These are my permanent notes after reading the book Soundtracks by Jon Acuff. My goal is to summarize the book into my own words so that I can revisit and remember the important lessons. This is not a review—I try not to pass judgment and instead collect the things that resonate with me and preserve them.

Quick summary

Overthinking causes many of us to talk ourselves out of living the life we want by allowing our anxiety and doubt to discourage us. The self-talk we regularly tell ourselves is our “soundtrack”, and the content of that soundtrack can prime us to take or not take certain actions. By learning to turn down our negative soundtracks and replace them with positive ones we can turn our overthinking to our advantage. We can do this by collecting positive, resonant statements, creating a daily mantra from them, and then using that mantra to prime our thinking throughout the day.

Full summary

Overthinking can get in the way of living the life we want. Rather than acting, overthinkers get in their head about the various decisions they make throughout a day. This book attempts to overcome that tendency through the concept of “soundtracks.”

A soundtrack is the collection of thoughts we listen to on repeat. We listen to these thoughts so often that they prime us to act in certain ways.

Our soundtracks are negative.

Our brains are jerks. We dwell on embarrassing incidents from the past that we can’t change. We devote too much headspace to our insecurities. And we talk ourselves out of actions by listening to our fears and doubts about the future.

There are three main reasons our thoughts tend to skew negatively.

1. Our brain lies about its own memories.

Our memories are unreliable. As time goes on, we are much more likely to misremember events in our life, but our confidence about those memories only grows.

2. Our brain is particularly sensitive to trauma.

What’s the opposite of trauma? There is nothing equivalent because good events don’t register nearly as strong in our memories as negative events. When we experience social rejection—or even think about social rejection—our brains release opioids to help us survive emotional pain.

3. Our brain believes what it already believes.

We experience confirmation bias. If we tell ourselves we are disorganized, we’ll ignore five examples fo the contrary and latch onto the one example that proves that belief correct.

Because our brains naturally skew towards negative thought, we are liable to overthink our actions.

The results of overthinking

Overthinking tends to take one of the following forms in our lives.

• Imagining the worst possible outcomes
• Telling ourselves we are incapable
• Fearing what others will think of us

All of these things prevent us from taking actions we would like to take to improve our lives. We don’t take risks when we focus on the worst possible outcome. We don’t try things if we’re convinced we’d be bad at it. We don’t let our personality show when we fear being judged. In all cases, overthinking is the voice which says “no” when our hearts want to say “yes.”

We know that we’re going to regret the things we don’t do more than the things we did do, this adds up for an unfulfilling life paralyzed by fear.

In addition, all of this overthinking is a waste. Thinking burns energy. We’re wasting energy thinking about negative outcomes rather than new ideas. Learning not to overthink our actions can unleash a torrent of creative energy.

“If you can worry, you can wonder. If you can doubt, you can dominate. If you can spin, you can soar.”

We can choose our thoughts

The first thing to do is to take inventory of our thoughts. The thoughts we listen to over and over are our loudest soundtracks. Notice what we tell ourselves and write them down so that they can be analyzed.

For each thought, ask ourselves:

Is it true? Some thoughts sound ridiculous once we put them into words. An example from the book is “I can’t charge people for my services because there are better people than me.” This fails to stand up to scrutiny because by that logic only the greatest person in the world has the right to charge money.

Is it helpful? Thoughts that are based on things that happened in the past are almost never helpful. You had one bad experience with public speaking. That doesn’t mean you’ll never be good at it. It’s not helpful to keep telling yourself that you’re a bad speaker.

Is it kind? Psychological safety is important in a workplace, and it’s even more important in your own mind. I used to pride myself on some rather intense self-talk. I told myself I had no excuse not to excel because of my privileged upbringing. Sometimes this talk was helpful, it’s arguably true, but it certainly wasn’t kind.

Any thought that doesn’t receive three “yes”s from this test should be obliterated. But we can’t just stop thinking something. Negative thoughts are not a “switch” which can be flicked on or off. They are a “dial”. We can only turn their volume down.

