Learning, it seems, is optimized for both humans and machines when we succeed around 85% of the time. From a recent paper by Wilson, Shenhav, Straccia and Cohen: In many situations we find that there is a sweet spot in which training is neither too easy nor too hard, and where learning progresses most quickly. […]

Productivity forms the backbone of any self-improvement effort. If you can’t organize your time, accomplish your tasks and complete your projects, what chance do you have to reach any other goal you’ve set for yourself? At the same time, few topics are so frequently misunderstood. Overwork is often equated with productivity. Burnout, stress and exhaustion, […]

One-on-one tutoring is one of the most effective ways to learn anything. In his famous paper on the “2 sigma problem” in educational research, Benjamin Bloom called for a search for group teaching interventions that approximated the efficacy of tutoring: However, the most striking of the findings is that under the best learning conditions we […]

How often have you read a book, taken a course or listened to a podcast and . . . promptly forgotten everything the minute you switch your attention to something else? Being able to retain what you learn is a central difficulty in our era of information abundance. Too many great ideas get wasted, simply […]