I asked my friend Benny Lewis, who is fluent in nearly a dozen languages, what he thought enabled him to gain fluency so quickly, often in as little as three months. He claimed that most of it came down to attitude—when he is learning, he stops speaking English, fully devoting himself to the language he […]
How Much Do Genes Matter?
A reader emailed me after I wrote about learning calculus in five days: “I question that you’re just a person of average intelligence who knows how to learn faster. I can’t imagine ever finishing an MIT class in 5 days.” My response to him was that, of course, I was probably smarter than average. If […]
Cynicism is Easy, Optimism Takes Guts
Just about every way you can measure, the world is a better place today than it was before. Life expectancy is up, poverty down, even most environmental indicators aside from greenhouse gases have improved. Yet this is never the story. The story is always how the world, despite the nearly consistent progress over the last […]
The Danger of “-isms”
One of my bigger regrets is publicly declaring myself an atheist. Not because I’ve made a recent conversion to faith—I’m still confident in my original opinion. Rather, because I believe “-isms” are dangerous, whether it is theism, atheism, vegetarianism, Buddhism or any other philosophy. When a belief becomes an “-ism” it generally becomes a part […]