big smile, and think it’s all a breeze for him. No, it is grueling training after training, day after day for years to get to that moment. Is it healthy to take your body to those extremes? Probably not. Is it worth it? He believes so.

Anything worth doing is tough. So, the question is not how difficult it’s going to be but whether it’s worth your effort. If the answer is yes, the difficulty becomes secondary, and you do what you must.

“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”—Epictetus

The results

This is a course on habits I created for an online academy. Since I’m not part of the academy anymore, I turned it into a post so everyone can access it.

Part I — The Principles

Introduction

Most of our behavior is directed by habits. Once we build them, they subconsciously influence our decisions and our actions. This is the benefit and the danger of habits. If you build the right ones, they will improve your life behind the scenes, but if you build the wrong ones, they can destroy it.

Habits draw their force from a compound effect: small actions every day that, when reinforced over a long enough timeframe, create lasting change. Eating junk food one day is not a big deal, for instance, but if you eat junk food every day for months or years, it will have a major negative effect on your health.

The same is true for good habits. Saving a few dollars every day may not seem like much in the short term, but if you keep doing it week after week, you can end up with a comfortable retirement, or plenty of funds for your kid’s education.

Welcome to the Mastering Habits course: The Principles and Strategies for lasting change. I’ll teach you everything I’ve learned through years researching and coaching people on how to form habits, how to make them stick, and how to use them to transform their lives.

This first part of the course will be an overview of the science and everything that goes into making and breaking habits. We’ll cover the principles: Why habits form, how they form, and the reasons you’ve had trouble creating good habits in the past—or breaking bad ones.

Part two will be about the strategies: how to build the habits you want. If you’ve failed to create habits in the past, it’s likely because you’ve been using the wrong approach, not because you lack willpower or discipline. We’ll cover the right strategies so you can finally start exercising, meditating, reading more, or any other habit goal you have.

The course is designed with the busy person in mind, with short, to-the-point, actionable lessons.

Let’s get started.

A New You

Imagine how your life would be if you finally built the habits you want. This could be working out more, eating healthier, saving more money, meditating, writing every day, learning a new language or skill, reading more, or working consistently on your side projects.

Habits hold the secret to success in all aspects of life. No one can get in shape, write a book, or become a master at a craft in a few days. All meaningful goals require consistent and persistent action over the long term.

This is the reason habits are so important. Without the knowledge to build habits that stick, we’ll never achieve the compounding effect needed to transform our lives and achieve our biggest goals.

The good news is that habits are not as difficult to build as you may have experienced in the past; it only takes the right approach and effective strategies. So, no matter how many times you tried and failed in the past, the information in this course will help you build the habits you want and make them stick.

Now, let’s stop imagining the bright future and let’s begin to build it.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
—Aristotle

Action Steps

Find Your Why
Take a few minutes to think about why you are taking on this new habit or why you want to get rid of one you don’t want in your life. Putting your thoughts in writing helps in two ways. On one side, writing helps develop and organize your thoughts. And on the other, having your “Why” in writing works as a reminder of your goals and the reason you chose them. So, write down your reasons and come back to them whenever you need to regain motivation and remind yourself why you should keep working on your goals.

A Better You
Now that you found your why, take a moment to envision how your life would be if you built the habits you want. How would you feel? What would be the short-term benefits of your new habit (3-6 months)? What would be the long-term benefits (1-5 years)? This exercise helps you create your vision for the future, the goal you will be moving toward.

How Habits Work

How are habits formed?

At their most basic, habits are an association between a cue, a response to that cue (which is a routine or behavior), and a result or reward from that response. All habits are composed of those three parts, called the “Habit loop”: Cue, Routine, and reward (Cue > Routine > Reward, as popularized by Charles Duhigg in his amazing book “The Power of Habit”).

Think of a negative habit, like emotional eating. You feel stressed or sad (the cue), so you go to the kitchen and stuff yourself with unhealthy food (the response or behavior) to feel some sort of relief (the reward).

Now, let’s look at a good habit. If you go for a run first thing in the morning every day, you’ll create an association between waking up and heading out to run. Waking up is the cue, running is the response or routine, and the feeling of completion at the end is the reward.

Repeating the same cycle of Cue > Response > Reward over time strengthens the action and makes it more unconscious. If you keep going for a run every morning after waking up, the routine will turn into an automatic loop that takes care of itself, and the more you repeat it, the less you resist it. You’ll wake up in the morning and, almost automatically, head out to run.

As habits get stronger, you think less about them. Your conscious mind becomes less involved, freeing up energy for other activities. At that point, you end up moving smoothly through the habit cycle—sometimes without even noticing. That’s the automation we want for all our good habits, and soon, we’ll learn how to build it.

How long it takes to build a new habit?

It depends. The popular belief is that it takes 20 days (of daily repetition) to build a new habit, but as with many popular beliefs, this fast rule doesn’t tell the whole story. It can take anywhere between 20 days to 6 months to build a new habit. It really depends on you and the habit you are trying to build. Some habits may come easily to you, others, not so much.

But don’t let these timeframes discourage you. What they are really saying is that it can take anywhere between 20 days to 6 months for a behavior to become habitual, seemingly automatic. This doesn’t mean that whatever habit you are trying to build won’t get easier to keep going the more you do it—even in the short term. So even if a new behavior takes 6 months to become automatic, it might get easier and easier to stick to it after only a few days or weeks.

In that sense, our main goal is to get our habits started the right way and remove as much resistance as possible. Soon enough, you’ll find your new behavior easier and easier to keep going until it eventually becomes a solid habit.

Why You Failed to Build Habits in The Past

Knowing is not enough

The biggest challenge with habits is that we can’t reason our way into them. Knowing which habits we want in our lives (and even why we want them) is not enough. Only repeated action, going through the cycle over and over, can build our habit and eventually take it to a tipping point where it becomes easier to do it than not to.

We know why we want a new habit like exercising more, or why we want to break a bad one like smoking. But knowing the benefits of the habits we want or the drawbacks of the ones we want to break doesn’t cut it. If that were the case, all of us would be in better shape, reading more, eating healthier, and working on our goals consistently.

Lack of motivation or understanding of why we should change a behavior is rarely the problem. Lack of consistent action is. I’m not implying that motivation or planning are not important; they are (as we’ll see later in the course). But the bulk of building and solidifying a habit lies in taking action often. Going through the habit loop (cue>response>reward) over and over until it becomes almost automatic. The strategies we’ll learn throughout the course are based on that principle. They are designed to encourage and sustain ACTION.

Remember: Wanting a new habit is not enough. Knowing the value of the habit we want to build is not enough. We must take consistent action.

Willpower is exhaustible

Another reason people fail to build new habits is that they rely on willpower too often. Willpower is exhaustible. We can think of it as the gas in our car. The fuel will keep the car going only until the tank is empty—then, the car will come to a stop. In the same way, once we’ve used our willpower for other things in our day, such as waking up early to work, tolerating difficult coworkers, and going through our commute without losing our mind, there will be little willpower left to use for sticking to our diet or going outside for a run.

If we are counting on willpower or inner strength to stick to our habits, we are setting ourselves up for failure. Willpower can help us get started or give us an extra push when we need it, but we can’t depend on it. We need more reliable strategies to create our habits and keep them going. (we’ll explore them later in the course)

Remember: Willpower can only take you so far. Use it when you need it, but think of it as a backup, not your main strategy.

Trying to create many habits at a time is counterproductive

Every year, people come up with a long list of New Year’s resolutions. They act like it’s a wishlist when they should approach it more like a budget. We have limited time and energy. We can’t do it all. Trying to pursue too many goals or build too many habits at the same time is counterproductive. You won’t give any of them the attention they need to find their place in your life.

The right approach is to start with only a few habits, focus on those, and add more as you go. Two or three habits at a time should be a good guideline. I know there are many habits you want to add to your life, and you will get to add them all. But it won’t happen if you try to add them all at the same time.

Remember: Few things at a time. Think progression. There will be time for everything, just not everything at the same time.

Too much intensity too early can lead to burnout

Going too intense too soon is a common mistake when trying to create new habits. Think of people who have never worked out in their lives and suddenly decide that they are going to start working out every single day for two hours a day. Maybe they’ll be able to push through a week or two, but more often than not, these people end up quitting.

This is similar to when we are very hungry and order too much food at a restaurant. Our mind is overwhelmed with the feeling of hunger, and it makes us believe that we can eat more than we really can. The same happens when it’s the new year and we get excited about making changes in our lives. We get pumped up about all the great things we think we can achieve. Then, high on motivation, we mentally commit to more than it’s realistically possible to take on. It’s not long before we find ourselves exhausted, frustrated, or demoralized.

Going on a habit binge is not a good strategy. A better way to build habits is to start easy and small, and build intensity only as we get better (we’ll discuss more on this later in the course).

Cramming doesn’t work

Another reason people fail to build habits is that they plan for cramming sessions instead of spreading out their new behavior over days. In a fitness example, this would be like going for a run for 4 hours once a week instead of going for a run for 2 hours twice per week or going for a run for 1 hour 4 times a week. Remember: habits are formed through consistent action.

Trying to do too much one day and then taking a long break is counterproductive. We need consistency to build habits. We’ll worry about intensity later.

Working on our habit for several hours at a time one day and forgetting about it for the following days or weeks doesn’t work. Consistency is the name of the game. It’s more effective to do our habit daily or as many times a week as possible, even if it’s for less time or less intensity.

Lack of clarity is the enemy

The last reason we’ll discuss why people fail to build habits is a lack of clarity. People think, “I want to exercise more,” and while that’s a good start, the statement is vague and doesn’t translate into specific behavior. A more accurate statement would be, “I’m going to run for one hour in the mornings 4 times a week.”

People approach habits as aspirations, without a clear plan for how they are going to make them fit into their lives. You won’t make the same mistake. We’ll translate your general goals into specific behaviors later in the course. We’ll also give them clear implementation plans so you’ll be set up for success even if you’ve tried and failed many times in the past.

Part II — The Strategies

Introduction

Welcome to the strategy section of this course. Now that you understand the science behind habits, why they form, and why you’ve had trouble creating good habits or breaking bad ones in the past, we can move into how to start new habits and make them stick.

We’ll cover many strategies, so I recommend that you first read through all of them and then choose a few (about 3 or 4) to focus on. If you try to implement too many strategies at the same time, it’s going to be overwhelming. Keep the process easy and simple at first. You can add more strategies later.

Also, everyone is different, so some strategies will resonate with you more—those are the ones you should prioritize.

At the end of this strategies section, we’ll cover how to break bad habits. The reason breaking bad habits is at the end is because the best way to break bad habits is not really to break them, but to replace them with good ones. So, we first need to learn how to create habits, and then use those to replace our bad ones.

Let’s start.

The Power of Small and Simple

The first and most important points to consider for successfully building new habits are to work on a few of them at a time, keep them simple and low-pressure, and start small.

Complexity is our enemy. Our mind doesn’t like to tackle things that are difficult, confusing, or demand too much time and energy. If you want to start a writing habit, for example, don’t think that you have to write a masterpiece every day. Your goal should only be to sit down and write. Also, don’t start with the expectation of writing every day for several hours. Start with thirty min a day and let your habit grow organically as it becomes part of your life.

Our mind also gets frustrated when it needs to juggle many things at a time. If you try to take on too many habits at once, you’ll soon get frustrated and eventually quit some of them—if not all.

If at any point you are having trouble with your habits, come back to these principles: A few habits at a time, keep them simple and low-pressure, and start small.

Contrary to popular belief, going big right away and setting the bar too high at the start makes it more likely that we quit our habits. Research shows that we are better off starting with small goals, not putting too much pressure on ourselves, and keeping the bar low. That’s how we build momentum and stay motivated to keep our habit going and grow it over time.

Explore Your New Habit

One of the first and most important strategies is to explore the habit you are getting into. Think of this as information gathering, but don’t make it an excuse to delay starting to work on your habit. You’ll be gathering information as you go.

What’s the purpose of this strategy?
Many times we get into a new habit without knowing what we should expect: the pain points we’ll face, the challenges, and everything else that awaits us. If you want to eat less sugar, for example, you should know that you’ll experience some mild withdrawal symptoms for a few days. You’ll have a headache and will also be irritable, distracted, and even tired. But as annoying as those side effects are, they don’t last longer than a few days. Knowing this before—or as you start your new healthy eating habit—is valuable. You’ll know what to expect and prepare for it when it comes. However, if you don’t know that you will experience those symptoms, the moment you feel them, you could be tempted to quit, thinking that giving up sugar is too hard. In this example, then, knowing that the hardest part of quitting sugar only lasts a few days will keep you in line and pushing through the pain period.

As a personal example, a few years ago, I set out to build the body I’ve always wanted. It wasn’t easy. People think that the hard part is weightlifting, but the real challenge is the diet. Giving up many of the foods I loved was painful. And starting to eat more of the foods I didn’t like wasn’t fun either. I didn’t think I could make it. Being such a fan of food, it didn’t seem worth it to live a life without all the gastronomic pleasures I enjoyed: Chocolate, more chocolate, and everything fried.

Here’s the part that no one ever told me: The cravings change. As you spend more time eating healthy, you begin to crave healthy food. And as you get healthier, anytime you eat unhealthy food it makes you feel terrible—so you don’t want to eat it anymore. Yes, you have a few days here and there when you want to go all out and eat everything you used to eat before, but it’s not the norm anymore. The key point I want to make is that after a few months of new eating habits, you no longer crave the old food. So technically, you eat everything you want, it’s just that what you want happens to also be good for you.

No one ever told me that would happen. I just thought it would be a long life of deprived pleasures if I wanted to stay fit. No. Your habits change you, and after a while, they are no longer something you fight to keep going but rather something that keeps you going without much effort (and in many cases, they become what you want to do rather than what you “have” to do). Had I known this change would happen after a while, it would have saved me a lot of psychological hardships.

That was a long personal story, but I hope it sheds light on any habit you are trying to build. What seems hard at the beginning progressively becomes easier and easier to do.

The main point of this strategy then, is that we need to find out more about the habit we are about to take on so we are better prepared for what lies ahead. This will help us prepare for different challenges and set up a plan that will put the odds of success in our favor.

How do we find out more about our target habit? The easiest way to do this is by talking to people who have already built the habit we want or reading about it. There’s plenty of information online, including blog posts and YouTube videos, where we can gather all the basic information about the challenges and key points of building the habit we want.

Implementation Plans

We are more likely to do something if we plan for when, where, and for how long we’ll do it. If you want to write every day, your plan could be, “I’ll sit at my desk to write every day from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.” In this example, you state specifically when, where, and for how long you’ll write. At the same time, you are planning for consistency by doing your writing at the same time and location, making it more likely to turn into a habit.

What we are looking to achieve with an implementation plan is clarity: to make all decisions about our habits beforehand. Once we know exactly what we are supposed to do and how we are going to do it, our only job becomes showing up and following through. Everything else had been set up in advance.

A variation of this implementation plan would be to use habits and routines we already have as “time” cues instead of specific hours in the day, such as “I will write after breakfast for two hours” (instead of “I will write from 8:00 to 10:00 a.m.”). In this variation, we are turning the end of an established routine in our lives, having breakfast, into the trigger for our new habit, writing. In this variation, the implementation plan for writing would then look like this: “Every day after breakfast, I’ll sit down at my desk and write for two hours.

This habit “stacking” (adding writing after breakfast in our example) is one of the most effective ways to build new habits. It connects what we want to do with something we are already doing. With enough repetition, the “stacked” habits will form a chain where the first one automatically pushes us into the next one.

