The Intelligence Trap by David Robson

A manifesto of intellectual humility every aspiring scientist needs to read (and reread).
When you get the chance to hold the torch of Science and shine light on the mysteries of Nature, you should be aware of the limits of that light. Expertise in one domain does not transfer to another automatically — or as Epictetus put it: “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

The best scientists have intellectual humility: they know the limits of their knowledge. They know that what they once knew, they might have forgotten. The PhD does not coincidentally have a “Ph” in it. We are not training professionals with big egos — we are also training character. The Intelligence Trap should be the sword of Damocles hanging above us, to avoid the many mistakes and cognitive biases we are prone to fall prey to — while also practicing empathy, as we, like everyone else, will fall prey to them.1

Strong convictions are acceptable so long as they are open to change.

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10% Happier by Dan Harris

A relatable story about what meditation can bring to the average Joe. A journalist-turned-meditator narrates his story of stumbling upon meditation — through war correspondence, an on-air panic attack, career struggles, and meditation retreats — always returning to the breath.

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The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

A sharp history of neuroscience and psychology, pinpointing how dogma can derail science (looking at you, behaviorism).
Pinker takes a nuanced, balanced look at morals and language — how the meaning people attach to words matters more than the words themselves. Words keep changing as long as we have prejudices.
It tackles hard topics like gender and politics. You don’t have to agree, but you should read it and think for yourself. Steven Pinker has the intellectual humility to admit he does not have all the answers, but he is asking the right questions.

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Think Like a Horse by Grant Golliher

A vivid take on leadership principles from a horse whisperer. The principles are not necessarily novel (most are known in management/leadership science), but the perspective is — and this is one of those books that perfectly exemplifies the maxim that books let you live multiple lives in a single lifetime.

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Drive by Daniel Pink

Engaging stories about the research on motivation, flow, and incentives — why purpose matters and what kinds of rewards work best. Think casino: unexpected, and after the event. Giving a reward before a task can rob the intrinsic motivation.
I have wanted to read this book for a long time — and although many of the principles turned out to be familiar, the storytelling was convincing and entertaining — a bonus if you also consider yourself an aspiring writer.

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When by Daniel Pink

I had the same longing to read this as for Drive, and I was not disappointed. Daniel Pink is a master storyteller. His books read as great entertainment, where you also learn something as a bonus.
A practical review of research with actionable insights on chronotypes, the effect of fresh starts, how to fight the middle slump, and the real way progress happens (long plateaus interspersed with bursts). Also covers the second wind, why the finish line prompts us to prune (good incentive to subtract!), and the U-shaped curve of happiness (i.e., no abrupt mid-life crisis).

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Montaigne by Stefan Zweig

A short secondary source on Michel de Montaigne, the creator of the essay — read also The Age of the Essay by Paul Graham.
I have been planning to read Montaigne’s magnum opus for a while. Consulting a secondary source before diving into a deeper topic is always a good idea — something I learned from Cal Newport.
Stefan Zweig gives us a glimpse into Montaigne's life, circling back to the main question he asked himself: What do I know?
And though not chasing accolades, this journey for self-knowledge did not go unnoticed by his peers — the burden of serving his king and country found him, even though he was more comfortable in his tower. I take this as another lesson in intellectual humility.

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The Wisdom of Wolves by Jim Dutcher and Jamie Dutcher

I do believe the biggest advantage of books is that you get to live multiple lives without leaving your sofa.
In this book, a team lets us glimpse into their adventures following the Sawtooth wolf pack and reintroducing wolves into parts of the US. They provide a “magnifying glass” to inspect and document how wolves actually love and behave, deepening our understanding beyond the superficial.
Beautiful, touching on species-spanning principles of a great life and character, and a way to reconnect with Nature.

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A World Appears by Michael Pollan

An exploration of the hard problem of consciousness, starting — surprisingly — with plants. Pollan challenges our brain-centric view of awareness: if memory, agency, and decision-making exist beyond brains, what counts as conscious? The idea that “consciousness equals felt uncertainty” stuck with me — since we are a curious species, we never reduce uncertainty to zero.2
As a bonus, the recurring discussion of qualia always brings me back to one of my favorites, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

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The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

A deep investigation into where our food comes from, tracing four food chains — industrial, pastoral, organic, hunter-gatherer — from soil to plate. The revelation that we are, molecularly, corn and that the economics of agriculture invert common sense (lower prices drive higher production, not less) reframes how you look at every meal. Pollan exposes the oxymoron of industrial organic and the limits of reductionism: knowing a few chemicals does not mean we figured out agriculture, just as knowing a few variables does not mean we figured out Nature — frequently tying back to Wendell Berry’s The World-Ending Fire. Tip of my hat for actually trying out every step of food production, including taking the lives of the animals involved.
The book is suitable for a US audience, but does not factor in how industrial agriculture and cheap food have an allure for food safety (at least in the short term) and, thus, for populations who are starving (or have generational trauma about not enough food; think WWII).

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(Fiction) The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Magical language transports us into Barcelona in the first half of the 1900s to tell a story of books, secrets, and human suffering. It echoes the dark moments of the Spanish Civil War, weaving in a sharp critique of the unscrupulous rich and acolytes of Franco’s dictatorship, while threading in a hint of dark magical realism with masterful prose. Zafon’s phrases flourish and flower, but do not cross the Rubicon of kitsch. You can feel you are in that magical (and sometimes frightening) Barcelona, I can only imagine he deeply loves.
This is the first book of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, which I am currently devouring.

