Acing exams isn’t the only goal of learning. Life is full of opportunities for learning things well that will never have a final test. Learning another language is a goal many people have. It’s also one that many people stumble on. They get stuck, give up and maybe even convince themselves they don’t have the […]
Five Scientific Steps to Ace Your Next Exam
Below, I’d like to outline a simple strategy you can use to ace any exam you might have coming up. Although the specific strategy is my own, the approach is based on cognitive science. In particular, I’m going to look at five key ideas from cognitive science that are easy to miss, but extremely important […]
How to Know When to Give Up
There are plenty of great stories of persistence. J.K. Rowling living on welfare, while writing Harry Potter. Thomas Edison and his team, attempting thousands of different materials, before eventually settling on tungsten filaments for the lightbulbs that created an industrial empire. Albert Einstein, failing to find work in physics, dreaming up his revolutionary ideas for […]
The Real Way to Improve Your Reading Speed
I’ve written before about how I first got interested in speed reading. I had read a book teaching it, and noticed it helped me read almost twice as fast. A few years after, however, I mostly stopped using the technique I had learned and went back to the normal approach to reading. A few years […]
I'm a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, podcast host, computer programmer and an avid reader. Since 2006, I've published weekly essays on this website to help people like you learn and think better. My work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, TEDx, Pocket, Business Insider and more. I don't promise I have all the answers, just a place to start.