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Motivation is a finite resource. It’s not unlimited.

You can say no to anything—until suddenly you can’t—and then you become unable to say no to things that normally wouldn’t be an issue for you.

I see this principle illustrated in the way people have handled this pandemic—particularly those who started strong and decided to social distance completely. I’ve seen people who have friends who invite them to stuff every day and at some point, they just give in. You say no enough times, you run out of discipline—and when there’s nothing left and you can’t say no.

When you use it up it’s gone.

Let’s use the example of a new habit. Let’s say I decide I want to be a kinder person. If I say “I’m going to be a kinder person from now on”, then anything I do, I have to ask myself: “Is this what a kind person would do?” This rarely works long term because we use up our self-control very quickly. Since creating a new habit is far more energy consuming than using an established one, we fall back into the behavior we were trying to shake. If instead, I say, “when someone interrupts me at work and I am tempted to snap at them, I will do x behavior.” This only requires me to change a behavior in one specific context, which means it requires less self-control to maintain.

It’s much easier to say “when they pass cookies around at work, I will refuse,” than to say “I will eat healthier from now on.”

It isn’t so much about who has the most discipline, (though it is a skill, and you should practice it) but it’s more about creating systems that make you act a certain way. I know many successful people who if you ask them they would describe themselves as naturally lazy, but they made systems to manage themselves. If you have good systems and habits, it doesn’t matter how motivated you are, stuff gets done.

How do you build those systems?

If you have spent any amount of time in the self-improvement/habit world you have probably heard of micro-resolutions. If you haven’t, a micro resolution is a change in behavior so small and specific that you can’t help but stick with it. I find that this is a very effective way to get started.

The next step is to do what I call “chaining behaviors”. This is where you only require yourself to do one behavior but that one behavior is the cue for more habits that you build. This way the initial behavior takes the most motivation and the following habits happen naturally when you do the initial behavior. For example, each new habit you build around working out is cued when you show up at the gym, you don’t have to decide if you are going to work out after you enter the gym, it just happens.

This happens all the time with bad habits, choosing to stay up a few minutes later than normal might make you do a bunch of other negative habits without thinking about it—next thing you know you watch YouTube for an hour, and then you have a midnight ice cream Sunday. Or an example from when I was younger, when I was a young teen I would bring a book to bed at 9:30, and then I would read until 12:30 or later. I discovered that bringing a book to bed cued my brain for several hours of reading instead of using my brain for sleep—because of this, I made a rule to never take a book to bed. When I did this I suddenly was going to bed at 9:30 and falling asleep before 10:00 every night.

The guiding principle is that we want to do the right thing—whatever that is—to be lower friction than doing the wrong thing.

Anytime we notice that the right thing is more work to do than the wrong thing, we have to change our system. Since motivation is a finite resource we need to create systems that don’t rely on our limited motivation. Better that our systems are designed for when our motivation runs out.

Take some time to think about habits or behaviors you want to start, ask yourself this question: is it easier to do the right thing or the wrong thing here? Why is that? What factors contribute to that?

Increase friction for the behaviors you don’t want and decrease friction for the behaviors you do.

In JavaScript, we store data in variables. Sometimes we need to store multiple pieces of information in one place—we use objects and arrays for that.

An array is what we use when we want to list a bunch of items in one place. For example:

const iceCreamFlavors = [‘Vanilla’, ‘Mint Chip’, ‘Strettatela’, ‘Chocolate’];

Now we have an array called ‘iceCreamFlavors’ which lists each of the flavors we have. Arrays have what’s called an ‘item index’ which tells the location of each item in the memory. In our example above, ‘Vanilla’ has an item index of 0, while ‘Chocolate has index of 3. Indexes start at 0.

let bestFriends = ['James', 'Hailey', 'Sharron'];

Let’s say, that we want to keep track of our best friends using JavaScript. If we decide we want to add another person to our array, we can use ‘.push’ or ‘.unshift’ to add a name at the beginning or the end of our array, respectively.

bestFriends.push['Bobby'];
bestFriends.unshift['Tom'];

return bestFriends; 
//['Tom', 'James', 'Hailey', 'Sharron', 'Bobby'];

Perfect, now what if we decide that we hate Bobby and that Tom is annoying? We use pop and shift.

bestFriends.pop['Bobby'];
bestFriends.shift['Tom'];

return bestFriends;
// ['James', 'Hailey', 'Sharron'];

We can also loop through an array by using the item index. For example:

let newArray = ['item1', 'item2', 'item3'];

function selectRandomItemFromArray() {
const randomIndexNumber = Math.floor(Math.random() * (newArray.length));
console.log(newArray[randomIndexNumber];
};

// returns a random item from newArray[]

We can put just about anything we want into an array—functions, objects, other arrays, etc.

