Books like Make It Stick

01

A Mind for Numbers

Barbara Oakley · Self-help

A Mind for Numbers is Barbara Oakley's guide to learning hard subjects effectively, written primarily for students struggling with mathematics and science but drawing on cognitive science principles that apply to any demanding field.

Oakley takes the retrieval and spacing research at the heart of Make It Stick and turns it into a working method for anyone who thinks they are bad at math or science.

02

Ultralearning

Scott Young · Self-help

Ultralearning is Scott Young's synthesis of principles drawn from his own extreme learning projects — completing MIT's four-year computer science curriculum in one year, learning four languages in a year, and other aggressive self-directed learning experiments — and from the academic research on skill acquisition and deliberate practice.

Young pushes the same evidence into the deep end, aggressive self-directed projects built on retrieval, directness, and drilling your weakest points.

03

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool · Science

Peak is Anders Ericsson's definitive account of deliberate practice — the specific type of focused, feedback-driven training that, more than any other factor, determines how expert people become in demanding fields.

Ericsson's deliberate practice is the expertise engine underneath it all, not more repetition but effortful, feedback-rich reps at the edge of your ability.

04

The Talent Code

Daniel Coyle · Science

The Talent Code is Daniel Coyle's investigation into why certain places — a tennis academy in Russia, a soccer training ground in Brazil, a music conservatory in Texas — produce a disproportionate number of world-class performers.

Coyle reports from the world's talent hotbeds and lands on deep practice, the messy, mistake-driven struggle that Make It Stick names desirable difficulty.

05

Learn Like a Pro

Barbara Oakley and Olav Schewe · Self-help

Learn Like a Pro is a concise, evidence-based guide to studying more effectively, written by Barbara Oakley — the engineer-turned-neuroscientist best known for A Mind for Numbers and the Coursera course "Learning How to Learn" — and Olav Schewe, a student learning consultant.

A short, no-nonsense toolkit of the same techniques, retrieval, spacing, beating procrastination, for readers who want the how without the research narrative.

06

Moonwalking with Einstein

Joshua Foer · Science

Moonwalking with Einstein is Joshua Foer's account of spending a year training for and winning the United States Memory Championship, beginning as a journalist covering the event and ending as its champion.

Foer's year training for the US Memory Championship is the entertaining case study in how memory really encodes, told by a journalist who became the experiment.

07

The First 20 Hours

Josh Kaufman · Self-help

The First 20 Hours makes a sharp distinction that most books on learning quietly ignore: the difference between becoming competent at a skill and becoming world-class at one.

Kaufman aims the science at raw skill acquisition, a practical route from clueless to competent fast by structuring practice the way learning actually works.

08

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

David Epstein · Science

Range is David Epstein's argument against the ten-thousand-hours gospel.

Epstein's case for breadth and cross-domain sampling is the big-picture defense of the interleaving Make It Stick shows beats narrow, one-thing-at-a-time drilling.

09

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Carol S. Dweck · Psychology

Carol Dweck's central claim is simple but far-reaching: people hold one of two basic beliefs about their own abilities.

Dweck supplies the belief that makes desirable difficulty bearable, that struggle is how ability grows rather than proof that you lack it.

10

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman · Psychology

Thinking, Fast and Slow is Daniel Kahneman's account of the two cognitive systems that govern human thought.

Kahneman explains the fluency illusion Make It Stick warns about, how the easy, confident feeling of System 1 tricks us into thinking we have learned something.

11

The Art of Learning

Josh Waitzkin · Self-help

The Art of Learning is Josh Waitzkin's account of how he became a national chess champion as a child and later a world-champion martial artist, and what those two very different disciplines taught him about the structure of high performance.

A chess prodigy turned martial-arts champion on the inner craft of learning, the felt experience of the effortful practice the cognitive scientists measure.

12

Why We Sleep

Matthew Walker · Science

Why We Sleep is Matthew Walker's attempt to do for sleep what no amount of public health messaging has managed: make people genuinely afraid of what they're losing.

Walker fills in the piece Make It Stick only gestures at, that sleep is when spaced practice consolidates, the biology turning today's retrieval into tomorrow's memory.