The Only Skill that Matters

By Jonathan A. Levi (2019)

One minor quibble I have about "The Only Skill That Matters" is that the title only accurately describes the contents if you take it as meaning, "How to Learn Efficiently", even though this overarching skill is subsequently broken down into quite a few distinct sub-skills that need to be acquired in different ways.  

Having said that, all of what the author says makes a huge amount of sense, even if you will have seen most of it somewhere else already.  He rehashes the inspirational work of Harry Lorayne on how to use visual mnemonics, discusses the various applications of the Pareto Principle, (that 80% of the benefits accrue for 20% of the input), about how to manage motivation, speed reading, pre-reading, the inter-related nature of knowledge, aka cross-pollination, the benefits of the brute force approach, self-quizzing and teaching, all of which we have come across before elsewhere but it is all condensed very neatly and accessibly. 

Would highly recommend and this despite the fact that the author repeatedly says that it is only adults who learn this way, when I think there is a strong argument to be made for the case that young people also learn this way too. Their learning is just as experiential, context dependent and problem solving as adults, it is just that we don't respect it as much when they choose to learn what they want to learn, and because the culture of schooling has habituated us to the idea that children will only learn when they are forced to do so. However, this sort of childism applies to most books on this sort of subject, so you can't really hold this particular author to account and all you have to do is ignore it and read the book with a view to applying the lessons to all humans.

Rating 9/10