In my quest to understand the nuts-and-bolts process of how we learn complex, valuable skills, I’ve read quite a few books on learning, teaching and skill acquisition. This batch of books challenged my thinking and changed my mind on quite a few things. I read these books to further investigate learning by doing and the […]

Say you need to learn a complicated skill: physics, French or computer programming. How much time should you spend building your background knowledge before you start practicing the actual skill? Consider machine learning. One way to learn this field would be to master first the underlying math. Then, when you encountered the programming commands for […]

How much do we learn simply by doing the things we’re trying to get good at? This question is at the heart of a personal research project I’ve been working on for several months. Readers can note some previous entries I’ve already written on this project. My original intuition was that we get good at […]

I often don’t feel smart enough to do what I do. I don’t say this out of false modesty or as an attempt to be more relatable. I spent the last decade taking on rather-immodest learning challenges. I’ve always been confident in my ability to learn new things. Instead, the insecurity comes from recognizing that, […]