I’ve often heard the titular expression in conversations about professional success. Uttered with a sneer, it seems to point at the unfairness of life and the hopelessness of the masses of people without good connections. It’s also an expression that is mostly true. Talent and effort matter, of course, but the gears of the machine […]
Two Types of Growth
Anything you try to improve will have a growth curve. Imagine you ran everyday and you tracked your speed to finish a 5-mile course. Smoothing out the noise, over enough time you’d probably get a graph like this: Here, improvement works on a logarithmic scale. As you get better, it gets harder and harder to […]
Rethinking “Learn it Once”
When I wrote Learn More, Study Less in 2008, one of the big pieces of advice was to “learn it once”. The main idea being that, while review is still necessary, you shouldn’t procrastinate on what you’re learning—if you don’t understand something, the pre-exam cram session isn’t the time to learn it. I stand by […]
What I Would Change About the MIT Challenge
After a year spent learning MIT’s computer science program independently, I’ve gotten a number of emails from people who want to do the same thing. People who want a computer science education but don’t want to wait four years and pay thousands of dollars to get it. I’m very happy with how I conducted the […]
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.