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I Analyzed 13 TED Talks on Improving Your Memory— Here’s the Quintessence

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How you can make the most out of your brain.

Created by the author on Canva.

Meta-learning is one of the most powerful tools you can acquire.

No life skill can earn you greater dividends than learning effectively — you’ll need less time and energy to master any topic you want.

I spent the last years exploring the intersections between neuroscience, brain research, and cognitive psychology. I’ve shared my book recommendations on learning how to learn and how-to guides for applying the strategies to writing, reading, online courses, EdTech software and knowledge management.

In the last week, I watched and summarized 13 TED talks on memory, brain enhancement, and learning how to learn. The most insightful made it into this article.

By reading, you will learn how to best use your brain to get the result you want. You can read the article in one go or jump to the sections that are most interesting for you.

Here are the best ones I watched and the key messages so you can apply them to your life.

You’ll understand how neuroplasticity works (1), how you can actually change your brain (2), and acquire skills rapidly (3). You will then learn how specific strategies can improve (4) and increase (5) your memory function (4) and techniques to triple your memory (6) so you can remember everything you want with ease (7).

Table of Contents
1) After Reading This Your Brain Will Not Be the Same
2) Learn How to Learn From Somebody Who Has Transformed Her Brain
3) How to Learn Anything Fast in 20 Hours (Rapid Skill Akquisition)
4) Techniques to Improve Your Memory Function
5) The Most Transformative Thing to Improve Brain Function
6) Here’s How You Can Triple Your Memory
7) Supercharge Your Learning Practice With This Technique

1) After Reading This Your Brain Will Not Be the Same

How does your brain change throughout life based on what you think, do, and experience?

In her talk, brain researcher and professor Lara Boyds explains what science currently knows about neuroplasticity. In essence, your brain can change in three ways.

Change 1 — Increase chemical signalling

Your brain works by sending chemicals signals from cell to cell, so-called neurons. This transfer triggers actions and reactions. To support learning your brain can increase the concentration of these signals between your neurons. Chemical signalling is related to your short-term memory.

Change 2 — Alter the physical structure

During learning, the connections between neurons change. In the first change, your brain’s structure stays the same. Here, your brain’s physical structure changes — which takes more time. That’s why altering the physical structure influences your long-term memory.

For example, research shows that London taxi cab drivers who actually have to memorize a map of London to get their taxicab license have larger brain regions devoted to spatial or mapping memories.

Change 3 — Alter brain function

This one is crucial (and will also be mentioned in the following talks). When you use a brain region, it becomes more and more accessible. Whenever you access a specific memory, it becomes easier and easier to use again.

But Boyd’s talk doesn’t stop here. She further explores what limits or facilitates neuroplasticity. She researches how people can recover from brain damages such as a stroke and developed therapies that prime or prepare the brain to learn — including simulation, exercise and robotics.

Her research is also helpful for healthy brains — here are the two most important lessons:

The primary driver of change in your brain is your behaviour.

Repeated practice is the most effective way to reprogram your mind.

In line with other research on a concept called the desired difficulty, her research has shown that increased struggle during practice leads to both more learning and greater structural change in the brain.

This is counterintuitive yet super powerful, so let me rephrase it: Learning works best when it feels hard. You want to struggle while learning.

The opposite the “fluency illusion” while, e.g. rereading material, can give you a false illusion of competence. A helpful antidote is self-testing.

There is no one size fits all approach to learning.

The 10,000-hour rule is overly simplified. No single intervention is going to work for all of us in the same way. Lara Boyd makes a call for personalized learning.

She then continues with something I don’t agree with: “The uniqueness of your brain will affect you both as a learner and also as a teacher. And now this idea helps us to understand why some children can thrive in traditional education settings and others don’t.”

It’s not your brain’s uniqueness that determines whether you thrive or barely survive in traditional education settings.

She neglects socio-economical factors such as emotional support or a family’s income level. Moreover, there are actually evidence-based techniques that seem to work for almost all of our brains, see (2), (5), and (7).

The most powerful lesson to remember from her talk is the following: You’re never too old to stop learning. Because of neuroplasticity, you can build the brain you want.

2) Learn How to Learn From Somebody Who Has Transformed Her Brain

It hadn’t always been clear that Barbara Oakley would become a professor of engineering. She fell off the “math bandwagon” early on and flunked her way through elementary, middle, and high school math and science.

At age 26, during her military job, calculus and physics looked like hieroglyphics to her. But she didn’t settle with the status quo. She asked herself:

“What if I could get those ideas? What if I could learn that weird math language?”

So she set on a journey to change her brain — a journey that would ultimately influence many other learners as well.

Dr Oakley reached out to top neuroscience and cognitive psychology professors around the world. She asked them:

“How did you learn? And how do you teach, so others could learn?”

One of the key answers she got was the distinction between two brain modes: the focused and the diffused mode.

For optimal learning, you need the focused and the diffused mode.

In focused mode, you think based on prior knowledge and rely on often used neural connections associated with problem-solving on familiar tasks.

The diffused mode, on the other hand, feels like daydreaming and enables unpredictable, new neural connections.

When you let your mind wander without actively thinking about the problem, you likely come up with a solution you hadn’t thought about. It’s the state where creativity flows freely.

To learn, you need both.

Many people optimize their days for focused mode thinking — through deep work, flow states, and other work sessions. Learning can happen during focused attention.

But the diffused mode is equally important. Diffused thinking only occurs when our minds can wander, for example, during a shower or while going for a walk. While this feels like taking a brain break, our mind continues to work for us.

A famous example for this is Dali’s and Edison’s napping time, as Dr Oakley shares in her TED talk. To access their diffused thinking mode, they looked at a problem and took a nap to come up with a solution.

To integrate the two thinking modes into your daily schedule (and to beat procrastination), you can use the Pomodoro technique — focusing for 25 minutes and giving yourself a pleasurable 5-minute brain break afterwards.

How to learn most effectively

Lastly, she gives a couple of applicable knowledge nuggets on how to learn most effectively.

  1. Exercise can increase your ability to both learn and to remember (also see 5).
  2. Testing yourself, e.g. through flashcards, until the solution flows like a song from your mind.
  3. Instead of rereading and highlighting, recall something from your memory. Look at a page, look away, and see what you can remember from the top of your mind.
  4. Understanding is not enough to build mastery of new material. Instead, you want to combine it with practice and repetition in different circumstances.

Now let’s look at a concrete example of how you can acquire new skills rapidly.

3) How to Learn Anything Fast in 20 Hours

What if you’d only need 45 minutes a day for a month to get decently good at skills such as language learning, coding, or arts?

Out of necessity (his newborn child minimized his free time), Josh Kaufman explored how to learn new things really fast. As a result, he developed the most efficient practice method.

The 4-step process to learn any skill fast

The 10,000-hour rule is a myth — instead, there are four steps neccessary for rapid skill acquisition:

  1. Deconstruct a skill by breaking it down into smaller pieces. The more you can break it apart, the better you can learn. For example, learning to write online becomes idea-collection, headline practice, introduction writing, editing, and distribution.
  2. Learn just enough to self-correct. Books, courses, etc. are often a way to procrastinate on the practice itself. Use resources to learn enough to know when you make a mistake. Then practice.
  3. Remove any distractions that keep you from practising. This aligns with what many smart people such as Clear or Thaler preach. Self-control and self-discipline depend much more on your environment than on your willpower. Ban your phone and TV from your practice.
  4. Really practice for the full 20 hours. You have to do the work and overcome initial frustration barriers. The greatest barrier to learning something is emotional, not intellectual. So, push through the initial “feeling stupid” phase and learn for 20 hours before your stop.

4) Techniques to Improve Your Memory Function

Memory works in three stages: encoding, consolidation, and retrieval.

Nancy Chiaravalotti’s research focuses on the first part — remembering new information such as names of people you meet or items from your to-do list.

To enhance how you encode two very effective techniques:

Use imagery

Attach an image or picture to visualize the information. For example, if you want to remember the word ‘house’, picture your house. Thereby, you encode new information in two ways (verbal and visual), which increases brain activity.

A very effective way to remember things better is to combine unrelated ideas into a single image. The best image for any given word, is the one you associate with the strongest memory.

For example, “mum at the beach” for you would look completely different from me (because your picture would be your mum and a beach would be the most vivid beach you can bring to your mind).

Make it even more robust through context

What comes before or after a word by providing more semantic meaning. For example, instead of just a house, you can say the old house on the hill. Invent a mini-story around new information.

The best way is to combine both techniques. Chiaravalloti tested this with people who have memory injuries and found significant improvements after ten sessions.

Increased brain function through imagery and context practice. Source: Nancy Chiaravalotti.

You are able to change your brain. Start to visualize things and add a story to better remember what you want to learn.

5) The Most Transformative Thing to Improve Brain Function

Neuroscientist Dr Wendy Suzuki used to sit, read, and study for hours. She published well-respected articles and was on her way to becoming a renowned memory researcher.

Still, she felt something was off. It wasn’t until she started regular exercise that she felt better.

“After every sweat-inducing workout that I tried, I had this great mood boost and this great energy boost. And that’s what kept me going back to the gym,” she says in her TED talk. “I was able to focus and maintain my attention for longer than I had before. “

Because of the benefits she felt, Dr Suzuki did something unusual for researchers. She changed her research field — from memory pioneer to exercise explorer.

Exercise changes your brain in three main ways

And that’s how she came to the hypothesis that exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do to your brain: “Moving your body has immediate, long-lasting and protective benefits for your brain. And that can last for the rest of your life.”

Immediate attention increase. A single workout will immediately increase your levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline. This, in turn, improves your ability to shift and focus attention for at least two hours following your workout.

Memory enhancement. Long-term exercise changes the hippocampus (critical for your capability to form and absorb new long-term memories). You produce new brain cells that improve your long-term memory.

Protective brain effects. Your brain is like a muscle. The more you’re exercising, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (critical for attention, decision-making, and focus) gets. The two areas will grow and slow down the effects of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer and dementia.

A single researcher’s team discoveries aren’t enough to confirm her hypothesis. But there’s a canon of research that attests to the brain-altering effects of exercise.

Researchers from Harvard have shown that exercise boosts verbal memory, thinking and learning. Plus, moving your body supports your ability to learn a new language by enhancing your ability to remember, recall and understand new vocabulary.​

You don’t need to become a marathon runner to unlock the benefits of exercise. As a rule of thumb, you want to exercise three to four times a week for at least 30 minutes.

6) Here’s How You Can Triple Your Memory

What’s the best way to memorize things?

Ricardo Lieuw On, the founder of remind learning, walks the audience through a memory palace to make them remember the first ten presidents of the United States.

He makes the case why creating bizarre images in a place you know helps you memorize things in order.

Yet, he doesn’t mention how to build a memory palace. Here’s my brief explanation if you want to learn the so-called “method of loci”:

How to develop your personal memory palace

There are five steps you can use to create your personal memory place.

  1. Pick a place. Choose a space you remember vividly, e.g., your childhood home or your workplace. Close your eyes and picture the floor plan. Now take a mental walk inside the location.​
  2. Identify specific features. Remember distinctive features about your space. If you use your childhood bedroom, for example, you can include your bed, shelf, closet, lamp, window, door, and carpet. These features will serve as memory slots.​
  3. Repeat the walk. ​Once you’ve identified a couple of objects, repeat the mental walk three times. Always use the same direction. Visualization can feel tough first, but it’ll become easier with practice. ​​
  4. Fill the spots with things you want to remember. ​Once you’ve established your memory palace, you can imprint it. Say you’re trying to memorize the planets in their distance to earth. All you need to do is take the known object (e.g. your bed), and visually place Mercury on it. You continue with the other planets on your other memory slots.​
  5. Revisit your memory palace from time to time. Repetition strengthens your neural representations. That’s why you want to visit your memory places once in a while. You can build as many places as you like because your brain capacity is unlimited.
How to build a memory palace (Source: WikiHow licensed under CC 2.0).

7) Supercharge Your Learning Practice With This Technique

Brain athletes can memorize a card deck within 12 seconds — TEDx speaker Boris Nikolai Konrad can do it in 30.

Boris also completed two master studies (physics and computer science) in the time of one and holds a PhD in psychology. He is fluent in English and Dutch and speaks decent Mandarin and Spanish.

Yet, he wasn’t born with a better brain than yours.

Building better memory is a skill you can learn.

These people (including Boris’s) don’t have a better memory than you do. Brains of memory athletes do not look different from yours.

In his talk, he shares a manual on how to develop a superbrain.

Just as Lieuw On (6) made his audience memorize 10 presidents, Konrad made his audience remember physics through a visual story.

And on top of these two memory experts, Jonathan Levi explores the same accelerated learning technique in his talk.

A picture is worth more than a thousand words.

In quintessence, all three share the idea that a picture is worth more than a thousand words. Instead of remembering verbal facts, your brain is more likely to remember the information if you picture it (this is also in line with (4)).

Let’s say you want to remember China’s 14 neighbouring countries: Afghanistan, Bhutan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Myanmar, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Vietnam.

Instead of rereading the list, again and again, a much more effective technique is to visualize an image for each of the countries. Here’s his example — but remember that yours can look completely different (as its dependent on your strongest association with a word).

Source: Jonathan Lewi’s TED TALK

In Conclusion

Some themes reoccur in all talks, such as your innate ability to change your brain whenever you want, the power of visualization, and adding context and stories to remember new information better.

Once you get better at the process of learning, you can apply it anywhere to your life — hobbies, jobs, or relationships. In Dr Oakley words:

“Learning how to learn is the most powerful tool you can ever grasp. Don’t follow your passions, but broaden your passions and your life will be enriched beyond measure.”

May you enjoy your learning journey.

My free weekly Learn Letter will give you tools and resources to accelerate your learning. If you’d like to accelerate your online writing, register here.

A Podcast Listening Strategy for Learning

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Three steps to make the most of your podcast time

Source: Canva

Podcasts are an excellent way to acquire new knowledge. Hosts boil hours of research down to digestible content.

Yet, while podcasts are growing into one of the largest knowledge libraries on our planet, many people are not as strategic about their listening practice.

Listening to podcasts doesn’t make you smarter per se — it’s what you pick and do with it that will make all the difference.

The following lines will give you three quick ways to make the most of any value-packed podcast you listen to.

1) Find high quality podcasts

The friction to publishing podcasts is lower than it is for publishing books. You don’t need a publisher. Anyone with a phone and internet connection can become a podcast host.

Hence the quality of podcasts varies, and most podcasts are not worth your time. But some are. Instead of choosing a podcast based on the thumbnail and title, make a short effort to find the best one for you.

You can check out charts in the category “education,” search by keyword and podcast (e.g., best podcasts for language learning), or look at a podcast curation site.

Here are three of my favorite value-packed podcasts for learning:

Huberman Lab
Dr. Andrew Huberman, a tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, discusses science and science-based tools for everyday life.

Philosophize This!
Stephen West shares ideas that shaped our world. It’s for anyone interested in an educational podcast about philosophy where you don’t need to be a graduate-level philosopher to understand it.

NPR: It’s an independent, nonprofit media organization founded on a mission to create a more informed public. NPR has many great podcasts, but my favorites are Radio Ambulante (in Spanish) and TED Radio Hour.

2) Use apps that help you remember more

You won’t remember much from a podcast if you only listen to it. Your brain needs repetition and elaboration to make new knowledge stick.

Unlike books, you can’t highlight audio — or can you?

I listen to my podcasts while biking or walking. Hence, an extremely uncomfortable situation to open a notepad or Roam Research whenever I hear an interesting idea.

But two applications have transformed how I listen to podcasts: Snipd and Airr. Both are audio highlighting tools.

When you hear something you want to remember, you tap a button. In Snipd, this creates a snippet that includes a descriptive title with optimized start- and end-points to capture the context, a summary of your snip, and the full transcript.

Source: Snipd

Airr is very similar to Snipd. The app allows me to tap on my AirPod and pin a conversation so that I can reread it whenever I need it. I no longer need to scan back through an entire episode to find a snippet or thought I can’t quite remember.

I sync Airr with a service called Readwise, which extracts all my audio snippets to Roam and Obsidian.

Source: Airr on the App Store

I haven’t fully tried Snipd yet, but I like Airr (mainly because of the AirPod feature). However, an advantage of Snipd is that it works for Android as well as iOS. Snipd also offers you a direct integration to Obsidian, which makes the monthly Readwise subscription obsolete. You should be able to export markdown with Airr as well, but I haven’t managed to do this.

3) Become a teacher by learning in public

Have you ever read a book only to forget the quintessence three weeks later?

You don’t have a bad memory. Forgetting is natural and actually even essential for learning.

But to make information stick, you’ll want to interrupt this forgetting, ideally, through a meaningful learning practice.

All great books on learning that I have read agree on the effectiveness of teaching newly learned things to others.

In ‘How We Learn’, Benedict Carey writes,

“Many teachers have said that you don’t really know a topic until you have to teach it, until you have to make it clear to someone else.”

The attempt to communicate what you’ve learned to your family, friends or any online audience is a very effective learning technique. Carey again:

“These apparently simple attempts to communicate what you’ve learned, to yourself or others, are not merely a form of self-testing, in the conventional sense, but studying — the high-octane kind, 20 to 30 per cent more powerful than if you continue sitting on your butt, staring at that outline. Better yet, those exercises will dispel the fluency illusion. They’ll expose what you don’t know, where you’re confused, and what you’ve forgotten — and fast.”

Carey is not the only one who recommends teaching what you’ve learned to other people. In ‘A Mind for Numbers’, Dr. Barbara Oakley provides another powerful example:

“The legendary Charles Darwin would do much the same thing. When trying to explain a concept, he imagined someone had just walked into his study. He would put his pen down and try to explain the idea in the simplest terms. That helped him figure out how he would describe the concept in print. Along those lines, the website Reddit.com has a section called ‘Explain Like I’m 5’ where anyone can make a post asking for a simple explanation of a complex topic.”

You don’t have to be an expert on the topic you just listened to on the podcast. Having some knowledge gaps can even benefit your learning practice.

Oakley again:

“You may think you really have to understand something in order to explain it. But observe what happens when you are talking to other people about what you are studying. You’ll be surprised to see how often understanding arises as a consequence of attempts to explain to others and yourself, rather than the explanation arising out of your previous understanding. This is why teachers often say that the first time they ever really understood the material was when they had to teach it.”

So the next time you listen to an episode you want to remember, explain it to your flatmate in a blog post or a short video clip. You will be surprised by how much this practice improves your learning.

My free weekly Learn Letter will give you tools and resources to accelerate your learning. If you’d like to accelerate your online writing, register here.

The Key Idea All Great Books on Learning Have in Common

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And how you can implement the powerful way to learn.

Source: Created by author

No life skill can earn you greater dividends than learning how to learn.

After reading more than 30 books on learning, I noticed a recurring principle.

It’s a clear practice that integrates almost all of the most effective learning strategies:

  • Retrieval practice: recall something from your memory
  • Spaced repetition: repeat the same information across increasing intervals
  • Interleaving: alternate before each practice is complete
  • Elaboration: rephrase new knowledge and connect it with existing insights
  • Reflection: synthesize key lessons taught by experience
  • Self-testing: answer a question or a problem and identify knowledge gaps

The following lines will not only reveal the key idea and how it works but also show you an efficient way to integrate it into your daily life.

The Principle All Great Books on Learning Agree On

I spent countless hours trying to find a process that integrates all of the above aspects into a learning habit. For example, one result was an efficient (yet time-consuming) way to remember everything you want from non-fiction books.

Luckily, there’s a more efficient way: teaching in public.

Here’s why and how it works.

When you teach, you first have to retrieve what you know from your memory.

And the good thing: you don’t need to feel fully knowledgeable about the content before you instruct others. You’ll understand the material by teaching.

Dr Barbara Oakley writes in her book:

“You may think you really have to understand something in order to explain it. But observe what happens when you are talking to other people about what you are studying.

You’ll be surprised to see how often understanding arises as a consequence of attempts to explain to others and yourself, rather than the explanation arising out of your previous understanding.

This is why teachers often say that the first time they ever really understood the material was when they had to teach it.”

Moreover, by teaching, you make new material stick to your memory.

Learning through teaching is efficient because you have to rephrase new knowledge in your own terms and connect it with existing insights — the essence of elaboration, as the authors of ‘Make it Stick’ define it:

“Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.”

Moreover, knowing you’re learning something to explain it to somebody else transforms how you process the material in the first place and includes a second repetition loop.

