Something to readGetting ahead
A Mind for Numbers
A book on learning hard subjects well, from an engineering professor who flunked high school math
Why it’s worth your time
Being handed something hard to learn in the middle of a career can bring school rushing back. This book treats learning as a skill you can get better at, and its encouragement comes from someone who once needed it herself.
How to learn something hard for work
The book · About 6 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Read the book a chapter at a time.
Watch for her case that grinding on a problem nonstop isn't an effective way to learn it, and that stepping away lets a more relaxed part of your thinking help.
- Practice one new skill until you can do it from memory.
Pick one thing your job needs you to learn this month: a formula, a query, one screen of a new system. Work on it in a short, focused stretch, then walk away and do something else. The next day, try it again without your notes and write down where you got stuck.
Good moments for this: when your job hands you something newafter a training you only half followedbefore a certification or exam
Keep going with Truest
Small actions add up. Truest helps you find the next thing worth doing, make the space to do it, and keep a record of your progress. It’s a private place to work on your career, and it’s yours, not your employer’s.
- It actually happensWe’ll put it on your calendar and remind you before it starts.
- Your growth areas, keptWhat you said you are working on getting better at sits on your Foundation page.
- It’s yours to keepEach thing you do is saved to your private record, there when your next review or job search comes around.
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Learning mid-career tends to sprawl into everything at once. One query language, one regulation or one part of the new system is plenty for a month.
What might make this harder
Say what you can do now and when you expect to be quicker, and ask who can check your work in the meantime. That usually lands better than a gap someone finds later.
Questions people ask
What is A Mind for Numbers about?
How to learn difficult subjects, especially math and science, with methods its publisher says apply to anything you find hard.
Is A Mind for Numbers only for students?
No. Its publisher pitches it to people changing careers who need a new skill set as well as to students.
What are focused and diffuse thinking?
Two learning modes in Oakley's teaching: concentrated effort on a problem, and a looser, more relaxed state.
What is the Learning How to Learn course?
A popular online course on Coursera that Barbara Oakley created with neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski. The publisher calls A Mind for Numbers its companion book.
What it says, and how it holds up
Barbara Oakley failed high school math and science and went straight into the Army, where she learned Russian. She left the service at 26, worked for a while as a Russian translator, and then started over with remedial algebra and trigonometry, going on to become a professor of engineering. Hard material, in her telling, can be learned by people who weren't born good at it.
The publisher's description gives the core idea plainly: attacking a problem in a narrow, laser-focused way until it gives isn't an effective way to learn, and stepping away lets a more relaxed, creative part of the mind take over. If you'd like a free way in first, Oakley's 2014 essay in Nautilus, How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math, tells her story and adds the other half of her argument: understanding something while it's being explained tends to slip away unless practice turns it into fluency.
In her Nautilus essay she takes a clear side in a live debate about teaching, pushing back on math teaching that, as she sees it, prizes conceptual understanding over practice. The math-and-science framing may put off people learning something else, though the publisher says the strategies apply to any subject.
Drills suit skills with right answers. If what you're learning is a judgment skill, like running a team or reading a negotiation, repetition on your own helps less than someone who watched you do it and can tell you what they saw. For those, the faster teacher is usually a person rather than a practice routine.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.