The average lifespan of a technical skill is roughly 18 months. The world is moving fast. Anything you learn today may become obsolete tomorrow. It may feel discouraging—why bother acquiring a new skill if it will soon be useless?—but it shouldn’t be. The fact is it has never been easier to teach yourself anything. In … Read More
When I was a kid, my parents struggled to understand why I always looked so tired. We had a curfew and were usually pretty quiet after bedtime. What was happening? Well, I was reading. Sometimes until dawn. Treasure Island, The Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Count … Read More
Should you share your work in public? Lots of research has been conducted to determine whether sharing your goals in public was a good thing or a bad thing. Some studies show that people are more likely to do stuff if they keep their intentions private. Basically, goal sharing may give us the same psychological … Read More
Most schools use blocked practice to teach students: it’s an approach that consists in practicing a single skill over and over, with repetition being the key, and little to no variance. With blocked practice, you wait until you feel comfortable with a topic before moving onto the next one. This is how most curriculums are … Read More
Highly effective readers use a collection of mental processes called active reading in order to retain more of the information and make the new acquired knowledge more useful. Reading in a passive way isn’t an effective way to understand and learn. In order to stay focused and retain more information, it’s important to be highly … Read More
About 2 million books get published every year in the world. The indexed web contains at least 5.75 billion pages. So much to read, so little time. In a world obsessed with speed and productivity at all costs, it’s no surprise that someone came up with a solution. It’s called speed reading, and its promise … Read More
Our current education system is designed to optimise for input. Hours are spent reading, observing, and listening, and output is mostly encouraged as a way to measure the student’s progress. It’s a shame, because there’s lots of research showing that we remember things better when we actively engage with the information and create our own … Read More
While most people—including scientists—agree on the benefits of reading books, not everyone seems to have been made equal when it comes to remembering their content. Some people are an endless source of insights, recalling every single detail long after they’re finished reading. Others, not so much. What’s going on here? And how can you better … Read More
Nowadays, when we want to remember something, we mostly use our phone to take a quick note, create a reminder, message ourselves on Slack, or just add it to our calendar. Granted, having a good memory may not be as useful as it used to be, but there’s lots of research showing that training your … Read More
I absolutely love reading. Fiction, non-fiction, poems, blogs, newspapers, magazines. Unfortunately, in today’s world, we spend less time reading and more time browsing—scrolling through Tweets, liking Instagram posts. It’s a shame, because reading offers many benefits that are backed by science. If you’re not convinced you should make it a habit, see below for some … Read More