One of the few lessons I recall from business school is the make-or-buy decision. Big companies often face a choice: should they make something in-house, or outsource it to a supplier? The decision depends on many factors, but a big part is cost: will it be cheaper or more reliable if you invest in in-house production? Or does it make more sense to pay someone else to do it? Decisions about whether or not to learn something are often similar. For almost any conceivable skill you can: Learn to do it yourself. Hire someone else to do it. Avoid doing it entirely. Consider programming. You could ..read more

A studying plan organizes three things: What you have to learn. How you’re going to learn it. When you’re going to invest the time. Although it sounds simple, most students don’t make a detailed study plan. Of those that do, they often make mistakes that render the plan highly unrealistic—a recipe for future guilt, not future learning. In this article, I’m going to outline how to make a studying plan—and how you can stick to it. Why Make a Studying Plan? Learning is effortful. Although that effort can be enjoyable, our impulses about what to do in the moment often don’t coincide with what wo ..read more

A reader emailed me citing a few examples of people who abruptly changed their lives: they started exercising, built better habits, studied hard and got good grades, moved up in their careers … basically turning themselves into “successful” people seemingly overnight. He wanted to understand why this happens and ask how someone might attempt a similar transformation. I’ve witnessed this kind of personality change in others several times, so I believe the phenomenon is real. A number of my friends suddenly became much more motivated, conscientious, organized and ambitious—often translating into ..read more

What are the best books to read to become a better learner? (Aside from my book, of course.) I get asked this question a lot, though most of my recent reading lists have been more academic and somewhat removed from immediate applications. Today, I’d like to change that and share a list of some of my favorite approachable and actionable books on learning. Here’s ten I highly recommend. 1. How to Become a Straight-A Student by Cal Newport Although famous for Deep Work, Cal’s early books were aimed at students (that’s how we met). Straight-A is easily the best of Cal’s student-oriented trilogy ..read more

Recently, I asked readers here to share how they’re using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to learn and study. Today, I’m rounding up some of those suggestions and trying to synthesize the advice for when (and when not) to use these tools for learning. Strengths and Weaknesses of LLMs Using applications like ChatGPT requires some care. Part of the difficulty is that ChatGPT’s human-like conversation abilities can be deceptive. Feeling like you’re talking to a real person encourages you to rely on conversational expectations that may not hold with a machine. For instance, we generally ..read more

I’m finishing up a longer post incorporating some of the many useful and interesting suggestions readers shared about how they use ChatGPT to learn languages, programming, mathematics and more. However, before I share that post, I’d like to address a different question. One question a few readers have is whether ChatGPT will eliminate the need to learn things. After all, if you can easily ask the machine a question and it will spit out an expert-like answer, what’s the point of getting students to write essays, memorize facts or try to remember a lot of knowledge? Like everyone, I’m gobsmacked ..read more

Transfer occurs when learning one thing helps you learn or do something else. It’s arguably the most important issue in educational psychology. After all, we spend years in the classroom. One would hope the things we learn make us more productive on the job, conscientious as citizens or intelligent in our daily lives. Yet it turns out the titular question is really difficult to answer. This is because the answer depends on three different questions, each of which is itself incredibly complicated: How do we perform skills? How do we acquire them? What sorts of skills are used in real life? Ab ..read more

I’ve shared some reading lists based on my research for my upcoming book. But in addition to the 140 or so books I’ve read for the project, I’ve also read around 500 scientific papers. While most academic papers don’t make for lively reading, the best are fascinating. Here I’d like to share a selection of some of the papers that had a significant influence on my thinking and might do the same for you too: Side note: I’ve tried, when possible, to include links that follow to a PDF in case you want to read it yourself. Where that was unavailable, you’ll be on your own… cough Sci-Hub cough cough ..read more

A lot of readers have asked me about how ChatGPT, and other large language models, might shape how we learn things. For those unaware, ChatGPT is an impressive AI application that can dialog fluently about nearly any subject. It has the ability to write code, pass the US Medical Licensing Exam, translate in dozens of languages, summarize text and even write funny limericks. It also sometimes makes stuff up. Incredibly, it does all this largely through being trained to predict the next word of text. Much of the discussion surrounding ChatGPT has reflected the hope and anxieties about how it mig ..read more

Here are a few more books I finished over the last few months and some insights I gleaned from each. 1. Beginning to Read by Marilyn Adams I didn’t expect to find a 500-page book on the science of early reading to be interesting. But I was enthralled—both by the amount of work that has been done on figuring out how people learn to read (and the best way to teach them) and by what it implies for learning other skills. Fluent readers can comprehend text at a rate of several words per second. Given this, it’s easy to believe that we skim over words, infer the text by its likely context or don’t ..read more