Get Better at Anything

12 Maxims for Mastery

De: Scott H. Young

Narrado por: Scott H. Young

The author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Ultralearning explores why it’s so difficult for people to learn new skills, arguing that three factors must be met to make advancement possible, and offering 12 maxims to improve the way we learn.

Life revolves around learning—in school, at our jobs, even in the things we do for fun. Yet learning is often mysterious. Sometimes it comes fairly effortlessly: quickly finding our way around a new neighborhood or picking up the routine at a new job. In other cases, it’s a slog. We may spend hours in the library, yet still not do well on an exam. We may want to switch companies, industries, or even professions, but not feel qualified to make the leap. Decades spent driving a car, typing on a computer, or hitting a tennis ball don’t reliably make us much better at them. Improvement can be fickle, if it comes at all.

In Get Better At Anything, Scott Young argues that there are three key factors in helping us learn:

See—Most of what we know comes from other people. The ease of learning from others determines, to a large extent, how quickly we can improve.

Do—Mastery requires practice. But not just any practice will do. Our brains are fantastic effort-saving machines, which can be both a tremendous advantage and a curse.

Feedback—Progress requires constant adjustment. Not just the red stroke of a teacher’s pen, but the results of hands-on experience.

When we’re able to learn from the example of other people, practice extensively ourselves, and get reliable feedback, rapid progress results. Yet, when one, or all, of these factors is inhibited, improvement often becomes impossible. Using research and real-life examples, Young breaks down these elements into twelve simple maxims. Whether you’re a student studying for an exam, an employee facing a new skill at work, or just want to get better at something you’re interested in, his insights will help you do it better.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2024 Scott Young (P)2024 HarperCollins Publishers

Getting Better is Always Better

It would be ideal to take notes while listening to the audiobook. There's a lot of useful information to ponder and/or do more further research. The next step is to practice what we have learned.

Great Book Overall

I liked how the author went into depth for each maxim, with plenty of great different examples. Overall is great, but at certain portions the book does feel a little "stretched out". But a great resource nonetheless!

I've read Ultra learning many times and..

this book is a really good rehashing of what Scott teaches in his first book. As the world and tech advances the need for life long students in pursuit for knowledge will not abate but become more pronounced and aggrandized. I pride myself in finding books for life and this is one of those!

Face your fears and get better at what matters most for you

Scott does a fantastic job at explaining useful knowledge on the field of psychology, education and more to understand how we can get better in any discipline, in accordance with the way we learn things, and offers specific strategies on how to improve, 10/10.

Clarity about best practices using research and histories of a great variety of masters in their fields

Just a few chapters in, but as a fan of author's first book, Ultralearning - it is a pleasure to update strategies and be inspired by compelling detailed examples and methods of mastery. Young is a skilled and passionate narrator on his subject and practices the methods he uncovers in his research.

Author uses tacit way way way too much

Extremely convoluted, difficult to get to the point, overuse of big words for no reason. Would not recommend.

Is this book about math, or learning?

Scott Young appears to have two major problems. He's too cheap to pay an actually skilled narrator to record his audiobooks (this was a problem with his book Ultralearning as well), and he really wants everyone to know how smart and sophisticated he is.
There may very well be a good book in here somewhere. I really enjoyed his book Ultralearning. But, considering that he spent the entire first hour of this book talking about an obscure, highly advanced math theorem, I'm never going to find out whether there is a good book in here or not. He just talks way too much about things that are not at all related to what the book is supposed to be about. And, even when he's vaguely talking about learning, he seems to be trying to overcomplicate the information on purpose. He uses the word "problem space" about ten times over the course of the first chapter, and I'm fairly certain he's only using it to make himself sound smart.
This book is going to get moved to my DNF pile. I can't be bothered to deal with terrible narration AND drawn out exposition that doesn't move the book forward to cover the meat of what it's supposed to be about.

it is a discussion of how to solve math problems.

I like the powerful white noise it creates to achieve deep sleep. It is a powerful method to cure insomnia.

Boring read out loud statistics

No tools or adwise, just never ending research results. Waste of time and money. Don’t recommend