We present a near-optimal reduction from approximately counting the cardinality of a discrete set to approximately sampling elements of the set. An important application of our work is to approximating the partition function $Z$ of a discrete system, such as the Ising model, matchings or colorings of a graph. The typical approach to estimating the partition function $Z(β^*)$ at some desired inverse temperature $β^*$ is to define a sequence, which we call a {\em cooling schedule}, $β_0=0<β_1<...<β_\ell=β^*$ where Z(0) is trivial to compute and the ratios $Z(β_{i+1})/Z(β_i)$ are easy to estimate by sampling from the distribution corresponding to $Z(β_i)$. Previous approaches required a cooling schedule of length $O^*(\ln{A})$ where $A=Z(0)$, thereby ensuring that each ratio $Z(β_{i+1})/Z(β_i)$ is bounded. We present a cooling schedule of length $\ell=O^*(\sqrt{\ln{A}})$. For well-studied problems such as estimating the partition function of the Ising model, or approximating the number of colorings or matchings of a graph, our cooling schedule is of length $O^*(\sqrt{n})$, which implies an overall savings of $O^*(n)$ in the running time of the approximate counting algorithm (since roughly $\ell$ samples are needed to estimate each ratio).