Action Step

Create your implementation plan for your habit. Think of a behavior or routine you already do that you’d like to link to your new habit. Here’s the formula: After I (habit or action you are already doing consistently), I will (your new habit).

Example: After I have breakfast, I will sit at my desk and write for one hour.

Another Example: After I brush my teeth, I will floss.

One last Example: After I leave the office, I’ll go work out at the gym for forty minutes.

Now, create your plan.

First Consistency, Then Intensity

Habits are built through long-term consistency instead of short-term intensity. Many people try to do too much too soon, making it more likely that they burn out and quit. The right approach to building habits is to focus on consistency first and adding intensity second—to start small and build upon it.

If the habit you want to build is meditation, for example, it would be better to start with 10 minutes a day for a few days or weeks before increasing the sessions to 20 minutes and beyond. This progression is more effective in building a new habit than trying to cram our way into it. If you try to start your meditation habit with the goal of meditating for 2 hours per day every day, it is more likely you’ll quit.

This was a short strategy, but it is one of the most important ones. So remember: Focus on consistency first, then progressively add intensity.

Get Back On Track As Soon As Possible

This strategy is about expecting failure and planning for it. There will come a time when we’ll break our habits. It happens. That’s normal, and we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for it. Missing a day is not a big deal, but we should be careful not to let it snowball. What happens often is that we miss a few days and fall into what’s been called, “what the hell” mode. We think that since we already missed a day or two, all is lost, and there’s no point in doing our habit for the rest of the week. We think, “I missed two days already. What the hell, I will start again next week.” We should avoid this pattern at all cost. It will turn a small sidetrack into a derailment.

If we break our habit, we must get back on track as soon as possible—and not let it escalate into more missed days. A great piece of advice from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, is to be forgiving if we break our habit one day but never allow ourselves to break it twice in a row. Following this rule will keep us from going from missing a day of our habit to missing a week or even a month.

Remember: You’ll break your habit eventually. It’s okay. Give yourself a break. But make the commitment that you will not miss your habit twice in a row.

Failproof Your Habit

We have better chances of sticking to a habit if we make it convenient to do it and inconvenient to break. For those in bodybuilding, for example, a way to make their nutrition habits convenient is to prepare and freeze their meals in advance. When it’s time to eat, they don’t have to think about it; they take out their prepared meal and eat it.

On the other side, a way for them to make it inconvenient to break proper eating habits would be not keeping “forbidden” foods in the house. It’s hard to stick to a diet if you have a pot of “dulce de leche and brownie chunks” ice cream staring at you through the freezer drawer. But if you have to leave the house and go to a store to buy the ice cream, it’s more likely you won’t cheat on your diet.

We can use the same principle for any habit. If you want to start journaling in the morning, a way to make it convenient would be to have your desk organized with your journal and pen ready to go the night before.

Having everything set up in advance takes away resistance from your habit. It’s one less task to do before sitting down to journal, which translates into one less chance to ask yourself the downward spiral question, “Do I feel like doing it today?” The moment you ask that question, you already lost half the battle. The goal, then, is to reduce the chances of asking it by removing decisions and inconveniences around your desired habit.

As for making a habit difficult to break, we can copy the amazing writer Neil Gaiman. He reserves time for writing and sticks to a rule he set for himself: “You can sit here and write, or you can sit here and do nothing, but you can’t sit here and do anything else.” After a while of doing nothing, he explains, writing is more interesting, so he writes.

Depending on the habit you want to build, you’ll have specific obstacles, decisions, and excuses that make it harder to stick to. But the goal of this strategy remains the same: to remove as many of them as you can. The more convenient and less mentally taxing you make things around your habit, the more likely you are to stick to it. And at the same time, the more inconvenient it is to break your habit, the less likely you are to do it.

Use Your Environment

The essence of this strategy is to first recognize the power of our environment in creating or eliminating habits and then use it to our advantage. We’ll shape our environment in a way that encourages our good habits and discourages the bad ones.

Our environment influences our thoughts and actions more than we are aware of, or are willing to admit. If you are trying to eat healthy but leave a jar of Nutella out on the kitchen counter, every time you go to the kitchen you’ll see the Nutella and it will cue you to eat some. But if you put the jar away, it’s easier not to think about it or be tempted. The old saying is true, “out of sight, out of mind.”

We touched on this earlier in the previous strategy, “Failproofing your habits.” To refresh your memory, one example would be that if you are trying to start the habit of going for a run first thing in the morning, you could prepare your running shoes and clothes the night before so there’s less friction to do your habit once you wake up.

Another way to use our environment is to look for consistency in the time and place we engage with our habits. If you want to write every day, it’s easier to do it at the same time and in the same place. (For example: writing every day from 10 am to noon at your desk, or writing every day after breakfast at the local Starbucks). We are trying to remove decisions about time and place beforehand so the habit is easier to follow.

An important note to keep in mind is that our “environment” is also the people we surround ourselves with. Trying to stop smoking when all your friends smoke around you will make it really hard for you to quit. In the same way, if you want to start exercising but most people around you don’t exercise and don’t care about it, it will take more effort on your part to go against the common behavior of your social circle.

The opposite is also true. If you hang out with people who are fit, work out all the time, care about their nutrition, and place high importance on staying healthy, it will be easier for you to start and stick to any fitness habit.

We want to believe that we are stronger than the influence of our social circle, but it’s well documented that we pick up a great number of behaviors and beliefs from the people we spend the most time with ( “Monkey see, monkey do”).

It’s hard to fight the influence of our friends and family, and even if you can, there is no reason to add difficulty to building and maintaining your habits.

This doesn’t mean you have to change your friends, though some people benefit from a shakeup in their social circle. What I’m suggesting is that you at least join groups that have the same goals and value the same things you value. Keep your friends, but if they are detrimental to your habit, make sure you also spend time with people who will support your new goals. They will motivate you to keep going and can counter the bad influence from other groups (if that happens to be the case).

Remember: Our environment influences the way we think and act. Tweak it to your benefit, and it will work for you behind the scenes.

One Day At a Time

There will be days or weeks when we’ll find it difficult to stick to our habits. Our progress will seem too slow and the road too long. We need to be ready to go through these phases and still keep our habit going.

One way to stay consistent is by taking things one day at a time. This is a proven psychological strategy to overcome one of the most intense challenges a human being can endure: addiction. Recovery programs talk about “winning the day,” an approach that encourages focusing on today—the here and now. Alcoholics, for instance, are taught to direct their thinking to “I won’t drink today” and avoid obsessing about what happened yesterday or what may happen tomorrow.

Paying attention to the present moment removes the weight from the number of days they have been recovering and the pressure of having to stay sober for years to come. Thinking, “I won’t drink for the rest of my life,” is overwhelming, even scary. But if the goal is “I won’t drink today,” it becomes manageable, realistic, and doable. And once achieved, it’s a matter of renewing it day after day for months, years, and hopefully, a lifetime.

Recovering from addiction is an extreme example, but it sheds light on our psychology. Projecting work into the future can discourage us from doing it, but breaking it down into daily actionable steps will empower us. The greatest feats can be achieved if we shorten the timeframes and take it one day at a time.

With the respect and admiration that recovering addicts deserve, we’ll use their example as inspiration for achieving our own goals. We’ll borrow their strategy of short-term attention for long-term success to stick to our habits.

Rather than thinking, “I’ll do my habit day after day for months or years,” we’ll think, “I’ll do it today.” We’ll avoid thinking about the past of the future and will focus on “winning the day.” That’s all that matters.

Even with this strategy, we may feel as if the level of discipline and dedication required from us is out of reach. So, it’s important to mention that it gets more manageable with time. The more we repeat our habit, the easier it is to keep it going. This cycle takes some time to build momentum, but once it does, it’ll help us sustain our habit in the long term.

Use the Power of Small Wins

Our emotional mind is easily demoralized, especially with projects that take longer to show results. This is the case with our habits. We rarely see results immediately. When we are trying to learn a new skill, get fit, or eat healthier, for example, we don’t see the benefits right away. It takes some time to notice how our habits are changing us.

We usually pick up goals that are too big, and we focus on all the progress we have yet to make, instead of the progress we’ve already made. We don’t focus on the 10 pounds we already lost for instance, but on the other 30 we still have to drop. When the road looks too long and our progress slow, it makes us want to quit. To counter this feeling and stay motivated, we must set milestones, keep track of our progress, and above all, celebrate our small wins.

BJ Fogg, the author of “Tiny Habits,” one of the best books on habit formation out there, explains that through his research he’s found that feeling success is the best way to create a positive feeling that wires your new habits.

Do not underestimate the power of congratulating yourself every time you do your habit, even if you are doing a small version of it (like meditating for only five minutes, for example). Feeling successful will motivate you to do more of your habit.

Celebrate every step you take in the right direction, no matter how small. Your brain will soon associate the good feelings with the behavior you want to turn into a habit and encourage you to do it.

Turn It Into A Challenge

A good way to start a habit is to NOT think about it as a habit at all but as a temporary challenge. For some people, the idea of starting a habit—something they will do constantly for a long time—is overwhelming. So it can be easier to approach it as an experiment or a temporary change in behavior.

Think of the current popularity of 30-day challenges. That’s what we’ll be doing in this strategy. Take your habit, whatever it is (exercising, eating healthier, writing, meditating, Journaling, saving money), and commit to doing it for only 30 days.

A 30-day challenge (It can be a 20, 60, or 90-day challenge, your choice) is a way to kickstart a habit without thinking about it as a habit.

Reducing the amount of time we are committing to the new behavior will make it more likely that we’ll follow through. Also, the idea that it’s a challenge turns it into a type of game or fun activity, instead of a drag.

You’ll find that by the time the challenge is over, the new behavior will have found a place in your routine, and you will have started to see its benefits, making it easier to keep going.

If you don’t feel you have enough momentum to stick to the habit after the challenge, then renew the challenge for another 30 days (or however long you are making it). You can even add a change or twist to it. If your challenge was running every morning for 30 days on a particular route, for example, switch the route for the following 30 days. The idea is to create a new challenge with some variety in it so it feels like a new cycle. This is a great option to use at any time (not just starting out). If an established habit is feeling boring or hard to do because it has become monotonous, add a twist to it in the form of a challenge for a few weeks.

As an addition to this strategy, you can bring your friends and family into the challenge. That way, everyone will benefit from the environmental (in this case, social) influence we talked about in an earlier strategy. When we share a challenge with others, we keep each other accountable and motivated. It also reinforces our desire to do the new behavior because, with everyone else around us doing it, it starts to feel like the new normal.

Action Step

Create your first 30-day challenge. For example: Sober October, 30 days of no sugar, 30 days of going for a walk for half an hour a day, and so on. Ask some friends and family to join you in the challenge if you can. It will make it more motivating and fun, and it will keep everyone accountable.

Focus On Progress, Not Perfection

Here’s a reality of building habits: We’ll stumble every now and then. And the same goes for breaking undesired habits. We’ll sometimes fall back into our old ways. It happens to everyone. The goal is not trying to be perfect but to expect and prepare for the times we fall short.

When we accept some stumbles along the way as an inevitable part of changing and improving, we’ll be more forgiving of ourselves, which in turn will help us keep our motivation.

The search for perfection is our enemy. It prevents us from taking action and sets an impossible standard that results in self-criticism and demotivation. Yet, we often judge ourselves against the impossible standard of being perfect…all the time.

For our goal of establishing new habits, we’ll forget about being perfect. Our only focus should be progress. Am I working on my habit consistently? If the answer is yes, even if we are taking very small steps and we are far from perfect, we are on the right track.

We need to remember that great achievements come from small improvements compounded over time. Striving for progress is what ultimately leads to achieving all other goals.

Forget perfection. Contrary to popular belief, aiming too high from the start often results in quitting. The goal seems insurmountable. A better approach is to start small, focus on consistency, and raise your standards along with your progress.

It seems counterintuitive, but it’s better to set the bar low at the start because It will motivate us to reach it. And once we do, it will keep us motivated to reach a little higher and so on.

None of this is to say that we should be complacent and not demand the best from ourselves. I am not suggesting that we KEEP the bar low, but that we should set it low at the start to get the small wins and stay motivated.

Rewards And Penalties

Ideally, we should be motivated by the goals we set for our future—the reason we started the habit. There should be no need for rewards or penalties. But the reality is that we’ll go through times of frustration and discouragement, and we’ll need an extra push. It’s during these times that rewards and penalties can keep us going until we regain our intrinsic motivation.

On the rewards side, we should use something that encourages more practice. If you have the goal of painting every day, your reward could be to buy a new set of brushes or better-quality paint if you stick to your habit for a month. Using those new painting tools as a reward will encourage more painting and keep the habit going.

Opposite to rewards, some people find it easier to stick to a habit when facing a penalty for not doing so. This could mean donating to a cause you disapprove of, not eating your favorite snack for a week, or any penalty that comes to mind. It doesn’t have to be harsh—even small penalties can go a long way.

Try rewards, penalties, or both if you are having trouble sticking to your habits and need the extra push, but make sure not to rely on them often. Rewards or penalties should only be used to give us a boost when we need it.

Remember Your Why

When creating a new habit, you will have easy days and hard days. The easy days take care of themselves. It’s the hard days, the days when we can’t find our motivation or keep making up excuses to not do our habit, that we need to prepare for. Rewards or penalties (the previous strategy) can give us the extra push to keep going. But they are only external motivators. Here, we’ll take a look at our internal motivators.

This strategy, “Remembering your why,” is exactly what it sounds like. When your motivation is at its lowest and you are making excuses to avoid your habit, you need to revisit your grand vision for your life and remind yourself of your greater goals. You want to be healthier, fit, more knowledgeable, save more money, or manage stress. Whatever your motivation to start your new habit in the first place, bring it back to mind. Try to feel the excitement you felt before you started, the world of possibilities you dreamed of, and the trust you put in yourself to follow through on your commitment.

As an added point for motivation, look at your heroes. The influencers or simply the people you admire who have succeeded in building habits themselves. Those who work at improving their lives every day. As a personal example, I look up to Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) for my working out habit. And to Ryan Holiday (Bestselling author of “The Obstacle is the Way”) for my reading and writing habit.

Whenever I feel like taking it easy or breaking my habits, I think of them. I imagine them working on their habits daily and beating resistance. It gives me the extra push I need to feel motivated again and stay on track.

Action Step

1. Think back to what made you want to start this habit in the first place. Try to relive the emotion as strongly as you can. Don’t just “think” why you got started, FEEL again that drive, that defining sensation that made you decide you wanted to transform your life.

2. Think of the people you admire most. Bring them to mind and let them motivate you. Feel how they encourage you, how they set a standard you want to live up to. You can even think of them encouraging you directly; telling you to keep going and not give up.

Embrace Your New Identity

The last strategy we’ll discuss is embracing a new identity. Making lasting change requires that we start to see ourselves in a new light. We have to imagine ourselves being who we want to become. And if we want to accelerate our progress, we need to embrace that new identity as soon as possible.

Embracing a new identity means starting to think of ourselves as the type of person who engages in our desired habit consistently. And think of it not just as something we do but as something or someone we are. If you want to exercise every day, for example, you have to start thinking of yourself as the type of person who exercises every day. Or if you want to write every day, you have to start seeing yourself as the type of person who writes every day. And so on.

When we change our self-image, it’s easier for our behaviors to follow. Let’s look at an example. Imagine you want to paint every day. If you start seeing yourself as a painter or simply as someone who paints every day, that new identity encourages you to do the actual work. If you think of yourself as a painter, you would ask, “What does a painter do?” well, he or she paints.