Jim Kwik, a renowned expert in memory improvement, explains in ‘Limitless’:

“Everything we learn should be learned with the intent to teach someone else. When we know we have to present information to someone else, we pay attention differently than when we learn just for ourselves.

So if we can take that mentality and apply it to everything we want to learn, we can increase our retention and understanding. The thing about learning to teach is we actually get to learn twice. The first time when we learn it ourselves, and the second when we teach it to someone else.

The information gets cemented through their questions and observations, making learning an interactive process instead of a passive activity.”

Effortful learning is far more effective than passive content consumption. And teaching is one of the most active things you can do.

The more work your brain does, the more connections you establish. And as you know, more connections increase the chances of remembering what you learn.

By teaching, you have to recall things from your memory actively. The authors of ‘The New Science of Learning’ state::

“To make good use of your study time, don’t just look over the material or read over the material passively, but actually try to recall the material.

Each time a memory is recalled, both it and its cue are strengthened, and you can access the desired information in your brain faster. Simply reading the material over is much less effective in building a strong memory process.”

Lastly, teaching helps you identify knowledge gaps and review the material strategically.

Award-winning science writer Benedict Carey explains why teaching something to others is so effective:

“These apparently simple attempts to communicate what you’ve learned, to yourself or others, are not merely a form of self-testing, in the conventional sense, but studying — the high-octane kind, 20 to 30 percent more powerful than if you continued sitting on your butt, staring at that outline.

Better yet, those exercises will dispel the fluency illusion. They’ll expose what you don’t know, where you’re confused, and what you’ve forgotten — and fast.”

Now that you know why teaching is so powerful (it naturally includes retrieval, spaced repetition, elaboration, self-testing, and reflection), let’s see how you can put this into practice.

Created by Eva Keiffenheim

The Best Way to Teach and Maximize Your Learning

You can do many things, but many of them are inconvenient. Likely, you don’t have the time or resources to give lectures, host a podcast, or have patient friends who listen to you trying to explain newly learned concepts.

I tested various ways to teach in public before finding the most effective way. For example, I created YouTube videos about cryptocurrencies or recorded Podcast episodes about communication and polyamory.

While I enjoyed the process, it was time-consuming and filled with secondary tasks (video and audio cutting).

Writing in public is the best way to teach what you learned to the entire world. It comes with less friction (you can write anywhere) and minimum time commitment (no video or audio skills required).

Since I’ve started writing in March of 2020, I learned more than in the combined five years of university education.

When you write, you put pressure on your thinking. It forces you to make your thoughts crystal clear. In this process, you learn and understand.

Writing helps you see how seemingly unrelated thoughts connect. That’s why writing is a mind-expanding, often even enlightening experience.

Through writing, you realize whether you truly got the concept or swim in the illusion of knowledge.

“The one who does the work does the learning,” learning scientist Doyle states. And when you write about your newly learned knowledge, you do the work.

“I’ve learned more in the course of writing and researching the thousands of articles to date than in all the years of my formal education combined.”

— Maria Popova, author of The Marginalian

How You Can Create a Consistent Writing Habit

A replicable writing habit is not as simple as having an idea, writing it down, publishing.

New writers often fail to acknowledge the micro-steps that are neccessary to move from idea generation to a well-articulated article.

Here’s what you want to focus on to stay consistent and create your personal learning engine.

1. Start with the right mindset

Write and publish 30 articles before expecting any joy or return on your time investment.

When you start out, writing can feel challenging. Words don’t come easily, and writing might feel slow and painful.

Likely, with every step of your writer’s journey, things become more complicated — you’ll become aware of everything you don’t know yet. But be sure that this is a sign of progress, not of desperation.

Just like any habit, it’s easy to stop after your initial enthusiasm. Answering the following questions early on have kept me going.

  • How does writing online fit into your story?
  • Why is writing online the right thing for you to do right now?
  • What might get in your way and prevent you from completing this course and publishing consistently?
  • How do you prevent this from happening? Can you use the energy from this fear to help you?

2. Set a clear goal and schedule

Again, the first few months of writing are tough. You will struggle to put words on paper, and nobody will be interested in your work because it’s not good enough (yet).

You don’t have external recognition; you don’t have the skills to write fast and good; you don’t have a backlog of content you can recycle; you don’t have a large following waiting for you to publish, which will increase your commitment.

Remember that building a writing habit is not linear but exponential. You will have to practice a lot before your words resonate with readers. In the early days, you will write in the void.

Source: Created by Eva Keiffenheim

What you want is to set up a routine and structure that carries you towards writing your first 100 articles. A couple of questions that can help you:

  • How many articles do you want to publish until the end of this month and year?
  • When and how often will you write? (days, time, duration)
  • What do you need to stop doing so you find the time to write?
  • How will you protect your writing time?

3. Get help and join a tribe of fellow writers

Steven King shared a piece of wisdom in his book on writing: “You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”

I agree. And yet, while you have to do the work yourself, the right tools and tactics can fuel your growth.

That’s why I started the writing online accelerator — a three-week cohort-based course that will help you transform from a dreamer into a doer. You will learn how to create your learning engine and attract a broad audience. You can pre-register for free here.

Writing is one of the rare professions that give you a ticket to lifelong learning by turning you into a teacher. Make sure to make the most of it.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

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How You Can Make the Most of Summary Services Like Blinkist

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While they won’t make you smarter, you can still use them to your advantage.

Source: Canva

Because I read a book a week, people often ask me why I don’t use Blinkist instead.

Blinkist is a book summary service, similar to Shortform and getabstract. You find the key ideas of non-fiction books.

The tempting promise — you will gain more knowledge in less time.

While this is flawed for various reasons (e.g. because brains don’t work like recording devices and you don’t acquire knowledge by reading sentences), book summary services have even more strikes against them:

  • No cross-checking. When you read through summaries, you can’t check the quality of the book’s sources in its appendix. You won’t be able to judge whether books are light on the science and heavy on the anecdotal evidence part.
  • Additional subjective filters. Instead of you, the summary author picks what’s most relevant. You will never know whether you might have found other passages to be way more relevant than Blinkist’s selection.
  • Lack of complexity and context. It’s in the essence of summaries to compromise on depth and meaning. You’ll get the author’s conclusion without understanding their reasoning. Blinkist “eliminates the fluff” — but often, the fluff is what will invite you to deeper reflections and questions.

And while summaries often feel like a pale ghost of the real book, there is still a very valid use case for them. To understand this, let’s quickly recap the following concept.

Adler’s Four Levels of Reading

Mortimer J. Adler, an American philosopher and one of the brightest readers of the 20th century. In ‘How to Read a Book’, he explains the four reading levels.

Before I learned about these levels, precisely level two, I was among the people who’d dive straight into a book. I wouldn’t bother to read the table of contents or the preface. I started to read from front to back, unknowingly wasting a lot of time.

Basic Reader (Level 1)

If you can read and understand words you’ve mastered this level already.

Strategic Reader (Level 2)

Think of this as a quick chat you have with the author to determine whether you should read the entire book, a few chapters, or nothing at all.

Critical Reader (Level 3)

Effortless reading is like writing in the sand, here today and gone tomorrow. Reading a book is not the same as mastering the ideas behind it. Adler suggests you should take notes and answer questions while you read. What is the book about as a whole? What is being said in detail, and how? Is the book true, in whole or in part?

Synoptical Reader (Level 4)

This level is about relating different books on the same topic to master it fully. By deploying syntopical reading, you can compare the author’s arguments, explore research questions and draw a knowledge map.

“With the help of the books read, the syntopical reader is able to construct an analysis of the subject that may not be in any of the books. It is obvious, therefore, that syntopical reading is the most active and effortful kind of reading.“

— Mortimer J. Adler

How Blinkist Can Help You Become a Strategic Reader

Summary services support you in making an informed decision before investing time in reading.

Before I used the software, I set myself a time limit of 20 minutes and completed the following three steps for every time-intense non-fiction book I planned to read:

  • Looking at the cover and skim the preface to get a feeling for the book’s category.
  • Reading the table of contents to identify the most relevant chapters.
  • Identifying the main points by reading a paragraph or a whole page and figuring out if I want to read the book.

Now, this is where Blinkist can help you. Instead of doing the steps yourself, you can quickly browse through a couple of books within the same category.

By reading through the main points, you feel whether the book is worthy of your time.

New books are written and published every minute. Yet, you only have a limited number of books you can read in your life.

Not all books are created equal, and most books aren’t worth your time. But some books do have the power to change your life for the better.

Using summary services as a tool to identify them can help you on your path to health, wealth and wisdom.

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

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Your First Five Steps to Set-Up a Slipbox in Obsidian

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Take smart digital notes with the Zettelkasten approach.

Photo by Daniel Öberg on Unsplash

I recently switched to Obsidian because it beats RoamResearch in terms of speed and data privacy.

Similar to Roam, Obsidian is a note-taking software many people use for knowledge management.

While both tools use markdown and share some functionalities, they look and work differently.

Here are the first five steps I took to set up my slip-box (aka Zettelkasten) in Obsidian.

1) The basic commands you want to know

In your left panel, you can create a new folder and a new note.

For formatting your notes, there are a couple of commands you might want to keep in mind.

For writing italics, utilize the *this* or _this_ command. For bolding the text use a double combination like ** this** or __ this__ .

Hashtags set the size of your heading. Make sure to include a space after the hashtag otherwise you create a tag.

Source: Obsidian Help Desk

The last basic command you need is the [[ ]] for linking. Similar to Roam, Obsidian will create a new note out of an existing note, if you bracket a word or sentence. Yet, you need to click on the bracketed word to actually create the note. You can also use files and links and tags and embed notes in others.

2) Create the templates for different notes

To quickly create the three different Zettelkasten note types, you want to use templates. Here’s a quick recap about the different types of notes in a Zettelkasten:

  • Fleeting Notes: Fleeting notes are ideas that pop into your mind as you go through your day. They can be really short, just like one word. You don’t need to organize them.
  • Literature Notes: You capture literature notes from the content you consume. It’s your bullet-point summary from other people’s ideas. I create these notes for all books, podcasts, articles, or videos I find valuable.
  • Permanent Notes: When you create permanent notes, you think for yourself. In contrast to literature notes, you don’t summarize somebody else’s thoughts. You don’t just copy ideas but develop, remix, and contradict them. You create arguments and discussions. By writing your idea down, you put pressure on your thinking and transform vague thoughts into clear points.

In Obsidian, templates work differently from the ;; command in Roam. But once you set it up it’s quite intuitive.

First, you create a new folder and call it “Templates”. Then, head to “Settings” on the bottom left corner, select “core plugins” and enable the Templates.

Lastly, head back to the settings, scroll to the very bottom, select “Templates” and assign the Template folder location to your newly created page “Templates.”

Next, you can create templates for your literature notes and your permanent notes. Depending on your preference and slipbox structures, yours might look different.

Here’s how I set up mine: Similar to my Roam Zettelkasten, I use an orange icon for literature notes and a green book icon for permanent notes. Here’s the exact structure:

The nested tags in the status help me see items I have to finish as a tree instead of a flat list.

Source: obsidian help desk

3) Set up your slipbox structure

Next, you might want to set up three new folders: one for your fleeting notes, another for your literature notes, and one for your permanent notes.

The fleeting notes will serve the same function as my default option for noting down any atomic idea or note.

The literature notes are the highlights imported from Readwise (more on that in the next steps) with additional notes. The permanent notes folder contain my original writing.

I don’t use a content map and I’m not planning to number the notes. I used to do this in RoamResearch but it has been slowing me down and I don’t see many benefits.

4) Connect Readwise to Obsidian

Readwise was the superpower behind my Zettelkasten in Roam and will hopefully remain the superpower in Obsidian as well.

In essence, it is a service that imports all your highlights (e.g. from books, kindle, Twitter, podcasts, medium articles, browser) and exports them in a customized format to your note-taking tool (e.g. Notion, Roam, or Obsidian).

I see it as my personally curated search engine. It contains all highlights from the past 100 books and 1000 articles I read and highlighted within the last two years.

To connect Readwise to Obsidian, you want to launch your obsidian vault, click on settings, select “community plugins” in the left panel, and toggle off Safe mode.

Then, search for “Readwise Official”, click install and enable. In the panel, scroll down to “Readwise Official” and click on connect. Weirdly I had to wait for around two days until the import was fully functioning.

5) Create a workflow that works for You

The most sophisticated tool is useless until you integrate it into your processes.

In the beginning, you might ask yourself whether you’re doing it right. The setup options you have with tools like Obsidian can distract you from actually using them.

With 25 core plugins, 439 community plugins, and 113 themes, plus custom styling, you can adapt Obsidian to work and look exactly to your needs.

One thing that has helped me is not worrying too much about the perfect structure. The researchers who digitized Zettelkasten’s inventor’s notes found inconsistencies in his labelling and interlinking — his Zettelkasten was far from perfect and still made him one of the biggest scientific contributors of his time.

Start using Obsidian and you will soon discover whether you need more functionalities or a better design. There’s still much to discover and I’m excited about the features it offers.

Sign-up free for the weekly Learn Letter and receive tools and resources that accelerate your learning. And if you want to accelerate your online writing, sign-up free here.

A Clear Guide for Creating an Online Course Your Students Will Love

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The exact steps I followed to reach course-market fit (including templates).

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

Many online courses are money machines for course creators but time-wasters for their students.

By creating my first cohort-based course last August, I wanted to do it differently. My goal wasn’t to maximize income but learning effectiveness.

Looking at sales, net promoter score, and completion rate, I succeeded. I sold all 25 available spots, 85 per cent completed all assignments and rated the course with 9.6/10.

Students’ responses to the NPS question of the feedback survey.

The following guide can help you create an online course your students will love. After a brief explainer of why cohort-based courses are the future of online learning and my prerequisites, you’ll find the exact 5 steps I followed to achieve maximum course-market fit.

Why Cohort-Based Courses


If you went to school, you’re familiar with cohort-based learning. Students take the same lecture, assignments, and tests simultaneously.

In Cohort Based Courses (CBCs), a group of people moves through the same curriculum at the same pace. CBCs often include a mix of life lessons, pre-recorded videos, remote assignments, and peer learning.


 are the Future of Online Learning

In 2011 massive open online courses, so-called MOOCs were praised for revolutionizing online learning.

But data from Harvard University and MIT revealed only three to four per cent complete self-paced MOOCs— a rate that hasn’t improved in the past six years.

On the opposite end, reports about CBCs look promising.

Seth Godin’s altMBA, a cohort-based online MBA, has a completion rate of 96%. Other CBC providers claim to have 85% of their users finish the course they started.

CBCs are designed around best practices in online learning. For example, a study found interaction with instructors affects learner retention. CBCs use online tools like Zoom or Slack to give feedback, host group coaching, or offer 1-on-1 check-ins to help students complete the course.

Source: Eva Keiffenheim

Don’t Compare Apples and Oranges

A friend told me he attempted to copy Ali Abdaal’s structure to make $2,000,000 on Skillshare. My friend soon gave up. He neither had the video experience nor an existing audience that followed him everywhere.

The best tutorial is useless if you compare yourself against someone too different.

Knowing where I started when I built my first course will help you determine whether and which of the below steps will help you.

  • Audience. Before creating the course, I had 15,000 followers on Medium, 2,500 on LinkedIn, 10,000 podcast listeners, and 3,500 e-mail subscribers of the weekly Learn Letter.
  • Teaching experience. In 2018, I completed a six-week teacher training as Teach For All fellow. I worked as a full-time Maths, Informatics, and PE teacher for two years. I hosted about 25 online workshops, and I’ve read around 30 books about how we learn.
  • Additional support. I was accepted to the Maven accelerator and supported by pedagogic, marketing, and point coaches. I also contracted brilliant Eszter Brhlik for e-mail copywriting and operational support.

You can create an effective online course without the above prerequisites. But an existing audience, didactics experience, and support can make building a course easier and faster for you.

The biggest struggle most online creators have is selling their courses. This is so much easier if you have an existing newsletter subscriber base (here’s what I learned from growing my newsletter to the first 3000 subscribers).

But enough with the prerequisites — let’s get started.

1) Collect Data to Make an Informed Best Guess

Source: Eva Keiffenheim

I wanted to run a course on learning how to learn.

Luckily, I learned from my smart fellow writer Julia Horvath that you should first understand your customers before you build a digital product.

In my weekly newsletter, I sent out a couple of questions:

“I’m thinking about building an online course. Which topics would you like to see me cover?”

People replied with questions about how to write online.

In my next mail, I asked:

“What’s the number one biggest challenge when it comes to learning or writing?”

Informed by around 25 replies to these two questions, I wrote this e-mail and created this survey. 200 people replied to the survey, which helped me with the subsequent step.

The e-mail template I used to ask my audience.
The e-mail led to this survey, where I would capture initial interest.

Action steps for you:

  1. Brainstorm 3–5 course ideas informed by what you’re good at.
  2. If you have an audience: Ask them what they would like to learn from you.
  3. Create a survey to learn more about your potential customers.

2) Find a Compelling Course Title and Scope

As a next step, I searched for the intersection between the problems people have around writing online and the problems I can and want to solve.

Narrowing the course scope can feel hard. But if you build a course for everyone, you build it for no one.

The first step I took was copying all survey responses into a visual tool such as Miro. Then, I clustered the responses. After an hour, I realized around 80 percent of the respondents shared the same four pain points.

I decided which of the pain points I wanted to solve and came up with a couple of title ideas. My first three versions for the course name were the following:

  • I help beginner; occasional writers transform into consistent writers that attract a broad audience
  • How to write non-fiction short-form for beginner writers who struggle with publishing consistently
  • How to build an online writing habit to accelerate your learning, express your thoughts, and fuel your impact
Screenshot of Miro, a digital whiteboard I used for organizing the survey results.

Action steps for you:

  1. Analyze the data you acquired from the previous step.
  2. Narrow your course scope by deciding which problems you can and want to solve.
  3. Come up with 3–5 course titles that include whom you do the course for, what they can do based on the course, and which struggle you’re solving.

3) Test and Refine Your Course With User Interviews

Next, I sent out an e-mail to all people who answered the survey. I asked them to book a 15-minute session with my Calendly.

Screenshot of the e-mail for my user interviews.

I felt a lot of resistance in sending out this mail. Until then, I communicated with my audience through writing. I was scared and curious, how Zoom calls would turn out.

After two hours, all 20 available slots were booked. The conversations were interesting and inspiring. During the sessions, I asked the following questions:

  • What’s your single biggest challenge with online writing right now?
  • Name 2–3 areas you are stuck in for reaching your writing goals.
  • How are you currently tackling it? What have you previously tried to achieve your writing goal?
  • What’s your primary goal with writing online?
  • What else should I have asked?

While listening, I took a lot of notes. I organized them on a digital whiteboard.

Screenshot of Miro, a digital whiteboard I used for organizing the user interviews.

Action steps for you:

  1. Schedule user interviews with your potential customers
  2. Analyze the answers to better understand their most pressing problems.

4) Define Your Students’ Transformation

This is what many online instructors spend too little time thinking about — their students’ learning outcomes.

You want to be crystal clear on what your students should be able to achieve with the help of your course.

A helpful framework is the following, suggested by Wes: “By the end of the course, you’ll be able to do X without Y (usual blocker or friction).”

You can replace the verb “do” with anything from blooms taxonomy:

Revision of Bloom’s taxonomy. (Source: Eva Keiffenheim based on Krathwohl and Anderson et al.)

To set the learning outcome, think again about what people told you in the user survey combined with what you know about the topic you’re teaching.

Here are the key learning outcomes I defined:

  • Publishing three high-quality articles within three weeks during the course (and overcoming any mindsets that have held them back before).
  • Discovering, learning, and using the tools that help them with their creative workflow (e.g. for knowledge management and editing).
  • Learning how to use the data they will generate (reading time, views, clicks) to make future content decisions.
  • Starting an e-mail list including landing page, call-to-action, and optimized welcome e-mail that will become their most valuable asset.
  • Having a repeatable and consistent idea-to-paper process that works for them long after the course.

Action steps for you:

  1. Informed by the previous three steps, fill the sentence, “By the end of the course, you’ll be able to do X without Y (usual blocker or friction).”
  2. List all learning outcomes required to make your sentence true.

5) Use Backward Design For Your Course Structure

Traditional curriculum planning uses forward design. People plan learning activities, forms of assessments and only then try to connect them to learning goals.

In backward design, you start with the learning outcome. You think about the destination your learners want to reach and plan the trip to help them get there.

