I recently had an email exchange with a reader who, in his words, claimed to struggle with a lack of commitment.  He wanted to study machine learning, but he couldn’t get past the first few modules of the course he’s taking. After a few emails back and forth, however, I discovered the reason he “wasn’t able to commit” was simply that his full-time job and family responsibilities kept getting in the way. I don’t think this reader’s problem was a lack of commitment.  When genuinely more important things interfere with side projects, procrastinating on the side project is the correct th ..read more

Human reason is a puzzling ability. As a species, we’ve invented logic, mathematics, science and philosophy. Yet we suffer from a list of cognitive biases so long that an entire Wikipedia page is devoted to categorizing them. So which is it: are we excellent at reasoning or incurably irrational? Psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird has spent his career working out the answer. His theory of mental models explains how we have the ability to reason correctly—and also why we frequently fail to do so. I recently read Johnson-Laird’s nearly 600-page book, How We Reason. The book weighs in on an impress ..read more

When it comes to language learning, grammar gets all the attention. Most theories about second language acquisition focus primarily on how we acquire syntax—the way we put words together to form sentences. Vocabulary, in contrast, has historically been outside of the spotlight. This is unfortunate. Research has shown that your vocabulary has the greatest effect on comprehension.1 A major difficulty students have in learning a new language is the sheer volume of new words. Given its importance, I was pleased to encounter Stuart Webb and Paul Nation’s How Vocabulary is Learned, a research-based ..read more

The most popular piece of studying advice I’ve ever come up with was the Feynman Technique. While the technique itself is only loosely based on Richard Feynman’s practices, the idea of self-explanations took off and became a studying meme that has since gone far beyond my own audience. The basic idea for the technique is simple: Pick an idea you don’t understand very well. On a blank sheet of paper, write an explanation for the idea as if you are teaching it to someone else. Whenever you get stuck, go back to the textbook to fill in the gaps in your understanding. This technique was a stap ..read more

My new book, Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery, is now available for preorder. This book means a lot to me. It’s easily the longest and hardest I’ve ever worked on any project in my life. From start to finish, the project took over four years, involving hundreds of books, several hundred scientific papers and countless conversations with leading experts to assemble. The book digs deep into the fascinating science of learning. I cover the fundamental principles researchers have uncovered that explain how learning works, condensed into twelve memorable maxims you can use to guide yo ..read more

Studying for school can be hard, but the process is pretty straightforward: Read all the material and attend all the lectures. Practice in ways that mirror what will be on the final exam. Use feedback to figure out what you need to fix. Outside of school, though, this strategy breaks down. It’s impossible even to be aware of all the books that might be useful for any given subject, never mind actually reading them all.  In an infinite library, choosing what material to learn dwarfs even the largest difference in studying efficiency. How to Choose What to Learn Next Learning in an infin ..read more

What if being productive doesn’t mean feeling productive? A paradox of productivity is that the things that feel productive—working incessantly, checking off lots of tasks, feeling strained and drained—are often not what produces important accomplishments; in fact, these things can get in the way.  Recently, two of my friends have written books which argue versions of this thesis. The first is Ali Abdaal’s Feel Good Productivity. Ali’s central idea is that we’re at our most productive when we’re happy. In the moment, grinding ourselves into exhaustion may seem like a necessary trade-off ..read more

A single habit has improved the quality of my book reading more than anything else: reading rebuttals. To explain, let me first give some context. I’ve long enjoyed reading big-idea books in science, business or self-improvement. These books range from mega-bestsellers (The Tipping Point; Guns, Germs and Steel) to the relatively obscure (The Enigma of Reason; How Asia Works).  In most cases, I don’t have deep expertise in the topic I’m reading about. The research literature the authors cite is unfamiliar to me. I don’t know whether the proposed idea is a near-consensus opinion or some qui ..read more

Burnout is miserable. You feel exhausted, but you still need to keep showing up to the job, day after day. Whatever fire you had for your work has now fizzled out—making you wonder whether you should quit and start over. Why does burnout happen, and how can we avoid it? Christina Maslach is one of the world’s leading experts on burnout. In the 1980s, Maslach and her colleagues developed one of the first psychological assessments for burnout. In the subsequent four decades, she has built a career investigating the causes of burnout. Burnout is More than Just Being Tired Maslach’s research finds ..read more

Recently, I wrote a defense of psychologist John Carroll’s claim that what separated stronger and weaker students wasn’t a fundamental difference in learning potential, but a difference in learning rate. Some people learn faster and others more slowly, but provided the right environment, essentially anyone can learn anything. In arguing that, I primarily wanted to dispute the common belief that talent sets hard limits on the skill and knowledge you can eventually develop. Not everyone could become a doctor, physicist or artist, the reasoning goes, because some people will hit a limit on how mu ..read more