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🧠 Learning Hacks

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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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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Antilibraries Are the Better Libraries

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Here’s how they can accelerate your learning.

Photo by Pickawood on Unsplash

Do you ever feel guilty about the book staple you haven’t read? Polymath Nassim Nicholas Taleb says you shouldn’t:

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

Yes, you read it right. The pages you haven’t studied indeed add value to your life. Here’s why.

Antilibraries protect you from ignorance

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. Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes:

“A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.”

Antilibraries help you overcome the biggest enemy

The illusion of knowledge — the things you think you know — is learning’s biggest enemy. The authors of the learning bible ‘Make it Stick’ write:

“The illusion of mastery is an example of poor metacognition: what we know about what we know. Being accurate in your judgment of what you know and don’t know is critical for decision making.”

Stuart Firestein, professor of Biology at Columbia University, adds an important point:

“We know a lot of stuff but of course there is more stuff that we don’t know. And not only is there more stuff that we don’t know — but the more we know, the more we increase the amount of stuff we don’t know, because there was all that stuff that we didn’t know that we didn’t know before. [
]

An image I always like is of a circle of knowledge — but as the circle grows, as the diameter increases, so does the circumference that’s in contact with all that darkness outside the circle of light — that ignorance.”

When you’re convinced, you 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. So overcoming our egos is one of the big learning challenges.

Antilibraries accelerate your learning

“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.

My friends are right. Even though I read 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.”

How to move forward

Don’t ever feel discouraged by the books you haven’t read. Instead, see them as a reminder to be humble and curious. Combined, they’re the essential ingredients for life-long learning.

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 Binge-Worthy Books for Life-Long Learners

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These resources can help you expand your brain.

Created by the author via Canva.

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life,” Mortimer J. Adler said. I disagree.

Books don’t magically make you live the good life. You can read a book a week without changing at all.

Reading doesn’t help you per se — it’s reading the right books that can make all the difference.

No life skill can earn you greater dividends than learning how to learn. After reading more than 30 books on learning, these three are my favorite picks on meta-learning.

Every single one will help you understand how your brain learns. By doing so, you’ll make better decisions and find yourself on your journey to wisdom.

1) Make it Stick

Did you know rereading and highlighting are the most popular yet the least productive learning strategies?

Revisiting concepts and ideas might feel like learning because you recognize some of them. But you’re not learning. You’re trapped in an illusion of knowledge.

Mastering a text is different from recalling or remembering what you read.

“People commonly believe that if you expose yourself to something enough times, you can burn it into memory,” the authors write.

They also why it’s not worth it: “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.”

I used to think learning should feel easy. Slow and difficult meant unproductive. Turns out I was wrong.

Effective learning must feel hard: “Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”

‘Make it Stick’ doesn’t stop after dismantling learning myths.

The research group around neuroscientist Henry Roediger and psychologist Mark McDaniel spent ten years exploring learning strategies. Their goal was to bridge the gap between cognitive science and educational science.

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.

Last but not least, ‘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).

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

2) The New Science of Learning

This book should be mandatory for students, teachers, and anyone who wants to learn. It’s based on state-of-the-art science about how the human brain learns. It will help you make learning more effective and teaches how you can retain knowledge and skills for a lifetime.

Similar to the ‘Make it Stick,’ the authors reveal common ineffective learning methods. The authors agree on many levels: “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.”

To learn effectively, you need to use new information to form meaningful connections to other information. That’s why a multi-dimensional learning experience that involves many senses is effective.

Listen, talk, read, write, and think about the new material at hand to make learning more effective. The more work your brain does, the more connections you establish. And as you know, more connections increase the chances that you remember what you learn.

But it’s not only the learning itself that can improve your memory:

  • Sleep. During sleep, your brain cells shrink, and fluid can wash the toxins out. Sleep is your brain’s way of keeping itself clean and healthy. While sleeping, you strengthen the learning of your day.
  • Movement. Various studies attest to the importance of exercise for learning ability. Move your body to learn better.
  • Environment. A distracted brain can’t study. Prepare your environment for maximum focus. Go to a study room, turn off your phone, and eliminate any other distraction.

“Learning and memory have two key components: the learned object itself and the retrieval cue to find the learned object.”

3) How to Take Smart Notes

Do you finish a book or an article and think you’ve found great insights but don’t know what to do with them?

I read a lot, but I struggled to manage the input and my ideas for creative output. While writing an article, I often remembered I read something related but couldn’t find the source.

As Ahrens writes: “Having read more does not automatically mean having more ideas.”

Taking smart notes is the fast track to improve your productivity and creativity. Yet, most note-taking systems are ineffective.

This is one of the books that has forever changed the way I learn. Before, I didn’t know the difference between note-taking, note-making, and note-hierarchies.

‘How to Take Smart Notes’ transformed the way I store and manage what I read. It helped me realize a learning workflow can turn into a virtuous circle.

The idea is not to hoard knowledge but to develop ideas, arguments, and discussions, and the method he describes is called the slipbox.

Niklas Luhmann, a social scientist, invented the slipbox. He wrote 73 books and almost 400 research articles on various topics during his life, including politics, art, ecology, media, law, and the economy.

When someone asked him how he published so much, Luhmann replied, “I’m not thinking everything on my own. Much of it happens in my Zettelkasten. My productivity is largely explained by the Zettelkasten method”.

The slipbox is a fantastic learning tool as it forces us to use all the strategies known for effective learning.

When you read the book, you’ll marvel at sentences like: “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).”

I love how Sönke Ahrens describes Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method and embeds it into the science of learning. It’s like “Make it Stick” applied to note-taking. This book will forever change the way you take notes.

“To seek as many opportunities to learn as possible is the most reliable long-term growth strategy.”

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If Knowledge Is Power, Knowing What You Don’t Know Is Wisdom

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Adam Grant’s principles can change the way you think.

Created by the author via Canva.

“When was the last time you changed your mind about something?” I send to all new online dating matches. I want to test whether they foster a flexible, curious mind.

Changing your opinion when presented with evidence or arguments is one of the most valuable skills you can have in the 21st century. In fact, it’s so relevant, well-known psychologist Adam Grant dedicated an entire book about it.

Bill and Melinda Gates say ‘Think Again’ is a must-read. If you’re willing to expanding your mind, you can learn a lot from this book. The following insights can improve your ability to rethink and change your mind.

Embrace Your Second Thoughts

“You can’t change your opinion all the time,” my parents used to say whenever I liked something that I previously disliked. “It makes you weak.” So whenever I changed my mind, I felt guilty.

Society values character traits such as decisiveness and having a strong opinion. It gives a sense of control and stability. But this thinking is flawed.

If I could talk to my younger self, I’d say changing your mind isn’t a bad character trait. It means you’ve got a flexible mind and are open to learning.

When you don’t allow for rethinking your opinions and updating your beliefs, you stagnate. You’ll stop challenging your ideas and numb yourself through life.

“Decisiveness is overrated,” Adam Grant writes, “but I reserve the right to change my mind.”

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

The Smarter You Are, The Harder You Might Fail

In our world of information overload, your intelligence isn’t all that matters. In fact, your heightened ability to learn and think can be counterproductive. Recent research suggests the smarter you are, the harder it is to update your beliefs.

Most smart people lack intellectual humility — they’re unaware of what they don’t know. Here’s an example.

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 a good deal, you become ignorant. You might be too confident, too sure, and less aware of the things you don’t know.

That’s why I love antilibraries, a collection of unread books. Antilibraries represent unknowledge. They’re a great cure for overconfidence and ignorance.

“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 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.

If you want to learn something new, you first need the humility to see what you don’t know.

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

The True Purpose of Learning

Grant tells the story of Spanx founder Sara Blakely. While she knew she could turn her idea en idea for footless pantyhose into reality, she doubted having the right tools for it.

Blakely relied on her beginner’s mindset and learned as much as possible about prototyping and patent law. What made her successful was her confidence in learning anything she would need.

It’s your mindset, your views on your intelligence, and your abilities that determine how much you learn.

Researcher Carol Dweck highlights the differences between the two types of thinking. Even though her model falls prey to the binary bias, her categorization can help us understand the distinct mindsets.

People with fixed mindsets believe intelligence is a fixed trait. In contrast, individuals with growth mindsets, such as Sara Blakely, see intelligence as something that grows by acquiring knowledge and skills.

“The purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs.”

The Potential Power of Imposter Syndrom

Many people bought into the story that you can become successful despite your doubts. But what if your doubts drive success?

Basima Tewfik led a study to explore this idea. She invited med students who were about to start their clinical rotations two times. On their first visit, the students answered a survey on impostor syndrome. They were, for example, asked how often they think stuff like “I am not as qualified as others think I am.”

A week later, she invited these med students to inspect patients (who were played by actors). Similar to their professional reality, the students diagnosed diseases and suggested treatments.

Twefik tracked whether the students made the right diagnoses and how they handled their patients.

Guess what: the students with stronger imposter syndrome did significantly better — they scored higher on empathy, respect, professionalism, and communication.

This evidence is new and has not yet been replicated among other studies. But we might have been wrong about judging impost syndrome as a weakness.

“Feeling like an impostor can make us better learners. Having some doubts about our knowledge and skills takes us off a pedestal, encouraging us to seek out insights from others.”

Final Thoughts

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.”

To not operate among the stupid, keep in mind to:

  • update your beliefs when presented with evidence and new arguments
  • remaining aware of what you don’t know
  • looking for ways to learn and evolve your beliefs
  • use your doubts to seek out insight from others

By valuing curiosity, learning, and mental flexibility, you will not only win my heart but also live a happier and wiser life.

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Evidence-Based Strategies to Better Remember What You Learn

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Many people waste their time relying on outdated learning techniques. They use ineffective strategies like rereading and highlighting. By following these techniques, learning becomes pointless entertainment.

A research group around neuroscientist Henry Roediger and psychologist Mark McDaniel spent ten years exploring learning strategies. Their goal was to bridge the gap between cognitive science and educational science. The result of their work is ‘Make it stick.’

Reading more than 15 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.

Or, as the researchers of ‘Make it Stick’ put it:

“Elements that shape your intellectual ability lie to a surprising extent within your own control.”

Howwe learn changes our brain’s neural network. This concept, neuroplasticity, is the enabler for lifelong-learning. Whether you’re a life-long learner, a trainer, teacher, student, or a parent who wants to best help your kids, effective learning strategies can make new knowledge stick.

Here are five evidence-based strategies that help you learn better and store new knowledge in your long-term memory.

1.) Retrieval Practice

With retrieval, you try to recall something you’ve learned in the past from your memory. For example, you might ask yourself what you remembered from the book you finished two weeks ago.

The more time has gone since your information consumption, the more difficult time you’ll have to retrieve it. Naturally, a few days after we learn something, forgetting sets in. And that’s why retrieval is so powerful. In the words of the authors:

“Retrieval strengthens the memory and interrupts forgetting.”

While retrieval practice can take many forms — take a test, write an essay, do a multiple-choice test, practice with flashcards — some forms are better than others:

“While any kind of retrieval practice generally benefits learning, the implication seems to be that where more cognitive effort is required for retrieval, greater retention results.”

2.) Spaced Repetition

With spaced repetition, you repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals. Again, our natural forgetting curve kicks in. But the harder it feels to recall the information, the stronger the learning effect:

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

It might sound counterintuitive, but forgetting is essential for learning. Spacing out practice might feel less productive than rereading a text because you’ll realize what you forgot. To retrieve your knowledge, your brain has to work harder. And it should work hard.