This is more tricky than simply cluttering the curriculum with anything that might be relevant, but it’s far more intentional and effective.

Two questions that led my thinking was: “Which activities would students need to practice to achieve the desired learning outcome?” and “Which input is required so they can best complete this activity?”

Screenshot of the first version of my course structure.

Only once I was happy with the backwards-designed curriculum, started to collect content and resources.

The result were action-oriented sessions that focused on the “how” instead of the why and what:

Source: Eva Keiffenheim

Action steps for you:

  1. Consider the learning outcomes and the necessary practice for achieving them prior to considering how to teach the content.
  2. Design the lessons around action orientation. Provide guided exercises, templates, and step-by-step guides to help your students succeed.

In Conclusion

While getting here can seem tiring, and like a lot of work, the effort is worth every minute. The five steps help you get very specific about the learning design required to help your students succeed:

  1. Collect data to find out what people want to learn from you
  2. Set a compelling course title and scope
  3. Speak to potential users to further refine your course content
  4. Be clear about your student’s transformation
  5. Plan your course structure with backward-design

Building this course has been one of the most rewarding learning experiences of my life (apart from teaching kids at a school). I hope you will find similar enjoyment in building a course your student will love.

Sign-up free for the weekly Learn Letter and register your interest for the second cohort of the writing online accelerator.

Why and How to Switch From RoamResearch to Obsidian

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A 3-step process to migrate all of your notes.

Photo by Fabian Irsara on Unsplash

I’ve been a RoamResearch power user for over a year before I fell out of love.

Roam is an online workspace for organizing and evaluating your knowledge. Unlike linear cabinet tools, the software allows you to remix and connect ideas, where each note represents a node in a dynamic network.

Networked note-taking with Roam transformed my writing process and cut my research writing time in half. It increased my productivity and helped me think better and have more original ideas.

Yet, about half a year ago, I fell out of love. Here’s why and how I switched from Roam to Obsidian.

Two Reasons Why I Switch From Roam to Obsidian

My entire writing process used to happen within Roam. Every morning, I’d start by opening my headline practice template. Once I decided on the headline, I’d create a page for the chosen title and use my article template to get started.

How I start writing an article using my Roamkasten (Recording by Eva Keiffenheim).

Performance issues and slow load time

About 50% of the time, when I started my writing process, Roam wouldn’t load. I’d need three to five attempts reopening the software until my graph finally loaded.

Roam’s performance issue is not new. Other users reported having slow load time as well, and a Reddit user writes: “I’m concerned that this is an issue at this level of product maturity and wonder if there’s any roadmap to resolve these issues.”

Alexander Rink measured Roam’s performance times and writes: “Roam Research is still usable with the 10,000 pages data set, but you need good nerves when using the high-linked pages because the application keeps you waiting and jerks.”

Ten thousand pages might seem like a lot, but it isn’t. If you’re an avid reader and connect Readwise to RoamResearch and consistently create permanent notes, you’ll soon have a few thousand pages with page links.

Rink concludes: “I’m pretty sure that Roam Research will need some algorithmic enhancements to reduce the bottlenecks at references and backlinks because they will be even more dramatic the bigger the database (and the number of backlinks) gets.”

Data security

The other issue around Roam is data security. Even though Roam is a cloud service, the software doesn’t offer end-to-end encryption. A hack, or anyone guessing your single password, would make your private data vulnerable.

A leak of my notes about book summaries wouldn’t worry me. But Roam serves as my second brain and contains sensible personal information.

I’m not alone with this concern. Mark Mcelroy writes: “If you care at all about the integrity and security of your personal knowledge management system, Obsidian may be a better solution than Roam.”

The 3-step Process to Migrate All of Your Notes

1) Export Files from Roam

First, click on the three dots on the top right corner and select “export all” and the “markdown” format. All you have to do afterwards is to unzip the file “Roam-Export-xxxxxxxxxxxxx.zip”.

2) Download Obsidian and Open Folder as a Vault

Next, click on “Open” next to open folder as vault. Pick the folder you just unzipped to.

3) Use the Markdown Format Converter to format your Notes

In Obsidian, on the left side, click “Open Markdown Importer.” Turn on the first three options and start the conversion.

Obsidian now converts from Roam’s variations of Markdown format and link convention to Obsidian format. For example, it will turn #tag into Obsidian [[links]] and also convert Roam’s ^^highlight^^ into Obsidian’s ==highlight==.

Optional: Connect Readwise to Obsidian

To connect Readwise to Obsidian, you want to launch your obsidian vault, click on settings, select “community plugins” in the left panel, and toggle off Safe mode.

Then, search for “Readwise Official”, click install and enable. Then, in the panel, scroll down to “Readwise Official” and click on connect. Here is a short video tutorial by Readwise.

Before you initiate a sync, you want to ensure to enable a couple of options: set the resync frequency to your desired interval (I chose 1 hour). If you want to review your highlights in your daily notes, check out this article.

In Conclusion

Even if I fell out of love with RoamResearch, I admire the software. I’m grateful it introduced me to the power of networked note-taking and bi-directional linking.

If at some point, they resolve the performance and data issues, I might return to the software. Until then, I’ll start getting acquainted with Obsidian. And I’m in good company — with more than 45,000 members in their Discord chat and 20,000 members on their forum, Obsidian has one of the largest note-taking communities.

Do you want to build a consistent writing habit?

Pre-register for the next cohort of the writing online accelerator. You will transform into a consistent writer to attract an audience, create career opportunities, and become a better person. Find more details about the next launch date here.

Four Brain and Energy Hacks for Better Learning

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Use these mental and physical shortcuts to increase learning efficiency.

Geralt on Pixabay

People tend to believe the more hours you learn, the better you become. And while the time you practice is essential, it’s only one part of the equation.

By gaining a deeper understanding of how the brain processes information, you can make all sorts of improvements in how you learn.

While there is no single solution, reading more than 40 books on learning has taught me there are general tips that apply to most people.

If you want to optimize your brain function and energy levels, you can use the following mental and physical tricks. Here are five evidence-based hacks to help supercharge your brain’s learning potential.

1) Augment Your Memory With This Free Tool

Ever wondered why you forget certain details over time? There’s nothing wrong with your brain — it’s human to forget information after specific periods of time.

But you can interrupt this so-called forgetting curve with a specific practice.

Forgetting Curve with Spaced Repetition (Source: Icez at English Wikipedia).

Spaced practice is the holy grail in terms of learning strategies to better remember and retain information.

All you have to do is repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals.

“Spaced practice, which allows some forgetting to occur between sessions, strengthens both the learning and the cues and routes for fast retrieval,” learning researcher Roediger and psychologist McDaniel write.

Forgetting is essential for learning.

Spaced repetition helps you make the most from it.

To apply this hack, you don’t need to write flashcards. You can use existing, free, software that is optimized for interrupting your forgetting and strengthening your learning.

Anki is the best tool for applying spaced repetition (despite its outdated user- interface design).

Use Anki to effectively learn a language, study for exams, remember people’s names and faces, improve your geography skills, learn long poems, or remember everything you want for your entire life.

You can save time by using pre-built Anki decks, so you don’t have to create the cards by yourself.

A free, spaced-repetition tool (Source: Anki).

If you want to use spaced practise for language learning, you can also check out Lingvist or Memrise. Lingvist helped me learn 5000 Spanish words within three months.

2) Use These 4 Steps to Gain Momentum

“I’ll always be a procrastinator,” a friend told me while we were co-working.

I don’t believe in “natural” procrastinators. It’s either a failure of planning or a lack of motivation for the task (which often results from false planning).

Our brain is designed to solve problems. But to harness its power, the problem, time frame, and intention need to be clear.

What helped me the most in my learning journey is the following simple three-step process.

Make your learning goal achievable

If your goal is too big, you’ll never tackle it. Break your learning goals into micro-steps and focus on completing just the initial part of the task.

When I got accepted for an exchange semester in Santiago de Chile, the condition was to have a C1 Spanish level. At that time, I was at A1, and there were only six months left. What has helped me was breaking down the goal into achievable micro-steps.

If your goal is to learn Spanish, focus on learning 30 new words a day. If you want to write your thesis, focus on reading and summarizing five papers a day. Make the sub-steps so small you can’t help but start learning.

Set a time limit

If your task can take endless hours, you might never want to start working on it. Thoughts such as “It will take forever” or “I’ll never be able to do this” can prevent you from actually starting.

An easy yet powerful trick is to restrict yourself to the learning time.

James Clear writes: “Small measures of progress help to maintain momentum over the long-run, which means you’re more likely to finish large tasks.”

I always work in 50-minute chunks. Even if the overall project takes 5 hours, I won’t attempt to tackle it in one sitting. There’s nothing more encouraging than meeting your learning goal again and again.

Be clear about your intention

One of the most important things when you’re learning is having a clear intention.

Intentions help you not get distracted by the outcome and stay on track. They are commitments that you make by yourself, to yourself, for yourself.

Whenever you sit down, think about what you want to have learned in this specific period of time. This way, you make effective learning a game that you’re playing.

Reflect on your learning session

While this step might seem like it’s slowing you down, the opposite is true.

Progress starts with self-awareness. There is nothing more instructive than learning from your experience.

Metacognition Cycle. (Source: Abhilasha Pandey on the progressive teacher).

3) How You Can Reboot Your Brain During the Day

Do you ever feel like your brain is foggy? Even if you’re not learning all day, your brain is constantly processing information.

Learning legend Dr Barbaray Oakley explains how your brain creates metabolic toxins while being awake.

They’re flushed out only while you sleep.

Sleep is your superpower to keep your brain clean and healthy.

Sleep is crucial for your memory and learning process. Sleep improves your ability to learn, recall information, and solve problems.

During sleep, your brain cells shrink. This creates space between them so that fluid flows through them and takes the toxins away.

Moreover, according to researchers from Germany, the brain evaluates memories during sleep and retains those pieces of information that are most relevant for you.

That’s why for most people, the brain feels sharpest after waking up.

But what if you could wake up twice a day?

Taking a nap after a learning session is one of the best ways to create mental capacity and manifest what you learned. You can get a tiny portion of these benefits by taking a nap during the day.

“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” ― Jim Rohn

4) The Most Transformative Thing to Improve Your Brain Function

Neuroscientist Dr Wendy Suzuki used to sit, read, and study for hours. She published well-respected articles and was on her way to becoming a renowned memory researcher.

Still, she felt something was off.

Out of personal interest, Dr Suzuki joined all fitness classes she could find. The effects were transformative.

“After every sweat-inducing workout that I tried, I had this great mood boost and this great energy boost. And that’s what kept me going back to the gym,” she says in her TED talk. “I was able to focus and maintain my attention for longer than I had before. “

Because of the benefits she felt, Dr Suzuki did something unusual for researchers. She changed her research field — from memory pioneer to exercise explorer.

Dr Suzuki says exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do to your brain: “Moving your body has immediate, long-lasting and protective benefits for your brain. And that can last for the rest of your life.”

But how does exercise transform your brain? She shares the three main changes:

  1. Immediate attention increase
    A single workout will immediately increase your levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline. This, in turn, improves your ability to shift and focus attention for at least two hours following your workout.
  2. Memory enhancement
    Long-term exercise changes the hippocampus (critical for your capability to form and absorb new long-term memories). You produce new brain cells that improve your long-term memory.
  3. Protective brain effects
    Your brain is like a muscle. The more you’re exercising, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (critical for attention, decision-making, and focus) gets. The two areas will grow and slow down the effects of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer and dementia.

Apart from Dr Suzuki’s research, there is more evidence on the effects of exercise on learning.

Researchers from Harvard have shown that exercise boosts verbal memory, thinking and learning. Plus, moving your body supports your ability to learn a new language by enhancing your ability to remember, recall and understand new vocabulary.

But don’t worry — you don’t need to become a marathon runner to unlock the benefits of exercise. As a rule of thumb, you want to exercise three to four times a week for at least 30 minutes.

Conclusion

There are so many excellent cognitive tips and tricks out there, but they’re only helpful if you apply them. Try the hacks you’re curious about, and stick with the ones that work for you.

  1. Use spaced-repetition software to enhance your memory
  2. Split your learning goals into micro-steps, set a time limit and intention, and reflect on your learning practice
  3. Get enough sleep every night and take a nap during the day
  4. Don’t sit at your desk for long hours — include regular exercise to boost your brain

May you enjoy your learning journey đŸ™‚

“Learning is an ornament in prosperity, a refuge in adversity, and a provision in old age.” — Aristotle

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

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Four Principles That Helped Me Go From 0 to 56 Read Books a Year

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Simple mindset shifts I see not many readers following.

Source: Canva

Each January, people pledge it will be the year they will read many books. Each December, the majority wonders why they didn’t.

In 2016, I was among the millions of people who said they’d read many books — but I didn’t read a single one. Yet, in the years that followed, I gradually transformed from a reading-muffle into a book-binger.

How I went from 0 to +50 read books a year. (Source: Screenshot from Goodreads).

Books are the cheapest but most impactful way to gain more skills, meaning, joy, and contentment in your life. For an average of $9, you can receive years of someone’s wisdom, distilled to some hundred pages that can be read in a few hours.

Reading 50 books a year is way easier than you might think. You don’t need to compromise on sleep, relationships, or work. In fact, you can even elevate these aspects by reading more.

Caveat: Reading is often treated as an intellectual status symbol. The more books you read, the smarter you are thought to be. It’s tempting to focus on reading as many books as possible - but it comes at the cost of depth and enjoyment. This article doesn’t encourage you to speed up your reading practice. Instead, it's an inspiration to read more (and yet slow, joyful, and thoroughly).

1) Break Up With Your Perceived Hierarchy of Books

If you’re reading this, you likely grew up with a very narrow definition of knowledge.

The existing paradigm, also prevalent in schools, is left-brain centred. Logic, reasoning, and quantification are more respected than creative expression, imagination, or emotions.

We rate knowledge sources based on this binary scheme. Many people would agree that reading for knowledge is the best reason to open a book.

Of the 102 books Bill Gates recommended over eight years, 90 were non-fiction. And from the 19 books Warren Buffett recommended in 2019, 100% were non-fiction.

But this knowledge hierarchy comes with limits. Social critic Minna Salami wrote: “The idea that calculable reasoning is the only worthy way to explain reality through is one of the most dangerous ideas ever proposed.”

Books don’t exist in hierarchies. Non-fiction isn’t superior to fiction.

Again, Salami: “We need an approach to knowledge that synthesizes the imaginative and rational, the quantifiable and immeasurable, the intellectual and the emotional. Without feeling, knowledge becomes stale.”

Luckily, there are books that can make you feel and know.

When you read Tara Westover’s memoir, you’ll feel how it’s like to grow up in a Mormon family in off-grit Idaho. Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest novel helps you understand what it was like to break free from social expectations in the 1940s.

Through stories, you elevate your levels of empathy for people outside of your cultural community. You learn not only to see the world from the perspective of others but also to share their feelings of pain, fear, and joy.

What to do:

Expand your definition of ‘knowledge’ and break up with the fiction versus non-fiction hierarchy.

Pick the book that sparks your interest, and forget whether this book will make you ‘smarter’ in a traditional sense.

“
.a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable — books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.”

― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

2) Read Books You Love Until You Can’t Stop Reading Because You’re In Love With Books You Read

The first book I picked up for my reading goal in 2016 was Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow.’ It was on top of any bestseller list, and my university professors praised it.

Yet, whenever I read a page, I fell asleep. Ultimately, I stopped opening it altogether. Kahneman’s pamphlet became my ultimate reading killer.

I was too proud to stop. I wish I could’ve told my younger self to stop forcing yourself through books you don’t enjoy.

If your goal is to read more, quit the books that slow you down.

You might have to quit several books before you open a book you can’t stop thinking about.

What to do:

Knowing what you want to read is essential, but so is its inversion — knowing what you don’t want to read.

You’re the only person who can judge whether what you’re reading is best for you now. Read the genres you cherish, the content you enjoy, and the authors you admire.

Don’t feel guilty to start with the ‘bad stuff.’ A few hundred books in, you will become a more critical reader and anyway gravitate towards the good stuff.

Better to waste 9$ than 4 hours of your lifetime. Books aren’t created equal — millions aren’t worth your time.

As a rule of thumb, remember the following: If you don’t look forward to continuing reading the book that’s on your shelf, skip it.

“Books are tangible objects of myriad textures — aged, hardback, hand stitched and so on. They are mentally stimulating, therapeutic, and they potentially transform your deepest thought patterns. They affect you entirely.”

— Minna Salami

3) Make your phone your reading-ally

Desired behaviour isn’t solely tied to your willpower. Self-control and self-discipline depend on your environment, as Nobel-prize winner Thaler discovered.

Phones hijack your self-control: The red notification badges, Apple introduced with its Mac OS X years ago; the pull-to-refresh slot machine mechanisms that we refresh in unconscious hope of a quick dopamine shot; the infinite scrolling design, that in Nir Eyal’s words, is “the interaction design’s answer to our penchant for endlessly searching for novelty.”

The average person spends over four hours a day on their device. If you spent half the time reading, with a reading speed of 250 words per minute and an average book length of 90,000 words, you’d finish more than two books a week.

When it comes to grabbing your attention, books can’t compete with phones.

The equation is simple: The less time you spend on your phone, the more you’ll read.

Tristan Harris said: “Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn’t choose, wouldn’t we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens?”

What to do:

Disable all notifications. Use airplane mode whenever possible. When you start reading, put your phone in a different room.

Keeping your phone away from your bed is one of the hardest habits to break. But the work is worth it. I replaced my phone with an alarm clock and stopped taking my phone to the bed two years ago. In bed, I can either sleep or read.

This is what will give you plenty of time.

Make reading the obvious choice. Put your book on the pillow when you make your bed in the morning. Thereby, reading in bed becomes your default option. Not having to use willpower will set you up for a regular reading habit.

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”

— Naval Ravikant

4) Have an Antilibrary

Do you ever feel guilty about the book staple you haven’t read? You shouldn’t — unread books increase your motivation and capacity to learn.

When you just read a few books in your life, you’re likely aware of what you don’t know. But once you’ve read through some hundred books, you tend to become ignorant.

You might be too confident, too sure, and less aware of the things you don’t know. That’s where antilibraries come into play.

The books you haven’t read (and will never read) assemble your antilibrary.

They represent unknowledge and are the best cure for overconfidence.

“You will never read all those books,” friends say when they look at my want-to-read list. The list grows by 2–3 books every day. They are right. Even if I continue reading 1–2 books a week, I will only get through some of them.

But that’s the point: My antilibrary is a constant reminder of what I don’t know. It helps me stay curious and humble.

Psychologist Adam Grant writes: “No matter how much brainpower you have if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again.”

When you’re convinced you know something, learning something new means you have to change your mind. The best motivator to continue reading your book is a long list of books you want to read after finishing.

What to do:

Don’t ever feel discouraged by the books you haven’t read. Instead, see them as a reminder to be humble and curious.

Whenever somebody recommends a book (and you should ask the people that inspire you the most for their top 3 book recommendations), add it to your reading list (if you haven’t one, check out Google Keep, Wunderlist, ToDoist, or Goodreads and settle on your favourite list).

“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In Conclusion

Reading is liberating. Freedom means choosing from a set of options. The more options you have, the freer you are. And that’s where reading kicks in. It helps you explore options you never knew existed.

No therapy session, university lecture, or coaching session has had a bigger impact on my life than reading books. Books change your life; they change the way you think in unimaginable ways.

While each of the above principles can change how you read in one way or the other, they only serve as inspiration, and you certainly don’t need to implement every single one.

Choose one or two you like, but screw the rest. Only one person should define your reading journey — you.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

This Mind-Changing Principle Shows It’s Never Too Late to Become a Better Self

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How you can change your habits for good.

Created by the author via Canva.

Which parts of your identity do you believe to be fixed?

The older we get, the more we tend to see our thoughts and actions as predetermined.

I’m a procrastinator. I can’t lose weight. I’m not a runner. That’s just how I am.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Your brain’s neuronal structure isn’t fixed once you cross a certain age.

No matter how long you’ve been telling yourself you can’t — you can always unlearn, relearn, and, as a result, change.

In recent years, researchers have better understood how our brains work. You’ll understand the science behind it and how you can change for good.

The Reason Why You Can Always Change

Neuroplasticity is your brain’s ability to change throughout life based on what you think, do, and experience.

