78 books like Make It Stick

This book is a creative and accurate description of how to use scientifically developed principles to help yourself learn effectively. The author vividly shows that he "eats his own dogfood" and reports his compelling personal experiences that buttress the science. Moreover, the book is well written and tightly organized. If you want to help yourself to learn more effectively, this is the first book I would consult.

Professor Kahneman’s ideologies on decision-making have helped me in business and my personal life.

His insights have enhanced my decision-making process and helped me navigate the strait between instinct and decision. His insights have encouraged me to delegate routine decisions, allowing me to reserve my mental energy for the most critical choices.

The learnings from this book have helped us so many times to make good decisions for our coaching business. Two concepts in particular have stood out: The Hedgehog Concept and Stockdale Paradox from this book are alive in us every day.

The Hedgehog Concept is the intersection between three circles: 1) What can you be best in the world at? 2) What drives the economic engine? 3) What are you deeply passionate about?

The Stockdale Paradox is to always retain the faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of difficulties, while confronting the brutal fact of your current reality.

This book both confirmed and encouraged the best mindset to optimize growth. It’s about learning to create a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. Studies have shown that it’s a better way to be successful and happy in life.

“Qualities can be nurtured; our potential is unknown, and failure does not define you. Deal with it, learn, and praise the process."

The main keys are that it’s all about learning, learning, learning…no matter what happens to you. “Yet” is a key word, and hard work is required to succeed. Setbacks are opportunities for growth.

The author immersed himself in the world of memory experts and describes how he went from (metaphorical) memory rags to memory riches – eventually winning a prestigious memory contest. This book takes the mystery out of how to learn vast bodies of information; Foer describes learning devices that anyone can use to put their memory on steroids.

I've bought this book at least a half-dozen times, giving it as a gift to friends who have kids in middle school or who are interested in how principles of learning can be applied in clever ways. This book is elegant in concept and design, and is one of a series of books Holt wrote that use similar applications of the science of learning to teach readers a set of interesting facts in a way that is almost effortless and a lot of fun.

It’s impossible, as a parent, not to marvel at the miracle of learning that occurs in very young children. Indeed, parents have experienced this sense of awe for time immemorial, and some have gone so far as to venture explanations for how it works. John Dewey, the American philosopher and psychologist, argued at the dawn of the twentieth century that children are like young scientists as they go about their day, subtly testing the things and people around them to see how they work. We now know, in no small part due to the work of researchers including The Scientist in the Crib author Alison Gopnik, that Dewey was right. Children are compelled to experiment; what’s more, they make the most of the limited data they produce with a powerful logic invisible to the untrained eye. Parents—but also anyone with a sense of wonder—will find answers to deep mysteries in… show more.

Both of us read this book separately in the early 90s and started applying these habits, which have stayed with us ever since. These habits have given us a solid foundation for anything we have wanted to do in our lives.

You learn how to create your own vision for your life, clarify the most important values to act on, and use basic communication skills to create trust and synergy with the people around you. You also learn the importance of nurturing and managing yourself to be healthy, enjoy your life, and be able to be there for others.

These are some of the best life skills anyone can learn, no matter what work or hobbies you have, and it was natural to keep sharing these habits with other coaches and players even 30 years later!

There is a cottage industry of historical and analytical books attempting to explain where, exactly, our educational norms, structures, and strictures came from. Many of these are terrific, but Lagemann’s An Elusive Science is the best of the bunch for exploring how nineteenth and twentieth-century scientific research influenced modern educational practice. The author is the source of a line oft-quoted in ed circles: “I have often argued to students, only in part to be perverse, that one cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.” This is the book that explicates and explores this almost primordial dichotomy, and how different philosophies of science became aligned with complementary philosophies of educational practice. A piercing, impeccably researched, enjoyable read. 

The Sane Positivist, by Geraldine Jonçich Clifford (née Jonçich), an expansive, out-of-print volume from 1968, was our favorite discovery from my book's research phase. Written in a stylish, old-fashioned present tense, the book is a biography of E. L. Thorndike, a figure who can credibly claim as much influence over the US’s (and much of the world’s) educational path as any other single human being. Even if E. L. Thorndike weren’t an educationist of historic significance, he would still belong in the animal behavior research pantheon, thanks to his immensely important work cataloguing the learning powers of animals (usually, cats he observed escaping from cages).

The author documents this early work and Thorndike’s subsequent leap (which I consider misguided) from animals in cages to humans in classrooms, while giving a deeply sourced and keenly observed account of his personal development. The figure she describes is as complex as… show more.