As a rule of thumb: learning works best when it feels hard.

3.) Interleaving

Imagine you had to remember 100 paintings from five different epochs. Would you prefer studying one epoch after another or mixing all five?

While our intuition tells us blocking to be more effective, researchers pointed towards the benefits of interleaving:

“If your intuition tells you to block, you should probably interleave.”

Here’s what interleaving means:

“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.”

Alternate working on different problems feels more difficult as it facilitates forgetting. But as you will know by now, that’s the desired effect you want to achieve.

“If learners spread out their study of a topic, returning to it periodically over time, they remember it better.”

4.) Elaboration

Elaborating means you explain and describe an idea in your own words. You consciously associate material you want to learn with what you’ve previously learned. In the words of the book’s authors:

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

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.

Elaborative rehearsal is a method to encode 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.

5.) Reflection

Reflection is a combination of retrieval practice and elaboration that adds new layers to your learning materials. Here are a few questions the authors suggest to reflect upon:

What went well?

What could have gone better?

What might you need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might you use the next time to get better results?

By reflecting, you’re retrieving what you learned and connecting it to existing memories. In the words of Roediger and McDaniel:

“Reflection can involve several cognitive activities that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these new experiences and visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.”

6.) (Self)-Testing & Calibration

While reading often falsely tricks us into perceived mastery, testing shows us whether we truly mastered the subject at hand. Self-testing helps you identify knowledge gaps and bring weak areas to the light. In their book, the scientists conclude:

“It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution.”

To answer a question or solve a problem before looking at the answer is what learning scientists also call experiential learning. Even if you don’t get the right answer, the process facilitates remembering the correct answer.

Plus, objective instruments, like testing, or self-testing, help you adjust your sense of what you know and don’t know:

“One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.”

Takeaway

If you only remember one thing, pick the following:

“Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”

Effective learning strategies include retrieval, elaboration, spaced repetition, interleaving, self-testing, and reflection.

Plus, once you’ve mastered new material, you can use mnemonic devices and build memory places to help you retrieve what you’ve learned.

6 Habits Worth Building to Improve as a Knowledge Worker

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Deliberate practice will help you advance in your career.

Photo by fauxels from Pexels

To get better runners run, writers write, musicians play. So all knowledge workers need to do is know?

Quite the opposite is true. The things you think you know — the illusion of knowledge — are the biggest enemies of improvement.

When you’re convinced to know something, learning something new means you have to change your mind. But people don’t want to change their minds; a principle psychologists call cognitive laziness.

“We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995,” Adam Grant writes in Think Again. “We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt.”

But if knowing is counterproductive to improve as somebody who gets paid for thinking, what is it then that makes you better? The following habits can help you improve as a knowledge worker.

Work and think through writing.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman wasn’t a writer. Yet, he wrote — a lot. In an interview about his journals, a reporter asked: “And so this represents the record of the day-to-day work.” But Feynman rejects: “I actually did the work on the paper.”

The reporter doesn’t believe Feynman: “Well, the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” But Feynman says: “You have to work on paper, and this is the paper. OK?”

Many people still don’t get what Feynman tried to explain to the reporter: Writing is working because it facilitates thinking. When you write, you tie yourself to your train of thought.

You’ll also get more creative. Research shows the best ideas will arise once you flow into the writing process. So the more you create, the more creative you become.

Don’t know where or how to start? Block time-slots in your calendar, use a journal or empty document, and answer one of these prompts:

  • Which problem needs to be solved? What do you know about it?
  • What are you not seeing right now?
  • Which idea can’t you stop thinking about?

Build a personal knowledge management system.

A personal knowledge management system (PKM) helps you seek, consume, capture, connect, and apply whatever is kept in your head. Well-implemented it’s the career booster.

While most PKMs are kept private, some thinkfluencers learn in public. My favorite examples include Andy Matuschak’s working notes library, Maggie Appleton’s Digital Garden, or Luhmann’s digitized slip box.

Luhmann was living proof for an effective system. During his life, he wrote 70 books and 500 scholarly articles. He said this was only possible because of his Zettelkasten, the German word for slip box.

For the past years, I experimented with various note-taking systems — outlining, sketchnoting, mind-mapping, Notion workflows, and BulletJournals — before I finally settled on Zettelkasten.

I’ve been using the Zettelkasten with Roam for three months, and I can already see how it’s improving my reading and thinking.

A Zettelkasten can work as an idea-generation machine. You discover related ideas that you hadn’t thought of in the first place. As your notes grow, you will start seeing patterns. These patterns can serve as the basis of your original work.

On each slip are either literature notes (your synthesis of other people’s ideas) or permanent notes (your original thought).

Writing permanent notes is tough. You have to distill the quintessence from your thoughts. That’s why it’s also a great metric for tracking your progress as a knowledge worker.

Seek constructive feedback, always.

Feedback is the fuel for improvement but getting feedback is tricky. Most people don’t like to get direct feedback. Whenever you ask, “What can I do to improve,” you’ll likely receive a polite but fluffy “you’re doing so well, there’s nothing I can think of.”

Jane Park shared a great trick in Forge. Instead of asking people to criticize you, ask them about your shared goal: “Can you help me make this better for us?”

Use proven reading principles.

Do you ever finish a non-fiction book and worry whether reading is a time-waster? If you feel like a book can’t help you improve, it’s likely because you don’t know about crucial reading principles.

Reading non-fiction takes anywhere from six to nine hours — a significant time investment. These hours aren’t wasted if you read for entertainment.

But if you carve out the hours from a busy day to read books like Thinking Fast and Slow, you’re likely looking for something more than joyful reading time.

To make reading effective, you need to factor in the two components of learning and memory: the learned information itself and the so-called retrieval cue that helps you find the material you learned.

Here’s how you can do it.

  1. Elaborate. Use your own words to explain what you read and connect it to things you already know. After reading an interesting sentence, scribble your thoughts on the book’s page or your note-taking app.
  2. Retrieve. You learn something not only when you connect it to what you already know (step one) but when you try to access it. So after finishing a book, map out a summary from your memory.
  3. Space out self-testing. The more time has gone since you read a book, the more difficult it is to recall it. But by revisiting your summaries once in a while, you likelier remember what you read.

“What I know for sure is that reading opens you up. It exposes you and gives you access to anything your mind can hold.”

— Oprah Winfrey

Teach to learn.

You learned something new, but you struggle to explain it to other people? You likely don’t know what you think you know. Mortimer Adler said: “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

So the best self-test to check whether you genuinely understood something is to explain and teach it to others — your co-workers, your family, your friends.

Pick the topic you want to remember, pretend you explain the content to a 12-year old (as simply as you can). Identify where you struggle to explain and fill your knowledge gaps by rechecking the original source.

Self-reflect and learn from experience.

After workshops, podcasts, public talks, interviews, I take a piece of paper and draw to columns: what went well and even better if. Then, I fill them with everything that comes to my mind.

We don’t have to be visibly active to learn. Progress starts with self-awareness. If we aren’t aware of a problem, we can’t improve. Here are two questions worth answering by Julie Zhuo, a former Facebook VP:

  • When you remember your last success, what were the traits that enabled you to succeed?
  • What are the three most common pieces of advice from your team or boss on who you can improve?

The key to managing yourself is understanding your strengths and weaknesses. And a great way to do this is by reflecting — the active decision to think about your past.

Or, as researchers put it: “Reflection is the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.”

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Adler’s Four Levels of How to Read a Book Will Improve Your Reading

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Get the most out of your books.

Library in Stuttgart, Germany. (Source: Juan Urdaneta on Flickr)

Books give you access to the smartest brains on our planet. And learning from the greatest minds is your fast track to health, wealth, and wisdom.

But reading per se doesn’t improve your life. You can read a book a week without changing at all.

It’s about what and how you read that will improve your life’s quality and enhance your mind. Mortimer Adler, a famous philosopher, and prolific reader, used to say:

“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.”

I read a book a week for more than three years now, and I always look for ways to improve my reading. Recently, I reread Mortimer Adler’s classic ‘How to read a book,’ where he shares great advice. Here are the four levels of reading and how to apply them:

Level 1: Read like a first grader.

This level of reading because it’s what you learned as a kid in elementary school.

How to do it:

If you can read these words, you’ve probably mastered the level of basic reading. Congrats!

Level 2: Become an inspectional pre-reader.

Think of this level as a quick chat you have with the author. Instead of devoting ten hours to a book only to discover it had not much to say to you, you can use inspectional reading to avoid it.

The goal is to determine whether you should read the entire book, a few chapters, or nothing at all.

Before I learned about these levels, 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.

You don’t owe the author anything. Dare to skip pages or even chapters. A non-fiction book’s sole purpose is to help you grow by answering your questions or introducing valuable ideas.

And here’s where becoming an inspectional pre-reader can help you. You do this step before you start reading. The goal here is to decide within around 10 to 30 minutes whether a book is worth your time.

How to do it:

Set yourself a time limit of 10–30 minutes and complete the following four steps for every time-intense non-fiction book you plan to read.

  1. Look at the cover and skim the preface. When doing so, you’ll get a feeling for the book’s category.
  2. Read the table of contents. Which chapter is most relevant to you? Read a few paragraphs from the chapter to grasp whether the book meets your expectations.
  3. Identify the main points. After steps one and two, you have an understanding of the book’s most important points. Look at the pivotal chapter to the argument and check the structure and connection. Does it resonate with you? Read a paragraph or a page, and figure out if you want to read the book.

Level 3: Know how to analyze any non-fiction book.

Yay! You’ve found a book worth reading. Thereby, you moved past the quick chat from the second level and started an intense conversation with the author.

Once you chose your next great book, the effortful part begins, also called active reading.

When I first learned about this level, I sighed. Why would I put even more time into reading? Analyzing a book seemed like slowing me down.

But the opposite is true. Effortless reading is like writing in the sand, here today and gone tomorrow.

While reading, most people think they understand the texts they read. But understanding doesn’t work like this. As scientists write in ‘The science of successful learning’: „Mastering the text is not the same as mastering the ideas behind them. “

“The more effort the better.”

— Mortimer Adler

To really master the ideas behind a text you need to think about what’s being said. You want to deploy your metacognition. What does the author want to say? How does it relate to what you already know? What context can you think of to apply the arguments?

Take notes along the way. Expand on your notes the deeper you dive into the arguments. Make reading a conscious effort because that’s how you will remember most of what you read.

How to do it:

Answer these three questions every time you read a book.

  1. What is the book about as a whole? Look at the cover at the table of contents and write down the answer in your own words.
  2. What is being said in detail, and how? This is where you want to use your metaknowledge and rephrase the critical argument.
  3. Is the book true, in whole or in part? Critical thinking and constructive criticism will help you put the book into perspective. You could answer this question only if you mastered the previous two.

Level 4: Unlock the power of syntopical reading.

This level is pretty hard. I’ve only done it once so far, and it only makes sense if you want to explore a specific topic or research question in depth. Level four is not about a single book but about how the books you read relate to each other.

The aim isn’t to understand one single book but to understand an entire subject. By deploying syntopical reading, you can compare their 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 Adler

From a learning perspective, this level is terrific. To learn something, you need the information itself and its relation to what you already know. So-called memory cues help you access information when you need it.

How to do it:

Determine the subject and collect all the books you read related to it. Then, find the relevant passages of the books and rephrase them in your terms.

While summarizing the key ideas, focus on your questions instead of the author’s answers. Only pick the arguments relevant to your questions.

