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Make It Stick
A writer and two psychologists' book on how learning works, and why the slower-feeling methods last longer
Why it’s worth your time
Make It Stick, from a writer and two psychologists who study memory, explains why the study habits that feel productive tend to produce learning that fades, and what works better. If you're new to a role, picking up a tool or training other people, it can change how you spend your practice time.
How to learn something at work so it sticks
The book · About 6 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Read the first chapter, then the last.
The first chapter makes the case that common study habits mislead us. The last is a practical, step-by-step guide to using the techniques. The chapters in between explain why it works.
- Write down what you remember about one thing you're learning.
Pick one thing you're learning for work: a tool, a product, a process. Close your notes, write down everything you can recall, then check what you missed. Do it again in a few days, mixed in with something else you're learning.
Good moments for this: when you start a new rolebefore learning a new toolwhen you're training someone
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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.
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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
McDaniel has said the techniques the book recommends may not bring the quick gains students usually see from rereading. If you're learning on the job with colleagues watching, saying what you're doing and why can keep a slower first week from being read as trouble.
What might make this harder
Keep Brown, Roediger and McDaniel's self-quizzing, which still tends to help in a short window, and spread it over the days you do have rather than saving it for the last night.
Questions people ask
What is Make It Stick about?
The cognitive psychologists Mark A. McDaniel and Henry L. Roediger III wrote this 2014 book with the writer Peter C. Brown, on what research says about studying and practice. It argues that rereading, highlighting and cramming create an illusion of mastery, while self-testing, spacing practice out and mixing topics build learning that lasts, and it tells that case through the stories of people putting the ideas to use.
What is retrieval practice?
Pulling something back out of memory, for example by quizzing yourself, instead of reviewing it again. Roediger has called regular retrieval one of the book's main points, and says doing it at spaced intervals also slows forgetting.
What is interleaving?
Mixing practice of two or more related skills or problem types instead of finishing one before starting the next. The authors report that it produces more durable and flexible learning, even though it feels slower at the time.
What it says, and how it holds up
Rereading a manual, highlighting it, drilling one move until it feels smooth: each gives a sense of progress. Brown, Roediger and McDaniel argue that much of that progress is an illusion of knowing, and that the gains fade fast. What lasts, in their account, is harder work: pulling things back from memory, spacing practice out so a little forgetting sets in, mixing different problems together, and trying to solve something before you're shown how. Learning that feels effortful is often the kind that sticks. They borrow the psychologist Robert Bjork's phrase for it, desirable difficulties.
Roediger and McDaniel, cognitive psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis when they wrote it, supplied the research; Brown, a writer, interviewed the people whose stories carry it. Much of the evidence comes from a decade of work on applying cognitive psychology to education, so classrooms are home ground, though Jennifer Gonzalez of Cult of Pedagogy noted its examples from sports, the military, music and corporate training. The book also takes on learning styles, arguing there's little good evidence for teaching to them.
A 2013 review of ten study techniques led by the psychologist John Dunlosky rated practice testing and spaced practice highest and rereading and highlighting low, the same split the book's advice draws. Sheri Lynn Warren's review in Education Review called it easy to read and full of methods she could use with her own students, and named one weakness, a chapter on the brain that seemed out of context to some degree; Gonzalez found the reading hard going at times.
The harder question for work is transfer. Much of this research measures how well people remember material, and getting better at a messy skill, like running a negotiation or managing someone through a hard quarter, takes more than recall. For skills like those, practice with real stakes and an honest debrief after each attempt is likely to do more than any study technique, and a quiz is at best the warm-up.
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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.