“When you think or do something repeatedly, your brain actually changes its physical structure,” Shad Helmstetter writes in ‘The Power of Neuroplasticity.’

New thoughts and skills carve out new neural pathways. Every time you think, feel, or do something, you strengthen this pathway, and that’s how you form a habit. In other words: learning rewires your brain.

Traditionally, research associated brain plasticity with childhood. But now, it’s generally accepted that adults brains change as a result of learning.

But what exactly changes when you learn?

In a recent study, neuroscientists used magnetic resonance imaging to observe the brain’s structure while learning.

Your brain consists of gray and white matter. It’s white because it contains billions of axons that are coated with a fatty substance called myelin.

Gray matter vs. White Matter (Source).

These myelin-coated axons play a critical role in learning: they connect the neurons in the gray matter into circuits. The myelin works like electrical insulation and, as researchers write, boosts the speed of transmission by 50 to 100 times.

Hence, myelin (the fatty white substance around the axons) is a critical factor for learning as it determines your brain’s information transmission speed. Myelin makes signals faster, stronger, and more precise.

And here’s where learning and practice come into play: Every time you repeat a practice, the myelin layer thickens. The more you practice a specific skill, the better insulated the circuit becomes. In return, your thoughts and behaviour become faster and more precise.

The authors of ‘Make it Stick’, one of my favourite education science books, write: “The thickness of the myelin coating correlates with ability, and research strongly suggests that increased practice builds greater myelin along the related pathways, improving the strength and speed of the electrical signals and, as a result, performance.”

How to Change Your Self-Beliefs Habits

Your brain’s innate ability to adapt enables change. Yet, before you dive into the self-help part of this piece, keep in mind that you are magnificent without self-optimization.

You can live a happy, fulfilled life without running a marathon, meditating every morning, or climbing up a corporate ladder.

Many of us constantly fight an inner battle between how we are and how we would want to be. Political scientist Minna Salami sees the root in our conditioning: “It is a tenet of Europatriarchal Knowledge that nonmales, nonwhites, and nonelites live lives of constant dissatisfaction.”

Before you focus on identity or habit change, ask yourself why you think the goal is worth pursuing. Is it because of your own wants or because of societies expectations?

Don’t use self-improvement to live up to societies expectations.

If you still want to develop the habit, the following can help. I applied the strategies to write and publish consistently, meditate almost every morning for six years, and spend an average then less than 1 hour on my phone.

1) Be Clear About Your Why

Why do you want to attain the specific habit? What will change as a result? Write your reason(s) on a piece of paper and place it at a place you look at every day.

When I started meditating, I wrote down, “I meditate every day because I want my mind to experience life with clarity and presence.” I placed the note next to my bed so I would see it every day when I woke up.

2) Make it Incredibly Easy to Start With

No matter how big your habit, start thinking small. When you start building a new habit, focus on micro-steps.

“Make it easy to start, and the rest will follow,” James Clear writes, “you have to standardize before you can optimize.”

The more you internalize the beginning of a process, the likelier you are to show up consistently. The goal is to make it so easy you can’t say no.

  • Run five miles → tie your running shoes and go for a walk
  • Eat healthy → google one new recipe and add items to your grocery list
  • Become a writer → write down one idea and a potential headline for it

3) Build a Habit Stack

Tie the new habit you want to form an existing habit you already have.

Every morning, after I brush my teeth, I drink a glass of water. When I started meditating, I decided to combine the existing habit with a new one: “After drinking a glass of water, I sit down on my meditation pillow.”

4) Utilize Your Physical Environment

Prepare whatever you need for making your habit. Pack your gym bag and place it next to your door.

When I started building a writing habit, I ensured to put my phone into flight mode and away from my desk and bed the evening before. I wanted to start writing with a clear mind. I closed all tabs on my computer and opened nothing but my idea board.

Removing friction for starting your habit can help you dive right into it.

5) Be Kind to Yourself

Reward yourself when you’ve met a specific streak, but also be kind to yourself when you miss a day.

The best athletes make mistakes just like we do. But they get back on track as fast as possible.

James Clear writes: “Research has shown that missing your habit once, no matter when it occurs, has no measurable impact on your long-term progress. Rather than trying to be perfect, abandon your all-or-nothing mentality.”

Don’t expect to fail, but make a plan for failure. What can you learn from it? How will you get yourself back on track?

Building self-efficacy through being consistent is more important than the intensity of your habit.

In Conclusion

The most important lesson to remember is: whatever you do repetitively has a lasting effect on your brain. If you want to manifest new thought patterns or habits, don’t quit too early. Your brain needs repetition to coat neurons with myelin.

Practice until your new neuronal pathways replace the old. You will soon realize your brain never stops changing in response to learning.

If you want to change, you can change. But keep in mind that whether you build new habits or not — you’re enough by just being.

Take genuine pleasure in being alive.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

You Want to Write Online in 2022? Publish Your Articles Here

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Where you start makes all the difference.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Where will you publish your writing?

You face ever-growing options —Medium, Substack, your own website, and LinkedIn, and other publications.

This guide will help you make the right choice on where to start publishing your writing. The choice depends on your context. Some platforms might be more suitable for you than the other ones.

After reading this article, you’ll know the key factors for decision-making, and you’ll feel confident about your choice.

The key question to ask yourself

The most important thing you should look out for is to get sufficient data on your writing because this is what will help you improve.

You want to know which of your posts perform best and how much time people spend on your articles. Comments underneath your posts to learn about your readers’ needs and interests.

Through data, you can analyze your writing and create more from what works well. You can push the topics your readers are genuinely interested in and steadily attract more people.

But to get this kind of data, you need an initial audience of people reading your posts. That’s why the core question you should be asking yourself is: Do I have an existing +10K follower base on any social media platform or +2K newsletter subscribers?

In essence, you can break down all the existing options into this formula: They either distribute your content to their existing audience, or you have to bring in your own people.

You can write the best content in the world, but if nobody discovers your work, it will be worthless. So unless you have an existing audience, the key metric for your decision-making should be whether the platform you choose can help you grow your audience.

Writing on your personal blog

James Clear, Farnam Street, and many other successful writers post their writing on their blogs.

The key advantage of your own blog is that you own your audience. You can do with your blog traffic whatever you like: share affiliate links, advertise brands or sell your own products.

Another argument for blogs is your independence from algorithms. You’re not dependent on platforms to show your work to the readers. And you can design the website in your personal style.

You don’t need to be a programmer to publish your articles online. Content management systems like WordPress, Ghost, or Wix make website building easy.

Yet, unless you have an existing follower base, you’ll need to have a plan to drive people towards your blog. Are you good at SEO or plan to learn it? Can you spare +$2000 dollars and hire freelancers for sustainable traffic strategies? And is your writing good enough so that people will actually read your post once they find them?

When you’re starting out, you don’t know which articles people want to read from you. You might begin with a food blog and realize only later on that you’re not really into the topic. If you write on a blog and change your mind regarding your niche, you might have to start everything again from scratch.

That’s why — unless you have solid data on your niche and some 100 articles in your backlog — I advise against starting on a blog/website.

Writing on Substack

Newsletters are tempting. Platforms such as Substack, a platform for newsletters where subscribers have to pay for the creator if they wish to receive the recurring content, are on the rise.

Substack has grown from 0 to 1,000,000 paying subscribers within its first 4 years on the market. According to Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, the top 10 publications of the platform together bring in more than $20 million per year.

“When you look at the economics of newsletters
 If you can find 10,000 people to pay you $100 a year, you’re making $1 million a year. No one in media is going to pay you that.”

— Casey Newton, Platformer

Other success stories include Scott Hines, who grew his email list to 1,000 in less than a year. He writes personal essays about life, parenting, sports, and architecture. Scott says he started from scratch.

Yet, substack doesn’t help you gain an audience. You’ll have to bring in people on your own.

One of the most common Substack advice is to reach out to your family members, friends, colleagues and ask them to subscribe (out of solidarity).

Many of the people who experienced rapid growth on Substack, had an existing audience when they started their newsletter. So unless you can bring an audience from another platform, I’d advise against starting on Substack.

Writing on Linkedin

LinkedIn has 774,61 million active users and the platform is expected to reach 1,034.56 million by 2025. LinkedIn is the go-to platform for networking in the business world, and it can offer a large audience.

There’re two ways to write on LinkedIn in 2021. You can either publish articles or posts. Articles are in-depth pieces, while posts are quick ideas.

LinkedIn articles can be an option for you if you have an existing audience within your niche and you know which content works well for them. With that, you can get initial traction of people commenting and being interested in your content.

Yet, long-form articles mostly don’t perform well on LinkedIn even for people with a large follower base. You also won’t get paid anything on LinkedIn for writing, regardless of how many people have read your work.

Short-form posts can help you gain followers if you go viral or semi-viral. Yet, short writing mostly lacks in-depth information and expertise. To build authentic relationships and a loyal follower base, you’ll have to provide more valuable content to your audience than ‘few hundred words long’ social media posts. As on most social media platforms, creators fight for the attention of the users on LinkedIn as well.

Source: Wes Kao

If you want to build a loyal audience that values depth and clarity, I don’t recommend starting writing on LinkedIn. While the platform can be a growth tool to drive traffic towards your content, it’s not the best place to practice your craft.

Writing on Medium

Founded in 2012 by Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, Medium users have grown steadily. The platform has gone through several changes through the years, including the introduction of the Partner Program, which allows writers to earn money based on members’ reading time.

In 2021, Medium proportionally reduced its paid journalists and started to support independent writers.

On Medium, publishing is frictionless. You tap into an existing audience of people interested in long-form content— unlike LinkedIn, where people mainly go to network and scroll. Through publications, comments, and curation, you receive feedback on your writing. Data on reading time, views, and the reading ratio will help you improve.

Plus, you don’t have to spend time building your website, doing SEO, and finding sponsorships or affiliates for your website. You get paid based on the user’s reading time on your articles.

Many creators complain their earnings aren’t in alignment with their time and energy investment. Indeed, only the top 10% of the writers regularly earn more than $100.

My income on Medium varies from $1,500 to $5,000 — but even if Medium wouldn’t pay me a single cent, I’d write on the platform. I get thoughtful comments and 10 to 25 e-mail subscribers a day.

I see the platform as a tool for testing and improving my writing and building an audience. The income is a nice side effect. If you’re starting out, the platform can offer you many growth and learning opportunities.

Conclusion

To make the best decision on where to publish online, you’ll have to consider the size of your audience.

While it makes sense to redistribute your 10k+ social media following to a paid newsletter subscription or to a blog filled with ads and affiliates, if you’re starting from scratch, it’s easier to tap into the audience of already flourishing platforms.

Do you want to build a consistent writing habit?

Pre-register for the next cohort of my writing online accelerator. You will transform into a consistent writer to attract an audience, create career opportunities, and become a better person. Find more details about the next launch date here.

Steepen Your Learning Curve with Deliberate Practice

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The four pillars for achieving mastery.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

The 10,000-hour rule is a harmful myth.

Malcolm Gladwell argued in ‘Outliers,’ if a person practices a skill for 10,000 hours, they will become a world-class master in that field.

While this simple rule sounds appealing, it’s wrong in several ways.

Ericsson, a scientist among the study’s authors that Gladwell popularized, debunks this learning myth:

  1. Ten thousand hours was an average. Most world-class performers practiced less or more before they achieved mastery.
  2. Nothing in the study implied almost anyone could become an expert in a given field by practicing ten thousand hours.
  3. Gladwell didn’t distinguish how the hours were used. If your practice is ineffective or flawed, even 10,000 hours won’t help you become a master.

Luckily, there’s a better model you can use to replace the misleading 10,000-hour rule — deliberate practice. Here’s how it works and how you can use the method to steepen your learning curve.

The four pillars of deliberate practice (Source: Eva Keiffenheim).

In essence, deliberate practice means actively practicing a skill while intending to improve your performance. “This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to the improved ability,” Ericsson writes.

The authors of ‘Make it Stick’ further specify: “If doing something repeatedly might be considered practice, deliberate practice is a different animal: it’s goal-directed, often solitary, and consists of repeated striving to reach beyond your current level of performance.”

So here’s how you can make your practice deliberate.

1) Define a Specific Learning Goal

Before you dive into practicing, consider which goal you want to achieve. Break down your ultimate goal into sub-steps, similar to skill trees.

If you want to become a better guitar player, decide what to focus on. The rhythm? Ear training? Barre chords? Riffs?

By breaking down your desired activity to one specific goal, you’re setting the groundwork for deliberate practice. One clear outcome is a thousand times better than overarching terms such as “succeed” or “get better.”

If you’re unsure where to start, get inspired by Danny Forest’s excellent exploration of Skill Trees. Here’s a beautiful visualization he created for playing the Ukulele for Beginners.

Source: Danny Forest

2) Commit to Absolute Focus

“Where your attention goes, your energy flows,” somebody wise once said. Absolute focus is the most valuable skill of our century. But it requires training.

In Cal Newport’s words, absolute focus means: “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit.”

The key term here is ‘distraction-free.’

Whenever you practice, flight mode your phone and put it in a different room. Turn your computer off. Set a timer for your desired practice time and focus on nothing else.

Distraction-free environments are the crucial factor to unlock deliberate practice. “In tranquil silence, you can do deep work — the real work,” a fellow Medium writer rhymed.

“‘Just keep working at it, and you’ll get there,’ is wrong. The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.”

— Karl Anders Ericsson

3) Get Immediate Feedback

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent. You can repeat a specific behavior indefinitely without getting better at it. All you do is manifest the existing technique.

If you practice soccer with the same ineffective dribbling technique, you’ll never improve. To get better, you need to know what exactly you’re striving for and become aware of your shortcomings.

Feedback is the cornerstone element for deliberate practice.

You’ll understand how the desired skill works and what you need to do to get there. Feedback helps you manifest the correct revisions rather than repeating ineffective behavior.

There are a couple of ways you can use to get immediate feedback:

  • Self-record a video of you practicing a specific skill (e.g., playing an instrument, doing a sports technique) and compare it to an expert’s video.
  • Hire a coach or trainer who has mastered the practice you’re aiming to achieve.
  • Use learning software that provides you with immediate feedback. For example, language learning tools such as Lingvist or Memrise, or programming learning software such as Codecademy, have in-built feedback mechanisms.

4) Aim for Desired Difficulty

Whenever you practice, you want to challenge yourself a bit further than the last time. Desirable difficulty means putting in a considerable but desirable amount of effort into your practice.

“In the short term, conditions that make learning more challenging — such as generating words instead of passively reading them, varying conditions of practice, transferring knowledge to new situations, or learning to solve multiple types of math problems at once — might slow down performance. However, there is a yield in long-term retention,” a Stanford article says.

To steepen your learning curve, practice a bit outside your comfort zone. While additional challenge makes your practice less enjoyable, it will become more effective.

“There is a place, right on the edge of your ability, where you learn best and fastest. It’s called the sweet spot.
The underlying pattern is the same: Seek out ways to stretch yourself. Play on the edges of your competence. As Albert Einstein said, “One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.”

The key word is ‘barely.’”

— Daniel Coyle in ‘ The Little Book of Talent’

In Conclusion

Not every practice needs to be deliberate. You can learn a new skill just for fun and doodle around. Hobbies without clear goals or a coach inside your comfort zone can be a source of joy and fulfillment.

But if you’re looking for a way on how to learn a new skill faster, keep the four pillars of deliberate practice in mind:

  1. Specify your goal into a sub-goa.
  2. Schedule distraction-free focused practice.
  3. Find a way to get immediate feedback.
  4. Push yourself outside your comfort and inside your learning zone.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

How the Meta Log Can Turn You Into a Better Writer

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Steal my tool to build a consistent, deliberate writing habit.

All you need are four columns. Source: Canva.

When I started writing, it felt painful. I didn’t know how to write introductions and struggled to express my ideas. I thought my texts sounded trite (which they did), and I knew I was not as effective as I could be.

I almost stopped writing altogether.

Fast forward, and I’ve built a consistent writing habit and reached more than two million readers through my articles and newsletters.

If I had to name one tool that has kept me going and improved my writing it’s the meta log. It will support you in establishing a deliberate, consistent writing practice that will turn you into a better writer.

The Science Behind the Meta Log

I invented the tool out of necessity and only recently understood why it works. The meta log is rooted in metacognition. It’s a skill essential for learning, according to many educational scientists.

Different studies show high performers have better metacognitive skills than low performers across various disciplines. Educational psychologist Schraw writes:

“Metacognition is essential to successful learning because it enables individuals to manage their cognitive skills better and to determine weaknesses that can be corrected by constructing new cognitive skills.”

But what is metacognition?

In essence, it means noticing and understanding the way you think. It’s thinking about thinking, knowing about knowing, or becoming aware of your awareness.

When it comes to learning, educational scientists say: “It refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance.”

Here’s a visual explanation:

Metacognition Cycle. (Source: Abhilasha Pandey on the progressive teacher).

“The best performers observe themselves closely. They are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it’s going.”

— Geoff Clovin

How to Quickly Set Up Your Meta Log

According to research, three steps are necessary for unlocking your metacognition: planning, monitoring, and evaluating.

Before you start writing, plan. You first think about your desired goal and consider how you’ll use your time.

Second, you can use self-monitoring to remain aware of your progress. You question the steps you take and reevaluate whether you’re following your planned path.

Finally, you want to reflect on your performance. You evaluate what went well and what you can do better next time you sit down to write.

To integrate this into your writing habit, all you need is a journal or spreadsheet with four columns.

  1. The first column is for the date.
  2. The second column is for the duration of writing.
  3. The third column is for planning and self-monitoring.
  4. The fourth column is for evaluation.
Source: Created by the author.

When you fill out the columns before and after your writing practice, you use your experience to regulate and improve future learning behavior. You self-monitor and self-regulate. Thereby, you steepen the learning curve towards your desired goals.

The 3 Principles to Make the Most of It

This meta log is a variation of learning journals, which have been proven to enhance meta-cognition.

“However, how the learning journal is used seems to be critical and good instructions are crucial; subjects who simply summarise their learning activity benefit less from the intervention than subjects who reflect about their knowledge, learning, and learning goals,” this meta-analysis in Nature concludes.

To make this practice effective, keep these three principles in mind.

1) Fill the blanks without a reader in mind.

Contrary to your articles, you don’t write for any reader. The meta log is for you. Don’t obsess over word choice. Nobody will ever read it, and it’s only there for you. The more honest you are with yourself, the more helpful it’ll be.

2) Use it every time you write.

Unused tools are useless. The meta-analysis in Nature says the longer you stick with a learning journal, the more effective it is. Strong effects have been observed among students in the context of writing.

Make it a habit to finish your writing with an entry in your meta log. Specify the next step for tomorrow.

3) Bold your key insights.

At the end of a month, go through your meta log and bold your key learnings. That way, you’ll have an easy time revisiting the critical lessons from the past and bring them back to your mind.

Here’s how my meta log from April 2020. I still keep coming back to the highlights once in a while.

Source: Created by the author.

In Conclusion

If you want to become a great writer, consistency matters most.

The meta log keeps you motivated, shows your progress, and helps you move in the right direction. This tool will help you be more effective by including metacognition in your writing process.

Are you ready to set it up?

I’m building a course on how to write online based on evidence-based practices to make the most of your time. You won’t sit in front of pre-recorded videos and struggle to stick with them. If you’re interested in joining a group of 25 people, you can pre-register here.

A Quick Manual to Turn You Into an Effective Learner for Life

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It’s not what you’ve learned at uni.

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

I took ownership of my learning 16 months ago.

I produced 93 podcast episodes, wrote 33 newsletters, published 250 articles, created 13 websites, and hosted 27 workshops.

In the process, I learned more than in the five years of my Bachelor’s and Master’s studies.

Schools and unis work towards a purpose of education that was created a century ago. Most of them aren’t built on the insights from neuroscience. Students mostly move at the same pace, using the same means.

Effective learning doesn’t happen while you listen to a lecturer.

Effective learning requires a different state of mind.

Don’t wait for education systems to change.

You can take charge of your own learning.

This article will give you a lens to look at learning and five actionable ideas to get you started today.

How You Can Conquer the Pyramid’s Peak

When you read through educational theories, a couple of concepts plop up again and again: Piaget’s constructivism, Skinner’s behaviorism, Gardener’s theory of multiple intelligences.

But there’s one theory I keep coming back to — Bloom’s taxonomy.

Around 1956, educational psychologist Bloom and his colleagues did a couple of studies. Their goal was to determine factors that affect how students learn.