Once you’ve collected the key points from all the different books, order them in relation to one another.

Lastly, analyze the discussion. Even if you’re not a writer, an article can be the best tool to do this.

Research shows the more you create, the more creative you become. The best ideas and connections will arise once you flow into the writing process.

Final Thoughts

Following Mortimer Adler’s levels seems complex. But these principles make reading worthwhile and help you get more from your books.

  1. Read at the elementary level.
  2. Use inspectional pre-reading to pick the best book for you.
  3. Become an effortful reader by answering the three key questions.
  4. Deploy syntopical reading whenever you want to dive deep into a topic.

Instead of feeling discouraged by all the ideas about what you could do to improve your reading, enjoy experimenting at your own pace. Keep the ideas that work for you and screw the rest.

Choose one or two new ideas until you find a pattern that helps you on your journey to health, wealth, and wisdom.

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.”

— Mortimer Adler

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The More You Learn the Richer Your Life

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Three ways to make learning a daily habit

Photo by Meryl Katys from Pexels

Naval Ravikant once said:

“The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.”

And while life-long learning pays great dividends, many people struggle to make it a habit for life. They never learned how to learn or don’t know where to start.

Continuous learning is one of the most powerful habits you can build. The following three ideas will spark your desire to learn and help you make learning a habit you’ll stick with.

1) Create your want-to-learn list.

The best motivator to continue learning is a long list of things you want to learn in life. Similar to a want-to-read shelf, your want-to-learn list creates urgency. If you don’t realize the first two items on it, you’ll never get to all the other things you dream about.

Ask yourself, ‘What do you want to learn before you die?’ and note your answers in your journal or note-taking app. I use a simple table in Notion to collect my want-to-learns. Here’s a sneak-peak of how it looks like:

Notion Want to Learn List (Source: Eva Keiffenheim)

Don’t worry if you don’t have many learning desires in mind. The ideas will flow once you start looking for answers, and your list will grow organically.

When you write down what you want to learn, think beyond online skills. While it’s nice to know how to start and grow your newsletter, the world will become richer when diversifying your skillset.

2) Follow your curiosity.

When was the last time you did something out of pure curiosity? With full calendars, there’s not much time for undirected exploration.

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.

While you gaze through the window, your subconsciousness consolidates knowledge. It connects the dots. Stephen King writes his best novel ideas came to him while driving, showering, or walking:

“Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty, and telekinesis came together, and I had an idea.”

Give your mind regular breaks and make space for exploration. Follow your curiosity — it will drive discovery. It’s the ultimate fuel for your desire to learn.

An excellent way to follow your curiosity is by asking yourself every evening, ‘Did your day help you cultivate curiosity?’

3) Ban your cell phone from the bedroom.

What if developing learning habits is about what you should do less of rather than more of? The smartest way to start learning every day is by identifying the patterns that hold you back. All you have to do is eliminate them.

If you charge your phone in your bedroom, you’re missing one of the most significant learning opportunities — reading before sleeping.

Once you ban your phone from your bedroom, you’ll realize learning is way easier than you thought.

“What I know for sure is that reading opens you up. It exposes you and gives you access to anything your mind can hold,” Oprah Winfrey once said.

And it’s true. Reading gives you access to the brightest brains on earth. Learning from the most remarkable people is the fastest way to become not only wealthy but also wise.

If I had to name a single learning habit that improved my life, it’d be reading. Books made me wealthy, transformed my sex life, expanded my worldview, and improved the way I work.

Follow your curiosity and order a few books that resonate with you. Replace your pre-sleep phone scrolling with reading, and witness how the pages will get through to you.

In Conclusion

Following these steps isn’t complex or exhausting. On the contrary: These ideas make learning fun and worthwhile.

  • Start and grow your want-to-learn list.
  • Use your curiosity as a guiding principle.
  • Replace your phone with a book.

Instead of feeling discouraged by all the ideas about what you could do to turn learning into an ongoing habit, enjoy experimenting in your rhythm. Think for yourself and keep the things that work for you.

Choose one or two new learning habits until you find a pattern that helps you on your journey to health, wealth, and wisdom.

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Get More Value Out of Online Courses with These Four Strategies

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Knowledge is useless unless applied.

Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash

Have you ever paid for an online course and failed to finish it?

In 2020, 183,744 courses launched on Teachable alone. And while the number of new courses keeps rising, their quality doesn’t. Studies show only one in seven people completes them.

In the last months, I spent around $2,000 on online courses. And if I’ve learned one thing then it’s this:

Whether you spend $900 or $50 dollar on an online course, chances are your course creator doesn’t know much about evidence-based learning design.

If you don’t take charge of your learning, nobody else will. Here are the things that will help you make the most of any online course.

1) Start with what you need the most.

E-learning is often ineffective because it’s distant from the actual application.

How often have you watched an aircraft’s safety video? Every time before take-off, you watch how flight attendants put on their life vests. With every flight, you re-watch the video. But it’s ineffective.

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

Ultralearner Scott Young labels this the principle of directness. But how you call it doesn’t matter. Simply focus on what you need the most and skip the rest.

How to do it:

Why did you take the course in the first place? Decide on your learning goal and start with the lessons closest to your objective.

When I took my first online courses I felt like disrespecting the course creators by not watching from start to finish. What I didn’t realize is I disrespected my time.

Online lessons aren’t created equal and not every section is worth your time. Many times you find fluffy filler sections. When you see one, skip it.

Treasure your time and jump ahead whenever you feel lessons are a time-waster. Prioritize what you need the most and ignore the rest or save it for later.

2) Find a way to apply what you learn directly.

In my first months of online writing, I took three online courses. And while watching successful writers inspired me, it didn’t help me advance my craft. I ignored that the only way to get better at anything is by practice and application.

“The one who does the work does the learning.”

— Terry Doyle

Online courses can help you create better products, earn more money, and help you live a happier life. But unless you apply the lessons from the instructors, the courses remain mere entertainment. Knowledge is useless unless applied.

How to do it:

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

If you take a course on e-mail newsletter, write your first e-mail. If you take a drawing class, do your first drawing. If you take a course on online writing, write your first article. Foster a bias towards action.

You don’t learn by watching things. You learn by doing them. The more you engage with the content, the likelier it will stick with you. Knowledge trapped in online courses is meaningless unless applied to your life.

3) Form an accountability group with fellow learners.

It’s difficult to hold yourself accountable if you’re sitting alone in front of a computer. Last year, I learned it the hard way.

Studying has always been easy for me. I finished my Bachelor and Master studies with great results. So when I started part-time studying philosophy, last year I was nothing but thrilled.

Yet, five months later and I didn’t take a single exam. The reason? I didn’t connect with fellow learners. I lost motivation. I stopped.

I’m only a month into the new semester but my accountability group makes a difference. We e-meet once a week and share tips and resources, ask probing questions, and encourage each other.

Accountability groups add personal layers to online environments. Community-based learning can work on different levels: as a motivational safety net, learning practice, relationship builder, and accountability tool.

How to do it:

If your online course has a Slack channel or private Facebook group look at the most active members. Reach out to them personally, to form an accountability group.

Schedule weekly check-ins. Discuss what you applied. Listen, talk, read, write, and think about the new material. The more work your brain does, the more connections you establish. And the more connections the higher the chances that you remember what you learn.

4) Take effective notes using a Roamkasten.

Our brains don’t work like recording devices. Learning and memory need two components: the learned information itself and a so-called retrieval cue that helps you find the learned material.

In the last years, I experimented with various note-taking systems — outlining, sketchnoting, mind-mapping, Notion workflows, and BulletJournals — before I finally settled on the Roamkasten, an implementation of Luhmann’s Zettelkasten in RoamResearch.

Here’s why this note-taking system beats others:

  • The Roamkasten gets more useful with every additional note you create.
  • The system is built on state-of-the-art learning science.
  • It offers you serendipitous idea discovery.

Through bi-directional linking, the Roamkasten helps you create connections between different domains and challenges your insights while minimizing effort and stress.

Former R&D lead at Khan Academy Andy Matuschak said if you had to set a single metric as a leading indicator for yourself as a knowledge worker, it would be the number of permanent notes they take.

How to do it:

First, decide on a digital tool. You can pick between programs solely built for Zettelkasten, like Zettlr and The Archive, or more functional alternatives like TiddlyWiki, Obsidian, RemNote, Amplenote, and Org-roam. I use Roamresearch ($15 a month) because of its clean design and its Readwise connection.

Second, create a page for your online course where you write down your standard course notes. They include everything the instructor said that you might want to remember. It’s easy to write them because you don’t have to think for yourself. Simply jot them down, one bullet at a time.

Third, create permament Zettelkasten notes. Look at your course notes and ask yourself questions like “Which new insights do you have based on the new material? How does it relate to what you already know? Where in your work or life will you apply it?”

Write exactly one note for each permanent note and write as if you were writing for someone else. Use full sentences, disclose your sources, make references, and try to be as precise, clear, and brief as possible.

When you’re done, relate the note to existing notes inside your storage system using bi-directional linking. That way, you implemented two strategies that are known for effective learning — elaboration, and retrieval.

Final Thoughts

Online courses can improve many aspects of your life. But to belong to the few percent who take away a lot from it, consider:

  • Starting with the lessons that help you the most. Skip what you don’t need.
  • Apply what you learn as soon as possible.
  • Form your accountability group to boost motivation and learning.
  • Use a personal note-taking system that helps you remember what you learned.

Don’t feel discouraged by these different ideas. What worked for me might not work for you. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, take what resonates and forget the rest. And most importantly: enjoy your learning journey.

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3 Principles of Reading Most People Don’t Learn Until Later in Life

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As long as you’re reading, you are already on your way to wisdom.

Photo by Adil from Pexels

Do you ever close a non-fiction book and worry whether reading is a time-waster?

If you ever feel like the knowledge in a book can’t help you live a better life, it’s likely because you don’t know about key reading principles.

Reading non-fiction takes anywhere from six to nine hours — a significant time investment. These hours aren’t wasted if you read for entertainment.

But if you carve out the hours from a busy day to read books like Thinking Fast and Slow, you’re likely looking for something more than joyful reading time.

Whether you want to use books to advance your career or apply what you read to your life, this one is for you. Here are fundamental reading principles many people learn too late in life.

1.) Passive Reading Won’t Make Information Stick

It’s Sunday morning, and you’re on a walk with friends. The topic revolves around some serious non-fiction books you just read. First, you feel proud because you read it. But soon after, you feel dumb.

Because when the conversation goes beyond the main book themes, you feel lost. You discover you only remembered a fraction of the content.

This happened to me quite often. I could talk about the basic claims, but when a friend asked a probing question, I couldn’t answer it. I often thought reading didn’t work for me and considered quitting books altogether.

I didn’t have a basic understanding of how our brains work. Twelve books and hours of lectures later, I understand how we learn and remember.

Human brains don’t work like recording devices. The words on the pages don’t magically stick to our memory.

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 reading effective, you need to factor in the two components of learning and memory: the learned information itself and the so-called retrieval cue that helps you find the material you learned.

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

— Mortimer Adler

What to do:

These three evidence-based steps will help you remember anything you want from the books you read.

First, elaborate. Explain what you read in your own words and relate it to what you already know. Stop after reading an interesting sentence and scribble your thoughts on the book’s page or your note-taking app.

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 elaborating, you become an active reader and make new information stick.

Second, retrieve. We learn something not only when we connect it to what we already know (elaboration) but when we try to access it. Retrieval is powerful because when you recall a memory, you reinforce both it and its cue.

