Learning

💡 3-Sentence-Summary

An unforgettable memoir about a woman who was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom and, despite her extremely difficult family circumstances, managed to earn a Ph.D. from an elite university. Throughout the book, she shares all the lessons she learned on her way. Tara’s story will continue to motivate you long after reading. You’ll feel empowered to tackle any challenge that lies ahead of you.

💭 What I think about it

If Tara managed to earn her degree despite all the struggles, what will withhold you from achieving your goals? There’s a reason you’ll find plenty of praise for this book from the world’s greatest thinkers.

🌟 Who benefits from reading this book?

This book is not only beautifully written, but it’s also one of the most powerful success stories about higher education. You’ll peek inside a Mormon family and off-grit Idaho life. Tara’s story will motivate and stick with you long after reading.

📚 How the book changed my life

Here are the three key lessons I took away from the book:

1. Education can be a way out of the most difficult situations.
2. Whatever learning challenge you face, you can do it.
3. Life is a quest for learning; one is never done with it.

✍️ My Favorite Quotes

• “You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
• My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.
• The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I’m fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I’m not falling apart. I’m just lazy. Why it’s better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I’m not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.
• We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.
• Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.
• I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.
• The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.
• Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.
• An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.

💡 3-Sentence-Summary

Think Again can make you more humble, self-aware, and intelligent by showing how intellectual ignorance can harm you. Grant differentiates between preacher mode, politician mode, and scientist mode. According to Grant, the right thing to do is to follow the scientist mode and doubt what you know, be curious about what you don’t know and update your beliefs when presented with new evidence.

💭 What I think about it

This book inspired me and I dedicated an entire article to the key lessons. Changing your opinion when presented with evidence or arguments is more important than ever.

🌟 Who benefits from reading this book?

This book is literally for everyone who is willing to expand their mind. The key ideas from the book can improve your ability to rethink and change your mind.

📚 How the book changed my life

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. Nassim Nicholas Taleb says: “Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.” This book reminded me to stay curious and question everything I learned – despite (or because of!) reading so much.

✍️ My Favorite Quotes

• The smarter you are, the more complex the problems you can solve—and the faster you can solve them. 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.
• Cognitive laziness. Some psychologists point out that we’re mental misers: we often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones.
• We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995.
• No matter how much brainpower you have, if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again.
• The purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs.
• If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.
• You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future while maintaining the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present. That’s the sweet spot of confidence.
• This evidence is new, and we still have a lot to learn about when impostor syndrome is beneficial versus when it’s detrimental. Still, it leaves me wondering if we’ve been misjudging impostor syndrome by seeing it solely as a disorder.
• Psychologists find that admitting we were wrong doesn’t make us look less competent. It’s a display of honesty and a willingness to learn.
• Rethinking depends on a different kind of network: a challenge network, a group of people we trust to point out our blind spots and help us overcome our weaknesses. Their role is to activate rethinking cycles by pushing us to be humble about our expertise, doubt our knowledge, and be curious about new perspectives.
• Agreeableness is about seeking social harmony, not cognitive consensus. It’s possible to disagree without being disagreeable. Although I’m terrified of hurting other people’s feelings, when it comes to challenging their thoughts, I have no fear. In fact, when I argue with someone, it’s not a display of disrespect—it’s a sign of respect. It means I value their views enough to contest them.
• Changing your mind doesn’t make you a flip-flopper or a hypocrite. It means you were open to learning.
• When we choose not to engage with people because of their stereotypes or prejudice, we give up on opening their minds.
• Psychologists have a name for this: binary bias. It’s a basic human tendency to seek clarity and closure by simplifying a complex continuum into two categories.
• A fascinating example is a divide around emotional intelligence. On one extreme is Daniel Goleman, who popularized the concept. He preaches that emotional intelligence matters more for performance than cognitive ability (IQ) and accounts for “nearly 90 percent” of success in leadership jobs. At the other extreme is Jordan Peterson, writing that “There is NO SUCH THING AS EQ” and prosecuting emotional intelligence as “a fraudulent concept, a fad, a convenient band-wagon, a corporate marketing scheme.” Both men hold doctorates in psychology, but neither seems particularly interested in creating an accurate record. If Peterson had bothered to read the comprehensive meta-analyses of studies spanning nearly two hundred jobs, he’d have discovered that—contrary to his claims—emotional intelligence is real and it does matter. Emotional intelligence tests predict performance even after controlling for IQ and personality. If Goleman hadn’t ignored those same data, he’d have learned that if you want to predict performance across jobs, IQ is more than twice as important as emotional intelligence (which accounts for only 3 to 8 percent of performance)

💡 3-Sentence-Summary

Learning how to learn is one of the most powerful skills you can learn. This book reveals how most people’s learning strategies are inefficient, ineffective and wrong. The book reveals how effective learning strategies look like and how you can retain knowledge and skills for a lifetime (vs just for a test).

💭 What I think about it

While this is not my favourite book on learning, it is a good refresher on the underlying principles of learning how to learn. For example, it explains learning and memory need two components: the learned information itself and a so-called retrieval cue that helps you find the learned material. It also enforces why retrieval is so powerful: when you recall a memory both it and its cue are reinforced. With every additional retrieval, you strengthen the connection and can access your memory faster.

