Cheery Friday e-mails
Every Friday I send a “Cheery Friday” email chock full of insights about learning and changing to a million registered learners from the massive open online course (“MOOC”) Learning How to Learn. To receive these emails, just register for the course here (it’s free, and registration takes only a few seconds). “See” you on Friday!
Confessions of a Public Speaker
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week This week’s book recommendation is Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker. We’ve read a fair number of books about various aspects of public speaking, and Scott’s book ranks among the best. He goes into the nitty-gritty of travel, preparation, and what it feels like …
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Hit Refresh
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week We happened to pick up Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone, by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. To be honest, we weren’t expecting much (we read a lot of books that never make the cut for our Cheery Friday newsletter). We …
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Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week This week, we opted for some light reading with Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, by Mason Currey. This is basically a compendium of workaholic work habits of a number of famous writers and artists. Since we’re sort of workaholics ourselves, it was an intriguing glimpse into …
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The problem with experts
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Month (Yes, a second one) We’re embarrassed to admit that, despite all of the hullabaloo over the past decade, we had never previously gotten around to reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable—a no-holds-barred vivisection of so-called experts. Taleb doesn’t shy …
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When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Month We’ve long been major fans of Dan Pink. His latest book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing lives up to Dan’s fantastic writing record. Right from the start, we were riveted to read of a ship sunk on a sunny afternoon within sight of shore—with over a thousand liv …
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Barb in San Francisco
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week We received an awesome Christmas gift—How to Traumatize Your Children: 7 Proven Methods to Help You Screw Up Your Kids Deliberately and with Skill. By making fun, (in hilarious fashion) of common parental foibles, it also helps us keep in mind what good parenting really entai …
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Escaping the Ivory Tower
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week We very much enjoyed Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, an eye-opening book on the world of olive oil. We had a sense that olive oils were often mislabeled, but this book really opened our eyes about how “extra virgin first cold-pressed olive oil …
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Hit Lit–Top Ten Books & Learning Tools of 2017 for Learning How to Learners!
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Books of the Week As LHTLers know, we love biographies! This week, we reread Jack Weatherford’s monumental Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, which is one of our top two biographies of all time (our other top favorite biography is Robert Massie’s Peter the Great: His Life and W …
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Book of the Year: Why We Sleep
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Year [EMBARRASSING REVELATION (added August 21, 2021): Walker’s book, as it turns out, is riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, as described in this outstanding analysis by Alexey Guzey (himself an early student of Learning How to Learn). As Wikipedia notes: “Walker fa …
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The great Leonardo da Vinci
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Month Everyone’s been talking about Walter Isaacson’s latest biography, Leonardo da Vinci, so we had to join the crowd and see what all the hullabaloo was about. (We’ll admit, we’ve previously tackled da Vinci biographies that ended up putting us to sleep, so we were excited to se …
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