In order to turn down negative soundtracks, we need to find techniques which help us to dwell on them less. Here the author suggested a number of techniques:

• Exercising
• Writing a list
• Completing a minor task to feel accomplishment
• Speaking to friends

The techniques that work in your own life will surely differ. For me, I tend to be able to reset my negative self-talk by listening to a playlist of power songs or playing with my cat.

Napster for positivity

Reducing the volume on our negative soundtracks opens up the opportunity to turn up the volume on a new, positive soundtrack.

Here, the author recommends simply listening for quotes that resonate with you and stealing them. These are very personal. Quotes that works for some people will sound banal or cheesy to another. That’s fine. You’re gathering these for yourself and no one else needs to hear them.

Some sources of new soundtracks...

Quotes from inspirational posters:

• “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
• “Shoot for the moon—even if you miss, you will land among the stars.”
• “Courage is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.”

Quotes from celebrities that resonate with you:

• “My life is dope and I do dope shit.” —Kanye West
• “I can’t think of any better representation of beauty than someone who is unafraid to be herself.” —Emma Stone
• “You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” —Robin Williams

Here are some of the quotes that the author listed:

• “People are trying to give me money.” You have something to give the world and that people value.
• “It’ll feel awesome after.” It might hurt to start, but it will be worth it.
• “Spare change adds up.” If you said you’d write 1000 words today, write 1100.
• “Pick ROI, not EGO.” Do you want feedback or compliments? One will make you better, one will stunt your growth.
• “Pivot, don’t panic.” Life is trying to give you lessons. Learn to listen.
• “Writers write.” If you’re trying to write, get writing. Don’t worry about what you’ve published. Stay focused on the work.

If you want to write your own soundtracks, go right ahead. But there’s a wealth of inspiration out in the world already. Collect as much as you can and filter later.

Another way to find our new soundtracks is to study and flip our broken soundtracks. Take the thought you're already having and find a way to turn it positive. One negative soundtrack might be “I need to be finishing writing books.” You might agree with the sentiment but recognize that it’s not kind or helpful, and flip that to “Three pages a day is plenty.”

Or, you might catch yourself doubting yourself and saying “What if I fail?” Flip that to ask yourself “What if I’m a resounding success?”

The power of mantras

Zig Ziglar was a salesman and motivational speaker who was famous for advocating the daily affirmation. His advice: every morning when you wake up, and every night before you go to bed, look at yourself in the mirror and repeat a scripted mantra of positivity.

Ziglar’s mantra started like this:

“I, [your name here], am a person with integrity, a great attitude, and specific goals. I have a high energy level, am enthusiastic, and take pride in my appearance and what I do. I have a sense of humor, lots of faith, wisdom, and the vision and courage to use my talents effectively. I have character, and am a smart, talented person. My beliefs are strong, and I have a healthy self-image, a passion for what is right, and a solid hope for the future. I am an honest, sincere, and hard-working. I am tough, but fair and sensitive...”

You get the idea.

The author stresses that actually performing this action feels goofy and cringe, but that it’s an important step in opposing the tidal wave of negativity that usually floods our brains. You’re practicing having positive thoughts, not so you feel good in the moment you’re saying the mantra, but so that those thoughts can prime your mindset as you go through the day.

The book culminates with a personalized version of the mantra which synthesizes the most resonant of the positive quotes and individual insights the author collected. While the author’s own mantra (called The New Anthem) is tailored to his own desired mindset, it’s generalized enough to be of use to others. To prove this, he ran a study with 10,000 participants and saw that repeating the mantra had a positive effect on most people who tried it.

I am left thinking that the very act of saying a daily mantra can be effective, whether it's from Zig Ziglar or the author, but it’s important to ultimately compose your own mantra with the thoughts that you need the most in your life.

Positive thinking during the daily grind

For many of us, the moments immediately after we wake up and immediately before we fall asleep are some of the only moments we have true control over. Saying a mantra during these times has benefit, but what about the rest of your waking hours?

