Books › Make It Stick
Make It Stick
336 pages
A paradigm-shifting guide that dismantles everything you thought you knew about learning, replacing frustration with evidence-based empowerment.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like having a fog lifted from your brain. It is a steady, clarifying journey that systematically dismantles the comforting but ineffective study habits we have relied on for years. The tone is pragmatic and encouraging, grounding dense cognitive science in relatable anecdotes from pilots, surgeons, and students. Instead of making you feel foolish for past mistakes, it reframes struggle and friction as the very mechanisms of true mastery. The prose is crisp and accessible, never bogging down in academic jargon. It is a deeply motivating experience, leaving you equipped with a new, resilient toolkit for lifelong learning. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to stop spinning their wheels and start truly absorbing the world.
- Mood
- intellectual
- motivating
- clarifying
- Tone
- authoritative
- pragmatic
- encouraging
- myth-busting
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the value of struggle · lifelong learning · cognitive resilience · illusions of competence · mastery through friction
- The writing
- Clear, accessible, and anecdote-rich, translating dense cognitive science into digestible, actionable insights.
- The arc
- Moves from the humbling realization that your trusted study habits are flawed to an empowering sense of control over your own cognitive potential.
- Who it's for
- Lifelong learners, students, and educators eager to ditch ineffective habits and optimize how their brains acquire and retain knowledge.
About the book
To most of us, learning something "the hard way" implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners. Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned. Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement. - Publisher.
Description from Open Library.
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