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Reflection

As I have been thinking about the future of research in light of the proliferation of AI in scientists’ workflows, I cannot help but return to the concept of intellectual humility and to Montaigne’s famous question3. I did not plan to, but I found the same story play out in The Omnivore’s Dilemma — which is not that surprising, given that especially in the West, the scientific approach (to management, to economics, and yes, even to agriculture) dominates. Science is akin to democracy in Winston Churchill’s infamous quote4. This is not a dismissal of science — it does work. The moral is to know the limits, and to have the intellectual humility to admit where those are.

If you are interested in all the books that piqued my interest, you can also visit my Goodreads profile.

Weeks passed without a single meeting with my supervisor — because I had nothing to show. I kept postponing, waiting until I had an answer worth presenting. It never occurred to me that a meeting could be for asking questions, not only delivering solutions.

That was my first unknown unknown. There were many more.

False signposts of certainty

A PhD feels deceptively simple from the outside. You agree on a topic. You have a supervisor. You do the work. You get the results — or so you might have assumed.

Credit: Florian Aigner. Source

In reality, the rules you internalized as an undergrad — that problems have solutions, that the toolbox is given, that effort maps to visible progress — quietly stop applying. The comfortable solution is to keep spinning your wheels — do what worked before, harder. It takes courage and self-reflection to see how much you don’t know1.

This is, at its core, a problem of unclear expectations. There are unknown unknowns you cannot anticipate, and the curse of knowledge makes this worse from both sides. Supervisors have long forgotten the fog of the first year — they may not even realize what they’re leaving unsaid. Students don’t yet know which questions to ask. Both assume the expectations are clear — and neither checks2.

An overwhelming majority of PhD students suffer from this. So let’s lift the fog on expectations.

Unclear expectations are not the same as misaligned ones. Misalignment means you want X, your supervisor wants Y, and both of you know it. Hopefully, if you followed my questionnaire for selecting a supervisor, you are not in that camp. What follows is about the murkier problem: expectations that were never made explicit in the first place.

Things no one tells you upfront

Questions are better than answers

I made the mistake I see many PhDs make: I was afraid of booking meetings with my supervisor because I had no results3.

Rule of thumb: You don’t need to bring results to a meeting. It’s enough to bring questions and problems.

This is fundamentally different from what you were used to during your studies, where you aced all tests and solved all the problems. Here you are at the forefront of knowledge, where questions, failure, and getting stuck are the norm.

As one of my friends, Jana Zeller, quipped:

The task of your supervisor is to help you succeed.

Ask for their time accordingly. If they don’t have one, volunteer to set up a calendar for lab members to book meetings. If they have a secretary, be proactive and ask about the PI’s constraints so you know when it’s easier to get a slot.

Bad ideas are part of the process

Most of your ideas will be bad — that is normal. The problem is that they are yours, and attachment prevents you from seeing their faults — kill your darlings. You need to develop the internal taste to recognize weak ideas early, before they cost you months.

You build that taste by exposing your ideas to criticism. You don’t need cheerleaders; you need people who point out where your ideas fail. Expect most ideas to die, and treat that as the process working, not as failure.

See also: Taste for Makers, You and Your Research

“Can do” does not mean “should do”

In my undergrad, I never needed to question whether solving a task made sense — it did, if only because it contributed to my grade.

In a PhD, you need to internalize the distinction between “can do” and “should do.” As with many things, I learned this the hard way: I once spent weeks on a proof that turned out to be pointless. As far as I can tell, it was correct — but I had not asked whether it was worth doing.

“Worth doing” does not necessarily mean having a world-changing impact. Sometimes it means “only” that you learn something. But you need to ask yourself before spending weeks on something whether it makes sense.

Just because you can do something does not mean you should.

This problem comes in many disguises: having a hammer and mistaking everything for a nail, being carried away by inertia, or playing someone else’s game — even a groundbreaking result is the wrong result if it doesn’t align with your goals.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore — curiosity-driven research is how breakthroughs happen. But exploration with intention is different from inertia. Know why you’re exploring before you spend weeks on it.

Rule of thumb: Ask your why before deciding what you do.

There is no universal toolbox

Experimentation and failure are necessary to find your tools — whether productivity systems, your ideal daily schedule, or research methods. There will be conventions of your field you need to be aware of, but they should not constrain how you work.

Embrace experimentation and fail fast. Not for failure’s sake, but to separate the wheat from the chaff — I’ve written about failure at length.

But do not mistake shiny tools for impactful productivity. Start small, pick the simplest tool that is good enough, and extend if necessary. Time spent on tools is time not spent on research.

See also: An allostasis theory of failure

Asking for help is not a sign of weakness

Feedback loops only function if you reach out when you’re stuck.

Checking someone’s code or proofs can go a long way — though the more involved the feedback you seek, the less frequently you can expect it (but do ask!). Instruction accelerates learning the most.

This is also the best way to calibrate your expectations. Maybe finishing a project in 6 months was unrealistic from the start, and you set yourself up for failure — and unnecessary suffering.

I know this can feel awkward, especially if you're used to having all the answers. It doesn’t have to be a formal meeting or code review — a coffee chat or a passing mention during lunch counts too.

See also: Kind and Wicked Learning Environments

You are the expert

One of the most frequent mistakes I made was assuming that colleagues, reviewers, and supervisors are familiar with the intricate technical details of my project. They know the field and the idea — but how would they know why my code doesn’t work or why the proof is stuck?

