To Learn, Retrieve
Mike Ebersold is a neurosurgeon. In neurosurgery and indeed life there is an essential kind of learning that only comes from reflection on personal experience. In the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, the …
Learning
Vincent van Gogh on Why Never Learning How to Paint Helped
In a letter to his brother Theo, dated September 1882, found in Ever Yours: The Essential Letters, Vincent van Gogh describes the advantages of never learning to paint. While making it I said to myself: let me not leave before there’s …
Albert Einstein on Education and the Secret to Learning
In 1915 Einstein, who was then 36, was living in wartime Berlin with his cousin Elsa, who would eventually become his second wife. His two sons, Hans Albert Einstein and Eduard “Tete” Einstein were with his estranged wife Mileva in neutral …
Elon Musk on How To Build Knowledge
Elon Musk recently did an AMA on reddit. Here are three question-and-response pairs that I enjoyed, including how to build knowledge. He knows how to say I don’t know. Previously, you’ve stated that you estimate a 50% …
Richard Feynman: The Difference Between Knowing the Name of Something and Knowing Something
Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was no ordinary genius. He believed that “the world is much more interesting than any one discipline.” His explanations — on why questions, why trains stay on the tracks as they go around a curve, how we look for …
The Art of Winning An Argument
We spend a lot of our lives trying to convince or persuade others to our point of view. This is one of the reasons that Daniel Pink says that we’re all in sales: Some of you, no doubt, are selling in the literal sense— convincing …
Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance
“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.” — Confucius *** It’s been a while since I covered an …
A Few General Principles Associated With Wise Behavior
Paul Baltes once described wisdom as “a topic at the interface between several disciplines: philosophy, sociology, theology, psychology, political science, and literature, to name a few.” Farnam Street aims to be at the …
The Impoverishment of Attention
“While the link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time, it ripples through almost everything we seek to accomplish.” *** Focus matters enormously for success in life and yet we seem to give it little …
Rethinking the Value of a Business Major
Melissa Korn reporting in the Wall Street Journal: “The biggest complaint,” writes Korn is that “undergraduate degrees focus too much on the nuts and bolts of finance and accounting and don’t develop enough critical thinking and …
Arguments Are For Learning, Not Winning
Despite his best efforts and long hours, Nobel-Prize winning physicist and professor Carl Wieman grew frustrated by his inability to teach and his students’ failure to learn. When I first taught physics as a young assistant professor, …
Kathryn Schulz on why Knowledge Collapses as often as it Accretes
Kathryn Schulz comments on the fantasy that knowledge is static in This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking. Because so many scientific theories from bygone eras have turned out to be wrong, we must …
The Seductive Path of Good Enough
The ability to learn new skills is the entry ticket for being a knowledge worker. If you can’t learn and adapt, you fall flat on your face. But not all of us learn at the same pace, and not all of us reach the same level of mastery. …
Charlie Munger: How I Would Teach Business School
Everyone has an opinion on what to teach at business school. However, few are as qualified as the legendary Charlie Munger, the billionaire business partner of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. When ruminating on how to teach business …
Value Process Before Results
More insight from The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance: The issue is fundamental to the pursuit of excellence in all fields. If a young basketball player is taught that winning is the only thing that winners do, then …
Josh Waitzkin on Mastering the Fundamentals
Some excerpts from Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance. The best way to launch into the learning process is by breaking down what you are learning into its fundamental building blocks. …
The Art of Learning
Josh Waitzkin has mastered the game of Chess — winning his first National Championship at the age of nine — and the physical challenge of martial arts, becoming a World Champion of Tai Chi Chuan. One thing Josh is good at is learning to …
Stretching yourself to learn new things
Carol Dweck, Daniel Coyle, and Noel Tichy all point out that you need to stretch to learn new things. First, this from Carol Dweck … My colleagues and I have conducted interventions with adolescents in which they learn that their …
A Simple Tool to Help You Learn Better
Learning something new shouldn’t be easy. If it feels effortless, you’re probably not actually learning anything. In order to get better, you have to reach. It needs to be a little bit difficult. From The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for …
Why Can’t Someone Be Taught Until They’re Ready To Learn?
Clay Christensen is best known as the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. He’s also the author of a new book, How Will You Measure Your Life?, which has some wonderful insights (see excerpts here and here). The founder of …
An Algorithm for Solving Problems
“He (Richard Feynman) was always searching for patterns, for connections, for a new way of looking at something, but I suspect his motivation was not so much to understand the world as it was to find new ideas to explain. The act of …
Ten Commandments For Living From Philosopher Bertrand Russell
Philosopher Bertrand Russell: The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows: 1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything. 2. Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing …
The Learning Paradox: Why Struggling to Learn is a Good Thing
The more you struggle to master new information, the better you’ll understand and apply it later. Annie Murphy Paul explores in Time: The learning paradox is at the heart of “productive failure,” a phenomenon identified by Manu Kapur, …
Feynman Technique: The Ultimate Guide to Learning Anything Faster
The Feynman Technique is the most effective method to unlock your potential, develop deep understanding, and quickly learn any subject. Richard Feynman was not only a Nobel laureate in Physics but also a master of demystifying complex …