Teachers’ ability to individualize instruction was among the key factors they found.

Bloom and his research friends wanted to help teachers individualize learning. They came up with a so-called taxonomy.

This taxonomy is a hierarchical model that ranks learning objectives. On the bottom, you find the simple ones, on top the most complex goals.

Revision of Bloom’s taxonomy. (Source: Eva Keiffenheim based on Krathwohl and Anderson et al.)

A quick caveat: There are a couple of things flawed with this theory. When you look at the pyramid, you might think that you need to climb each step to reach the top. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Learning is no linear process.

You don’t start at the bottom to move to the top.

The levels mentioned are interdependent, and you can start right at the top.

For example, the generation effect shows you remember information better once you create your own version of the material (according to this meta-analysis across 86 studies).

You don’t have to remember before you can create. You can remember because you create. While you create, you’ll also continue to analyze, apply, and understand.

27 Prompts to Become a More Effective Learner

Bloom’s theory got one thing right most schools and universities still haven’t: Learning is best when it’s active.

Creation is the essence of effective learning.

Instead of highlighting or taking notes, it’s much more effective to write, animate, draw, build, blog, or produce your own material.

“We have to apply and create in order to understand. The creation process is where we construct deep understanding,” educator Ron Berger writes.

“When I was a classroom teacher and my students were unusually successful, people often asked me what made my classroom different. One difference was basic: my students spent much of the day making things, not sitting and listening.”

Create your version of whatever you want to learn, and you’ll steepen your learning curve. Here’s the pyramid’s top with 21st-century creation prompts I created for you:

Source: Created by the author.

To make the most of what you consume, you want to become a creator.

Here’s an example from a student that created her own interpretation of Bloom’s taxonomy against Harry Potter movies (yes, it’s meta)./media/a243f4088d3d2ee82425a7748610e431

Four Actionable Ideas to Accelerate Your Learning

Whenever you tackle your next task, remember your learning is most effective when you create things.

Here are a couple of actionable things you can do to accelerate your learning:

  1. Sign-up to Convertkit (or any other e-mail provider) and start a bi-weekly newsletter about a topic you want to learn. Take the readers with you on your learning journey.
  2. Pick up your phone (or any other recording device) and record a 30-day video vlog about the habit you’re building. Sprinkle in some self-researched background information once in a while.
  3. Sign-up to Buzzsprout (or any other hosting platform) and run your learning podcast. Do monthly interviews with thought leaders within your niche. Podcasts are the best excuse to book time with people you look up to.
  4. Create a Medium account and publish twice a month. Write about what you’ve learned from books you read, conversations you had, or things you learned in your job.

Whatever you do, keep in mind learning is no static pyramid.

It’s the fuel that enables you to live the life of your dreams.

Even if you have the best mentors and teachers — they can only offer you the tools and a system. You are responsible for effective learning. Start today.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

Most Online Courses Are a Waste of Your Time — Here’s How You Know

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A quick guide that helps you find the worthy ones.

Picture bought by the author via Canva.

This year I spent around $5000 on online courses.

Warren Buffet said, “the best investment you can make is an investment in yourself. The more you learn, the more you’ll earn.”

But his statement is flawed.

Not all learning investments are created equal. People who’ve excelled at their craft are often not the best teachers. Likewise, creators who write the best sales copy don’t offer the most value.

Here’s precisely how you can spot bad online courses so that you won’t waste your time and money.

1) They Tell But Don’t Show

Most online courses are useless because they focus on the why and what instead of the how.

In a Medium writer’s online course, for example, the instructors spend 90% of the time exploring what writing consists of. They have an hour-long conversation about the importance of consistency. Yet, they don’t show the students how they can write consistently.

The medium star could’ve talked about the roadblocks and how he overcame them. He could’ve shared his calendar or accountability system. He could’ve shared strategies for when you’re struggling to get started. But he didn’t. For me, the course felt like a time-waster.

“Never tell us a thing if you can show us, instead.”

— Steven King

What to look out for instead:

Look for how material instead of endless talks on the why and what. Valuable things often include templates, tutorials, spreadsheets, and screen-sharings.

Here are some examples, so you know how to tell the difference:

Source: Created by Eva Keiffenheim.

2) Instructors Teach in One Direction

“Active learning works, and social learning works,” said Anant Agarwal, founder and chief executive of edX, in an interview with the New York Times. To back this up, a recent study suggests social learning helps you complete online courses.

Yet, most online course creators choose alow-maintenance model. They pre-record videos so you can watch them at your own pace.

But what’s scalable for the instructors isn’t the best for you. Data from Harvard University and MIT shows only three to four percent complete self-paced online courses.

To increase your chances of success, you need a community.

I love Cam Houser’s comment in a joint Slack channel: “People don’t take courses for information. That’s what google and youtube are for. They take courses for outcomes, accountability, process, community.”

What to look out for instead:

A slack channel or Facebook group isn’t enough. Great courses offer structured space for social learning. You have an accountability group, comment on each other’s work, and have regular live touchpoints with your instructors or coaches.

Source: Created by Eva Keiffenheim.

3) They Ignore the Principle of Directness

Online courses are often distant from the actual application. You watch videos about your desired skill, but you never actually practice.

Let’s consider one of my favorite examples.

Imagine you’re a frequent flier. Before every start, you watch the video of a flight attendant putting on the life vest. You watch the video again and again.

But as this study shows, actually putting on the inflatable life vest a single time would be more valuable than repeatedly watching another person doing it. You acquire true mastery by performing the procedure yourself.

The author of ‘Ultralearning’ calls this principle directness. It is essential for mastering any skill. Yet, most online courses teach skills far from direct.

What to look out for instead:

You don’t learn by watching things. You learn by doing them. So the more you engage with the content, the likelier it will stick with you.

What’s your desired outcome behind taking the course? Check whether you have assignments that are directly linked to your desired skill. Pick a class as close to your end goal as possible.

If you take a course on e-mail newsletters, write your e-mail and ask for feedback. If you take a drawing class, do your first drawing. If you take a course on online writing, write your first article.

Just like the minimum viable product, find a minimum viable action. What is the simplest thing you can do based on what you’ve just learned?

Foster a bias towards action. You learn best when you do the work.

“Just keep working at it, and you’ll get there is wrong. The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.”

— Anders Ericsson

4) They Don’t Understand the Science of Learning

Masters might not be the best teachers. More likely, they’re beginners when it comes to instructional design and the science of learning.

Most online courses are built on the assumption that our brains work like recording devices. But students don’t acquire their desired skills by consuming content. Instead, learning is at least a three-step process — we acquire, encode, and retrieve.

Learning scientist Roediger writes: “Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow. Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful.”

Learning through passive content consumption isn’t effortful. That’s why most online courses are a mere form of entertainment.

What to look out for instead:

Look out for active learning elements. Check whether the course uses evidence-based learning strategies such as:

  • retrieval practice ⇟ recall something you’ve learned in the past from your memory
  • spaced repetition ⇟ repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals
  • interleaving ⇟ alternating before each practice is complete
  • elaboration ⇟ rephrasing new knowledge and connecting it with existing insights
  • reflection ⇟ synthesize, abstract, and articulate key lessons taught by experience
  • self-testing & calibration ⇟ answer a question or solve a problem before looking at the answer and identify knowledge gaps

“Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills and processes, is a quest. Don’t assume you’re doing something wrong if learning feels hard.”

— Roediger et al.

Conclusion

Most online courses don’t help you reach your desired outcome. You can spend thousands of dollars and hours without learning anything at all.

Learning doesn’t help you per se — it’s taking the right courses that can make all the difference:

  • Check whether the course curriculum goes beyond why and what and teaches the how to do stuff.
  • Evaluate whether you’ve got regular touchpoints with your instructor and learning opportunities with fellow students.
  • Understand whether you’ll practice your desired skill.
  • Look out for evidence-based learning elements such as spacing, retrieval, or reflection.

I’m building a course on how to write online based on evidence-based practices to make the most of your time. You won’t sit in front of pre-recorded videos and struggle to stick with them. If you’re interested in joining a group of 25 people, you can pre-register here.

A Mind Hack You Can Use to Boost the Way You Learn

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Make metacognition work for you and become a learner for life.

Observe your thinking. (Source: Created by the author via Canva).

Do you ever feel like you’re not learning fast enough?

If you ever worry you’re learning slower than you should, it might be because you’re missing out on one of the most effective thinking tools.

You’re not alone here. Most people use countless hours diving into a task without using metacognition.

In the following 5 minutes, you’ll learn what metacognition is and how you can use it to level up your learning.

Once you make it a habit to use this skill, you’ll never wonder whether you’re progressing fast enough.

The Power of Metacognition

“Metacognition is essential to successful learning because it enables individuals to manage their cognitive skills better and to determine weaknesses that can be corrected by constructing new cognitive skills,” educational psychologist Schraw writes.

Metacognition means noticing and understanding the way you think. Most people describe it as thinking about thinking, knowing about knowing, or becoming aware of your awareness.

Nancy Chick, Teaching Assistant Director at Vanderbilt University, says: “It refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance.”

But metacognition is more than that.

Your own experience is used to regulate and improve future learning behavior. You self-monitor and self-regulate. Thereby, you steepen the learning curve towards your desired goals.

A large body of research in educational sciences testifies the importance of metacognition in learning. Different studies show high performers have better metacognitive skills than low performers across various disciplines.

“The best performers observe themselves closely. They are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it’s going.”

— Geoff Clovin in “Talent is Overrated”

How You Can Unlock This Learning Superpower

You can rely on this skill when you clean your apartment, study for an exam, or learn any new skill. Here’s the process you need to include metacognition in your thinking.

According to research, three steps are necessary for unlocking your metacognition:

Applying metacognition to tasks and learning (Source: Created by Eva Keiffenheim based on Schraw).

Before you start a task or learning endeavor, you plan. You think about your desired goal. You consider how you’ll use your time and which strategies you’ll apply.

Second, you use self-monitoring to remain aware of your progress. You question the steps you take and reevaluate whether you’re following your planned path.

Finally, you reflect on your performance. You evaluate what went well and what you can do better next time you approach the task or learning chunk.

While you might think reflecting on a task will slow you down, it will save you time and energy.

Here’s a personal story.

July 2009. It’s the first day of my summer holidays, and I open the door to my dad’s workshop. I see black dust and inhale the smell of welding. My dad is a blacksmith, and I’m about to work as a metalworker for the next four weeks.

The task is mundane, but I get paid on piecework. I treat the job like a game. The more parts I can perforate in a day, the more I earn. I can’t wait to get started. I push the parts into the punching machine, one hour after another.

A few days in, my dad asks me, “Haven’t you thought about how to make this easier for you?”

I looked around. I had no clue what he meant.

He then moved the table with the punches closer to the machine. The difference looked like this:

My dad’s smart move. (Source: Created by the author).

His improvement saved me two steps per task which gave me a precious extra hour a day.

More importantly, he taught me a lesson I will never forget: Before you work on anything, think about the best way to do it.

In Conclusion

Metacognition is one of the most important skills to become an effective lifelong learner. Evidence suggests you can learn and improve it, even long after adolescence.

Before your next task or learning endeavor, make sure to:

  1. Plan. Say it out loud. Be explicit about the way you approach a task.
  2. Monitor. Stay aware of whether you’re doing it right.
  3. Evaluate. Reflect on how well you’ve done.

Don’t stress too much about the speed of learning. You set the tempo of your life. If you find yourself worrying, remember this short poem by Rupi Kaur:

if you tried
and didn’t end up 
where you wanted to
that’s still progress

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to the weekly The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This evidence-based newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you become a lifelong learner.

This Trap Prevents Most People From Clear Thinking

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How to stop clouding your judgment.

Photo by Niloofar Kanani on Unsplash

In his book ‘Stillness is Key,’ Ryan Holiday wrote:

“Wisdom is [
] the ability to rise above the biases, the traps that catch lazier thinkers.”

I disagree.

Mental traps not only catch the lazy thinkers — they snag all of us. Because cognitive laziness is how our brains save energy.

Among the most common pitfalls is our tendency to stick to what we believe. Warren Buffett said:

“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”

Cognitive psychologists call this confirmation bias. It means we select and favor information aligned with our beliefs and values.

We can’t eradicate this thinking trap. But this article will equip you with tools that help you think better.

The Bias That Clouds Your Thinking

“Many startups fail because founders disagree,” my professor said. It was June 2017, and I listened to one of my last business lectures.

He continued explaining the specifics, but I had already stopped listening.

I just founded my first company and thought, “This doesn’t apply to us. We chose the right people.” I continued daydreaming.

Little did I know that wishful thinking would cost me loads of money and energy. Yet, I’m not alone in this. Many others tend to ignore disconfirming evidence.

In 1979, three researchers at Standford divided study participants based on their opinion on death penalties. One group included all believers, the other all skeptics.

Both groups read articles with evidence on death penalties. Half of the people in both groups read studies that disproved the death penalty efficiency. The other half read conforming studies.

Did the evidence influence the participants thinking?

It did. But not in the way you might imagine.

Evidence reinforced preexisting beliefs. No matter which of the two studies they read — both groups were more convinced of their initial opinion.

We do not change our opinion based on research. Instead, we interpret the facts in a way to supports our values and beliefs.

“ In an attempt to simplify the world and make it conform to our expectations, we have been blessed with the gift of cognitive biases.” — Sia Mohajer

How to Rise Above the Confirmation Bias

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson stated in 1789. But he was wrong.

Facts don’t make humans better thinkers or citizens. Often, they make us more ignorant.

“What we believe depends on what we want to believe,” Adam Grant said. “We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt.”

Here are four strategies that help you see what you don’t want to see so you can think clearer.

1) Seek Contradicting Evidence

Test your hypothesis. If you read a book, use red post-its to highlight contradictions to your worldview.

Juvoni Beckford says: “If you read a book and there are very few red flags, then there’s no real reason to keep on reading the book. If you understand everything, why are you reading the book?”

2) Dare to be wrong

The enemy of learning is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge — the things you think you know.

When you’re convinced to know something, learning something new means you have to change your mind. Overcoming your ego is one of the big challenges for better thinking.

The further you’re in your career, the stronger you’re desire to be right. But this desire prevents you from seeing the truth. Embrace intellectual humility. Dare to be wrong.

3) Ask open-ended questions

If you google “Is Green tea better for my body than coffee?” you will see results that highlight the advantages of yoga. If you phrase the question in the other way, “Is coffee better for my body than green tea?” you will see the opposite tendency.

The search engine will show you what you asked for. By using open-ended questions (“Which beverage is best for my body?”), you’ll get closer to an objective answer.

4) Become a critical thinker

At age 21, Franklin gathered smart people in his city to form a mutual improvement club. Each Friday evening, the club’s members brought an interesting conversation topic. Once every three months, the members wrote essays on the topics they discussed.

Learning researcher Anders Ericsson writes about it: “By creating the club Franklin not only ensured himself regular access to some of the most interesting people in the city, but he was giving himself extra motivation (as if he needed any) to delve into these topics himself.”

As research shows, accountability increases your motivation to think critically. If people around you ask you to justify your thinking, you’re likelier to overcome confirmation bias.

Evaluating your worldview is exhausting. It requires mental energy. Even if you’re not lazy, your brain likes to take shortcuts.

Yet, confirmation biases can harm us in the form of misjudgments and bad decision-making.

The best recipe against unconscious biases is self-awareness. Now that you’re aware of our collective mental laziness, you’ll have an easier time overcoming the mental trap. Step by step, you’ll be able to think better.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to the weekly The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This evidence-based newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you become a lifelong learner.

Understand This Rarely Mentioned Concept and You Will Never Stop Learning

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Everything you know has an expiration date.

An old advertisement showing a doctor recommending cigarettes.
Country Gentleman, 1946 (Source)

From the 1930s to the 1950s, doctors recommended smoking.

People who believed cigarettes were good for you weren’t stupid. They followed the tenor of their times.

Much of what we believe today will be wrong 50 years from now. Here’s the reason why and what you can do about it. Knowing the following concept will help you keep an open mind so you can become a lifelong learner.

The Half-Life of Knowledge

Half-life is the time it takes for a certain quantity to halve in value. Nobel Prize winner Ernest Rutherford discovered the concept in his work on radioactivity, but it also applies to everyday life.

The biological half-life of caffeine is around 6 hours. So when you drink a cup of coffee with 200 mg caffeine at 6 AM, you’ll still have 100 mg in your system around lunchtime. Another six hours later, and you’ll have 50 mg in your blood (which is why sleep scientists recommend not drinking coffee after lunch).

The half-life of knowledge works similarly: it measures the amount of time before half of the knowledge in one area is outdated or proven untrue.

As a med student, my fiancé takes hour-long multiple-choice exams every year. Yet, the box marked correct in the last year might not be correct in the next.

The half-life of medical knowledge is 18–24 months. Half of what doctors believe to be true today will be outdated in less than two years from now.

This iteration is not only true in medicine but in other academic disciplines.

Scientist Rong Tang explored 750 scholarly monographs to determine the half-life of knowledge. Here’s what he found:

Adapted by Eva Keiffenheim based on Rong Tang (2008).

Can we derive history has a knowledge half-life of 7 years? No. Tang’s research hasn’t been replicated, and he solely focused on books.

But there’s one thing to learn here: knowledge isn’t permanent. Most of what we consider truth today decays within a decade from now.

“We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995.”

— Adam Grant

What Most People Ignore For Too Long

Philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote almost a century ago, “the fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Changing your opinion when presented with conflicting evidence is one of the most valuable skills of the 21st century.

Psychologist and researcher Adam Grant dedicated an entire book to rethinking. One line stayed with me long after reading: “The purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs.”

If Pulitzer Prize winner Kathryn Schulz read this statement, she would agree.

In ‘Being Wrong,’ she writes: “This is the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new insights and discoveries. In this model of progress, errors do not lead us away from the truth. Instead, they edge us incrementally toward it.”

Everything you know has an expiration date. But this change is nothing to be afraid of — it’s how you learn and progress.

Smoke a fresh cigarette. R.J. Reynolds, 1931, SRITA. (Source)

“Facts change in regular and mathematically understandable ways.”

― Samuel Arbesman

How You Can Benefit from This Concept

In 470 B.C. Philosopher Anaxagoras said, “Thunder was produced by the collision of the clouds, and lightning by the rubbing together of the clouds.”

We might laugh about ancient philosophers’ theories as they attempted to make sense of their world — but what are some of our current beliefs that will seem crazy in 50 years’ time?

Understanding that facts have a half-life helps you on many levels:

  • You don’t cling to outdated beliefs. You keep an open mind and can make better sense of the world.
  • You understand truth as an asymptote. We can never reach the absolute truth. But constant questioning and a curious mind lead to better approximations.
  • You ask yourself: What do I believe that might be proven wrong soon? Looking for evidence that contradicts your worldview is how you become a lifelong learner.

In Summary

Just because you read something in a study doesn’t mean it remains true. Many scientific studies are cited long after they’ve been proven wrong.

Consider Howard Gardner’s ‘Theory of Multiple Intelligences.’ According to it, all students have learning styles: linguistic, musical, kinaesthetic, and spatial. The theory was published in the 80s, proven wrong in the 90s, and, as Alex Beard writes, “enshrined in teacher-training syllabuses in the 2010s.”

Question what you read. Change is the only constant in knowledge.

It’s impossible to know everything. Even if you do nothing but reading tons of papers on your subject, you can barely keep up with new knowledge.

Here’s what to keep in mind:

  • update your beliefs when presented with evidence and new arguments
  • remain aware of what you don’t know
  • never stop learning

Because learning is the most valuable skill of our time.

“If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.”

— Adam Grant

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

3 Specific Ways to Benefit from the Zeigarnik Effect

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How interrupting your tasks can boost your creativity.

Photo by Robert Katzki on Unsplash

Have you ever felt guilty about not finishing a task?

My parents used to tell me “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” (German: Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen.)

I grew up in the mindset believing anything that can be done today should be done today. Whenever I procrastinated on a thing, I felt bad.

But not finishing can be a good thing. Here’s a brief explanation of the Zeigarnik effect and four ways to reap the benefits in everyday life.

A brief explanation of the Zeigarnik effect

In the 1920s, soviet researcher Bluma Zeigarnik discovered people remember interrupted or uncompleted activities better than completed ones.

She observed the effect in waiters. They remembered orders only so long as the order was open and forgot it as soon as it was served.

As a scientist, Zeigarnik started experiments to test her observation. She asked probands to complete 15 to 22 tasks such as solving a puzzle, stringing beads, folding paper, or counting backward.