But what if we need to store a bunch of information about one thing and an array is insufficient? Enter the Object. The syntax for an object is variable keyword, space, object name, space, equals sign, and curly braces.

const newObject = {
// Your code here
};

Objects allow us to store a selection of data related to one thing—using something called a key:value pair. For example, if we create an object called userProfile:

let userProfile = {
firstName: "John",
lastName: "Doe",
userName: "johndoe123",
};

firstName is a key, and John is the value assigned to firstName. Another thing we can use is a method. A method is a function, that the object owns. For example, we can create a function that holds a message for when our user signs in:

let userProfile = {
firstName: "John",
lastName: "Doe",
userName: "johndoe123",
userMessage: function() {
return `Hey ${this.firstName}, you are signed in as ${userName}!`
},
};

console.log(userProfile.userMessage());
//We will see the message: "Hey John, you are signed in as johndoe123!"

It’s worth noting, we don’t name the function. Methods don’t exist outside of an object, so userMessage is the key and we are assigning its value to be this anonymous—or unnamed—function.

Recently, I built a stupid website called “Goat Rotator”. I used an object to store an image of a goat and the corresponding goat name for each goat inside of an array.

const goatHolder = [
{ name: "Simon, the 'Kool' Goat", img: "goat_image_1.jpg"},
{ name: "Tim", img: "goat_image_2.jpg"},
{ name: "Jane", img: "goat_image_3.jpeg"},
{ name: "Barnebas Crabappleby", img: "goat_image_4.jpg"},
];

This allowed me to cycle through the objects inside of my array. JavaScript is very flexible about types and what you decide to do with them, so nesting objects inside of an array totally works.

If need to access an item from within an object we use one of two methods:

objectName.keyName; // returns keyValue
objectName[keyName]; // returns keyValue

If we need to remove a key:value pair from our object later we use the delete method:

delete objectName.keyName;

That’s a basic overview of arrays and objects in JavaScript. There are a ton of array methods that are worth learning, but those are a few basic ones to get started with.

Over the last year, I have been watching the college industry. In that time, I began to become less and less sure that it was worth the 100,000 dollars worth of debt that completing a degree would cost.

At its core, paying lots of money for a college degree is a bet. You are gambling that going to university payoff. You are potentially giving up $100,000 and 4 years of your life—for a payoff that might never come.

The value proposition of a college degree has never been worse. These days, a degree is table stakes but costs far more than it ever has before.

Then COVID happened, and suddenly there were millions of people with college degrees and prior experience looking for jobs. The odds just got worse.

Because of this, I decided not to return to college. Instead, I’ve begun attending Lambda School—a web development trade school with an ISA.

In order to improve my learning and hopefully help other students along the way, I will be documenting some of my learning here. I hope that this will help anyone who is thinking about attending Lambda or just looking to learn web development.

Learning can be hard. One area I used to particularly struggle with is memorization. I was never very good at remembering the things I wanted to remember.

Memorization is something that people love to hate. I have heard people say things like, “I have the worst memory,” and “Rote memorization is a waste of time.”

There is some truth to this, not everything is worth remembering—and often knowing the principles of why something works is more important than memorizing every example. The problem is, there are many of times where memorization is crucial.

Which is a bummer for those of us who aren’t naturally good at memorizing stuff. But what if there was a way to turn memory into a choice, where you remember everything you decide to remember—forever?

[Read more…] about Using Flashcards and Spaced Repetition Systems to Learn Faster

College students rarely prioritize sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation is the norm—I only know a few people who consciously plan their sleep schedules. 

I’m one of those few. I try to sleep 9-10 hours each night (which seems to be a shocking thing to my fellow college students). But when I fail to get sufficient sleep, I can’t function. 

Turns out, it’s not just me, humans in general need at least 8 hours of sleep each night.* If we sleep less than 8 hours and we are unable to function properly. 

I have seen people who are proud of how well they can function without sleep.  They feel that they don’t need as much sleep as other people—when really, they just never let their brains reach their potential. They have no idea what a healthy amount of sleep would even feel like.

Everything becomes harder when I fail to rest. I can’t focus very well, I’m stressed, and I can’t get anything done. 

But when I get sufficient sleep everything improves. We are not robots. It’s impossible to sustain the college schedule long term unless you sleep. 

Try it for a month—you’ll see what I mean.

Life is better when you sleep.

Of course, getting enough sleep isn’t always just a matter of deciding it’s important. Next time, I’ll share some practical tips for how you can get more sleep more regularly.

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*Why We Sleep, Mathew Walker, PhD