I want to take a moment to clarify that I am not talking about the law of attraction here. The point I’m making is that how we perceive ourselves has a great influence on the actions we take. Someone who considers himself lazy and has built that into his identity is more likely to act lazily. And someone who thinks of herself as a healthy eater is more likely to buy and eat healthy foods.

We like to act in accordance with who we think we are. At the same time, acting contrary to our beliefs and perception of ourselves creates something called cognitive dissonance, which is a very uncomfortable state of mind. When we experience this cognitive dissonance, we are left with two choices to relieve the tension: either change our identity or change our behavior. We can’t live with inner incongruence for long. So the strategy here is to shape a new identity to support our new habit. Think of yourself as the kind of person who does the habit you want to build. For example: I am a writer, I am a health enthusiast, I am a fitness junkie. Or simply, “I am the type of person who does X (X being your desired habit)”

You’ll find out that once you change your self-image, it is easier to stick with the behaviors that support it.

Extra Strategy: Make It A Daily Routine

It seems counterintuitive, but if you find it difficult to stick to your habit a few times a week, try doing it every day (even if it’s for less time, or less intense). You’ll find that a daily routine is easier to stick to. It removes any decision of “Do I feel like it today?” It also removes all excuses. You just know you have to do it every day, whether you are inspired or not, tired or not, feel like it or not.

And this is true for fitness, dieting, learning new skills, or anything else. If you do your habit daily, you’ll find that it becomes easier and easier to keep doing it. That is the power of momentum. But when you take a break, you’ll want to stretch that break longer and longer. In that sense, the “few times a week” schedule can be harder to stick to than a daily one.

You may not be looking forward to doing your new habit every single day, but it takes less effort than you think. After a few weeks, you accept it as part of your normal routine.

As a personal example, I work out daily. I don’t take breaks because I find it harder to restart after taking a day off. If I skip a day, I then want to skip the next one, and then the one after that. But when it’s every day, I accept it as part of what I do regularly. People think I’m disciplined because I work out every day, but it’s the opposite. It’s because I don’t have the discipline to work out two or three times a week following a schedule that I need to work out daily.

There’s a popular story about how Jerry Seinfeld approached his writing habit. He relied on a simple calendar and a red marker. All he would do was put a big red X in the calendar for each day he wrote. Seinfield’s goal was to never break the chain of red Xs. That’s it.

This can sound unrealistic or simplistic if you’ve never tried it, but you would be surprised by the power of a visual reminder to stick to a habit.

Not everyone is interested in doing their habit daily, but if you are one of those people, a habit tracker (you can find several online) or a simple calendar can help you stay in line.

In any case, doing your habit every day without a break may not be your choice, but you should give it a try to realize that it’s not as difficult as you imagine. Do keep in mind to lower the intensity of your habit. If you were exercising 3 times a week for 2 hours, for example, do one hour every day instead. You would be spending the same amount of time exercising, but you would be focusing on turning your routine into a daily habit.

“It’s either every day or never” —Andy Wharhol

Action Step

The exercise for this strategy is simple. If you’ve decided to try doing your habit daily, get a calendar (ideally, a physical one) and mark an X every day you do your habit. Your only mission, as Seinfield explained, is to not break that chain of Xs.

You’ll find that using a physical calendar and having to mark the x by hand is more meaningful than if you put it on a digital file. It’s not a requirement, however. You can do it in a physical or digital calendar. Your choice.

Breaking Bad Habits

Regardless of how many times you’ve tried and failed to break bad habits, you are not stuck with them. It’s likely you’ve been using the wrong approach, and that’s why it’s been so difficult to get rid of them. Most people think the way to break bad habits is through sheer willpower, but that’s the worst approach. Let’s look at more effective strategies.

Remove the cue

Remember from our habit loop discussion earlier in the course (cue>Response>Reward) that the cue is what gets a habit started. The first option for fighting bad habits, then, is to get rid of its cue. If you’re trying to cut down on snacking, for instance, this means avoiding snacking cues. One of those cues could be seeing chips or cookies on the kitchen counter. In this case, putting your snacks out of sight will help you cut down on snacking because you won’t be constantly reminded to do so. Out of sight, out of mind.

Make your habit hard to do

Another option for fighting bad habits is to make them inconvenient, difficult, or expensive.

In the case of snacking, a way to make the habit inconvenient would be to not have snacks at home in the first place. So if you really want snacks, you’d have to drive or walk to the store to buy them. It’s likely you won’t.

Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of this strategy. Even small inconveniences go a long way in getting rid of a behavior.

Swap the habit

Removing cues and making your bad habits inconvenient are your first options for breaking undesired habits. But we know this is not always possible. Many people like eating cookies or some kind of sweets after a meal, for example. For them, finishing a meal is the cue for reaching out for sweets, and because they eat meals every day, they are constantly reminded to eat sweets afterward.

If we can’t get rid of the cue for our bad habit, we’ll focus on changing our reaction to it. In the example above, the cue is unavoidable—we have to eat every day—but we can start replacing what we do after eating. Instead of reaching for sweets once we finish a meal, we can brush our teeth so we don’t want to eat more or chew gum so our mouth is already occupied with something. After some time, we’ll create a new connection between the cue “eating” and the behavior we’ve been attaching to it, chewing gum or brushing our teeth.

Think of this strategy as habit-swapping. We are leaving the same cue from the habit we want to break, but change our reaction to it. After a meal, instead of picking up a cookie, we take out chewing gum or go brush our teeth. The cue stays the same, and we only replace one behavior with another.

I know that this sounds simple in theory and that, in practice, it is much harder. Yes, replacing habits is challenging. It will take work and perseverance. And sometimes, we may stumble back to our old ways. But the important point is that replacing a bad habit is much easier than eliminating it. And though replacing a habit is still difficult, it gives us a better chance of success than trying to get rid of it altogether. Take it slowly, celebrate your progress, and be forgiving of the times you falter.

Since the goal is no longer to get rid of a habit but instead replace it with something you want, all the strategies you’ve learned in the course will help you build the new habit to replace the bad one.

Action Step

Choose a habit you want to replace a bad one, then review the strategies in the course to create and strengthen the “replacement” habit.

Part III — Bonus Material

Strategies Cheat Sheet

The Power of Small and Simple
Work on a few habits at a time, keep them simple, and start small.

Explore Your New Habit
Find out what you are getting yourself into and what challenges will come your way so you are better prepared to face them

Implementation Plans
We are more likely to stick to a habit when we know when, where, and for how long we’ll do it.
Example: I’ll write every morning at my desk for two hours right after breakfast.

First Consistency, Then Intensity
We build habits through consistent action, not sporadic binges. Focus on doing your habit consistently first, and once it starts becoming routine, increase the intensity.

Get Back on Track as Soon As Possible
We’ll break our habit at some point. It happens. Don’t beat yourself up about it, but make sure it doesn’t snowball. Get back on track as soon as possible.

Fail-Proof Your Habits
Make your habit easy to stick to and hard to break. Example: If you want to avoid unhealthy food, don’t keep any of it at home.

Use Your Environment
Keep the time and location of your habit consistent to make it easier to stick to. Also, surround yourself with people who do the habit you want to build. A supportive environment makes it easier to create and maintain our target habits.

One Day at a Time
Don’t think about yesterday or tomorrow. Focus on doing your habit today. Focusing on daily actions is empowering. We can achieve even the greatest feats if we think of them in short timeframes.

Use the Power of Small Wins
Our emotional mind is easily demoralized. We need to constantly celebrate our small wins to stay motivated. Acknowledge your effort and progress often, it will keep you on track to greater improvement.

Turn it Into a Challenge
An easy way to kickstart a habit is to turn it into a temporary change. Turn your desired habit into a 30-day challenge and invite others to join you to make it even more fun.

Focus on Progress, Not Perfection
Trying to be perfect will make you miserable. We all make mistakes and break our habits every now and then. It’s normal. Focus on making progress instead, it will take you further than trying to be perfect.

Embrace Your New Identity
Think of yourself as the kind of person who does the habit you want to build. When we start seeing ourselves through the lens of the person we want to become, our mind will progressively gear us toward it.

Rewards and Penalties
Whenever you need a boost to stick to your habit, incorporate small rewards for following through and/or penalties for not doing so.

Remember Your Why
We’ll have times when our motivation will hit low points. When that happens, remember your grand vision. Why did you take on the habit in the first place? Who did you want to become, and why? Revisiting the inspiration that made us choose our new habit in the first place will recharge our motivation.

Extra Strategy: Make it a Daily Routine
If you are having trouble being consistent with a habit, try turning it into a daily routine. For many people doing something every day is easier than a few times a week.

Remember: You can adjust the intensity and time commitment so you are able to do your habit every day. Example: Instead of working out 3 times a week for an hour and a half, you can do 30-minute workouts every day.

Habits Quick-Start Worksheet

1. What’s your general goal?
Example: lose weight.

2. Why do you want to build that habit?
Find a strong reason that will keep you motivated Example: I want to look better in the mirror and improve my health so I can have more energy for my kids.

3. What’s your specific goal?
Example: Lose 20 pounds in the next 3 months.

4. What are the different possible paths (habits) that can take you there?
Example: To lose weight, you have to move more or eat less (or both). There are many different programs to move more (weightlifting, cardio, CrossFit, etc). And there are many diets out there to help you lower your calorie intake. The goal of this step is to consider the different options available so you can then choose the one that fits your preferences and lifestyle the most. Some examples: Cut sugar, or do CrossFit 3 times a week, or do cardio every day for thirty minutes, or work out at the gym twice a week, or lower my daily calorie intake by 200 calories, or a combination of the above, etc.

5. What is your preferred path?
From the different options you identified in question 4, choose the ones you want to turn into habits. Example: Do CrossFit 3 times a week.

6. What’s your implementation plan?
In this step, you are designing your habit, After I do X, I will do Y (refer to the “Implementation Plan Strategy”). Example: I’ll go to CrossFit class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays after I leave work.

7. Take consistent action
We love planning, but we avoid taking action. Remember though, consistent action is what turns behaviors into habits. Keep building momentum by engaging with your new habit consistently.

8. Start implementing the strategies in this course
This course introduced you to many strategies and tactics. Choose a few to work on and start implementing them. Example: You could start with these three, “Failproof Your Habit,” “Turn it into a Challenge,” and “Focus on Progress, not Perfection.”

9. Celebrate small wins
Our emotional mind needs to feel good about the progress we make, even if small. So make sure you take time to acknowledge and celebrate your improvement. Example: Congratulate yourself every time you finish a class, go out for a well-deserved nice dinner with your partner after every week you are consistent with your habit.

F.A.Q (Frequently Asked Questions)

What else can I do to get better at sticking to my habits?

Sticking to our habits is harder when we are unhealthy, sleep-deprived, and stressed. And all these three factors work in combination:

We crave sugars and fried food when we are stressed and lack sleep.

We have poor sleep when we eat unhealthily and feel stressed.

We are less likely to cope with stress when we eat unhealthy food and have bad sleep.

The good news is that the cycles also work in reverse: Eating better helps us reduce stress and promotes better sleep, and so on. Ideally, we want to work on all three components (nutrition, sleep, stress), but even starting with one will have a big influence on the other two.

You’ll notice that as you improve these areas you’ll have more energy, more determination, more motivation, and more willingness to take action and change your life.

What habit should I start with?

Most likely, you already have a habit you want to create or one you want to break, but if you are looking for a recommendation, here it is: Exercise.

Exercise is the gateway habit to everything health-related that will improve your body and mind. After exercising regularly for a couple of weeks, you’ll notice that you start to crave healthier foods, thus improving your nutrition. Exercise also improves sleep, mental health, and sex life. At the same time, it reduces stress and anxiety.

Exercising is the best thing you can do for yourself. And though it has plenty of benefits on its own, the extra vitality and drive you’ll get from exercising will also motivate you to take on other new habits and become a new you. I cannot recommend exercising enough.

What books do you recommend on habits?

Here are my three favorites:

Tiny Habits by B.J. Frogg

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Atomic Habits by James Clear

If you want more book recommendations, I compiled the books I like and used as a knowledge source for this course under the last lesson called “Recommended Reading & Source Material”

There are many strategies in this course. Which ones do you recommend starting with?

Different strategies work better for different people, but the top three I recommend everyone to start with are:

“The Power of Small and Simple”

“Implementation plans”

“Focus on progress, not perfection”

Those three strategies are enough to jump-start your new habit and make it stick.

I don’t think I can change, I’m too set in my ways, would this work for me?

Yes. Definitely. We all have the ability to change, but the first thing you need to leave behind is the belief that you can’t change. Holding on to the idea that you are set in your ways will work as an excuse to self-sabotage and quit your new habit.

Once you believe you can change, however, you are opening yourself up to work hard and improve. If you need reassurance that you can change, here it is: You have the power to transform your life if you are willing to work for it. Everyone can improve their lives regardless of who they are or how long they have been stuck in old patterns of behavior. I promise you that you can change, I believe in you. Now it’s time you believe in yourself and take consistent action.

Recommended Reading And Referenced Material

• Frogg, B.J. Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 2020

• Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Canada: Doubleday, 2012.

• Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. New York: Avery, 2018.

• Dean, Jeremy. Making Habits, Breaking Habits. Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2013.

• Rubin, Gretchen. Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives. Canada: Doubleday, 2015.

• Baumeister, Roy, and John Tierney. Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. New York: Penguin, 2011.

• Wiseman, Richard. :59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot. United Kingdom: Pan Books, 2010.

• Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. New York: Random House, 2010.

• Currey, Mason. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.

• Hardy, Benjamin. Personality isn’t permanent: Break Free From Self-Limiting Beliefs And Rewrite Your Story. New York: Portfolio, 2020.

• Maltz, Maxwell. The New Psycho-Cybernetics: The Original Science of Self-Improvement and Success That Has Changed the Lives of Over 30 Million People. Prentice Hall Press, New York 2001.

• Mcguinness, Mark. Resilience: Facing Down Rejection & Criticism on the Road to Success. Lateral Action, 2012.

• Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006.

• Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Canada: Collins, 2018.

Bonus PDF: 8 Habits of Great Minds

“Renaissance man” is a term used to refer to polymaths, people who excel at different skills. The term derived from the historical period of the Renaissance as it gave us some of the most famous polymaths in history.

One example is Michelangelo, a master sculptor, painter, architect, engineer, and poet. And likely, the most recognized example is Leonardo da Vinci. He was a painter, sculptor, engineer, inventor, and scientist, among other things. He was remarkable not only for mastering several skills but also for how he combined them for new creations and new techniques and even evolve the very crafts he pursued. Leonardo leveraged his knowledge of one field to do great work in another. In his notebooks, we see sketches of weapons and machines that look like works of art. And his plans for paintings resemble architectural drawings.

Many of us wish we could master several skills as the Renaissance men did. But as knowledge evolves and fields develop, it gets increasingly difficult to become a master in more than one. It can now take a lifetime of dedication to become an expert at even a sub-subject or branch of a complex domain. And even if we were interested in less intricate ones, most of us don’t have the time, energy, or resources to pursue several in our lifetime. Our choice, it seems, is to be a master of a single craft or a “jack of all trades, master of none.”

This choice has been a frustration throughout my life. There are too many interesting skills, and I want to learn them all. But I also want to be great at something. I know many others feel the same way. We want to excel at a craft but also learn about several. The problem is that committing to mastering one skill keeps us from the variety we crave, but jumping from one to another makes it impossible to master any.

Most of us end up falling into a familiar pattern. We take on a craft and become obsessed with it. But once a new one catches our attention, we redirect that obsession toward it and neglect the one before. We go over this pattern again and again, jumping from one craft to another, never staying long enough with any to become great at it.

