focus

Josh Kaufman's TEDx talk argues that you can reach practical competence in almost any skill with about 20 hours of focused practice, rather than the 10,000 hours often quoted. He describes how becoming a parent led him to rethink how adults learn, and lays out a short method for rapid skill acquisition.

Adam Savage answers viewer questions on dealing with condescending colleagues, focusing on dismissive phrases such as 'why don't you just' and 'I would have'. He explains why such language undermines the person receiving it.

A short clip of George R.R. Martin asking Stephen King on stage how he writes so fast. King describes setting daily page goals, around six pages a day, and keeping focused hours.

A clip from Steve Jobs's 1997 WWDC session, in which he answers a hostile question from an audience member about Apple killing OpenDoc. He says to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, and that saying no is part of focus.

Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement address, built around three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss including being fired from Apple, and death. It is a 15-minute talk on finding work you love.

CGP Grey argues for picking a theme for the year or season instead of setting goals or new year's resolutions. He explains how a theme gives direction without a pass/fail target.

CGP Grey argues that your brain treats a whole home as one room during lockdown, blurring work, rest and leisure. He recommends creating separate spaces and routines for different activities to stay balanced.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address, told through three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss, and death. It includes the calligraphy class and the 'stay hungry, stay foolish' close.

CGP Grey's sarcastic animated video adapted from the book How to Be Miserable, listing habits that reliably make people unhappy. By inverting the advice, it shows what to avoid and prompts reflection on goals and routines.

A five-minute clip of Ira Glass on the gap between good taste and early creative work. He says beginners know their work falls short and must keep producing to close the gap.

A short How to ADHD explainer, featuring Brendan Mahan, on why simple tasks can feel impossible for people with ADHD. It introduces the 'wall of awful', a pile of past failures, shame and anxiety that builds up in front of a task and blocks starting it.

Will Stephen's humorous six-minute TEDx talk shows presentation techniques that make you sound brilliant while saying essentially nothing.

Tim Urban's TED talk on why people procrastinate, covering YouTube binges and Wikipedia rabbit holes. It ends with the life-calendar idea as a nudge to act before time runs out.

Eduardo Briceno gives a TEDx talk on mindset, contrasting fixed and growth views of ability. He argues that believing abilities can be developed encourages challenge, deliberate practice and grit.

A short overview of Tabs Outliner, a Chrome extension that shows browser tabs and windows as a nestable tree. It demonstrates organizing, saving and restoring tabs.

The original music video for Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen, a spoken-word piece built on Mary Schmich's 1997 column of life advice, produced by Baz Luhrmann.

Zack Freedman gives advice on why makers fail to finish projects, including scrapping bad ideas, showing work publicly and writing a plan that keeps projects fun. It is aimed at hardware DIY but generalizes.

A 12-minute beginner lesson from Nick Milo's Linking Your Thinking series introducing the Obsidian note-taking app and the first steps to start using it.

A short video of David Foster Wallace's 'This Is Water' commencement speech about awareness and choosing how to think. It argues that the most obvious realities are the hardest to see, using the fish-in-water parable.

Admiral William McRaven's 2014 University of Texas commencement address, built around lessons from Navy SEAL training. It famously opens with the case for making your bed every morning.

Thai farmer Jon Jandai talks about leaving Bangkok to farm and build his own house, arguing that food, shelter, clothing and medicine are easy to provide and that modern life is made needlessly complicated. He founded the Pun Pun Center for Self-reliance.

BJ Fogg of Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab argues that lasting change comes from tiny habits, such as flossing one tooth or doing one pushup, anchored to things you already do.

A Harvard Business Review video with tactics for getting better at small talk and enjoying it, such as setting goals, allowing pauses, and starting and ending conversations.

Stephen Duneier describes a decision-making approach that took him from struggling with simple tasks to achieving ambitious goals. The talk centers on breaking goals into small marginal adjustments.

A motivational compilation of Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2018 speech, delivered as inspiration about work and purpose.

A five-minute CBC Radio WireTap farewell video in which people of all ages offer words of wisdom to younger people. The advice is short and funny, and keeps coming back to the point that nobody really knows what they are doing.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Web 2.0 Expo keynote on building a personal brand in social media. He urges keeping a day job while building something on the side, with passion and persistence, in a loud and profane style.

A 1970 demonstration of W. Timothy Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, teaching a complete beginner to play tennis in about ten minutes. He chats with her, feeds balls and gives positive feedback instead of instruction.

Clayton Christensen's TEDx talk applying business theory to personal life. He argues that career success is not the right measure of a life and urges attention to relationships and values.

An RSA Animate illustrating a lecture by psychologist Philip Zimbardo on how people's perspectives on time (past, present, future) shape work, health and well-being.

Julia Galef introduces the soldier versus scout metaphor for two approaches to thinking, using the Dreyfus Affair as the illustration. She argues the scout mindset leads to better judgment.

A five-minute clip from Donald Knuth's Web of Stories interviews in which he gives advice to young people, including being wary when too many people adopt an idea.

A five-minute SuperMemo demo of incremental reading: importing a Wikipedia article on nutrition, extracting passages, making cloze deletions and finishing the item. It lists the keyboard shortcuts used.

Alain de Botton gives a TED talk questioning how we define success and failure. He argues that snobbery and the assumption that outcomes are fully earned make career anxiety worse.

Adam Grant's TED talk on the habits of original thinkers, including procrastination and embracing failure. He argues the greatest originals fail the most because they try the most.

Harvard professor Arthur Brooks explains why boredom is useful rather than something to avoid. He describes how a wandering mind engages the brain's default mode network, which supports creativity and curiosity, and suggests it may protect against depression.

A Langfocus video examining why Portuguese, especially European Portuguese, sounds like Russian or Polish. It compares shared sounds such as vowel reduction and palatalization.

Demis Hassabis of DeepMind speaks at Google Zeitgeist, saying human-level AI is decades away but the debate should start now. He covers DeepMind's focus on game-playing agents.

A SIGGRAPH 2013 demo from Douglas Lanman and NVIDIA of near-eye light field displays, which allow much thinner head-mounted displays that still show accurate focus and depth cues.

A short excerpt from Dr Russell Barkley's 2012 Burnett Lecture on ADHD, focused on treatment. He argues ADHD is a disorder of executive function and self-regulation, and that environments should be designed to compensate.