Learning - Self-improvement, productivity, career, leadership

Self-improvement, productivity, career, leadership

Learning

A collection of 9 posts

Curiosity as a Career Moat: Why Asking Better Questions Outpaces Intelligence

Curiosity as a Career Moat: Why Asking Better Questions Outpaces Intelligence

The smartest person in the room is rarely the most valuable one. The most curious person usually is.

The 10,000-Hour Rule Is Wrong — but So Is the Critique of It

The 10,000-Hour Rule Is Wrong — but So Is the Critique of It

Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 book Outliers popularised what has since become the single most-quoted piece of folk wisdom about expertise: the 10,000-hour rule. Based on work by Anders Ericsson and colleagues, Gladwell argued that roughly 10,000 hours of practice was the threshold at which world-class expertise became

Decision Journals: The Boring Habit That Makes Smart People Measurably Better

Decision Making

Decision Journals: The Boring Habit That Makes Smart People Measurably Better

Michael Mauboussin, the strategist now at Morgan Stanley, has written about decision journals in multiple papers and talks over the last fifteen years. The research he cites, mostly from Philip Tetlock's work on forecasting and from studies of expert judgment, converges on a pattern that almost nobody in

How to Build a Second Brain — and Why Most Attempts Fail

How to Build a Second Brain — and Why Most Attempts Fail

Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain (2022) sold hundreds of thousands of copies and spawned a cottage industry of courses, templates, and YouTube walkthroughs. The promise was appealing: your life contains too much information for one biological brain to retain, but a structured digital system — a "second

Learning Velocity: Why Some People Double Their Skills Every Two Years

Learning Velocity: Why Some People Double Their Skills Every Two Years

Between 2018 and 2023 I watched two colleagues — similar age, similar starting point, both analysts at the same consulting firm — take measurably different career trajectories. One is now a director at a top-tier fund, running a portfolio worth nine figures. The other is still an analyst, at a different but

The Feynman Technique: How to Know If You Actually Understand Something

The Feynman Technique: How to Know If You Actually Understand Something

Richard Feynman had a specific test for whether he actually understood something. He would pick a technical concept — a mathematical proof, a physical mechanism, a derivation — and try to explain it to a class of freshmen, or sometimes to himself out loud as if to a freshman. If he got

Speed Reading Is Mostly Nonsense — Here's What the Evidence Actually Shows

Speed Reading Is Mostly Nonsense — Here's What the Evidence Actually Shows

The speed reading industry is worth roughly $200 million a year globally, built on courses, apps, and books promising to triple or quadruple your reading speed while maintaining comprehension. Evelyn Wood, who founded Reading Dynamics in 1959, claimed to teach students to read 1,500 to 6,000 words per

The Zettelkasten Method: How a German Sociologist Wrote 70 Books Using Index Cards

The Zettelkasten Method: How a German Sociologist Wrote 70 Books Using Index Cards

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist who between 1951 and his death in 1998 published 70 books and around 400 academic papers. He is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most prolific social theorists of the twentieth century. When asked how he did it, he never attributed the output

How to Read 30 Business Books a Year Without Wasting a Single Hour

How to Read 30 Business Books a Year Without Wasting a Single Hour

The number 30 is arbitrary. I didn't choose it by research — I chose it because it was the highest number I could sustain without my marriage or my work suffering, and it turned out to be achievable with about 35 minutes of reading per day. Most people overestimate