We want the best of both worlds, mastery and variety, but they seem to contradict each other. We can’t become masters of many crafts, yet we don’t want to be confined to one. So, what can we do? How can we pursue mastery in one field (and enjoy the deep knowledge and proficiency that comes with it) while satisfying our curiosity for others? That will be the subject of this discussion, a guide to becoming a new breed of ‘renaissance man/woman.’

The concept is simple: we’ll have a main craft but allow the study of others to complement it. We’ll learn from different fields but only in relation to—and to integrate with—our preferred one. This means we won’t be jumping from one skill to another, but we won’t be restricted to a single one, either. Instead, we’ll give ourselves space to delve into various fields, though only to take the knowledge that improves or complements the craft we chose as our main one.

A good example of this approach is the evolution of mixed martial arts. In the early days of the UFC and other combat organizations, fighters specialized in a single martial art. We would see fights between boxers and wrestlers, for instance, or judokas and Muay Thai fighters. These mixed fights exposed the strengths and weaknesses of the different martial arts. Strikers realized their skills could be neutralized on the ground, and grapplers found out it’s difficult to take someone down while being punched, kicked, kneed, or elbowed in the face.

After the first years of these events, it became obvious that no single martial art was the be-all and end-all—though Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu came close as a dominant one. All of them had weaknesses, and fighters had to learn parts of other styles to become more competitive. Striking martial artists started to learn grappling and vice versa. Fighters didn’t switch their main martial art; they picked up what they needed from other disciplines to improve their own. They started mixing martial arts, and now we know this interdisciplinary training as MMA (mixed martial arts). All fighters are now expected to be proficient on the ground and on their feet. And though they usually have either striking or grappling as their core, they use knowledge from different fighting styles to improve and complement their own.

At this stage in the sport, the training of many fighters has gone beyond learning from other martial arts and into skills that seem unrelated. Georges Saint-Pierre, one of the greatest fighters of all time, took on gymnastics training to improve his fighting. His goal wasn’t to become an Olympic gymnast but to use gymnastics to get better at his main craft, fighting.

And with the way MMA evolved as part sport and part entertainment, we could say it’s an advantage for some fighters to learn public speaking to add theatricality into promoting their fights. An example is Conor McGregor. Despite being a great fighter, he can attribute a great part of his success to his ability to polarize the public and create drama around his fights. Those who loved him tuned in to cheer, and those who hated him tuned in, hoping to see him fall. This made him a popular fighter, and he’ll always be considered one of the greatest in the sport, though most will remember McGregor for his showmanship skills rather than his fighting ones.

Just like these fighters, in the new Renaissance man approach, we’ll focus on one domain and expand only to parts of others with the goal of influencing, improving, or adding possibilities to our main one. In this approach, we can be curious, we can explore, we can venture beyond our main craft, but always remaining connected to it. We are learning from other domains but with the purpose of transferring the new knowledge or skills to the one we’ve chosen as our core.

Let’s look at another example. Let’s imagine that your main field is finance, that’s your core, but you also like history. History is a broad subject and could suck you in if you start studying it without a specific purpose. So, instead of going aimlessly into the study of history, you would stay connected to your core, finance, and expand into history in a way that can relate back to it. One option would be learning about the history of finance and economics or the economic models of ancient empires. In those cases, you would not be learning everything you can about history, just parts of it—the ones that complement or relate to finance the most.

With this form of study, we get to explore outside our core—satisfying our need for variety and novelty—but we also get to add to it for doing so. Every new subject we learn from becomes an extension of our main skill, giving us more depth and new creative or executive possibilities for it.

Sometimes, the connections between fields happen organically. We unconsciously combine new knowledge with what we already know. But this is not a given. Much of what we learn remains context-dependent, meaning we only think of it in the context we learned it (or learned to use it for). To get the best out of different fields, we need to look for connections between them.

Here’s where traditional higher education fails us. Few classes are tailored to specific majors. Instead, they are purposefully made neutral to be shared among students of different fields. Staying with our earlier example, let’s imagine you are a finance major and want to take a history class. Most likely, the only choice available is the same for any other major: some version of History 101—an introduction to history. Though It may be an interesting class, it’s not tailored to your main field of study, finance.

In an ideal scenario, there should be a class that connects directly to your major. For example, a class such as “The History of Finance.” And if you wanted to expand into art instead, a class such as “The Business of Art.” Even more specifically, if you wanted both history and art, a class such as “The Role of Finance and Patronage in the Art World of the Renaissance.” In every case, you would expand into new subjects, either history or art, while keeping a connection with your main one, finance.

Here’s a real-world example of a connection between subjects done right. Earlier in my life, I had the opportunity to attend a great music school. Among the classes offered, there was one for my instrument (guitar) that caught my attention, “Hard Rock/Metal Lab.” Here’s the description:

“Exploration of technical innovations provided by three decades of classically influenced, hard-rock players. In-depth study of the early pioneers of the style (Ritchie Blackmore, Uli-Jon Roth, Michael Schenker) and the more recent guitarists (Yngwie Malmsteen, Jason Becker, Joe Stump) who helped to redefine the genre known most commonly as shred.”1

The class is not about all musical instruments nor about all music styles or music history in general. It’s about a specific part of music history from a specific style for a specific instrument: the history of Hard Rock and Metal for guitar players. Do I like the guitar? Yes. Do I like Metal? Yes. Do I like history? Yes. So what do you say to a class like that? Hell Yeah!

By going into new subjects with a direct link back to our main one, we get to maximize the transfer of knowledge between them. And though it’s rare to find classes or courses that resemble the scenario above, we can create our own. For our earlier example, we could ask: what would a “history for finance people” class look like? What would it cover? Then, we can create an ideal “curriculum” for it and start learning the pieces we need on our own.

Let’s change the example and imagine your core interest is bodybuilding. But let’s also say you love food and want to learn how to cook. In this case, you would ask, what would a “cooking for bodybuilders” class look like? What would it focus on? Then, instead of going into cooking head-on and learning it as a separate craft, you would only focus on what connects best to bodybuilding.

Here’s how it would work at a practical level. Taking an average cooking class could interfere with your bodybuilding goals. Bodybuilding takes calculated nutrition plans, so learning to make traditional French pastries or crêpes would throw off your macros fast. Instead, you could focus on learning tasty vegetables and lean protein dishes. You could also prioritize learning various cooking techniques and the use of herbs and spices so you could add variety to what seems like a highly restrictive diet. Getting into cooking with this approach not only satisfies your interest in culinary arts but also enriches your work in bodybuilding.

Let’s look at one final example, one where the two subjects seem too far to connect: Martial Arts and music. We’ll take martial arts as your main interest and music as the one you want to expand to. How would a class called “Music for Martial Artists” look like? What would it cover? The subjects seem to be far apart, but there are already examples of the combination. There’s capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art that incorporates elements of dance in its moves, and it’s deeply connected to music. There’s also Muay Thai, the Thai discipline also known as the “art of eight limbs.” Though in most places Muay Thai has been stripped of its connection to music, in Thailand, fights are still fought at the pace of traditional tunes.

Our study of “Music for Martial Artists” could include learning about those martial arts and exploring how music provides pacing in their practice and execution. Another option would be studying the use of music as a psychological anchor for accessing peak states. Martial artists and athletes from different fields use music before a competition to hype themselves up. Here, we would be going into music as an element of sports psychology and peak performance, something we can also incorporate into martial arts.

The connections between music and martial arts exist, we just have to make a conscious effort to find them. And the same applies to connecting other fields. We need to create the link as we expand from our main craft into a new one and not treat them separately.

Expanding into new subjects with the intention of integrating the new knowledge with our main interest offers two important benefits. On the learning side, it’s easier to learn something new if we connect it to what we already know or see it as an extension of it.

Also, when we approach new subjects with a clear purpose or use for them, we learn them faster. Purpose primes our mind to learn. It makes us more receptive to process and internalize new information. And on the lifestyle side, we get to explore other fields—and satisfy our curious nature—while staying committed to our main one.

With this new Renaissance man approach, instead of jumping from one domain to another, we are only taking short trips outside our core to gather new knowledge we can use to complement it. Incidentally, getting influence from other fields improves our creativity and gives us a new range of possibilities for how we think about and apply our main craft.

In a time when mastering many skills is unrealistic for most of us, for either increased complexity in domains or for personal circumstances, the “new renaissance man” approach is the closest we can get to the best of both worlds: variety and novelty from expanding into new fields, and depth and proficiency from staying with one as our core. We’ll get to learn from many domains without sacrificing our pursuit of mastery in our main one and, instead, will get to enhance it for stepping beyond it. We can become ‘Jack of some trades, master of one.’

You can read the first two chapters of my book, “Learn, Improve, Master” here:

Or you can read a promotional interview I did during the book’s launch here:

Notes

This is a bonus piece I wrote for my book “Learn, Improve, Master.” It’s an interview with a Kintsugi master about his art and his views on learning and mastery.

A Short History of Kintsugi

In 16th-century Japan, tea bowls became as coveted as land. Shogun Oda Nobunaga had taken control of most of Honshu (Japan’s main island), and in an unprecedented move, he restricted the tea ceremony (a Japanese cultural activity) to only those he granted permission—and conducting the ceremony without it was punished by death.

After elevating the status of the tea ceremony and making it an aspiring right of the elite, Nobunaga stopped granting land to high members of society and instead rewarded them with tea bowls and accessories, which represented the right to conduct the prestigious ceremony.

With Nobunaga’s move, tea bowls turned into a symbol of status and power for feudal lords, wealthy merchants, and military leaders—and became as coveted as land. These delicate bowls, however, would sometimes fall and break, leaving their owners with their most prized possession in pieces.

The broken bowl owners turned to Maki-e artists for help (Maki-e is the art of gold sprinkling on urushi, lacquer made from a tree of the same name). The artists transposed their skill to do the reparation, using the urushi as glue to bind the broken pieces and the gold to decorate and showcase the bindings. This new application of their art gave birth to Kintsugi (Kin=Gold, Tsugi=bind).

Kintsugi embodies one of the most beautiful concepts in Japanese philosophy, Wabi-sabi: finding beauty in imperfection, incompleteness, and inevitable decay. In the hands of an artist, Wabi-sabi is about revering transience and flaws. It’s the reason Kintsugi moves away from concealing bindings and instead showcases them. The art strives to make artifacts better for having been broken.

Kintsugi gives us a profound philosophy for life: That the painful experiences we go through can make us better and that we should honor our scars because there is beauty in them, not in spite of them.

Historically, in Japan, there weren’t Kintsugi artisans; the craft was part of Maki-e. Today, however, Kintsugi’s rising popularity is turning it into an independent art. Practitioners are breaking away from Maki-e and embracing new techniques. Select artists, however, continue the tradition and original purpose of Kintsugi that started in the 16th century (repairing valuable tea ceremony artifacts with Maki-e techniques).

One such artist is Showzi Tsukamoto, a renowned Maki-e and Kintsugi master (involved in both arts for over five decades). Tsukamoto-san collects broken artifacts from the Edo period and turns them into Kintsugi masterpieces, often displayed in museums and art galleries around the world.

I had the incredible opportunity to learn Kintsugi techniques from him over a few days. More than learning the basics of Kintsugi, I was interested in seeing him work, and get a taste of how he taught the art. During my time with him, I got to ask him a few questions about his craft, his journey, and his view on mastery. Here are his thoughts.

Q: How has your perspective of the art evolved over the past five decades?
A: In the beginning, you are expanding your mind, growing, opening up to new ideas, and gathering as much as you can. But over the years, you start narrowing down. In other words, early on, you are expanding, and in the later stages, you are contracting. With time, you zero in on what’s important and what matters most to you, the type of art you want to create, and where you focus your efforts.

Q: Were there times you wanted to quit?
A: I don’t remember ever wanting to quit, but I do remember many times when learning the art was difficult. I wasn’t good at it at the beginning, so it took me a lot of hard work to develop my skills. Even if you like what you do, it won’t always be easy, but you have to stick with it.

Q: How do you feel about your art now?
A: I love it as much as I did early on, maybe even more. Not a moment goes by that I’m not thinking about my art. I work at it every day, and every day I’m excited about it. This is the most enjoyable time in my career because I have the freedom to do art for myself. Before, I had to make art for others—and try to please them—to make a living. All the art I do now, I do it for myself. I can create anything I want, and only work on what I enjoy.

Q: What keeps you motivated?
A: I dream of new pieces all the time; I have too many ideas. I worry that I won’t be able to make them all. I wish I could live long enough to make everything that I envision. So, every day I’m excited about my art because I get to work on materializing those dreams.

Q: You see a lot of students come and go. What are the characteristics of the ones who last and the ones who don’t?
A: Perseverance. Sometimes, you see students who show talent at the beginning but lack discipline. They don’t get far. On the other side, you see students that have a tough time, it doesn’t come easy to them, but they stick with it and improve a lot. This is a long journey, just learning the art takes about six years, you can’t tell how far someone will go only by early show of talent. So, as a teacher, I also have to encourage and be patient with those who have a harder time. You don’t know what they are capable of in the long term if they keep working hard.

Q: What does mastery mean to you?
A: Mastery is being able to materialize your ideas as accurately as possible. In other words, having the ability to turn your visions into reality.

Here are the first two chapters of my book “Learn, Improve, Master: How to Develop Any Skill and Excel at It”

INTRODUCTION

A young mother holds the body of her dead child across her lap. She looks down at him in a moment of overwhelming love and sorrow, her grief forever captured in stone by one of the greatest artists that’s ever lived, Michelangelo Buonarroti. The details of this sculptural masterpiece, the Pietà, make us forget we are looking at marble. What we see instead are figures of flesh and drapery so vivid they keep our gaze fixed, awaiting their movement. It is one of the most beautiful works of art ever created.1

In response to people’s admiration of his Pietà, Michelangelo is supposed to have said, “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.” What seemed like the product of pure genius was the result of years of labor and many more learning his craft. We tend to think of mastery as something magical or the consequence of raw “talent,” but it comes from effort and dedication over many years—in most cases, a lifetime.

We usually see a master’s polished performance or the refined final product of their efforts, but not the process behind it, and so we believe that what they do is beyond our capabilities. We think we don’t have the talent or special abilities to do what they do. It’s like watching a magic illusion. A magician vanishes a card and makes it reappear in an impossible location. As spectators, we see the end result and are amazed by it. But we do not get a glimpse at the mechanics that made it possible. If we could peek behind the illusion, we would find a process anyone can replicate through the study and practice of sleight of hand.

The same is true when watching a great quarterback playing a championship game, a virtuoso cellist giving a concert, or an inspiring speaker commanding the stage. We look at their performance, not how they developed their skills through a process that we could follow too.

This book is about that process: how to learn, improve, and master any skill. We’ll look past the “smoke and mirrors” and study the method that creates the magic. We’ll begin by exploring the principles of learning and common misconceptions (Foundation). Then, we’ll discuss how to learn anything (part I). After that, we’ll move into improving our abilities and overcoming common challenges (part II). And finally, we’ll get into mastery and the path to pursue it (part III).

While everything we’ll cover throughout the book stands on science, this is not a science book. I’ll keep the scientific explanations, research, and studies to a minimum and present them in their simplest form. We can think of it this way: racecar drivers don’t need to know all the mechanics or engineering of their cars; their focus is on mastering how to drive them. This will be our approach. We’ll cover some science of how our mind works, but our main interest will be how to use it. For those interested in going deeper into the science, see the “Selected Bibliography” section at the end for referenced material.