Two strategies are given for staying positive during the rest of the day:

1. Gather evidence that things are good
2. Create symbols to remind you of your ideals

Gather evidence that things are good

The author talks about a “pocket jury” which we carry around with us, constantly passing judgment on ourselves. In reality, this is just our brains’ natural inclination towards negativity. But rather than try to ignore this jury completely, we should try to gather real evidence to be used when arguing on our own behalf.

The daily mantra can prime our brain to recognize moments where the cheesy positive comments we make to ourselves are actually true. An act of real generosity will remind you of the comment you made to yourself that “I am a generous and good person.” Felt silly when saying it, but, huh, maybe it’s true?

One example the author gives is the quote “Everything is always working out for me.” We’re quick to notice when things don’t go our way, and to develop a victim’s mindset. But when we prime our minds with the thought that everything is always working out for us, those examples will start to become more obvious.

Create symbols to remind you of your ideals

A symbol is an object which holds particular meaning to a certain person. Rather than writing out quotes from your daily mantra near your workspace or in your car, you can encode those thoughts and intentions into a physical object.

For example, the author likes the symbol of a coin (in particular, a silver half-dollar). The coin looks like a dial, which reminds him that negative soundtracks can be turned down, and it can be flipped, which reminds him that negative soundtracks can be flipped.

What do you need to be reminded of during the day? What kind of physical symbol can you place in front of you on a daily basis? The book abounds with examples which work for certain individuals, but only you can decide what will work for you.

When I first learned how to make web layouts I felt disgusted. Nearly every attempt to create a nice-looking web page with columns and rows required me to contend with floats. Now, there's nothing wrong with floats – if you're using them for their original purpose. Floats were made for the modest purpose of flowing text around objects, but because there was no proper layout tool in the early 2000s we were dependent on abusing them to lay out our web pages.

So when I had the opportunity to make the definitive Pluralsight course to introduce the first proper layout module for CSS, I jumped at the chance. Browser support for CSS Grid has reached ubiquitous levels and the time to learn this technology has come.

Course overview

In the first module, Meet CSS Grid, I introduce CSS Grid and contrast its declarative syntax compared to the hacky float syntax of yesteryear. I also explain how its terminology fits in with the world of larger world of layout design.

In Up and Running with CSS Grid, I bypass most of the available properties to show how complete layouts can be coded as simply as possible. This was my chance to fix what I consider the biggest issue with other resources that teach CSS Grid – the sheer number of properties are overwhelming! I want to get you working in CSS Grid as quickly as possible to appreciate its power and simplicity without the subtleties of different properties getting in the way.

You can think of the process of creating layouts in CSS Grid as being a two-step process:

1. Define your grid
2. Position items inside your grid

The next two modules, Defining Grids: In-depth and Positioning Items: In-depth go into each step in detail. You'll learn about all the remaining properties, including how they give you neat shorthands and maximum control over every aspect of your layout.

Finally, Advanced CSS Grid dives into the discussion of naming lines and areas, as well as the fun technical details that can really help you feel like you've mastered the tool. Putting the subject of naming into the last module was another important instructional design decision. I felt like introducing naming too early undermined the importance of contending with grid lines. I would rather the learner master this aspect, and then learn how to use named grid areas. This hopefully makes the course feel like concepts are introduced gradually and purposefully, but doesn't affect the overall goal of mastering every aspect of CSS Grid.

Watch the course

The course is exclusively available on Pluralsight. You can watch it with an active subscription, or you can get a free trial which will give you plenty of time to watch the course.

Pluralsight: Creating Layouts with CSS Grid

Testimonials

This is the first time I feel like I actually understand CSS Grid!  I have done a few tutorials and researched some syntax, but not until this course have I had a full understanding of the Grid concepts

Fantastic!! Wonderful teacher that delivered the information clearly and concisely. I would definitely take another class with this instructor. Job well done!!

One of the best course I have taken at Pluralsight

Ultralearning is justified in science but rooted in obsession.

The book lays out a framework for learning things fast. Really fast. Way faster than conventional wisdom would say is possible.

• a Master’s-level education is obtained in a year
• languages are learned in months
• skills are learned in weeks

Though it’s written for a general audience, containing economic benefits and the encouraging suggestion that anyone can become an ultralearner, the secret sauce is obsession.

