What this is
This is a tool, a guide, a tutorial, and an information repository. I refer to this guide with many different words. Sometimes I’ll call it a book, other times a guide, a tutorial, a document, a checklist, and even a text.
The purpose of this guide is to help people accomplish their goals. The book does this through two main methods:
- By providing advice and information and
- By providing step-by-step instructions and tutorials
All aspects of this guide are derived from scientific literature. Data, facts, and experiments are what make up this book. At the time of writing, everything in this book is as close to empirical fact as it can possibly be.
Depending on the success of this book, I may continue to update it with new information whenever useful or contradicting scientific research is published. If I choose to do so, I’ll be sure to timestamp any updates, send out an email notification of the updates, and explain the changes.
This book is currently, only published to efficienado.com which is a website dedicated to publishing information that teaches people how to be more efficient in their life and work. This guide is fitting because it teaches people the most efficient way to achieve their goals. Because a major component of goal attainment is related to mindset and productivity, much of this book contains general life and productivity advice. That information may be very useful to you even if you are currently not interested in seriously pursuing a goal.
If you wish to sign up for email notifications, you can do so at efficienado.com.
All rights reserved. Please don’t steal this content. This has taken me a lot of time and energy to make.
Why you should read this
You should read this book if:
- You wish to achieve a goal as efficiently and quickly as possible with the least amount of effort
- You are serious about achieving a goal
- You have tried previously to achieve a goal and failed
- You wish to learn various facets of productivity, habits, and learning
- You wish to learn become more efficient in the various pursuits of life
Why you should trust this
You’re reading this because you have goals and you want to learn how to best accomplish those goals. Awesome, you’ve taken an incredible step in the right direction. I too have many goals I’ve been pursuing my whole life and which I dedicated myself to. However, I am also a person who’s obsessed with processes, systems, and most importantly, efficiency. One day, I decided to find the most efficient way to go about achieving my goals and desires.
However, as someone with a Business Degree and years of experience reading texts and articles from the business world, I’ve come to learn that the vast majority of such texts are mostly conjecture and opinion. Almost all such texts suffer from the outcome bias, and have very little empirical evidence to support their claims. That is one of the reasons why I am writing this document: because I’ve found all existing texts currently available on this subject to be insufficiently researched and supported. When it comes to my decisions, I want nothing but the truth to support them. I don’t care what a middle-aged business professional has to say on the subject of goal attainment, I only care what the science has to say.
In order to make this document, I’ve spent many weeks reading and aggregating the information used in this guide. On top of this, I’ve spent many years reading scientific articles of this nature and have built up a general knowledge on these topics. But, don’t worry. While writing this book, I’ve gone back and reread all such journals and have made sure to verify each claim I make with a citation. Almost all of the information and advice in this document is taken from scientific articles and empirical data. This document is as close to proven fact as I could reasonably get. Perhaps new studies in the future will disprove some information in this document; however, this is what we currently have, so it is wise to follow it. As stated, I plan to update this document as more information is released or brought to my attention.
My Contribution
- I found information,
- I sorted and organized that information,
- I rewrote that information,
- I created actionable takeaways from that information,
- and I provided real-life uses of that information
Many of the scientific articles I read for this guide do not consist of actionable takeaways. Many scientific articles will simply report on their experiments and their findings. For example, I discuss how being happy can help you focus on a task or how to learn more efficiently. And while this is true and supported by the scientific literature, the literature I cite does not directly say that. The literature I cite says this:
“These results demonstrate that, like reward, positive affect and negative affect are not dedicated to a particular broadened or narrowed attentional scope but rather provide embodied information about the value of currently accessible attentional orientations.”
My contribution is reading hundreds of pages of text similar to that, finding the information in it that can benefit us, connecting that information to other similar facts, and then simplifying the language and concepts. The end product is a verifiable yet easily digestible book that will finally help you achieve your goals.
The layout of this document was entirely designed by me and not dictated by any scientific study or empirical data. After sifting through all the information, I organized similar advice into categories. I then proceeded to sort the categories in a logical manner to give the book a healthy flow. Since this aspect of this document was decided by my opinion and not scientific knowledge, I would appreciate any and all feedback. I am open to the idea of restructuring this document depending on your feedback, and the associated rationales, that I receive.
Final Notes to keep in mind
Not every step in this document will be beneficial to you. Humans are all very different and unique; not everything that motivates others will necessarily motivate you or vise versa. The conclusions from the studies and experiments which inform this document are averages. Each line of advice in this document has been shown to help more people than not. If a piece of advice proves to not be useful to you, it’s okay. Simply ignore it and move onto the next step. In fact, it is highly unlikely that every step in this book will be of use to you. Also, many of the steps in this document may only make minor or subliminal differences. This means that you may not notice any changes after following this guide. This is normal and should be expected. Change is slow and gradual, and us humans are quite bad at noticing such things. Try not to worry about it and put your faith in the thousands of scientists who have put hundreds of thousands of hours into their research and experiments. They (and I) have done the work, now all you must do is read with an open mind.