I divided most chapters into principles and strategies, with each of these sections laid out one major point at a time. The principles are the essence behind the strategies, and once you understand them, you won’t be limited to the strategies I give you—you’ll be able to come up with your own. As pioneer efficiency engineer and management theorist Harrington Emerson noted, “As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” That said, you’ll still find many strategies and tactics to have immediate actionable steps.

Whether you are taking on a new skill or already working on one, these pages will serve as a companion guide to help you learn and master your craft. I’ll share with you everything I’ve learned through years researching and studying cognitive science, top performance, and mastery. I’ll show you how to optimize your process and give you the tools to make your dream of excelling at a sport, music, art, (or anything else) a reality.

Nick Velasquez
Tokyo, Japan

Chapter 1
Principles of Learning

Learning is the greatest power of the human mind. Everything we’ve built, everything we’ve created, everything we’ve become has been the result of our ability to learn. And this great power is inherent in all of us. We are made to learn.

Throughout millennia of evolution, we developed two primary systems to adapt to our environment. One is our genes, a transgenerational long-term memory encoded in our DNA. Genes carry the instructions for our physiology (and some behavioral traits) and are an inflexible system that evolves over many generations. The other is our learning brain, a flexible system that learns from our environment and adapts to changing circumstances.

Our learning brain allows us to develop skills based on specific needs and wants within our lifetime. Consider reading and writing. Written language is too recent for humans to have evolved a brain structure designed for it. We can read and write because our brain can learn. And the same goes for playing a sport, a musical instrument, or a board game. Without a learning brain, we couldn’t take on any of those skills, or the thousands that exist as hobbies and professions. But how does the brain learn? What’s behind the greatest of our powers? Let’s delve into the principles of learning.

Neuroplasticity and Specialization
The first principle we’ll discuss is our brain’s capacity to adapt, known in scientific terms as “neuroplasticity.” Instead of being a fixed structure, our brain can change itself depending on circumstances and redirect functions to different regions to optimize the neural pathways we frequently use. The implication of neuroplasticity in learning skills is that our brain changes as we learn them. If we take on the cello, for instance, the area of our brain responsible for finger movement in our fingering hand will enlarge and become more active. With extensive practice, our brain will recruit more neurons for the task, strengthening connections and building complex networks that specialize in playing the instrument.

This principle is illustrated by the results of brain scans done on musicians. A study led by Thomas Elbert from the University of Konstanz in Germany showed that the brain area responsible for left-hand movement in violinists and other string instrument musicians, their fingering hand, was larger than in non-string instrument players.

At the same time, the results showed that the brain area responsible for right-hand movement in the same string instrument musicians, the bow hand, was similar to that of non-string instrument players. In other words, the brain area controlling the fingering hand of violinists, cellists, and bassists was overdeveloped, while the one responsible for the bow was average.

The results indicate that the string instrument musicians were not born with more complex brain structures for using their hands—had that been the case, they would have shown larger brain areas for both of them and not just one—but instead, that their brain had changed in response to the demands and use of their fingering hand, directing more energy and resources to the area responsible for its movement.

Our brain’s capacity to change itself also applies to mental skills. Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues examined the brain structure of London cab drivers and compared them to non-cab drivers of the same age group. Cab drivers in London must go through extensive training to navigate the city. They need to memorize streets, buildings, routes, and by the time they complete their training, they should know the fastest way from any point in the city to another. Their skill is impressive, and so is the way developing it changed their brain. Maguire and her team found that the cabbies’ posterior hippocampi, responsible for spatial navigation skills, was much larger than in non-cab drivers.

Their study also revealed a direct correlation between the time spent working as a cab driver and the size of the brain area recruited for spatial navigation skills. The longer their career behind the wheel, the bigger the area used for the task. This brings us to a fundamental principle of learning and mastering skills. When we practice, our brain changes to specialize, and the more we practice, the more pronounced the effect. Let’s take a closer look at how this specialization is built and strengthened.

Imagine you are on a hike, and you come across a field of high grass. There’s no path ahead, so you have to make your way through this grass to cross to the other side. The next day, you go on the same hike and face the field again, but this time you see a trail of tamped-down grass made by the steps you took the day before. You follow the same route, and in doing so, you make it more accessible to walk next time. If you keep doing this for several days, that rough trail will turn into a smooth path.

Neural pathways work in a similar way. First, we create a primary neural connection for a behavior or thought process, the rough trail going from one neuron or group of neurons to another. But as we keep using the connections, they become faster and stronger, allowing information to move more efficiently from one side to the other.

Without getting too technical, this efficiency builds as a substance called myelin surrounds the neural connections we repeatedly use—a process called myelination. Myelin works as an insulator that supports stronger and faster signal exchange between neurons. The amount of myelin surrounding neural connections depends on the frequency of use. The more we use them, the more layers of myelin they get.

Myelination is the internal process for getting better at anything: through practice, we build layer upon layer of myelin on the neural pathways related to our skill, making them robust and specialized, the neural equivalent of turning a rough trail into a path. And if we continue our practice over the years, that path evolves into a speedway.

So far, we’ve discussed how learning promotes physical changes in our brain. Now let’s see how learning changes the way we think.

Association
Learning is about making connections. Neurologically, these happen when neurons get excited simultaneously, making them bond to each other—a process first described by neuropsychologist Donald Hebb as “neurons that fire together wire together.” Cognitively, they happen when we associate ideas, concepts, patterns of thinking, and behavior.

Let’s take speaking a language as an example. We started learning our native language by making associations between sounds and our environment. The sound “mom” (or “mamá,” or “maman,” in Spanish and French respectively) was just noise, but after training from our parents, we began to associate the noise with our mother. Over time, the connection got reinforced and turned both the word and its meaning into a single unit. “Mom” stopped being noise and became permanently linked to what it represents.

Throughout life, we make thousands of these associations between noises and concepts, developing fluency in our native language. These connections become so strong we can’t separate them. If someone is talking to us in our native language, we can’t help but interpret concepts and meaning instead of hearing noises.

Association plays a primary role in developing skills. When learning to play the piano, for instance, we create connections between finger movements and sounds we want to produce. In hockey, we associate how we hit the puck with where we want it to go. And the same applies for other sports, arts, or anything else. We build our abilities by creating connections and reinforcing them over time.

Chunking
When associations grow complex, they lead to chunking. This is when our brain groups and processes several pieces of information as a unit instead of individually. When reading, for instance, we look at letters but process them in groups as words. Two associations are at play here: one between each letter and its sound, and a larger one for what they mean and sound like when put together to form words. Taken one step further, we chunk words together and interpret them as sentences.

When learning to drive, making a turn seems like a long list of tasks that need to happen in close succession: use the flasher to signal the turn, reduce your speed, check your mirrors, verify the road is clear, rotate the steering wheel, adjust speed as you turn. At first, each step stands on its own—one, two, three—and we create separate connections between each step and how our body should move. But with practice, we chunk the steps together until turning becomes one fluid sequence. We no longer process all the steps of the turn individually but see them as part of a larger action.

The same principle applies to all other learning. We start by making individual associations between concepts and behavior and then group them to form more complex, larger chunks. As we get better at processing these associations, they move from our conscious awareness into our subconscious (we no longer read letters but see words instead, and we pay little attention to our body movements as we drive). Let’s take a look.

Automatic Processing
When we reinforce connections between thinking patterns or behavior, they start becoming automatic. Consider walking, a skill we learned early in life. At the time, it was difficult for us, but we don’t pay attention to it now. Walking became a seemingly automatic process. We no longer think of how or in what order to move our legs and balance our body.

With enough practice, we can automate tasks, or parts of them, and reduce the conscious awareness we give to their execution. This automation is valuable in learning because it frees up conscious energy to work on other things and build on top of what we already know.

Masters take this process to the extreme. They practice their craft to a point where they can execute outstanding technique without thinking much about it. Their conscious mind is not occupied with the mechanics of the task and can instead focus on higher-order thinking, such as expression, creativity, or strategy.

Consider the speed of professional violinists. They move four fingers from one hand through the fingerboard, landing on the right position at the right time, while the other hand moves the bow at the correct angle with the right speed to get the desired sounds. That’s too complex for the conscious mind to process.

Professional violinists can play fast because they have reinforced the neural connections associated with the mental and physical tasks of playing the instrument to the point of automation. They no longer focus on where to put their fingers or what angle to move the bow to hit the right notes. With the subconscious handling those parts, the violinists’ conscious energy can be directed to their interpretation and other areas of their performance.

An important note to keep in mind is that automatic processing (aka automaticity) does not discriminate between desired behaviors and undesired ones. If we repeat bad habits or keep making the same mistakes, that’s what we’ll reinforce and automate—and they will be harder to correct later on. We must be careful, then, of what we automate to avoid transferring the wrong things into our subconscious.

The principles we’ve covered—neuroplasticity, specialization, association, chunking, and automation—are the foundation of all learning. Our brain rewires itself through practice, creating clusters of neural connections composed of associations between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that specialize in what we repeatedly do. When reinforced, these connections move from our conscious awareness to our subconscious, becoming almost automatic. Then, our conscious mind is free again to process new tasks and add complexity to our growing abilities. Whether we go into French cooking, sculpting, or golf, these are the processes taking place behind the scenes as we learn. And they change the way we think as much as they change the physical structures of our brain.

Let’s move on now to dispel the popular myths and misconceptions surrounding learning and mastering skills.

Chapter 2
Myths and Misconceptions

“Learning should be fun.” “Old dogs can’t learn new tricks.” “You either have it or you don’t.” “It takes ten thousand hours of practice to master any skill.” These ideas have been repeated so often they are now accepted as truth. But they are myths and misconceptions, and believing them can hurt our progress, give us a poor perception of our capabilities, and even keep us from learning something in the first place. Let’s take a moment, then, to dispel the most popular but false beliefs about how we learn and what it takes to master a craft.

“Left-Brained vs. Right-Brained Learners”
Our first stop is the idea that each brain hemisphere is responsible for specific thinking modes. It’s common belief that the “left brain” is responsible for logical tasks while the “right brain” is in charge of creativity. That’s not exactly the case. Though one hemisphere may take priority over the other in certain thinking processes, we use both sides of our brain for almost everything, including learning. That means none of us are “left-brained” or “right-brained,” and we shouldn’t buy into learning “techniques” that target our “dominant” side or block our “non-dominant” one.

And as long as we are discussing the brain, let’s get rid of another myth that’s been a part of pop psychology for decades: “We only use 10 percent of our brain.” It’s a fantasy idea that makes for a good story, but it’s not true. Brain scans, neuroimaging, and research on brain damage, among other studies, have proved time and again that we use all brain areas and that they are often active.

“Learning Styles”
This is the idea that each of us has a primary learning style, and that we learn best when material is presented in alignment with it. Many theories have stemmed from this concept. Without getting into details, for they are beyond our discussion, a well-known example is the “VAK/VARK learning styles” theory, which categorizes learners into either visual, auditory, (reading), or kinesthetic. Another one is the Honey-Mumford model, which divides learners into activists, reflectors, theorists, and pragmatists. While all these theories propose different “styles,” they share the idea that we learn best if we study based on our dominant one, a premise unsupported by research.

These theories come from observation and “experience” in classrooms, not from rigorous testing. There’s no evidence that we learn better if new material is presented in what we think is our style of learning. When psychologist and cognitive scientist Harold Pashler and colleagues set out to test the claims of different “learning styles” theories, they couldn’t find any supporting studies, and instead found ones that contradicted them.

What’s true is that we do have preferences in the way we learn, though this doesn’t mean our preferred style makes the most difference in our learning. Other factors, such as the type of subject we are studying, how we perceive ourselves and our capabilities, prior knowledge, and our ability to extract underlying principles from the material, play a far more important role in how we learn.

Limited research exists on learning style theories, so even if some have validity, there’s currently no thorough research to support them. In that sense, we cannot write them off as a myth, but we cannot structure our learning based on them either, much less define ourselves by their categories.

“Old Dogs Can’t Learn New Tricks”
Years ago, it was thought that the brain was flexible during our development years, (childhood and early teens), and mostly rigid throughout adulthood. In other words, that we were better learners early in life. This old idea has been proven wrong. Though our brain’s flexibility does decrease with age, it keeps its ability to learn and rewire itself throughout our entire lives.

What does get worse with age, however, is how good we are at rote learning, repeating information over and over until we commit it to memory. But rote learning is inefficient for memorizing in the first place—more on this in chapter 6. We’ll explore more effective memory strategies that aren’t age dependent, so we shouldn’t be concerned with our diminished ability to rote learn later in life.

Despite the scientific findings, it still seems like young people learn faster. But the explanations are found in psychology and behavior rather than biological differences in age. One factor has to do with our mindset: if we believe we are too old to learn, it will have an adverse placebo effect, aka “nocebo effect,” hurting our confidence and progress as long as we believe it to be true.

Another explanation has to do with our priorities and motivation. For most adults, learning comes behind work, family, finances, and other responsibilities. But for many young people their hobbies come first—be it skateboarding, playing drums, or video games—and they dedicate them as much time as possible. That extra study, practice, and attention accounts for a great part of what seems like better learning capabilities.

A different comparison we often make is with kids. We believe them to be great learners, but considering that it is their main, if not the only, responsibility and that they spend all their time learning both at home and in school, they are not better at it than adults.

The example most people like to bring up is how “quickly” they learn a language. But in reality, it takes kids several years of life to develop fluency in their primary language. And keep in mind that they are surrounded by it all day every day, and that they need to learn it to get by in life. That timeframe is not different for adults. With proper teaching, dedication, and a supportive environment, adults can learn even the most difficult languages in under two years.

None of this is to say that age doesn’t play any part in learning. It does. Depending on how far you want to take certain skills, you’d better start early, when your body and mind are more adaptable. If you want to be a top ballet dancer, for instance, it makes a difference to start as a kid. You can still learn the skill at any age, even become great at it—within the boundaries of your physicality—just don’t expect to grace the stage of the Bolshoi Theater if you start late in life.

“Learning Should Be Fun”
Many books and articles on learning claim that learning should be fun. Not true. Learning can be fun, but it’s not required to be so. Learning is challenging; it makes the mind work hard, and that isn’t always enjoyable.

At different points, the learning process will be dull, frustrating, and even discouraging. As Aristotle once noted, “Youths are not to be instructed with a view to their amusement, for learning is no amusement, but is accompanied with pain.” That’s the process. We have to embrace it and strive forward with perseverance, even when it’s painful. In that sense, the condition we should be after is enthusiasm, not fun. We must be eager to learn, accepting the hardships that will come with it.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy learning. Have fun learning your craft, but don’t rely on it being enjoyable to stick to it, and don’t get discouraged when it’s not. Struggle is a normal part of the process, and as we’ll discuss later, it even strengthens our learning.

“You Either Have It or You Don’t”
We like to think that potential is determined by innate traits, that top athletes and performers got to their level because of natural advantages, and that we could do the same if we had them too. This belief protects our ego. We get to blame our shortcomings on factors beyond our control. But talent and intrinsic traits play a limited role in learning and mastering skills. How far we go in our craft is mostly under our control if we are willing to work for it.

This doesn’t mean you can be anything you want. I can’t tell you that. But I also can’t tell you where your limits lie based on your aptitudes and perceived talents (or lack of them). No one can. What’s certain is that passion and perseverance, what psychologist Angela Duckworth calls “grit,” will make you great at your craft regardless of innate traits. How great? The only way to find out is by going through the process and putting in the work. In the words of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it.”

An example to follow is that of Demosthenes, the great statesman and orator of ancient Athens. He was afraid of public speaking and had a speech impediment earlier in life. But through years of dedicated practice, he honed his speaking skills and became one of the best orators of his time, despite what seemed like crippling disadvantages.