🌟 Who benefits from reading this book?

This book is particularly good for students who look for ways to improve their learning.

📚 How the book changed my life

To be honest, the book didn’t change my life in a meaningful way. But it taught me how to use new information to make meaningful connections in my brain and that a multi-dimensional learning experience that involves many senses is effective.

✍️ My Favorite Quotes

• Higher education is odd in that we don’t typically teach teachers how to teach, students how to learn, or administrators how to lead.
• Better learning does not always require more effort or more time; rather one need only effectively align how the brain naturally learns with the demands of the college classroom.
• New learning requires a considerable amount of practice and a meaningful connection to other information in order to become a more permanent part of memory.
• Your teacher’s goal is to get you to do as much of the work in the learning process as possible, because the more work your brain does, the greater the number of connections established. More connections in turn increase the likelihood that more permanent memories will be formed.
• Only when you practice, read, write, think, talk, collaborate, and reflect does your brain make permanent connections. Your teachers cannot do this for you, and at times this work will make you tired.
• To remember what you need to know in school, you need to have repeated exposure to the material and then you need to use it. This strengthens both the memory and the cues for recovering the memory so that you can use the information when you need it.

💡 3-Sentence-Summary

How to Take Smart Notes is an actionable, well-research how-to guide on improving your writing, reading, learning, note-taking, and knowledge management. Sönke Ahrens has spent years exploring the Zettelkasten (slip-box method). This book is the best English literature on the topic and explores fleeting notes, literature notes, and permanent notes in depth.

💭 What I think about it

Because of its applicability, this is my favorite book on note-taking. You’ll not only understand how note-taking works as a learning tool, but also get actionable insights on how to implement this into your life. The book is like “Make it Stick” applied to note-taking.

🌟 Who benefits from reading this book?

This book is for anyone who wants to level up their personal knowledge management.

📚 How the book changed my life

These are several ways this book (in combination with setting up a Digital Zettelkasten in RoamReseach) has transformed my thinking, learning, and writing. I wrote an entire article about this here.

• Increased productivity. I write and create faster. Instead of using my brain to browse through books and digital bookmark notes, I have everything in one place. A research-based 1,300-word article used to take me three hours to write— with Zettelkasten, it takes me one and a half.
• Original ideas. Whenever I write or research a topic, I browse through my Roamkasten and find what I’m looking for, plus connections between domains I hadn’t thought about in the first place.
• Better thinking. New information challenges my thinking and helps me overcome cognitive biases. I gain a deeper understanding of everything I read.

✍️ My Favorite Quotes

• Every intellectual endeavour starts with a note.
• To seek as many opportunities to learn as possible is the most reliable long-term growth strategy.
• A good workflow can easily turn into a virtuous circle, where the positive experience motivates us to take on the next task with ease, which helps us to get better at what we are doing, which n return makes it more likely for us to enjoy the work, and so on.
• Not learning from what we read because we don’t take the time to elaborate on it is the real waste of time.
• Notes are only as valuable as the note and reference networks they are embedded in.
• We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval)
• If we accompany every step of our work with the question, “What is interesting about this?” and everything we read with the question, “What is so relevant about this that it is worth noting down?” we do not just choose information according to our interest

💡 3-Sentence-Summary

The research group around neuroscientist Henry Roediger and psychologist Mark McDaniel spent ten years exploring learning strategies. ‘Make it Stick’ summarizes six evidence-based, application-ready strategies that help you learn better and store new knowledge in your long-term memory. The six strategies include 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).

💭 What I think about it

Because of its applicability, this is my favorite book on evidence-based learning. You’ll realize the factors that shape your intellectual ability lie to a surprising extent within your own control. After reading, you’ll understand how to make the best learning techniques work for you.

🌟 Who benefits from reading this book?

This book is for anyone who wants to become a better learner.

📚 How the book changed my life

This book helped me understand fundamental truths about learning: Here are some powerful concepts from the book explores:

• Your brain’s capacity is unlimited. Contrary to common belief, our brains are never full. The more we learn, the more we can remember. Learning is a virtuous circle. The more cues we have, the easier it is to encode new information to these cues. As long as you connect further information to existing brain branches, you can store much more than you think.
• To learn, you first need to forget. I always thought forgetting is a character’s flaw. But it isn’t. Forgetting is necessary for new learning. That’s why spaced repetition is among the most effective learning strategies. You allow forgetting to occur and thereby strengthen your memory.
• The power of reflection. Reflecting leads to stronger learning. To reflect, you need to retrieve, connect, and visualize earlier memories. Often, you mentally practice what you’d do the next time differently. That’s why regular thinking breaks are so valuable.

 

✍️ My Favorite Quotes

• Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills, and processes, is a quest. Don’t assume you’re doing something wrong if learning feels hard.
• Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.
• Many teachers believe that if they can make learning easier and faster, the learning will be better. Much research turns this belief on its head: when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer.
• 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 of the content. The hours immersed in rereading can seem like due diligence, but the amount of study time is no measure of mastery.
• It’s not just what you know, but how you practice what you know that determines how well the learning serves you later.
• Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.