This document discusses improvements to the Press-Schechter theory for modeling the abundances and clustering of dark matter halos. It proposes that modeling halo collapse as requiring the density to "step up" above a critical density threshold at progressively larger spatial scales provides a better approximation than assuming fully correlated or uncorrelated densities. This "stepping up" approach requires only 2-point statistics and can be applied to non-Gaussian fields. The document also suggests that modeling the distribution of density slopes at peak positions provides a way to match halo counts through an Excursion Set Peaks model.