Happiness is a paradoxical goal. We all want to be happy, yet we often fail spectacularly at predicting what will make us happy. We pursue goals like wealth, fitness, status and mastery only to find that achieving them doesn’t really change our lives very much. In contrast, we often deliberately make ourselves miserable: we worry about things we cannot...

I recently had an email exchange with a reader who, in his words, claimed to struggle with a lack of commitment.  He wanted to study machine learning, but he couldn’t get past the first few modules of the course he’s taking. After a few emails back and forth, however, I discovered the reason he “wasn’t able to commit” was simply that his full-time...

Human reason is a puzzling ability. As a species, we’ve invented logic, mathematics, science and philosophy. Yet we suffer from a list of cognitive biases so long that an entire Wikipedia page is devoted to categorizing them. So which is it: are we excellent at reasoning or incurably irrational? Psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird has spent his career...

When it comes to language learning, grammar gets all the attention. Most theories about second language acquisition focus primarily on how we acquire syntax—the way we put words together to form sentences. Vocabulary, in contrast, has historically been outside of the spotlight. This is unfortunate. Research has shown that your vocabulary has the greatest...

The most popular piece of studying advice I’ve ever come up with was the Feynman Technique. While the technique itself is only loosely based on Richard Feynman’s practices, the idea of self-explanations took off and became a studying meme that has since gone far beyond my own audience. The basic idea for the technique is simple: Pick an idea you...

My new book, Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery, is now available for preorder. This book means a lot to me. It’s easily the longest and hardest I’ve ever worked on any project in my life. From start to finish, the project took over four years, involving hundreds of books, several hundred scientific papers and countless conversations...