Most career-advice today deals with matching—trying to pair people’s aptitudes and passions with specific jobs. So, the advice goes, if you’re friendly, maybe you should go in sales. Good at math? Consider engineering or science. The matching paradigm here strikes me as too optimistically egalitarian. It somehow assumes that all jobs are equally desirable, but […]
Why Learn Math?
Math often has a bad reputation. Learn my views about why learning math might be beneficial in the real world.
First Lessons in Trying to Finish 4 Years of MIT in 12 Months
It’s been exactly one month since I started working on my goal to learn MIT’s computer science program at 4x the pace, without taking classes. In that time, I’ve written the final exams for 4 of the 33 classes I’ll need to take over the next year. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about […]
Good Life Philosophies Aren’t Simple
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 […]
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.