After finishing a book, summarize the content from your memory: “How can you summarize the book in three sentences? Which ideas do you want to keep in mind and apply? How does the book relate to what you already know?”

This is also the technique Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman used to remember what he learned. He mentally recalled all principles and main points he wanted to keep in mind. You can do the same. Unlock the benefits of retrieval by writing your summary after finishing a book.

Third, space out self-testing. The more time has gone since you read a book, the more difficult it is to recall it. That’s why you can’t remember concepts when you talk to friends. But forgetting isn’t a character flaw. It’s essential for learning.

After a week went by, think about the book you read. Recall your summary without looking at the sheet. After, check for your knowledge gaps. In that way, you strengthen your memory and cues for faster retrieval. Repeat the self-testing once in a while, and you’ll be able to recall a book’s content fast.

The entire process can feel slow and intense. But that’s how effective learning works — you have to do the work.

2.) Reading Isn’t About the Number of Books You Read

When I made reading a life habit, I set the intention to read a specific number of books a year. And while reading 52 books a year for three years certainly helped me get started, this mindset is counter-productive.

Focusing on a number of books accelerates the way you read. But speed-reading isn’t helpful. Different studies confirm when reading speed goes up as a result of speed-reading, comprehension goes down.

And as you know from the previous point, comprehension is only the start of proper knowledge acquisition. If you want to remember what you read, you need to use metacognition (meaning the questions you answer while and after reading).

If you want to expand your knowledge and learn deeply, read slower.

The better the book, the slower you should look at the words. Because all new information and concepts you learn need to be connected to your existing knowledge.

Before building my first business, I had read dozens of books for each stage in the business lifecycle. But when it came to starting, the biggest gamechanger was connecting it to my life by applying what I read.

“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 Adler

What to do:

Don’t focus on the number of books you read. Instead, look for ways to include new ideas into your life. Quality matters more than quantity. Pay attention to what’s in front of you. Think about how you can apply it to life, then do it.

As Ratna Kusnur said: “Knowledge trapped in books neatly stacked is meaningless and powerless until applied for the betterment of life.”

When you read High-Performance Habits and learn about the power of morning affirmations, start to act. Record your own affirmations. After learning about the benefits of journaling through Stillness is Key, place a notebook with a pen on your nightstand and start journaling the same evening.

Whenever you stumble upon practical advice, pause and act upon it. Put an item on your To-Do list or place an action item on a specific spot. Reading a book isn’t a race — the more insightful the book, the more often you should pause to apply it.

3.) Mediocre Books Just Don’t Cut It

This is probably the most common disbelief that prevents people from unlocking a book’s power. Our desire to finish what we start is what makes reading feel meaningless.

Bad books are hard to read; good books almost read themselves. There are too many excellent books on this planet. Don’t waste your time reading the bad ones.

I got this wrong for years. I felt if I put down a book, I disrespect the author. Plus, I paid for the book. So why would I harm both of us?

Now first, the author won’t know if you put it aside. There’s nothing to worry about. You don’t do anyone good if you force yourself through a book you don’t like.

Second, there’s a sunk-cost fallacy that is ruining your decision. This psychological trap means you continue consuming something because you’ve invested time or money in it.

But if you carry on with a lousy book only because you paid for it and spend some hours reading, all you’re doing is digging a deeper hole. Better to waste $11.95 than four additional hours of your lifetime.

What to do:

When you like a book, you feel it. You love the writing style and marvel at the ideas. You can’t wait to read the next page. You look forward to reading it all day long.

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 like them. Once you know, you can stop reading bad books without feeling guilty, your reading practice changes. Because once you quit a bad book, you open up the opportunity to read a great one.

Even if your best friend, a smart mentor, or Bill Gates said, you should read a book; you can quit it. Because the best person to judge whether you should finish a book is you.

Quit most books. Read-only a few. Re-read the best ones twice, thrice, or a hundred times. Books change as we do. You’ll be amazed at how many new things you can discover that you may have missed before.

Conclusion

Reading can be the fast-track to a happier, healthier, wiser life. But unless you get the key reading principles right, it remains mere entertainment.

Try all of the strategies but don’t force yourself through anything that doesn’t feel right for you. Do your research, add other techniques, skip what doesn’t serve you, and think for yourself.

Keep the steps that work for you and screw the rest. No matter which strategies you use, applying them will pay off. As long as you’re reading, you are already on your way to wisdom. Charlie Munger, self-made billionaire:

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time — none. Zero.”

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How You Can Make Reading an Ongoing Habit

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We make reading more serious than it needs to be.

Image by izoca from Pixabay

When you look at human history, the fundamental human problems are the same in all ages. No matter what problem we face, odds are someone has faced it before and written about it.

Carl Sagan states in ‘The Persistence of Memory’:

“Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

Through books, we can learn from citizens of distant epochs. The solution to every problem lies in some a book. That’s why reading is the key to a successful and happy life.

Over the last years, I transformed from reading two books a year to reading at least one book a week. If I can do this, you can too. These tiny shifts can help make reading a habit for life.

1) Buy the books you really want to read.

When I started reading, I followed celebrities reading recommendations and best-seller lists. If Charlie Munger, Melinda Gates, or the New York Times recommend a book, it’s a must-read for me.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

These lists are not where you want to start your reading journey. As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in his essay on reading and books: “People read always only the newest instead of the best of all times.”

We shouldn’t read the book everyone talks about. Because the best person to judge whether you should read a is neither a billionaire nor a newspaper — it’s you.

“Read what you love until you love to read.”

— Naval Ravikant

How to do it:

Start with what sparks your interest. A few hundred books in, you will anyway gravitate towards the good stuff.

Depending on where you are in life right now and whether you want to read for fun or learning, ask yourself:

  • What are you most curious about right now?
  • Which life area (health, wealth, relationships, work) do you want to advance?
  • What’s a problem in life you really want to see solved?

Find ten-books that potentially satisfy your needs. Search for keywords or experts within the niche. Go to a bookstore and ask for timeless recommendations.

Then, scan through the book’s table of content. Read a few pages and see whether the words resonate with you. Buy three books that attract you the most.

Oh, and if a book doesn’t promise to deliver on your questions, quit it. There are too many great books waiting for you. Choose wisely, then, read thoroughly.

2) Create your ultimate reading environment.

“If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us,“ Dr. Marshall Goldsmith wrote about triggers.

Desired behavior isn’t tied to our willpower. Instead, self-control and self-discipline depend much more on our environment, Nobel-prize winner Thaler discovered.

I bet if we compare a person who takes their phone to the bedroom with a person who doesn’t, the latter will almost always read more.

Resisting social media’s mechanisms is incredibly hard. You don’t want to be nudged to use your phone first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening.

Instead, you want to design your environment to make it work for you. As James Clear put it:

“You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.”

How to do it:

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. Best-decision ever. In bed, I can either sleep or read.

As soon as you charge your phone outside of your bedroom, you have more time during the evenings and the mornings. Instead of newsfeeds, your environment invites you to read.

The less time you spend on your phone, the more you’ll read.

What also helped me is making reading obvious. I put my book on the pillow when I make my bed in the morning. Thereby, reading in bed becomes the default option. Not having to use willpower will set you up for a reading habit for life.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

3) Don’t eat the same dish for breakfast and dinner.

You don’t want to eat the same dish for breakfast and breakfast. Why would you read the same book in the morning and the evening?

Many people try to force themselves through a specific book at a specific time. Reading becomes joyless. Ultimately, they stop reading altogether.

Don’t feel like reading before you go to sleep? Chances are high it’s the wrong book on your bed table.

By reading different books simultaneously, you can take a break from whatever title you don’t want to read at that time. Books are patient. They’ll wait for you until you feel like picking them up again.

“Everyone I know is stuck on some book. I’m sure you’re stuck on some book right now. It’s page 332, you can’t go on any further but you know you should finish the book, so what do you do? You give up reading books for a while.”

— Naval Ravikant

Plus, reading different books at the same time can reveal unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated titles. As James Clear says: “The most useful insights are often found at the intersection of ideas.“

How to do it:

Start a new book before you finished the one you’re reading. Place your books in locations that remind you to read them at the right time.

Right now, I’m reading 12 books. In the morning, before journaling, I often read a page of ‘Meditations.’ The physical book is right next to my journal. I’ll dive into ‘How to Take Smart Notes’ right after writing to level up my reading practice. That’s why my Kindle is on my desk. ‘Leaders Eat Last’ lingers on my shelf since last May, but I’ll give it a second chance before I quit it. Before sleep, I want to dive into a new world, and I do this with a historical novel.

Don’t force yourself through a content-dense book before you start a new one. This slows down your reading practice and takes away any joy. Having different books for different situations will change the way you look at books.

4) Apply new knowledge to improve your life.

Reading lets, you borrow smart people’s brains. Yet, reading per se doesn’t make you a better person. You can read a book a week without changing at all.

If you only read but never act upon your new knowledge, reading can feel like a time-waster. Ratna Kusner said:

“Knowledge trapped in books neatly stacked is meaningless and powerless until applied for betterment of life.”

It’s about what and how you read that will improve your life’s quality and enhance your mind.

Social climber Dale Carnegie used to say knowledge isn’t power until it’s applied. And to apply what you read, you must take your reading game to the next level.

How to do it:

If you stumble upon useful advice in a book, act immediately. Put an item on your to-do list or place an action item on a specific spot.

By forming action items from your books, you’ll make the most out of any book. You’ll be able to apply knowledge from books to your life.

Don’t intend to read a specific number of books per year. Instead, take your time with the books that can transform your life. Reread them and act upon new knowledge.

When you witness how reading improves the way you go through life, you’ll gladly make reading a habit for life.

Final Thoughts

No matter who you are or what you do, reading can help you achieve your goals. But most of the time, we make reading more serious than it needs to be. Sometimes, tiny shifts can change the way we read.

  • Read the books you can’t stop thinking about.
  • In the bedroom, replace your phone with a book.
  • Be okay with reading different books at the same time.
  • Apply what you read to your life.

While each of these points 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.

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Arthur Schopenhauer’s 3 Ideas Will Improve the Way You Read

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Timeless advice on how to make the most of your books.

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels

Books carry the wisdom of the smartest people who ever existed. Through reading, you find yourself on the surefire way to become happy, healthy, and wise.

Yet, books per se don’t make you a better person.

You can read every day without changing at all. It’s what and how you read that will improve your life’s quality and enhance your mind.

I’ve read a book a week for more than three years and always look for ways to improve my reading practice. Recently, I stumbled upon Arthur Schopenhauer’s essay on reading and books.

Schopenhauer was a philosopher whose writing on morality and psychology has influenced Einstein, Nietzsche, and Freud, among others. Here are his powerful reading insights and how to apply them:

1) Stop Reading Passively

In 1851, Schopenhauer got something right most people still ignore. Books are the arena of someone else’s thoughts, not our own. He writes:

“When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process.”

Human brains don’t work like recording devices. You don’t absorb information and knowledge by reading. Relying on highlighting, rereading, or, worst of all, passive reading is highly ineffective.

For my first 80 books or so, I was a passive reader. Whenever a conversation revolved around something I read, I could never remember much. I thought forgetting is a personal character flaw.

But it isn’t. Instead, it’s the way we read that’s flawed.

To get the most from books, we need to think for ourselves while reading. Active reading is the way we acquire and retain knowledge.

How to apply it:

Before opening your next book, take a pen to your hand. Scribble your thoughts on the margins and connect what you learn with what you already know.