Provide context top-down. People will signal the level of detail that is enough for them. It will almost always be less than you think.

Rule of thumb: If you wrote a three-page summary, cut it down to half a page. You have much more time to spend on a single idea, project, or document than your mentors.

This does not mean you should remain superficial. It means starting with the big picture and building up complexity incrementally — a skill that will serve you in papers and talks alike.

Lack of feedback/response is not a sign of neglect but busyness

No answer from your supervisor doesn’t necessarily mean ghosting or lack of interest. More often, it means busyness and forgetfulness. Reminders are always appreciated — and necessary.

Rule of thumb: Write more reminders than you think necessary/prudent.

Your PI has a lot on their plate — running the lab, writing grants, reviewing, teaching. This can steal their time even at the last minute, leading to cancelled meetings. It is not personal.

People can be picky about authorship

Authorship disputes are common, and your inexperience with the norms makes early-career situations especially awkward. Clear this up in advance. Not all “authorship fights” go the way you’d expect — some people will fight to put you in a more prominent position4.

Rule of thumb: Discuss authorship expectations before a project starts, not after tensions build up.

I remember once thinking: why does X want to be on this paper? I did the whole project — wrote the code, ran the experiments. That person “only” gave me feedback. I changed my mind on this. Nowadays, I ask:

Would this project have succeeded if that person had not been involved?

If the answer is no, we have a (joint) first/last author. Beyond that, nuance matters — feedback alone or a single conversation is not enough, but active involvement in shaping the work is.

Some journals, such as TMLR, have clear criteria for what constitutes authorship. Check, and if uncertain, ask — earlier than you think necessary.

Reviews can be unfair

Reviews can be unfair, outright dismissive, or even aggressive. This is common — not good, but common. It does not mean your work is bad.

Detaching your self-worth from the feedback on your work is hard but essential for a sustainable career.

Writing reviews will help you understand (some of) the criticisms you receive. I’ve written about both how to write reviews and how to rebuttal.

The next deadline is always around the corner — it’s up to you to take rest

Research never stops, even though it has milestones along the conference cycle. If you don’t plan to rest, you will burn out5.

The high of submitting fades quickly because the next deadline is already approaching. You may need to prepare the preprint or write reviews for the same conference. Pace yourself.

Missing a deadline is not the end of the world — even though it feels like it. Give yourself a day or two to commiserate. Then pick it up where you left off, and reflect on what went wrong.

The mindset to adopt

Be humble. Make it explicit that you are here to learn, and since you don’t know many of the conventions and norms, you are asking to learn those.

Earning a PhD does not make you immune to cognitive biases, so practicing intellectual humility is the priority. This comes with lots of questions. As an upside, it will accelerate your progress in every pursuit of your life because you will learn much faster by admitting what you don’t know — and these include the expectations.

Doing a PhD is hard: you are pushing the boundaries of not just your own knowledge, but of humanity’s. The journey should not be made harder by implicit norms and mismatched expectations.

My shift from answers towards questions — from proving myself to asking better questions — changed everything. It accelerated my research, improved my relationships with supervisors, and freed me from the weight of pretending I had it all figured out.

A checklist to clarify expectations — with yourself and your supervisor

The items below are split into two: things to work out on your own, and things worth discussing with your supervisor. Consider revisiting this after your first few months.

Work out for yourself

• Am I starting work before asking whether it should be done at all? Do I know my “why”?

• Am I holding onto an idea, rather than exposing it to feedback early?

• When a review is harsh, am I separating the quality of my work from the tone of the response?

• Do I have a system for managing my work that I’ve actually tested, or am I running on defaults? Do I embrace some experimentation?

• Have I scheduled rest, or am I assuming it will happen?

• Am I assuming expectations are clear — or have I actually checked?

Discuss with your supervisor

• Have we agreed on what meetings are for? (Asking questions, not only presenting results.)

• Do I know what “enough progress” looks like before our next meeting?

• Is the scope of my current project mine to decide, or does that need a conversation?

• Have we discussed authorship expectations for any ongoing collaborations?

• If I send an email and don’t hear back, what is the best way to follow up?

• What would you want me to come to you about that I might currently be handling alone?

However, it is easy to forget that the knowledge you toiled months to internalize is unfamiliar to your audience. This is a real threat that, in many cases, adds nuance to the outcry about a malicious Reviewer 2.

During my master’s, I received a review, and my first reaction was: how can the reviewer be so silly as not to understand? The shame of realizing it was — at least partially — my own making still humbles me.

That was when I understood1 the curse of knowledge, the poison dripping from the double-edged sword of expertise2.

The room that goes silent because no one can follow. The meeting where you nod without understanding. The paper that gets rejected not because the science is bad, but because the author could not transcend their own expertise.

This is not a knowledge problem, but an empathy and communication problem. Assuming knowledge that can only be earned. Remember that you were in the same shoes when you started learning about the topic.

The antidote starts with intellectual humility, i.e., knowing what you don’t know. And, more importantly, imagining—or remembering—what your audience doesn’t know yet3.

How to fight the curse?

Here are a few guidelines I found useful:

1. Think with the head of the audience, and consciously remind yourself you were in the same shoes as the novice — even better, ensure there is something in your life where you are a novice (pick up a new hobby, or read a book about an unfamiliar topic).