The heroes of this story are obsessors like:

• Eric Barone, who single-handedly made the video game Stardew Valley, drawing every pixel and writing every line of code himself
• Benny Lewis, who becomes conversationally fluent in a new language every three months
• Nigel Richards, who won the French Scrabble championship (despite not speaking French) by memorizing hundreds of thousands of words
• László and Klara Polgár, who trained their daughters to become chess masters using a rigorous training schedule from age three

It’s not clear if obsession deserves a bad reputation. If you live by the “everything in moderation” rule, it seems to indicate more than a healthy amount of passion. But if obsession is put to productive use without making a devil’s bargain in the process, is it really a bad thing?

The obsessions written about in Ultralearning are not the Jodie Foster type, but driven by an earnest desire for self-betterment. And while productive obsession feels like something exclusive to geniuses, Ultralearning suggests that the results are within everyone's reach.

The idea of learning great things on a tight schedule sustained by raw self-motivation is attractive. But in order to take this seriously you need more than a “growth mindset” (the belief that intelligence can be developed), you need a “hyper-growth mindset”—something limited to the most privileged of us.

The shame is that cognitive, racial or economic factors do not prevent someone from succeeding, but the audacity to believe in oneself and try—to say nothing of the freedom to devote time and money to lengthy learning experiments—is a product of our environment.

This isn’t the place to solve that problem. But Ultralearning will either ring true or hollow to you—recounting the success stories isn’t likely to change your mind.

For those blessed with a sense of remarkable potential, Young has identified nine principles which unify most successful ultralearning experiments.

The Nine Principles of Ultralearning

Principle 1: Metalearning

Don’t just grab the nearest “Blank for Dummies” book and charge ahead. First survey the subject you are about to explore.

• What is your own inspiration for learning this and is it enough to sustain you?
• What are the major concepts, facts, and procedures to know?
• How have others learned these things?
• What is the hardest part of this subject and how can you overcome it?
• What areas are you personally going to struggle with or excel at?

If you were trying to quickly learn calculus, you should find a course syllabus or two to see how broad the scope is, how long is spent on certain topics, and what sort of resources are commonly used. Collecting a number of these, you could start to see general patterns or resources that are commonly referenced. This will inform how to move forward intelligently rather than wasting time with the wrong focus.

Principle 2: Focus

Entire books have been written about focus—I recommend Deep Work by Cal Newport. The difficulty of finding focus in our daily lives is a major obstacle to getting basic things done. It’s no surprise, then, that high-level achievement requires not just occasional focus, but mastery of it.

First you must conquer procrastination, then train your ability to sustain focus despite distractions, obstacles, and failure. Both of these things can be deconstructed to practicing good habits, but this is a major barrier to most people.

Taylor surprised me by not following this up with a discussion of the benefits of flow state (as popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), but by specifically calling ultralearning “unsuitable for flow”. Apparently even an optimal balance between challenge and skill is suboptimal for ultralearning.

I’ll admit I struggle with this idea. But I don’t struggle with accepting the power of focus in general. I’ve experienced firsthand the dramatic difference between working in an office and working from home. Focus is crucial.

Principle 3: Directness

This is the principle that pulls most of the weight.

So often we treat education like a Disneyland ride—we enter at the entrance, wait in line, and trust the person who sends our vehicle down the track. Our experience at school was a long series of such rides, being led through a syllabus that promised knowledge by the final exam.

As an adult learner, those formal classroom environments are replaced with books, apps, and MOOCs, but the principle remains the same—we follow the path set out for us.

Directness means

1. Decide what you really want.
2. Take it.

This means you don’t aim for French fluency, you aim to read Les Misérables in the original.

You don’t aim to “learn computer science”, you aim to code a space invaders clone.

Such directness will fundamentally change the way you go about learning. It will be more interesting to you and bring results far more quickly than the one-size-fits-all approach that most take.

Principle 4: Drill

There are going to be things you suck at. And those are the things you will hate studying the most.