Like Demosthenes, all masters had to spend countless hours learning and refining their craft regardless of their aptitudes or “talents.” No exception. None. Ever. Even Mozart, who has been popularized as a born musical genius, had to work hard to develop his skills. “It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me.” Mozart said to the conductor leading rehearsals for Don Giovanni, “I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.” Attributing Mozart’s mastery to innate abilities is a disrespect to the lifetime of dedication he put into his craft.

Expertise and expert performance studies in many fields show that innate traits and abilities have limited effect in developing excellence.* The exceptions are physical qualities such as height and body structure, but they only matter in a few areas—mostly specific sports—and only to an extent. And even in those domains, people with natural advantages still have to work hard to become great. In other words, masters are made, not born. As German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it, “Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it’s the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.”

Let’s take basketball as an example, one of the few fields in which natural traits have a larger influence. The game gives an advantage to tall players, but being tall does not mean you are automatically good at it, nor are the tallest players the best ones. A good reference is Stephen Curry, who is several inches shorter than the average NBA player and yet one of the best to step onto the court.

Learning and mastering basketball takes years of dedicated training, not just height. Basketball skills like ball-handling, shooting, passing, and rebounding have little to do with being tall. A seven-foot stature may be an advantage, but it’s not necessary for developing the skills that make up the game. Those can be learned by anyone. And if basketball had height divisions, like fighting sports have weight classes to account for physical advantages, there would be top-ranked players of all heights for any playing position. They would just belong to different divisions.

Whether we’re talking about basketball, public speaking, or any other skill, the most relevant impact that talent and natural abilities may have in our development is how thinking about them affects our psychology. In the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, one of the most influential works in personal development, Carol Dweck discusses how a “fixed mindset,” the belief that we are born with certain qualities that can’t be altered, creates a mental block that limits our thinking and our progress. But embracing a “growth mindset,” the realization that we can change and get better regardless of our qualities, will motivate us to take on more significant challenges and help us improve faster.

Our mindset toward our natural abilities (or lack thereof) is crucial early in the learning process. Many people quit a new skill within weeks, believing they lack aptitude for it and can’t do anything about it. They buy into the “you either have it or you don’t’’ myth. But showing early ability is not a guarantee of anything. Some people learn faster at the beginning and then slow down. Others go through it in reverse: they have a hard time at first and progress quickly later. Learning and mastering a skill is a long-term process; a fast or slow start doesn’t determine how far we’ll go.

We must also keep in mind that natural abilities come in different forms. We don’t know how our strengths and their combination will shape our development. Maybe we are not suited for some parts of our craft, but we may compensate in others. A musician with an average technical aptitude for classical interpretation can excel at composing or improvising. Or in the case of Steph Curry, his shooting skills—which are among the best in the game’s history—more than make up for his height disadvantages in other parts of the sport.

Like basketball, most domains are composed of several parts and sub-skills, and a lacking aptitude for some doesn’t mean we can’t excel at the craft in general. Talent in areas like

strategy, leadership, and creativity to name a few can compensate for our lack in others, including technical prowess.

All points considered, we should stop obsessing about natural abilities and focus on the things within our control, which incidentally matter most: the dedication and perseverance we put into improving our skills. “I wasn’t naturally gifted in terms of size and speed; everything I did in hockey I worked for,” says hockey great Wayne Gretzky.

And from the intellectual domain, we can turn to the words of Alexander Hamilton, “Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this, when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly,” he said. “Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.” In the search for mastery, being talented or suited for a craft is an advantage, but in most cases, it’s not a requirement.

“The 10,000-Hour Rule”
The 10,000-hour rule is a misconception popularized and echoed by high-profile authors in recent years. The idea is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to reach mastery in any field. It makes for a marketable soundbite, but it’s not true. The “rule” is a misrepresentation of research findings from K. Anders Ericsson, an authority on deliberate practice and expert performance. Ericsson himself wrote about his dissatisfaction with how these authors presented his findings. What his study focused on was the practice habits of a group of musicians (violinists to be precise) from a prestigious music school, revealing that, on average, the amount of deliberate practice accumulated by the best of them was close to 10.000 hours.

Let’s take it one piece at a time. First, the study was done on a particular skill, not across many. Second, it reported an average; it did not intend to set a universal mastery timeline. Third, it looked at deliberate practice, a form of training requiring focus and pushing one’s limits—not to be confused with mere repetition, or mindlessly going through the motions. Fourth, the study did not imply that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master—even if the time is spent in deliberate practice. Ten thousand hours was the average that the best musicians had spent in solitary, deliberate practice by the time they were twenty years old. They were excellent and likely on their way to becoming the best in their field, but they still had a long way to go. Last and most importantly, Ericsson’s conclusions focused on the fact that all the best musicians in the study had gone through extensive hours of deliberate practice, suggesting that talent had little to do with developing their exceptional skills.

Let’s set the record straight. What the study found was not that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master in any field, but that it takes massive amounts of deliberate practice to become very good at a craft—with or without “natural advantages.” People talking about the 10,000-hour rule as a mark for reaching mastery are not only misinterpreting Ericsson’s findings but also focusing on the wrong thing. It’s not about how long it takes; it’s about how far deliberate practice can take us. In Ericsson’s words, “There is no reason not to follow your dream. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach. Open that door.”

In this chapter, we discussed some popular myths and misconceptions about learning and mastery—from the misguided expectation that learning should be fun to the limited part that age and innate traits play in developing our skills. These false beliefs won’t hold us back anymore. We are now ready to learn, improve, and ultimately master our craft. So, how do we do it? Let’s find out.

You can get a copy of the book or audiobook here

You can read a promotional interview I did during the book’s launch here:

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If you are new to my previous work, here’s an interview I did during the launch of my book Learn, Improve, Master: How to Develop Any Skill and Excel at it. It will give you a better idea of what it is about, why it matters, and how it can help you improve your life. Feel free to jump to any question that catches your attention.

You can read the first two chapters of the book for FREE here:

Why did you write “Learn, Improve, Master”?

I’ve always wanted to learn too much, but learning anything takes time. It looked like my choices were to cut down on the things I wanted to learn or to become a better learner. I chose the latter. I began studying learning science, cognitive psychology, and skill acquisition in search of ways to optimize the process.

After years of research, I had enough information to create a learning guide I could use for my life. Then I thought, “If I’m going through all this trouble to create a learning guide, why not turn it into a book and solve the problem for other people.” Had I known what I was getting myself into, I’m not sure I would have done it. I’m glad I was ignorant of the amount of work in front of me and that I was so passionate about the subject, otherwise, I don’t think this book would exist.

What sparked your love for learning?

I’ve always been curious; that’s what drives me to learn. There are too many fascinating subjects—everything has its own magic. So, I’ve always gone into different fields to study them. Some only on the surface, others more in-depth.

I’ve been into arts (music, writing, photography, magic), sports (Muay Thai, jiu-Jitsu, swimming, bodybuilding), languages (Spanish, English, French, Japanese), business (entrepreneurship, trading, real estate investing) and many other skills and interests (riding motorcycles, memorizing playing cards, beer brewing). Learning gives purpose to my life and shines light through the darkness that insists on looming over me.

There are a lot of amazing things to learn that can become our life companions, our shelters, and even part of our identity. I can’t think of anything more gratifying than adding new knowledge and skills to our lives, progressively improving at them, and wearing ourselves out developing our potential.

I think we all have this curiosity, but many times, it’s numbed down by our educational system. I was lucky to attend an unconventional school in my teens. The school encouraged a passion for knowledge and regarded learning as a noble activity to be pursued over a lifetime.

The school was founded on the teaching methods of the Greek philosopher Socrates. The essence of the method (known as Elentic or Socratic Method) is to draw out knowledge through questions (active learning) instead of feeding information (passive learning)—this meant I worked with study guides based on questioning instead of listening to lectures.

As a result, learning was something that happened from inside of me rather than being imposed on me. This made all the difference. Learning became a process of discovery that, even when challenging, was never boring or annoying. Having control over my learning and experiencing it almost as a puzzle to be solved encouraged the curiosity and love for knowledge that keeps me motivated to learn every day.

Why should we learn how to learn?

Learning is the most important meta-skill of all. When we get better at learning, we get better at improving anything else. The problem is that we don’t give the subject enough attention. We don’t want to learn how to learn, we want to learn the actual skill we are interested in, whether it is playing guitar, sports, painting, or something for our job. But if we worked on improving our learning abilities, we would optimize the time and energy we invest in every other skill.

But learning goes beyond efficiency. Becoming better learners improves our quality of life, both professionally and personally.

On the professional side, honing our learning skills is not only the best chance of becoming successful but may be the only way of staying successful. We can no longer learn a set of skills and rely on them for an entire career. With jobs, industries, and technology evolving at an unprecedented pace—and many going obsolete from one year to another—only those who can learn and adapt quickly will survive and thrive.

On the personal side, I can’t think of anything more gratifying than adding more learning to our lives, whether to take on more hobbies and projects or to go deeper and pursue mastery in a chosen one.

Learning gives our lives joy and meaning. I don’t know what I would do without my hobbies and interests. Playing guitar, reading, writing, sports, learning languages, and everything else I’ve gone into has shone light through the darkness that insists on looming over me.

And history is full of examples. F.D. Roosevelt once said, “I owe my life to my hobbies —especially stamp collecting.” Einstein played violin for pleasure and relaxation—also to help him think. Winston Churchill was a prolific writer and spent a lot of his “free” time painting. George Washington loved ballroom dancing and Benjamin Franklin Chess, among many other interests.

There are a lot of amazing things to learn that can become our life companions, our shelters, and even part of our identity. But many times, we avoid learning new skills or hobbies because it takes too long or it feels difficult. The goal of learning how to learn is to minimize both obstacles: we get to learn more efficiently and effectively—which also motivates us to learn even more—and we remove a great part of the confusion and unnecessary “hardships” of learning. The result is that we get to learn, enjoy, and benefit from more knowledge and skills in our lifetime.

Can anyone learn anything?

Yes. We are built to learn. With enough dedication and the right kind of practice, anyone can learn anything. The caveat here would be physical or mental disabilities depending on the skill in question, but even then, there are incredible stories of people overcoming what seemed like crippling disadvantages for their chosen craft. In essence, yes, we all have the capacity to learn anything, and all skills are “learnable.”

So, what stops people from learning new skills?

There are many reasons, but these are the ones I see most often:

People sometimes avoid learning because they find the process confusing and frustrating. They also feel like it takes too long or it’s too hard. Sure, learning a new skill can take a long time—depending on how far you want to take it—and it will also be hard at times. But if people had a better understanding of the process and the tools to make learning work for them, I believe they would try to learn more things.

Another reason people are discouraged from going after new skills has to do with popular misconceptions about learning. Beliefs like “old dogs can’t learn new tricks” or “you either have it, or you don’t” prevent people from giving learning a real chance. They end up quitting after a short time or don’t even bother trying in the first place.

Tied to these misconceptions are also the unrealistic expectations we have for ourselves. In the case of many adults, it has been so long since they tried learning a new skill that they’ve forgotten how it feels like to start from the beginning and go through the process. They expect to learn things quickly and improve faster than they actually do. So when they miss their expectations, they blame it on themselves—instead of adjusting their understanding of what it’s like to learn something for the first time. They think, “I’m not good at this,” or “I’m too old for this.” That’s the wrong attitude. Learning is challenging and even frustrating for everyone at some point, it’s part of the process.

Another point that adds to the challenge I just mentioned is that once we reach adulthood, we are likely to be proficient at a number of skills, and it feels good to be so. It takes humbleness to go back to zero, to not know what we are doing, to make mistakes, and to face our incompetence. Being a beginner is hard, and many people choose to feel proficient in their limited set of skills —and stay in their comfort zone—rather than going back to beginner stages in new ones.

How should we approach learning, then?

Three changes in mindset.

Trust the process: As I said earlier, we are built to learn. If you study and practice your chosen skill consistently and diligently you will get good at it. It’s inevitable.

Commit to doing the work: A great part of learning and mastering a skill comes down to doing the work every day. It’s the slow but steady compounding of our abilities over time that ultimately makes the biggest difference in our progress.

Be Willing to suck (at first): Those willing to make mistakes, look foolish, and fail are the ones that move faster through the process. If you put your ego aside and embrace being a beginner, you’ll learn faster than most. It’s important to note here that I’m not advocating failure, I’m advocating courage, which inevitably brings with it failures and setbacks, but as a side effect, not a goal.

Can you expand on that last point (willingness to suck)?

Sure. Throughout years of formal and informal learning, I’ve noticed that those willing to try things and make mistakes are the ones who improve faster. You see this often in learning foreign languages. The students who push themselves to practice despite making mistakes and “failing” are the ones who learn the language faster. The rest—including me—are too concerned about looking “foolish” and revealing that we are not good yet, so we avoid practice and end up taking longer to learn the language.

We can’t wait until we are proficient to go out and try things; it’s trying, failing, and correcting that makes us proficient. I see too many perfect preparers, I’m one of them. We don’t want to jump into the water until we know how to swim, but we can’t learn to swim without going in the water. There’s no way to go around the process. We can only go through it.

Being a beginner is not always comfortable, but it’s necessary to learn anything. If we are not willing to accept the discomfort of sucking at first, we’ll never improve. And this goes for any craft. There are no quick fixes and no effortless learning or training strategies to become good at anything. Everyone has to start at the beginning and work hard to improve, even those with natural abilities. Shakespeare had to learn to write and Mozart to play scales, and both made plenty of mistakes doing so. And while we can’t deny some people move faster through the process than others, no one escapes it. No exceptions. None. Ever.

On the practical side, how should we start learning a skill?

All skills are composed of a set of sub-skills. In that sense, we don’t learn cooking, for example, what we learn is a set of principles and techniques (Food chemistry, knife skills, use of ingredients, cooking methods, etc) that, when put together, we collectively recognize as the skill and art of cooking. Learning any skill then implies learning a set of sub-skills. So, an important step is to first deconstruct our chosen skill into its components, build those individually (following the model explained in the book), and progressively put them together and refine them.

What about learning hacks?

The book (Learn, Improve, Master) is about optimization—getting the most out of the time and energy we put into the process—not hacks. Learning hacks tend to be about getting a type of result in record time, like winning a contest or match after only a few weeks or months of preparation. These hacks are not about learning a skill or optimizing our learning abilities, they are about finding loopholes and techniques in a field to get a specific outcome, which is then portrayed as a measure of having learned the craft in record time.

The author Mark Manson talks about this in his book Everything is F*cked. He refers to a story he read of a guy who set out to “master” chess in a month. All the guy did was memorize chess moves from a program and then beat a high-ranked player. That’s not learning chess, much less mastering it. The guy hacked a result, not the mastery of the game.

Hacks give the illusion of learning, but they are superficial. It’s like that friend who figured he could beat you and your other friends at a fighting video game like Mortal Kombat or Smash Bros by making the same move over and over—a low kick or some type of projectile attack. That’s not mastering the game, Quenten!

With that “hack,” we could win against beginner/intermediate players, but we would miss the complexity and fun of the game: learning the moves and combos of the characters, improving the game’s fighting dynamics, and mastering strategy. We would just have a move that many players don’t know how to counter.

On a different example, I’ve been getting a lot into writing, but I wouldn’t want to write stories following a formula that people like and then say I hacked writing. That would not make me a writer (and likely, I couldn’t write anything other than the formula I learned.) I want writing to be part of my life. I want the skill, and I want to explore the different sides of the craft and how I can express myself through them. That can’t be done with hacking.