2. Say the “trivial” things. If you feel embarrassed to state the obvious, you are doing it right.

3. Do not assume everyone wants all details. Aim for clarity and simplicity, and layer in the nuance progressively — and acknowledge where you simplify.

4. Ask your audience to summarize what they understood with their own words.

Next time, watch the experts closely. Not for what they know — but for whether the room can follow. That’s the real test of expertise: making others understand what you know.

Knowing the curse of knowledge also has an unexpected upside: making you a better learner.
Topics can be overwhelming because of missing context and unstated assumptions. Once you see that, you know exactly what to ask — whether of a colleague, a textbook, or an AI prompted with your specific background. The curse, turned inside out, becomes a diagnostic tool.

“Progress”, as measured by conventional, easily measurable metrics like papers1, seems to be zero. For a very long time. Just like the initial (negative) part of a function we call a rectified linear unit (or ReLU) in machine learning.

The problem isn’t that it starts out flat — but that for your PhD, you do not know when (or even whether) it starts to increase. Even worse, you might feel clueless because there is no signal (gradient) in the flat part.

This whole illusion hinges on how we measure progress. I get it, it’s easy to count papers — but it neglects so much nuance that it stops being useful, especially as you start doing research.

Feedback is essential for learning — to use another machine learning analogy: the credit assignment problem in RL states that it’s hard to learn a good solution when feedback (rewards — think the score in a computer game) is sparse and not immediate.

Make your rewards dense. How?

For example, write down how much time it took you to deeply understand a paper — revisit in a few months. It will be faster. Or track how long it takes to set up experiments. It will be faster, too.

Yes, you still need to trust that the metrics the system cares about will start improving for you. But if you have numbers showing that you are actually making progress, you can see ReLU-flatland for what it is — an illusion.

P.S.: I thank JZ and AM for their insights on the topic, and MK for his advice.

P.P.S.: A beautiful quote from Oliver Burkeman’s The Imperfectionist: “Uncertainty is our basic state of existence, not something to be got through to the certainty beyond.”

P.P.P.S.: an amazing speech-to-text app that actually works, with clever functionality like custom snippets and styles. This link gives you and me a free month of Pro. The free version is also plenty—it has rate limits, but you get almost the same functionality

After a few months away, this is the question I kept coming back to. Two things are shifting what “possible” means for me — and probably for you: growing into more senior roles, and the proliferation of AI assistance.1

I’m calling this theme redefining research. It will be the thread running through the essays ahead. It starts with self-reflection but should be accompanied by the exploration of the — rather jagged — technological frontier.

Growth is impossible without exploring the current frontier first

The frontier, or as Ethan Mollick more descriptively calls it, the jagged frontier, needs to be charted first. Its jaggedness reflects that at the frontier, things might work wondrously, and they might go wrong unexpectedly.

The question is whether we bring the curiosity to explore and the willingness to extend.

To use an example from AI (more on this below): coding is within the frontier, reliable knowledge management is at the frontier. At least for now.

At the jagged frontier of AI-assisted research

AI is changing research, period. But even researchers and PhD students in AI don't embrace exploring the jagged frontier2 — so if we do, we are ahead of the majority.

But first, we need to explore the jagged frontier to see where and what types of guardrails are required. Surely, we need them (see the NeurIPS 2025 hallucination incident, or the distinction between vibe coding and vibe engineering). Once we know where the frontier breaks, we can build tools to extend it. My attempt was releasing bibtexupdater3 with reference fact-checking capabilities. With such guardrails in place, we can increase our speed — because it won’t be a careless act. In the words of Andrew Huberman, we can go as fast as we carefully can. And I believe we should.

At the personal jagged frontier

Growing professionally entails its own jagged frontier exploration. I wrote earlier about emulating this stage — partially with AI tools. As I have taken on more supervisory roles, the parallels are hard to miss: we delegate, we set up guardrails and safe-to-fail experiments, we expect mistakes — including our own.

The dynamic is strikingly similar to working with AI agents. As Ethan Mollick observed, engineers building with agents are rediscovering the best management practices. Both require guidance, verification, and accepting that our collaborators — human or otherwise — will lack the context we take for granted. This highlights both the importance of clear communication and the need to remember how it was before we earned those years of experience.

In both cases, we are relinquishing control but gaining speed. This can be frightening — it was, and sometimes still is, for me. But this is also about embracing discomfort and enlarging our comfort zones, which is a prerequisite for growth.

Both frontiers are moving, demonstrating that “fast” needs to be redefined. Not to engage in a race to the bottom, but to live up to our full potential.

One Useful Thing

Management as AI superpower

I just taught an experimental class at the University of Pennsylvania where I challenged students to create a startup from scratch in four days. Most of the people in the class were in the executive MBA program, so they were taking classes while also working as doctors, managers, or leaders in a variety of large and small companies. Few had ever coded. …

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3 months ago · 840 likes · 95 comments · Ethan Mollick

One Useful Thing

Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier

A lot of people have been asking if AI is really a big deal for the future of work. We have a new paper that strongly suggests the answer is YES…

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3 years ago · 834 likes · 59 comments · Ethan Mollick

This was a re-listen, which I was glad to do as this is one of the best books on communication. As I came to believe that most conflicts arise from communication issues, especially when emotions run high.

The Hallmarked Man by J. K. Rowling

If you don’t know Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series, then you should. The book is so captivating that I devoured the 900-plus-page tome in less than a week, while attending a conference.