She let half of the participants complete all of their tasks while she interrupted the other half before they finished.

Zeigarnik then tested how many unfinished tasks the participants would remember. The experiment’s results were significant. Participants were twice as likely to remember incomplete tasks than complete ones.

You likely know this effect from earworms. When you stop listening to a song halfway through, your brain will start the song repeatedly to complete it. The music will be stuck in your head.

The Zeigarnik effect has also been explored more recently by two researchers from Florida State University. Baumeister and Masicampo discovered people did worse on a task when they were interrupted finishing a warm-up activity — because it is still stuck in their working memory.

created by Eva Keiffenheim vie Canva

How to use the Zeigarnik effect for you

Luckily, the Zeigarnik effect also comes with upsides. You can use it to improve your creativity, memory, and much more.

1) Better recall through interleaving

Learning scientists agree unfinished things stay longer in your memory. If you interrupt a learning session and resume later, you’ll likely remember more of the content.

Researchers call this learning strategy interleaving: “In interleaving, you don’t move from a complete practice set of one topic to go to another. You switch before each practice is complete. If learners spread out their study of a topic, returning to it periodically over time, they remember it better.”

So the next time you’re trying to remember information, schedule strategic breaks in the middle of your learning session.

2) Boost your creativity with this trick

Creativity doesn’t work with willpower. You can’t sit down and force your best ideas to come to your consciousness. Creativity works better in your brain’s diffused mode.

This mode feels like daydreaming and enables new neural connections. When you let your mind wander without actively thinking about the problem, you likely come up with a solution you hadn’t thought about.

Adam Grant writes in his book Originals: “When you’re generating new ideas, deliberately stop when your progress is incomplete. By taking a break in the middle of the process, you’re more likely to engage in divergent thinking and give ideas time to incubate.”

The Zeigarnik effect can help unlock your best ideas. Start thinking about a topic or an unsolved problem. Write the question down and bring it to your mind. But then, do something unrelated where you can let your mind wander, e.g., washing the dishes, cleaning the apartment, going for a phone-free walk.

“These were all situations which occurred to me-while showering, while driving, while taking my daily walk and which I eventually turned into books.”

— Steven King

3) Get people’s attention with cliffhangers

Ever binge-watched a series? Likely, every episode finished unfinished with a story thread that hadn’t been resolved.

But even if you don’t write a playscript, you can increase people’s interest with informational teasers.

When you give presentations, for example, the Zeigarnik effect can help you retain your audience’s attention. Tease a piece of important information early on, but don’t reveal it until the end.

The next time you feel guilty about not finishing a task, remember the Zeigarnik effect — a strategic break can actually help you be more creative, improve your recall, or get people’s attention.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

The Habits that Led James Clear to One Million Books Sold

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“The most important thing is also the least sexy one.”

James Clear (Source: James Clear/Flickr CC BY 2.0)

James Clear’s journey has not always been so clear as his name suggests.

I love his book. Others love it too. Atomic Habits has over 20,000 reviews on Audible and was translated into 40 languages. More than a million people subscribed to his newsletter.

I wanted to find out how he became a prolific writer. So I listened to around thirty of his guest interviews. Then, I went all the way down to internet time travel — a site that reveals website content from a decade ago.

His success is no coincidence. These are the habits that led him to write a book bought by one million people. You can steal them to write your own bestseller.

Iterating via Trial and Error

His website ‘jamesclear.com’ has been online for more than a decade. Within a decade, it underwent surprising turns.

In 2010, Clear announced ‘James Clear photography’. He sold his travel photos online and in print.

James Clear’s blog / October 2010 (Source).

Maybe he didn’t get as many sales as he hoped to. Maybe he got bored.

So, Clear started something new. On December 13, 2010, he said:

“I am launching a new site that will become the centerpiece of my effort to build a business that I am proud of. The focus of the site will be on personal finance with an entrepreneurial twist.”

James Clear’s blog / December 2010 (Source).

Three days later, he was done with planning. He announced to focus his self-employment on three main tasks:

  1. Creating mobile applications, including graphic design and user interface.
  2. Building niche websites on a topic he enjoys or a product he believes in.
  3. Selling travel photography.
Fun fact: His own mobile application was called passive panda — an app that teaches people how to earn money / January 2011 (Source).

If you’d asked him in 2011 whether he’s planning to become a bestselling NYT author, his answer probably would’ve been a clear no.

It wasn’t until 2012 that his trajectory finally pointed towards the bestselling author he would later become.

Publishing Articles Twice a Week

In November 2012, James Clear launched a new website. He vowed to publish a new article every Monday and Thursday.

Even though he feared it was too late to start writing online, he kept that pace for the first three years. Reflecting on this first year of writing online, he writes:

“I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday in 2013. (I only missed one day all year, which happened when I was sick with food poisoning while traveling through Italy).

My first article was published on November 12, 2012. I’m proud to say that since that time I have published 114 articles on JamesClear.com and received 686,937 unique visitors.”

His streak went on in 2014. In his annual review, he says:

“I’m proud to say that I stuck to this schedule without missing a post in 2014. I did take some time off during a planned sabbatical in June.”

2013 was also the first time he wrote about identity-based habits. Three years of writing online would go by until he was offered a book deal.

James Clear (Source: James Clear/Flickr CC BY 2.0)

“The most important thing is also the least sexy one. I wrote two to three articles per week for three years, and I tried my best every time.” — James Clear

Following His Two Most Important Principles

While his business ideas iterated, he realized two core principles. In essence, it’s what still drives his continuous growth.

Discover what your audience wants

Early on in his entrepreneurial journey, he advised people who wanted to build a business.

“I’m about to let you in on an advanced technique that everyone should be using — and it’s really simple. Ask people what they want from you.

It is critical that you get to know the people that spend time on your site. Ask them what they want. Get to know their interests and needs. You will gain valuable insights about what you should be offering.”

He intuitively understood what Pat Flynn would later popularize as ‘Will it fly’ or Tucker Max as the ‘Target book audience’. You can copy his approach to learn more about your audience.

“Also, use open-ended questions that are proven to get responses. For example, a great question would go like this, “With respect to [your topic], what is the number one problem that I can help you with?”

When you start like James Clear — publishing on a blog, within a newsletter, or on Medium, you can build an audience before selling a book. You’re more likely to land a book deal and have an existing audience when you start selling your book.

Writing online before writing a book diminishes your risk. Instead of assuming what people want to read from you, the data shows you what works and what doesn’t. You get to know your audience without any sunk costs.

Writing online helps you discover the value you can bring to your audience before taking any money from them. Clear writes:

“I have readers emailing me each week asking when my book is coming out. I have friends telling me every month that I need to launch a product. Maybe it’s my own fears or mental barriers holding me back, but I haven’t done it yet. I want to do it. I plan to do it.”

Connect with your audience using email marketing

In a podcast interview, he explained that his email list went from 0 to 30,000 subscribers in the first year.

Eight years later, on Jan 5th, 2021, his list hit 1 million subscribers.

What did he do? He focused on connecting with his audience to truly understand their needs and build an email list from day one./media/e424a38d9f3b51c7b55549d26cde4674

Continuous Improvement for High Quality

Clear says it took him about a year to find his voice. He copied the style from various artists he admired. The longer he stuck with a writing habit, the more he developed his voice.

Even when he discovered his niche, he didn’t start writing a book. Instead, he continued improving his website.

He explains that the average article took him 20 hours to write. During his sabbatical, he reflected on how he could improve his writing. He added pictures to his articles and sources below every single one.

It’s this learner’s mindset he fostered all along.

“Picking what to read and making sure I’m reading consistently is a really important part of my writing and idea-generating process.” — James Clear

Final Thoughts

Success isn’t linear. James Clear could have stopped in 2010. He could have quit after his travel photography failed to take off. He could have quit after the demand for his financial freedom app didn’t materialize.

But he didn’t. He searched for his niche, produced consistently, and never stopped learning. And so can you.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

What I Learned from Meditating Every Day for 2193 Days

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Training your mind can transform your life.

Image created by the author via Canva.

It’s winter 2013, and I’m twenty years old. I’m walking through a corridor at university, heading towards my very first psychologist appointment. I’m hopeful because I don’t know yet that the doctor will diagnose severe depression and ask me to quit my studies.

It’s in this moment over my hopefulness that I wonder how I lost control over my life. I hate my job. My roommate just kicked me out, and my boyfriend left me. I feel unworthy, lonely, and lost.

“Time doesn’t heal. It’s what you do with time,” Edith Eger wrote. Weeks went by, but I still wished to get sick, so I had a reason to stay in bed. I had no courage for any kind of introspection.

Today, like most mornings this year, I woke up smiling. I love my life.

Meditation is a powerful way to heal. Here’s what I learned from meditating every day for six years.

Expect unexpected benefits

Athletes meditate to improve their focus, stock traders to circumvent cognitive biases, and CEOs to quieten their minds. I meditated to feel better.

People try meditation for various reasons. Most benefit from it beyond their expectations:

  • A meta-analysis with more than 1,200 adults found meditation can decrease anxiety.
  • In a randomized controlled trial, researchers found that mindfulness meditation reduces loneliness and enhances social interactions.
  • A study from the University of North Carolina showed individuals who completed a meditation exercise had fewer negative thoughts when seeing negative images.
  • This 8-week study showed workers who did daily 13-minute meditations reported better well-being and less distress.

The most unexpected benefits for me were better sleep, a constant feeling of inner calm, and being able to let go of the things I can’t control. I’m less stressed because I understand stress is the difference between reality and how I want reality to be.

Your experience will vary. But no matter your reasons, meditation will help you advance in life and improve your well-being on surprising levels.

“It’s not an escape from reality. It’s getting in touch with reality at least for two hours a day. I actually observed reality as it is, while for the other 22 hours I get overwhelmed by emails and tweets and funny cat videos. Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, I could not have written Sapiens and Homo Deus.”

— Yuval Noah Harari in an interview with Tim Ferriss

Training your mind equals mind transformation

Long before learning from Eckhart Tolle, Tara Brach, ThĂ­ch Nháș„t HáșĄnh, Sadhguru, Deepak Chopra, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, I watched a TED talk by Buddhist monk and Dalai Lam interpreter Matthieu Ricard. He said:

“It’s more to say that mind training matters. That this is not just a luxury. This is not a supplementary vitamin for the soul. This is something that’s going to determine the quality of every instant of our lives.

We are ready to spend 15 years achieving an education. We love to do jogging, fitness. We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful.

Yet, we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most — the way our mind functions — which, again, is the ultimate thing that determines the quality of our experience.”

One year from my psychologist’s diagnosis, my circumstances had changed. I had an exciting job in New Delhi and fell in love with a boy who will become my husband.

Yet, my inner state of mind hadn’t changed as much as I thought it would.

You can land a prestigious job, earn tons of money, and find a wonderful partner — if you don’t change your mind and the lens through which you look at life, none of it improves your well-being.

Once you’ve meditated for a few months, you can see and interrupt thought patterns before you chase them down the abyss. You can see worry and let it go without sticking to it all day.

Research shows your brain physically grows when you meditate. Gray matter concentration changes in brain regions involved in learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective-taking.

When you train your mind with meditation, you rewire your brain for well-being. Again Matthieu Ricard:

“Well-being is not just a mere pleasurable sensation. It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment. [
] Now, it takes time because it took time for all those faults in our mind, the tendencies, to build up, so it will take time to unfold them as well.

But that’s the only way to go. Mind transformation — that is the very meaning of meditation.”

Meditate first thing in the morning

Even with the clear intention to meditate during the day, skipping the practice is easy. Meditating never feels urgent, and timebound to-do’s get in the way.

When your mind is in full-speed working mode, pausing becomes harder and harder. Once you’re in the monkey mind zone, it’s tough to zone out into the zen mode.

I agree with Naval Ravikant, who said: “Everyone says they do it, but nobody actually does. The real set of people who meditate on a regular basis, I’ve found, are pretty rare.”

My six-year experience taught me: If you don’t sit down first thing in the morning, you likely won’t meditate all day.

Here’s how you can trick yourself into sitting down every morning: Put your phone on flight mode before you go to sleep. Turn it on only after you meditated.

Dr. Nikole Benders-Hadi, a psychiatrist, says: “Immediately turning to your phone when you wake up can start your day off in a way that is more likely to increase stress and leave you feeling overwhelmed.”

If you have an old device (I use my old phone), install nothing but your meditation facilitator (YouTube, a timer, or a meditation app). Alternatively, you can download whatever you need to meditate on your current device to have it available offline.

Get out of bed, brush your teeth, drink a cup of water, and sit down on a pillow (not in your bed; you likely fall back to sleep).

“All of humanity’s problems stem from people’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal

Happiness is the absence of desire

Before I meditated, I thought happiness is something you attain. I thought I’d be happy once I had a specific income or spend a vacation in Bali.

But the opposite is true. You’re truly content and happy when you’re mind is free from desire. You’re full of bliss when you stop wishing you’d rather be somewhere else, doing or having something different.

Happiness is a by-product of complete presence.

You’re truly happy when you silence your inner chatter. You feel content when you stop judging what you’re experiencing and just experience.

“When we do not expect anything, we can be ourselves.”

— Shunryu Suzuki

Never skip two days in a row

As with all new habits, building a meditation habit is hard first. It requires the willpower to sit down every day instead of keeping yourself busy.

Meditating is like running or weight lifting. The more days you skip, the harder it is to get back into the rhythm.

What helped me to build a habit was a 30-day challenge. I set the intention to meditate every day for 30 days using Headspace. The duration didn’t matter. I started with 3-minutes and ended with 10-minutes.

I didn’t like it at first.

But I loved the effects the training had on my everyday life.

Life’s Only Constant is Change

When you sit still and scan through your body, you notice all kinds of sensations. Itchy toes, lungs expanding with air, the cold air flowing in through your nostrils. With every moment, your sensations change.

While meditating, you feel life is a constant state of change and that this change is okay.

In 2019, I went to a 10-day silent meditation course. During a Vipassana training, a Buddhist term that often translates to “insight,” you wake up at 4 AM and meditate for 10 hours every day. You don’t talk, write or speak.

The days were tough. I went to the course expecting relaxation and flow states. Instead, it felt as if I was nonstop working and doing tough inner work. But this practice helped me develop equanimity.

Instead of instant reactions, meditation helps you notice whatever is going on, become aware of it, label it, and then act.

Don Johnson, a meditator for 49 years, writes: “The purpose of meditation is not to control the mind. A quiet mind happens as a result of a connection to an inner experience of peace.”

Regular meditation is a mental tool that will allow you to deal with any hardships of life. By applying this technique, you’ll achieve and share true happiness with others.

You Need Thoughts to Do Your Mental Pushups

For a long time, I believed freedom of thought was the ultimate goal of meditation. So I talked myself down every time thoughts crossed my mind and thought my mind wasn’t made for meditation.

I was wrong.

The goal of meditation isn’t to get rid of thoughts. In fact, you need your thoughts to meditate. Without thoughts, you wouldn’t have any object of practice.

Thoughts are the weights in your mental gym. Your job is to return your attention away from them and back to your breath (or any other point of focus like a candle, a mantra, or a body part).

When I meditate, I follow my breath — inhales and exhales. Sometimes my mind will wander to thoughts or feelings. And when it does, I acknowledge them and come back to my breath.

This is the core of meditation. Catching yourself while being distracted. The more you practice, the better you’ll get at noticing when you’re unfocused.

Now I think of thoughts as mental push-ups. The more thoughts I have, the more opportunities for exercise.

Thoughts can be contradicting, harmful, wonderful, or crazy. But you are not your thoughts. They are the vehicle that carries you through life. When you meditate, you become the driver.

“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

— Mark Twain

In Conclusion

Meditation is a highly effective tool to train your mind. A regular practice can help you let go of fear and anxiety, focus on the present moment, and find inner calm. Meditation is the entryway to a more fulfilled and joyful life.

When building a practice, it’s important not to be too hard on ourselves. Skipping meditation once in a while doesn’t matter. What matters is consistency. You’ll only return to your practice if you don’t judge or push yourself too hard.

Most importantly, it’s your practice. Your habit can look different from mine or the guru’s recommendations. But once you find a ritual that works for you, stick to it.

Use a facilitator to get started. Meditation apps like Calm, Headspace, Waking Up, or Insight Timer can support you in building a robust habit. You can also start with guided meditations on YouTube, such as this one or this one.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

Five Common Beliefs About Learning That Are Actually Learning Myths

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Stop following them to save precious time and energy.

Created by the author via Canva.

In 2013, I studied for weeks for an undergrad test. Yet, I failed.

Research from different studies shows up to eighty percent of students never learn how to learn effectively. Even long after school and university, people waste time and energy with ineffective learning practices.

In the past five years, I’ve worked as a full-time teacher, completed a course on meta-learning, read 20 books on the science of learning. Each week I publish The Learn Letter — a newsletter that examines the best ideas around lifelong learning.

Again and again, I stumble upon beliefs around learning that are actually wrong.

Misunderstandings about learning waste your time. After reading this article, you’ll understand which common beliefs are learning myths so you can become a better learner.

1) Your brain capacity is limited

Some people fear lifelong learning can overload their brains. But, contrary to common belief, your brain is never full.

Learning is a virtuous circle. The more you learn, the more you can remember.

In this paper on the science of learning, scientists explain why storing information in your memory creates brain capacity. Rather than a library with limited shelves, your brain works like a growing tree.

The more knowledge you store, the more branches grow and connect. Instead of using brain space, learning creates additional opportunities for linkages and storage.

A research group around neuroscientist Henry Roediger and psychologist Mark McDaniel spent ten years bridging the gap between cognitive science and educational science. In their book, they explain:

“Learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn, the more possible connections we create for further learning.”

Remember Instead:

Your brain capacity is unlimited. The more you know, the easier you can hang up new information in your memory tree.

2) Rereading is an effective learning strategy

One of the most common learning myths is believing that reexposing yourself to something will burn the content into your memory.

Rereading feels productive because concepts sound familiar. But this feeling is an illusion of knowledge.

Roediger and McDaniel explain: “Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time-consuming. It doesn’t result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery with the content.”

“Don’t assume you’re doing something wrong if learning feels hard.”

Remember Instead:

Rereading doesn’t lead to better retention. Effective methods include spaced repetition, interleaving, elaboration, self-testing, and free recall.

3) People learn better following their learning styles

Are you a visual or a verbal learner? While you might have preferences about the learning material, they don’t improve recall or retention.

No solid evidence from controlled experiments says that teaching in the preferred learning style improves learning.

“Tailoring instruction as suggested by the learning style approach can potentially have negative consequences for the learner,” psychologists explain in an evidence-based blog post.

Remember Instead:

The richer the learning material and the combination of styles, the better. The wider your mix of methods, the greater your learning success.

4) Rich environments enhance childrens’ brain

In ‘Understanding How We Learn,’ researchers looked for evidence for misunderstandings in learning. They examined 12 empirical papers with almost 15000 participants in 15 countries.

One of the biggest misconceptions about learning they found was the belief environments rich in stimuli improve the brains of pre-school children.

One reason why so many people wrongly believe this might be the following story of a misused teenager. Genie was locked by her father for 13-years. She was socially isolated. When she was found, she didn’t know how to talk.

True sensory deprivation can indeed lead to decreased learning. But under normal circumstances, the reality is enough for brain development. The researchers conclude:

“Even without decorated classrooms, children encounter sufficient information to enable their brains to develop normally.“

Remember Instead:

Children don’t need a stimuli-rich environment for healthy brain development.

5) 10,000 Hours of Practice Lead to Mastery

In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell introduced the ten-thousand-hour rule in his book ‘Outliers.’ He argued that it’d take 10,000 hours of practice to become a master in any field.

While this simple rule sounds appealing, it’s wrong in several ways.

Ericsson, one of the study’s authors that Gladwell used as the scientific foundation for his rule, debunks this learning myth. Ericsson lists several reasons why the rule is flawed:

  • There is nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours. A lot of world-class performers practiced less or more before they achieved mastery. Ten thousand hours was an average.
  • Gladwell didn’t distinguish how the hours were used (e.g., deliberate practice vs. ineffective practice).
  • Nothing in the study implied almost anyone could become an expert in a given field by practicing ten thousand hours.

Remember Instead:

10,000 hours of practice don’t guarantee world-class performance. The additional practice would lead to further improvement even if you crossed the 10,000-hour mark.