While reading, think about questions like:

  • How can you link the words to your own experiences?
  • How can you use the author’s thesis to explain something else?
  • Do you have any memory that proves or contradicts what you read?

You store new information in terms of its meaning to our existing memory. To remember new information, you not only need to know it but also to know how it relates to what you already know.

And by scribbling down your own thoughts, you’re doing what cognitive scientists call elaborative rehearsal. You associate new information with what you already know.

Soon you’ll realize that taking notes not only helps you to concentrate but also to remember what you read. That’s how you transform yourself into an active reader.

2) Not Every Book is Worth Your Time

Books aren’t created equal. When looking at current best-seller lists, what Schopenhauer wrote some hundred years ago feels right on point:

“Nine-tenths of the whole of our present literature aims solely at taking a few shillings out of the public’s pocket, and to accomplish this, author, publisher, and reviewer have joined forces.”

A book’s sales numbers don’t say much about its quality. Best-selling authors are primarily great marketers.

When you look at human history, the fundamental human problems are the same in all ages: Justice, happiness, power, love, and change.

And through books, you can connect with people who mastered these areas centuries before. So why bother with the short-cycle of current books?

Again, Schopenhauer:

“A public that will leave unread writings of the noblest and rarest of minds, of all times and all countries, for the sake of reading the writings of commonplace persons which appear daily, and breed every year in countless numbers like flies; merely because these writings have been printed today and are still wet from the press.”

How to apply it:

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

Statistically, the chances are small that the best books are written in the current decade. So, look beyond best-seller lists to choose the books you read.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. Instead, follow A.B. Schlegel’s advice, who had also been a guiding star for Schopenhauer:

“Read the old ones, the real old ones. What the new ones say about them doesn’t mean much.”

I love to find ‘the real old ones’ through Mortimer J. Adler’s book recommendations, starting page 175.

3) Develop Your System of Thought

Schopenhauer’s last advice concerns the way we systemize reading:

“Every one has aims, but very few have anything approaching a system of thought. This is why such people do not take an objective interest in anything, and why they learn nothing from what they read: they remember nothing about it.”

Knowledge isn’t power unless it’s applied. And to apply what we read, we must first remember what we learned.

Schopenhauer got right what Harvard scientists confirmed some hundred years later:

“It is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read if one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.”

When we don’t pause to think and to contemplate, we keep circling in a limited sphere at a higher velocity. We can read a book a week to 10x our productivity and still lose the most important life lessons.

Like Mortimer J. Adler said: “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.”

How to apply it:

Don’t focus on the number of books you read, but on your reading depth.

Use your margin notes to create a summary. Keep it brief and use your own words. Depending on your preference, here’s what you can do with it:

  • Keep your summaries analog in your journal.
  • Post them publically on GoodReads, Bookshlf, or your blog.
  • Create your personal knowledge database in Notion or Roam.

Summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing a book might feel like slowing you down. But the opposite is true. Learning works best when it feels slow and difficult.

The One Thing Schopenhauer Was Wrong About

While most of his advice is timeless, he holds one flawed assumption. In his words:

“One can overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment.”

You can never over nourish your brain. The opposite is true. The more you learn, the easier it’ll be to remember. As cognitive scientists write in this paper:

“Our capacity for storing to-be-learned information or procedures is essentially unlimited. In fact, storing information in human memory appears to create capacity — that is, opportunities for additional linkages and storage — rather than use it up.”

Retrieval, the process of accessing your memory, is cue dependent. This means the more mental links you’re generating during stage one, the acquisition phase, the easier you can access and use your knowledge.

The more connected information we already have, the easier we learn.

Conclusion

Acting on Schopenhauer’s insights isn’t complex, long, or exhausting.

On the contrary: These principles make reading fun and worthwhile and help you get the most from books.

  • Become an active reader by taking notes while you read.
  • Know what not to read. Don’t waste your time on mediocre books.
  • Systemize your thinking by creating a personal knowledge base.

Instead of feeling discouraged by all the ideas about what you could do to improve your reading, enjoy experimenting at your own pace. Keep the ideas that work for you and screw the rest.

Choose one or two new principles until you find a pattern that helps you on your journey to health, wealth, and wisdom.

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How to Host Learner-Centric Zoom Workshops

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Online workshops rooted in evidence-based learning techniques.

Photo by Artem Podrez from Pexels

A great workshop is less about the tools you use but more about why and how you use them.

I’ve run many interactive workshop sessions using Zoom in the past year: individual coaching calls, digital maths lessons for my students, and larger scale workshops on reflecting and goal setting.

If your target audience differs, don’t worry. When it comes to learning, human brains work in similar ways. Here’s how you create digital workshops on Zoom, rooted in evidence-based learning techniques.

Make Your Workshop as Direct as Possible

Learning in formal settings is often ineffective because it’s distant from the actual application.

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.

Using the power of directness, ultralearner Scott Young mastered four languages within one year. He traveled to the respective country and forced himself to only speak in the foreign language.

Learning works best when you apply it. Hence, aim to include exercises as close to your desired outcome as possible.

What’s your workshop’s learning goal? Once you know what you want your learners to achieve, design exercises directly linked to that goal. Offer a bias towards action.

If you aren’t clear on your learning objective, none of this article will matter. Without learning goals, you’re choosing your gear without knowing whether you’re going on a surf trip or snowboarding.

How to do it:

Write down the learning goal. Then come up with activities that lead to the desired outcome.

If you’re a writing coach and want your participants to reach a broader audience, share headline writing insights. Then, make your learners come up with their own headlines.

If you’re a life coach and want your learners to unleash the power of visualization, make them write and record their own prompts to listen to them after the workshop.

The opportunities are manifold — once you know your what you’ll easily find your how. Focus on your true end-goal and pick a practice that’s as close to it as possible.

Include Testing as A Learning Tool

Many people shrug when they hear about testing as a learning tool. Their memories of tests as a measurement tool have taken their toll. But if done correctly, testing can improve the way we learn.

A study by learning researcher Roediger showed that testing has positive effects on long-term retention. In ‘Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning’ he writes:

“Testing helps calibrate our judgments of what we’ve learned. In virtually all areas of learning, you build better mastery when you use testing as a tool to identify and bring up your areas of weakness.”

Self-testing helps your learners overcome the illusion of knowledge. It shows whether they really understand the subject at hand. Plus, testing helps in identifying knowledge gaps and bringing weak areas to the light.

How to do it:

Instead of repeating your input a third time, use the time for a quick quiz. Kahoot or Zoom Polls will show whether your participants understand the new concepts.

If you’re hosting a series of workshops, you can also open each session with a quiz on the previous lesson. Even if they don’t get the right answer, the process facilitates remembering the correct answer.

During my math lessons, students loved to do low-stakes testing. They revised the material before our session as they wanted to win against their classmates.

I loved it, too. I gained insights into my student’s comprehension. Plus, this type of testing gave entry to meaningful questions.

Unlock the Power of Reflection

Brains don’t work like recording devices. We don’t absorb information and knowledge by consuming content. We store new concepts in terms of their meaning to our existing memory.

If you want your participants to remember what they learn, include them in the learning process. Let them interpret, connect, interrelate, or elaborate on new material.

To remember new concepts, your workshop participants not only need to know it but also to know how it relates to what they already know.

Reflection is an effective exercise to help learners connect new information to existing memories. Again, Roediger:

“Reflection can involve several cognitive activities that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these new experiences and visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.”

How to do it:

Include reflective exercises after every learning unit. Chats are a great way to create a collaborative reflection experience. You can, for example, ask your learners to answer reflection questions like:

  • What surprised you the most, and why?
  • How does your new knowledge change the way you look at life?
  • What’s one thing you will implement today?
  • What might you need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might you use the next time to get better results?

Be Aware of Zoom Fatigue

Did you ever wonder why you’re so tired after an online workshop?

In the book ‘Engaging Learners through Zoom,’ the author shares a study by Sacasas, director of the Center for the Study of Ethics and Technology:

“One of the reasons Zoom can be so exhausting is the additional focus needed during video communication to remain attentive to facial expressions, body langauge, and the subtleties of verbal language.”

That’s why learners need more focus on a video call than they need in an offline learning setting. It’s hard to process non-verbal cues like facial expressions, or the voice pitch, via a screen.

Video chats mean we need to work harder to process non-verbal cues like facial expressions, the tone and pitch of the voice, and body language; paying more attention to these consumes a lot of energy.

How to do it:

Ask participants to use speaker view. Explain that they’ll feel less tired once they’ve minimized their own window and the other participant’s faces. That way, your participants only have to see one individual, which simplifies non-verbal cue processing.

In Closing

Attention and time are the most valuable resources of our time. Don’t waste your learner’s time. Don’t ever give an hour-long lecture using PowerPoint slides. Lengthy lectures without learner engagement are extremely boring and don’t lead to meaningful learning outcomes. Instead:

  • Link your exercises as close as possible to your desired learning outcome.
  • Use testing as a learning tool.
  • Include reflection exercises to help learners remember what they learn.
  • Help your learners overcome Zoom fatigue.

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How to Learn Like Someone Who Aced the MIT Challenge

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The four principles of ultralearning.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

In 2014, Scott H. Young embarked on a controversial project.

He completed the MIT undergraduate computer science curriculum at 4x speed. Instead of the typical four years, he passed all final exams in less than 12 months.

Some people praise his results as the ultralearning experience.

Others are more skeptical as Scott transformed his MIT challenge into lucrative blogs and books. Here’s a question some people ask:

Is Scott a sneaky marketer or one of the most efficient life-long learners?

And while I’ll share my opinion at the end of this article, the answer doesn’t really matter. What matters is what we can learn from his learning journey.

These are Scott’s tips on how to become an ultralearner and quadruple your learning efficiency.

Use directness to improve learning effectiveness

Learning in formal settings is often ineffective because it’s distant from the actual application. Let’s take an example.

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.

Social climber Dale Carnegie used to say knowledge isn’t power until it’s applied. And it’s true.

Don’t spend your time on tasks far away from your end goal. If you want to write online articles, don’t spend time watching a masterclass on how to write a book. Foster a bias towards direct action.

The directness principle is a powerful way to make learning more efficient.

How to do it:

What’s your end goal behind learning?

Let’s say you want to learn writing. What do you want to use it for? Is it for writing a novel? Then start learning to write by writing a novel. Is it for earning an extra income? Then start studying submission guidelines for paid online platforms and pitch your articles there.

Whatever you learn, focus on your true end-goal and pick a practice that’s as close to it as possible.

Feynman’s technique helps you remember anything

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988) was an expert for remembering what he learned — by teaching.

Teaching is the most effective way to embed information in your mind. Plus, it’s an easy way to check whether you’ve remembered what you learned.

Because before you teach, you have to take several steps: filter relevant information, organize this information, and use your own vocabulary to paraphrase the concepts.

Feynman mastered this process like no other. The people of his time knew him for explaining the most complex processes in the simplest language. They nicknamed Feynman “The Great Explainer.”

Bill Gates was so inspired by his pedagogy that he even named Feynman “the greatest teacher I never had.”

How to do it:

The Feynman Technique consists of three simple steps:

  1. Summarize whatever you want to learn on a blank page.
  2. Explain what you learned in plain, simple language as if you were talking to a child.
  3. Identify your knowledge gaps and revisit the concepts whenever you’re stuck circle back to your knowledge source.
  4. Reread what you forgot to mention and add it to your explanation.

By following this technique, your learning by ‘first principles’ instead of superficial memorization.