The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson

It was a very interesting listen on the selfish hidden motives that drive human behavior, what the authors call the elephant in the brain. I loved the narrative and how the authors illustrated their point across many human endeavours. If you are only into the bottom line, I think reading the official outline from the authors is sufficient.

The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer

Another impulse-listen on Audible. Well, a quarter listen. Although it started with interesting thoughts (and food for thought) about consciousness, it got way too vague and spiritual, so I dropped it. Only part 1 is worth listening to, in my opinion.

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

This is a(n in)famous classic from 1937, claiming to have uncovered the secret to becoming rich. I was extremely sceptical, but wanted to better understand one seminal piece of the self-help literature. I would not have read this book, but listening to it on a long flight was a good excuse. Well, it has a lot of unscientific mumbo-jumbo about manifesting. Though if you throw away the superficial surface, you might find some truth in the book’s praise of discipline, willpower, and consistency.

If you are interested in all the books that piqued my interest, you can also visit my Goodreads profile.

But I have a limited attention span and time, just as everyone else. Thus, I need to be careful what information source I spend my time on. That is,

the real value is not in information, but in information filtering1.

I stopped following daily news long ago, because news outlets are incentivized to keep up the constant chatter, i.e., their filters are down. On the other hand, years went into most books to hone both reasoning and story2.

Still, not all books deserve your full attention. Not necessarily because they are “bad”, maybe only because they serve a different purpose. Realizing this, I started experimenting with audiobooks3. Reading in solitude is still my ideal setting for deep thinking. However, when I am on my feet, my thoughts flow more easily. But then, why don’t you just read the very best books?

Because different types of information sources serve different purposes: a lighter one can serve as a reminder, a gentle introduction, or provide a different angle. These act as different filters, emphasizing the most important meta-point:

it matters more which source you select than how much effort you put into it.

Active Listening Techniques - 30 Practical Tools to Hone Your Communication Skills by Nixaly Leonardo

The reason why you need to be a better listener is very-well formulated by George Bernard Shaw:

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place

And this is often due to being lost so much in your thoughts that you do not realize what the other person is saying. This short book gives you the tools or serves as a reminder about what we all need to be doing more frequently.

The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

Although I am involved in cutting-edge research, I have not spent much time thinking about the potential futures of technology. As being involved in AI research does not make me qualified to predict the future, I started covering my bases by listening to people with both credibility and years of experience. Kevin Kelly is one of the Internet’s pioneers, and believes that

Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.

Note that his is not a Pollyannaish optimism, but one that acknowledges the problems new technology will create—though its credo is that the new technology will help us figure out a solution.

What I liked in The Inevitable is that it acknowledges that progress depends on the underlying system. The system will support approaches that will keep the system alive—which is a line of reasoning you will also find in Seth Godin’s This is Strategy, about which I wrote this March. And also an essential observation for creative endeavours like research, as systems can make great ideas fail.

Nudge - Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler

The floor plans of our offices or the default response in a form, influence our decisions. Thus, it is baffling often how little intention goes into such choices. The book takes this simple observation and backs it up in all walks of life, from finances, healthcare, politics, to the more quotidian [but nonetheless important, due to the effect of compounding] matters of food arrangement in a cafeteria.

What I liked especially was that I got to listen to a revised edition, where the authors included a response to criticisms of their framework. If you just read that part, it’s worth it to see what a well-crafted, balanced, and transparent reasoning looks like—even, and especially, if you happen to disagree with the authors.

The Power of Self-Coaching - The Five Essential Steps to Creating the Life You Want by Joseph J. Luciani

This audiobook was a great reminder that there are means to help navigating the hardships of an ambitious life. Remember: what you do outside of your main pursuit (not just timewise, but also mindset-wise), affects your performance. By a lot. Even if self-coaching is not a miracle medicine, it offers tools that can help navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of stress and mental health challenges.

If you are interested in all the books that piqued my interest, you can also visit my Goodreads profile.

But, as my undergraduate mentor pointed out to me, this is the sign that you are learning.

It would be foolish, he said, to think that neither your opinion nor your approach will change with more experience.

Indeed, it is the best signal that you are learning.

If you have never presented at a conference, it's natural to feel anxious. You know your work's limitations, and might expect that people will ask mean questions. While it's important not to oversell, notice that this information is asymmetric.

Most people (read: 99.99%) have neither the time nor the expertise to get all the details—and that is often unnecessary. So most conversations will be high-level. Remember this when you design your slides and posters.

There will be people who are actually looking for you1. They are there because they are interested and want to better understand what you did.

You might still be wondering: how do I reconcile scientific integrity and "selling" my work? Talking prominently about the limitations surely invites attacks, right?

I have a thought experiment for you: what would you think of a friend who is transparent about their work's limitations? If you are like me, you'd admire them, as this takes a lot of courage. Then, you might try doing the same—I promise you'll have at least one person who will tip his hat for you.

This book is a must-read if you are considering a career in academia. Jen Heemstra shares advice on the skills you need to master beyond doing great science. In graduate school, most programs do not put enough emphasis on the soft skill side of things. Labwork to Leadership addresses this gap by providing practices grounded in research and lots of experience.

No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

A deep dive into the organizational culture behind Netflix, centred around feedback, radical candour, and trust. I believe that fostering a feedback culture is key to developing great ideas, and this book gave me ideas on how to create such an environment.

The Netflix Culture Deck is a short summary of the same principles. The company Valve also has a similar Handbook for New Employees.