Accept this as a natural part of learning and you gain the powerful perspective that improving your worst areas is the quickest way to improve overall.

This is where drilling comes in. What do you do with 7-foot basketball centers who can’t make free throws? You make them do a lot of free throws.

Identifying your own weak points requires emotional maturity and humility. But once you’ve identified them, inventing a drill to get better is pretty easy to do. The question is: will you do it?

Principle 5: Retrieval

It’s very easy to feel confident while looking over a study guide, reading and re-reading all the facts that you will be tested on tomorrow. But the test is a different story. Confronted with nothing but question prompts and blank lines, suddenly the answers don’t seem so obvious.

Recognition is easy. Retrieval is hard.

Effective learners constantly force themselves to retrieve information. And the more general the question, the harder it is.

A flashcard question like “Who was George H. W. Bush’s vice president?” is harder than the same question as a multiple choice. But asking yourself open-ended questions like “Why did George H. W. Bush not win re-election?” will force you to think even harder about a subject.

Ultralearners drill such things because it’s hard. It exploits their gaps in knowledge and protects them from the illusion of mastery.

Principle 6: Feedback

It’s even harder to hear critical feedback about an area of insecurity.

I have frequently given the advice that, if you’re trying to learn a language, speak with a native teacher as quickly as possible so that your flaws can be identified before they become bad habits.

But do I do that myself? No way.

You can easily trade hours or days of reinforcing bad habits by getting feedback from somebody knowledgeable. The embarrassment is not just a side effect—it's what will burn mistakes into your brain so that you’ll never forget the right way.

As someone who doesn’t take feedback well, I avoided this. But living in Japan for six years means I was bound to screw some things up. And I've never learned anything faster than the moments an embarrassing error was pointed out to me.

Principle 7: Retention

Everything listed above is in vain if you forget it in three months. Material must move from your short-term to long-term memory.

This can be done in a few ways:

• translate knowledge into procedures you can practice
• re-learn the most critical aspects of a topic from another source
• spaced repetition flashcards

Of the three, I've already written about spaced repetition flashcards and I'm a big believer. It does take extra effort to set up, but it means that material you learn in 2020 can be just as fresh in 2030.

Principle 8: Intuition

The problem with flashcards is that, used by themselves, they enforce a very brittle understanding of subjects. You learn to answer questions that are worded in a very specific way, but you don't have that firm foundation that allows you to contribute in high-level conversations.

The secret to overcoming this is to ask and answer questions. Ask seemingly-simple questions that probe the edges of the material you've learned, and seek to understand how theoretical knowledge is employed in explaining concrete examples.

It's one thing to understand the wave theory of light, but quite another to explain to somebody else why that means the sky is blue. Dig deeper to understand concepts at their root levels. Try to put things into your own words.

Principle 9: Experimentation

If Principle 1: Metalearning is about thinking critically about the material, this principle is about thinking critically about yourself.

More than the eight principles above, what unifies ultralearners is an attitude of experimentation. There is nothing more important than understanding how you learn best. Which activities are most and least helpful to you? How are you preventing yourself from getting complacent in a single style of studying?

A challenge to learn a language in three months is never really about the language. It's about your own abilities, idiosyncrasies, and potential. You look at yourself through a microscope at regular intervals to judge whether any of this is working. And even if it seems to be, ask yourself whether a change could improve things even more.

~

Ultralearning is inspiring—while reading it I was more fired-up than I had been all year. Even if you lack the freedom and obsession to speak nothing but Danish for three months, there are a lot of great tips that can help when learning on a more modest schedule.

But the line which will stick with me the longest is not written by the author, but is written in the Foreword by James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. He says what resonated with him about Taylor is that he has “a bias toward action.”

Those simple words indicate a whole attitude toward life and learning which penetrates through any complex methodology. Among the thousands of microdecisions which paint the color of your days and eventually your life, do you have a bias toward action? Rather than doing nothing, will you take some positive action? Rather than planning something, will you walk the first step?  Those are the words that I’m trying to live by, and the principles in Ultralearning are a way to spin that core attitude into amazing accomplishments.