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

Create a meta-learning map

No life skill can earn you greater dividends than learning how to learn. Yet, most people don’t know how to master meta-learning.

Meanwhile, taking responsibility for your learning is one of the most important undertakings you can manage.

Your meta-learning map serves as a knowledge tree for your practice and will help you learn better. Scott Young, the author of ultralearning, says a meta-learning map should contain three key items:

  • Concepts: Anything that needs to be understood.
  • Facts: Anything that needs to be memorized.
  • Procedures: Anything that needs to be practiced.

How to do it:

Make a learning map before you dive into any specific skill.

If you want to write paid articles, don’t start by practicing headlines. Instead, list all the things you need to acquire, like style, editing, storytelling, research, headlines, and a solid idea-to-paper process.

Unsure how to start the map? Find people who mastered the skill you want to learn and ask them about their learning paths.

Do you want to publish a bestselling non-fiction novel? Craft personal, short e-mails and send them to Malcolm Gladwell, Brené Brown, Nicolas Cole, James Clear, and all the other successful authors. Ask them about the core skills they needed to master. Then, start drafting your own map.

Unlock the power of self-testing

Many people feel traumatized when they think of formal test settings. But testing can be a powerful tool to improve the way we learn.

Because self-testing helps us overcome the illusion of knowledge and shows us whether we truly mastered the subject at hand. Plus, self-testing helps to identify knowledge gaps and brings weak areas to the light.

Even if you don’t get the right answer, the process facilitates remembering the correct answer. In almost all cases, it’s better to solve a problem than memorizing a solution.

Use the testing process to learn more as you go along. Always test yourself before you feel confident and push yourself to recall information, not just review it.

How to do it:

My favorite testing techniques include flashcards with a built-in spaced repetition feature (like Anki for anything, readwise for books, podcasts, highlights, or lingvist for languages).

Apart from flashcards, you can also use free recall. After reading something, try to write down everything you can remember, then use the source material to fill the gaps you missed. After your session, sit down with a piece of blank paper. Challenge yourself to list everything you can remember from what you’ve learned in as much detail as possible.

A third alternative includes the question-book method. Here you write down questions that test the content and answer these questions whenever you revisit the source. Ali Abdaal explains the active recall method in one of his learning videos.

Did Scott Young really finish the MIT curriculum?

Yes and no.

Yes, because he achieved his goal of ‘just wanting to learn more about Computer Science.’

No, because he self-graded his exams, skipped advanced course modules, and replaced peer-projects with less intense modules.

There are plenty of discussions that shed more light on Young’s underlying assumptions. And meanwhile, he also shared a critical reflection on his learning path.

But there’s a more important lesson here: With the right tools, learning any new skill is possible.

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How to Remember What You Read From Non-Fiction Books

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A guide for applying evidence-based learning strategies to reading any non-fiction book, and retaining what you read.

A woman sits at a desk while reading a book.
Christina Morillo / Pexels

At age 18, I felt most school lessons were time-wasters. To save future pupil generations from what I had suffered through, I decided to change the education system. And if that wasn’t naïve enough, I assumed studying business education would get me there.

Where, if not in an education program at university, should you learn how to learn?

I was wrong. There were no classes on learning or cognitive science. Being assigned dry, academic, self-promoted professor books, I hadn’t figured how the right books could teach you anything. Instead, I asked the best-performing fellow students about their learning techniques and copied their bulk-learning and memorizing. But after graduation, I felt dumb. I forgot almost everything from my classes.

A Bachelor’s degree taught me how to learn to ace exams. But it didn’t teach me how to learn to remember.

Different studies reveal most students never learn how to learn. Kornell & Bjork and Hartwig & Dunlosky, for example, show that 65% to 80% of students answered “no” to the question “Do you study the way you do because somebody taught you to study that way?”

From the ones who answered “yes,” some likely watched the most-popular Coursera course of all time: Dr. Barabara Oakley’s free course on “Learning how to Learn.” So did I. And while this course taught me about chunking, recalling, and interleaving, I learned something more useful: the existence of non-fiction literature that can teach you anything.

So I read—a lot. Since 2017 I have read about 150 non-fiction books about how our minds work, how children learn, and how education might solve global health problems, to name a few. I was fascinated by education and learning; I skipped the corporate career and became a Teach for All fellow to learn more about learning.

Yet, about 80 books into my reading journey, something felt odd. Whenever a conversation revolved around a serious non-fiction book I read, such as ‘Sapiens’ or ‘Thinking Fast and Slow,’ I could never remember much. Turns out, I hadn’t absorbed as much information as I’d believed. Since I couldn’t remember much, I felt as though reading wasn’t an investment in knowledge but mere entertainment.

I know many others feel the same. When I opened up about my struggles, many others confessed they also can’t remember most of what they read, as if forgetting is a character flaw. But it isn’t.

Forgetting most of what we read isn’t a character flaw. It’s the way we work with books that’s flawed.

Once I understood how we learn — through online courses, books, and Teach for All — I realized there’s a better way to read. Most people rely on techniques like highlighting, rereading, or, worst of all, completely passive reading, which are highly ineffective. It’s only logical most people forget almost anything they read.

Since I started applying evidence-based learning strategies to reading non-fiction books, many things have changed. I can explain complex ideas during dinner conversations. I can recall interesting concepts and link them in my writing or podcasts. As a result, people come to me for all kinds of advice. Plus, I was invited to speak at panel discussions, got paid for content curation, and have received high-level job opportunities. I finally feel like reading is a true investment in knowledge.

And if I, a former naïve clueless mouflon monster can do it, you can do it, too. But before you learn how this system works, let’s explore why it works. To become a truly effective learner, we need to understand the key aspects of human learning and memory.

What’s the Architecture of Human Learning and Memory?

Human brains don’t work like recording devices. We don’t absorb information and knowledge by reading sentences.

Instead, we store new information in terms of its meaning to our existing memory. And we give new information meaning by actively participating in the learning process — we interpret, connect, interrelate, or elaborate. To remember new information, we not only need to know it but also to know how it relates to what we already know.

That’s why memory and the process of learning are closely connected. Radvansky, a researcher for human memory and cognition, explains the connection in his book:

“Memory is a site of storage and enables the retrieval and encoding of information, which is essential for the process of learning. Learning is dependent on memory processes because previously-stored knowledge functions as a framework in which newly learned information can be linked.”

Three stages of human memory processing

Human memory works in three stages: 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.

The three stages of human memory processing: acquisition, retention, and retrieval.
Adapted by Dunlosky et al. (2007) based on Nelson & Narens’s (1990) framework for metamemory.

We use our memory to encode information, retain it, and then access and use our memory to make decisions, interact with others, or solve problems.

Here, we need to understand that the three phases interrelate. Retrieval, the third stage, is cue dependent. This means the more mental links you’re generating during stage one, the acquisition phase, the easier you can access and use your knowledge.

In the words of a research group around Bjork, a renowned human learning and memory researcher:

“To be a sophisticated learner requires understanding that creating durable and flexible access to to-be-learned information is partly a matter of achieving a meaningful encoding of that information and partly a matter of exercising the retrieval process.”

Now, the question is: how can we achieve meaningful encoding and effectively exercise the retrieval process?

Evidence-Based Learning Strategies, Why They Work, And How You Can Apply Them

We’ve established a basic understanding of how our human memory works (acquisition, retention, retrieval). Next, we’ll look at the learning strategies that work best for our brains (elaboration, retrieval, spaced repetition, interleaving, self-testing) and see how we can apply those insights to reading non-fiction books.

The strategies that follow are rooted in research from professors of Psychological & Brain Science around Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel. Both scientists spent ten years bridging the gap between cognitive psychology and education fields. Harvard University Press published their findings in the book ‘Make It Stick.’

I applied their evidence-based learning techniques for reading. Since I use these techniques, I feel reading indeed is a true investment in knowledge. I can access what I want to remember and use it for writing, podcasting, conversation, or self-improvement.

The strategies presented follow in chronological order and apply to both physical books and e-readers. There are extra supportive capabilities for Kindles that I will explain afterward.

#1 Elaboration

Elaborating means you explain and describe an idea in your own words. Thereby you consciously associate material you want to learn with what you’ve previously learned. In the words of Roediger & McDaniel: “Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.”

Why elaboration works: 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.

How I apply elaboration: Whenever I read an interesting section, I pause and ask myself about the real-life connection and potential application. The process is invisible, and my inner monologues sound like: “This idea reminds me of
, This insight conflicts with
, I don’t really understand how
, ” etc.

For example, when I learned about A/B testing in ‘The Lean Startup,’ I thought about applying this method to my startup. I added a note on the site stating we should try it in user testing next Wednesday. Thereby the book had an immediate application benefit to my life, and I will always remember how the methodology works.

How you can apply elaboration: Elaborate while you read by asking yourself meta-learning questions like “How does this relate to my life? In which situation will I make use of this knowledge? How does it relate to other insights I have on the topic?”

While pausing and asking yourself these questions, you’re generating important memory cues. If you take some notes, don’t transcribe the author’s words but try to summarize, synthesize, and analyze.

Elaboration applied by making notes in a book.
Elaboration applied: Remarks in ‘The Lean Startup’ (Source: Author)

#2 Retrieval

With retrieval, you try to recall something you’ve learned in the past from your memory. While retrieval practice can take many forms — take a test, write an essay, do a multiple-choice test, practice with flashcards — some forms are better than others, as the authors of ‘Make It Stick’ state: “While any kind of retrieval practice generally benefits learning, the implication seems to be that where more cognitive effort is required for retrieval, greater retention results.”

Why retrieval works: The more time has gone since your information consumption, the more difficult time you’ll have to retrieve it. Naturally, a few days after we learn something, forgetting sets in. And that’s why retrieval is so powerful. Retrieval strengthens your memory and interrupts forgetting and, as other researchers replicate, as a learning event, the act of retrieving information is considerably more potent than is an additional study opportunity, particularly in terms of facilitating long-term recall.

How I apply retrieval: I retrieve a book’s content from my memory by writing a book summary for every book I want to remember. I ask myself questions like: “How would you summarize the book in three sentences? Which concepts do you want to keep in mind or apply? How does the book relate to what you already know?”

I then publish my summaries on Goodreads or write an article about my favorite insights, like here with Ben Horowitz, Elizabeth Gilbert, or Brené Brown.

How you can apply retrieval: You can come up with your own questions or use mine. If you don’t want to publish your summaries in public, you can write a summary into your journal, start a book club, create a private blog, or initiate a WhatsApp group for sharing book summaries.

Whatever you settle for, be careful not to copy/paste the words from the author. If you don’t do the brain work yourself, you’ll skip the learning benefits of retrieval. You want to use your own memory, even if it feels hard. By thinking about the concepts and giving new information your meaning, you’re creating an effective learning experience.

Retrieval applied through a chapter-by-chapter summary.
Retrieval applied: Chapter-by-chapter Goodreads Summary (Source: Screenshot Author)

#3 Spaced Repetition

With spaced repetition, you repeat the same piece of information across increasing intervals. The harder it feels to recall the information, the stronger the learning effect. “Spaced practice, which allows some forgetting to occur between sessions, strengthens both the learning and the cues and routes for fast retrieval,” Roediger & McDaniel write.

Why it works: It might sound counterintuitive, but forgetting is essential for learning. Spacing out practice might feel less productive than rereading a text because you’ll realize what you forgot. Your brain has to work harder to retrieve your knowledge, which is a good indicator of effective learning.