Meet Your New AI Tutor by

An amazing post by Jeremy Caplan on how to use LLMs for learning.

Wonder Tools

📚 Meet Your New AI Tutor

AI assistants are now more than simple answer machines. ChatGPT's new Study Mode, Claude's Learning Mode, and Gemini's Guided Learning represent a significant shift. Instead of just providing answers, these free tools act as adaptive, 24/7 personal tutors…

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8 months ago · 48 likes · 6 comments · Jeremy Caplan

If you are interested in all the books that piqued my interest, you can also visit my Goodreads profile.

The upside of planning

Ideation, though not trivial, is cheap. If done in excess, it is like daydreaming; it feels good, but it is a means of analysis paralysis. To turn ideas into reality, we need to plan. You might object that nothing will go according to plan. You are right.

Plans are useless, planning is helpful—Eisenhower

The point is not having the plan; it’s about the process. Planning should force you to make all assumptions explicit, reduce the burden of the end-goal into bite-sized steps.

Planning is about figuring out what can fail and figuring out how to prevent that.

If you cannot devise a good plan2, the idea might not have been that great. Thus, you can pull the plug before wasting a lot of time.

Procrastination, deadlines, and planning

You have seen people accomplishing many things before a deadline. Perhaps you have done that too. The second wind is real; performance can get a boost close to the finish line. The question is

Are you using deadlines intentionally to boost focus and productivity?

While reading Labwork to Leadership, I became aware of the distinction between active and passive procrastination. Active procrastination is an intentional way of knowing the realistic time demands of a task, and delaying doing it, but only to a point that you can still finish before the deadline. This can induce the feeling of flow, with a reasonably low risk.

Passive procrastination, on the other hand, is unintentional and stems from the anxiety the task at hand causes. In this category, you might still pull it off, and you might still tell yourself that you procrastinate to experience the boost. Only you know the real answer, and it requires self-reflection.

Planning, or lack thereof, is a good indicator, though. Luckily, conference deadlines are usually (approximately) known in advance. A question I find useful is asking yourself—especially if you tend to leave things to the last minute:

What if you worked consistently beforehand, and the jolt of excitement only adds the cherry on top?

You might say that you work well under pressure, but if you have never tried out the alternative, how do you know?

Under stress and lack of sleep, it's more probable that you will get sick. Thus, there will be a sweet spot even for active procrastination.

Planning tools: pre-mortem and pre-victorem

There are two tools that can identify the critical steps of the project. Becoming aware of these will help set a more realistic timeframe and also identify the risk factors.

The pre-mortem3 assumes that the project failed and asks what caused the failure. The pre-victorem is similar, but it assumes that you succeeded. A few useful questions to ask:

• What caused the failure?

• Was the time plan appropriate?

• Was it clear who the owner of each task is?

• Was the communication unclear?

• Did we make a wrong decision?

• Did we make the right decision, it just did not play out?

Dig Deeper

How to develop great ideas?

The short answer is that you cannot force it. But there are useful principles that can guide you forward.

Part 1: developing ideas

Go to the frontiers of knowledge

To have any ideas, you cannot forgo diving deep into a topic.

Just as a coastline, the more you zoom in, the more of the infinitude you will recognize. Knowledge at the edges is a fractal.

Exploiting forever sounds like life insurance for your career. But you need to be very considerate about the diminishing returns and about falling prey to the method orientation. Not every nail is worth hammering. Perhaps surprisingly, Richard Hamming “accused” Claude Shannon of being guilty of this, as despite his celebrated results in information theory, he stuck too long to it.

Recent research demonstrated that shifting your field can improve your impact, because you are not constrained by the field’s doctrine. Paul Graham formulated this advice as1:

Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more.

Broad knowledge/interests can help connect the dots without reinventing the wheel. The caveat is finding the balance of range without spreading yourself too thin.

“Don’t be the best, be the only"—Kevin Kelly

The advantage of Range is sound: the probability of being an expert in both X and Y is strictly less than being an expert in only one. The catch is finding fields that are meaningful to combine.

Failed past ideas were not all bad

The graveyard of failed ideas includes some great ones. They might have failed because2 :

• technological limitations,

• the political climate,

• unfavorable culture, or

• an unfriendly economy.

There is a big caveat, though:

Failure in the past does not make a bad idea a great one.

If you are happy to take that risk, what you could do—just like Katalin Karikó—is to find very old, forgotten, and niche papers.

An environment for fostering great ideas

Ideation is not just sheer hard work and willpower, it is also being in an environment conducive for developing great ideas. A few hallmarks of such environments are3:

1. Minimize distractions;

2. Immerse yourself in nature;4

3. Go for walks;5 and

4. Interact with people of diverse backgrounds, expertise, and interests.

Sometimes closing out the consensus can help you think independently, as you won't be influenced in advance.

Write or prototype to close the loose threads

You need to write (or prototype) because it does not allow you any slack. Writing a proof or a program, or setting up an experiment in the lab, forces you to specify all details.

Take rest

Developing great ideas requires taking rest—creativity requires diffuse thinking. Rest affects your work performance6. You need to let your mind wander. Go for walks!

Part 2: selecting great ideas

Only do it if you can’t not do it

An idea should become more and more interesting as you spend time on it. If you feel an urge to work on an idea, then you should do it. Lesser motivation predestines an idea to die prematurely, as you will get stuck. This also means that you need to abandon your lesser ideas.