Final Words

Learning is a journey, not a destination. This meta-study on learning, memory, and metacognitive processes has shown that most learners hold outdated beliefs and commit errors that can even impair their learning effectiveness rather than enhance.

Reading more than 20 books on learning, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern: it’s less important what kind of brain you have — what matters is how you use it. To learn more effectively, here’s what to remember:

  • Learning is a virtuous circle, and your brain capacity is unlimited.
  • Spaced repetition and free recall are more effective than rereading.
  • Learning in your preferred style doesn’t lead to better cognition. Mix the methods instead.
  • Children don’t need a stimuli-rich environment for healthy brain development.
  • The 10,000 rule is a lie. How you practice is equally important to how much you practice.

This Learning Hack Helps You Remember More From Any Book You Read

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How writing book reviews fuels your learning.

Library in Vienna’s University of Economics and Business (Martino Pietropoli/Unsplash)

Reading gives you access to the smartest brains on earth. Learning from the greatest people is the fastest way to become healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Yet, reading per se doesn’t make you a better person. You can read 52 books a year without changing at all.

I’ve read about 20 books on learning in the past four years, and I’ve noticed a recurring pattern: it’s less important what kind of brain you have — what matters is how you use it.

I love my Zettelkasten and RoamResearch. But chatting with my newsletter subscribers, I understood that it’s tough to maintain these systems unless you’re a writer who can spend an hour a day reflecting on the books you read.

The best personal knowledge management systems are useless unless applied. Using the following learning hack can help you make the most of the books without wasting your time.

Why Writing Book Reviews Fuel Your Learning

We only recently started to understand how learning works. Learning science is a new field that combines the knowledge of neuroscience and social and cognitive psychology.

Books have been around for a long before learning science.

What we know now is that learning is a three-step process: acquisition, retention, and retrieval. In the acquisition phase, we link new information to existing knowledge; in the retention phase, we store it, and in the retrieval phase, we get information out of our memory.

Books were invented before these insights. It was Schopenhauer who already stated in the 1850s: “When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process.”

You don’t read a page and shelf it in your mental library. Instead, your brain stores new information in terms of its meaning to existing memory.

To remember what you read, you not only need to know it but also to know how it relates to what you already know. You can add this layer of meaning by interpreting, connecting, interrelating, or elaborating.

Elaborating means you explain and describe an idea in your own words.

Learning researchers Roediger and McDaniel write: “Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.”

Elaborative rehearsal encodes information into your long-term memory more effectively. The more details and the stronger you connect new knowledge to what you already know, the better because you’ll be generating more cues. And the more cues they have, the easier you can retrieve your knowledge.

„Elaboration is thought to be one of the best ways to increase learning and memory among many memory theorists,” scientists write in the evidence-based book ‘Understanding How We Learn.’

Book reviews are an elaboration practice for reading. Spending 5-minutes every time after you finish a book with writing them will help you store and retain more from what you read.

“A good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable — books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.”

― Mortimer J. Adler in How to Read a Book

How to write book reviews for maximum learning

The more you elaborate or try to understand something, the more likely you‘ll keep this new information in your long-term memory.

When you use book reviews as a learning hack, you don’t focus on the quality of writing (eloquence, succinctness, conciseness) or the quality of the content (originality, editing, research, quoting).

Instead, you answer meta-questions that invite you to recall what you read from your memory and store it in relation to its meaning. Here are a few questions you might want to answer every time you finish a book.

  • How would you summarize the content in three sentences?
  • What do you find interesting about this book? Which parts surprised you? Which arguments altered your understanding?
  • How does the content relate to what you know? Does it contradict or confirm something you previously read?
  • When would you like to stumble upon the ideas in the book again?
  • Which concepts or ideas from the book do you want to apply in your life? When and where will you use these insights?

You don’t need to answer every single one. Keep the prompts that work for you, and screw the rest.

When you write a book summary, you have to filter relevant information, organize it, and articulate it using your own vocabulary. Don’t transcribe the author’s words but try to summarize, synthesize, and analyze. That way, you will remember much more from what you read.

Where to publish your book reviews

Many people I know don’t share their work in public because they’re scared other people judge them. I shared this fear. Around 200 articles later, I know the upsides far outweigh any risk.

Since I publish my work on Medium and in The Learn Letter, I learn faster, meet interesting people, and job proposals from projects that fascinate me.

So if you dare, publish your book reviews online. You can share them on Amazon, Goodreads, Medium, your blog, or a digital garden.

Once you write book reviews, you not only help other people but also yourself.

You will be able to explain complex ideas during dinner conversations, recall interesting concepts and ideas when you need them, and create your personal library.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

How I Built a Book Brain with RoamResearch

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Here’s how you can do it, too (templates included).

Image credit: Model-la.

Have you ever read a book only to forget the quintessence three weeks later? Human brains don’t work like recording devices. When we read things a single time, we’ll likely forget them. Even the densest non-fiction books become mere entertainment.

I read a book a week for some years now and encounter many interesting ideas. Yet, I often struggled to find the content when I needed it. Researching sources for my articles, my weekly newsletter, podcast interviews, or panel discussions was a long and frustrating process.

Building a book brain in Roam helped me find what I need within seconds. As a result, I no longer spend hours searching for ideas from books. Instead, I have everything at a single digital place ready for usage.

Whether you’re struggling to organize your thinking, want to make more of the books you read, or look for inspiration to organize your reading, this article is for you. Here are the exact steps you can follow to find what you need when you need it by building a book brain with RoamResearch.

The Setup

I built a book brain using my Kindle, Readwise, and RoamResearch.

Disclaimer: I'm not sponsored by Roam or Readwise. I pay $15/month for RoamResearch and $8/month for Readwise. Free alternatives to RoamResearch include TiddlyWiki, Obsidian, RemNote, Amplenote, and Org-roam. The only alternative to Readwise is importing highlights manually.

Kindle

I was an e-reading enemy until I read my first e-book. Before, I’d argue you can’t smell and dog-ear the pages, scribble your questions in the margins, or sketch out the concept you just learned.

And while these arguments still hold, technology-assisted learning makes most of them irrelevant. Now that I discovered how to use my Kindle as a learning device, I wouldn’t trade it for a paper book anymore.

Your Kindle Notes page shows all your book highlights (for books purchased via Amazon). This feature is essential for the process that follows.

The kindle notes page (screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim).

Readwise

Readwise is an online service that helps you retain books better. You can resurface your highlights through spaced repetition on their website. In addition, the program also allows you to tag, annotate, search, and organize your highlights.

The only Readwise feature I use is highlight syncing. You can sync your Kindle highlights to Evernote, Notion, and Roamresearch. Once it’s set up, Readwise syncs your highlights with notes automatically every day.

This is how I customized my Readwise to Roam integration:

Readwise configuration page (screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim).

Here’s the code I used for the page metadata. Feel free to copy or adjust it to your needs.

{% if category == "tweets" %}
#twitter 🐩
{% elif category == "books" %}
{{"{{"}}[[TODO]]{{"}}"}} #ToProcess create literature notes for this book
{{"{{"}}[[TODO]]{{"}}"}} #ToProcess create permanent notes for this book
{{"{{"}}[[TODO]]{{"}}"}} #ToProcess write a summary for my blog and publish it
{% else %}
podcast or article
{% endif %}
Author:: [[{{author}}]]
Tags:: #readwisesync
Full Title:: {{full_title}}
Type:: #{{category}}
Recommended by::
Import Date:: {{date}}
{% if document_tags %}Document Tags:: {% for tag in document_tags %}#[[{{tag}}]] {% endfor %} {% endif %}
{% if url %}URL:: {{url}}{% endif %}
{% if image_url %}![]({{image_url}}){% endif %}

RoamResearch

RoamResearch is an online workspace for organizing your knowledge. In essence, it’s a note-taking app that works in line with your brain.

To understand why RoamResearch is superior to most note-taking apps, let’s understand how our memory remembers things. Harvard researchers describe a three-step process:

  1. Through encoding, your memory learns new information, either visual (see), acoustic (hear), tactile (feel), or semantic (mean).
  2. Everything you encode is first stored in your short-term memory and then, through spaced repetition, in your long-term memory.
  3. Through retrieval, you can access and recall what you stored in your brain.

Hence, to retrieve and access what you learned, you first need to encode and store it in a way that helps with this process.

The more details and the stronger you connect new knowledge to what you already know, the better. By doing so, you’re generating more cues. Computer-scientist and lifelong learner Helmut Sachs writes in his book, “The more we know, the more information (hooks) we have to connect new information to, the easier we can form long-term memories.”

Networked note-taking encodes information into your long-term memory more effectively. It can be advantageous to relate the material to a personal experience or to something you already know, explaining the idea to someone else, and explaining how it relates to your life.

And this is where Roam comes into play. While traditional note-taking tools, such as Notion or Evernote, operate within a hierarchical structure for linear thinking, Roam was built around networked thinking. Through bi-directional links and the daily notes default, the platform is built for connecting and interrelating your book notes and ideas.

Created by Eva Keiffenheim via Canva.

The Workflow

One of the biggest hurdles in building a book brain is actually taking the time to do it. Unfortunately, it’s more tempting to start a new book than work with the one you just finished.

But whenever I rush to the next book without pausing to think and reflect, I won’t remember nor apply most of what I read. Hence, I block an hour each Monday to go through the book I just finished.

Within this weekly hour, I do three things: write literature notes, permanent notes, and publish a book summary. To make sure not to miss a book, the three steps show op in my Roam [[ToDo]] page. When I’m done, I tick them off. In case you want different ToDos or # to show up in your database, configure the code above.

Roam [[ToDo]] page (screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim).

1) Create Literature Notes

You might have heard of the Literature notes from the Zettelkasten method. But you don’t need to understand the complex system for knowledge management to create them.

Literature notes are brief, contain your own words, and sometimes bibliographic references. When writing literature notes from a book, I answer two questions:

  1. What is so interesting about this?
  2. What is so relevant it’s worth noting down?

First, I try to recall everything from my memory (an exercise that supports my memory in transforming information from the short-term to the long-term memory).

When I’m done with this brainwriting, I’ll go through the highlights from the book. Readwise synced the book’s highlights to my RoamResearch database, so I don’t have to pick up my Kindle. If I find something noteworthy I hadn’t thought of, I’ll add it to the literature note.

Three examples for my Roam literature notes (screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim).

2) Create Permanent Notes

While literature notes are your summary of someone else’s ideas, permanent notes are your own ideas. You combine what you read with your area of interest and focus. Literature notes serve as a stepping stone for your thinking.

While your literature notes are bullets and fragments, your permanent notes should sound like written prose. A reader of your permanent note (e.g., your future self) should understand it without reading the source that led to your idea.

These notes are called permanent notes because they’re supposed to be permanently useful to you.

Created by Eva Keiffenheim based on “How to take smart notes.”

3) Write a Summary to Learn in Public

Writing is one of the most effective ways to embed information in your mind. Before you write, you have to take several steps: filter relevant information, organize this information and articulate them using your own vocabulary.

In short: When you write, you have to understand and think for yourself.

Scientists call this the ‘Generation effect.’ In 1978, researchers discovered that information is better remembered if generated from one’s own mind rather than read. And while research is still unclear about why it works, it has been shown to accelerate learning and remembering information.

I committed to learning in public. Hence, I publish my book summaries on my website. This is a way to hold me accountable to show up each week and support people who want to become lifelong learners. And that’s it — the process I use to create a book brain in Roam.

In Conclusion

Books are incredible — you can learn about anything, travel in time and place, and become anyone you want.

With a book brain, you can remember and use anything you want from the books you read. If you’re new to Kindle, Readwise, and Roam, it might take a day to set it up. Yet, once in place, it can save you hours. Depending on how much you read, it will take you one to four hours a month to make the most of what you read.

The 5 Best Platforms to Create Your Cohort Based Online Course

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Teachable & Co belong to the past. Here’s what’s next.

Photo by ConvertKit on Unsplash

Whether you’re a serial course creator or entertaining, the thought of launching your first online course — cohort-based courses will likely disrupt the way you teach.

Platforms like Teachable, Podia, and Kajabi belong to the past. Say goodbye to course design that ignores social and active learning.

Your (future) customers don’t acquire new skills by consuming pre-recorded content. Learning is at least a three-step process: acquisition, encoding, and retrieval.

That’s why learning by doing is much more powerful than learning by watching. These platforms will help you create and sell learner-centric courses that help your customers master the skill you teach.

1) Teachfloor

Teachfloor combines all the tools you need to build a cohort base course. The platform equips you with a curriculum builder, Zoom and Stripe integrations, e-mail automation, a course landing page, calendar scheduling, on-demand videos, and peer-review opportunities.

Teachfloor offers a vast course creator academy with 24/7 support in 50+ countries. With more than 3,000 clients, Teachfloor belongs to the more seasoned platforms.

After a 14-day free trial, pricing starts at $49 a month (billed annually).

Screenshot of Teachfloor’s landing page by the author.

2) Maven

Maven is a very new cohort-based course platform started by the founders of Udemy, altMBA, and Socratic.

In a podcast interview, Maven co-founder Gagan Biyani shared how they aim to revolutionize education and replace universities with a more individualized approach to education.

Pricing is not displayed on their website. If you want to create a cohort-based course on their platform, you must apply to their course accelerator. In an intense 3-week program, you build and get feedback from a cohort of top-notch instructors and coaches.

Screenshot of Maven’s landing page by the author.

3) Virtually

Virtually provides all tools you need to run your online learning program in a single place.

Features include analytics, life conferencing, payment processing, calendar management, auto-attendance tracking, assignments and grading, student records, and content libraries. Plus, Virtually has integrations with Zoom, Slack, Stripe, Google Sheets, Airtable, Circle, Zapier, and Google Calendar.

According to their website, creators such as Ali Abdaal and Tiago Forte built their courses with Virtually.

If you join the beta, pricing is $50 a month for your first 250 students and $0.25/month for each additional learner.

Screenshot of Virtually’s landing page by the author.

4) Graphy

Similar to Teachfloor, Graphy is an all-in-one platform to help you set up your live courses, grow your community, and monetize your knowledge without any barriers.

Yet, Graphy doesn’t include features or integrations for asynchronous communication. Instead, they built a tool similar to Zoom that can be used for online live teaching.

The platform doesn’t charge upfront. They make money only when you make money with a flat 5% platform fee only on successful enrolments in your courses.

Screenshot of Graphy’s landing page by the author.

5) Classcamp

Classcamp is a mobile-first, interactive learning platform for creators. Unlike the other platforms, your brand will serve as the center for the learning experience.

Features include the option for pre-recorded or live lessons, fan assignments, submissions, and reaction videos.

The platform launches in September, but you can already sign up on their website.

Screenshot of Classcamp’s landing page by the author.

Excluded Platforms

While researching this article, I stumbled upon a few sites that were recommended as cohort-based-course platforms. Yet, upon further review, I found these sites to be misleading.

Airschool

Airschool is a course creation tool. As a creator, you start a landing page and launch with them, then share the link with your community. Initially, I found their claim to “Sell Courses, Make Money!” a bit sketchy, but the team reached out and clarified all my doubts. The tool is free to use but charges 9.90% of the product’s price if it’s priced higher than $30.

Airtribe

Airtribe aims to help the world’s top instructors start cohort-based courses which are live, engaging, and community-driven. While the claim sounds promising, the platform is very early-stage, and it’s not clear how Airtribe intends to achieve its goal.

Disco

Founded in 2020, Disco helps creators build live learning experiences. It comes with integrations to Stripe, Mailchimp, and Zoom. From their website, the exact features and the pricing are not listed yet. Similar to Maven, you can apply to get creator access to build your own course.

Eduflow

Eduflow is a well-established collaborative learning platform. I didn’t include their solution in the list, as they targeted higher education and corporate training. For example, they don’t have payment provider integrations, and you’d have to go with the $400/mo subscription to add your personal branding to the course.

TopHat

Founded in 2009, TopHat provides an all-in-one teaching platform purpose-built to motivate, engage and connect with students. TopHat offers interesting features (e.g., interactive textbooks, simulations, testing as a tool) but is targeted at higher education institutions.

Conclusion

Most educational video content is available free — learners watch content on YouTube 500 million times every day. But while the means for learning online are abundant, community-based experiences are scarce.

The list of online creators who successfully scaled their business by running cohort-based courses is long:

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

7 Powerful Habits that Help You Become a Learner for Life

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Because lifelong learning is the most valuable skill you can build.

Created by the author via Canva.

Have you ever wondered how some people keep reinventing themselves while others seem to be stuck?

“The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn,” Naval Ravikant said.

But learning is much more than gaining a competitive advantage and making more money.

Continuous learning helps you make sense of yourself in the world, find belonging, and transcend yourself to a new level. It’s the ultimate ticket to a fulfilled and meaningful life.

Unfortunately, most people think they’re done with learning when they finish school.

True learning starts after you finish school. It’s when you follow your curiosity and interest that the wonders of learning start to emerge. Each of the following seven habits can help you become a better learner.

1) Read Books that Make You Want to Read More

Reading is the most powerful habit of becoming a lifelong learner. Here’s why:

  • Books give you access to the brightest brains. You can pick the brains of the smartest people on earth.
  • Reading helps you find new questions and discover unknown unknowns.
  • Reading is liberating. Freedom means choosing from a set of options. The more options you have, the freer you are. Reading helps you explore options you never knew existed.

If I had to name a single learning habit that transformed my life, it’d be reading. Books made me wealthy, transformed my sex life, expanded my worldview, and improved the way I work.

Start with the books you truly enjoy. When you love what you read, you will ultimately love to read.

Bad books are hard to read, while good books almost read themselves. Life is too short for bad books. Read the genres you love, the content you deeply enjoy, from authors you admire.

Start books quickly but also quit them fast if you don’t enjoy reading. There are too many excellent books on this planet. Once you quit a mediocre one, you can read a great one.

In case you’re struggling to make reading a habit borrow James Clear’s 2-minute-rule. Instead of trying to read 30 books, aim to read one page before bed every night. Reduce this habit into a 2-minute first step.

“It’s not about “educated” vs “un-educated.” It’s about “likes to read” and “doesn’t like to read.”

— Naval Ravikant

2) Reframe Your Questions

When you ask closed questions, you get limited answers. It’s easy to make the world black and white.

Whether you ask a colleague for feedback to advance your career or have your role model’s undivided attention — open-ended questions will help you get the most of it.

Great questions are designed to determine what the other person knows — not to show what you know.

If you don’t understand your counterpart’s answer clarify with “What makes you say that?” or “Why do you think that?”

Here are some great questions you can ask:

  • If we had spoken to you 10 years ago, what different views of the world and yourself would you have had?
  • What were the best and most worthy investments (money, time, energy, or different resources?
  • What advice would you give to a young person starting in (subject area)? Would you advise to specialize early or late?
  • Don’t: Do you think I could’ve done this better?
    Do: What could I have done better?
  • Don’t: Do you have feedback for me?
    Do: What feedback do you have for me?
    Even better: What’s one thing I could do better in that meeting?

Once you get in the habit of asking great questions, you’ll find yourself on the fast track to better learning.

“To ask the right question is harder than to answer it.”

— Georg Cantor

3) Stick Through With What You Start

Did you know less than half of the books that are bought for Kindle aren’t even opened? Or that data from Harvard University and MIT revealed only two to four percent of people who join online courses complete them?

The feeling you get when spending money on learning is rewarding. Yet, when you don’t follow through, it’s a waste of money. You’re tricking yourself into the illusion of knowledge.

Yet, it’s not your willpower that determines whether you finish an online course.

When you pick a course, you want to evaluate whether the curriculum design will help you achieve your desired outcome. Here are features to look out for:

  • Offering real-time feedback on learning progress.
  • Having assignments that are directly linked to your desired skill.
  • Including structured access to a fellow community.
  • Evidence-based learning design, e.g., deploying spaced repetition features and using testing as a tool.

“Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.”

— Naval Ravikant

4) Embrace Being Wrong

The enemy of learning is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge — the things you think you know.

When you’re convinced to know something, learning something new means you have to change your mind, people who don’t want to change their minds keep stuck in the same place. Overcoming our egos is one of the big learning challenges.

And the antidote? It’s your willingness to change your mind. To admit when you’re wrong. To ask questions instead of pretending to know.

Changing your opinion when presented with evidence or arguments is one of the most valuable skills you can have in the 21st century.

Well-known psychologist Adam Grant writes in ‘Think Again’: “Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.”

