Learning

You can have shelves full of unread books and still not be a serious reader. What matters is not what you own, but what you’ve absorbed. As Adler puts it, "Full ownership comes only when you have made [the book you’re reading] a part of yourself." This process isn’t passive — it only occurs when you focus, reflect, and write down your thoughts.

Skill, on the other hand, must be developed, step-by-step, mostly through failure. The quickness and quality of skill development depends on the quality and immediacy of the corrective feedback a student receives. It also depends on the student’s willingness to re-engage after failing. It is also dependent upon the number and level of students in a

What are the best original sources that everyone else quotes? Find that book and aim to know it.

Even if you can’t experience the thing directly, try going for information-dense sources with high amounts of detail and facts, and then reason up from those facts. On foreign policy, read books published by university presses -- not The Atlantic or The Economist or whatever. You can read those after you’ve developed a model of the thing yourself,

Bottom Line: Treat your time as a graduate student like a professional musician treats his or her performance repertoire. If you’re not constantly straining yourself to learn more and perform better, you’re in danger of being left behind.

The value of a graduate student (not to mention, an assistant professor), I’ve come to realize, is directly proportional to the quantity and complexity of their technical tool kit. If you study algorithms, for example, the more corners of the literature you’ve mastered, and the more mathematical analysis techniques you’re comfortable with, the more

People learn by creating their own understanding. But that does not mean they must or even can do it without assistance. Effective teaching facilitates that creation by getting students engaged in thinking deeply about the subject at an appropriate level and then monitoring that thinking and guiding it to be more expert-like.

I’d say that perhaps 5-7 really good books on a subject would give you the sort of mastery I’m talking about. It would give you the sort of competence that, say, an advanced graduate student in the subject area might have before writing a dissertation. Choose the books wisely.

You can learn more about politics if you really study a few classics and case studies than almost everybody involved in it figures out in a lifetime.