So, spaced repetition prevents your brain from forgetting. Research shows repeating the same information ten times over different days is a better way to remember things than repeating the same information twenty times on a single day.

How I apply spaced repetition: After some weeks, I revisit a book and look at the summary questions (see #2). I try to come up with my answer before I look up my actual summary. I can often only remember a fraction of what I wrote and have to look at the rest. I’ll also evaluate whether I’ve applied the knowledge nuggets to my life and, if not, why I didn’t.

The process is quite time-intense, but whenever I feel it’s a timewaster, I remember Ratna Kusnur’s quote on the importance of applying theoretical non-fiction concepts: “Knowledge trapped in books neatly stacked is meaningless and powerless until applied for the betterment of life.”

How you can apply spaced repetition: You can revisit your book summary medium of choice and test yourself on what you remember. What were your action points from the book? Have you applied them? If not, what hindered you?

By testing yourself in varying intervals on your book summaries, you’ll strengthen both learning and cues for fast retrieval. If you read on your Kindle, there’s software to assist you with spaced repetition—more on that after the next two techniques.

Spaced repetition applied through self-testing on a book summary.
Spaced Repetition applied: Self-Testing one of my book summaries (Source: Author)

#4 Interleaving

In interleaving, you switch practices before completion. So, interleaving means mixing learning with different kinds of approaches, concepts, or viewpoints. By practicing jumping back and forth between different problems, you solidify your understanding of the concepts and promote creativity and flexibility.

Why interleaving works: Alternate working on different problems feels more difficult as it, again, facilitates forgetting. While our intuition tells us completing one topic should be more effective, researchers pointed towards interleaving benefits. Plus, the authors of ‘Make It Stick’ conclude: “If learners spread out their study of a topic, returning to it periodically over time, they remember it better.”

How I apply interleaving: I read different books at the same time. Between my reading start and finish of Harari’s content-dense world history, I read four other books. Mixing my reading with Brown’s vulnerability classic and the memoir of a Holocaust Survivor brought insightful connections between various concepts, similar to what James Clear once meant when he said: “The most useful insights are often found at the intersection of ideas.”

How you can apply interleaving: Your brain can handle reading different books simultaneously, and it’s effective to do so. You can start a new book before you finish the one you’re reading. Starting again into a topic you partly forgot feels difficult first, but as you know by now, that’s the effect you want to achieve.

The books that the author is currently reading while applying interleaving.
Interleaving applied: The various books I’m currently reading (Source: Author)

#5 Self-Testing

While reading often falsely tricks us into perceived mastery, testing shows us whether we truly mastered the subject at hand. Self-testing helps you identify knowledge gaps and brings weak areas to the light. In their book, the scientists conclude: “It’s better to solve a problem than to memorize a solution.”

Why it works: Self-testing helps you overcome the illusion of knowledge. “One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.” Objective instruments, like testing, or self-testing, help you adjust your sense of what you know and don’t know.

How I apply self-testing: I explain the key lessons from non-fiction books I want to remember to others. Thereby, I test whether I really got the concept. Often, I didn’t. After reading a great book on personal finance, I recorded a podcast episode where I explained how Exchange Traded Funds work.

I reworked my preparation four times until I felt it included everything the listener needs. But instead of feeling frustrated, cognitive science made me realize that identifying knowledge gaps are a desirable and necessary effect for long-term remembering. I keep Mortimer Adler’s words in mind, who wrote: “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

How you can apply self-testing: Teaching your lessons learned from a non-fiction book is a great way to test yourself. Before you explain a topic to somebody, you have to combine several mental tasks: filter relevant information, organize this information, and articulate it using your own vocabulary.

When you explain the content from what you’ve read to another person, you’ll identify potential knowledge gaps, can reread the passages you want to double-check, and strengthen your understanding.

Self-testing applied through teaching via a podcast.
Self-Testing applied: Teaching what I learned in a podcast episode (Source: Author)

Additional Tweaks for Kindle Readers

Most people are e-reading enemies until they truly read their first e-book. I remained an enemy fifteen books in. You can’t dog-ear your favorite pages, scribble your questions in the margins, or elaborate on a concept you just learned. You can’t apply much of what I’d described above.

And while these arguments 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. Here are the four steps it takes to enrich your e-reading experience.

1) Highlight everything you want to remember

Based on your new insights into human memory, it won’t surprise you that researchers proved highlighting to be ineffective. It’s passive and doesn’t create memory cues.

And while I join the cannon against highlighting as an ineffective learning tool, we need it to create your learning experience. Use your fingers to highlight any piece of content you find worth remembering. You’ll next understand why.

2) Cut down your highlights in your browser

After you finished reading the book, you want to reduce your highlights to the essential part. Visit your Kindle Notes page to find a list of all your highlights. Using your desktop browser is faster and more convenient than editing your highlights on your e-reading device.

Now, browse through your highlights, delete what you no longer need, and add notes to the ones you really like. By adding notes to the highlights, you’ll connect the new information to your existing knowledge. You might recognize this tactic as an effective learning strategy you learned earlier: elaborative rehearsal (see #1 elaboration).

3) Use software to practice spaced repetition

This part is the main reason for e-books beating printed books. While you can do all of the above with a little extra time on your physical books, there’s no way to systemize your repetition praxis. As you know, spaced repetition (see #3) helps you prevent your brain from forgetting and will strengthen your memory.

Readwise is the best software to combine spaced repetition with your e-books. It’s an online service that connects to your Kindle account and imports all your Kindle highlights. Then, it creates flashcards of your highlights and allows you to export your highlights to your favorite note-taking app.

Common Learning Myths Debunked

While reading and studying evidence-based learning techniques I also came across some things I wrongly believed to be true.

#1 Our brain’s capacity is limited

This is simply untrue. As the researchers write in this paper: “We need to understand, too, that our capacity for storing to-be-learned information or procedures is essentially unlimited. In fact, storing information in human memory appears to create capacity — that is, opportunities for additional linkages and storage — rather than use it up.” You increase your brain’s capacity for learning.

#2 Effective learning should feel easy

We think learning works best when it feels productive. That’s why we continue to use ineffective techniques like rereading or highlighting. But learning works best when it feels hard, or as the authors of ‘Make It Stick’ write: “Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”

While techniques like retrieval, spacing, and interleaving can feel hard and appear as if the learning rate would be very slow, the opposite is true. As the researchers write in this paper: “Because they often enhance long-term retention and transfer of to-be-learned information and procedures, they have been labeled desirable difficulties, but they nonetheless can create a sense of difficulty and slow progress for the learner.”

In Conclusion

While these techniques stem from evidence-based learning strategies, their application is my preference. I developed and adjusted these strategies over two years, and they’re still a work in progress.

Try all of them but don’t force yourself through anything that doesn’t feel right for you. I encourage you to do your own research, add further techniques, and skip what doesn’t serve you. Instead of feeling discouraged by all the ideas about how you can improve your learning experience, enjoy experimenting at your own pace. Keep the steps that work for you and screw the rest.

If you’re unsure where to begin, or you’re overwhelmed by all the application strategies, I suggest you start with book summaries first. Writing down what you want to remember makes you think about and rephrase what you just learned.

You can then use it for future spaced repetition (#3) or as a reference guide if you want to teach your insights to somebody (#4). And to write the summary, you will soon realize it’s helpful to elaborate (#1) while reading. Doing it with several books simultaneously (#2) can be a level up once you feel comfortable with the implemented routines.

No matter which strategies you use, applying evidence-based learning strategies will pay off. It’s not a quick win and takes time and patience, but you’ll ultimately reap the benefits.

“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

Four Great Resources That Will Teach You How to Learn

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Crack the core of education and become a lifelong learner.

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

No life skill can earn you greater dividends than learning how to learn. Yet, most people don’t know how to master learning.

When asked, “Do you study the way you do because somebody taught you to study that way?” a study by Kornell & Bjork showed about 73% of students answered “no.”

Long after school, we continue to rely on ineffective learning strategies like passive consumption, highlighting, or rereading in the hope new knowledge will magically stick to our brain. Most people ignore that humans don’t absorb information and knowledge by reading sentences.

The mediocre majority will continue struggling through life this way, never experiencing the benefits of effective learning. They don’t care enough about the potential benefits to invest in their growth.

Most people ignore the proven ways to improve their learning process.

As a result, their lives stagnate. “Entertainment and distraction is the enemy of creation and learning. They will keep you in mediocrity,” Benjamin Hardy once wrote.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

A life full of meaningful learning and growth is available if you know where to start. In the last years, I read +15 books on learning, taught as a Teach for All fellow, and continue working in education. Here are the best resources for learning how to learn.

📘Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

A research group around neuroscientist Henry Roediger and psychologist Mark McDaniel spent ten years exploring learning strategies. Their goal was to bridge the gap between cognitive science and educational science. The result of their work is ‘Make it stick.’

The book in one sentence: Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow; learning works better when it feels hard.

Why you should read 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.

Time Commitment: 336 pages; 7 hours to read it

Content Sneak Peek: This book explores and 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).

đŸ’» Dr. Barabara Oakley — Learning How to Learn

Learning How to Learn is the most popular Coursera course of all time taught by academic experts Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski from the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Oakley’s research has been described as “revolutionary” in the Wall Street Journal, and she won numerous teacher awards for it.

The course in one sentence: Taking responsibility for your learning is one of the most important undertakings you can manage.

Why you should watch it: By exploring effective learning and retention strategies, this course upgrades your learning toolbox. Plus, the course dismantles common learning traps and guides and how to overcome them. After watching it, you’ll feel ready for an effective, personalized learning journey.

Time Commitment: Self-paced 15 hours

Content Sneak Peek: The course explores the modes of thinking (diffuse mode and focused mode), how our memories work (long-term memory and working memory), a handful of learning strategies (recalling, interleaving, and deliberate practice), learning blockers (Einstellung, procrastination, illusions of knowledge, task-switching), brain hacks on a mental level (memory training, environment, Pomodoro technique, habit-forming, focus) and hacks on a physical level (sleeping, naps, workout).

📰 Farnam Street Blog: Accelerated Learning

Shane Parrish, the founder of Farnam Street, was a cybersecurity expert at Canada’s top intelligence agency and an occasional blogger. He promotes proven strategies of rigorous self-betterment as opposed to classic self-help fare. The best articles on the blog explore timeless ideas around learning.

The source in one sentence: You can train your brain to retain knowledge and insight better by understanding how you learn.

Why you should read it: The blog is excellently written and application-oriented. There’s constantly new content, and it serves as a great refresher to the other resources.

Time Commitment: Around 10 minutes per article.

Content Sneak Peek: The blog explores various topics, like deliberate practice, double-loop learning, learning from failure, the half-life of facts, spaced repetition, and the Feynman Technique.

📘Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

There’s been a lot of criticism around this book as the studies by Carol Dweck haven’t been replicated. Yet, I benefited so much from the mindset this book taught me that it belongs in this resource list. While reading it, just consider that it’s not peer-review science but rather mindset advice.

The source in one sentence: By distinguishing between a fixed and a growth mindset, Dweck shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor is influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities.

Why you should read it: This book is a must-read for every person looking for growth. After reading this book, you’ll be able to integrate a growth mindset into your life. For example, you’ll see mistakes as valuable learning opportunities. Studying this book can empower any educator to make positive changes in the classroom environment.

Time Commitment: 320 pages, 6.5 hours to read it

Content Sneak Peek: Mindsets shape whether we believe we can or can’t learn, change, and grow. People with a fixed mindset seek approval, while those with a growth mindset seek development. Role models from our childhood strongly influence our attitudes and ideas, yet we can change our mindset even in adulthood.

Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset (Source: Author based on C. Dweck)

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Don’t Just Do — Reflection Can Help You Take Better Action

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Here’s how.

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

The other week I went for a walk with a friend. He was part of a national athlete team and among the top LoL gamers, studied statistics used to make a living from day trading, and now works as a mental coach.

While we wandered along the Danube and talked about my current research interest in learning and reading, he said something interesting:

“There is nothing more powerful, more instructive than learning from your past experience.”

A truth we often forget. We confuse activity with progress and seek new, better, innovative ideas and solutions. Meanwhile, we repeat the same mistakes and thought patterns.

If we’re not visibly active, we believe we’re not learning.

When we don’t pause to think and to contemplate, we keep circling in a limited sphere at a higher velocity. We can read 50 books to 10x our productivity and still lose the most important life lessons. By acting without looking backward, we close our eyes to the bigger picture.

Reading this article, you’ll learn why reflection works and how you can make it work for you. Understanding the power of introspection is one of the rare concepts you can’t unlearn.

Science and Gates on the Benefits of Reflection

Reflection is the active decision to think about your past. Or, as researchers put it:

“Reflection is the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.”

Even if our eyes can’t witness its effects, introspection is powerful. By ruminating, you’re distilling the key insights from your experience. Connect your past with the present moment is an effective learning technique. Neuroscientist Roediger and neurosurgeon McDaniel write:

“Reflection can involve several cognitive activities that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these new experiences and visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.”

But what’s so good about this strong learning effect? Scientists from Harvard Business School explored this question and state:

“Reflection is a powerful mechanism by which experience is translated into learning. In particular, we find that individuals perform significantly better on subsequent tasks when they think about what they learned from the task they completed.”

Apart from the scientific consensus, well-known people rely on the power of reflection.

Billionaire entrepreneur Sara Blakely shared in an interview how she filled more than 20 notebooks with her life’s obstacles and her lessons learned.

Before learning from Warren Buffett, Bill Gates said he “had every minute packed and thought that was the only way you could do things.” Bill concludes Warren taught him the importance of giving himself time to think and reflect.

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

— Carl Jung

Photo by Jeremy Perkins on Unsplash

How You Can Make Reflection Work for You

Reflection isn’t complex. It can be an easy addition to your toolbox, close at hand whenever you need it. Here are three strategies to start your own reflective practice.

#1 Level Up Your Journaling Practice

You can call it a bullet journal, reflective journal, or learning journal. As long as you spend time pondering on your past, the effect is the same. The key is not to capture events or facts but rather the process and how you felt about it.

Here are prompts to use on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis:

  • What went well? Why?
  • What went wrong? Why?
  • What new did you learn? How can you use this insight?
  • Which activities or tasks did you skip? Why? What can you learn from your behavior for your next steps?
  • On which topic did you change your opinion? How does this shift affect your next decisions?
  • Who are the most important people in your life? Why?

Plus, you can level up your journaling practice with evidence-based tricks. Write sitting in different positions, write for yourself, use the language you feel comfortable with, use diagrams and drawings, or record your own voice.

“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

— Steve Jobs

#2 Meet Up With Friends for Joint Reflection

This one isn’t a substitute but a great addition to your journaling practice. Meeting with a group of peers for joint reflection can be powerful.

Heron, a social science pioneer, explains the method in his book:

You have got the choice of which topics you bring up. It can be a job-related reflection circle, discussing relational topics, or generally share personal journal excerpts or your thoughts behind it.

If you want more guidance, you can use these free reflection cards to get additional inspiration. Structure your meeting in facts, feelings, insights, and actions.

#3 Distill Key Lessons in Your Annual Review

The dark months around New Year are a great reminder to pause, reflect, and rethink the past 12 months. A yearly review is powerful. It can uncover valuable self-knowledge.

Here are ten powerful questions for a reflective practice at the end of a year:

  1. Which things have you discovered this year? Which do you want to keep?
  2. What experiences, people, and accomplishments are you most grateful for? Why?
  3. Which residual feelings do remain if you think about the past year? Are you ready to let them go?
  4. What was the biggest struggle in the past months? How did you tackle it, and what did you learn on the way?
  5. How have you grown and developed in the past year? In what area(s) of your life did you make progress?
  6. What have you discovered about yourself?
  7. What moment did you feel the most alive this year?
  8. When did you feel your heart most open this year?
  9. What inspired you the most in the past months? How did this impact your life?
  10. Based on your experience from last year, which advice would you give yourself for the next year?

“Extraordinary individuals stand out in the extent to which they reflect — often explicitly — on the events of their lives, large as well as small
by seizing the opportunity to leverage and frame these experiences, we gain agency over them. And this heightened agency, in turn, places us in a stronger position to deal with future experiences, even as it may alter our own sense of strengths and possibilities.”

— Howard Gardner

Final Words

We don’t have to be visibly active to learn. Progress starts with self-awareness. If we aren’t aware of a problem, we can’t improve.

With practices like reflective journaling, reflection circles, and yearly reviews, we can better understand our thoughts and emotions while exploring how they affect our behavior. We find pieces of our self-puzzle and can hold on to them for good. Step by step, we discover what life paths we want to take, leave, or create.

Let’s stop to rush through life and, instead, take time for reflection. In the words of American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Dewey:

“We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”

5 Things Prolific Readers Don’t Do

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Give up these bad habits to get the most out of your books.

Photo by Mark Cruzat from Pexels

While most people agree that reading leads to happiness and wisdom, only a few become prolific readers.

The majority feels discouraged when they learn Warren Buffett reads 500 pages a day, or Bill Gates retreats to entire reading weeks. They think they can’t make enough time to read.

Yet, these people commit a common thinking error. They confuse reading time with reading quality. Becoming a productive reader has little to do with the total hours you spend reading.

Over the last years, I became a book fanatic, and since 2017, I’ve read 173 books. And until this summer, I did so while working a full-time job and running a startup at +65 hours a week.

If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that prolific readers don’t focus on doing more of something, but rather avoiding common pitfalls. Here’s the complete list:

They Don’t Force Themselves Through Mediocre Books

We only have a limited number of books we can read before we die. While our life is ticking away, new books are published at light speed.

How many books will you read before you die?

This article uses a life expectancy calculator and data on US reading habits to calculate the numbers. A 25-year old voracious reader who finishes 50 books per year has only around 2950 books left to read in their remaining life.

The number alone might seem like a lot. But if you put it in perspective, you’ll realize it’s almost nothing. Because 2950 out of 129,864,880 books are around 0.000023.

And that’s why prolific readers don’t force themselves through mediocre books. They know not all books are created equal, and most of the books aren’t worth their time.

Patrick Collison, the self-made billionaire founder of Stripe, explains in a podcast interview:

At every moment, you should be reading the best book you know of in the world [for you]. But as soon as you discover something that seems more interesting or more important, you should absolutely discard your current book â€Š because any other algorithm necessarily results in your reading ‘worse’ stuff over time.

Time is a limited resource, and if you waste your time with a mediocre book, you won’t have enough left for the great ones.

How to do it:

Stop reading mediocre books. Get comfortable with putting an unfinished book aside when you find a better one. Look out for and read the great books, the ones that hold the power to change your entire life.

Prolific Readers Don’t Forget What They Read

Ever wondered why the smartest people you know seem to remember everything they read? It’s because people who know a lot are also likely to remember more.

Scientists agree that we learn by relating new information to what we already know. And minds filled with previous knowledge have an easier time remembering new content.

Elon Musk once answered in an ‘ask-me-anything’ Reddit thread:

“Knowledge [is]
 a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to”

So the question is, how do you start building your knowledge trunk?

The learning theory answer is called elaborative rehearsal. You make an association between the new information in the book and the information you already know. The more you elaborate, or try to understand something, the more likely you‘ll keep this new information in your long-term memory.

How to do it:

The best way to do so is to connect the new knowledge to what you already know, and in the best case, apply it in real life. Take notes while reading. Instead of keeping your books look new, use them to the fullest. The more you write in the margins, the more you’ll remember.

Great Readers Don’t Focus On One Book at A Time

In March 2018, I didn’t finish a single book. It’s not that I stopped reading. Instead, I only managed to read five pages of Harari’s Sapiens before falling asleep every night.

That’s why prolific readers don’t read just one book at a time. You don’t want to eat the same dish for breakfast, lunch, and breakfast. Why would you read the same book at different times of the day?

Our brains can handle reading different books. In fact, spaced repetition, meaning revisiting some concepts with some days in between, is one of the most effective learning methods.

So, reading several books simultaneously can improve the way you remember what you read. Plus, you’ll likely find useful intersections between various concepts. It was James Clear who said:

“The most useful insights are often found at the intersection of ideas.”

How to do it:

Read a few books at the same time. Start a new book before you finish the one you’re reading. Pick a content-dense book, like Sapiens, for learning mode and a lighter fiction book for a nighttime session.

They Don’t Get Distracted By Technology

Our world is distracting, and we’re tempted to shift focus at light speed. When phones are within a hand reach, it’s easy to switch tasks without even realizing it.

Some 2000 years ago, Stoic philosopher Seneca summarized how bad even the most intelligent people are when it comes to protecting their time:

“No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tightfisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.”

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. The equation is simple:

The less time you spend on your device, the more you’ll read.

In truth, we knew long before the documentary The Social Dilemma about social media’s harming effects. Yet, we fail to act upon our knowledge.

I struggled to change my phone habits for an entire year. But the journey was worth it. Once I abandoned my phone from my sleeping room and left it shut until 10 AM, I didn’t need to skip any activities to read 52 books a year.

How to do it:

You don’t need to try the digital detox apps like Forest, and Freedom. Instead, read Deep Work and Digital Minimalism and conclude that your best option is to switch off your phone whenever you want to focus completely.

Smart Readers Don’t Aim For A Number of Books

Most people confuse reading with progressing. They think reading a specific number will make them happier, healthier, and wealthier.

But no idea could be further from the truth. Reading is no fast-lane to wealth and wisdom. Instead, reading can even limit your achievements.

I know because I made this mistake.

Before building my first business, I had read dozens of books for each stage in the business lifecycle. But when it came to really starting, the biggest gamechanger was just doing it.

At some point, reading distracts you from acting. You’ll achieve more if you bump along without any books than you ever will reading and not doing anything.

So, prolific readers don’t have the goal to read a specific number of books for the sake of reading.

There’s a subtle difference between book hoarders, focusing on the total number of books they read, and prolific readers. Whereas book hoarders judge themselves by the number of books they own, smart readers judge themselves by what they got out of them and applied in real life.

Mortimer J. Adler put it best when he wrote:

“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.”

How to do it:

Don’t confuse reading with acting. When you finish the book, ask yourself what to do with what you’ve just read. Apply the knowledge and put what you’ve learned into action items.

All You Need to Know

Letting go of these things isn’t difficult or exhausting.

On the contrary: Avoiding these common mistakes makes reading fun and worthwhile.

  • Don’t force yourself through mediocre books.
  • Take notes to remember what you read.
  • Read several books simultaneously.
  • Leave your phone shut whenever you want to read.
  • Apply what you read to your life.

Instead of feeling discouraged by all the ideas about becoming a prolific reader, enjoy experimenting at your own pace. Keep the habits that work for you and screw the rest.

Choose one or two new reading habits until you find a pattern that helps you on your journey to health, wealth, and wisdom.

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