The best antidote to ignorance are so-called anti-libraries: a collection of unread books.

“You will never read all those books,” friends say when they look at my want-to-read list. They’re right. The list grows by two books every day. Even though I read two books a week, I will only read very few of the list.

But that’s the point. My antilibrary is a constant reminder of what I don’t know. It helps me stay curious and humble.

If you want to learn something new, you first need the humility to see what you don’t know.

“The purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs.” — Adam Grant

5) Start a Group with Likeminded Learners

In ‘Peak,’ author Anders Ericsson shares an interesting story about one of America’s first brilliant minds: Benjamin Franklin.

At age 21, Franklin gathered the smart people in his city to form a mutual improvement club. Each Friday evening, the club’s members brought an interesting conversation topic. Once every three months, the members wrote essays on the topics they discussed.

Anders Ericsson writes about the benefits: “One purpose of the club was to encourage the members to engage with the intellectual topics of the day. By creating the club Franklin not only ensured himself regular access to some of the most interesting people in the city, but he was giving himself extra motivation (as if he needed any) to delve into these topics himself.”

But you don’t need to be Benjamin Franklin to start a learning circle. Reach out to people that share your learning goal or join an existing group. Such a mastermind group can be a genius way to increase commitment and keep motivated.

Through regular collaboration, you form a community. You network with like-minded people from across the globe. As you follow the same learning goal, these relationships can be very powerful.

6) Create Your Own Version of The Material

Mere content consumption doesn’t lead to more knowledge. Human brains don’t work like recording devices. The words on the pages don’t magically stick to our memory.

Yet, people often overestimate the benefits of consuming things but underestimate the advantage you get from making things.

The key to effective learning isn’t to consume more information at an accelerating pace. The key is staying with what you learned and connecting and applying it to your life.

The authors of ‘Make it Stick’ compare learning with writing an essay. In the beginning, the first draft is unorganized and feels messy. Only after some consolidation and editing, things start to make sense and feel coherent.

Similarly, learning is at least a three-step process: encoding of information in your short-term memory, consolidating knowledge in the long-term memory and retrieving information when it’s needed.

To make the most of what you consume, you want to become a creator of newsletters, podcasts, blog posts, videos, or other learning material.

In December 2019, my partner and I started a podcast for the pure joy of learning. We labeled it “Zusammen Wachsen” (German for “Growing Together”) and recorded one episode a week about a topic we’re curious about.

For the past 81 weeks, this has been our ultimate learning engine.

Likewise, writing is one of the rare professions that give you a ticket to lifelong learning. When you’re typing your first posts, you can answer these meta-learning questions: “How does this relate to my life? In which situation will I make use of this knowledge? How does it connect to other insights I have on the topic?”

You can’t rephrase anything in your words if you don’t get it. By creating your own version, you become an effective learner and make new information stick.

7) Pick a Job that Helps You Learn Every Day

A few years ago, I became obsessed with starting at a tier-one consulting firm.

I studied to ace my exams, spent weeks practicing case studies, and admired consultants from afar. When I finally sat in the interview, there was just one problem: I realized I’d never want to work there.

Whenever I share this story, I hear similar anecdotes. So many people climb up the ladder only to realize it’s been leaning against the wrong wall.

Many work environments kill your love for learning. If you can, pick a job that provides you with the freedom to follow your curiosity. Ultimately, your job isn’t about what you do but about who you become on the way.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

How Cohort Based Courses Can Help You Master Any Skill You Want

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MOOCs are dead. Here’s what’s next.

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Having access to content is not enough to master a subject. Learners ace a skill via direct practice of the skill they’re trying to master.

In 2011, people believed massive open online courses, so-called MOOCs, would revolutionize online learning.

Yet, data from Harvard University and MIT revealed three devastating data points against these courses:

  1. Completion rates. Only three to four percent complete MOOCs — a rate that hasn’t improved in the past six years.
  2. Retention. Only seven percent of MOOC learners start another course after their first year.
  3. Accessibility. While MOOCs promised to bring high-quality education to all corners of the world, only 1.43 percent come from countries classified as “low” in the Human Development Index.

As a result, the future of education doesn’t belong to MOOCs any longer. Instead, a new model emerged. Whether you’re a content creator or a lifelong learner — here’s how Cohort-Based Courses can help you master any skill.

What are Cohort-Based Courses?

In Cohort Based Courses, so-called CBCs, a student group moves at the same pace through the same curriculum. Typically, CBCs include a mix of life lessons, remote assignments, and peer learning.

If you ever attended school, you’re familiar with cohort-based education. Schools and universities rely on cohort learning models — students take the same lecture, assignments, and tests simultaneously.

Both have in common that you don’t pay for the content’s quality. Studying with free videos can teach you as much as attending universities or CBCs. What you pay for is the likelihood of completing the learning track and achieving the desired outcome (e.g., land a job or acquire a specific skill).

Why CBCs Are Better Than MOOCs

Socrates tutored two learners at a time; a MOOC scaled learning up to 100,000. With CBCs, the teacher-student ratio increases, and relationships are at the core of the learning process again.

If you want to master a skill, access to instructors will help you stick with the course.

A study found interaction with instructors affects MOOC learner retention directly. CBCs use online tools like Zoom or Slack to give feedback and help students complete the course.

“Active learning works, and social learning works,” said Anant Agarwal, founder, and chief executive of edX, in an interview with the New York Times.

Seth Godin’s altMBA, a cohort-based online MBA, supports this fact with a completion rate of 96%. Other CBCs report, the completion rate is up to 85%.

Building relationships with instructors and peers, plus the limited time factor, is a way to force yourself to complete a course. Through more teacher-student and student-student touchpoints, you’re more likely to hold yourself accountable.

The Distinctive Learning Features

There’s more to CBCs than the tutoring and completion ratio: collaboration and community.

While you go through the course, you interact with your peers. Thus, learning is not one-directional (teacher to student) but also bi-directional (student to student).

Through regular collaboration, you form a community. You network with like-minded people from across the globe. As you follow the same learning goal, these relationships can be very powerful.

If you join a community of future data scientists, this network can give you access to opportunities and resources in the future that will enhance your career.

How You Can Distinguish Average from Great

You don’t absorb information and knowledge by consuming content. Instead, learning is at least a three-step process — you acquire, encode, and retrieve.

Learning by doing is much more powerful than learning by watching. When you pick a course, evaluate whether the curriculum design will help you achieve your desired outcome. Here are key features to look out for:

  • Real-time feedback on learning progress.
  • Assignments that are directly linked to your desired skill.
  • Structured access to a subject-specific community.
  • Evidence-based learning design, e.g., spaced repetition features and testing mechanisms.

7 Promising Cohort-Based-Courses

Here are seven courses you might want to consider:

  1. Career Advancement
    Reforge teaches the systems and frameworks that help you take the next step in your career. CBCs include product management, marketing, and growth strategies.
  2. Writing (Beginner level)
    Ship 30 for 30 teaches online writing through active learning. You will establish a writing and publishing routine with 500+ other writers.
  3. Writing (Advanced level)
    Write of Passage helps you develop a process for cultivating ideas and distilling them into writing.
  4. Knowledge Management
    Building your Second Brain can support you in saving your best ideas, organizing your learning, and expanding your creative output.
  5. Video Creation
    Minimum Viable Video is a 5-week live cohort that helps you creating and publishing professional videos that move the needle.
  6. EdTech, NoCode, Deep Tech, Scale, and More
    In 2021 Be On Deck launches 120 cohorts of 25 programs. They attract top talent to accelerate your ideas and careers, surrounded by a world-class community.
  7. Youtube
    The Part-Time YouTuber Academy teaches you how to grow your YouTube channel from 0 to 100,000+ subscribers and transform it into a sustainable, income-generating machine while keeping your day job.

In Conclusion

In a podcast interview on the future of education, Udemy founder Gagan Biyani stated how in 2009, nobody believed in online learning. Since then, everything has changed.

Apart from MOOCs, like EdX or Coursera, other EdTech solutions emerged. Platforms like Udemy or Skillshare created marketplaces for online education. Teachers competed with keywords and content and shared their earnings with the platform.

Then followed a third iteration: direct-to-customer solutions, such as Teachable, Kajabi, and Podia. On these platforms, online educators bring their own audience while keeping most of the revenue.

The new iteration towards CBCs is more student-focused than any previous solution, and it’s one of the most effective ways to master skills online:

  • Accountability through communities and instructors helps learners follow through when things get hard.
  • Because CBCs are outcome-focused (e.g., mastering a skill, landing a job, growing an audience) instructors focus on the how instead of the why.
  • CBCs help learners build skill-relevant communities that will support them in their future endeavors.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

Top 3 Ways to Discover Inspiring Content as a Creator

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All of them are free.

Source: Created by the author via Canva

With fluff-flooded feeds, finding unique content can be tricky. As a creator, you probably know how difficult that can be.

When I started writing, I wasted much research time on social platforms. In the end, I was rarely satisfied with the results.

But discovering inspiring resources doesn’t need to be complicated. There are reliable, free platforms designed for online creators.

Here are my top three sources for content inspiration. Every single one can improve your creative process.

1) Refind — the 5 most relevant links.

The site helps you find the best from all around the web, tailored to your interests, curated by experts and algorithms.

You follow your favorite topics, sites, thought leaders, and friends, and Refind puts together the most relevant new links and key takeaways for you. Every day you see 5–10 new content pieces. I use Refind as a key inspiration for my weekly newsletter.

In addition, you can also subscribe to Deep Dives. Dozens of experts introduce you to the best articles and videos from their field of expertise.

For example, I created a deep dive on ‘How to build a writing habit’ with ten time-tested articles and videos from around the web. Any creator can curate a deep dive and get boosted to an audience who would otherwise not have found them.

How you can use it:

Sign up for free here and select your favorite creators and industries. Once the platform knows your preferences, you’ll receive 5–10 relevant links each day.

Whenever you find something valuable, you can organize your links within your collections— for yourself or the web.

Screenshot of Refind.

2) Bookshlf —curation by humans.

Bookshlf is a place designed for curious learners who share their knowledge in public.

So-called shelves are curated link collections. A single Shelf can be organized by topic, mood, category, or media type, or in any other way that makes sense to you. As a result, the platform is filled with diverse content across industries.

Most curators post 20% self-created content, like their podcasts, videos, articles, and 80% resources. You can find things that alter your mindset, your understanding or get you to look at the world from a new angle.

I’ve used the platform since January 2020 to discover and organize content. I created shelves around my writing topics. On my profile, you’ll find shelves for education & learning, entrepreneurship, and creativity.

How you can use it:

You can sign up free here. Browse the Shelves and communities that trigger your interest. Subscribe to Shelves and follow your favorite curators to access exciting and relevant content easily.

You can also create your Shelves and get tipped by other users.

Screenshot of Bookshlf.

3) Feedly — smarter news reader.

Feedly is an online service that uses artificial intelligence to cut through the noise and flag specific topics and trends you care about from all the sources you trust. In essence, it’s an RSS feed aggregator.

While Refind and Bookshlf started recently, Feedly has been around since 2006. The platform is used by +15 million curious minds.

I started with Feedly in 2014 and upgraded to the premium version four months ago. For $99/year, I have all newsletters, favorite Twitter feeds, and blogs in one place.

How you can use it:

You can sign up free here. Just like Refind and Bookshlf, Feedly is free — and if you’re happy with limited functionality, it can stay free forever.

Feedly is less intuitive than Refind or Bookshlf. First, you want to find and organize the right sources. Second, train the AI assistant Leo to filter out the noise (which I haven’t managed to do yet). Then, you can read through your curated feed.

Screenshot of Feedly.

In Conclusion

Managing and discovering content doesn’t need to feel difficult. These three tools help you organize, curate, and find the content you love:

  • Refind — the 5–10 most relevant links tailored to your interest.
  • Bookshlf — a digital library from curators for curators.
  • Feedly — an RSS feed aggregator to have everything in a single place.

I rely on all three content discovery tools, but right now, Refind is my favorite (it’s free, but I like it even better than my paid Feedly).

Instead of feeling discouraged by all these ways to find new content, experiment at your own pace. Try the platforms that resonate with you, and screw the rest.

Choose one or two new content resources until you find a pattern that helps you to become a better content creator.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

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3 Promising Opportunities to Teach Your Kids From Home

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These organizations innovate homeschooling.

Photo by Marga Santoso on Unsplash

“What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children’s growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools,” educational theorist John Holt said, “but that it isn’t a school at all.”

Holt argued schools work as oppressive environments and turned kids into compliant employees. And that’s how in the 1970s, the modern homeschooling movement began.

The debate is still ongoing, and many people argue schools enforce and prioritize compliance and consumption over critical thinking and creativity.

Learning in home education is often less formal and more personalized than school education — ranging from traditional school lessons to free forms such as unschooling.

Reasons for homeschooling vary from better educational opportunities, a healthier learning environment, special needs, or being the only option in remote areas.

Homeschooling is legal in many countries (e.g., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States) but outlawed by others (e.g., Germany, Japan, Brazil).

Homeschooling legality Source: Fobos92 and Svenskbygderna

What follows are three organizations that rethink the way children learn from home.

1) Primer — A home for ambitious kids.

Primer is the world’s first community built for curious and ambitious kids to find and explore their interests together. Their goal is to “free the next generation of kids to be more ambitious, more creative, and to think for themselves.”

Unlike connected learning networks that replace core curricula, Primer is supplemental. To foster kid’s curiosity, the team offers various learning formats:

  • Clubs. Students collaborate on projects such as writing, storytelling, coding, inventing machines, music, or nature.
  • Rooms. Live audio chat spaces allow students to experiment with new ideas, solve problems, and tap into their interests (e.g., debating, writing, puzzling, coding, starting a business).
  • Journals. In journals, kids can document their projects by creating and organizing blocks of text, images, videos, and links.

There is no set schedule for a day with Primer, as all their activities happen in addition to set curricula.

After a free trial month, Primer is $49 a month for the first child and $19 a month for each additional child.

Primer was founded by Ryan Delk and Maksim Stepanenko, who both have been homeschooled. Previously, they helped build companies like SpaceX, Square, Gumroad, Lyft, and Coinbase.

“We studied the American Revolution by driving to historic locations in the original 13 colonies and crawled through cardboard tubes to learn how the digestive system works.”

— Ryan Delk, Co-Founder of Primer

Screenshot of Primer Landing Page

2) Outschool — Where kids love learning.

Outschool online marketplace of virtual classes for children aged 3–18. Outschool’s goal is to engage and inspire learning through various classes and subjects.

The platform offers kids the opportunity to explore their interests in-depth with interactive classes taught via live video by experienced, independent teachers.

Like Primer, Outschool doesn’t suggest a fully-fledged curriculum. Instead, the platform offers more than 100,000 live lessons to more than 900,000 learners in 174 countries.

Pricing starts with $10 a course, and the most expensive multi-week course I found on the platform costs about $75.

The platform was founded by Amir Nathoo, who is a former investor and holds various patents.

“If we just stick to the core curriculum, then it is very difficult for kids to develop differentiated skills. More of the school day needs to be spent on kids pursuing their interests with the benefit of increased autonomy and self-direction — with this, kids’ motivation to learn can increase. There’s going to be so much change in technology and society in the next 10 years, I think we will head in a direction of hybrid core + self-directed.”

— Amir Nathoo, Founder of Outschool

Screenshot of Outschool Landing Page

3) Synthesis — Where kids become
problem-solvers.

Synthesis started as a school spin-off from Elon Musk’s AdAstra school. As of now, it’s a weekly, 1-hour enrichment program for students who want to learn how to build the future.

They offer a simulation-based learning experience built around complex team games. Students work through case studies, simulations, and game-based challenges.

Synthesis doesn’t design simulations for content but the experience. Simulations are complex and have no right answers. For example, 18–20 kids work in groups with one facilitator. But facilitators don’t lecture. Instead, the student groups explore and learn game rules on their own.

The idea of the simulations is to change the way kids approach real-life problems and prepare them to navigate the complexity and chaos that comes with life.

While playing, kids teach themselves how to win. In the process, they learn new problem-solving skills. Here are two game examples:

  • Art for All. Students compete in an auction game for the best art exhibits. The simulation covers negotiation and covers mental models such as auction theory and the winner’s curse.
  • Fire! In this collaborative game, students fight forest fires with varying conditions. It covers mental models such as positive-sum vs. zero-sum games.

Pricing is $180 per month, and a sibling discount is available.

Synthesis is led by Chrisman Frank. On a visit to Elon Musk’s AdAstra school, he fell in love with Synthesis.

In 2020, Frank convinced the AdAstra principal and his former colleague Josh Dahn to spin-off Synthesis as a for-profit company. Frank’s vision was to scale the learning software and develop a generation of super thinkers.

“When mistakes are not penalized, people are more likely to just keep trying. And if you keep trying, then naturally, you have more chances of eventually succeeding.”

— Ana Fabrega, Chief Evangelist at Synthesis

Screenshot of Synthesis Landing Page

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

5 Quick Fixes for a Calmer, More Focused Life

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How to *not* be distracted all the time.

Image created by the author via Canva.

Do you ever feel time runs like sand through your fingers?

If you’re struggling to live a more present life, you likely focus on the wrong things. Improving your inner peace is about what you do less of, not more of.

Taking a moment to integrate these quick fixes can help you find an inner state of calm while staying on top of things.

None of these suggestions should take you more than three minutes to set up, but every single one will help you reach more focus and presence.

1) Change Your Social Media Passwords

Without your active consent, social media’s persuasive design tricks you into screen time with severe consequences.

Different research attests to a relation between social media usage and mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and even suicide-related thoughts.

Not knowing your password is one of the most effective ways to spend less time on social media. I follow this technique since 2017, and it has given me weeks of time. I created a threshold that prevents me from impulsive social media checks.

How to do it:

Go to all social media you use regularly and change your password to a random combination you can’t remember.

Don’t save the new password in your browser. Instead, write it on a piece of paper. Then log off your social media platforms and place the paper in some drawer.

2) Don’t Consolidate Messaging Apps

Self-labeled productivity apps like Shift or Franz sound tempting. It seems convenient to aggregate all communication channels in one place.

Yet, these apps lead to context switching and thereby destroy your focus.

Cal Newport says: “Switching your attention — even if only for a minute or two — can significantly impede your cognitive function for a long time to follow.”

Once I deleted Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and Franz from my desktop, I focused better on one project at a time.

How to do it:

Delete all messaging aggregators from your computer. Anytime you need a specific communication channel, open it in your browser.

Instead of being surprised by new messages, you actively decide when to open and read the messages.

3) Delete Mail from Your Phone

I used to check my email when walking up the stairs and while waiting in a line. My mind revolved around work even while I wasn’t at my desk.

But our brains need off-time. To get maximum focus during working hours, we need enough time away from work. Plus, boredom brings benefits.

How to do it:

Pick your phone and delete your Mail app. Nothing is so urgent it can’t wait until you’re back at your desk.

“Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something good, and stop bouncing around.”

— Marcus Aurelius

4) Use Site-Blockers

Compulsive social media checks will make your thoughts bounce around like a ping-pong ball. A study from Irvine University found it takes 20 minutes to refocus after distractions.

Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook executive, says: “We were not evolved to get social approval being dosed upon us every 5 minutes.”

For better productivity, fix your environment. If you don’t want to get distractions, use a site-blocker.

How to do it:

I use this free chrome extension to block LinkedIn, Facebook, and Mail from 9 PM to noon.

Block all sites that dilute your focus. You’ll be surprised how much more you can achieve in less time.

5) Charge Your Phone Outside Your Bedroom

If you charge your phone in your bedroom, you’re likely poisoning your mind with trash at the most important times of your day — before you sleep and after you wake up.

Here are the three of the most damaging effects of using your smartphone in your bedroom:

  • You lose time
  • You lose focus
  • Your sleep quantity and quality drops

By abandoning your phone from your bedroom, you can implement new bedtime and morning rituals such as reading, meditating, journaling, or letting your mind wander.

Keeping my phone out of my bedroom was the single most effective habit to read more books. Since I managed my phone habits, I have read one book a week for almost three years.

How to do it:

Get an alarm clock and stop waking up to your smartphone’s alarm. When you sleep with your phone in another room, you don’t need to exert your willpower first thing in the morning. Instead, you’ll start your days with a clear mind and ease into a distraction-free morning.

Often, anxiety and hurry are caused by distraction. These quick fixes help me live a calmer life that’s full of focus. I hope they do the same for you.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.