Oliver Burkeman’s heuristic is that if you forget an idea, then it was not so interesting for you. But sometimes you forget great ideas—so keep notes, and revisit them. If you are still excited, go for it.

Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap, including your ideas

The ideas started coming, but then

How do you realize which is a great one?

For most ideas are bad, you need to:

1. Suspend judgment to get the bad ideas out of the way

2. Seek feedback to figure out which are the bad ones; i.e., to develop taste.

In most organizations, including research labs, people have a hard time both getting and receiving feedback. For learning, you need a kind learning environment, which hinges on feedback. Failing fast is also about feedback.

A question I found very useful is:

I have this idea X, do you want to work on it?7

The goal is to overcome your ego to create space for the truly great ideas. What helps is looking for the following signs.

Signs of a great idea

It seems embarrassingly simple, trivial, "I-am-sure-that-someone-already-thought-about-it"

Many times these are the ideas that need to be spelt out8.

It seems ridiculous, or outright wrong.

Maybe it goes against the grain, or it disagrees with the expected outcome of the experiment. Dig there. But be careful not to be a contrarian for being a contrarian's sake. In the words of Adam Robinson:

If you want to find gold, it’s where things don’t make sense.

The two flavors here are:

1. It works, but the consensus/your intuition tells you it should not

2. It does not work, but the consensus/your intuition tells you it should

It targets the implicit assumptions

If everyone is on autopilot, traditions and assumptions can get outdated. Paul Graham’s questions can help figuring this out:

• What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think? What becomes possible if you discard it?

• Is there a widely held but mistaken belief?

• Is there an underexplored aspect of somethong people think is already well-explored?

Actionable advice

• Increase your surface area to luck

  • read widely

  • read old

  • talk to people from many walks of life

• Never blindly accept traditions

• Ask for feedback to weed out bad ideas

• Look for combining (seemingly) disparate fields

• Look for the seemingly wrong, the neglected, the counterintuitive, the unfancy

Dig Deeper

• Oliver Burkeman: How to forget what you read

• Paul Graham

  • How to Do Great Work

  • How to Write Usefully

  • Novelty and Heresy

  • How to Think for Yourself

  • Taste for Makers

• William Deresiewicz: Solitude and Leadership

• : Range

• Adam Alter: Anatomy of a Breakthrough

• Shane Parrish: The Great Mental Models

• Annie Murphy Paul: The Extended Mind

The difference is not necessarily in the behavior, but in its effect. Introverts get depleted from social situation, extroverts get energized.

This resolves the quandary of why introverts can enjoy conversations; they might just get tired afterwards. The nuance is that

drainage depends on the circumstances.

We came up with this theory in a deep discussion with a self-described introvert colleague1—and we both felt energized afterwards!

So instead of thinking of extroverts having a larger and introverts a smaller social battery, we moved to a different mental model. Though the capacity might differ as well, what matters is what and how fast drains those batteries. Small talks and big social groups tend to drain it faster for introverts, but nerding about science or hobbies might even energize them.

Your task is to figure out what makes your battery drain slower and what recharges it.

I started learning French recently, and this time, I wanted to figure out how to effectively and efficiently do that. This led, via Tim Ferris, me to Gabriel Wyner's book. It has lots of unorthodox advice, coming from a former opera singer who learned languages for a living. Highly recommended.

P.S.: I never thought that I would ever say it, but learning the IPA made a huge difference in deciphering French pronunciation.

Also see:

• How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months

• Learn Any Language in Record Time and Never Forget It

• How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour

Why French is Easy by Benny Lewis

Another book on French, also inspired by Tim Ferriss. It's a short and practical guide with great examples and (free) resources like Yabla.

The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne

Writing is different from editing. After reading a lot about writing, I wanted to see what I could learn about writing from an editor's perspective. The book is a no-nonsense guide to editing principles - although for fiction in general, the storytelling part applies to non-fiction.

The Hannibal Trilogy by Thomas Harris

As Shawn Coyne uses Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs to illustrate how the story grid looks like, I read it and the other Hannibal Lecter books as well. There is a fourth book, too, on diving into Hannibal Lecter’s past.

Internal Family Systems Therapy by Richard C. Schwartz

What if we were to see our fears, struggles, and traumas in the context of an internal family? As if each of us is composed of multiple personalities trying to serve the well-being of the Self. This is what IFS does. Interesting read, but way too verbose.

If you are interested in all the books that piqued my interest, you can also visit my Goodreads profile.

But it does not. Sometimes the hard decision is to pull back, take same rest, and do nothing. Creative thoughts require divergent thinking, i.e., not focusing. Beating the market in the long run (à la Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger) requires not making daily trades but waiting for the moment. Getting the upper hand in negotiations requires resisting the urge to speak.

It seems counterintuitive, feels counterintuitive, and is counterintuitive. But not taking action is part of mastery.

Dig deeper

I can recommend these episodes by :

Do you need a knowledge management system?

You don't—but you would make your life harder not to use one1.

The fancy productivity systems, tools, and apps don't make you productive; consistency does. It's necessary to experiment, but you should stick to something.

Beware of the overhead

AI-assisted, color-coded apps with elaborate folder systems sound fancy. But never mistake the feeling of pseudo-productivity of mastering an app with actually accomplishing something important. Mastering the new shiny system might make you feel accomplished, but as novelty ebbs, you might start looking into a shiny new thing.

