Everyone wants advanced knowledge. But it’s typically the basics that matter most. Most math is arithmetic, not algebra. Running a business is largely a matter of keeping revenues above costs. Good writing is the product of clear ideas and clean sentences. I knew someone who was enrolled in a college…

Here are 10 interesting books I’ve been reading recently! 1. Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

Time for learning can feel like a luxury. After a long day, it often feels like there isn’t energy for anything other than watching television and falling asleep. Who has time to learn philosophy, French, or painting? Yet our peak experiences come when we expand our thinking. …

Learning, it seems, is optimized for both humans and machines when we succeed around 85% of the time. From a recent paper by Wilson, Shenhav, Straccia and Cohen: In many situations we find that there is a sweet spot in which training is neither too easy nor too hard, and…

Productivity forms the backbone of any self-improvement effort. If you can’t organize your time, accomplish your tasks and complete your projects, what chance do you have to reach any other goal you’ve set for yourself? At the same time, few topics are so frequently misunderstood. Overwork is often equated with…

How often have you read a book, taken a course or listened to a podcast and . . . promptly forgotten everything the minute you switch your attention to something else? Being able to retain what you learn is a central difficulty in our era of information abundance. …

If I made you take the final exam for a class you studied a decade ago, would you pass? The unfortunate truth is that, except for knowledge we actively use in daily life, much of what we learn is beyond our powers of recall. …

What’s the one habit you can build from the comfort of your bed that costs little, never gets boring, and makes you wealthier, smarter, happier and a better person? It is reading books. Despite most of us wanting to read more, we often default to watching TV shows and browsing…

Suppose you’re learning a skill like algebra, programming or drawing. Consider two different strategies for studying: Examples first. Before you try anything on your own, study examples of how other people solve similar problems. Problems first. Before looking at any examples, try to solve the problem independently. …