It’s cliché, but it’s true: ultimately, it’s about the path, not the destination. Or as Zig Ziglar more eloquently put it, “What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” (quote often attributed to Goethe or Henry David Thoreau) Hacking skips the becoming. We don’t get to develop the skill, build a relationship with the craft, explore its nuances, or make it an inseparable part of our life, even our identity.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look for efficiency. In fact, the premise of the book is to maximize the time and energy we put into the learning process. But there is a difference between trying to optimize the process and searching for ways to skip it.

On a last note, looking for hacks, cheat codes, or shortcuts so you can rank in some measurement of proficiency just to prove you can do it is pointless. If you are not passionate about a skill or need it in your life—something to learn for work, for example—then trying to hack it is a waste of time. Just because you can do something fast doesn’t mean you should do it. No amount of hacking beats simply not doing what you don’t give a damn about or don’t need in the first place. And every second you spend on it, no matter how optimized, is still a second wasted.

What are common mistakes in learning?

A common mistake starting out is trying to learn too much at once. Learning builds on itself. It’s a progression, so we need to take it one step at a time. This is counterintuitive. We feel that we learn more when we work on many things at once, but little of it sticks. Getting better at anything requires focused time and attention. The right approach is to work on a few things and progressively add more as we become proficient.

Closely related to the last point is wanting to learn new things all the time, even if we are still struggling with what we learned before. I’ve seen this mistake often, and I’ve made it myself many times in martial arts, music, dancing, and learning languages. We are excited to learn new techniques, new moves, new grammar, but after the novelty wears off, we want to move on to the next thing without reaching proficiency in the previous one.

There’s a delicate move between introducing new learning and working on improving and solidifying the old one. Even coaches and mentors are guilty of teaching their students new things all the time to keep classes “dynamic.”

But proficiency is built through drilling the same techniques—mostly the fundamentals—over and over and over again. We need to control our need for novelty and accept “repetitiveness” as an integral part of the process.

Another mistake is being a “theorist.” Many people spend their time studying the theory of their craft (the conceptual side) and doing little practice. I’ve also made this mistake many times. It feels good to study theory because we move faster through it than we develop actual skills through practice. But if we don’t practice, we don’t get better.

On the opposite side, I don’t agree with the “just learn by doing” approach. We can save ourselves a lot of mistakes and time by studying our art and the advice of those who have mastered it before us.

Ideally, there should be harmony between the two (theory and practice), what’s that harmony? It depends. It depends on what we are learning and our level. Some skills are theory-heavy, and others are more hands-on. Also, early learning requires a significant study of theory, but as we get better, it all falls on incorporating the concepts into practice.

A mistake that usually comes in the intermediate and advanced levels is falling into a comfort zone. After a few months or years practicing a craft, the novelty and excitement start to wear off, progress becomes slower, and we settle into a routine—we show up for practice and just go through the moves. We become comfortable with our skill level and start easing into our practice and our standards. This state is also called the OK plateau. To get past it, we have to push our limits. We have to ask more of ourselves. It’s hard work, but it’s the only way to improve.

Can you give us a specific example of a mistake you’ve made learning a skill?

I took on the guitar in my early teens because I loved heavy metal, especially Metallica and Iron Maiden. I wanted to play their songs, write my own, and start a band. That’s all good, but after a few years learning the instrument, I made everything about scales, theory, and exercises. I got strict about developing the technical side of the instrument, thinking that was the road to becoming a great guitar player. It wasn’t long until I sucked all the joy out of “playing” guitar. I lost sight of why I was learning the instrument in the first place and eventually stopped playing.

Practicing the technical side of your skill is important, but don’t forget to spend time doing what you enjoy most about it. It’s easy to turn practice into work, so be careful not to get lost in the practice to the point where you forget why you are practicing, why you are learning, and why you took on the craft in the first place.

What’s your biggest challenge at the moment?

I struggle with the same challenges as most people. I know what I should do, but find it hard to do it.

Developing skills is not easy, it never will be, but that’s also why it’s worth pursuing. In the book, I explain ways to optimize the process, but there is no way to skip it; we all have to put time and energy into learning anything. So I also make excuses, get distracted, procrastinate, and many times just “show up” and go through the motions instead of making practice deliberate.

On the other side, there are times when I’m so much into something that I forget to eat or shower. During that time, I also don’t want to sleep, and when I finally go to bed, I can’t wait to wake up the next day to keep working on it. That drive isn’t necessarily pleasurable, I don’t jump out of bed with joy, smiling at what the new day of learning has in store for me. It’s more like an obsession, and it’s accompanied by pain—a deep frustration for how little I improve any given day. That extreme is not good either. If you are into something for the long run, it’s better to have a steady pace than burn yourself out over a few weeks of uncontrolled compulsion.

One last note about that: many times, I look at the number of unread books on my bookshelves, my Amazon book wishlist, or the list of skills I want to learn, and I feel like I can’t breathe. It doesn’t matter how much I optimize the process, my life won’t be long enough to learn everything I want. So, a big challenge has been to come to terms with that reality and narrow my focus. Limiting our learning and saying no to everything else is tough, but as Stephen King said about editing out good lines, “It’s a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” In a way, it is a good thing that we will never have enough time to learn everything we want, which makes us value what we do, choose to learn even more—and choose it carefully.

Let’s talk about Mastery. What’s the most important factor for mastering skills?

That’s a difficult question, it’s like asking what’s the most important part of building a house or starting a business. There are many important parts, and without their combination, you end up with something incomplete and weak. I understand the desire to find “the one thing,” but as with many things in life, learning and mastery are complex subjects that depend on many factors that need to work in combination. Now, if we imagine we are already paying attention to all the different parts, the question could be: which ones would give us a higher return than the others? In that case, the answer is a long-term commitment and doing the work every day.

What stops people from pursuing mastery?

People think that masters are fundamentally different or that they have a magical shortcut to get ahead. And so everyone wants “the secret.” But that “secret” has been revealed time and again: consistent and persistent deliberate effort over time. We just chose to ignore it because we want an easier, faster way to get the same results.

We have to remember that it’s just as difficult for masters and aspiring ones to do the work, the difference is that they do it. It doesn’t come easy to them, but they push through the pain, and that’s what makes them rise above the rest. As big-wave surfer legend Laird Hamilton said, “Just because people are doing extraordinary things doesn’t mean they’re not ordinary people.”

An eye-opener for me was watching a YouTube clip of Usain Bolt training. Seeing him throw up during practice and keep going like it was just an unavoidable part of hard work made me realize how little I push myself. A part of me wanted to think that the scene was added for dramatic purposes or to make him look larger than life—anything that would make me feel better about my own pathetic “efforts”—but he is that intense. After losing to Yohan Blake in the 2012 Olympic trials in Jamaica, Bolt said, “For the next month, the work that I put in to make sure I could silence all these doubters was just unbelievable. I vomited daily because I was pushing myself to the ultimate level.”

It makes you wonder what you could accomplish if you had the same level of commitment. People could argue that’s unhealthy, sure, or that we shouldn’t put our body and mind through such extremes. Valid points, but that’s what it takes to be at his level. And if you want to be the next Bolt, you better be ready to do the same.

It reminds me of people who want to eat meat but not have animals die. One comes with the other. We can dislike that reality, but it will remain the reality. And the same goes for mastering skills. Mastery doesn’t come easily, it must be sought with effort and paid for with pain and sacrifice. There’s no way around it.

We can lie to ourselves and say Bolt is just talented or a genetic freak. But mostly, he’s just “Freak.” And the hard pill to swallow is that his willingness to go through the pain is also within our reach, we just don’t do it. We don’t put in the work. We are not as committed. We don’t do what it takes.

It stings to admit it, and our reaction is to come up with excuses to avoid self-loathing. But it’s true, and unless we are willing to take a good look at ourselves and accept we’ve been taking it easy, we’ll never develop the resilience to achieve extraordinary results.

However hard we think we are working, we can do much more. And that’s the difference: the willingness to go through the pain, to have our body ache, to be exhausted, to cry, to throw up, to pass out, to face our fears, to fail, and to stand back up, again and again.

Are you saying talent doesn’t matter?

We can’t deny that some people have natural abilities or traits that give them an edge. But it’s mostly just that, an edge. Even they have to work hard to master their craft.

We like to think that talent and natural traits play a bigger role in developing skills than they actually do because they protect our ego. The idea of “the natural” allows us to say “well, it’s easy for them, they were born to do that” and “If I were as ______ (tall/smart/strong etc) I could do it, too.” And just as delusional, we think that if we had those advantages, we would have no problem putting in the work to develop them. It becomes an excuse to not do anything and still feel good about ourselves.

The truth is that our development is mostly under our control if we are willing to work for it. Talent and natural traits can help us improve faster or push our limits further, but the bulk of learning and mastering any craft is found in the compound effect of consistent and persistent effort over the years. In the search for mastery, talent is an advantage but not a requirement.

Any final thoughts?

Different skills have different levels of complexity, and some take longer to learn than others, but everything can be learned through the right process. All it takes is a few hours of focused attention and deliberate practice a day. The challenging part is putting in the time and effort day after day over months and years.

Learning and mastery require long-term thinking and commitment. They also need us to delay gratification and make sacrifices. That’s the hard part, but it’s also the one that makes the biggest difference, and fortunately, it’s within anyone’s reach.

You can get a copy of “Learn, Improve, Master” here

You can also read the first two chapters for free here:

Books have made me everything I am. They have been my mentors in almost every area of my life. They have influenced and improved my mind, finances, health, social life, and everything I do. They correct me when I make mistakes, guide me through difficult paths, inspire me to dream, and then help me achieve those dreams.

Books have been my critics, my motivators, my teachers, and my entertainers. If books have improved my life in all possible ways, how could I not want to read more?

Introduction

Reading improves your life. When you read, you are exposed to new ideas, see new perspectives, expand your mind, and learn new skills. Reading gives you knowledge about the world and helps you find balance and meaning in life.

Books are fascinating. When you buy a book—usually for under $30—you get the knowledge that took someone years or even a lifetime to gather and organize. I’m amazed every time I think about it.

Books also transcend the barrier of time. Through a book, you can have a conversation with great minds from the past—even the ones that lived hundreds of years ago. You can learn from their successes, failures, ideas, and knowledge. That should be reason enough to pick up a book.

The people you admire are avid readers. Everyone I feel great admiration for is an avid reader. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Their reading habits are an important factor in their success and their skill level. Being constantly exposed to new ideas allows them to connect with what they already know in creative ways.

Read more to be exposed to new ideas. Read to be taken on a journey. Read for entertainment. Read for pleasure. Read for culture. Read for knowledge. Read for whatever reason you find valid, but READ.

If you don’t know where to start, I have a list of amazing books I’ve read in the past two years while researching my next book. You can find the list here:

Part I: Reading More

Reading more can be broken into three parts: Time, Concentration, and Speed.

Time is how long you spend reading. This is the part where people complain the most. I hear often, “I don’t have time to read”. It’s usually not time that they lack, but discipline. You are not supposed to find time to read, you take it from all the useless activities you do every day.

Concentration is how focused you are while reading. Having poor concentration makes us read slower and forget what we read. Can you remember a time you read a paragraph, and by the time you finished it, you couldn’t remember what it said? That’s poor concentration. We start thinking about other things, get distracted by outside noise, or try to multitask.

Speed is simply how fast you read. Your reading speed will affect how much you read in the time you dedicate to it.

Improving any of these areas will help you read more. Ideally, you would optimize all three of them, but there’s no need to approach it mechanically. Implement only the ideas that you like from the strategies we’ll discuss. Later on, you can go back and add more.

Remember: You are trying to read more. Find what’s sustainable for you instead of what will help you read a lot for a short while but make you quit after because it feels like work.

Let’s look at some strategies for each part—Time, Concentration, and Speed.

Time

Carry a book everywhere. This is the simplest way to get more reading done. Take a book—or reading device—everywhere you go and read every time you have a chance. Read when waiting for an appointment, a meal, a flight, a train, etc. Whenever you feel the urge to get your phone out, grab your book instead.

Read a pre-determined number of pages a day. Something I did a few years ago when I wanted to catch up on my reading was to set up a rule of reading at least 50 pages first thing in the morning, no matter what.

I didn’t allow myself to do anything else until I passed that limit. No email, no internet, just breakfast and then read. Once I finished the 50 pages, I could start my day. This is probably not convenient for everyone, but you get the idea. You can do it before going to bed and read any set number of pages. The point is to be consistent and to treat reading as a priority instead of dedicating it the time you have left—which is usually none.

Read for a pre-determined amount of time every day. Similar to the strategy above, it is to dedicate a specific amount of time to reading every day. You’ll start realizing that reading more is not challenging. It’s common to finish a book in 2-5 days without dedicating too much time to it. That adds to about a hundred books per year. The problem that most people have is doing it consistently. If you read for even just half an hour every day, you will get a lot of reading done in a year.

For either “Pages per day” or “Time per day” the most important thing is being consistent. Read every day. Doesn’t matter if you read 5 pages or read for 15 min as long as you do it every day. You can start small and increase from there. That’s how you build a reading habit—or any habit for that matter. First, create the habit, then build the intensity.

Read, read, read. The more you read, the easier it is to dedicate time to reading. You’ll start enjoying reading. It will slowly become part of your life, something you just do.

Concentration

Avoid distractions. If you can, choose a quiet environment where you won’t be interrupted. As you get more reading practice, you’ll be able to concentrate in almost any environment, but for now, try to be in a quiet place.

If possible, turn off your phone and avoid other distractions. Keep whatever you need (i.e., water) nearby so you don’t have to stand up or close the book often. You want your reading time to be uninterrupted.

Don’t multitask. Trying to do other things while you read will slow you down and make you forget what you are reading. I’ve seen people trying to text while they read. They stop every few lines to send or read a text. It doesn’t work. If you can only commit to 20 minutes without doing anything else, I'd rather you do that than read for an hour while you try to do something else.

Read, read, read. Another way to increase your concentration is practice. As you read more, your concentration will improve naturally. It won’t take you as long to get immersed in your reading or regain concentration after being distracted.

Speed

This component needs special attention. We’ll spend some time looking deeper into it.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with books. When you realize how much you want to read it’s natural to want to increase your reading speed. Some people obsess about this part, but speed is only one of three components of reading more. Remember, reading more is broken into Time, Concentration, and Speed.

What affects reading Speed?

Concentration. We already talked about some techniques to improve concentration. Here, I’ll mention it again because it also affects reading speed. The more you avoid distractions and multitasking, the faster you will read.

Writing style. Some books are just hard to read. The author is disorganized, uses words that are too technical or fails to keep you engaged. That’s going to slow you down.

Type of books. One of the biggest factors affecting reading speed is the kind of books you read. Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra reads differently than Harry Potter. There is nothing wrong with the genre of books you choose, but the point to make is that some books are more complex and slower to read than others.

Familiarity with the subject. Related to the type of books is your familiarity with the subject. If you have already read five books on a subject, the sixth one will be faster to read. You will be familiar with the principles, terms, and theory of what you are reading, so it will make information easier to understand. On the other hand, if you are reading a subject you know nothing about, it will take more time to internalize the ideas, and your reading speed will be slower.

Technique. Reading is a skill. And like any skill, It takes good technique to do it right. If you want to increase your reading speed, you will have to improve the way you read. Let’s take a look at some ways to improve your technique.

Increasing your reading speed

Read, Read, Read. The first way to increase your speed is to read more. It’s natural to become more efficient at what we do often. Reading more will increase your reading speed, especially when combined with proper technique.

