Please Tell Me Your Secrets

It is slightly surprising to me that some things that are clearly incredibly valuable and useful aren’t more popular. Anki (a flashcard program that helps you remember things)¹ is probably the most obvious example to me here - when I started using it, it was just obviously so much better than other ways of studying for exams. It required a bit of effort to get started, but if you put in that effort, the returns were huge. If you look through my university transcripts from my undergraduate degree, you’ll notice that my grades on some modules are much, much better than others - there are modules in which I did exceptionally well in (i.e. much better than anyone else I knew) and modules in which I didn’t do particularly well at all. There is no obvious similarity between the modules I did extremely well in - they weren’t all quantitative modules or anything like that. But they were all exam-based, and Anki is useful for exams but much less so for essays. I cannot overstate how much impact…