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. Without learning, life is stale. Below are seven […]
The 85% Rule for Learning
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 where learning progresses most quickly. […]
The 10 Best Books on Productivity
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 productivity. Burnout, stress and exhaustion, […]
You Should Pay for Tutors
One-on-one tutoring is one of the most effective ways to learn anything. In his famous paper on the “2 sigma problem” in educational research, Benjamin Bloom called for a search for group teaching interventions that approximated the efficacy of tutoring: However, the most striking of the findings is that under the best learning conditions we […]