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 a...