After reading 哈佛学子无我专注力:好成绩不靠凌晨四点半(Harvard students have selfless concentration: good grades do not rely on waking up at 4:30 in the morning)

A book that I think is poorly written.

I am interested in “how to learn effectively?” and have tried various strategies for studying efficiently since high school. Currently, I am learning how to teach machines. One of the important factors in learning is “focus”, which is one of my weakness. Therefore, the title “The ability of Focus” caught my attention. However, the result wasn’t what I expected.

Around page 70, I thought about giving up reading hundreds of times.

However, I thought that the author who wrote this book must be much smarter than me. So, there must be some other factors that make the book boring.

So, I approached reading with the mindset of

“what kind of book is a poorly written book?”

My conclusion is as follows:

  1. The content of the book is the opposite of what the reader expects.

As mentioned in the beginning, I picked up the book to get advice on improving my focus. However, the content of the book is all about child education. Even in the book introduction and preface, there is no mention of child education, so I had to read through the book and pick out the parts that were relevant to me, like picking the meat out of a soup.

  1. Lack of persuasive power due to insufficient objective evidence

There were some interesting parts in the book, such as the statement that “the best time to study is right after waking up, from 8-10am, from 4-6pm, and before going to bed.” This caught my attention because I had never thought about it before. However, the book does not provide any objective reference to support this statement. I only had to believe the author’s words. Furthermore, in fact that the book is talking about how to study and learn, but it only lists four references, despite being published in 2021.

The above can be considered the main problems with this book. Next time, I think I should check the book’s references first.

In the meantime, there were some useful parts in the book, such as the “Pomodoro technique.”

If you have an interest in child education, this book may be helpful. However, if you are looking for ways to improve your focus ability, I recommend searching for summaries of the book online and reading other books like “Flow” instead.

Originally from return_go