Education Bookcast

People often talk about how to work better, but it is rare to hear discussion of how to rest better. Take the famous so-called "10,000 hour rule". This is adapted (with some distortion) from the work of K. Anders Ericsson, the late great psychologist of expertise. The nature and volume of practice among top performers in various fields, as described in his work, is widely cited. But the same research contains details of how high performers rest differently. And yet nobody seems to have taken notice. In Rest, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that work and rest are not adversaries, but partners. Looking closely at the lives of many great writers, mathematicians, scientists, politicians, and businesspeople, he reveals that although their lives revolved around their work, their days did not. They would have ample leisure every day; they would rarely do more than four hours' work per day; and they often seem to take more naps than other people. Scientific research on this topic seems thin on the ground. Pang shares wh