Being critical of generally accepted ideas makes sense if there’s reasonable doubt. These are the ideas I think are overrated.
With the World’s Knowledge a Click Away, We Spend Our Time Looking at Funny Pictures of Cats
Last week I introduced the concept of ultralearning: deep, aggressive self-education. This is the strategy that I used to learn hard subjects like differential equations or Mandarin Chinese in a short amount of time. This kind of self-education—epitomized by doing intense practice to learn hard subjects—isn’t a normal practice for most people. I believe that […]
If You Had 15 Days to Learn Calculus, How Would You Do It?
If you had fifteen days to learn calculus well enough to pass a comprehensive exam, starting from scratch, how would you do it? A gut reaction might be to memorize. If you learn everything by rote, you can spit it out on the exam paper, then forget it. But this only works if your exam […]
Career Planning and the Dao
You’ll swim fastest if you go with the current. You’ll accomplish more in life if you work with the flow of things rather than against it. The ancient Chinese called this the Dao. The ineffable becoming of things to which we are all linked. The height of wisdom, they believed, was to work with this […]
I'm a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, podcast host, computer programmer and an avid reader. Since 2006, I've published weekly essays on this website to help people like you learn and think better. My work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, TEDx, Pocket, Business Insider and more. I don't promise I have all the answers, just a place to start.