Fans pick 100 books like Making the Most of College

This is the best book we have read about how to practice in the best way possible. So many people practice hard but don’t improve. We always say, “What you practice, you get good at,” … so make sure you practice and train in the smartest way possible.

Spaced-out practice means you need a break and time to recharge, and that is important for retention. Interleaving means that you don’t stay with one segment of a skill until you master it. You interleave several segments, and it makes it a lot harder to do, but retention and mastery improve.

I read this book when it came out in 1985, as I was polishing my first book. I recommended it to a senior colleague who had written several books and edited a leading journal. He took it with him to some beach on winter vacation as he was completing his next book. When he returned, he said he was so engrossed in the book that his wife got mad at him for not putting it down. He loved it as much as I did.

If you have mastered this book, your writing will improve dramatically, and you will not need another style manual for the rest of your life. 

When students come to college, everything is new. This book offers well-seasoned advice on how to make the most of office hours, how to study effectively, why not to worry about your major or career path too early, and at the same time, how to plan ahead.

Lots of nuts and bolts advice, a perfect high school graduation gift.

When I heard Ken Bain give a talk on what the best college teachers do, his arguments so impressed me that I changed my syllabus that night before the start of classes the next day. 

This book follows a similar model of drawing on interviews to search for best practices. In this case, Bain culls his best practices from interviews with successful college students. From a student’s perspective, reading the book is a bit like speed-dialing peer advice.

Bain devotes an entire chapter to working through failure and spends considerable time on deep versus superficial learning.

Whether and how childhood adversity shapes human development is a question that has long intrigued scientists and citizens.

This book tells the story of a great sociologist mining archival data about children who grew up during economically troubled times in America in order to underscore how the past is—and is not—prologue. Perhaps its greatest contribution is in illuminating the environmental conditions and life experiences that determined whether children eventually thrived or failed. In so doing, this work shaped the field of developmental studies, including my own work, for decades to come.

The retired Harvard psychiatrist shepherded the Grant Study of American men, one of the most robust longitudinal studies of humans ever done – basically examining the question: Why do some people live long and thrive? Here’s the science that confirms what everybody suspected, and I won’t tell you the answer but I think you can guess.

Vaillant is actually a pretty good writer too —which maybe isn’t surprising; literary chops are bred in the bone. George’s son, John Vaillant, is the mightly talented author of The Golden Spruce, among other books.

Whenever I’m working with clients who are trying to figure out if polyamory is for them, I always recommend finding a way to connect to real-life polyamorous folks. It’s so important to hear genuine stories from a wide variety of perspectives—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Going to a local meetup group is the best way to do this, but reading this book comes in at a close second. Dr. Eli Sheff, a researcher who has conducted several longitudinal studies on polyamorous families, presents this compilation of personal stories from many different folks in non-monogamous families and networks. These stories span the range from hilarious to heartbreaking. 

I loved hearing the stories of these men, both Harvard College students (including the young John F. Kennedy) and Boston “townies,” as they mature from ages 20 to 90. The largest long-term study of human development, each of these 600 men was interviewed and studied every two years, creating a vast data set for students of human development.

George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist, decided to test Erik Erikson’s theory of the stages of life using the Harvard Grant data. What he found gives hope to all of us late-bloomers: early deficits could be redeemed by later successes. What matters, he found, is not IQ or perfect health but close relationships with family and friends. “Maturation is the evolution of teenage self-centeredness into the disinterested empathy of a grandparent.” 

Catching thoughts is an excellent book to introduce mindfulness to young children. This book touches on intrusive thoughts and how they are paired with feelings. It presents the idea of acknowledging thoughts and feelings, without getting carried away by them and then letting them pass on. I think this book is a great resource for any child and perhaps especially children with high anxiety. The illustrations feel quiet and introspective which is paired so beautifully with the verses. 

Epley, a behavioral scientist, provides an often-humorous take on our daily efforts to read the minds of others. He offers trenchant, real-life examples (in addition to scientific studies) of how we go horribly wrong – and why we sometimes get it right. In one clever experiment, people tapped out the tune of a song on a wooden desk while they hummed it in their heads. The tappers were wildly overconfident that others could identify the song – because it sounded so clear to themselves. Mindwise is a wonderful reminder to get out of our own heads and figure out the limits of what others can perceive.