Speed reading. Like most avid readers, I turned to speed reading, thinking it would be the solution to my ever-growing list of books to read. There is much controversy on the subject, so before I give you my perspective, I will explain what speed reading is, what it is not, and the experience I had with it.

What’s speed reading? Speed reading is a collection of techniques to make reading more efficient. The concept is based on a few sane principles: having precise eye fixations (where your eyes stop to get the input), reading more words per fixation, reducing the time of each fixation, and eliminating subvocalization (hearing the words in your mind as you read).

How fast is speed reading? Speed reading ranges from a few hundred words per minute to around 1200. In some cases, the speeds reported are much higher. The current world record is 4251 words per minute. (On a Harry Potter book)

There are some other categories of speed reading, with practitioners claiming speeds of 40.000 words per minute and higher. All you need to know about these reading courses and techniques is to stay away from them. They are scams.

How to learn to speed read? There are great articles and books on how to speed read. Instead of writing a half-decent guide, I’m choosing to link those sources here so you go straight to quality training.

• “Scientific Speed reading: How to read %300 times faster in 20 minutes” (Article) By Tim Ferris

• “The Speed Reading Book” by Tony Buzan

• For Spanish speakers: Curso definitivo de lectura rapida de Ramon Campayo.

• There are also apps and software to learn how to speed read, but I haven’t used any, so I won’t be recommending or mentioning them.

Does it work? In my experience the techniques do help to read faster—to an extent.

Is it worth it? To a point. I practiced for a few weeks and significantly improved my reading speed. The problem was that, as with most skills, practicing became more demanding, and results slowed down. So, I stopped when I felt comfortable with my technique and my speed. I didn’t want to be a “speed reader” or read fast, I just wanted to read fastER.

If you just want to improve your technique and read faster, then practice speed reading, but don’t obsess about it. There’s a difference between wanting to run properly, for example and wanting to become a professional sprinter. It’s important to know what you want with speed reading. Don’t get lost in it and spend hours learning to read faster when you should be spending them reading more.

Remember: Above all, It’s not about reading faster, it’s about reading more. Speed is only one component. Don’t learn to optimize something you won’t do. If you don’t read, learning how to read at twice the speed won’t help. You will still NOT read at the same speed.

How much should you practice? 15 to 20 min a day for a few weeks should be enough to see good results. You won’t read 1200 words per minute, but you will increase your reading speed. Once you feel good about your speed, practice only every few days to maintain the skill.

Critics of speed reading say it makes reading tedious and lowers comprehension. They are partly right, but this is temporary. Just like in learning any skill, the initial practice is difficult, hard to enjoy, and many times makes you worse than you were before. It takes time to make a new skill less conscious and get good enough to start enjoying it. You are basically re-learning to read. Can you remember learning to ride a bicycle? It was the same. You couldn’t enjoy riding the bike or going anywhere because you kept losing balance, falling, and not going anywhere.

What should you look out for? People who have tried speed reading and then criticized it are likely to have made one of the three following mistakes. Avoid them, and you’ll make speed reading work for you.

1. They didn’t stick with it long enough. The techniques have to become second nature before you can focus completely on the book again. In the beginning, you will be too conscious of the way you move your eyes and how fast you are going, which will take away from the book itself. It takes practice to make the techniques subconscious so you are able to focus entirely on what you are reading.

2. They practiced on books they were interested in. Until you get used to the techniques, you should practice speed reading on books you don’t care about. Why? Because the goal for now is to develop your reading speed, not to read the book. Imagine someone trying to learn speed typing while writing a novel. They would complain that the novel was not good and that they didn’t enjoy writing it. Shocking…

Once you internalize the techniques, you won’t be thinking about them anymore. You will be able to apply them to all books without affecting your comprehension or enjoyment of reading.

Remember: Don’t obsess about speed reading techniques when you are reading what you want to read. Leave the speed reading practice for practice time with practice books until the skill becomes unconscious.

3. They didn’t Practice often. No skill can be developed without practice. Ideally, you should practice every day or every other day for about 15-20 min. Minimum practice should be three times per week. If you space it out more, you’ll lose some gains in between sessions, and practice will be less effective.

Skimming. Sometimes, Skimming is considered speed reading. It is not. Skimming happens when you are not reading the entire text but only selected sections. You jump from paragraph to paragraph or page to page or chapter to chapter, only reading a few lines to get a general idea of the material. When you skim, you are not reading faster, you are reading less. Understand: Skimming is a tool for reading, not a way of reading.

There are only four instances where I would recommend skimming a book.

1. The book sucks. I give books a good chance of gaining my interest. If they don’t, I put them away or skim the rest. I skim just in case there is something worth looking into—there usually isn’t. You don’t have to read every word of a terrible book just because you started it. If you were waiting for someone to tell you it’s ok to do it here it is: you are allowed to skim or close an awful book even if you are 10 pages away from finishing it. You only feel guilty until you read the first few pages of the next book, I promise.

2. The ideas in the book are diluted. This happens often, especially in business books. The author had one good idea that could be discussed in 10 pages but wanted to make a book out of it. These books are full of redundant talk, excessive stories, and endless examples. Unless I’m looking to be entertained or the stories and examples are exceptionally good, I’ll skim the better part of the book.

3. Priming your mind for the material. This is the most valuable benefit of skimming. The idea is to skim the chapter you are about to read (or the entire book) before you read it. This will spark your curiosity and attention. It will also give you a general structure of what’s ahead. These conditions—curiosity, attention, and structure—help us understand and memorize what we read.

I chose to include skimming as a tool for reading faster for this benefit. Priming your mind for the material you are about to read will help you understand it better and read it faster. Ideally, you want to get an overview of the entire material before reading it. Look at the book contents, skim the chapters, and then go back to read the book.

Obvious Note: Do not do this with fiction books. You’ll ruin them.

4. You are familiar with the subject. When you know about the subject you are reading, it’s likely you will come across repeated ideas. You can skim these sections. Move on to what you think is valuable and new.

A final note on speed reading and reading speed. Your reading speed should be flexible. It’s good to have a rhythm, but you should feel free to slow down, speed up, or stop if you want to. Being too rigid in the technique will make reading miserable. Remember: the goal is to read more. Reading faster is only part of it. If trying to speedread is making reading annoying, I rather you don’t do it. It would be counterproductive. You might learn to read faster, but you will read less.

Part II: Remembering What You Read

Priming your mind to learn. This first strategy is about getting your mind in a state where it’s easier to absorb the information you are about to read. The goal is to have a general idea of the subject and explore just enough to become curious and excited about it.

Read a short article on the subject. This is something you can do to get an overview of what you’ll learn before you start reading the book.

Look at the table of contents to know how the book is organized.

If the book or chapters have introductions and summaries, read those first. If you don’t like to get too far ahead, read only the summary of the first chapter, then read the chapter. After that, read the summary of the second chapter, followed by the chapter, and so on.

Skim the chapters to get an idea of what you’ll learn.

What we are trying to do is ask questions and get curious about the subject. Our minds don’t like unsolved problems or unanswered questions (especially when we find them interesting). It’s our nature to try to fill that knowledge gap, so this curious and inquisitive state is ideal for learning and creativity. It focuses our attention and prepares us to reflect on what we’ll read.

Underlining and taking notes. I used to not underline a book or write on it, I thought it was disrespectful to do so. Today is the opposite, all my books are full of notes and underlinings. I feel it’s disrespectful not to do it. Why? Because you want to learn from the book, not just read it. That’s how you really respect the book. Taking notes, writing on the margin, and underlining will help you internalize the information.

Underlining or highlighting. The concept is simple: underline or highlight the main ideas and any information you find valuable. Underlining forces you to stop and focus on what you are underlining; this extra attention works as a boost for your memory.

To avoid underlining too much, try to do it after you finish the paragraph. If you do it as you read—especially if you don’t know anything about the subject—you will think that everything is important and worth underlining. So, finish the idea first, understand what is being said, and then underline what’s important.

Taking Notes. There are different kinds of notes. Sometimes, you transcribe or summarize what you read. Other times, you write questions, observations, ideas, and even have discussions with the author. All of these reinforce what you read in different ways. Summarizing, for example, helps you understand and encode the information. Observations, on the other hand, help you connect with ideas and knowledge you already have.

For general knowledge, the notes we write on the margin of a book are called “Marginalia”. If you prefer to write them in a notebook where you keep all other notes, observations, ideas, etc, this notebook is usually referred to as a commonplace book. (More on the commonplace book below)

I encourage you to make all types of notes. Write everything that comes to mind as you read—either on the margin or in your commonplace book. it is important that you do it not just to help you memorize but also to elaborate more on what you read. Writing makes you slow down and organize your ideas in a coherent way. This promotes further thinking and connection between ideas.

Another benefit of underlining and making notes is that you can go back to a book and only read those. The first time you read a book, you need examples, stories, and arguments. But once you understand the subject, you can go straight to the information you want and avoid all the fillers. If you don’t take notes or underline, you will have to read the entire book again.

Summaries and concept maps. Making summaries leads to a better understating of the subject. It makes you think about what you are reading. It also forces you to condense the information. As an added benefit, the summaries you make also work as quick references to refresh your memory. To get the best results, summarize in your own words, it will help you understand and encode the information at a deeper level.

Conceptual maps or Mind maps help you in a similar way. They force you to create an overview of what you read and to organize the main ideas. All this thinking and ruminating on the information helps solidify it in your memory. It’s important to mention that reviewing is not much of a learning strategy. The value of reviewing is to refresh the information you already know, but it is not an effective strategy to learn it the first time.

When you review information (either your notes, summaries, underlinings, or the entire book), be aware of the “Fluency illusion”. This is where we mistake our familiarity with the material with the mastery of the content. In other words, you recognize the information, so you assume you already know it. To really find out what you know or don’t know, you need some kind of self-testing. This is done either in the form of explaining the subject in your own words or answering questions about it.

Commonplace Book. Closely related to marginalia, underlining, and summarizing is keeping a commonplace book. This is a type of journal or notebook where you write down ideas, quotes, and concepts you find valuable.

A commonplace book becomes a collection of all the wisdom you come across. There are variations on how to keep one, it can go from just writing down anything you find worthy of remembering without any order, to a complex system with many categories and cross-references. Check this article by Ryan Holiday on why and how to keep a commonplace book.

Practice Testing. A great way to use marginalia to remember what you read is by creating quiz-like questions as you are reading. Let’s imagine that you are reading a book on Napoleon. As you read, write questions next to the paragraphs where you learned something you would like to remember.

For example, if you just learned about a specific battle, write next to the paragraph, “When did this battle take place, and how did it unfold?” Once you finish the book, you can go through your questions, trying to answer them by memory. Don’t worry if you can’t remember the answer, It’s in the paragraph next to the question. Keep quizzing yourself every other day until the material is solid in your memory. This strategy basically creates instant Flash Cards.

Why should you do this? Practice testing is one of the best learning strategies out there. It surpasses summarizing, underlining, reviewing, and rote learning (repetition). The effort we put into trying to recall the right answers during practice testing makes a big impact in strengthening our memories.

John Dunlosky explained it best in his article “Strengthening the Student Toolbox: “Study Strategies to Boost Learning,” Featured on American Educator:

“Taking practice tests can substantially boost student learning…The use of practice tests can improve student learning in both direct and indirect ways. When students correctly retrieve an answer from memory, the correct retrieval can have a direct effect on memory. When a student fails to retrieve a correct answer during a practice test, that failure signals that the answer needs to be re-studied; in this way, practice testing can help students make better decisions about what needs further practice and what does not.”

He then adds, “Most important is to make frequent use of testing and retrieval practice to verify what you really do know versus what you think you know.”

Mnemonics. Mnemonics are memory techniques to make memorizing easier and more efficient. It’s beyond the scope of this post to discuss the techniques, but we’ll cover them in depth in future articles. In the meantime, I encourage you to pick up a book on the subject. Reading about Memory and mnemonics is fascinating and well worth your time. Here’s a link to a good book to start: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Talking about the book or teaching what you learned. This idea is similar to summarizing and making conceptual maps, but instead of writing, you’ll be talking. Next time you are socializing, talk about the book or the subject. Try to explain to other people what you learned. You will find that is difficult the first time, but you will get better as you force yourself to do it. This type of recall will help you strengthen and organize the knowledge you got from the book.

Read in Clusters. Read more than one book on a subject. There are several benefits to doing this:

You’ll get a better understanding of the subject. Your mind will be thinking about it for longer, and you’ll have more information to build your knowledge. Also, as you internalize the principles, you’ll start seeing deeper layers and nuances of what you are reading.

You’ll remember more. With better understanding also comes better encoding. It’s easier for us to remember what we understand deeply. We are also being exposed to the information for a longer time. And as ideas repeat themselves they get reinforced in our memory.

You’ll be exposed to different perspectives from several authors. Reading this way gives you a better understanding of the subject. It makes the books complement each other instead of being ‘stand-alone.’ Also, reading from different authors on a subject will help you avoid the “only source bias.” This is when we believe that what we read is right even though we haven’t read other sources.

When I was younger I used to be hunted by all the things I didn’t know, I was obsessed about it. I would say that now I’m just as concerned (or maybe more) about what I think I know but might be wrong. I am concerned that I might be basing my life on information I never revised because I once accepted it as true without studying other perspectives.

If you are going to follow this strategy, make sure not to let much time pass by between books. Ideally, read them back to back. The information should be fresh in your mind so you don’t waste time reviewing and relearning the material.

Reading in clusters will also improve your reading speed. Since you already have knowledge of what you are reading you won’t have to spend time trying to understand it again. The Information will also start to overlap. You can then speed up on the parts you already know and focus only on the information that is new and important.

Make knowledge personal. We learn faster and remember better when the knowledge is personal and actionable. Try to relate what you are learning to something you already know, and visualize specific scenarios where you can apply the new knowledge. Think about how it relates to or can benefit your life. If you are reading a book on body language, for example, think about how you can apply the ideas to your next presentation at work and how this would benefit you.

Taking action/Using the information. The best way to remember what you read is to use it or incorporate it into your life. Besides being the best strategy to remember what you read, it’s also the ultimate goal of reading (nonfiction, that is). Using the information—which can also mean being able to talk about the subject or having a better understanding of it—is why you wanted to learn the ideas from the book in the first place.

Read, Read, Read. The more you know, the easier it is to learn more and remember what you learn. Why? Knowledge is not linear in our minds, it is a web. We make connections between subjects and memories. The more things you can connect new knowledge to, the easier it is to understand and remember it.

We’ve covered many strategies to remember what you read. It might seem overwhelming, so implement the ones you like the most, let them become second nature, and then work on another one. My goal is to show you different things you can do to remember what you read, but I don’t want to turn reading into a dreadful activity for you. Above all, I want you to read and learn more. So, Implement the strategies at your own pace.

Reference

How to read more and remember what you read

Reading more

• Dedicate more Time

• Carry a book everywhere

• Read a pre-determined number of pages every day

• Read for a pre-determined amount of time every day

Improving Concentration

• Avoid distractions

• Don’t try multitasking

• The more you read, the more you improve your concentration

Increasing your reading speed

• Book type, writing style, and familiarity with the subject affect your speed

• Read in an environment that allows you to focus

• Learn and practice the basics of speed reading

• Skim when necessary

Remembering what you read

• Prime your mind to learn

• Underline and take notes

• Make summaries and conceptual maps

• Keep a commonplace book

• Practice testing

• Learn the basics of mnemonics

• Talk about the book or teach what you learned

• Read in clusters

• Make the knowledge personal

• Take action, use the information