Keep it as simple as possible, and introduce complexity as you need it

Notecard systems

The value of your notes comes from connecting them to each other. For this purpose, using (physical or digital) notecards is a handy solution.

Types of information

• Papers: use a paper management system like Zotero (it's free and integrates with note-taking apps like Obsidian and Notion)

• Experimental results: for computational experiments, use an experiment management system (e.g., Weights and Biases, Neptune.ai)

• Code: use version control (e.g., git)

• Random stuff: use a (paper or digital) notebook2

• Time-sensitive: put it on your calendar

The information allocation principle

Information should have its place, especially for projects. Dedicate a place for each, and move all relevant information there. If you find an interesting article, it's OK to save it as a notecard. For collaborative projects, centralized places such as overleaf.com or Google Docs are much better3.

A personal example: I store my notes about papers I read in Obsidian (the papers are in Zotero, and I export from there), but for every project, I move the relevant information to Overleaf.

Beware of information-hoarding

Information is only useful if you act on it. Having a bunch of notes and never revisiting them is a waste of your time. Yes, serendipity can strike and you might find it useful years later (if you can find it among 1000s of notecards), but you need to reflect on whether information hoarding is your way of procrastination.

Revisit your notes

Revisiting old notes seems less alluring than exploring shiny new things4, but the treasure is there. Look for excitement when revisiting your forgotten ideas.

Both benefit from thinking with your audience in mind and treating the materials as support to tell your story. As you imagine explaining your findings, you can figure out both slide ordering and the poster layout.

But there are specifics to a poster session. While giving a talk, everyone in the room is supposedly listening, whereas in a poster session—up to 1000+ posters—you need to stand out1.

Many people are just wandering, so first you need to help them decide whether they are interested—just as when reading papers. I use a huge2 TL;DR summary with a vibrant color or background. This takes up a lot of space, but it attracts more people—as a positive side effect, you cannot overcrowd the poster with content. Only include figures, tables, and formulas that help you explain your results or answer anticipated audience questions.

This is an example of a recent poster my coauthors and I created:

Tips and reminders

• Negative space works: less is more, as it helps the audience get an overview

• Use a few colors: less is more regarding colors, too. A free color wheel tool can help you select harmonizing colors

• For multiple presenters, ensure that everyone can navigate the poster by using the maximum size (conferences usually have a policy on this) and preferably a landscape orientation

• A QR code for online assets helps people find the paper or code—and decreases the "barrier of entry", ie, some people might scan the QR code without stopping. This is a free QR code generator

• You can print posters on fabric, which is more expensive, but makes transportation simpler34

Tools for poster creation

• Google Slides/PowerPoint

• Canva

• Your favourite LaTeX editor

Dig Deeper

Though you might think a PhD is the same, it is not—and neither are most (all?) knowledge work jobs and even beyond. The geniuses of history serve as a reminder: you might admire the visionary thinking of Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison, but that is only part of the package. You cannot have that without the downsides: Steve Jobs was infamous for how badly he treated employees, and Thomas Edison also wasn't the epitome of goodwill (keyword: Tesla).

You might say that these geniuses chose not to care about the above. The point is that this is necessary to be outstanding in something1 . So,

what are the things you choose not to care about?

This doesn't mean that you need to be a jerk. But you might decide, even if temporarily, that you don't engage in office gossip, don't follow celebrity news. Or you take harder decisions such as scaling down physical activity, volunteering, or neglecting one skill to master another. There is always a compromise. It's up to you what you choose.

Is it possible to feel down while performing well? Judith Joseph gives this feeling common to type-A pushers a name: high-functioning depression1. An eye-opening book about what it takes beyond achievement to have a full life.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson present a blueprint for politics on the left in the US, based on abundance: by fighting crises with more (housing, energy, etc). They argue that Democrats need to build more, both literally and figuratively. They are not shy in doling out harsh critique to the Democrats, showcasing how some of the crises in the US are caused by regulations enforced by Democrats.

The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa

Sociologist Hartmut Rosa dives deep into the drawbacks of the prevalent desire to control everything. It is not a coincidence that Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's flow or optimal learning environments require some randomness (uncontrollability, if you wish)-the same holds for how the most effective slot machines (or social media) are designed: by providing rewards randomly. If you know the outcome, it's not interesting. Pairs well with High Functioning.

Thanks to from for the recommendation.

Deskbound: Standing Up to a Sitting World by Kelly Starrett

This is a book I wanted to read at the end of 2021, but I forgot about it, for my own peril. I had lower back pain already in high school from sitting too much-that got better when I started doing sports, but my approach was not rigorous.

As I chose biomechanics to be the theme of my reading and learning for this summer, I finally read (i.e., devoured) this book. Highly actionable, and surprising about some of the "ergonomics" craze I believed, with lots of actionable advice. Let's see how much sticks.

See also Andrew Huberman’s interview with the author here:

Going to Pieces without Falling Apart by Mark Epstein

A curious journey into the amalgam of psychotherapy and Buddhism. You need to read it, I cannot say much more.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

Many breakthroughs in science in the 20th century pushed our understanding to the limits. How do you grasp scales from atomic nuclei to black holes? Benjamín Labatut puts a fictional spin on the lives of the people behind the mustard gas and the fertilizer (this was the same guy), quantum physics, and mathematics. His prose will make you cringe at times; it is so visual and often quite dark. Pairs well with The Uncontrollability of the World.

If you are interested in all the books that piqued my interest, you can also visit my Goodreads profile.